AFRICAN POETRY How does the poet present his experiences as a blackman in "Expelled"?

Answer Details

In "Expelled" the poet presents the experience of the black man as a movement from a settled, prosperous past into ruin and humiliation brought by colonial intrusion, and he does this chiefly through images of trade, agriculture, natural disaster and personal loss.

A picture of ordered life before the intrusion. The poet first sets before us a world that was whole and self-sufficient. The dominant image is one of commerce: the black community "had traded in this market competitively perfect," a picture of ordered, peaceful and confident economic life in which the people managed their own affairs and prospered by their own effort. This opening establishes the dignity and security that the black man once enjoyed, so that the loss to come is felt all the more sharply.

Devastation of the economy and the land. That order is then violently overturned. The poet uses stark metaphors of destruction, "cut our ribs," "dried our cows" and "burst the cowshed," to show the black man stripped of the cattle and farming that were the very bulwark of his wealth. Words such as "drought" and "famine" extend the ruin to the natural environment itself, so that both the economy and the land that sustained it are wrecked. The black man is thus cut off from his means of livelihood and his former confidence is broken.

Personal lamentation and disgrace. From this general devastation the poet turns to his own suffering, presenting the black man's experience as a private grief. The hyperbole "my tears flowed to flooded streams" measures the depth of his sorrow, while the biblical allusion to Sodom and Gomorrah suggests total, sweeping destruction and the penury into which he has fallen. The image of debtors and creditors gathered at his "rusty door" is poignant: reduced to poverty, he becomes a laughing stock as the little he has left is auctioned off. What was once a proud, trading people is now a debtor whose door is rusty and whose goods are seized.

Tone and overall effect. The tone moves from the calm assurance of the opening to lamentation and bitter protest, and the poet's own ruined life stands as a testament to the wider fate of the black man under colonialism. By tracing this fall from a "competitively perfect" market to a "rusty door," the poet presents the black man's experience as one of dispossession, humiliation and injustice, in which a whole way of life is expelled and destroyed.