Thinking Activity: African Poetry

Hello Friends!

This blog is a response to the thinking activity given by our teacher. We are studying African LIterature as a part of our syllabus. In this paper, we are studying African Poetry. In this blog, I am going to write about the brief introduction of the poem ‘Vultures’ by Chinua Achebe and the brief summary of one article related to it.

Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist and poet, considered one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. He is best known for his debut novel Things Fall Apart (1958), which is the most widely read novel in modern African literature.

 Brief Introduction of the poem ‘Vulture’

‘Vultures’ by Chinua Achebe describes the vultures in such a disparaging and grim fashion that could be construed as a metaphor for the people responsible for the atrocities in Belsen and in particular the “Commandant”.Chinua Achebe’s ‘Vultures’ is a gritty poem that is hard to read due to the harrowing subject matter. By using several visual and olfactory imagery, Achebe creates a dark and filthy environment in the poem. It depicts a truthful picture of the Belsen concentration camp. The commandant, in the poem, is none other than a representative of a class, who selflessly thinks of his own family even if thousands of families are rotting just around him. The fetid smell of rotting humanity inside him gets featured through the imagery of the vultures.

Article title: Chinua Achebe's 'Vultures'

This article starts with the basic information about Chinua Achebe. Eileen Newman says in his article that Chinua Achebe the Ibo novelist (born 1930) is probably better known for his first novel Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, than for his poetry. This poem, 'Vultures', could also be seen to deal with what happens in a country when 'Things fall apart and the 'blood-dimmed tide is loosed' as W. B. Yeats puts it in his poem, 'The Second Coming'.

'Vultures' is an expression of Achebe's horror at the obscenity of the civil war of 1967-70, which erupted when the eastern part of Nigeria tried to become the independent state of Biafra. Achebe was working for the Biafran government at the time and witnessed the suffering, violence, and brutality of this bloody war. The rebel nation was starved into submission and in 1971 Achebe published a volume of poetry Beware Soul Brother, dealing with war and its legacy. It is, at present, his only book of poems and was published in the USA as Christmas in Biafra. 'Vultures' is one of the poems in the second section of the book, which deals with the aftermath of war.

He also talks about the paradox in the poem by saying that the title 'Vultures' immediately carries with it a host of repulsive, horrific, and frightening associations, which Achebe expands upon in the main body of the poem. The very awkwardness of these birds is mirrored in the poem's irregular structure. The vulture has an ungainly, shuffling gait, head bobbing, neck pulsating, eyes never leaving sight of its victim. Its jerky movements seem to be almost an apology for its repugnant opportunism.

Achebe takes an image of this creature and its natural behavior as a metaphor for the paradox of man's simultaneous capacity for good and evil. He then explores this paradox more explicitly, reflecting on the fact that good and evil, love and hate, kindness and cruelty can exist together in one being. The poem is set in a country where unburied corpses lie in ditches. Although the background is the Nigerian civil war, the Belsen concentration camp is brought into the poem as a reminder of European atrocities; the issues here are universal. The poem is structured in the form of an argument. Achebe's consideration of the phenomenon of evil in our lives is reminiscent of some of Edwin Muir's philosophical poems in which Muir examines the sudden lurch towards evil. In 'The Good Town' Muir conveys the same bewilderment when he asks: 'How did it come?' and goes on to ask the unthinkable: 'Could it have come from us?' Likewise, Achebe finds it 'Strange/indeed' that love can exist alongside hatred and brutality.

Reference

Newman, Eileen. "Chinua Achebe's 'Cultures'." The English Review, vol. 10, no. 2, Nov. 1999, p. 14. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A79411118/LitRC?u=anon~76ee63f4&sid=googleScholar&xid=2f5d376e. Accessed 27 Dec. 2021.