The African Literature

1. Name: Disha Hiteshbhai Trivedi
Roll No: 31
Topic: Brief Overview of poem ‘ Telephonic Conversation’.
M.A. Sem. 4
Batch: 2015-’17
Email Id: trivedisha22236@gmail.com
Department Of English (M.K.B.U.)

2. About Author:
• Wole Soyinka was born 13 July
1934)
• He is a Nigerian playwright
and poet.
• He was awarded Nobel Prize in
1986 for Literature, the first
African to be honoured in that
category.
• Works:
• The road
• Before the blackout
• Search
• To my first white hairs

3. Ridiculous Question
“You mean
like plain or
milk
chocolate?”
poet
views it as
button B
or
Button A.

4. Summary:
• The speaker of the poem, a dark West African man
searching for a new apartment, tells the story of a
telephone call he made to a potential landlady. Instead of
discussing price, location, amenities, and other information
significant to the apartment, they discussed the speaker's
skin colour.
• The landlady is described as a polite, well-bred woman,
even though she is shown to be shallowly racist. The
speaker is described as being genuinely apologetic for his
skin colour, even though he has no reason to be sorry for
something which he was born with and has no control over.

5. Themes
• Racial conflict
• Poetry and Politics

6. Poetry and Politics
• Although the school of New Criticism struggled to keep
the worlds of politics and poetry at arm's length, a poem
such as "Telephone Conversation" is a reminder that poets
in some parts of the world, or of certain ethnic or racial
backgrounds, do not get to choose one side of that divide
or the other. Their existence is politically charged.
• For a speaker like in Soyinka's one poem, the politics
lingering behind such seemingly benign words as "dark"
and "light," for instance, are partly the pressures that
threaten to fragment a community and that resist a spirit
or imagination that might want to promote a sense of
wholeness or integration.
• Words, especially when used as labels, divide the world
of Soyinka's poem in the same insidious and powerful ways
as any political agenda might.

7. • It is this potential for divisiveness that the
speaker attempts to undercut in the closing lines of
the poem, when he effectively breaks down the
landlady's powerful (but unstated) fixation with the
word "dark" through his own list of the various
shadings that might clarify for her the abstraction of
darkness.
• As the speaker notes, he is simultaneously a man
who is "brunette," "raven black," and, in a wonderful
twist, "peroxide blonde" on the palms of his hands
and soles of his feet.

8. Racial Conflict
• "Telephone Conversation" is a
dramatic dialogue in which a
person of colour responds to
the racial prejudices of a
woman with whom he is trying
to negotiate rental
accommodations.
• As the poem begins, the
speaker's well-educated and
polished voice, as heard on
the telephone, make him
acceptable to the landlady, but
when he turns to the crucial
moment of "self-confession,"
the truth of racial conflict
comes to the foreground.

9. Continue...
• But even as she weaves her
• way through a series of deeply prejudicial
questions, ranging from "HOW DARK?" to
"THAT's DARK, ISN'T IT?" the woman
reveals the confused underside of racial
attitudes.
• At no point in the poem does the speaker internalize the sense of
inferiority that is being projected upon him, nor does he react in anger
to her narrow-mindedness.
• Instead, he engages language in a calm and highly sophisticated
manner, elevating the poem from diatribe or attack to a much more
effective end of allowing readers to see the world through the absurd
lens of racial prejudice.