Wole Soyinka's 'Telephone Conversation': Decoding Racial Satire

In this week’s episode of Beyond the Verse, the official podcast of PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+, Joe and Maya explore Wole Soyinka’s powerful poem 'Telephone Conversation,' delving into themes of white subjectivity, racial politics, and the power dynamics embedded in language.

The duo discusses the significance of Soyinka’s lyric ‘I,’ addressing the poet’s bold reclamation of personal voice, the systemic racial barriers of 1960s Britain, and the stark contrasts between the speaker’s calm demeanor and the landlady’s prejudice. Together, they unpack how Soyinka skillfully uses the poem’s structure—its caesura and capitalized dialogue—to convey a sense of social disconnect and power imbalance.

Exclusive resources for Poetry+ users on 'Telephone Conversation' include:

• Full PDF Guide
• Poetry Snapshot PDF
• Wole Soyinka Poet PDF Guide

Explore more about Wole Soyinka’s work and find thousands of analyzed poems on PoemAnalysis.com.

Tune in and Discover:

• Soyinka’s critique of British society and racial prejudice in the 1960s
• The intricate play of silence and power in Telephone Conversation
• How Soyinka’s Nigerian identity and his lived experience influenced his poetry

Listen now and deepen your understanding of this strikingly relevant poem.

Transcript

Wole Soyinka's 'Telephone Conversation': Decoding Racial Satire (Transcript)
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Joe: [00:00:00] Welcome to Beyond the Verse, a poetry podcast brought to you by the team at Poemanalysis.com in association with Poetry+. I'm your co-host Joe, and I'm here with Maiya. And today we're going to be talking about Wole Soyinka's poem, Telephone Conversation. We're going to be covering themes such as white subjectivity and the lyric I.

The literary politics of race and the ways in which distance can be distorted. But Maiya, why don't you tell us a little bit about Soyinka as a poet and where he is at this point in his career.

Maiya: So, Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist, and political activist. He was born in 1934. Soyinka was the first black African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986. Now, Soyinka has a fantastic, fantastic background. He graduated with an English degree [00:01:00] from Leeds Uni in 1958. His plays focused primarily on Yoruba folklore and tradition and he is a celebrated university lecturer.

But Jo, let's focus on what this poem represents, where it stands within his career as a whole. So please tell us all about it.

Joe: Thanks, Maiya. So, Telephone Conversation is a poem first published in 1963, after a period of time in which Soyinka had been living predominantly in the UK, as Maiya alluded to. He'd already had some plays performed, beginning to sort of achieve a bit of a reputation, but this was the first major sort of poetic endeavour he'd embarked upon.

The title gives you a pretty good sense of what this poem is going to be about. It takes place in the form of a dialogue over the phone between the narrator, one presumes to be based upon Soyinka, and an unnamed white landlady. And the poem's conceit effectively is that the speaker knows they are unlikely to be accepted by this landlady because of the color of their skin.

What becomes clear to this conversation is not only has Soyinka lost [00:02:00] faith in individuals in Britain, but he's lost faith in British institutions, he's lost faith in perhaps the idea of Britain that he would have grown up learning about in Nigeria, which at the time was under British rule. ~ ~the first thing I think I'd like to focus on is the way that Soyinka actually translates the way in which people , converse over the phone. Because obviously, it is very different to having a face to face conversation with somebody. I mean, you do have that sense of dislocation and the way in which when you're on the phone to somebody, you can often sort of pause, waiting for the other person to speak and then speak over each other.

The way this poem is punctuated, I think, is really fascinating. A lot of caesura, a lot of sort of disruptions to the pace and the rhythm of the poem, which I think are meant to reflect not only the sort of everyday disconnect that people have when talking on the phone, but also in this poem specifically, the way in which these two people are just not meshing at all., 

Maiya: What I find really interesting about this poem is that you're not entering it as someone who is directly involved, but you're entering it as a witness.

Now, I think Soyinka does this in many [00:03:00] ways to show, as you say, the distrust in These establishments, a distrust in individuals, but it also allows the reader to form their own opinion through the witnessing of this conversation. You see the speaker go through all of the motions, anger, upset. Pride, desperation, and it really creates a very fully formed image of who the speaker is.

I really love in this poem how Soyinka actually uses noise as a really determinant factor in how you, understand what these characters are trying to say. Soyinka immediately sets the white landlady and the black speaker against one another. in terms of how the words themselves on the page are laid out. So for the benefit of listeners who don't have the poem in front of them, all of the times in which the white landlady speaks, it is written in capital letters.

That immediately, regardless of how you interpret it, is somewhat aggressive. That is being interpreted, being internalized [00:04:00] by the speaker, by the reader, as something that is inherently quite standoffish and loud. But, what I really, really love about what Soyinka does in this poem is that her silences aren't silences at all.

Her silences are mediated exactly by what the speaker is thinking about those silences. And that says so much about Soyinka. His position and how he sees himself considered by Institutions by individuals and I really want to pick up on these specific lines.

