Nadine Gordimer's "Six Feet of the Country" & Wole Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation"

A Critical Paper of Nadine Gordimer's and Wole Soyinka's

 Six Feet of the Country and Telephone Conversation

By Isaiah Cabanero

“The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow,

he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.”

- Dr. Eric Berne

The natures of the relationships the African population had, in general, with the other populations of the world, particularly the ones they had with the population of the whites, who first came to settle in for trade and agriculture, then eventually to colonize, the southern portion of the African continent in the decades past have had very significant impacts in world relations and literature. Most especially during the Apartheid period^*, when the natures of these relationships were at their gravest, the African population suffered grievous separation policies of the ruling white government not only racially, but also economically, socially, and educationally. This is both the subjects being presented and tackled in Nadine Gordimer’s short story “Six Feet of the Country” and Wole Soyinka’s poem “Telephone Conversation”.

In “Six Feet of the Country”, a white couple living in their farm in the countryside, just ten miles outside the city of Johannesburg, is faced with a situation involving them and their young African farm boy and his brother, who illegally immigrated to Johannesburg to find work but got severely sick along the way, lied ill in his brother’s hut for days, and then died, inside the premises of the couple’s farm. The couple now is thrust with the responsibility to take care of and bury the dead young man’s body. The conflict arose when the young African farm boy’s dead brother’s body is handled by the authorities differently than what he, in coherence with his family’s tradition, had hoped for.

In “Telephone Conversation”, an African is on the phone, calling up to a landlady in some location far away in order to get himself some space to stay in upon his arrival there after his journey. He confessed to her that he is an African, and then their conversation over the telephone went from negotiating the price of the space he’d want to stay in upon his arrival to negotiating the lightness or darkness of his complexion. Their conversation soon ended with the landlady hanging up her receiver on the other end of the line.

The two selections, “Six Feet of the Country” and “Telephone Conversation”, though one is a short story and the other a poem, can be creatively analogized to the elements of the foremost-mentioned quotation by Dr. Berne; taking one of the two as the jay and the other as the sparrow. Concerning oneself much of which selection is which from the other, as what is followed-up by the quotation, forfeits oneself of seeing the essence of the selections or the messages they preach. With this kind of reasoning in mind, the two selections can be analyzed together, as one, as if in an overlapping or super-imposing manner, with the lines of the poem tried to be weaved harmoniously into the mesh of the short story’s paragraphs. Some of the lines of the poem are further chopped into composite sensible phrases, and are weaved not necessarily chronologically into the sequence of the paragraphs of the short story, but more soundly into the most comparable and most parallel ones. This kind of literary approach is part-Deconstruction, part-New Criticism, part-New Historicism, part-Structuralism, and part-Semiotic Criticism. ...

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