African Poetry’s Conflicts on Varied Perspectives

Zahidur Rahman Nahid

Conflict is the way of substantiate something through opposing or developing the contradictory doctrines between two objects. In African poetry, conflict mingles with its essence of perception. Here, conflict not only contradicts the western concepts and values but also develops the identity of Africa with its own history and perspectives. It creates through contrast with the western concepts and symbols. The opposing aspects of the Europeans made the Africans to contradict with them. African poets focused the conflicts in culture, nature, race, generation, power, values, religious, psychological and so on. Unlike these issues the double consciousness of the poets also creates the self contradictory conflicts. Where, overlapping these problems are really challenge to them and to face the challenge making conflict become inherent.

Cultural conflict is one of the most striking points in African poetry. In Africa what is culture and tradition that seems uncultured or peculiar to the western. The constructed culture of Europeans is subverted by the African poets through imposing their own culture and tradition. In Africa, there were festival songs, work songs. So, poetry has some benefit. They write about their problems, they wanted to convert the oral tradition in to the written form. It is the combination of traditional and modern element. African poet Gabriel Okara focuses the ice-cold attitude of Europeans to the African culture. In Africa what is traditional and cultural that appears as uncultured and humorous to the Europeans. They also represent the African culture in the humiliated sense. Okara in his poem “You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed” focuses this humiliation:

    

        “You laughed at my song

you laughed at my walk

Then I danced my magic dance

to the rhythm of talking drums pleading, but you shut your

eyes and you laughed and laughed and laughed” [Anthology of Commonwealth Poetry, page 127, L: 9-13]

Gabriel Okara focuses the ice-cold attitude of the Europeans to the Africans. This ice-cold attitude of the Europeans creates the conflict between Africa and European and Okara make the self identity of African culture through his poems. The conflict in Okara’s poetry substantiates the self identity of Africa. This conflict continues by Okara to satirize the artificial European manners and their cultural attitudes. Gabriel Okara in his poem “Once Upon A Time” satirizes European speech manners:

        

           “And I have learned, too,

            to laugh with only my teeth

            and shake hands without my heart

            I have also learned to say ‘Goodbye’,

            when I mean ‘Good-riddance’;

            to say ‘Glad to meet you’

            without being glad; and to say ‘It’s been

            nice talking to you’, after being bored.” [Anthology of Commonwealth Poetry, page 130, L: 27-32]

Above lines are presenting the artificiality of European manners and this also glorify African manners because it’s natural and instinct in this sense. This showing of European fake manners makes the deconstruction of European attitudes and reverses the humiliation.  Okara was greatly concern about the African people and in his rhythm he brought back the folk tradition. To focus on the folk tradition, Okara works on rural settings and drawing local images which conveys the traditional culture of the native Africans.

Moreover, Okara in his poetry “Snow Flakes gently down” bring out the cultural conflict as theme. The theme is the conflict of cultures of the confrontation of Europe and Africa. Here conflict shows metaphorically by using symbols. Besides the previous conflicts, this cultural conflict prefers the conflict against the constructed culture of Europe to the Africans. Some others poem like “Nuit de Sine” of senghor focuses on the black culture on the opposite of white celebration.

Nature means the feature or aspects of something which is instinct. It is usual that nature of anything is different from the others. In African poetry the portraying of African nature is noticeable. Focusing true African nature in foreign language became a tradition of African poets. Though having double consciousness, the African poets wanted to glorify the African nature rather than the constructed European nature. Poets like Leopold Sedhor Senghor, Gabriel Imomtime Okara, David Diop and Dennis Brutas are the successful portrayer of the nature of Africa in their poetry. Celebration of black, portraying matriarchal system etc is the contradictory doctrines of the western concepts. Bringing these issues African poets make the representation of true African nature and it deconstructs the European ideology. Such as Leopold Sedhor Senghor in his poem “Nuit De Sine” use the theme of black woman and show a tribute to the matriarchal system. Senghor in his poem “I will pronounce your name”, praises ‘Naett’ which symbolizes Africa:

            “Naett, coin of gold, shining coal, you my night, my sun!...” (A selection of African poetry, page 28, line-9 )

This praising line not only glorifies the Africa but also make the counter discourse [1]. This is an utter conflict of the African poets against the western concepts of ‘Dark Africa’. In this poem the poet has used many indigenous images to confirm their stand in conflict with colonial concepts. Where the whites counts black as nasty, impure there the poet Leopold Senghor glorifies ‘black’. One of his innovations in African poetry is his inversion of traditional images associated with black and anything dark. Rather than see black and dark as outrageous and evil, Senghor portrays it as beautiful and good. Traditional idea of black is totally absent in this poem, rather he is celebrating the ‘black’, it is ‘gold’ to him, it is his ‘shining coal’ and it is his ‘sun’. Gabriel Okara in his poem “Once upon a time” satirizes European culture through binary opposition. He criticizes European manner, their attitudes, talking manners as artificial and refer the Africans attitudes as natural.

Generation conflict portrays successfully in Gabriel Okara’s “Once Upon A Time”, in this poem the speaker was the father and the listener was the son. Father’s experiencing of colonialism illustrate to the son. A vivid description about the colonialism and the attitudes of colonizers describe here. As a teacher, father talked about his past to teach his son. Nostalgia of youth and age of father encourages him to teach his son. But at the ending this teaching is reversed by the statement of father:

“So show me, son,

            how to laugh, show me how

            I used to laugh and smile

            Once upon a time when I was like you” [Anthology of Commonwealth Poetry, page 130-31, L: 40-43]

This reversal of teaching suggests that the son will be the teacher of his father. This assertion of father reflexes the hope and aspiration of him to his son. Here father is the generation of pre-colonial and colonial state and his son is the generation of postcolonial state. Changes occurred in the meantime of colonialism; Africans are in essence of loss. To overlap this position the new generation is the hope. Here the conflict is, unlike the tradition the ancestor can not be the guiding spirit of young generation. This generation gap and the failure of ancestor’s guiding is the consequence of colonialism. Okara brilliantly portrays this generation conflict through the reversal of teaching. Moreover, this generation conflict gives a suggestion to the ancestors to hope on their young generation. Here the guiding spirit becomes the young generation because of the loss and conflict in colonial period of Africa.                                            

Besides drawing African vernacular poetry, African poets also draw for subject matter, re-telling stories from African histories and legend. Describing African folk-beliefs and customs, and putting into poetry the appearance of African landscapes. They also try to express the political experience that Africa has going through under the colonialism. Some of these revolutionary poetries asserting Africa and African traditions and values against Europe. Many of the poets spent much time in Europe and their poetry tells of the African’s experience in Europe, sometimes as protests sometimes as satires sometimes as lyrically.

Gabriel Okara in his poem “The snow flakes sail gently down” by using the technique of dream portrays the conflict of values between Africa and Europe. In the second stanza of the poem contains the burden meaning of it and poet uses the symbol of palm trees, gold and roots. The word ‘inside’ symbolically refers the inside of human beings and his essence. In contrast of the European concept of ‘inside’ Okara use it as the human essence and insight. Through these symbols the poet preferences his African values rather than the European values:

            I dreamed of birds, black

birds flying in my inside, nesting

and hatching on oil palms bearing suns

for fruits and with roots denting the

uprooter’s spades. [A selection of African poetry, page 45, L: 16-20]

In the poem “You laughed and laughed and laughed” Okara directly criticizes the European cultural values. Mentioning it as artificial and glorifying the African cultural values. This portrays the conflict of values between Africa and Europe rather than humiliate the European values.

In the sense of post colonialism [2] there are inner conflicts among the poets of Africa. African poets not only portray the essence of loss and nature of Africa but also focus on the conflict of every subject matter. The conflict created by colonialism is an uprising issue of every African poet. Such as language is one of the vital conflicts of writing the African poetry. There was a conflict between the Anglophone [3] and Francophone [4] writers. Whether, the matter is language; some poets think that writing African poetry hampers the motive and purity of African poetry and to express the pure African expression the foreign language should not use. Some writer of Francophone like Senghor thought that the mixing of language does not hamper the writings. It is possible to portray a true African nature by foreign language.