Madam. I warned I hate a wasted journey. I am African silence silenced transmission of pressurized good breeding Voice when it came, lipstick coated, long gold rolled, cigarette holder pipped. Caught I was foully. I just think the lyricism and the way in which Soyinka manages to show a reader, a listener, that [00:05:00] silence can contain so much more than just neutrality is fantastic.

Joe: I completely agree, and I'd love to pick up on, again, some of the nuances of using a telephone conversation as kind of your framing for this poem, because obviously, As you mentioned, we get a lot of the speaker's internal thoughts. We get an awful lot of their perspective, even though they're not saying everything aloud.

Now, obviously that's not uncommon for a first person narrative. And normally in a first person narrative, you do get a little bit of internal thought, but you don't get the views of other characters. But that is exacerbated when you have the telephone conversation, because the speaker cannot see the person.

He's talking to, he cannot read facial expressions. He cannot read body language. And so that places even greater emphasis on the words. And I think that point you mentioned about capitalization is a crucial one. I mean, he kind of builds this person out from the word she uses because he has no other stimulus is I think a really interesting way in which we all sort of engage with people over the phone with people we cannot see.

But I think the other thing that I find really sort [00:06:00] of. Fascinating about this poem is the way in which The telephone conversation should take the visual element out of a dialogue, and yet this poem demonstrates the way in which we continually try to bring it back to the conversation. Now, the white landlady, of course, does this very explicitly.

She asks very intrusive and very inappropriate questions about what the speaker looks like, but even the speaker himself, as you've mentioned in that excerpt you just read, he begins to create a mental portrait of this figure. He starts talking about her lipstick, and it's just really, I think, a fascinating example of the ways in which we.

We create and construct versions of people from the information that we have. What Soyinka is able to do is tap into that manner of human behaviour which serves to invent details about people that we don't know based on details that we do. And the problem with those kind of behaviours is that so often the bits that we create are embellished or caricatured versions of people rather than a true reflection of what people are like.

Maiya: Absolutely. , and [00:07:00] I think it's very poignant that, as you say, when in theory, this is meant to be, a kind of net neutral conversation. There shouldn't be anything more. I really actually enjoy the fact that That sense of self confession, that Soyinka brings up right at the start, creates almost a confessional booth, you forget that, you know, the speaker is in a phone box, talking on the phone to someone, he has no idea what they look like at the other end, but, then it becomes a conversation about the politics of race, how dark or light he is, and what his worth is within that racialized spectrum. And for any listeners who aren't aware, there is this fantastic critical text, , by Reni Eddo-Lodge that came out called Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race. It is absolutely brilliant, hugely recommend for anyone wanting to explore a little bit more about some of the things we'll be talking about today.

But in Edo Lodge's book, she effectively states that the politics of race operates on its invisibility. It's the fact that [00:08:00] institutions and individuals don't talk about it. And that in itself makes it incredibly difficult to then deconstruct. So for example, in this situation where you have a landlady refusing to rent a flat because the person she's renting to is a race that she doesn't belong to.

agree with, is a race that she doesn't understand. Generally, we would not be privy, as listeners, as readers, to that conversation. You would not be privy to someone's personal life in which they go and try and rent a flat, in which they try and buy a house. So, what Soyinka does so incredibly here is actually make you a witness.

He makes you an intimate part of that conversation, and I think that's one of the things that he does so well throughout so much of his work, but he really allows you to see firsthand the sort of disenfranchisement of that individual, and it makes it so much more personal off the bat, because.

You feel [00:09:00] involved. Because generally conversations like this happen behind closed doors, when you write a poem that creates this almost secondary witnessing, I think it really serves to start to deconstruct those more negative elements and I just, I really love the way that. You feel like you're sat alongside this speaker or, or really in the phone booth with them.

Um, but I, I'd love to know what you think, Jo.

Joe: Well I'd love to go back to that word confession, in particular those two words, actually self confession, and I think this is one of those moments in the poem where Soyinka is just Absolutely at the top of his game because there is so much to deconstruct in those words. So I guess first and foremost, the idea of a confession and what he is confessing is kind of darkly funny, you know, insofar as what he's confessing is his physical appearance, which is obviously something we very rarely need to confess because people can see what we look like.

So I think already we have the framing of the telephone conversation kind of adds a slightly comic element to that. But I [00:10:00] think there's so much more going on with this word. I guess the other thing is that coded within the word confession is the idea of guilt, and right away we have the context of Britain in the late 1950s, perhaps early 1960s, in which.

the darker your skin, the more sort of negative associations there were, so the idea that he should feel guilty for something like this is sort of coded into the language. Then we have that word self confession, and I find that fascinating because obviously normally, especially in the kind of, the way in which this poem subverts the idea of a Christian confession between, uh, member of the congregation and a priest, you're normally going for some kind of absolution or some kind of guidance.

And yet, what we get in this poem is somebody on the other end of the line who is not really interested at all in this person as an individual, only interested in them insofar as they want to reject them because of things that have nothing to do with their individuality. So the idea of self confession, Soyinka is perhaps saying that his speaker has nobody to confess to but himself because nobody else is listening.

