Here is my blog on The Joys of Motherhood Written by Buchi Emecheta.
It'sa story about the life of Nnu Ego, a Nigerian woman whose life revolves around her children. It explores what it means to be a mother in Nigeria where traditions and customs are changing, marriage, colonialism, and women's societal roles.
God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a full human being, not anybody’s appendage? I was born alone and shall die alone.What have i gained from all this?
This quote is said by Nnu Ego which I've tried to elaborate here in this blog.
Much of the written scholarship on Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood (1979) focuses on the novel's critique of traditional Ibo society.Specifically, such articles read Emecheta's text as a denunciation of the reproductive practices of the Ibo people, practices that do harm to women by promoting the idea that a proper wife should seek only to beget and care for her offspring.As critical texts that recognize Emecheta's attempt to expose the gender politics operating within indigenous Africa, these readings are important. They collectively validate The Joys of Motherhood as a work of sociohistorical import, as a novel that fills noticeable gaps in the historical record of African women's experiences. Nevertheless, the scholarly consensus that valorizes this work obscures other thematic threads that are equally important in the recovery of African women's history. As S. Jay Kleinberg discusses in his introduction to Retrieving Women's History, the effort to rectify women's erasure in history entails not only an analysis of their work and their role in the family, but also an analysis of "both formal and informal political movements and ... their impact upon women, women's participation in them and the ways in which they shape male-female interactions and men's and women's roles in society."
Kleinberg's call for an analysis of the way in which women's experiences are impacted by local politics encourages us to return to Emecheta's text to analyze a question that most critics of this book raise but do not fully explore: to what extent does colonialism impinge upon the lives of Ibo women? One compelling answer to this question is introduced by Rolf Solberg, who suggests that the lives of the Ibo women in The Joys of Motherhood are determined by the tensions of a "culture collision" between the institutions of traditional Ibo society and the institutions of western Europe. The focus of this paper will be to develop this suggestion and to argue its validity. In particular, I will demonstrate that the hardships endured by the women of Emecheta's novel do not emanate from an oppressive cultural practice regarding women's role in Ibo villages, but from a historical moment of political and economic transition, a historical moment in which the values and priorities of British culture clash destructively with the values and priorities of indigenous Africa.
The Joys of Motherhood bears out the fact that this transitional period was particularly disadvantageous for African women. As the plight of the novel's key character reveals, colonialism was a costly reality for those who were forced to walk a fine line between that which was demanded of them by their village communities and that which was demanded of them by the rules of a European political regime. This paper will demonstrate that the Ibo women of Emecheta's novel find themselves in this very predicament: specifically, they are subjected to new forms of exploitation as they are asked to assume traditional duties and responsibilities under a newly imported economic system that-unlike their native system-fails to validate or reward them for such work. In essence, this paper traces the destructive influence of Western capitalism and its associated ideologies on the relative power and autonomy of Ibo women. Colonialism, I hope to show, was a far greater threat to their collective well-being than the strictures of village patriarchy.
Set in the British colony of Nigeria in the 1930s and 1940s, The Joys of Motherhood details the life story of an Ibo woman named Nnu Ego who escapes the ignominy of a childless first marriage by fleeing to the distant city of Lagos to start anew with a second husband. Nnu Ego's simple dream of becoming a mother-a dream rooted in the cultural values of Ibo society, where motherhood is the primary source of a woman's self-esteem and public status-is happily realized several times over in this new setting. The pleasures associated with motherhood that the protagonist so eagerly anticipates, however, are ultimately negated by the difficult economic conditions of her new urban environment. In short, there are so few job opportunities for her husband to pursue (and so little ambition on his part to pursue them) that Nnu Ego spends her entire life alternately birthing children and working day in and day out as a cigarette peddler to stave off the hunger and poverty that invariably haunt her household. The novel focuses on this grueling battle, a battle that ends in a loss for Nnu Ego, as she witnesses her beloved sons grow up and leave Nigeria for good and her daughters marry and move away. Nnu Ego's hopes of living out her final years in the company of her grandchildren disappear before she turns forty, and she dies at the side of a country road, alone and unnoticed.
The title of Emecheta's novel is patently ironic, for it would seem that there are few joys associated with motherhood after all. And yet while that reality is certainly one message the novel imparts, there is far more to the text than a critique of motherhood. The fact that Emecheta's novel moves beyond this critique to explore the costs of colonialism for women in urban Nigeria is summarized in a crucial passage midway through the novel in which Nnu Ego pauses to assess the injustices of her life in Lagos: "It was not fair, she felt, the way men cleverly used a woman's sense of responsibility to actually enslave her.... Here in Lagos, where she was faced with the harsh reality of making ends meet on a pittance, was it right for her husband to referto her responsibility? It seemed that all she had inherited from her agrarian background was the responsibility and none of the booty." This excerpt is key in locating the source of Nnu Ego's anguish not in her position as a mother per se, but in her position as a woman who is asked to assume the same obligations of her "agrarian background" within a new cultural setting that confers "none of the booty" normally associated with such labor. Nnu Ego is able to interpret the inequity of this exchange as something that "enslaves" and "imprisons" her. She is also able to identify, at least on some level, the political economy of colonial Lagos as the Western construct of "the new" that proves to be unaccommodating of her traditional role as wife and mother: she notes, for example, that it is the "harsh reality of making ends meet on a pittance" that secures her thralldom.
Before discussing in further detail the political dynamics underwriting this thralldom, it might be useful to review the role women played in Ibo society before the widespread influence of British rule. As Kamene Okonjo points out, the popular belief that African women were impotent and/or trivial in the male-dominated communities of Ibo culture is a gross misconception. While men's labor was widely considered to be more prestigious than women's labor, and while the practice of polygamy and patrilocal domicile (married women dwelling in their husbands' villages rather than in their own) secured men's power over women in general, Ibo women still wielded considerable influence both within their marriages and within the larger community. Women, for example, were a major force in the society's agrarian economy: they planted their own crops, sold their crop surplus (as well as that of their husbands), and exerted exclusive control over the operation and management of the village market, the site where all local commerce took place.In addition, women were active participants in the dual-sex political system of Ibo society, a system in which Ibo men and Ibo women governed themselves separately, both sexes selecting their own set of leaders and cabinet members to legislate issues relevant to the members of their respective constituencies.
