Comparing Not My Business with Nothings Changed and how they demonstrate strong attitudes and feelings about how individuals are treated in society

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Hassan Bassam 10R

English Coursework

Comparing ‘Not My Business’ with ‘Nothing’s Changed’ and how they demonstrate strong attitudes and feelings about how individuals are treated in society

In the society I live in – in the UK – everyone has freedom of speech. In the past there used to be a lot of countries in which your feelings towards something were only to be known by you. Dictatorships do not allow freedom of speech nor even a freedom to be in certain places. Today, people are more equal in society (Maybe not much so in the less developed countries such as Nigeria and South Africa) and strictly speaking there are no ‘laws’ as of such, against or for a particular race, yet people who are discriminated know where they belong.

     This is displayed throughout ‘Nothing’s Changed’. Tatamkhulu Afrika begins ‘Nothing’s Changed’ with the first stanza describing the ground he is walking on; “Small round hard stones click” portraying the floor, full of obstacles as are most thing in the circumstances he lives in. This line is particularly effective as an opening sentence as TA uses monosyllabic harsh words to really draw you into the poem from the start as they make the reader need to read them and recognise them properly because the words don’t fade in your mind.

     Unlike ‘Nothing’s Changed’, ‘Not My Business’ is not written auto-biographically, infact the narrator has the complete opposite attitude towards discrimination and politics in Nigeria. Ironically, the title ‘Not My Business’, although agreeing with the narrator’s view; “What business of mine is it?”, it actually contradicts the purpose of the poem, that it SHOULD be our business, and we should care about mistreatment in our societies, no matter which level it is on, whether it’s bullying or racism. In the UK people are not afraid to speak up about their feelings and attitudes to things. In our society, people are not dragged out of their houses or killed for saying something is wrong.

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     Subsequently, the structures of the poems are very different. ‘Not My Business’ is very uniform as the first three stanzas all follow a pattern of having the same shape and they repeat the same question in the same way; “What business of mine is it so long as they don’t take the yam from my savouring mouth?” This is repeated after each of the first three stanzas to make you connect to the narrator and his views as many of them are similar to many people’s today. ‘Nothing’s Changed’ on the other hand at first, appears to have ...

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