So I find that to be a really interesting element. But of course, [00:11:00] by using the word confession, you immediately sort of conjure that Christian framework that I've mentioned. The idea of somebody going to admit they have done wrong in search of, like I said, guidance or absolution, forgiveness. the framing of that Christian conversation, for me, serves to sort of emphasize the way in which the landlady is acting in a completely non Christian manner.

Completely non generous, completely cruel to this person who is coming to her in search of help, in search of something. I think Soyinka is making quite a pointed, , sort of attack on the way in which people were acting, I think, therefore, by framing it in that way, Soyinka is highlighting the ways in which people were really failing to live up to the expectations that they would have of themselves. And I think the final thing I'd want to touch upon with that word confession is the notion of the power imbalance in this poem. When you think about that word in the Christian context, there is a sense of repentance and a sense of humility kind of built in to the notion of confession.

There is a sense that you are subjugating [00:12:00] yourself to some kind of higher power, the priest, but obviously more broadly speaking to God. And again, what we have here is a reminder that while Soyinka's narrator is Articulate and intelligent and cynical and all of the things, you know, that might suggest they have kind of power, they are having to subjugate themselves.

They are having to ask somebody to take them in. And it's really important. Again, as Maiya mentioned earlier on, this conversation takes place from a phone booth. And we get that very clearly because, , about a third of the way through the poem, Soyinka uses an asterisk which was meant to reflect the noise that a public payphone would have made.

Soyinka was not calling from a home. He's looking for a home, but there's every, there's no sense that he has somewhere to live already. He is sort of rootless and rudderless. And therefore, by denying this person the home, the security that they need, the cruelty of the speaker on the other end of the phone is emphasized all the more because she has the power to take those things away.

Maiya: I mean, Joe, that point you just touched on about rootlessness is one that, that [00:13:00] really speaks to me within this poem because I think, what you feel from Soyinka's speaker in this is that, that reduction of self, especially at the end when he kind of starts to say, please, please, wouldn't you rather see for yourself pleading is the term he uses, or pleaded.

And one line that I think I've always found quite standout actually, is that line that I mentioned earlier, I hate a wasted journey, I am African. Now, temporally, and it's very important to look at the timeline of this poem, because if you do take Soyinka to be the speaker, although I do personally believe that this is speaking on behalf of a community, if Soyinka is that speaker, the poem generally gives the impression that it's being written, being spoken from London.

You have the Red Booth, the Red Pillar Box, a double tiered omnibus. You have this real sense of location. Again, in time, this is after Soyinka has come from his bachelors in Leeds. He's done his undergrad degree, he's been in the [00:14:00] UK for at least three years, if not more. If you take it at a very base level.

And yet, immediately, you have this sense of scale. A wasted journey, I am African. And to the person on the other end of the phone, to the landlady, the only image is that of an immigrant. She does not really internalize anything other than the fact that he has mentioned the word African. This is someone, as Joe said, that is eloquent, educated, has been in the UK. That's what makes this poem so enduringly powerful, is that, in theory, there should be no differences between the two of them. But of course, Race plays into that, and makes a huge, huge gulf. It actually really reminds me, of John Agard's Listen, Mr. Oxford, Don, which was published in, I believe it was 1967.

And he uses this one phrase, and describes himself as a simple [00:15:00] immigrant from Clapham Common. And obviously the juxtaposition of those two things, to be an immigrant implies distance, implies a journey, implies labour, but from Clapham Common immediately undercuts that and suggests that he is local, and he understands London, and it creates this really fascinating depth to a character in which Both of those things can obviously coexist, but so often, the word immigrant is imbued with so many layers that people interpret so negatively, and I think, you know, this, this Soyinka poem precedes, , Listen, Mr.

Oxford, Don, but it really does a very similar thing, and I think it's a really lovely thread to actually see through this work,

Joe: Definitely, definitely. And I think, I mean, you and I spoke about this before the episode. It would have been fascinating to read a poem along these lines. three weeks or two months after Soyinka had arrived in the UK, [00:16:00] because one gets the sense that the speaker in that poem would be a lot more sort of hurt by this experience and this kind of conversation.

It's not to say the speaker is not still hurt by it, but they don't expect anything different. I mean, the very fact that they lead this conversation with the quote unquote confession that they're African implies that they know that this is going to come up at some point anyway, they might as well skip some of the sort of preamble in order to see whether the landlady is going to let him stay at all.

That speaks to negative experiences in the past. This is a much more worldly, a much more cynical poetic voice. And I think just as a comparison for listeners, I mean, when I was reading this poem, I was really sort of reminded of a really interesting novel I read last year, which was Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emicheta, who was a fellow Nigerian writer who moved to the UK in the 1960s.

And her novel is much, much more naive insofar as the speaker has recently arrived in the UK. I mean, a very similar kind of framework to Soyinka's [00:17:00] journey slightly later, albeit. The way in which her speaker's naivety is the thing that's emphasized in that novel, compared to the way this speaker's worldly cynical outlook is demonstrated, it's speaking for more people than just themselves. And I find the juxtaposition between the speaker in this poem and the speaker in Buchi Emicheta's novel to be a real reminder of the span of that community's experience.

