Marrakech Quotes (Poverty) Flashcards
“As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud but they came back a few minutes later.”
Cold/detached tone. This is the norm. Reader feels disgusted.
Short paragraph hightens dramatic impact.
(w.c.) Impersonal/Dehumanised
(w.c.) Lack of hygene/ impression of living in squalor
(i) Metaphor- emphasises the number of flies
“They hack an oblong hole a foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling over it a little of the dried up lumpy earth”
(w.c) lack of equipment
(w.c) suggest a lack of care and feeling. They are desensitised.
List highlights the ritualistic nature of the process.
“They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone.”
(i) Metaphor - like plants and weeds, their existence is insignificant, born to work and die unnoticed.
“I was feeding one of the gazelles in the public gardens.”
Anecdote - Orwell recalls a personal experience.
Tone contrasts with previous paragraph - now it is more pleasant.
There is extreme poverty yet the city has public gardens. The animals are better fed than the people. Orwell makes this remark to compare the difference between the two extremes. CONTRAST TO PREVIOUS SECTION.
“Finally he said shyly in French: ‘I could eat some of that bread.’ I tore off a piece and he stowed it gratefully in some place under his rags. This man is an employee of the Municipality.”
Man’s dialogue is used to show his desperation - he is begging.
Orwell’s actions reveal his compassion towards the man.
(w.c) poverty
The man has no money despite him having a job - imperialism.
“None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve hours a day, and every one of them looks on a cigarette as a more or less impossible luxury.”
Figures emphasise the brutal life of the Marrakech Jew.
They can’t even afford the most basic objects - Poverty as a results of colonialism.
“But where are the human beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed. What does Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange-grove or a job in government service. Or to an Englishman? Camels, castles, palm-trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays and bandits.”
French attitude: Marrakech is a business opportunity.
English attitude: Romantic image forgetting poverty and suffering.
Tourists don’t notice the poverty, Europeans don’t associate the country with the poverty of the people.
“For nine-tenths of the people the reality of life is an endless, back-breaking struggle to wring a little food out of an eroded soil.
Statistic shows majority live in poverty.
(I) Metaphor to emphasise the effort needed for insignificant reward, especially those struggling to live off the land