On the perspectives of other issues there are some conflicts. These conflicts are trying to solve by optimism, glorifying the past, encouraging the young generation with hope and aspiration. Poet like Gabriel Okara became optimistic in “Once Upon a Time” to the young generation to resolve the generation conflict. Under colonialism Africa is in essence of loss and after the post independence the disillusionment come to the Africans. In the poem “Africa” by David Diop this conflict has presented vaguely by using the statement:

 “The bitter taste of liberty” [A selection of African poetry, page 69, L: 24]

 The African poets have the conflict on the basis of double consciousness. Most of them were educated in Europe so it is difficult write something beyond the concepts. In contrast, they are African by nature so it is hard to up root their roots. This double consciousness benefices African poetry, it can identify the construction of European and sketch the true Africa.   

History of Africa is brilliantly focuses on David Diop’s “Africa”. The first seven lines present the beautiful Africa before being colonized. Thy have the power to resistance which indicates that they are organized community therefore they were not savage. This poem provides us with information. They were very much active people and make the soil to yield grains. Next nine lines focus on the history of colonized Africa. Their bitter experience under colonialism expresses here. The last eight lines portray the unguided, fainted picture of post independent Africa. Whether, the poet hopes for Africa to recover the bitterness of Africa through new aspiration. This inner conflict and doubt has developed through the true history of Africa. Where, the constructed history of Africa was trying to misguide the Africans and this poem faces the direct conflict with the constructed history.

Their grandmothers sing. They had their voice and they had the language. They also have a history. The treatment of the poem is post colonial. The blood is black. This blood has a connected with irrigation. From here it starts the colonial period. Land is a vital object for business and colonialism. In this poem the first two lines are repeated twice. The last line of the first stanza is repeated, it suggests their humiliation. There are not question marks. This repetition is the chief element of African song and the part of African history.

Before/ after the independence “but” suggest it is not a continuous process. It suggests a new era. It is the spirit of independence or the spirit of reconstruction. Here we find an optimism ‘tree’. A tree is growing and the white is fading. The bitter taste of liberty: the coast we had to pay for liberty. The nation which I get is no way better than previous state as the ruler is rude. This new fainted nation is now the nation of independent of Africa. The “grave voice” refers the ‘Nationalism’ [5] of Africans. Their optimism and bitter experience would be able to spread out the nationalism among the Africans. Here poet can not be sure about a strong African nation because of conflict. These conflicts are created by the oppression and construction of Europeans but the hope, enthusiasm, aspiration, optimism and the uprising tone of nationalism will resolve this conflict.

Like some other conflicts there is religious conflict between Africa and Europeans. This religious difference becomes the conflict by Europeans oppression. Their indiscriminate attitudes to African religions make this conflict. This conflict presents in the poem “The Vultures” by David Diop and it is associated with some one who waits for the destruction of others. It is associated with colonialism/colonial power. This is about colonial experience and the psychology of colonizers. European civilization tried to colonize them through violence, religion and education. Converting into Christianity-make one to think according western school of thought- violence. Holy water slapped: in place of forgiveness, love it is slap. They tried to inject Christianity. But the way was no way civilized or religious one. Hypocrisy of colonized mission here we find violence in general. Here we find the violence in a specific form. These people are singing the song without any passion. And this monotonous rhythm/ this history of oppression are dominated buy the religious song. The European malice attitudes to African religions make the conflict. Despite of being calm the Europeans get violence on Africans. Diop lyrically portrays this conflict of religions in “The Vultures” and focused the bitterness of European missionaries. 