Maiya: and you know, even though, This speaker is somewhat reduced at the end. You don't leave this poem surprised in many ways. But I always find that actually the voice of the poem is almost self reverent in a lot of ways. He's unashamedly introducing himself as African right at the start, , he also uses some really beautiful terminology when you look at how he describes his skin tone, you know, this, this question, are you dark or very light? And he responds, you mean like plain or milk chocolate. [00:18:00] That in itself is very simple. But he adjusts his answer and says West African sepia. That is just a completely different response, and one that actually comes unexpectedly, especially when you compare it to later in the poem, where the speaker is almost trying to prove that there is part whiteness to him, in the sense that he says, palm of my hand, soles of my feet are a peroxide blonde, that immediately implies fakeness. Peroxide, obviously being an unnatural way to color one's hair. It's a bleaching. But West African sepia represents the natural aging of when you look at old photographs, for example. So there's a real contrast there between how the speaker views his own sense of color and identity . And I just love that you have this really simple question like plain or milk chocolate.

And then suddenly he comes out with this really quite romantic. [00:19:00] idealization of himself.

Joe: I just love to pick up on that point and contrast the way in which he emphasizes the darker elements of his skin versus the lighter. You're absolutely right about the peroxide blonde, that sense of this being a very conscious decision to almost dye one's skin just like you would dye one's hair. There is something artificial and very deliberate about that word peroxide.

I think to contrast that with the way in which he describes. Parts of his skin that are darker is fascinating. So you mentioned the sepia that sense of aging we get a very similar description later On it says friction caused foolishly madam by sitting down has turned my bottom raven black And again, aside from being kind of a humorous image, what we have there is the idea of blackness as something natural, something worn, something that's sort of grown through the experience of living.

And it's such a gentle image by comparison to the peroxide blonde of his hands that really speaks to the fact that he feels comfortable in his blackness. Skin as a black man, [00:20:00] the parts of him that are attempting to sort of appease white people are the bits that feel more deliberate, a little bit more uncomfortable. I love the way in which those images of the darkness of his skin conjure that sense of time and conjure that sense of being worn, because it chimes with what I was saying earlier on about the fact that this is a conversation. He's having six, seven, eight years into his time in England.

The idea that this is not somebody fresh into the UK, but that sense of being worn down, I think a particularly description of the friction causing his bottom to grow blacker think that description really serves to emphasize the fact that this is a speaker who is cynical, who is used to these conversations because they've had so many of them before. 

Maiya: I would also like to add here, and, and Jo, this is very much for you to, to pick up the mantle on, but for listeners who haven't had a chance to yet, please do go and check out our last episode on Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven.

Jo did a Fantastic deep dive into symbolism of the raven and I would like to pick up on it here because using the [00:21:00] raven to describe this kind of raven blackness is really, really interesting. , one of the things you raised Joe in our episode last week was that mythology around the Tower of London and how if the last raven leaves the Tower of London, the kingdom of England will fall. So for Soyinka, as an immigrant to use this Raven terminology and be seeking a home, but being rejected from it, I think could play in and could be a little bit interesting, but, but what are your thoughts on that? 

Joe: Well, I'm very flattered that you've remembered my raven deep dive from last week. And again, I would implore listeners to go and check out that episode or others.

And remember that you can rate or review Beyond the Verse wherever you get your podcasts. I think the thing that it speaks to for me is perhaps apprehensions among certain members of the British establishment around. the independence of certain former colonies. So again, what we have here is a poem that's published just after Nigerian independence in 1960.

And there were many members of the British ruling elite who were sort [00:22:00] of unhappy or apprehensive about the fact that Britain's colonial power was shrinking. And that's a trajectory that continued over the course of 20th century. So I wonder whether the reference to the Raven, as you've said, the association with the Kingdom of England falling, if all the Ravens leave the Tower of London is some kind of manifestation of.

sort of certain fears among members of British society that Britain's influence around the world was collapsing in the wake of the Second World War and in the wake of countries like India and Nigeria and others seeking to rule themselves. 

Maiya: Well, thank you for that, Jo, but for now it's time for a quick break.

Joe: So I don't know about you, Maiya. I don't know about our listeners, but when I'm reading a poem, there's nothing better for me than working with it on physical paper. So whether I'm teaching a poem to my students or just reading it for my own pleasure, I love to have the tactile piece of paper in front of me.

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So whether you're a student, a teacher, or a general poetry lover, sign up now for a Poem AnalysisSubscription to PoetryPlus at Poemanalysis.com to get access to thousands of printable PDFs and many more benefits right now.

Maiya: Welcome back to Beyond the Verse. And in the second half of this episode, I think it's really worth us touching on something we haven't yet, which is discomfort. Now this poem deals very heavy handedly, With race, race is the central and core issue of this poem. And one thing that absolutely exemplifies this is the sense of discomfort that the speaker has. I'd like to [00:24:00] refer back to one of the lines I mentioned earlier, which positions us very strongly in London, but red booth, red pillar box, red double tiered omnibus squelching tar. Now, even lyrically, and I'm sure for listeners who are tuning in right now, my delivery of that did not sound great.

