33 pages • 1 hour read
Derek WalcottA Far Cry from Africa
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1962A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Nature Versus Civilization
Throughout the poem, multiple allusions to the dichotomy between the natural world and a more developed, “civilized” world present a complex tension for the speaker to explore. While the Kikuyu are a part of the landscape, attached to it by blood, the British colonizers use “statistics to justify and scholars seize” (Line 7), which presents the British as far away mathematicians and economists studying out of some book, making decisions that will determine the course of other people’s lives. The significance of the colonizers considering this untouched land a “paradise” (Line 4) prompts questions as to why then they would need to impose their so-called civilized way of living on to an already civilized, almost heaven-like place.
The most crucial way the poem interrogates this dichotomy is by addressing the glaring similarities between nature’s brutality and the brutality and violence of war:
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
seeks his divinity by inflicting pain (Lines 15-17).
This special attention to the idea of divinity makes a statement about the function of religion, doubting whether it truly civilizes man and keeps him from evil. The speaker is questioning whether the dichotomy between nature and civilization truly exists at all or if it is an illusion used to justify colonization and imperial rule in foreign lands.
The speaker feels a kind of reverence for the ancientness of nature, implying that nature is perhaps a much more powerful force than civility. The speaker says, “ibises whose cries / Have wheeled since civilizations dawn” (Lines 12-13). The speaker seems to believe that civilization has not been truly successful at eradicating the animalistic tendency within human beings to hunt, steal, or protect our families. Humans themselves are of nature, no matter how “civilized” they become; everyone is a part of the brutal cycle of life. In this way and in many others, we are not so different from beasts. The major difference is that beasts don’t inflict pain for some higher, misguided purpose. Beasts kill for survival, thus calling into question what humankind inflicts and even glorifies in the name of survival.
The Central Issue of Language
Language is a central issue for the speaker in this poem. His love of English is the primary conflict within the context of his identity crisis. He cannot resolve his anger toward the British colonizers because their language has colonized him. How can he love something that is a symbol of his ancestral trauma? This highlights the complex relationship many colonized peoples have with the language they’ve been forced to adopt. For the speaker, language is a tool that can be used to express things in a beautiful and moving way, a tool of undoing his own oppression in a post-colonial world, and a tool that helps fight the colonizers by using their own tools. But English as a whole also stands-in for colonization; England has colonized so much for the world, subjecting it to the violent act of being robbed of unique languages.
The speaker’s love of the English language makes the poem self-referential: We can see that the speaker loves language as he has just written a poem. But he struggles to reconcile the idea that it is this very language that has set him free that is also a mark of his oppression. To further complicate the issue, on one hand the English language has allowed him to express himself in an intimate and lyrical way, but on the other hand, he uses his English decisively to address the very oppression that mandated his use of the English language in the first place. In this way, he is using the tools of his oppressor against them, to critique them and hold them accountable for their bad deeds. Language becomes a weapon in the hands and mind of the speaker, and in this way he can claim some small victory within this unwinnable circumstance.
Much like all the other questions, this question, “how choose / between this Africa and the English tongue I love?” (Lines 29-30) cannot be answered. This is part of the internal conflict that accompanies colonization and oppression. The choice to leave these questions unresolved reflects the general uncertainty and confusion surrounding a colonized identity. Through the English language, the speaker has been given a great power, but this power causes him to feel as if he has betrayed himself in using it.
Historical Precedence of War
Throughout the poem, the speaker references historical wars that predated the Mau Mau uprising. The speaker uses these historical events to better understand the current war that is taking place within the poem. At the end of the first stanza the speaker alludes to the treatment of Jewish people by the Nazis during WWII. During WWII, Jewish people were rounded up into ghettos before being shipped off to forced labor and concentration camps for mass execution. Similarly, during the Mau Mau uprising, the British also set up forced labor camps in response to the event described in the first stanza, “the white child hacked in bed” (Line 9). Because the Kenyans typically used machete-like swords, the attack was especially brutal. This infamous incident prompted the extreme response from the British who, like the Nazis, also ended up committing mass execution in retaliation for the uprising. Many of those forced into labor camps had no direct involvement in the uprising at all and faced insufferable conditions at the hands of the British.
The Spanish Civil war is also discussed in the final stanza, “A waste of our compassion, as with Spain” (Line 24), and is used to make a statement about the parallels between what was happening in Spain with what happened in Kenya. From 1936 to 1939, Spain was engaged in a civil war between the left-leaning allies of the Popular Front government along with communists and anarcho-syndicalists against the ultra-conservative Nationalists, who held fascist and anti-democratic beliefs and ideologies. Ultimately, due to the political climate at the time the war was variously viewed as a class struggle, a religious struggle, a struggle between a dictatorship and a democracy. The speaker is making a point about the fruitlessness of war, that with all the complex political ideologies, terminologies, statistics, and scholars it is a waste of compassion to feel too badly about it. This once again plays into the idea that war is part of our violent nature. The speaker believes that when we can understand the precedent for war and the way in which it has defined so much of the world, the sadness and hopelessness becomes overwhelming. Instead the speaker is proposing that it is better not to care at all, as this is the way of the world and it does not make sense.
Related Titles
By Derek Walcott
