Telephone Conversation - Wole Soyinka

I am going to analyse this poem and answer a few questions:

1. This poem is full of colours not just that of skin, what do you think these colours signify?
2. What does the dialogue in this poem reveal about these two characters?
3. The poet dramatises a battle, who wins finally and why?

The poem is about a telephone conversation in England between the poetic persona seeking to rent a house and an English landlady who completely changes her attitude towards him after he reveals his identity as a black African.

Ans 1: The landlady also discriminates the poet by saying things like “ARE YOU LIGHT OR VERY DARK?”, this is racism, the landlady is just insulting the poet by making fun of his skin colour. The poet uses sentence fragments, “Red booth. Red pillar-box. Red double-tiered / Omnibus squelching tar”, to describe the persona’s frantic attempt to ascertain the situation. The diction “red”,which is connotative of terror and disturbance, is used three times to highlight the extreme mental discomfort of an African man, who referred to city buses, again humorously, as the idiomatic “omnibus”.

Ans 2: He was happy about the privacy that he believed that he would enjoy, for “The landlady swore she lived / Off premises.” At this stage, we get to know that the two were engaged in a telephone conversation, which, however, was to come quickly to an unpleasant end as the man decided to reveal his nationality - “Madam,” I warned. / “I hate a wasted journey – I am African.” A sudden, unexpected hush of silence is strengthened by a caesura in line 6 of the poem to emphasize the impact of the African’s race being revealed to the landlady. The landlady asked “HOW DARK?” The poet uses capital letters here, and a lot more to come, to accentuate the landlady’s effort in seeking clarification for something that would have been irrelevant to their previous topic, yet it mattered a lot to her. “I had not misheard”, the persona reflected. Before he was able to respond, the landlady asked again, “ARE YOU LIGHT OR VERY DARK?” reinforcing the racist overtone in the English society today. The woman’s pushy, unequivocal stance in pursuing the answer dumbfounded the man, who was so confused and so taken aback by the landlady’s sudden change of attitude that he suddenly appeared to have a blank mind. The automation imagery “Button B. Button A” that the poet uses here not only vividly shows the man’s temporary confusion, but also humorously foreshadows the intelligence contest that is to follow.

Ans 3: The victory the persona had over the landlady in this part of the conversation demonstrates the obvious difference in their education and knowledge, also illustrating the fact that beyond the landlady’s lavish exterior, she was simply a shallow judgmental racist.