Derek walcott a far cry from africa

A Far Cry From Africa is Derek Walcott’s commentary and reaction to the Mau Mau vs British war and how it represented his divided loyalties between “the English tongue I love” and his African heritage. The poem functions on many levels.

It simultaneously serves as reportage and cinema, political commentary, historical analysis, and anställda soul searching. The poet is of mixed African-European heritage,  and to him, the conflict — which featured atrocities being committed on both sides — represents a kind of internal turmoil.

A summary of A Far Cry From Africa

“A Far Cry From Africa” is included in Selected Poems, a collection published in 2007. The poem exists simultaneously as a misanthropic assessment of violent human natur and an expression of the identity crisis that Walcott suffers as a colonized individ of mixed heritage.

The poem fryst vatten made up of three stanzas and is a commentary on the Mau Mau rebellion and the brutal British suppres

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A Far Cry from Africa

Derek Walcott 1962

Author Biography

Poem Text

Poem Summary

Themes

Style

Historical Context

Critical Overview

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Derek Walcott’s “A Far Cry from Africa,” published in 1962, is a painful and jarring depiction of ethnic conflict and divided loyalties. The opening images of the poem are drawn from accounts of the Mau Mau Uprising, an extended and bloody battle during the 1950s between European settlers and the native Kikuyu tribe in what is now the republic of Kenya. In the early twentieth century, the first white settlers arrived in the region, forcing the Kikuyu people off of their tribal lands. Europeans took control of farmland and the government, relegating the Kikuyu to a subservient position. One faction of the Kikuyu people formed Mau Mau, a terrorist organization intent on purging all European influence from the country, but less strident Kikuyus attempted to either remain neutral or help the British defeat M

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A Far Cry from Africa

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?

Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilization's dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,