Motherhood In Chinua Achebe's 'Song Of The Old Mother'

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A war is a political measure, whose effects permeate civilians’ life, leaving them homeless, unprotect, frightened, in a profound despair, all gathered by the same fateful circumstances in a shelter, far away from what once was called home. As expected, with a hurtful and outrageous conflict comes sorrow and suffering embedded in the existence of refugees. Orji and Samuel (2013, p.46) define refugee as “someone forced against his/her will to seek safety elsewhere, usually in a strange land, so as to escape political or religious persecution or as a result of a national disaster”.
In A mother in a Refugee camp the speaker is envisioning a scene, using literary devices such alliterations, imagery and tones to describe motherhood in a war scenario. The poet, then, grasps the Nigeria War atmosphere and reflects upon a mother’s role. In literature a wide range of mother has been portrayed, and many of them are not depicted as a perfect model expected by society. For instance, the cruel Medea , the neglect Emma Bovary , or the resentful mother described in the poem Song of the Old Mother .
In broad terms, motherhood is perceived in several cultures as a …show more content…

Indeed, depicting the challenges of a war refugee reflected in a mother’ figure and her starving and ill child, demonstrates Achebe’s profound understanding of a refugee reality. Thus, A mother in refugee camp is an emblematic poem, whose imagery describe a mother reality in a land devastated by a civil war, revealing that “literature has often given us more and sharper insights into the moving spirit of an era than all the historical and political documents treating the same moments in a society 's development.” (Thiong 'o,1981, p.72). Chinua Achebe’s poem is the voice that conveys the realism of Nigerians embedded in the whisper of mothers and their children, whose lives have been wounded by those miserable conflict times that currently

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