Conclusion
The novel revolves around the life of Nue ego and how she goes through the Chaos she faces in her life.
Let's start today's blog with little light on What is Plagiarism ?
Plagiarism is presenting someone else's work or ideas as your own, with or without their consent, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgment.
Plagiarism is the fraudulent representation of another person's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work. While precise definitions vary, depending on the institution, such representations are generally considered to violate academic integrity and journalistic ethics as well as social norms of learning, teaching, research, fairness, respect and responsibility in many cultures. It is subject to sanctions such as penalties, suspension, expulsion from school or work, substantial fines and even imprisonment.
As given in our blog task here is my response to the question...
1) What is Plagiarism and what are its consequences?
Plagiarism is sometimes a moral and ethical offense rather than a legal one since some instances of plagiarism fall outside the Scope of copyright infringement, a legal offense.
Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own, with or without their consent, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement. All published and unpublished material, whether in manuscript, printed or electronic form, is covered under this definition. - Oxford
Consequences of Plagiarism :
In this let us see the various consequences of plagiarism. That how people have to suffer after they do plagiarism knowingly or unknowingly. Research has the power to affect opinions and actions, responsible writers compose their work with great care. They specify when they refer to another author's ideas, facts, and words, whether they want to agree with, object to, or analyze the source. This kind of documentation not only recognizes the work writers do; it also tends to discourage the circulation of error, by inviting readers to determine for themselves whether a reference to another text presents a reasonable account of what that text says.
The charge of plagiarism is a serious one for all writers. Plagiarists are often seen as incompetent-incapable of developing and express- ing their own thoughts-or, worse, dishonest, willing to deceive others for personal gain. When professional writers, such as journalists, are exposed as plagiarists, they are likely to lose their jobs, and they are certain to suffer public embarrassment and loss of prestige. Almost always, the course of a writer's career is permanently affected by a single act of plagiarism. The serious consequences of plagiarism re- flect the value the public places on trustworthy information.
Students exposed as plagiarists may suffer severe penalties, rang- ing from failure in the assignment or in the course to expulsion from school. This is because student plagiarism does considerable harm
Plagiarism betrays the personal element in writing as well. Discussing the history of copyright, Mark Rose notes the tie between our writing and our sense of self-a tie that, he believes, influenced the idea that a piece of writing could belong to the person who wrote it. Rose says that our sense of ownership of the words we write "is deeply rooted in our conception of ourselves as individuals with at least a modest grade of singularity, some degree of personality" (Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Gaining skills as a writer opens the door to learning more about yourself and developing a personal voice and approach in your writing. It is essential for all student writers to understand how to avoid committing plagiarism.
Why Academic Integrity is necessary? Write your views.
What is academic integrity?
Academic integrity is: 'the expectation that teachers, students, researchers and all members of the academic community act with honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility. '
Academic Integrity defines as a commitment to five fundamental values
Honesty is a necessary foundation of teaching, learning, research, and service, and a prerequisite for the full realization of trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility.
Trust in other people and in our community strengthens our working relationships and is built on a foundation of actions more important than words.
Fair treatment is an essential factor in the establishment of ethical communities. Important components of fairness include predictability, transparency, and clear, reasonable expectations.
Respect, scholarly communities succeed only where there is respect for community members and for the diverse and sometimes contradictory opinions that they express.
Responsibility for upholding the values of integrity is simultaneously an individual duty and a shared concern. Every member of an academic community - each student, faculty member, and research scholar responsible for safeguarding the integrity of its scholarship, teaching, and research.
Apart from these five, the sixth value that can be added is: Courage requires translating the values from talking points into action - standing up for them in the face of pressure and adversity. Courage is the capacity to act without fear.
Academic Integrity is important and necessary because when we do not insist to practice it in our work then our way will lead towards plagiarism. And after that the consequences one has to face in all ways. People always examine the ethical level and moral levels by academic integrity.
Here is my blog on Comparative Literature and Translation Studies. As part of the Master's syllabus in our final semester, we are studying articles related to comparative literature. For detailed reading here I've attached the link to the article here and also embedded the video link below the blog.
In a post-colonial context, the problematic of translation becomes a significant site for raising questions of representation, power, and historicity. The context is one of contesting and contested stories attempting to account for, to recount, the asymmetry and inequality of relations between peoples, races, and languages. the discourses of philosophy, history, anthropology philology, linguistics, and literary interpretation, the colonial "subject constructed through technologies or practices of power/knowledge is brought into being within multiple discourses and on multiple sites.
Western philosophical notions of reality, representation, and knowledge. Really is seen as something unproblematic, "out there"; knowledge involves a representation of this reality; and representation provides direct, unmediated access to a transparent reality.
Her concern here is to explore the place of translation in contemporary Euro-American literary theory (using the name of this "discipline" in a broad sense) through a set of interre- lated readings. I argue that the deployment of "translation" in the colonial and post-colonial contexts shows us a way of questioning some of the theoretical emphases of poststructuralism.
Chapter 1 outlines the problematic of translation and its relevance to the post-colonial situation. Reading the texts of different kinds of colonial translators.
In chapter 2, she examines how "translation" works in the traditional discourse of translation studies and in ethnographic writing. Caught in an idiom of fidelity and be- trayal that assumes an unproblematic notion of representa- fion, translation studies fail to ask questions about the histor- icity of translation; ethnography, on the other hand, has recently begun to question both the innocence of representation and the longstanding asymmetries of translation.
In chapters 3, 4, and 5, my main focus is the work of Paul de Man Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin (an earlier critic who is becoming increasingly important to post-structuralist thinkers). My analysis shows how translation functions as a "figure" in all three thinkers, becoming synonymous or associated with a major preoccupation in each: allegory or literature in de Man, the problematics of representation and intentionality in Derrida, and the question of materialist historiography in Benjamin. Pointing out the configurations of translation and history in Benjamin's work, she describes the kind of reading provided by de Man and Derrida of Benjamin's important essay "The Task of the Translator." Her argument is that Walter Benjamin's early writings on translation are trapped in significant ways into his later essays on the writing of history, a trope that goes unrecognized by both de Man and Derrida.
