Assignment 7

Wole Soyinka: “Telephone Conversation” (pp. 604-05)

The striking and frustrating thing about racism is its utter impersonality, its reduction of human beings to nothing more than their skin color. Soyinka’s poem underscores the impersonality by describing a telephone conversation rather than a face-to-face encounter. The poem opens matter-of-factly, with the speaker in mid-conversation. The caller is satisfied that the room he is seeking to rent meets his criteria. He strikes the first note of irony when he makes the “self-confession” (line 4). It is an interesting phrase in the context of the poem because what he has to confess is not something about himself but rather his very self, his African origin, his color. Before the lady breaks her shocked silence, the speaker resorts to irony when he says, “Caught I was, foully” (line 9), a line that befits a villain in a melodrama. But this is not melodrama; this is real life. The speaker, stunned by the lady’s question about his degree of blackness, momentarily considers hanging up. As the polite interrogation continues, he turns the tables ever so gently by playing his assigned part in this surreal drama. Unable to convey to her in words the exact shade of his blackness, exasperated with the demeaning questions, he gives her a vivid physical description of his body colors, ending with his “raven black” bottom (line 32). Clearly this genteel, racist lady who finds it perfectly appropriate to interrogate the speaker about his color is shocked by the caller’s crude reference to his “bottom” and abruptly hangs up.