A racism [6] concern of the Europeans oppresses the Africans and it became a bitter taste to them. Firstly this conflict broke out through ‘negritude’ [7] movement which tends towards portraying a Utopian projection of ‘African ness’ as ‘good’ and ‘full of life’. While Europe was in contrast, for example Senghor showed Africa through women feathers as ‘beauty’ while colonialist discourses has similarly represented Africa with female characteristics, so that the process of ravishing Africa could have been justified. So, the conflict between Africa and colonial discourses can be said as a result of ‘inherent tendency’ of any African. This racism was trying to resolve by the African poets. Such as Senghor doesn’t believe the line of deviations between Europe and African. Being an African he does not believe that he will not mix with Europe and he also believes that mixing with Europe does not threat his identity. This philosophy is controversial. How African is different from European logical imagination is a western system of thought. He is highly objectified through the binary opposition through asserting racism. African poets try to demolish the discrimination of racism actively rather than ideologically.

In conclusion it can be said that, there are many conflicts in African poetry. Some of these are ideological and some are rational. Inwardly and outwardly the African poets focuses these conflicts and try to resolve these. Here conflict is created by colonialism and it continues by oppression of the colonizer’s power and discourse application. The one-eyed construction and representation of the Europeans are conflicted by the resistance [9] of Africans. The resistance of deconstruction and counter discourse and African poetry is the good example of it. Whether, African poets did their responsible well by creating conflict with the western notion and make mileage to develop their native heritage of identity, culture, tradition, nature and history.

End Note

1.      ‘Counter Discourse’ refers the way to challenge the colonial discourse through representing the issues of canonical texts and their inevitable reinscription in the process of subversion. This term is coined by Richard Terdimann. 2.      ‘Post colonialism’ is a term which signifies which signifies the cultural, social. Linguistics experiences of former European colonies. It deals with the effects of colonization, examines the colonial process and reaction of colonialism. 3.      ‘Anglophone’ means the writer who originates from British and use to write in pure British English. 4.      ‘Francophone’ means the writer who belongs from the French and writes in English by avoiding the French tunes. 5.       ‘Nationalism’ is something forced and made. The basic is imagination and it can be constructed or fabricated. The sense of belonging, rituals, history, language etc. are the elements of nationalism 6.      ‘Racism’ stands for the idea of differentiating races with their aspects and linked with the same characteristics. 7.      ‘Negritude’ is the name of a movement. In short, a theory of distinctiveness of African personality and culture.

Caribbean Shore

              I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,

              I had a sound colonial education,

              I have Dutch, Nigger, and English in me,

              Either I’m nobody or I’m a nation.

Caribbean literature emerged within a context of many languages and cultures. The languages of the Caribbean—French, English, Spanish, and Dutch—are remnants of the colonizing powers and their historical encounters with the region. “It’s good that everything‘s gone, except their language, / which is everything”. The well-built history of Greek and Latin generates a suggestion that the languages of imperialism tend to outlast the empires. The British never made the mistake of understanding the importance of language though Creoles and local patois (hybrid languages) developed from the mixture of European languages with Native American languages, especially Carib and Arawak, and the languages of Africans brought to the Caribbean as slaves. Asians, primarily from India and China, and Middle Easterners also contribute to the region’s cultural diversity.

Slowly, ever so slowly . . . I was coming to an awareness . . . of cultural wholeness, of the place of the individual within the tribe.  Slowly, ever so slowly, I came to a sense of identification with these people, my living diviners.  I came to connect my history with theirs, the bridge of my mind was linking Atlantic and ancestor, homeland and heartland- (Kamau Brathwaite)

