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Comparing Things Fall Apart And A Mother In A Refugee

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Chinua Achebe (1930 – 2013) is best known for his novel Things Fall Apart, in addition to writing novels, Achebe was a critic and a poet. This paper intends to analyze and discuss Achebe's war poems. The poems that Achebe wrote in the time of the Nigerian civil war which lasted for three years and Nigerian people suffered a lot because of that war, Ogaga Okuyade in his article Of the Versification of Pain: Nigerian Civil War Poetry states that: "The Nigerian civil war is about the ugliest moment in the history of post-colonial Nigeria – a moment of hatreds and sufferings." (128). Poets of civil war, including Chinua Achebe, try to show the pain and suffering of the Nigerian people due to that war and what follows it from poverty to killing …show more content…

The First World War poets give the reader their message directly and their images of the war is through the eyes of soldiers, and they portray the suffering of soldiers in trenches and war fields, Wilfred Owen's Disabled, for example, shows and describes the suffering of a soldier who lost his limbs in the war. While on the other hand, Achebe's A Mother in a Refugee Camp creates a different image and it looks at war from a different point of view which is the suffering of a mother and her child, who are civilian, and it does not discuss the soldiers' situation. In his poem A Mother in a Refugee Camp, Achebe sheds the light on the suffering of a mother while she is watching the death of her son because of starvation in the …show more content…

This child will soon die, and she mourns him before his actual death. Ernest E. Emenyonu in his editorial book Emerging Perspective on Chinua Achebe argues that: " 'Refugee Mother and Child' paints the pathetic picture of kwashiorkor-ridden children, of dirt, poverty, and uncertainty in Biafra. Through the use of imagery the reader is made to perceive the repulsive stench that fills the camp and see the lamentable sight of starving children"

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