It is very mechanical, very difficult and

there's an abundance of mostly plosive sounds. You're looking at a booth, pillar box, double tiered. You immediately, without even looking at the content of it, have this very, very strong reaction to it. Now, I would like to use this really as a comparative, with two black British writers that are writing now. , one being Elizabeth Jane Burnett and one being Jason Alan Payson, who I mentioned all the time on this podcast.

So tune into any episode and I'm sure you'll hear me talking about his work. I think it's fantastic. Both of those writers are celebrated in the ways in which they talk about the English countryside, primarily. Elizabeth Jane Burnett [00:25:00] focuses on bodies of water. She looks at swimming in English rivers, for example, and finds herself situated , quite strongly within those spaces. She actually owes a lot of reverence to romanticism. Which is particularly interesting as a poet of colour, writing with a strong tradition that really historically excluded people of colour.

Now, Jason Alan Payson, again, as I've mentioned in previous episodes, does a very similar thing, but talks about walking through the woods. Now, the woods for Jason Alan Payson actually correspond with his own sense of blackness. He finds comfort in the fact that there is black soil and brown leaves. He feels rooted.

He feels that his skin is a type of bark. This is one of the phrases he uses. Now, we don't have that in this poem. We don't have any sense of home or comfort. The softest moments, as we've said, are when he talks about his own colour. And yet, he is completely contrasted with the [00:26:00] red booth, red pillar box, red double tiered omnibus.

Now, we could take a very basic interpretation of this and, you know, say, red obviously represents anger, but it also represents here, disconnect. There is absolutely nothing that this speaker can look to in his near surroundings that feel familiar, that feel like home, that correspond with his sense of self, and they're only exacerbated by the capitalization and the anger that comes from the other side of the phone.

Every time I read this poem, it really is my understanding that the surroundings and the atmosphere are actually creating even more of a sense of claustrophobia, you know, the speaker's already in a phone box being rejected, but you really get the sense that the world is shrinking, the omnibus squelching tar, now, in a very literal sense, this bus isn't going to be sinking into the tar of the road, the road is A solid thing just adds to this sense [00:27:00] of disappointment.

This real sense that the speaker cannot get anywhere, and they are sinking within the The structure of industry, they're sinking with their success in just finding a place to live. There's no sense of home here. 

And I think that's really, really powerful. I think my sort of thoughts take me in two directions. One, I think, is to return to that idea of anger you said, and I agree. I initially sort of dismissed that interpretation as being a little bit basic, you know, He sees red to sort of put it metaphorically, he's angry, but I think it's important to look at that and look at the way in which he speaks in contrast to the way in which he feels.

Joe: Now it's really important to mention that this speaker has every right to be furious. He is being mistreated, he is being terribly prejudiced against, and yet he never loses touch. Of the sort of the politeness of language. He's always calling this person, madam. And in contrast to that, the capitalization of the landlady speech, as you mentioned earlier, Maiya is all written in block capitals, that sense that she is [00:28:00] angry and she's not afraid to demonstrate that anger.

And I think the fact that repetition of red three times in a line signifies that his anger internally is growing but it never gets projected outwards and his speech doesn't change, the way he addresses the landlady doesn't change, is a real reminder of the way in which black men in particular are have been kind of forced to alter their behavior because of untrue and negative stereotypes about violence amongst black men.

But this white landlady has no qualms whatsoever about yelling down the phone at somebody who actually wants to pay her money to rent an apartment. I mean, it completely demonstrates the way in which men like the speaker in this poem were kind of shackled by racist stereotypes and really sort of, you mentioned that feeling of being entrapped.

And it's not only a physical entrapment in this phone box, but it's a a kind of symbolic entrapment by the oppressive expectations of society. He cannot demonstrate his anger because that would only serve to, in the eyes of people like the landlady, prove that black men are aggressive. And I think the [00:29:00] other thing I'd like to touch on about the red is the lack of nuance in the way in which red is brought up. It's brought up three times in a row as a kind of block color with no sense of variation between them.

And I think if we contrast that with the way in which other colors, particularly the color of the narrator's skin is talked about, there is so much nuance, so much sense of variation and evolution over time, so much sense of The breadth of the black experience, both in terms of the physical color of one's skin, but also the way in which one's experiences as a black man can alter one's perception of one's own race.

The block nature of that red I think serves as a reminder of the barriers that exist for people like the narrator. There is no sense that there is any kind of wiggle room here. There is no sense that things might be different in the future. There is simply blocks of solid color that seem immovable and impassable. 

Maiya: I think it's a really great contrast and, , what Jo mentioned there about the way in which black men particularly are transfigured in literature as aggressive, or angry, or [00:30:00] violent, is something that Soyinka, you know, really fantastically flips on its head here. Obviously, you're looking at someone who is, as Jo said, Polite and well mannered and actually uses some really stunning language far more than you would use in regular conversation, but obviously this sits in contrast to the capitalization and the heaviness. And it's something we keep referring back to Jo, your commentary on colour I think is, is particularly interesting there because it is physical and it feels very, very concrete here. There is even in that third line from the end, One moment, madam, sensing her receiver rearing on the thunderclap around my ears.

