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Two Scavengers In A Truck Essay

Decent Essays

How do Tatamkhulu Afrika and Ferilinghetti express the sense of inequality in the poems “Nothing’s Changed” and “Two Scavengers in a truck, Two Beautiful people in a Mercedes?”

Ferlinghetti’s poem “Two scavengers in a truck, two beautiful people in a mercedes” is trying to show two different people in the same place, same country which is supposed to be called equal but in reality are completely inequal.
However, Afrika’s poem “Nothing’s Changed” tries to connect two different time periods; before independence and after independence; He talks about the apartheid and believes that the inequality still exists, even though the apartheid is over. There is a very vivid and clear use of imagery in the third stanza, especially colour imagery, ‘whites only inn’, ‘the crushed …show more content…

He has varied the tone throughout the whole poem. There is a very surprising opening line in the poem with a series of monosyllabic words. This helps build up the imagery in the opening lines in which the poet establishes the wasteland that is District 6. As it is written in first person we are also drawn into the world the poet creates in the poem. The Imagery is reinforced with the references to un-mowed grass that has gone to seed and to the purple weeds. There is the beginning of a change in tone in the second stanza. The use of the two word title ‘District Six’ is a stark statement and expects you to know the area the poet is talking about.The repetition in the next few line underlines the growing anger the poet feels and heralds a dramatic change in tone from the opening lines of the poem. The use of punctuation also helps to build up the sense of growing anger. The poet has used several poetic devices at beginning of the third stanza; for example the internal rhyme on ‘Brash with glass’ and alliteration on ‘flaring like a flag’ which helps changing the tone by reducing the anger at the end of the last stanza to bitter

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