Home | Iain Crichton Smith Flashcards
‘The black polished car drew up outside the brown tenement’
contrasting colours | mirrors wealth and poverty
‘He was a big man with a weatherbeaten red-veined face and strong jaw’
physically strong and traditionally masculine | ‘weatherbeaten’ and ‘red-veined’ suggests a life of hardship and age | his outward toughness contrasts with his emotional response to returning home
‘Desiccated gipsy’
the word ‘desiccated’ shows she is delicate and falling apart
‘Held together, like a lacy bag’
suggests fragility and something barely intact, something that was once beautiful but now may look a little tattered
‘Lock the car, dear’
this instruction is given by Jackson’s wife when they arrive at the tenement in the rundown area of glasgow where they used to live, she is uncomfortable in this setting now and acutely aware that there car will attract unwelcoming attention in the neighbourhood, unlike her husband, she doesn’t trust the locals whom she considers to be from a lower social class
‘She smiled disdainfully’
the wife’s disdainful smile suggests judgement, discomfort, and superiority. She does not connect with this town | highlights her detachment | reinforces this place is not ‘home’ for her
‘Somebody had written in chalk the words. Ya Bass’
highlights the condition the town is now in, the tenement is so disgusting that no one has even cared to wash off such crude words after it being there for what we can only imagine a long time
‘Neat as a ray or razor’
simile - comparing him to a razor suggests he is dangerous | just as a razor is sharp and can cause someone harm so to he is just as dangerous and likely to harm someone himself
‘Gladiator’
metaphor - the wife’s tone is sarcastic, she is poking fun at the fact Jamieson was pathetically hostile and always ‘ready for a battle’
‘Wallet bulged from his breast pocket’
the fact the Jackson’s wallet is kept in his breast pocket shows that it’s physically close to him and it highlights that money and social status are what matter to him | even though they have now left behind their working class roots and have plenty of money the word choice of ‘bulged’ suggests a lot of notes still the Jackson’s do not appear to be genuinely happy
‘He wanted to tell someone how well he had done’
Jackson is motivated to return to the place where he used to live to show off his social status
‘She kept her fur coat as far away from them as she could’
she keeps her distance physically and mentally | she doesn’t want her coat to get dirty as it is worth a lot and she doesn’t want to associate with the ‘rubble’ | she isn’t comfortable and feels the environment is disgusting
‘So that he could show him his bank balance’
‘so’ tells us that Jackson wants the factor alive for his own benefit, he wants to show off his wealth to them. This shows that Jackson looks down upon the factor, now that he’s left and made money he sees himself as better than the factor
‘Blacks weren’t like us’
irony - highlights that Jackson appears oblivious to the similarities between the ways he was treated by the factor and the way in which black people are being treated in his new homeland, South Africa | he feels angry that he was victimised, recalling how retched he felt yet he fails to acknowledge that he has anything in common with people that are being treated far more cruelly in the 1970s than he was 35 years previously
‘You weren’t brought up in a fine house either. You worked in a factory’
he’s challenging his wife’s apparent sense of superiority, reminding her that she, too, comes from modest, working-class roots | exposes underlying tension - Jackson’s wife seems eager to distance herself from her past whereas Jackson seems more nostalgic
‘Like a bull wounded in the arena’
simile - comparing Jackson to a wounded bull is effective as he no longer feels dominant and has been humiliated, feeling powerless for a moment
‘Where we belong’
emotional turning point - Jackson is no longer chasing an idealised version of ‘home’. He realises Scotland is in the past and is no longer optimistic about the life there
‘An empress surrounded by prairie dogs’
Jackson’s colonial tendencies and links with Africa surface here again when he sees his wife surrounded by the local children from the tenements | the fact that they are compared to ‘prairie dogs’ is animalistic, reducing the youngsters from this poor area to the status of dogs while his wife is elevated to the status of a glorious ruler of an empire as fits for superiority | slightly mocking tone
‘Don’t scratch my car’
shows Jacksons values are materialistic, he worries about his possessions and status symbols | the need to protect his car may symbolise his need to maintain control and dignity in a place where he now feels powerless
‘Daddy’
repetition - mocking Jackson, likely for his age and obvious wealth
‘Tourist’
this blunt statement uttered by Mickey reinforces that Jackson no longer belongs in these glasgow tenements, they are no longer his home, he is merely a visitor from another place, here on a brief visit before he returns home to Africa
‘Blaring his horn savagely’
word choice of ‘savagely’ suggests an animalistic way of driving, behaving in an uncivilised way, maybe taking it from the uncivilised town
‘There was no space in this bloody country’
he sees Scotland as crammed and everybody is forced to stay in the same place with no chance of advancing socially unless they leave
‘Crowded together like rats’
simile - comparing people in Scotland to rats, this conveys his condescending attitude | imagery - just as rats have connotations of unhygienic, poor wasteland animals so to Jackson feels glaswegians are alike
