In the poem vultures the poet talks about how strange it is that love can exist in places we never thought possible. In the poem Not My Business the narrator describes how various people in his village are mistreated he is not affected by this until they come for him. Both poems are written by Nigerian poets and are set in Africa. However in both case Africa is merely a place and this even could occur anywhere. Likewise both poems protest how humans beings treat each other, but they d this in different ways using different techniques such as structure, vocabulary and poetic devices.
The poem vultures is written in free verse and consists of mostly short lines this was done so we read the poem slowly therefore appreciating its dark gloomy atmosphere. The poem not my business is split into four different stanzas each one specially written for each occurrence. At the end of each stanza there is a refrain this repetition is used to show that it is an instinctive response – he doesn’t want to think about it. The last there isn’t the usually words it’s his turn. His voice has been silenced.
The poet’s shows that turning a blind an eye will not make a problem go away and just because something doesn’t affect you should do anything about it. Simile is used to emphasize the brutality his ‘friends’ go through – ‘Beating him softly like clay’. This shows how violent the beating is which makes us imagine Akanni as a puppet with no feelings or emotions which is quite the opposite as her is a human just like me or you. The fact the narrator chooses to tells us his ‘friends name’ makes us feel close to him and when we hear that he has been brutally beaten makes us resent the narrator for just standing back and watching.
During the poem the jeep is likened to a wild animal – ‘the jeep was waiting in my bewildered lawn’. The personification of the lawn shows how the narrator is frightened and confused. The fourth stanza is different. In this instance, the Jeep has turned up at the house of the narrator; it is his or her turn to be dragged away. The repeated lines from the previous stanzas cannot feature now as there is, apparently, no one left to observe the injustice. The only reaction here is that of the lawn, which is personified as “bewildered”.
In the fourth section of Vultures, the poet again uses metaphors: the evil Commandant is ‘an ogre’ (line 43) with merely a spark of love – ‘a tiny glow-worm tenderness’ (line 44) in the ‘icy caverns of a cruel heart’ (line 46). These are fairly clichi?? d images, perhaps because Achebe wanted to suggest that what he is describing is nothing new: there will always be love and evil in the world. Both poems protest how human being treat each other. Vultures it’s about good and evil living side by side inside of one person.
Why does the world see one person as either good or bad’such as the reference to the German Commandant who gassed people by day in the concentration camps and then stopped for chocolate for his child on the way home. I think this poem shows that good and bad resides inside every person, and that they can surprise you. In Not my business the poet and the narrator voices are different. He has used an argument with which he does not agree, to make his readers create their own argument against it; thus, we agree with him by disagreeing with the point of view he has shown us.