Kamau Brathwaite reacts with great anger towards the oppressive colonial culture that has controlled the islands for so long. Brathwaite looks to Africa as the progenitor of his consciousness and ultimately rejects the European colonial power as an influence.  He throws off any connection to a European past with a certain amount of anger and violence. In his major works Brathwaite considers the issues that have troubled many of the contemporaries: the nature of Caribbean identity, the future of the Caribbean and its people, and the role of the artist in Caribbean society. In response, Brathwaite has consistently argued that the contemporary Caribbean is the product of along process of Creolization that continues to affect the islands. Accepting that Caribbean identity is made up of a variety of traditions and cultures, Brathwaite traces his roots back to Africa. He asks that the African contribution to Caribbean life not be forgotten. He is a champion of the survival of submerged languages and their forms in the language of contemporary life, and as an individual and communal poet he seeks to remake in his poetry a new language for a Caribbean future. Derek Walcott is much less aggressive in that approach, but no less vehement in the drive to assert the Self as a voice the world must reckon with.  Walcott embraces his African heritage and his European heritage:  the issue of history concerns him more than the question of which was more important. But, at times, Walcott seems very ambivalent about the issue of history and who he looks to as his progenitor (or even whether he looks to anyone, or simply rejects both sides as unsatisfactory): Another Caribbean poet, James Berry, reacted to the need for a Caribbean voice by looking back to Africa (as Brathwaite, did, but without the same extremely violent tendencies).  Once he affirmed the strength of Africa, he managed to pass that strength on to his own Caribbean heritage and voice. Kwame Dawes looks to Reggae for asserting a Caribbean voice. Each author has a different poetic sensibility and means of getting at the very thing that makes him/her a whole person.  For many, this involves throwing off the constraints of colonial powers and education in favor of something real and local.  Others push farther back and embrace Africa as the origin of the true, emerging Self.

Brathwaite, during his speech on the development of nation language in Anglophone Caribbean poetry, says: 

We in the Caribbean have a [. . .] kind of plurality:  we have English, which is the imposed language on much of the archipelago.  It is an imperial language, as are French, Dutch and Spanish.  We also have what we call Creole English, which is a mixture of English and an adaptation that English took in the new environment of the Caribbean when it became mixed with the other imported languages.  We have also what is called nation language, which is the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers, the servants who were brought in.

The principal feature of Caribbean societies is their extreme heterogeneity or diversity, which is the product of several centuries of slavery and indentured labor organized into plantation colonies in order to generate profits for Europeans. The contemporary Caribbean is also notable for a restless energy that domesticates language to local rhythms and intonations, while propelling many of its writers into diasporic movement from the homes to which their ancestors were transplanted. Caribbean plurality partakes equally of the exuberant and troubled. Its logic of self discovery is driven by a powerful sense of collective displacement. Their identity has been influenced by colonial, European powers, by native Amerindian culture, by the imported culture of the African slaves.  But their own culture and identity is separate from all of these influences; it is something unique to the Caribbean.  Just as the islands threw off the shackles of slavery and colonialism, now they throw off the shackles of history to assert their true identity.

The artist’s imagination, especially Caribbean, has always been motivated by the idea of the collective past because he or she wants to relate the past to the present. It is really important to reach and understand the collective past. The identity and the individual lives are somewhat shaped by collective past or by a fixed historical reality. Walcott’s poem “A Far Cry from Africa” reconstructs what it means to be Creole caught in the grim historical reality that shaped him problematic identity; being a Caribbean he has deep love for his language, English, but he is also a descendant of African selves brought to America:

            I who am poisoned with the blood of both

               Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?

                      I who have cursed

          The drunken officer of British rule, how choose

          Between this Africa and the British tongue I love?

History is expected to be true and objective, though the limitations of our very human experience often makes this quality of being true and objective impossible. Colonization has left a distorted history, one filled with several gaps. Walcott, in “The Muse of History” criticizes those postcolonial intellectuals who angrily lament over the destruction of the historical past; he rather focuses on the possibility of a history less world which provides the Caribbean an academic opportunity to rewrite their history again. Caribbean tendency is to find out the history not the root. Sense of dispossession and sense of loss insist them to re-establish the collective past The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy explores various African migrations, both within Africa and to West Indies and America, through the period of the slave trade and modern times. As such the settings vary from a Trinidadian slum around independence to the Ashanti Kingdom in West Africa before the arrival of white traders. Arrivants can be seen as an epic of black migration in its various forms, which links black experiences across continents and different periods of history as Masks, represents African culture and history. Both Walcott and Brathwaite use the imagination as a way of making sense of the Caribbean experience and creative something positive. Their work emphasizes the vastness in the terms of history, culture and geography, of that experience.

