Activity3
1. The capital letters used in the question asked by the landlady “YOU LIGHT OR VERY DARK?” is asked bluntly which emphasis how uneducated she is. It also conveys how she would sound, we associate capital letters with the tone of a person and emotion they are showing, in this context she is trying not to sound so uncultured which she fails at. The silence suggests how shocked he is by what she has said.
2.The poet conveys that the landlady is shouting through the phone by emphasising the capital letters “HOW DARK?” this shows how racist the landlady is because she doesn’t care if she insults him or not. This also shows how controlling she is, she doesn’t want to lose money over one black person in a whole flat building, because at that time whites and blacks were segregated and the whites wanted nothing to do with them.
3. The poet used the sibilance “shamed by ill-mannered silence”. This sibilance conveys the awkward silences they share when she asked him how dark he was. It took her few moments to regain herself, he feels ashamed of his skin colour now because of the silence which he shouldn’t.
4. I’m not sure what the paragraph was trying to say
5. Soyinka uses imagery to explain to the landlady that he isn’t completely black “palm of my hands, soles of my feet, peroxide blond”. He is now trying desperately to get this flat, this also shows how hard working he is and how long he has worked if the pigment in his hands are now fading to a lighter tone.
6. The poet has started to realise that he has probably gone too far “one moment madam!” the madam shows respect and social standing to show who the dominant one in the conversation is. The exclamation point conveys his desperation for the flat since has probably been through this process many