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

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

Ridiculous Question

ARE YOU DARK? OR

VERY LIGHT?”

“You mean like plain or milk chocolate?”

poet views it as button B or Button A.

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.

Themes

• Racial conflict • Poetry and Politics

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.

• 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.

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.

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.