Johnson Adeniyi's Elegy For A Dying Culture

Great Essays
The Poem and Movie Comparison
Good morning/afternoon. For hundreds of years there have been many different types of entertainment ranging from poems, books, plays, television and movies, all using its own technics and text features to convey a message. This presentation will deconstruct two types of entertainment, poems and movies bring them together to compare. The deconstruction will describe and elaborate on the technics that the director and poet used to convey a similar message and or intention. In the poem Elegy for a Dying Culture written by Johnson Adeniyi, the message is the destruction of a culture. The aspects of weakness and corruption all come to a message that the white man is killing a culture; this message of a destroyed culture is also seen in the dream sequence of Bran Nue Dae. In the movie, directed by Rachel Perkins, the message of a culture being destroyed is in a singing scene about the oppressions that aboriginal people have experienced and been represented on media. These messages are similar, but in the text the messages emotional impact on the reader changes. The change is due to the technics used or opinions that the director and poet may have, which in this presentation will be explained. The poet’s use of imagery captures the message of a destroyed culture, like “Our heritage vanishing, before us it’s diminishing” Straight away positions the audience so that if you’re not a part of that culture, therefore you’re positioned away, also the verse creates the image of a dark future for the heritage were it is slowing receding and getting smaller.
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A pessimistic tone and position for the audience is also in the verse “Stolen from us in broad daylight”. The imagery of stolen with broad daylight adds a tone to the destroyed culture message, usually something being stolen it would be at night, but the poet uses the image of broad daylight to say that the culture was taken without any resistance or concealment, this positions the audience to think that the poet is annoyed.
The second stanza of the poem shows the opinion of the poet “though not based on our geography. But it’s aimed at our philosophy” From the added attention of rhyme between geography and philosophy, symbolises that the poet believes that the invader may say there based on the geography, the land that the culture lives on, but what they really want is to take away their philosophy, their nature, reality and existence wiping them out. Halfway through the poem sheds the intention of the message, which is to blame and makes his culture wake up, seen in “Like predator scavenging at seaside. Awaiting her preys as it tides. Yet calmly we swim the bloody pool. Oh! Aren’t we tired playing the fool?” The imagery of the a deadly animal ready to strike and that “Awaiting her prey as it tides” says that the predator just waits for the food to come. The “Yet calmly we swim the bloody pool” The bloody pool is the tide that the predator is waiting at, because of the imagery of bloody it shows that the predator has killed before, the ‘we’ is the blame, we lead ourselves into our own death from the deadly predator. The last stanza finalises the intention of the poet in “while traditions plead for rescue, it’s a pity we have no clue” The word we directs the blame towards his own culture, with an almost sarcastic “it’s a pity we have no clue” forms a tone forms a tone from the poet that he is embarrass that his culture has let this happen to each other. The blame on his own culture continues in the next lines with “we’ve sacrificed chastity on alter of insanity” the image of purity in his culture being given for an absurdity. This absurdity may have been drugs or some other taboo for the poet, like mentioned in previous verses of the poem “Vices thrive and culture dies” were vices are bad habits that grew while the poet’s purity in his culture dies, another example is “Respect traded for shame, at the shop of white man’s fame” in this verse the respect

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