Compare 'Limbo' with 'Nothing's Changed, showing how the poets reveal their ideas and feelings about the particular cultures and traditions that they are writing about.

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Compare ‘Limbo’ with ‘Nothing’s Changed, showing how the poets reveal their ideas and feelings about the particular cultures and traditions that they are writing about.

In this essay I will be comparing Limbo and Nothing’s Changed to see how each poem conveys the authors ideas about culture and tradition. Even though both poems are set in very different places with different beliefs, there are still some views that go on throughout the world.

 Both Limbo and Nothing’s Changed show the inequality of different races with the black people being undermined by the whites. Also in each poem the Black people know that they deserve more than what they are getting. In Limbo you can feel the vulnerability as the ‘water is surrounding’ the slaves and as their ‘knees are spread wide’. This shows that the blacks feel insignificant and are made to feel as though they are below the whites.  The slaves also see the whites as ‘dumb gods’ who are powering over them but are only winning as they are the majority and hold the power. In Nothings Changed the first stanza shows the ‘amiable weeds’, which is that some of the black people are being forced into believing that they truly are an inferior race. Also, comparisons are made between the standards of living of whites and blacks as the whites have their ‘haute cuisine’ whilst the blacks are left with ‘bunny chows’.

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  The interpretations that can be made from reading both poems can have similarities but at the same time have differences can be immense, which may be due to the different nature of the poems and the way the authors convey their ideas. Brathwaite starts by evoking feelings of hate which come through by the one-syllable words that he uses like ‘stick’, ‘whip’ and ‘hit’. They have very harsh sounds but are also words of violence, giving you a hellish feel to the situation of slavery that Brathwaite is interpreting. However, in Afrika’s poem, he uses similar metaphors like ‘hard ...

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