In The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy Brathwaite tells about Caribbean experience, goes to Africa and comes back to Caribbean. Both the place makes him gloomy. Africa does not allow him to stay and the Caribbean was not the own home actually. In an unsatisfactory mood he accepts that only the journey is much better than the home. It is not the Brathwaite but the people who are searching the root and at the last stage they find a route to stay. Now they need a history and they are supposed to keep it. Actually a nation demands a history. But subjective history is always distorted. Walcott examines the standard view of Caribbean history and sees that colonization has left a distorted history, one filled with numerous gaps. In Caribbean history as Walcott finds it, the absence of facts renders the history as hollow as a coconut shell. Walcott wants the history of creative imagination but not the history which is distorted. For example, in Another Life he argues the primacy of the creative imagination, and its capacity both to possess and to transcend the events of history. Walcott’s intention is to provide autobiography, which he decorates with art, as an alternative to history or to the accumulation of dead facts. The poets of English speaking Caribbean have much to say to all those who care about the future, and who are prepared to look critically but constructively at the past. They view creative imagination as a productive means of attending difficult questions of identity, history and survival.

The experiences of Caribbean literature encompass the historical issues of enslavement and forced migration, the related themes of home and exile, and colonialism and decolonization, the gritty celebration of survival and festive celebration of an inheritance of place, tongue and tradition, the lament for the lost and the quest for identity, the championing of faith and the teeth of betrayal and disillusion. Caribbean literature also embraces the social and cultural themes of tradition, landscape, culture, and community, and addresses such universal questions as history, identity, sexuality, family life, pain, joy (Pokocean).

African Poetry: "Once Upon a Time"

Once upon a time, son,
they used to laugh with their hearts
and laugh with their eyes:
but now they only laugh with their teeth,
while their ice-block-cold eyes
search behind my shadow. 

There was a time indeed
they used to shake hands with their hearts:
but that’s gone, son.
Now they shake hands without hearts:
while their left hands search
my empty pockets. 

‘Feel at home’! ‘Come again’:
they say, and when I come
again and feel
at home, once, twice,
there will be no thrice –
for then I find doors shut on me. 

So I have learned many things, son.
I have learned to wear many faces
like dresses – homeface,
officeface, streetface, hostface,
cocktailface, with all their conforming smiles
like a fixed portrait smile.
And I have learned too
to laugh with only my teeth
and shake hands without my heart.
I have also learned to say, ‘Goodbye’,
when I mean ‘Good-riddance’;
to say ‘Glad to meet you’,
without being glad; and to say ‘It’s been
nice talking to you’, after being bored. 

But believe me, son.
I want to be what I used to be
when I was like you. I want
to unlearn all these muting things.
Most of all, I want to relearn
how to laugh, for my laugh in the mirror
shows only my teeth like a snake’s bare fangs! 

So show me, son,
how to laugh; show me how
I used to laugh and smile
once upon a time when I was like you. 

By GABRIEL OKARA,  a Nigerian Poet

Long Day’s Journey into Night: O’Neill...

O’Neill was trying to interpret life in terms of lives, never just lives in terms of character: “I am always acutely conscious of force behind- Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it- mystery certainly – and of the one eternal tragedy of Man in his glorious, self respective struggle to make the Force express him instead of being, as an animal is, an infinitesimal incident in its expression. And my profound conviction is that this is the only subject worth writing about and that it is possible – or can be – to develop a tragic expression in terms of transfigured modern values and symbols in the theater which may to some degree bring home to members of a modern audience their ennobling identity with the tragic figures on the stage. Of course, this is very much of a dream, but where the theater is concerned, one must have a dream, and the Greek dream in tragedy is the noblest ever!”

It was ‘the Greek dream in tragedy’ that O’Neill had in mind when he wrote his blatantly ‘Greek’ trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra. But that dream was also his when he was writing the two autobiographical plays, The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night. They observe even more strictly than Mourning Becomes Electra the classical unities, they incrementally uncover secrets of the past, and they make an audience feel ‘the Force behind’. Like all great tragedy, these three ‘classical’ plays celebrate mystery and the nobility of man’s struggle and endurance. Like all great drama, they appeal to our emotions. O’Neill believed that ‘our emotions are better guide than our thoughts’.  Our emotions are instinctive. They are the result not only of our individual experience but of the experiences of the whole human race, back through the ages. O’Neill insisted that the ‘truth usually goes deep. So it reaches you through your emotions’. He forever pursed the truth of man’s existence by appealing to emotions. He said he would ‘never be influenced by any consideration but one: Is it the truth as I know it – or, better still, feel it’. He himself felt deeply what he wrote, and here the autobiographical pressures exerted on his work – especially in Long Day’s Journey into Night.