The violence in this poem is not coming from the speaker, even though they are angry and they are upset. They are so well mannered, despite all of the ways in which they're being treated. But the violence comes from the other end. Now in many ways, because the landlady actually asks so few questions, it's very hard to say that she's demonized in any way, you know?

The [00:31:00] speaker is simply reiterating an experience that they have had. They are not really casting aspersions on it, to be honest, but because you as a reader are so intimately involved with how they feel, you really come to understand that there is a pressure and a really concrete sense of block between what the speaker wants and hopes for and what they realistically can achieve and receive. One of the methods that I think Soyinka uses quite tactfully is actually the lyric I. We haven't really touched on the fact that this is a lyric poem. It is a first person poem.

I hate a wasted journey. I am brunette. I chose. Now, for many, many writers of color, poets of color, the lyric I has traditionally been reserved for white men. White poetics for a very, very long time has been completely exclusionary of writers of color. There are thousands more celebrated white men than there are women, than there are poets of color, [00:32:00] than there are a whole amalgamation of the both. Now what Soyinka does here is reclaim that lyric I, and I think that is what is the most important thing in this poem, is that regardless of the speaker's treatment, regardless of their failure to actually achieve what they want, it does not matter because they are absolutely themselves. We've touched on how they really beautify themselves. We've touched on how they've had this experience before. All of that is cast aside by the fact that the Lyric Eye is fully embodied here.

You know, this would be a very, very different poem if we had the second hand view of this landlady. If we understood her point of view. But we're not allowed to. And that is okay. It makes this poem so, so much more powerful.

And I must admit, I think there's probably a lot to be said for the nature of the questioning that comes from the landlady. Obviously, the landlady, naturally, through the way she is built in this poem, is , very, [00:33:00] Abstract. She could be anyone, I think is the message that we're trying to get here. But I mean, Jo, do you have any thoughts really on, on that line of questioning in particular?

Joe: Yes. Well, the first place I'd like to start with is again, that contrast between the things you were just saying about the Lyric Eye, that sense of the narrator that feels proud of themselves, that likes themselves, that is sort of finds beauty in their own experience.

And that's often a very individual thing. The contrast of that with the line of questioning, which serves only to reduce the speaker to the color of his skin, it sort of strips him of his individuality. So I think that's the first thing I would look to focus on, but I think Soyinka does a really good job.

Fascinating job through these questions of exposing the way in which prejudice works. And I think you mentioned earlier on Maiya that she doesn't ask that many questions. That's mostly because she asks the same questions continually. She really zeroes in on the color of the narrator's skin. That's the only piece of information that matters to her.

And she continually asks questions and is dissatisfied with the answers. And what you have by the end of this poem is somebody [00:34:00] who's asked the same question five times and has learned nothing. And what Soyinka is therefore able to do is demonstrate the ways in which prejudice isn't looking to be challenged.

It isn't looking to be corrected. And he completely subverts prejudice. the function of a question because these questions do not serve to eradicate ignorance, but only to perpetuate it. And I think it's only when you reread the poem and realize that none of the questions are seeking new answers.

They're merely an expression of dissatisfaction with the answer they've been given. It's just, it's Soyinka at his very, very best. It's a brilliant expose on the way in which racism and prejudice works. Now just to kind of abstract this slightly and take a wider view, this obviously is a poem in which a speaker is interacting with somebody and the speaker we've spoken about is in a position that is vulnerable and that is, you know, in need of support and help.

But Maiya, can you tell us a little bit about the authorial voice and the kind of power that grants Soyinka in contrast to the speaker within the poem?

Maiya: Was a really fascinating topic actually and I [00:35:00] think I have two answers to this in a sense. To get a little bit academic for a moment. , There's a really brilliant essay by a critic called Sandy Palmer called Not a British Subject. Uh, this was published in 2020, and effectively within this essay, she makes the argument , poets and writers of color actually shouldn't use the lyric, I, because it has been exclusionary for so long, they need to find alternate forms of communication. She links this into many more complex arguments, but that is one of her core ones.

And it really points out something within the literary canon that I think actually offers a lot of tension within this poem, which is what is the speaker's right to occupy. So, we are looking in this poem specifically at Britain, in a particular point in time, in which racism was rife. The predominant voice is going to be white, usually male.

In this case, it's not, it's female, on top of that, a class [00:36:00] difference as well. We have that from the good breeding, the lipstick coated, long, gold rolled cigarette holder. I mean, even the way in which those words flow, you have this real sense of, kind of, gravitas, I'd like to say. And yeah, despite all of that, Soyinka offers us, in his speaker, Someone who is very unashamedly themselves, and I think that is the beautiful thing about claiming a lyric eye, is that, and maybe this is where my personal opinion comes into it, is that I don't think poets of color can reject a lyric eye without accepting the exclusion that comes with it. , and this is maybe in contrast to Parmar's argument here, but there are two schools of thought, which is one, you know, Soyinka could have written this poem and just talked about experience without centering it on himself. But by centering it on himself, I think it makes it so much richer. It makes it more personal.

