Telephone Conversation By Wole Soyinka

What is the theme of the poem "Telephone conversation" by Wole Soyinka?

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Quick Answer
The poem depicts a black man who is trying to confirm housing with a landlady
over the phone and begins after the two have discussed location and pricing. The
speaker wishes to inform the landlady that he is black, and then a ridiculous
conversation ensues regarding how dark his skin color is. Overall, the poem is a
tongue-in-cheek statement on racism, the speaker responding with sarcasm and
humor to her insulting questions. The poem also emphasizes the lack of
communication between different races.

Expert Answers
DOUG STUVA | CERTIFIED EDUCATOR

Here's "Telephone Conversation" by Wole Soyinka, along with a comment about

theme from the same website I found the poem on:

The price seemed reasonable, location

Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived
Off premises. Nothing remained
But self-confession. "Madam," I warned,
"I hate a wasted journey—I am African."
Silence. Silenced transmission of
Pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came,
Lipstick coated, long gold rolled
Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was foully.
"HOW DARK?" . . . I had not misheard . . . "ARE YOU LIGHT
OR VERY DARK?" Button B, Button A.* Stench
Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak.
Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered
Omnibus squelching tar. It was real! Shamed
By ill-mannered silence, surrender
Pushed dumbfounded to beg simplification.
Considerate she was, varying the emphasis--
"ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?" Revelation came.
"You mean--like plain or milk chocolate?"
Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light
Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted,
I chose. "West African sepia"--and as afterthought,
"Down in my passport." Silence for spectroscopic
Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent
Hard on the mouthpiece. "WHAT'S THAT?" conceding
"DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS." "Like brunette."
"THAT'S DARK, ISN'T IT?" "Not altogether.
Facially, I am brunette, but, madam, you should see
The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet
Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused--
Foolishly, madam--by sitting down, has turned
My bottom raven black--One moment, madam!"--sensing
Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap
About my ears--"Madam," I pleaded, "wouldn't you rather
See for yourself?"

Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka uses irony to depict the absurdity of racism in his
poem, "Telephone Conversation."

The situation and resulting conversation the speaker finds himself in is, indeed,
absurd. It is absurd in the traditional sense--it makes absolutely no sense--and it is
absurd in the literary sense--totally out of the speaker's control. How does one
salvage a situation in which one is asked how dark one is? The speaker replies with
tongue-in-cheek irony, making fun of the woman at the other end of the telephone
line.
 The speaker uses humor, in addition to irony. Or, the irony is humorous, I guess.
The poem reveals ignorance, culture gaps, problems with verbal conversation, and
most importantly, of course, prejudice. It is a look at the absurdity of racism.

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JMJ616 | CERTIFIED EDUCATOR

"Telephone Conversation," by Wole Soyinka is about racism; more specifically, it is

about the way people -- both white and black -- fail to communicate clearly about
matters of race.
The narrator of the poem describes a telephone conversation in which he reaches a
deal with a landlady to rent an apartment. He feels that he must let her know that
he is black:

Nothing remained
But self-confession. "Madam," I warned,
"I hate a wasted journey—I am African."

This is where the lapses in communication begin. The landlady's first response is,
"Silence. Silenced transmission of / Pressurized good breeding." She next asks the
ridiculous question, "'HOW DARK?...ARE YOU LIGHT/OR VERY DARK?'"

The narrator is "dumbfounded." Instead of telling her, "It's none of your business,"
or simply, "Let's forget about the apartment," he offers a cryptic response: "'West
Affrican sepia.'"

When the landlady asks for clarification, the narrator only confuses matters further:

Facially, I am brunette, but, madam, you should see

The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet
Are a peroxide blond.

He makes matters even worse by saying that "friction" has somehow turned his
buttocks "raven black."