To call Long Day’s Journey into Night a ‘domestic tragedy’ is to underestimate seriously its emotional effect. It is enlarged, not in the sense of Aristotelian ‘heightening’, but more by its constant movement ‘behind life’, in the phrase O’Neill once used to describe Strindberg’s expressionist dramas. For a play to move ‘behind life’ means that it expands inward, through the surfaces, and toward the core of life itself. The inner enlargement of the Tyrone plays not only scrutinizes the motives that produce the painful events, but somehow, also, enlarge an audience’s knowledge of the suffering these events produce. No drama of modern times contains more pain’s substance than Long Day’s Journey into Night, but in the final analysis, it is not the events, shocking through they are that grip the audience. The Tyrones suffer and the spectators or the readers are convinced that, when suffering is only reality, life is truly as it is depicted in the play.

The prison of the past is all the more tragic because the play shows not only the behaviors that led them into their current situation, but also what each of the Tyrones might have been had life taken a different course, had the prison walls not been built. As a young girl, for example, Mary had innocence, romantic ideals, and a strong religious faith centered on the Virgin Mary. That faith disappeared early in her marriage, and she desperately wants to rekindle it, because that would offer a way out of the prison.

At different parts, the past plays different roles. On one hand the past is a burden, Mary speaks with a terrible fatalism, claiming that nothing they are can be helped: past mistakes have fixed their present and future irrevocably: ‘The past is the present, isn’t it?’ cries Mary. ‘It is the future too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us’. It is the long day’s journey into the past. The past also takes the form of old hurts that have gone unforgiving. We hear the same arguments again and again in this play, as the Tyrones dredge up the same old grievances. Letting go is impossible, and so the Tyrones are stuck.

Although Mary is the character directly associated with living in illusion, all characters in the play try to hide from the truth in their own ways. At the beginning of the second act, O’Neill notes a change in setting which has taken place since the play opened. No sunlight comes into the room now and there is a faint haziness in the air. This haziness or fog obscures one’s perception of the world, and it parallels the attempts of each member of the family to obscure and hide reality. Tyrone, for example, drinks whiskey to escape his son’s criticism of cheap he is. The reference to fog always has a double meaning in this play, referring both to the atmosphere and to the family. Much of the activity carried on by the Tyrone family is under-handed and sneaky, they are always attempting to put something over on somebody and obscure the truth. Mary says she loves the fog because “it hides you from the world and the world from you”, but she hates the foghorns because “they warn you and call you back”. This escape is similar to the morphine she takes, and the foghorns are the family’s warnings against her addictions.  Edmund tells the father he walked out to the beach to be alone with himself. When told that he should have more sense than to walk out in the fog, Edmund replies with a quotation from Ernest Dowson (English poet), part of which reads as follows:

  

 “They are not long, the days of wine and roses:

               Out of a misty dream

               Our path emerges for a while, then closes

               Within a dream”.

The first lines indicate the brevity of life – the three remaining lines indicate the mystical and mysterious elements of life. The concern with “misty dreams” repeats the fog imagery. And if we emerge from a dream and then our life closes within a dream, there is meaning to life and no purpose to existence. We cannot understand or explain whence we come whither we are going. Edmund proceeds to comment further on life saying he wants to be where “truth is untrue and life can hide for itself”. This desire to shun the truth and to hide from reality repeats the attempts of all of them to live in illusion by forgetting what is and was.

“There is no help for all these things are so,

And all the world is bitter as a tear.”

Since this is O’Neill speaking through Jamie, we again see the concern with fate, with Forces we cannot control. The bitterness of the world and of our life in the world accounts for our attempts to escape through illusion – or as O’Neill quoted earlier, “Be always drunken…With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will do”.

