Prejudice in Telephone Conversation and Dinner Guest-Me...

Prejudice in Telephone Conversation and Dinner Guest-Me In the two poems, ‘Telephone Conversation’ and ‘Dinner Guest-Me,’ each poet uses their poetry as a means of confronting and challenging prejudice. In ‘Telephone Conversation’ by Wole Soyinka, a phone conversation takes place between an African man and a very artificial lady about renting out a room. When the lady finds out he is African she becomes very prejudiced and racist towards him. ‘Dinner Guest-Me’ by Langston Hughes is about a black man going to a dinner party where he is the only coloured person there, like he is the ‘token black.’ Anger and a sense of humour are shown in both of the poems. In ‘Telephone Conversation’ the African man is angry at the â€Å"peroxide†¦show more content†¦Her response of â€Å"DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT IS† she still doesn’t understand him. â€Å"My bottom raven black,† she is offended by this and finally realises he is making fun of her. In ‘Dinner Guest-Me’, Hughes uses onomatopoeia such as â€Å"murmuring† and â€Å"wondering† to suggest the tension between the other dinner guests and himself, the evening is leisurely and relaxed. In ‘Telephone Conversation’ Soyinka uses â€Å"Silence. Silenced transmission of pressurized good breeding† to pause and create perhaps a slight moment of tension between the landlady and the man hoping to lodge. In Wole Soyinka’s poem the landlady puts on a very artificial voice, â€Å"pressurized good-breeding† when talking to the man, her voice is emphasized, â€Å"HOW DARK? ... ARE YOU LIGHT OR VERY DARK?† just by using capital letters you can imagine the loudness and sudden rudeness of her voice as she becomes prejudice towards the African man after he ‘confesses.’ Polite and elegant phrases such as â€Å"fraises du bois†, â€Å"delicious† and â€Å"divine† are used in Langston’s poem; these create a different mood of gracious living. Soyinka doesn’t use any polite or elegant words, he uses ruder and shocking language such as the capital lettering, â€Å"WHAT’S THAT?† Despite that the landlady considers herself pleasing to the eye and upper class she is actually very rude and common. â€Å"Dinner Guest-Me† doesn’t have a particular rhyme or rhythm to it, the words just flow onShow MoreRelatedThe Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka2243 Words   |  9 PagesThe Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka The Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka (born 1935) was one of the few African writers to denounce the slogan of Negritude as a tool of autocracy. He also was the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Wole Soyinka was born July 13, 1934 in Abeokuta a village on the banks of the River Ogun in the western area of Nigeria. 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