Passage to Africa - Somalia and shock to its readers

Question 1

‘I saw a thousand hungry, lean, scared and betrayed faces as I criss-crossed Somalia’ (1)

Answer 1

Alagiah uses emotive diction (‘hungry’, ‘lean’, ‘scared’, ‘betrayed’) to abruptly describe the Somali people. The effect is amplified by the fact that this is the opening sentence of the extract.

Question 2

‘I was in a little Hamlet just outside Gufgaduud, a village in the back of beyond’ (3)

Answer 2

The use of an idiom(‘back of beyond’) suggests that the town is a lonely and forsaken place. Here, Alagiah’s tone seems shockingly casual and insensitive, indicating how accustomed he is to such places and conditions.

Question 3

‘The search for the shocking is like the craving for a drug’ (10-11)

Answer 3

Here, the writer employs a shocking simile to present himself as unhealthily addicted to searching for others’ suffering.

Question 4

‘[Her leg] was rotting; she was rotting. You could see it in her sick, yellow eyes and smell it in the putrid air she recycled with every struggling breath she took.’ (29-31)

Answer 4

Alagiah’s diction shockingly dehumanises the woman here; she is likened to a piece of organic matter that is ‘rotting’ (a point emphasised using repetition). Alagiah also uses visual imagery (‘her sick, yellow eyes’) and olfactory imagery (‘the putrid air she recycled’) to vividly evoke the woman’s shocking physical state and his own apparent lack of sympathy.

Question 5

‘That’s what the smile had been about. It was the feeble smile that goes with apology, the kind of smile you might give if you felt you had done something wrong.’ (54-56)

Answer 5

The diction of ‘apology’ is shocking because the reader knows that the man has nothing to apologise for. The pathos of this description is compounded by the fact that it is a ‘smile’ of apology, a phrase that seems oxymoronic.