Comment on the poet’s use of rhetorical question in Vanity.

Answer Details

A rhetorical question is one asked not for information but for effect, its answer already implied. In Birago Diop's "Vanity," the rhetorical question is the poem's chief device, and the entire lament is built upon a chain of such questions.

• Structure of the poem. The persona repeatedly asks who will hear the cries and the voices of his people, who will listen to their complaints and their sorrows. These questions are not genuine enquiries; the implied answer throughout is "no one." This structure makes the whole poem an anxious interrogation.
• Emphasis on futility and vanity. The rhetorical questions drive home the poem's central idea, expressed in its title. By asking again and again who will listen, and receiving only silence, the poet stresses the vanity, the emptiness and futility, of appealing to a generation that will not hear.
• Creation of a mournful, despairing tone. The unanswered questions build a mood of sorrow and helplessness. Each one deepens the sense of a people crying into a void, and this reinforces the elegiac tone of the poem.
• Involvement of the reader. Because rhetorical questions seem to demand a response, they draw the reader into the persona's anxiety and force us to confront the neglect of ancestral wisdom for ourselves.
• A warning about the future. The questions also carry a caution: if the living will not hear the voices of the past, their own future cries will likewise go unheard. The rhetorical form makes this warning insistent and unsettling.

Conclusion. Diop's use of rhetorical question is the backbone of "Vanity." It emphasises the futility of unheeded wisdom, creates a tone of lament and despair, engages the reader and delivers a warning, all without a single direct statement. The device thus perfectly serves the poem's theme of neglected voices crying in vain.