A PASSAGE TO AFRICA Flashcards
What form is it?
Essay
Autobiographical writing
‘…hungry, lean, scared and betrayed faces’
Negative connotations
Listing
Shows terrible tragic situation
‘Ghoulish’
Ghost/creepy connotations
Likes to watch dark and horrible things
Suggests guilt
Emotive language
‘…no long impressed us much’
Insensitive
Suffering is supposed to impress them
‘…like the craving for a drug’
Simile
Negative connotations (drug addict)
Suffering is drug of choice
Shows journalistic need for suffering
Reflects negatively on him and other journalists
‘this sounds callous, but it is just a fact of life’
Short matter of fact sentence
‘Habiba had die’
Short matter of fact sentence
Unemotional/callous
Trying to disconnect from emotions (what he has to do to be a journalist)
Death is common
‘…simple, frictionless, motionless’
Litotes
Enormous understatement
‘there was an old woman who lay in her hut… the smell of decaying flesh’
Imagery
Unpleasant sensory language
Repetition
Shows extent of poverty
‘…gentle v-shape of a boomerang’
Juxtaposition of violence and gentle is very jarring
Not gentle
‘it was rotting; she was rotting… smell it in the putrid air’
Upsetting disgusting imagery
Repetition to emphasise
Horrible descriptive language
‘and then there was the face I will never forget’
Structure
One line paragraph
Shows turning point in the story
‘…revulsion. Yes, revulsion’
Repetition
Like direct address
Feels ashamed
‘…evils of hunger and disease’
Personification
‘to be in a feeding centre… to be in a feeding centre’
Anaphora
Shows how disgusting it is in there
+ unpleasant imagery
‘…in this state of utter despair they aspire to a dignity’
Surprising contrast
Alliteration
Living side by side in poverty
What kind of pictures and stories do the television news companies want?
Powerful, emotive and tragic images that escalate in intensity
‘the comfort of their sitting rooms back home’
Juxtaposes the comfort of the viewer with the extreme distress of the subject
What are we shown about the TV audience?
Viewed as heartless and detached in their ‘sitting rooms’
Viewers can become desensitised by repeated images of desperation and poverty - he uses a simile to show how repeated doses of a drug have a lesser effect
‘…she had one daughter’
Litotes
Unable to describe or relate to the extreme emotion the mother must feel
Sounds callous
‘…on the hunt’
Predator-like connotations
Gives a vivid image of the world of journalists
How does sentence structure create effect?
Varied sentence lengths and incomplete sentences keep the reader engaged
‘…before the face turned away’
Synecdoche
Less emotionally invested
Has a role/job to do cannot be distracted by his emotions
‘how could it be?’
Rhetorical question
Shows confusion
‘what was it about that smile? I had to find out’
Structurally not moved by anything at the start but now he is
Rheotrical question + short sentence
‘the journalist observes, the subject is observed’
Polyptoton
Contrast of different roles
Inversion of what is normal which is shaking him
Reverses roles
‘…between me and him, between’
Repetition
Metaphor
Shows uncomfortable with this switch
‘…with all the power and purpose I could muster’
Plosive alliteration
Not going to back down
Shows determination
‘…my nameless friend… I owe you one’
Litotes
Shows how it affects the write very powerfully
Direct address
What is ‘A passage to Africa about’?
Post-war violence and its effect on people and how the world media, greedy for the news of suffering hunt the people down for the stories and pictures that can be gained from them