(If you want to see an interesting discussion of how blacks and whites fail to
communicate, follow the link below to Barack Obama's famous speech about race
from March 2008.)
Telephone Conversation

Telephone Conversation
by Wole Soyinka

The price seemed reasonable, location

Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived
Off premises. Nothing remained
But self-confession. "Madam," I warned,
"I hate a wasted journey—I am African."
Silence. Silenced transmission of
Pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came,
Lipstick coated, long gold rolled
Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was foully.
"HOW DARK?" . . . I had not misheard . . . "ARE YOU LIGHT
OR VERY DARK?" Button B, Button A.* Stench
Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak.
Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered
Omnibus squelching tar. It was real! Shamed
By ill-mannered silence, surrender
Pushed dumbfounded to beg simplification.
Considerate she was, varying the emphasis--
"ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?" Revelation came.
"You mean--like plain or milk chocolate?"
Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light
Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted,
I chose. "West African sepia"--and as afterthought,
"Down in my passport." Silence for spectroscopic
Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent
Hard on the mouthpiece. "WHAT'S THAT?" conceding
"DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS." "Like brunette."
"THAT'S DARK, ISN'T IT?" "Not altogether.
Facially, I am brunette, but, madam, you should see
The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet
Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused--
Foolishly, madam--by sitting down, has turned
My bottom raven black--One moment, madam!"--sensing
Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap
About my ears--"Madam," I pleaded, "wouldn't you rather
See for yourself?"

Wole Soyinka is among contemporary Africa's greatest writers. The Nobel Prize in
Literature 1986 was awarded to Wole Soyinka "who in a wide cultural perspective and
with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence". He is also one of the
continent's most imaginative advocates of native culture and of the humane social
order it embodies. Born in Western Nigeria in 1934, Soyinka grew up in an Anglican
mission compound in Aké. A precocious student, he first attended the parsonage's
primary school, where his father was headmaster, and then a nearby grammar school
in Abeokuta, where an uncle was principal. Though raised in a colonial, English-
speaking environment, Soyinka's ethnic heritage was Yoruba, and his parents balanced
Christian training with regular visits to the father's ancestral home in `Isarà, a small
Yoruba community secure in its traditions.
Wole Soyinka writes in English and is chiefly recognized as a dramatist. His many-
sided and vital literary works also include some important collections of poems and
novels, an interesting autobiography and a large number of articles and essays. He has
been, and is, very active as a man of the theatre and has staged his own plays in
England and Nigeria. During the civil war in Nigeria in the middle of the 1960s he was
drawn into the struggle for liberty because of his opposition to violence and terror. He
was imprisoned under brutal and illegal forms in 1967 and was released over two
years later - an experience that drastically affected his outlook on life and literary
work.

Written in the first person narrative point of view, the poem “Telephone
Conversation” by Wole Soyinka is a poetic satire against the widely-spread racism in
the modern Western society. The poem is about a telephone conversation in England
between the poetic persona seeking to rent a house and an English landlady who
completely changes her attitude towards him after he reveals his identity as a black
African. The motif of a microcosmic telephone conversation, therefore, is employed
by the poet to apply to a much broader, macrocosmic level where racial bigotry is
ridiculed in a contest of human intelligence, showcasing the poet’s witticism as well
as his ingenious sense of humor.

Instead of discussing price, location, amenities, and other information significant to

the apartment, they discussed the speaker's skin color. The landlady is described as a
polite, well-bred woman, even though she is shown to be shallowly racist. We can see
that the speaker is an intelligent person by his use of high diction and quick wit, not
the savage that the landlady assumes he is because of his skin color. All of these
discrepancies between what appears to be and what really is create a sense of verbal
irony that helps the poem display the ridiculousness of racism.

"The price seemed reasonable, location / Indifferent"

The first sentence of the poem includes a pun that introduces the theme of the
following poem and also informs us that things are not going to be as straightforward
as they appear. "The price seemed reasonable, location / Indifferent"

If we read over these lines quickly, we would assume that the speaker meant "Being
neither good nor bad" by the use of the word indifferent . But, indifferent is also
defined as "Characterized by a lack of partiality; unbiased." This other definition gives
the sentence an entirely different meaning. Instead of the apartment's location being
neither good or bad, we read that the apartment's location is unbiased and impartial.

However, we quickly learn in the following lines of the poem that the location of the
apartment is the exact opposite of unbiased and impartial.