The word translation not just to indicate an interlingual process but to name an entire problematic. It is a set of questions, perhaps a "field," charged with the force of all the terms used, even by the traditional discourse on translation, to name the problem, to translate translation. Translatio (Latin) and metapherein (Greek) at once suggest movement, disruption, displacement. So does Übersetzung (German).
Her study of translation does not make any claim to solve the dilemmas of translators. It does not propose yet another way of theorizing translation to enable a more foolproof "method" of "narrowing the gap" between cultures; it seeks rather to think through this gap, this difference, to explore the positioning of the obsessions and desires of translation, and thus to describe the economies within which the sign of translation circulates. Her concern is to probe the absence, lack, or repression of an awareness of asymmetry and historicity.
The post-colonial distrust of the liberal-humanist rhetoric of progress and of universalizing master narratives has obvious affinities with post-structuralism.
That translation became part of the colonial discourse of Orientalism is obvious from British efforts to obtain information about the people ruled by the merchants of the East India Company.
As translator and scholar, Jones was responsible for the most influential introduction of a textualized India to Europe, Within three months of his arrival, the Asiatic Society held its first meeting with Jones as president and Warren Hastings. the governor-general, as patron. It was primarily through the efforts of the members of the Asiatic Society, themselves ad- ministrators and officials of the East India Company's Indian Government, that translation would help "gather in" and "rope off" the Orient.
Grand Jury at Calcutta, his letters, and his "Oriental" poems to show how he contributes to a historicist, teleological model of civilization that, coupled with a notion of translation presupposing transparency of representation.
The most significant nodes of Jones's work are (a) the need for translation by the European, since the natives are unreliable Interpreters of their own laws and culture; (b) the desire to be a lawgiver, to give the Indians their "own" laws; and (c) the desire to "purify" Indian culture and speak on its behalf. The interconnections between these obsessions are extremely complicated.
In Jones's construction of the "Hindus," they appear as a submissive, indolent nation unable to appreciate the fruits of freedom, desirous of being ruled by an absolute power, and sunk deeply in the mythology of an ancient religion. In a let- ter, he points out that the Hindus are "incapable of civil liberty," for "few of them have an idea of it, and those, who have, do not wish it"
The idea of the "submissive" Indians, their inability to be free, and the native laws that do not permit the question of liberty to be raised are thus brought together in the concept of Asian despotism.
Indians thought of liberty as a curse rather than a blessing, since they certainly could not rule themselves or administer their own laws, these laws had first to be taken away from them and "translated" before they could benefit from them.
William Ward's preface to his three-volume A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos is instructive for the virulence with which it attacks the depravity and im- morality of the natives.
Ward does not see the present state of the Hindus as a falling away from a former Golden Age. Instead, like James Mill, who quotes him approvingly and often, Ward sees the Hindus as corrupt by nature, lacking the means of education and improvement.
Macaulay did not think it necessary for the entire Indian populace to learn English: the function of anglicized education was "to form a class who may be interpreters between us (the British) and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian.in.blood.and.colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect."
A Gauri Viswanathan has pointed out, the introduction of English education can be seen as "an embattled response to historical and political pressures: to tensions between the English Parliament and the East India Company, between Parliament and the missionaries, between the East India Company and the native elite classes. Extending her ar- gument, I would like to suggest that the specific resolution of these tensions through the introduction of English education was enabled discursively by the colonial practice of transla- tion. European translations of Indian texts prepared for a Western audience provided the "educated" Indian with a whole range of Orientalist image) Even when the anglicized Indian spoke a language other than English, "he" would have preferred, because of the symbolic power conveyed by En- glish, to gain access to his own past through the translations and histories circulating through colonial discourse. English education also familiarized the Indian with ways of seeing, techniques of translation, or modes of representation that came to be accepted as "natural".
The construction of the colonial subject presupposes what Pierre Bourdieu has called "symbolic domination." Symbolic domination, and its violence, effectively reproduce the social order through a combination of recognition and misrecogni tion (reconnaissance and méconnaissance)-recognition that the dominant language is legitimate (one thinks again of the use of English in India) and "a misrecognition of the fact that this language.
The notion of auto colonization implicit in the story about the "native boys" begging for English books could be ex- plored in greater depth through Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony.
My central concern here is not to elaborate on the battle for "history" now being staged in Euro-American theory but to ask a series of questions from a strategically "partial" per- spective that of an emergent postcolonial practice willing to profit from the insights of post-structuralism, while at the same time demanding ways of writing history in order to make sense of how subjectification operates.
History in the text of Post-structuralism is a repressive force that obliterates difference and belongs in a chain that includes the meaning, truth, presence, and logos.
If representation stands for the reappropriation of presence, translation emerges as the sign for what Derrida would call "dissemination"
The point is not just to criticize these characterizations as "inadequate" or "untrue"; one should attempt to show the complicity of the representations with colonial rule and their part in maintaining the asymmetries of imperialism.
Clearly, the notion of hybridity, which is of great importance for a Subaltern critique of historiography as well as for a critique of traditional notions of translation, is both "ambiguous and historically complex."" To restrict "hybridity," or what I call "living in translation," to a post-colonial elite is to deny the pervasiveness, however heterogeneous, of the transformations wrought across class boundaries by colonial and neocolonial domination. This is not to present a meta- narrative of global homogenization, but to emphasize the need to reinvent oppositional cultures in non essentializing ways. Hybridity can be seen, therefore, as the sign of a post-colonial theory that subverts essentialist models of reading while it points toward a new practice of translation.
This chapter examines the role played by translation in shaping a modernist poetic sensibility in some of the major literary traditions of India in the twentieth century, between 1950 and 1970.
The chapter will study examples from Bengali, Malayalam and Marathi, to understand how such translations of modern Western poets were used to breach the hegemony of prevailing literary sensibilities and poetic modes. Many of the major Indian poets - such as Buddhadeb Bose, Agyeya, Gopalakrishna Adiga, Dilip Chitre, and Ayyappa Paniker - were also translators. Their translations were 'foreignizing' translations that disrupted cultural codes that legislated regimes of reading and writing poetry. Little magazines played a critical role in opening up the poetic discourse.
