Prejudice In Wole Soyinka's The Telephone

As a human being, we all tend to make decisions based on a known set of information, information that we pull from our memories. This can be very useful in some situations. For instance, crossing the road, we tend to look both ways and ensure no traffic is coming, so we do not get hurt, but when we apply this same process to meeting new people, we might tend to draw upon negative experiences and associate this negative information with someone we have never met. Be it the way they act, their tone of voice, or the way they dress, we all make decisions about someone before actually learning anything about them. If we act negatively, instead of cautiously, on these predispositions, now we have just exhibited racism or prejudice against another

Contextual clues clue you into the lady’s race. Because of these differences, the narrator applies stereotypes to the white landlady, while the landlady is making a decision to rent or not to rent based on prejudice. She asks “ARE YOU LIGHT OR VERY DARK?”, and the reader is left to question what does skin color have to do with renting a place, but maybe she has had a bad experience with a dark gentleman before, and now applies this as a metric for renting to tenants (Soyinka, ). The narrator assumes the lady is white, and fancy, as demonstrated by this quote “Voice, when it came, Lipstick-coated, long gold-rolled Cigarette-holder pipped.” (Soyinka, ). The narrator is taken back by her questioning and confused at the merit of her questioning. This results in the landlady getting angry, and the narrator tries to defuse the situation, by saying “wouldn 't you rather See for yourself?” (Soyinka, ). The rest of the story is left to imagination, but you can imagine the reason he wants to appeal his case in person to eliminate the prejudice exhibited by the landlady. On The Subway by Sharon Olds, shares the same theme of stereotyping and prejudice. The narrator is the person applying the stereotypes this time though. Olds writes “He has

This is ironic, because neither of these actions are acceptable, and both degrade the communications between the two, even though the lady never knows how he is truly feeling. Olds relies heavily on the use of colors and imagery to show the negative impacts of stereotypes and prejudice. When she describes how white people have advantages in the nation, and black people are the target of murderous beams, and absorb them like “black cotton” would absorb the sun. The imagery she uses is so strong, that it really drives how the point the author is trying to make, racism and prejudice are unacceptable (Olds, ). Both authors aim to illustrate the effects that racism, prejudice, and stereotyping can have, and both employ different literary elements to accomplish the task. While Olds aims to tackle the subject at the national level, Soyinka decides to show the more personable effects, specifically between two people. No matter how the subject is tackled, both authors do an exceptional job at getting their message