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HOLLOW HEADS
Jwani
Mwaikusa
Hollow heads torture me with ignorance,
Blind eyes harass me with darkness,
Deaf ears tire me with silence,
Dumb voices deafen me with gibberish,
Blank minds confuse me with emptiness,
And, above all,
There is power and command.
*
With wits and ears and eyes,
I have speech and a strong mind,
But I remain weak and powerless.
They oppress me, they torture me
They fight me, they kill me.
It’s a fight to bring me down to
silence,
To darkness and gibberish, to ignorance,
And through brainwashing to emptiness.
*
All right, my friends,
It’s a battle and I’ll fight it.
Ears and wits and eyes and speech,
And a strong conscience:
These are my weapons,
And I will fight to the last cell.
INTRODUCTION
The poem ‘Hollow heads’
is a poem that ridicules the leaders who are empty-headed and try to prevent
intellectuals from thinking because they will criticise their practices. The
persona shows that he has a strong mind and speech but he remains powerless and
weak because he has intellectual power but lacks political power. This is very
common in political arena where those who seem to be critical to government
practices and propose new ways are hated, arrested or exiled.
THEMATIC
ANALYSIS
The possible themes
include, torture, oppression, ignorance, intellectual battle/protest, sacrifice
and courage.
TORTURE
AND OPPRESSION,
The persona complains
for the torture and oppression he gets from those in power. Those in power are
not intellectually powerful as the persona and he uses different images to
describe their incompetence. These are blind eyes, deaf ears, dumb voices,
blank mind etc all these show that he is fighting against empty-headed people
who cannot reason properly. He says
“I
have speech and strong mind,
But
I remain weak and powerless,
They
oppress me they torture me”
INTELLECTUAL
BATTLE/PROTEST
The persona describes
his opponents as empty-headed with brainwashing ideas. They want to silence him
that he may not express himself. They even want to kill him as a way of
silencing him. He raises an open protest against this oppression and torture
from the ruling class.
All
right, my friends,
It’s
a battle and I’ll fight it.
Ears
and wits and eyes and speech,
And
a strong conscience:
These
are my weapons
SACRIFICE
AND COURAGE
The persona shows that
although his opponents are powerful he is not going to retreat easily. He says
it is a battle and he has to fight it even to the last cell. Sacrifice and
courage are very important when dealing with brainwashing from the ruling
class. In the last stanza the poet says;
And
I will fight to the last cell.
GUIDING QUESTIONS
(a) Who
is the persona? How do you know?
The persona is an intellectual who is oppressed by the
system not to give his views. He says that he has a speech and strong mind.
(b) How
many stanzas are there?
There are 4 stanzas.
(c) Why
is stanza four made of only one line? And what message does it carry?
The poet wants to emphasize a point of sacrifice. It
is one line but carries the strong message of the whole poem that sacrifice is
his only remaining weapon.
(d) Comment
on the language use.
The language used justifies the poet’s anger towards
the ruling class. He has used a strong language that carries his message across
very easily.
The choice of words like, torture, oppress, ignorance, hollow heads, blind eyes, deaf ears, dumb
voices, blank mind etc help the readers to get the message of the poet more
easily.
There
is also the use of figures of speech like
Ø
Irony: All right my friends. (He calls his enemies his friends)
Ø
Parallelism; They oppress
me, they torture me, they fight me, they
kill me
Ø
Personification:
hollow heads, blind eyes, deaf ears blank minds,
are personified that
they can, torture, harass, tire, deafen and confuse, respectively.
(e) What
is the mood and tone of the poet?
The tone is serious and the mood is angry at the
ruling class.
(f) Does
the poem have a regular rhyming pattern?
The rhyming pattern is a bit complicated. There are
some lines that fall into a regular rhyme and some do not. If we were to
analyse the rhyme scheme it would look as follows;
Stanza one ABACBDE, stanza two FEBGGAAB,
Stanza three FHIAF, Stanza four D
(g) What
message does it carry?
Ø
There
should be freedom of speech and conscience for intellectuals to give their
views.
Ø
Sacrifice
is important if you want to achieve a particular cause.
Ø
Oppression
and ignorance are obstacles in the creation of ideal society and building the
future.
(h) Is
the poem relevant today?
The poem is relevant today because
Ø
We
see literary artists who criticise the wrongs of the government being
oppressed, tortured, banished or exiled e.g. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, journalists are
beaten, arrested, or killed for standing for truth, all these at times have
tasted the stinging bitterness of those in power.
Ø
There
are people who sacrifice their lives for the good of their societies.
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