Poets such as Neruda and Parra were widely translated into Indian languages during this phase. In this context, translation enacted a critical act of evaluation, a creative act of intervention, and a performative act of legitimation, in evolving a new poetic during the modernist phase of Indian poetry.
The translation was integral to the project of modernism in Indian languages, in assimilating a new poetic into the horizon of the 'native' reader's expectations as well as in contesting the claims of prevailing aesthetic norms by breaching its autonomy and authority.
The communal riots and killings that followed the Partition, the perceived failure of the Nehruvian project of modernity and the consequent erosion of idealism which had inspired an earlier generation of writers committed to socialist realism and Romantic nationalism.
André Lefevere's concept of translation as refraction/ rewriting, the chapter argues that 'rewritings' or 'refractions' found in the 'less obvious form of criticism..., commentary, historiography (of the plot summary of famous works cum evaluation type, in which the evaluation is unabashedly based on the current concept of what "good" literature should be), teaching, the collection of works in anthologies, the production of plays' (2000, 235) are also instances of translation. Hence, an essay on T. S. Eliot in Bengali by Sudhindranath Dutta, or a scathing critique in Malayalam on the poetic practices of Vallathol Narayana Menon by Ayyappa Paniker, can also be described as 'translational' writings as they have elements of translation embedded in them.
Modernist writers were responding to the internal dynamics of their own traditions in selectively assimilating an alien poetic that could be regressive or subversive depending on the context and the content.
An elaboration on the relation between 'modernity' and 'modernism' in the Indian context will need a separate chapter. For the purpose of our discussion, it may be broadly stated that 'modernity' designates an epochal period of wide-ranging transformations brought about by the advent of colonialism, capitalist economy, industrial mode of production, Western models of education, assimilation of rationalist temper, the resurgence of nationalist spirit and emergence of social, political, legal, juridical and educational institutions that constituted a normative subjectivity embodied with cosmopolitan and individualist world views.
The project of modernity in India was implicated in colonialism and imperialism. This colonial modernity informed literary and cultural movements, beginning from the reformist movement of the nineteenth century to the modernist movement of the mid-twentieth century.
When ideologies like nationalism and spirituality become apparatuses of the state, a section of the intelligentsia has no option other than to seek refuge in bunkers of individualism'.
The term 'modernism' implies a literary/artistic movement that was characterised by experimentation, conscious rejection of the nationalist/ Romantic as well as the popular, and the cultivation of an individualist, cosmopolitan and insular world view. In the European context, it signified a set of tendencies in artistic expression and writing styles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through a new aesthetic that was iconoclastic, insular and elitist.
While the modernism that emerged in Indian literatures shared many of these defining features, its political affiliations and ideological orientations were markedly different. Due to its postcolonial location, the Indian modernism did not share the imperial or metropolitan aspirations of its European counterpart. It invested heavily in regional cosmopolitan traditions. It was oppositional in content and questioned the colonial legacies of the nationalist discourse. It was elitist and formalistic and deeply distrustful of the popular domain.
How are we to evaluate the modernisms that emerged in the postcolonial phase in India? Critics such as Simon Gikandi, Susan Friedman, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, and Aparna Dharwadker have argued that non-Western modernisms are not mere derivative versions of a European hegemonic practice.
The Eurocentric nature of the discourse on modernism can be laid bare only by documenting the 'modernisms that emerged in non-Western societies. This will enable us to reimagine the centre-periphery dialectic in terms of a dialogic between peripheries.
The emerging problematic will have to contend with issues of ideological differences between the Western modernism and the Indian one, the different trajectories they traversed as a result of the difference in socio- political terrains and the dynamics of the relations between the past and the present in the subcontinent, which has a documented history of more than five thousand years. The problematic that informs this argument is manifest in the critiques of Eurocentric accounts of modernism by Gikandi, Friedman, Doyle and Winkiel, and Rebecca L. Walkonwitz, in different ways.
In the context of Bengali, as Amiya Dev has observed, 'It was not because they imbibed modernism that the adhunik [modernist] Bengali writers turned away from Rabindranath; on the contrary, Modernism was the means by which they turned away from Rabindranath and they had to turn away, for their history demanded it' Commenting on the role of Kannada modernists, R. Sasidhar writes,
If European modernism was drawn between the euphoric and the reactive, in Kannada the precipitate modernism was drawn between the Brahminical and the non-Brahminical. Just as the euphoric and the reactive modernisms were part of the internal dynamics of modernism itself, so also the Brahmanical and the non-Brahmanical modernisms in Kannada were part and parcel of a modernism that came as a reaction to the Nehruvian environment. (in Satchidanandan 2001, 34)
Translation enables us to delineate the complex artistic and ideological undercurrents that shaped the course of modernism in Indian literatures. To discuss this, we will look at three representative modernist authors from three separate Indian literary traditions - Sudhindranath Dutta (1901-60) from Bengali, B. S. Mardhekar (1909-56) from Marathi and Ayyappa Paniker (1936-2004) from Malayalam. These authors help us see the chronological trajectory of modernism across Indian literatures.
The translation is central to the modernist poetic as it unfolded in these literary traditions. Each of these three authors was bilingual and wrote essays in English as well as their own languages, outlining their new poetic, thus preparing the reader for new poetic modes.
Buddhadeb Bose, another Bengali modernist, rendered 112 poems of Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil into Bengali, apart from translating Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Hölderlin, Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, Wallace Stevens and Boris Pasternak. Ayyappa Paniker translated European poets into Malayalam, while B. S. Mardhekar's Arts and the Man (which was published in England in 1937) was a treatise on formalist aesthetics that legitimated modernist practice.
Their profound understanding of Western philosophy and artistic/literary traditions equipped these three writers with the critical capacity to see the significance and limitations of the West.
The case for the modernist poetic is argued in a persuasive manner in the context of the everyday world and its needs. In another essay, 'The Highbrow", he observes, 'I agree with Virginia Woolf that creative artists must from time to time seek shelter within the much-maligned Ivory Tower'.
