English Commentary.

A pillar, standing in the midst of a desert, crumbling on the outside but burning with the stench of corpses and reinforced by steel inside. A powerful yet gentle wind, assaulting the pillar, trying to quench the fires consuming it yet failing. {Teacher’s comments: This approach is to be abandoned – now! This is not a creative assignment; don’t experiment in this way. OVERVIEW.} That is the overall image I get from this extract. The pattern running through this piece is that of a battle between the old woman, signifying life, and the boy signifying death, and her attempts to bring the boy back into the light of life.

The first hints that the old woman’s efforts to prevent the boy from continuing to fight will eventually be futile comes early on in the extract. The old woman notes with surprise that ‘the stitches [are] still in’. The ‘stitches’ are presumably from a wound he got in battle. Personally, I feel as if the ‘stitches’ are a symbol of the bloodshed and injuries involved in battle, and the fact that those stitches are ‘still in’ him implies that he will not be able to escape battles. This feeling is further reinforced by the simile the author uses to describe the potential scarring: ‘a mark like a whiplash’. The word ‘whiplash’ carries associations of violence and pain. The old woman goes on to say that this scar will be ‘like a whiplash across his forehead for the rest of his life’. Is this ‘whiplash’ scar a symbol foreshadowing the boy’s continued involvement in dealing out and receiving violence and pain during battle?

Another prominent symbol in this extract is the ‘red tablecloth’. The red colour is an obvious symbol of blood. The red cloth is ‘wound’ around the boy’s head; thus is possibly symbolizes that the boy will not be able to escape from the bloodshed of war. It is interesting that the ‘stitches’, the potential ‘whiplash’ scar, and the ‘red tablecloth’ symbolizing blood, are all situated on the boy’s head, which is usually associated with the mind. This implies that the reason why the boy will not be able to escape the bloodshed and the battles is because they are already part of his mind. I personally feel that the ‘red tablecloth’, tied around his head, somehow signifies that the thoughts of fighting and war are confining, almost trapping his mind, so that he can think of nothing else. {Teacher’s comments: The tablecloth also has a significance as a part of family life in a peaceful, domestic setting ß how might that be explored?} The boy’s statement that his ‘head is not sore’ reinforces this feeling; it is as if the blood and injuries of war has become so much a part of him that he does not feel uncomfortable with them anymore. Furthermore, when he gets up, the boy ‘[brushes] the red band with his fingertips’. This gesture is delicate, almost tender, I feel, suggesting that he is attached to, and perhaps even reveres the blood and violence the ‘red tablecloth’ symbolizes. All this foreshadows that the old woman’s efforts to persuade him to ‘[wait]’ will ultimately be futile.

Nevertheless, the old woman’s attempts are indeed strong. At the beginning she is established as gentle and caring; she asks him questions, looks after him, and so on. Yet the description of her ‘impulse to mother’ directly mirrors and contrasts with his ‘instinct for battle’ later on in the extract. One symbolizes life, the other death. Thus does the author establish that the old woman and the boy are opposing forces. This is reinforced by the old woman’s constant attempts to reason with the boy, to try and pull him back from the darkness of war. Despite her caring and gentleness, she is also strong, powerful and aggressive in her arguments, and this comes out in her speech. The use of anaphora in the sentences such as ‘You are still children. You are throwing away. You are throwing away your lives before you know what life can be’ and the use of epiphora in the lines ‘Eighteen is young. Twenty-one is too young’ combine to give her words a power, a strength that befits her role in this extract as a symbol of life.

However, in the paragraph immediately after her words ‘Twenty-one is too young’, the lines between life and death begin to blur. The ‘red band’ which I interpreted as a symbol of blood and death, reminds the old woman of a ‘favour’ seemingly a tie between warriors of old to their women back hoe. Is the ‘red band’, perhaps, also a symbol of a tie to life? And yet the juxtaposition of ‘men hacked other men to death’ with ‘women’s favours fluttering on their helmets’ draws out attention to the fact that the favours are perhaps linked irrevocably to the battlefield and death as well. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of ‘[gore] and glory, death and sex’ implies that the driving force behind the boy is not just the desire to cause death, but also a ‘desire’ to propagate life. Further blending of life and death occurs when the old woman describes herself using a metaphor ‘crone of death’, and yet this ‘crone of death’ is ‘tying a favour’, symbolizing love and life, ‘around [the boy’s] head’. It is somewhat ironic, that the woman, so near death, is trying to bind the boy to life; this is perhaps symbolized by the ‘tying’ of the red band. But does the red not symbolize blood and death as well? As I said, the lines between life and death are blurred and results in a effect of confusion which seems to me to reflect the confusion in the boy’s and the old woman’s minds and lives.

Nevertheless, throughout the extract, the old woman never wavers in her effort to wake the boy up to the realities of way. She tries to do this through repetition. ‘Never, never, never’ will Bheki ‘leave that hole’. She uses blunt, graphic descriptions (now to think of it, ‘imagery’ is a much better term). ‘Bheki is in a box in a hole with earth heaped on top of him’. She uses the word ‘when’ when she says ‘they will smile with pleasure when you fall and make another notch on their gunstocks’. She uses short, direct sentences like ‘You are wrong’ and ‘This is war’ to get her point across. Her techniques seem to work. The boy stares back at her ‘as if [she] were striking him in the face, blow after blow’. This simile effectively conveys her power and strength.

However, the boy ‘[refuses] to wince’ and there is a ‘smoky film’ over his eyes. {Teacher’s comments: ‘that smoky film’ implies she has seen it before/it is common amongst young men when thinking of the glories of war, perhaps?} Is this ‘smoky film’ a symbol of his refusal to see the truth in front of him? The ultimate failure of the old woman to make the boy realize that war is not for him is explicitly expressed in the last paragraph. The author achieves this by shifting to the boy’s point of view in order to give the reader a clearer view of his thoughts and reactions to the old woman. And we see that her efforts have all been in vain. The repetition of ‘Talk, talk!’ conveys his disdain for her words. Then comes an extended metaphor about how his parents and grandparents ‘stooped under the weight of all the talk’. {Teacher’s comments: Investigate the political/social oppression through generations that the writer hints at during this paragraph.} The short sentences immediately after the metaphor, ‘Not he. He threw off talk’ convey his determination to ignore her and continue to fight his battles. That last exclamation ‘Death to talk!’ conveys strongly the feeling that death has won out over life, and foreshadows that the boy will continue to sink into the abyss of battles, blood, and death.

At the end of this extract, I was left with the feeling of the hopelessness and despair, that in spite of all the old woman’s efforts, the boy is still going to get himself killed in the war. The pillar has not fallen, and the strong wind has only served to stoke the fires burning within it, which have taken on the smell and colour of blood.