An Analysis of a favourite Grace Nichols Poem - Fear.

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An Analysis of a favourite Grace Nichols Poem – Fear.

             As the essay title states I am going to analyse a Poem written by Grace Nichols. Grace was born in Georgetown, Guyana, when finished school she went to university and then had several jobs before moving to England in 1977. Nichols then wrote poems mainly about racially sensitive topics, motherhood and sexuality.

            The poem, which I shall analyse, is called ‘Fear’. The main storyline in this poem is that a woman is worried and fears for her child living in England. I think this poem has a deeper meaning, basically about black people trying to adapt or not accepting the fact that they have to adapt to the way in which white people live. The writer of this poem sees it as blacks against whites, she feels very uncomfortable living in England, and maybe she feels out of place? Out numbered? In this poem there is much racial tension as she does not see the population to be as ‘one’, as equals. She uses words like our culture’, and ‘your own’. This clearly shows that she sees white coloured people as being different to blacks. I think that she sees the world population split into two – black people against the rest of the world.

             In ‘fear’ there is a big culture clash and this is what Grace Nichols wants us to think about. The culture clash is the main theme running through this poem. In the first two lines of this poem – ‘ our culture rub skin’ and ‘against your own’, we can see here that the technique used is enjambment. In these two lines we see the first signs of a tension felt by Grace Nichols between the two cultures. We know this because of several words, firstly ‘our’ here we can see that Grace is sectioning her culture off, to make it us against them.  Then on the next line we see ‘against’, this highlights a sense of difference, so in a different country and not around her own people. The word ‘your’ suggests that she thinks she is not included in the white community or she is on the outside. From these first two lines of the poem we can see that Grace feels great tension between the two cultures and we know she feels that she is not one of us.

                  The theme does not just occur in ‘fear’ but also occurs in the other poems in which Grace Nichols has written. In ‘two old black men on a Leicester square park bench’, we also see this culture clash, these men feel unwanted in England and so lament about there homeland making themselves think that London is such a bad place to live and that the Caribbean is more like heaven. To want to go back to the Caribbean so much they must feel that blacks are unwanted and are not treat as equals.

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             The theme in ‘fear’ continues throughout the poem because we can see it in the last two lines as well as the first two, - ‘I think my child’s too loving’ and ‘for this fear’ – here again we see that the technique used is enjambment and the effect that this has is that it makes us think about the two lines as one. We see a culture clash in these two lines, again, because of specific words, which have been used. Firstly ‘my’, when she uses this word, we see that she is sectioning ...

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