Dutta highlights Eliot's commitment to tradition as 'revolutionary in the fullest sense of the term'. He adds, "But I am convinced that if civilization is to survive the atomic war, Mr. Eliot's ideal must become widely accepted, so that in the oases that may escape destruction it may be cherished through the interregnum' (55). Obviously, Dutta's endorsement of Eliot's worldview has to be seen in relation to his critique of contemporary Indian society. Modernism in India was part of a larger decolonizing project. It was not a mindless celebration of Western values and the European avant-garde.
Kurkshetram is a poem of 294 lines in five sections. The opening lines of the Bhagavad Gita are cited as the epigraph of the poem, thus setting a high moral and critical tone in relation to contemporary life and society. As in Eliot's The Waste Land, Kurukshetram's opening lines communicate a pervasive decline of moral values and a disruption of the organic rhythms of society:
The eyes suck and sip The tears that spurt;
The nerves drink up the coursing blood;
And it is the bones that
Eat the marrow here
While the skin preys on the bones
The roots turn carnivore
As they prey on the flowers While the earth in bloom
Clutches and tears at the roots. (Paniker 1985, 14-15)
The title, 'Kurukshetram', signifies the place where the epic battle that forms the…
The second section of the poem retreats into a private space, away from these public images. The inner movement of the poetic structure signifies the undercurrents of a conflict that cannot be paraphrased in moral terms. In this sense, the poem defies the representational structure of the mimetic type. Lines such as, 'Rose of my dream, why do you wear the fevered look? / Singer of my vision, why do you droop and wilt!" (18), invoke subterranean depths of the mind from where memories of an organic community speak to the poet. But this vision of harmony is short-lived, as the self once again relapses into its infernal vision of collapse and disruption. The torments of dream, desire, and despair interrupt the existence: poem and the poet recognizes the futility…
The third section returns to the public world of conflicts. The mythical characters of Sugriva, Vibhishana, Vashistha, Lord Ram, Arjuna, and Oedipus are invoked in this section. The wisdom encoded in myths is now inaccessible to modern men and women, who are diminished into fragmented dehumanized figures. Since the self inhabits a violated space, it lacks the power to know itself.
Here is my blog on an outcome of Literature review given by prof.Dilip sir.
After watching blogs on literature review we are asked to answer these two questions
1) Define Literature review
To answer these questions let's try to understand what's the meaning of Literature review...
According to Bloomsburg University..
A literature review is a comprehensive summary of previous research on a topic. The literature review surveys scholarly articles, books, and other sources relevant to a particular area of research.
What is a literature review?
A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic.
A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources it analyzes, synthesizes, and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.
What is the purpose of a literature review?
When you write a thesis, dissertation, or research paper, you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge.
The literature review gives you a chance to:
1)Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context.
2)Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research.
3)Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists.
4)Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate.
5)Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.
Here is 5 steps for literature review process.
The answer of define literature review in your words is ..
A literature review is the writing process of summarizing, synthesizing and/or critiquing the literature found as a result of a literature search. It may be used as background or context for a primary research project.
2) Why literature review is carried out in research?
Here's a video link of the purpose of literature review The purpose of Literature review watch this video for easy understanding of what's literature review.
The overall purpose of a literature review article should be to provide a valuable, solid, informative, critical summary of a well-defined topic/area to the reader.
‘Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile,’ says J. Hillis Miller. The statement obviously alludes to the Christian myth of the Fall, exile, and wandering. In Western metaphysics translation is an exile, a fall from the origin; and the mythical exile is a metaphoric translation, a post-Babel crisis.
Given this metaphysical precondition of Western aesthetics, it is not surprising that literary translations are not accorded the same status as original works. Western literary criticism provides for the guilt of translations for coming into being after the original; the temporal sequentiality is held as proof of the diminution of literary authenticity of translations. The strong sense of individuality given to Western individuals through systematic philosophy and the logic of social history makes them view translation as an intrusion of ‘the other. This intrusion is desirable to the extent that it helps define one’s own identity, but not beyond that point. It is of course natural for monolingual European cultures to be acutely conscious of the act of translation. The philosophy of individualism and the metaphysics of guilt, however, render European literary historiography incapable of grasping the origins of literary traditions.
One of the most revolutionary events in the history of the English style has been the authorized translation of the Bible. It was also the literary expression of Protestant Christianity. The recovery of the original spirit of Christianity was thus sought by Protestant England through an act of translation. It is well known that Chaucer was translating the style of Boccacio into English when he created his Canterbury Tales. When Dryden and Pope wanted to recover a sense of order, they used the tool of translation. Similar attempts were made in other European languages such as German and French.
During the last two centuries, the role of translation in communicating literary movements across linguistic borders has become very important. The tradition that has given us writers like Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and Heaney in a single century – the tradition of Anglo-Irish literature – branched out of the practice of translating Irish works into English initiated by Macpherson towards the end of the eighteenth century.
Many of the Anglo-Irish and Indian English writers have been able translators themselves. Similarly, the settler colonies such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand have impressive modern traditions of literature, which have resulted from the ‘translation’ of the settlers from their homeland to alien locations. Post-colonial writing in the former Spanish colonies in South America, the former colonies in Africa, and other parts of the world have experienced the importance of translation as one of the crucial conditions for creativity. Origins of literary movements and literary traditions inhabit various acts of translation. Considering the fact that most literary traditions originate in translation and gain substance through repeated acts of translation, it would be useful for a theory of literary history if a supporting theory of literary translation were available. However, since translations are popularly perceived as unoriginal, not much thought has been devoted to the aesthetics of translation. Most of the primary issues relating to ‘form’ and ‘meaning’ have not been settled in relation to translation. No critic has taken any well-defined position about the exact placement of translations in literary history. Do they belong to the history of the ‘T’ languages or do they belong to the history of the ‘S’ languages? Or do they form an independent tradition all by themselves? This ontological uncertainty that haunts translations has rendered translation study a haphazard activity that devotes too much energy to discussing problems of conveying the original meaning in the altered structure.