The speaker is rudely denied the ability to rent the property because of bias towards
his skin color. This opening pun quickly grabs our attention and suggests that we as
readers be on the lookout for more subtle uses of language that will alter the meaning
of the poem.
"Caught I was, foully"

After this introduction, the speaker begins his "self-confession" about his skin color
(line 4). It is ironic that this is called a self-confession since the speaker has nothing
that he should have to confess since he has done nothing wrong. He warns the
landlady that he is African, instead of just informing her. "Caught I was, foully" he
says after listening to the silence the landlady had responded with.

I hate a wasted journey—I am African

Again, the word caught connotes that some wrong had been done, that the speaker
was a criminal caught committing his crime. By making the speaker actually seem
sorry for his skin color, Soyinka shows how ridiculous it really is for someone to
apologize for his race. To modern Western thinkers, it seems almost comical that
anyone should be so submissive when he has committed no wrongdoing.

An uneasy atmosphere ensues thereby. Following the caesura (break or silence) ,

there is “Silenced transmission of / Pressurized good-breeding”, with the word
“silenced” again to reiterate the landlady’s sudden change, as well as the man’s
intuitive sensitivity towards the unfriendliness on the other end of the phone. There is
a foreboding overtone, relevant to the change of the woman’s attitude she would
have towards the African man. And we get the first indication of the poet’s sense of
humour in the expression “pressurized good-breeding”, too, which is an ironical
manifestation of the polite manners landlady was supposed to have for the job of
renting premises. After a considerable period of silence, the landlady finally spoke
again, “Voice, when it came / Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled / Cigarette-holder
pipped.” It is interesting to note that when the landlady opened her mouth again,
the feeling she gave off is immediately contrastive of what she was like before, as if
her status in society was all of a sudden upgraded, which is indicated by her voice
colourfully and olfactorially described. Such evocative language, which greatly appeal
to our sensory impressions, conveys the poet’s power of imagination dissecting the
sound of an affluent landlady’s voice. And such use of subtly imagistic language is
abundantly rich throughout the rest of the poem.

Tension rises with the explicitly racial discrimination in line 10 of the poem as the
landlady asked “HOW DARK?” The poet uses capital letters here, and a lot more to
come, to accentuate the landlady’s effort in seeking clarification for something that
would have been irrelevant to their previous topic, yet it mattered a lot to her. “I
had not misheard”, the persona reflected. Before he was able to respond, the
landlady asked again, “ARE YOU LIGHT OR VERY DARK?” reinforcing the racist
overtone in the English society today. The woman’s pushy, unequivocal stance in
pursuing the answer dumbfounded the man, who was so confused and so taken aback
by the landlady’s sudden change of attitude that he suddenly appeared to have a
blank mind. The automation imagery “Button B. Button A” that the poet uses here not
only vividly shows the man’s temporary confusion, but also humorously foreshadows
the intelligence contest that is to follow. On a deeper level, the image of the readily
available automatic selection also implies the rampant racial discrimination taken for
granted in the western society.

What makes him come to his senses from this sudden dumbfoundedness, however, is
ironically the foul smell of the telephone booth, which the persona humorously refers
to as a facility of children’s play. “Stench of rancid breath of public hide-and-seek”
dragged him out from his dream-like world back into reality. The poet then uses
sentence fragments, “Red booth. Red pillar-box. Red double-tiered / Omnibus
squelching tar”, to describe the persona’s frantic attempt to ascertain the situation.
The diction “red”, which is connotative of terror and disturbance, is used three times
to highlight the extreme mental discomfort of an African man, who referred to city
buses, again humorously, as the idiomatic “omnibus”. Such extensive use of
symbolically chromatic images points out the setting of this poem, for the first and
only time, to be London. Thereby arises the sense of irony as the place where the
persona was facing such ostentatious racism is in London, a city seen as a symbol of
the developed western world, where equality and justice are supposedly valued above
all. “This is real!” the persona’s exclamation only serves to delineate his
bewilderment at the situation.

