I enjoy poetry, but I'm often lost in it. I usually prefer to read short stories or essays, perhaps because the metaphorical ideas are easier for me to understand.
In any case, this poem was a little different. Simply the title alone, "The Stranglehold of English Lit.," expresses the great irritation and disgust the author, Mnthali, felt. The language is short at times and very blunt.
One can feel Mnthali’s outrage over the education in his country. How can his people learn their own history if it is being taught or told from someone who is not one of them? Or from someone who is a native, but has been taught by the English? And how can their history be accurately told, written, and shared if it is diluted from an English standpoint? I can understand some of his frustration. The history in our country is constantly being edited, people deciding what we should and shouldn’t remember. Why? What is so wrong with things from our past? At one point I know that one issue debated, was whether or not to exclude religious views of many of our founding fathers. Our country was founded on the idea of religious freedom. Today the idea of tolerance is huge, you can see it all over the place: bumper stickers, billboards, notebooks, pencils, etc. If tolerance and acceptance, with regard to religion, is so highly valued, why would we want to hide the vast diversity of our country’s religious history, where we came from and where we are today?! To me it seems very contradictory.
I cannot begin to express how much I love the passionate display of emotion that is expressed in this poem! (small continuation of/addition to my stereotyping rant... ;) ) Most people would assume that as a girl, I express my emotions. However, this is not so much the case. I prefer to keep my emotions to myself and rarely let on to what they are, verbally that is. Writing, now that is a very different story. Writing is meant to be a way to express one’s ideas/opinions/feelings about any given subject. It is, in my opinion, the best way of really expressing how one feels. Mnthali is very effective at not only expressing how he feels, but making the reader feel his outrage.
"Your elegance of deceit,
Jane Austen,
lulled the sons and daughters
of the dispossessed
into a calf-love
with irony and satire
around imaginary people."
I think an interesting problem of the past is that people create memories to support their desire for a certain reality, and not a recognition of the reality in which we find our selves. Certainly Borges wrote about that for us at length. So his perspective lends an interesting light here. If I only learn the colonial history of my country, it feels to me like my country did not exist until the colonial powers came. This is what has happened in the US also. For a long time, there was no history in the US until the English Colonists came. American History started on Plymouth Rock. Now we know there is more but we still spend time talking about the Pilgrims who came seeking religious freedom only to burn Quakers who did not agree with them. I think the verse of the poem that you picked is a good one to epitomize the problem of forgetting to a) have multiple perspectives and b) look around at what is really happening rather than what one wished were happening.
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