Unfortunately for translation, the various developments concerning the interdependence between meaning and structure in the field of linguistics have been based on monolingual data and situations. Even the sophisticated and revolutionary theoretical formulation proposed by structural linguistics is not adequate to unravel the intricacies of translation activity. Roman Jakobson in his essay on the linguistics of translation proposed a threefold classification of translations:
(a) those from one verbal order to another verbal order within the same language system,
(b) those from one language system to another language system,
(c) those from a verbal order to another system of signs
As he considers, theoretically, a complete semantic equivalence as the final objective of a translation act – which is not possible – he asserts that poetry is untranslatable. He maintains that only a ‘creative translation’ is possible. This view finds further support in formalistic poetics, which considers every act of creation as a completely unique event.
Structural linguistics considers language as a system of signs, arbitrarily developed, that tries to cover the entire range of significance available to the culture of that language. The signs do not mean anything by or in themselves; they acquire significance by virtue of their relation to the entire system to which they belong. This theory naturally looks askance at a translation which is an attempt to rescue/ abstract significance from one system of signs and to wed it with another such system. But language is an open system. It keeps admitting new signs as well as new significance in its fold. It is also open in the socio-linguistic sense that it allows an individual speaker or writer to use as much of it as he can or likes to do. If this is the case, then how ‘open’ is a particular system of verbal signs when a bilingual user such as a translator, rends it open? Assuming that an individual language resides within his consciousness, we can ask whether the two systems within his consciousness can be shown as materially different and whether they retain their individual identities within the sphere of his consciousness. Or do such systems become a single open and extended system? If the translation is defined as some kind of communication of significance, and if we accept the structuralist principle that communication becomes possible because of the nature of signs and their entire system, it follows that translation is a merger of sign systems. Such a merger is possible because systems of signs are open and vulnerable. The translating consciousness exploits the potential openness of language systems, and as it shifts significance from a given verbal form to a corresponding but different verbal form it also brings closer the materially different sign systems. If we take a lead from phenomenology and conceptualize a whole community of ‘translating consciousness’ it should be possible to develop a theory of interlingual synonymy
as well as a more perceptive literary historiography.
J.C. Catford presents a comprehensive statement of theoretical formulation about the linguistics of translation in A Linguistic Theory of Translation, in which he seeks to isolate various linguistic levels of translation. His basic premise is that since translation is a linguistic act any theory of translation must emerge from linguistics: ‘Translation is the operation performed on languages: a process of substituting a text in one language for a text in another; clearly, then, any theory of translation must draw upon a theory of language – a general linguistic theory.
The privileged discourse of general linguistics today is closely interlinked with developments in anthropology, particularly after Lévi-Strauss. During the nineteenth century, Europe distributed various fields of humanistic knowledge into a threefold hierarchy.
The translation problem is not just a linguistic problem.
It is an aesthetic and ideological problem with an important bearing on the question of literary history. Literary translation is not just a replication of a text in another verbal system of signs. It is a replication of an ordered sub-system of signs within a given language in another corresponding ordered sub-system of signs within a related language.
The translation is not a transposition of significance or signs. After the act of translation is over, the original work still remains in its original position. The translation is rather an attempted revitalization of the original in another verbal order and temporal space. Like literary texts that continue to belong to their original periods and styles and also exist through successive chronological periods, translation at once approximates the original and transcends it.
The problems in translation study are, therefore, very much like those in literary history. They are the problems of the relationship between origins and sequentiality. And as in translation study so in literary history, the problem of origin has not been tackled satisfactorily. The point that needs to be made is that probably the question of the origins of literary traditions will have to be viewed differently by literary communities with ‘translating consciousness’. The fact that Indian literary communities do possess this translating consciousness can be brought home effectively by reminding ourselves that the very foundation of modern Indian literatures was laid through acts of translation, whether by Jayadeva, Hemcandra, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, H.N. Apte or Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.
This article, there are three parts and it is about Tamil literature history and its development during the problems has been face and all possible solutions.
It is starting with 'How does one translate a poem from another time, another culture, another language? Of, the literatures of the world at that time, Sanskrit in India, Greek and Latin in Europe, Hebrew in the Middle East, and Chinese in the Far East were Tamil's contemporaries. By this argument, he is making the clear in front of us that Tamil is as old as these languages.
The subject of this paper is not the fascinating external history of this literature, but translation, the transport of poems from classical Tamil to modem English; the hazards, the damages in transit, the secret paths, and the lucky bypasses.
Further, He out the question ' How shall we divide up and translate this poem? What are the units of translation? We may begin with the sounds. We find at once that the sound system of Tamil is very different from English. For instance, Old Tamil has six nasal consonants: a labial, a dental, an alveolar, a retroflex, a palatal and a velar-m, n, n. ii, n, n-three of which are not distinctive in English. How shall we translate a six-way system into a three-way English system (m, n, n)?
English words may end in stops, as in 'cut, cup, tuck,' etc.; Tamil words do not. When we add up these myriad systemic differences, we cannot escape the fact that phonologies are systems unto themselves (even as grammatical, syntactic, lexical, and semantic systems to are, as we shall see). Any unit we pick is defined by its relations to other units. So it is impossible to translate the phonology of one language into that of another-even in a related, culturally neighboring language. We can map one system onto another but never reproduce it. A poem is identical only to itself if.
We should translate metrical systems. Meter is a second-order organization of the sound system of a language and partakes of all the above problems and some more. So by putting this he going towards the Metre in his article.
Tamil Metre depends on the presence of long vowels and double consonants, and on closed and open syllables defined by such vowels and consonants. For instance. in the first word of the above poem, annay, the first syllable is heavy because it is closed (an-), and the second is heavy because it has a long vowel. There is nothing comparable in English to this way of counting feet and combinations (marked in the 'text above by spaces). Even if we take familiar devices like rhyme, they ': do not have the same values in different languages. English has a long tradition of end-rhymes-but Tamil has a long tradition of second-syllable consonant rhymes. In the above poem the first, second and fourth . . , lines have n as the second consonant in the line-initial words annay, ten "and man.
The 'tradition of one poetry would be the innovation of another.
Looking at the Grammar briefly, Tamil has no copula verbs for equational sentences in the present tense, as in English, e.g., 'Tom is a teacher'; no degrees of adjectives as in English, e.g., 'sweet, sweeter, sweetest’; no articles like 'a, an, the': and So on. Tamil expresses the semantic equivalents of these grammatical devices by various other means. The lies and ambiguities of one language are not those of another.