Instead of describing the justifiable indignation that the poetic persona was supposed
to have felt at the moment, the poet chooses to characterize him an a pacifist, or a
humble and meek man who would rather not stand up to face the situation. The
telephone conversation between the two conservationists continues as the African
man hoped to get on with their previous topic instead of starting a new, awkward one
on a politically sensitive issue – “Shamed / By ill-mannered silence, surrender /
Pushed dumbfoundment to beg simplification.” However, regardless of his thoughts,
the landlady, who was unequivocal in seeking the clarification, continues to question
him, “Considerate she was, varying the emphasis – “ARE YOU DAARK? OR VERY DARK?”
The African man, now probably fuming with anger inside, remained silent, while the
ruthless landlady continued with her racist inquiry: “You mean – like plain or milk
chocolate?” The limited choice of words as well as the simple object of comparison
that the poet uses to describe the landlady suggests her to be a linguistically
impoverished character despite her affluent economic status. Furthermore, her tone
was cold and bordering on aggressiveness, as is established by the persona’s
interpretation accurately brought forth with clarity and specificity - “Her assent was
clinical, crushing in its light / Impersonality.”

Deciding not to stay silent for any longer, and as if answering a passport control
officer, he replied “West African Sepia… Down in my passport”, which was then
responded with the landlady’s “silence for spectroscopic/Flight of fancy.” Here, the
character of the poetic persona is seen to undergo a rapid development as he started
to react against the landlady’s racist comments, by first forcing her into submission
with his superior vocabulary. The double alliteration of “s” and “f” produce a special
sound effect, making the atmosphere almost fearfully spooky, illustrating the mental
status of the landlady whose turn it was now to feel dumbfounded. Also worth noting
is the metaphor of spectroscope, hilariously befitting not only the skin colour of the
persona, but also the specific locale of England, where modern science and
technology still inexplicably intermingle with superstition. Either the case, the instant
victory he had over the landlady in this part of the conversation demonstrates the
obvious difference in their education and knowledge, also illustrating the fact that
beyond the landlady’s lavish exterior, she was simply a shallow judgmental racist.

The contrastive images that the poet has so far established of the persona of the
African origin and the landlady of the western European society serve to increase the
tension in the atmosphere, precipitating the conflict to its climactic moment.
Although the African man had already provided an answer, the landlady did not
understand as she was not only bigoted, but also definitely under-educated, as
compared to the poetic persona. She continued asking rudely, “…till truthfulness
changed her accent / Hard on the mouthpiece “WHAT’S THAT?” conceding / “DON’T
KNOW WHAT THAT IS.” Paying no attention to the landlady’s disrespect for him, the
persona started to turn the table completely against her, as he took a firm control
over the conversation, defending the dignity and integrity of his ethnic identity from
the ruthless onslaught of the racist landlady. To effectively show this, the poet
juxtaposes various major European hair colours together in a deliberately confusing
manner, suggesting that although being an African, the persona is nonetheless a
person no different from any Europeans – “Facially, I am brunette, but, madam, you
should see / The rest of me. Palm on my hand, soles of my feet / Are a peroxide
blond. Friction, caused – / Foolishly, madam – by sitting down, has turned / My
bottom raven black – One moment, Madam!” Sensing the landlady’s “receiver rearing
on the thunderclap”, which indicates the landlady’s slow but finally furious
realization that she had been outwitted, he rushed to ask sarcastically, “Madam, ……
wouldn’t you rather / See for yourself?” The quasi politeness of the tone the poet
uses here can hardly conceal the ultimate insult, which shows how indignant the man
was as he outwitted her by inviting her to see his bottom, thus ending the poem with
a tremendous sense of humour, apart from the obvious sarcasm.

To conclude, through his poem “Telephone Conversation”, Soyinka is able to satirize

the racist society in the west. By showing that a dark African persona is eventually
capable of confronting the racial discrimination aimed towards him, and retaliates
against it by outwitting the landlady, the poet sends out a clear message - dark
skinned people are no less intelligent than people that are lighter in skin colour.

PS: The explanation of this poem is mainly derived from the literary notes of Dr.
Ronnie Bai

From: Selected Poems [Paperback] Wole Soyinka (Author)Publisher: Methuen (February 21,
2002)
Language: English ISBN-10: 0413764605. ISBN-13: 978-041376460