It makes a reader or a listener understand that you are intimately involved with this [00:37:00] person's experience. And I'm sure you'd agree with me. I don't believe that the I should be exclusionary. You should be able to claim a sense of personality, a sense of space. Specificity, you should be able to claim your space in time, in a moment, in a specific location.

And that is what Suyinka does brilliantly. The sense of authorial strength and power that comes from this is fantastic. It is a speaker who is mediating themselves against all odds. And I really, really love what he does by Using that sense of authorial intention and pushing forward, despite being told consistently that they are not light enough, that they are not white enough, that they don't have enough in order to qualify for all of these things that they want.

It's, in my view, a really hopeful poem. Do you find that same sense of hope within this?

Joe: I do, when I look at it [00:38:00] in broad terms, I think when I read the poem closely, I can't help but find that sense of hopelessness with the word pleaded in those last couple of lines. I think that one of the real strengths of this poem, one of the real strengths of anything that's attempting to be satirical, is that you have to Hold on to the emotional core of whatever it is you're satirizing, even as you satirize it.

And I think it's why so many satires fall flat, but on the one hand, this poem emphasizes how cynical the narrator is, how he doesn't expect anything different, etc, etc. And that almost functions as a way in which he's putting up barriers to his own disappointment.

He's saying, oh, of course I won't get what I want. And yet at the end, we still get the sense of pleading because beneath it all, beneath this cynical exterior, this is still somebody who needs somewhere to live and is, you know, growing increasingly worried they won't be able to find it.

So I think that when I finished the poem, reading it closely, I struggled to see that sense of hope. When I think about what the poem represents in a wider context, I think absolutely. I think it's impossible for us in 2024 to [00:39:00] really comprehend the way in which this poem was breaking new ground. As you've mentioned, the idea of a poet of colour writing in the UK, adopting the lyric eye.

I mean, it's It had never been done in the way that Soyinka was trying to do it. And I think just to zoom out slightly for listeners who may not be aware, this poem is published just five years after Chinua Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart, which we actually spoke about in our episode on William Butler Yeats The Second Coming.

So I would implore listeners who haven't checked out that episode to go and do so. It's one of the best I think we've done so far. And I think. That novel in 1958 completely changed the game because it introduced British readers to characters from Achebe's Nigeria that were not caricatured, that were not set up merely as plot devices, but were truly three dimensional real people for the first time.

And that completely changed the way that certainly people in the UK and Britain and further afield that were reading that book began to view people in Nigeria. But it's also important to mention that that book is [00:40:00] written with a third person omniscient narrator. We don't get the internal thoughts of those characters.

So to view this poem in conjunction with a novel like that I think is really interesting because once again we have a portrayal of a Nigerian speaker that is not caricatured, that is not reductive, but this time we get the internal thoughts. We get that sense of inner turmoil in the way in which the speaker in this poem has to mediate between the injustice they feel on the inside and the way they project themselves on the outside.

And I think that is a major step forward between 58 and 63. And I think to read the poem in conjunction with that novel, I do find there is hope there. I do find a progression in the way in which writers from British colonies or for former British colonies felt more confident in able to write the way that they wished.

Maiya: I think it's tough as well, right? Is that, You know, the era in which both of those works were written, there's still a very, very fragile line to toe and all at [00:41:00] once, a speaker, a poet, a writer has to simultaneously speak on behalf of themselves and their own personal experience, but also write in a way that is trying to break political ground.

It's trying to demonstrate a sense of community and shared struggle. So, This poem and many other poems that came before and followed it. The political turmoil that is wrapped up in so many of these works, and so many of these publications, is really hard to ignore. And I think, you know, context is one of the things we talk about quite a lot on this podcast.

And I think there are many poems that you can divorce from their context. I don't think this is one of them. I don't think this poem is one of them, and I also think when you look at black British poetry that was written around this time, black African poetry, in Britain, you absolutely cannot ignore , the impact of colonization, the impact of things like independence, especially for a poem like this that is exploring a [00:42:00] speaker who came from a colonized country that has recently gained independence.

It's a really tenuous line between being a subject of a British colony To then suddenly being independent and being in Britain. You are treated in a completely different manner. And this is brand new at this time. This is something that is three years old.

Joe: No, I'd love to dive in on that point about the freshness and how new this was. You mentioned at the top of the episode, obviously we're looking at this in 2024. Soyinka, Nobel prize winner. I mean, he's taught at some of the finest institutions around the world.

He's taught to Oxford, he's taught at Cambridge, he's taught at Yale. He's taught at Harvard. I mean, this is a figure. Immersed in different literary institutions around the world. That is not the case in the early 1960s. And I think just to give a sense of how kind of fresh This moment was not only for Suinka, but for African writers more generally.

