Essay Questions

How does “Night in the Gardens of Port of Spain” use race to differentiate between night and morning?

The speaker observes, “Night, the black summer, simplifies her smells into/a village; she assumes the impenetrable/musk of the negro, grows secret as sweat, her alleys odorous with/shucked oyster shells.” The blackness of the night is comparable to a black person's dusky skin. Clearly, the darkness is responsible for the adverse depiction of the night, which encompasses the unpleasant odor that is be ascribed to ‘oyster shells’

Comparatively, for the day, the speaker asserts, “As daylight breaks the coolie turns his tumbril of hacked, beheaded coconuts towards home.” The skin color of a "coolie" is largely lighter than that of a "negro." The speaker associates coolies with daylight due to their comparative whiteness. Furthermore, the allocation of coconuts to coolies is more complementary than the oyster shells.

Explicate the ideological message in “A Far Cry from Africa”.

“A Far Cry from Africa” denounces the viciousness of colonialism: “Statistics justify and scholars seize/The salients of colonial policy./What is that to the white child hacked in bed?” Colonization subsidized racism for it reinforced the brutal butchering of the Africans who dissented against colonialism. The illustration regarding the chopping of a white child suggests that racism unequivocally underwrote the dehumanization of the subjects in the colonies.