No translation can be 'literal,' or 'word for word'. That is where the impossibility lies. The only possible translation is a 'free' one.
Remarkably, Tamil syntax is mostly left-branching. English syntax is, by and large, rightward. Even a date like 'the 19th of June, 1988,' when translated into Tamil, would look like '1988, June, 19.' The Tamil sentence is the mirror image of the English one and will also be true for English Languages. Postpositions instead of prepositions, adjectival clauses before nominal phrases, and verbs at the end rather than in the middle of sentences.
What is every day in one language must be translated by what is every day in the 'target' language also, and what is eccentric must find equally eccentric equivalents. If Poetry is made out of, among other things, 'the best words in the best order', and the best orders of the two languages are the mirror images of each other, what is a translator to do?
The most obvious parts of language cited frequently for their utter untranslatability are the lexicon and the semantics of words. Lexicons are culture-specific. Terms for fauna, flora, caste distinctions, kinship systems, body parts, and even the words that denote numbers, are culturally Loaded. Even when the elements of a system may be similar in two languages, like a father. mother, brother, mother-in-law, etc. In kinship, the system of relations and the feelings traditionally encouraged other each relative are culturally sensitive and therefore part of the expressive repertoire of poets and novelists.
Add to this the entire poetic tradition, it is rhetoric. the ordering of different[ genres with different Functions in the culture, which by its system of differences, distinguishes this particular poem.
The classical Tamil poetic tradition uses an entire taxonomy. A classification of reality, The five landscapes of the Tamil area, are characterized by hills. seashores, agricultural areas, wastelands, and pastoral fields; each with its forms of life, both natural and cultural. trees, animals, tribes, and customs. arts and instruments- all these become part of the symbolic code for poetry. Every landscape, with all its contents, is associated with a mood or phase of love or war. The landscapes provide the signifiers. The five real landscapes of the Tamil country become, through this system, the interior landscapes of Tamil poetry. The five landscapes with all their contents signify moods and the themes and motifs of love and war.
Thus a language within a language becomes the second language of Tamil poetry. When one translates, one is translating not only Tamil, its phonology, grammar and semantics, but this entire intertextual web, this intricate yet lucid second language of landscapes which holds together natural forms with cultural ones in a code, a grammar, a rhetoric, and a poetics.
Ramanujan takes a closer look at the original of Kapilar's poem, Ainkurunuru 203, 'What She Said', and his translation, quoted earlier in this essay. The word annay (in spoken Tamil, ammo), literally 'mother', is a familiar term of address for any woman, here a 'girlfriend'. So he has translated it as 'friend', to make clear that the poem is not addressed to a mother (as some other poems are) but to a girlfriend.
Note the long, crucial, left-branching phrase in Tamil: '. . . island's / [in- leaf-holes low /animals- having- drunk- / and]- leftover, muddied water’(in a piece-by-piece translation). In his English, it becomes 'the leftover water in his land, low in the water holes / covered with leaves and muddied by animals.' His phrase order in English tries to preserve the order and syntax of themes, not of single words: (I) his land's water, followed by (2) leaf–covered waterholes, and (3) muddied by animals.
The poem is a kurinci piece, about the lovers' first union, set in the hillside landscape. My title ('What she said to her girlfriend when she returned from the hills') summarizes the whole context (speaker, listener, occasion) from the old colophon that accompanies the poem. The progression is lost if we do not preserve the order of themes so naturally carried by the left-branching syntax of Tamil. More could be said about it from the point of view of the old commentaries.
The love poems get parodied, subverted, and played with in comic poems about poems. In a few centuries, both the love poems and the war poems provide models and motives for religious poems. God like Krsna is both lover and Warrior.
Thus any single poem is part of a set, a family of sets, a landscape, or a genre. The intertextuality is concentric on a pattern of membership as well as neighborhoods of likenesses and unlikeness. Somehow a translator has to translate each poem in ways that suggest these interests, dialogue, and networks.
If attempting a translation means attempting an impossibly intricate task, foredoomed to failure. what makes it possible at all? At least four things-
1. Universals-
If there were no Universals in which languages participate and of which all particular languages were selections and combinations, no language learning, translation, comparative studies or cross-cultural understanding of even the most meager kind would be possible. if such universals did not exist we would have had to invent them.
2. Interiorised contexts-
Poems interiorize the entire culture. Indeed we know the culture of the ancient Tamils only through a careful study of these poems. Later colophons and commentaries explore and explicate this knowledge carried by the poems setting them in context and using them to make lexicons and charming the fauna and flora of the landscape.
3. Systematicity-
The systematicity of such bodies of poetry, the way figures, genres, personae, etc., intermesh in a master code, is a great help in entering this intricate yet world of words. Even if one chooses not to translate all the poems, one chooses poems that cluster together, that illuminate one another so that allusions, contrasts, and collective designs are suggested, of their world, re-presenting it. Here intertextuality is not the problem, but the solution.
4. Structural mimicry-
In translating poems the structures of individual poems, the unique figures they make out of all the given codes of their language, rhetoric, and poetics, become the points of entry. The poetry and the significance reside in these figures and structures as much as in untranslatable verbal textures. So one attempts a structural mimicry, to translate relations, not items- not single words but phrases, sequences, sentences; not metrical units but rhythms; not morphology but syntactic patterns.
To translate is to 'metaphor', to 'carry across'.
Translations are transpositions, re-enactments, and interpretations. One can often convey a sense of the original rhythm, but not the language-bound meter: one can mimic levels of diction, but not the actual sound of the original words. Textures are harder to translate than structures, linear order more difficult than syntax, and lines are more difficult than larger patterns. Poetry is made at all these levels- and so is translation.
The translation must not only represent, but re-present, the original. loyalty. A translator is an 'artist on oath'. Sometimes one may succeed only in re-presenting a poem, not in closely representing it. With the anecdote of the Chinese emperor, Ramanujan says even if the representation in another language is not close enough, but still succeeds in 'carrying' the poem in some sense, we will have two poems instead of one.
Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka known as Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist in the English language. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, for "in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashioning the drama of existence",the first sub-Saharan African to be honoured in that category. Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta.In 1954, he attended Government College in Ibadan, and subsequently University College Ibadan and the University of Leeds in England. After studying in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its campaign for independence from British colonial rule. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years, for volunteering to be a non-government mediating actor.
Soyinka has been a strong critic of successive Nigerian governments, especially the country's many military dictators, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Much of his writing has been concerned with "the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it". During the regime of General Sani Abacha, Soyinka escaped from Nigeria on a motorcycle via the "NADECO Route." Abacha later proclaimed a death sentence against him "in absentia." With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation. In December 2020, Soyinka described 2020 as the most challenging year in the nation's history. He said: "With the turbulence that characterised year 2020, and as activities wind down, the mood has been repugnant and very negative. I don’t want to sound pessimistic but this is one of the most pessimistic years I have known in this nation and it wasn’t just because of COVID-19. Natural disasters had happened elsewhere, but how have you managed to take such in their strides?"
In Nigeria, Soyinka was a Professor of Comparative literature at the Obafemi Awolowo University, then called the University of Ifẹ̀. With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, he was made professor emeritus.While in the United States, he first taught at Cornell University as Goldwin Smith professor for African Studies and Theatre Arts from 1988 to 1991 and then at Emory University, where in 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts. Soyinka has been a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and has served as scholar-in-residence at NYU's Institute of African American Affairs and at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. He has also taught at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Yale.Soyinka was also a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Duke University in 2008.
Theme of the Poem
1) Sadism
In the poem, we can see how the poet is going through humiliation while he was in a prison cell. The poem starts with the dimension of his cell. It is about sixteen paces by twenty-three. They are behind the bars and watching one suffer was their(guard) great pleasure. It seems they are against truth and humanity.
Tricks to torture
The guards make prisoners' life as equal as hell and they give them third-degree torture . Here is a video showing prisons in Africa and how prisoners live there. It might disturb you to see as i've got that uneasy feel to find one appropriate video to show.
Government officials
Guards
Doctors
Voice of rebellious people
psyche of sadism
Galileo - genius
In the theme of sadism we can see the life of prisioner and how guard finds torturing prisioners pleasuruous.
Stygian comes to us from Styx, the name of the principal river in Hades, the underworld of the dead in Greek mythology. This is the river over which Charon the boatman was said to ferry the spirits of the dead; the Greeks and Romans would place a coin in the mouth or hand of the deceased to serve as fare. It is also the river by which the gods swore their most binding oaths, according to the epics of Homer. English speakers have been using stygian to mean "of or relating to the river Styx" since the early 16th century. From there the meaning broadened to describe things that are as dark, dreary, and menacing as one might imagine Hades and the river Styx to be.
Muse
3) Imprisonment
Space of cell
In the poem we can see the measurement of cell in which they are living.The phrase comes from the practice of interrogation under torture, where three degrees of torture were recognised, of increasing intensity. In other contexts, three degrees of interrogation were recognised, with torture being the third degree.First, the being threatened to be tortured. Secondly, being carried to the place of torture. Thirdly, by stripping and binding.
4) Metaphor
Three guards
Doctors
Government of Nigeria
You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed
You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed is a poem by Nigerian writer Gabriel Okara. One of the most popular in his oeuvre, it is a frequent feature of anthologies. "The piece belongs with the best of Senghor's nostalgic verse," wrote Michael Echeruo in a tribute to Okara on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, "with the militancy of many of David Diop's lyrics, and certainly with J. P. Clark's 'Ivbie', another of my favorite African poems. Okara's poem is more relaxed than these, however, more ironic, less tortured. In some ways, of course, it is less urgent, less strident, less involved. If Clark's 'Ivbie' was complex and for good reason, You laughed, and laughed, and laughed seemed also appropriately straightforward: proud without arrogance, hurting without showing it, and blunt without rudeness." The first of Okara's poems that it was Echeruo's pleasure to read, it was also in his opinion the most enduring.
African literature is a literature about the African people and that continent. It contains various languages and genres. The major themes of the African literature are culture, conflict, religion, colonialism, modernism and racism. Nigerian poet Gabriel Okara’s poem ‘You laughed and laughed and laughed’ brings out an emotion, feeling and pain faced by black people. This poem also brings out the sufferings faced by black people. This poem is as discussion between the black natives and white people which brings an rules, beliefs and practice of African. Okara brought out the suffering faced by the native people in this poem.
Themes of the poem
Racism
- Underestimating other race
- Tortures of white
- Mental tortures of white
The theme of racism is at the center of the poem like how poet how described pain of the black people as white thought that they only had better civilization and the ill treatment as white people laughed at their dance , song , and insides.
Cultural conflict
- Western culture
- Supremacy superiority complex
- Judgemental nature
- Cultural connection to nature
- Barbarian
Cultural conflict is the theme Okara often uses in his works. In the context of this poem we can see the western culture seems like supremacy. And as poet talks about their behaviour they seems too judgemental because white people judging very common things of black people's culture. They neglect the culture which is the having connection to the nature.
Modernism
- Materialism
- Use of 'Car'
- Luxuries - as attraction - upper class
Modernism we can have when poet uses the word 'car' and he tells :
“In your ears my song Is motor car misfiring Stopping with a choking cough And you laughed and laughed and laughed”
Also poet tried to criticize western civilization by their way of living and lifestyle like upper class and materialism.
Colonialism
- Physically controlled
- Mentally tortured
- Traits of being inferior
Colonialism is another theme of it. It is written after the colonization influenced upon the poet so how colonizers were treating and controlling the black or colonized people and also they used torture them in the way that they can rule easily on them. They tried to make them feel inferior so their way can be got in easy way.
Nationalism
- 'Magic Dance'
- 'Mystic inside wide as sky'
- 'Fire - warmth of the nature
- Living warmth of the earth 'Mother nature'
- necked feet 'raw' - 'pure'
Theme of Nationalism come in the indirect phrases the poet has used here in the poem. By above given phrases he is admiring his culture and criticizing western culture by various comparison.
