A Passage to Africa Flashcards
‘I saw a thousand, hungry, lean, scared and betrayed faces… but there is one I will never forget’
- Hyperbolic list and personal pronoun
- Shows the enormity of the extreme images he has seen, which juxtaposes the following sentence which focuses on a specific person, creating a level of intrigue from the reader for what was special about the face
‘a village in the back of beyond’
- Alliteration
- Emphasises how remote this village is to show that he is venturing far from comfort such as aid agencies
‘Take the Badale Road for a few kilometres till the end of the tarmac, turn right onto a dirt track, stay on it for about forty-five minutes’
- Asyndeton
- Further emphasises how remote this place is, building tension for what is going on in this place
‘like a ghost village’
- Similie
- Evokes pathos as it shows the derelict and empty nature of the village
‘ghoulish’, ‘hunt’, and ‘tramped’
- Predatory language
- Highlights how apathetic the journalists are in their search for shocking content
‘like the craving of a drug’
- Similie
- Makes us realise how jaded he is with these sorts of things, as well as making us feel slightly contemptuous
‘same old stuff’
- Sibilance and colloquial language
- Shows how he is not affected by seeing things most of us would find shocking due to his overexposure
‘wild, edible roots’
- Predmodifiers
- Emphasises the indigent nature of these people by the scavenger like nature of their meals
‘Habiba had died’
- Simple sentence
- Makes us realise how commonplace this is as she was alive moments ago
‘No rage, no whimpering’
- Parallel sentence structure (anaphora)
- Further highlights how commonplace death is by the lack of reaction
‘Simple, frictionless, motionless deliverance’
- Tricolon and asyndeton
- Emphasises how death is commonplace in this region
‘decaying flesh’, ‘festering wound the size of my hand’, ‘sick yellow eyes’, ‘putrid air’
- Dysphemisms (delibrately harsh words) and semantic field of repulsive, noisome vocabulary
- Makes it very impactful and surreal to the reader to learn just how awful the conditions are here
‘gentle V-shape of a boomerang’
- Domestic, simple language
- Allows us to understand the true extent to which they are suffering by using everyday language and examples we would understand
‘And then there was the face I will never forget’
- Volta and declarative sentence
- Grips the reader and builds even more intrigue, being indicative of a change of tone and content
‘twin evils of hunger and disease’
- Cliche metaphor
- Shows the simplicity of their desperation and their suffering, but also highlights how profound it is
‘an old woman’
- Indefinite article
- Makes us realise this suffering is occuring en masse and it causes people to lose their humanity
‘corpse’ and ‘dying’
- Semantic field of death
- Shows that death is everpresent in this area
‘fleeting’ and ‘meeting’
- Present continuous verbs
- Shows how frequent faces meeting eachother is, highlighting how profound the impact of this one particular face was
‘What was it about that smile? I had to find out’
- Hypophora
- Brings us into his mind by adding intrigue to why there was someone who smiled admist so much suffering
‘The journalist is active, the subject is passive’
- Compound sentence
- Shows the usual gap between journalists and subjects, which makes the moment where it was the other way round seem more extreme
‘rich world’ and ‘poor world’
- Juxtaposition
- Brings to light how Alagiah feels he should be embarassed that he has had it so easy after seeing the man embarassed for being seen miserable, emphasised by their socioeconomic differences
- It also shows the usual gap between the journalist and the subject but how the man smiling may have bridged that gap
‘Yet meeting him was a seminal moment’
- Hyperbole
- Shows how this was a turning point in his career as a journalist which highlights how admist all of the suffering he has seen he has never seen a smile
- It also shows the impact the man had on his perspective - it reversed the roles of the journalist and the subject as Alagiah began to question whether or not he should feel embarassed by being rich and comfortable
‘my nameless friend’
- Oxymoron
- Shows his appreciation for the man despite not knowing him
‘If you are still alive’
- Dependant clause
- Shows how life is short in this place and death is very commonplace