This poem is written in 1962, as we said, [00:43:00] first published in 1963. 1962 was also the first time that the African writers conference was ever held. So this gathering of writers from the continent of Africa and from the African diaspora, and this was an incredible event that happened in Uganda. And again, it's really important for us reading a poem like this to not only understand the.

context of Britain in the 1960s. And we've talked about the way in which that society was incredibly racist and incredibly prejudiced. A lot of African countries at this point either had just gained or on the cusp of independence from European colonizers.

And this conference marked an incredible sort of meeting of minds. Soyinka was there, Chimura Echebe, who I mentioned earlier on, was there. People like Gabriel Okara was there. One of the people we spoke about in our episode on Kamala Das poem, an introduction, Gugi wa Thiong'o was there, as well as Langston Hughes sort of representing, uh, the African diaspora.

That conversation, I mean, we spoke about this with relation to Kamala Das again, about how [00:44:00] much it matters to be in the room with like minded people and whether or not Actually, developments are just the result of socioeconomic factors rather than actually shared ideas in a room. But for us to look back at that now and to see five or six of those names to be hugely influential members of the literary canon, Soyinka included, it's almost difficult to picture what the atmosphere must have been like at the time when some of these guys had published, you know, a novel, a couple of collections, a play here and there.

The ideas and the kind of subject matter that was covered in that conference and its repercussions, I mean it's an incredibly famous meeting of minds. I think it's impossible to view poetry like this one which was written in the same year and other novels and plays by other writers at the conference without understanding that they felt like they were on the cusp of something new.

They felt like they were breaking new ground and that really translates across the literary works, including in this poem, that sense that this is something that hasn't been done [00:45:00] before. I think it's probably emboldened by the fact that they had just been to this conference in which new ground was being broken all the time.

Maiya: Well, Joe, thank you so much for that insight. I think this conversation has been fantastic and this poem is absolutely worth your time. So listeners who don't have the poem in front of them, please go read it. Go read more of Soyinka's work. He is one of the greats in my opinion.

, but I think for this episode, it would be really nice to leave you with some other recommendations to read around. Of course, for any listeners who are unfamiliar with any of the poems we've mentioned today, go look on Poemanalysis.com and go have your rabbit hole experience. This topic is one of my absolute favorites to cover, and Soyinka's work will take you down a million different roads. I would also leave you with a few more recommendations.

John Agard's Listen Mr. Oxford Don is, I think, one of the best satirical poems out there. I would also recommend listening to Linton Kwesi Johnson, one of the greats in terms of dub [00:46:00] poetry. He has written a poem that I think would be great in conversation with this one, called Sonny's Letter. And also check out people like Jean Vinterbreeze, or Elizabeth Jane Burnett.

They are fantastic female writers, and have so much to offer to this conversation. But Joe, I'm going to ask for your top three,

Joe: Oh, it's a tough question. I think a couple of Things that just right off the bat. I would absolutely echo Maiya's recommendations there and particularly the Linton Quesay Johnson recommendation and actually for Poetry+ subscribers, you can actually go and check out a PDF all about the Dub Poets, which is the literary movement to which Quesay is generally associated with and There are many, many other PDFs on individual poets, but actually some of the ones that I'm really interested in are those ones on literary movements.

And there are, I think, more than 25 literary movements explored in great detail in the PDF Learning Library, available exclusively to Poetry+ subscribers. So if you don't have a subscription already, please go and sign up for one now. In terms of my recommendations, I think, I've mentioned this on previous podcasts.

I think Things Fall Apart [00:47:00] is one of the finest novels ever written. And I think to read it in conjunction with Soyinka's work would be a very fruitful endeavor. And if anybody's interested in kind of one of the early inspirations for that novel by Chinua Achebe, they can go and check out our WB Yeats episode on The Second Coming that I mentioned earlier.

I really enjoyed, as I've said, the novel Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emicheta. I think that was a writer that I'd never read before when I first came across the novel last year. Um, shout out to Brixton Library, , who had it, and it's a fabulous, fabulous read. And again, a fascinating dialogue with this poem because it's a far more innocent, naive voice, and you get to see that kind of journey from naivety to cynicism, which is, whereas this poem sort of jumps in at the end with a, with an already cynical voice.

And one final recommendation from me, I'd like to just, direct readers to the website, Poemanalysis.com, where there are more than 25 poems by the Nigerian poet and novelist, Gabriel Okara. And I think in particular, I would direct them to the poem Once Upon a [00:48:00] Time, which like this poem by Soyinka sort of adopts a very satirical voice and subverts kind of Western tropes, in particular the nursery rhyme in order , to, express his point.

So lots of recommendations for listeners. And one final thing I would leave listeners with would be to make sure that you email us with your questions. You know, what did you think of our recommendations? Do you have anything that you'd like to recommend to other listeners on the podcast in response to or relation with any of the poets we've mentioned so far?

So email your questions, queries, or responses to beyondtheverse@poemanalysis.com. We can't wait to read them. 

Mai: But for now, it's goodbye from me.

Joe: And goodbye from me and the whole team at Poemanalysis.com and Poetry+.