To his friend George Jean Nathan, the famous drama critic, O’Neill mentioned that he was writing a play which would cover one day in a life, “a day in which things occur which evokes the whole past of the family and reveal every aspect of its inter-relationship. A deeply tragic play, but without violent dramatic action. At the final curtain there they still are, trapped within each other by past, each guilty and at the same time innocent, scorning, loving, pitying each other, understanding and yet not understanding at all, forgiving but still doomed never to be able to forget”. O’Neill feels a great sympathy for all four Tyrones and he does not condemn any one of these characters more than any other, as he wrote to his wife in 1940 when he completed the play: “All the characters have severe faults, and they are all part of one family that has stayed together throughout many years of hardship, and they can all be very loving and compassionate. One cannot single out any particular character as the protagonist or antagonist; one can instead see the themes that create strife in the family and the ways the family mends itself when it falls into disorder”. Long Day’s Journey into Night is undoubtedly a tragedy – it leaves the audience with a sense of catharsis, or emotional rebirth through the viewing powerful events, and it depicts the fall of something that was once great. The play focuses on the Tyrone family, whose once-close family deteriorated over the years, for a number of reasons: Mary’s drug addiction, Tyrone, Jamie, and Edmund’s alcoholism, Tyrone’s stinginess, the boys’ lax attitude toward work and money, and a variety of other factors. As the play is set, the parents are aging, and while they always hoped that their sons would achieve great things, that hope is beginning to be replaced by a resigned despair. The play is all the more tragic because it leaves little hope for the future; the future for the Tyrones can only be seen as one long cycle of a repeated past.  

 

References:

Ø Long Day’s Journey into Night 

Ø  ‘Eugene O’Neill: Three plays’ edited by Normand Berlin

Ø  Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009.

Ø  Monarch notes and study guides: Eugene O’Neil’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.

  

extract 2(“she did have one book…discovered through imagination”-chapter five)

Maureen was not a member of July’s family. She was one of the whites who suffered a terrible torment during the period of black’s revolt in South Africa. It was July, a ‘decently-paid and contented male servant’, who gave Maureen and her family a shelter. He rescued them (the whites) from danger. The place given by the black was the only hope of their existence and it was not their own. Maureen felt uncomfortable breathing with blacks. She felt that she was living in a hostile environment. The setting was totally unknown to Maureen. She had hardly anything to do except living in those Rondavels. And another thing she could do. She could read. But only one book The Betrothed she had and she did not want to finish it because what would happen when she had read AlessandroManzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, Italian name of the novel, or finished.

In July’s People Gordimer has dropped the way of living of the whites. She introduces us with a shocking reversal. In extract 2 it is realized that as a white, Maureen became someone else. She was feeling strange. Her life style had been changed. Circumstances forced her to leave the familiar activities of white existence. She was not what she was. She was living in unfamiliar circumstances. Though she wanted to give up the black life style she could not because she knew that she was living between the explosions of the old before the birth of the new.  But she was still hoping and she kept a taboo that if she did not read the novel, her family would find a solution soon; if she read, they would still be here when it was finished. Using the taboo she stopped herself from reading The Betrothed but she broke the law getting the pleasure of reading and to survive in this mysterious state.

Then, let’s talk about some major themes of July’s People, ‘Fact and Fiction’, which deal with this extract. Actually, fact is more authentic than fiction.  The place was not Maureen’s own and she was passing a weird time. She had left all the trappings of the white middle class life. She had only one novel to read in her leisure. But no fiction could capture the moments of Maureen and Leopard Doesn't/Can't change its spots.Does/Can they? Sorry and it cannot bear the burden of light shadows. When she began to read she got hardly any awareness of being within another time, place and life. She could not mix up herself with the fictitious elements of the novel as we do. She did not get the pleasure of reading. Because she was experiencing the fiction, and what she was really experiencing was the fact. The fact was that she was isolated. As a white she was feeling alone. A sense of displacement was working on her mind. Actually, it was of time, of place, and as well as of life.