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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