The wind travels across the sea to find her new home and remind her of her old home. The wind is referred to as a “howling ship.” This encourages the notion that it has travelled to find her. The word “howling” is onomatopoeia and adds to the atmospheric depth of the phrase and really makes the storm seem dark and mysterious.
The poem begins in the third person but changes in the second stanza to a first-person view as the poet speaks of herself, and addresses the tropical winds, this tells you of how violent the storm becomes with words, . The speaker here could be anyone who has made this journey, but Grace Nichols is probably speaking for herself in the poem. The poem is written mostly as free verse - there is no rhyme scheme; stanzas vary in length, as do the lines, though the first line of the poem is a perfect pentameter.
The phrase,
“Its gathering rage,” personifies the storm and really shows her homelands fury, through the fury of the storm.
The phrase,
“Like some dark ancestral spectre.” is a metaphor suggesting that she is being haunted by her ancestors from her home country, through the storm. It also tells of how, if she isn’t being haunted, she must have a longing to be there as she is being “haunted” by a storm from her home land, and perhaps rebuking her for leaving.
The poem is interesting for its range of vocabulary. Ms Nichols names two Caribbean gods, Oya and Shango. With an imperative, the phrase,
“Talk to me Huracan, Talk to me Oya, Talk to me Shango.” Suggest that she is ordering these Gods to make contact with her, which they do through the storm. The lines in this part of the poem are very short, composed of very few words before the writer starts a new line. This perhaps shows that the writer is frantically thinking these things about the storm.
The line,
“My sweeping back home cousin.” Personifies the actual storm itself as being a relation to her. As she feels it so deeply that she feels related to it.
The next stanza begins with a peculiar sentence. The phrase,
“Tell me why you visit An English coast?” starts off as an imperative, then it turns towards the end into a question. This suggests that she becomes more eager to know as the question goes on.
Niyi Osundare uses words such as, “Picked” to make it seem as though the victim is not a living human being, but an object to be beaten and abused, along with the word stuffed, which suggests a clumsiness about his being put into the jeep. He also personifies the jeep with the word “Belly” This is personification which makes the reader associate the jeep with human instinct. The word “waiting” suggests that he was destined for this jeep and once again is also personification because of course, the jeep wouldn’t actually be “waiting” for him.
These personifications also , I thought, made it seem as though they regarded the well being of the jeep higher than a human life, because they use personification upon the jeep, whereas the human being itself is suggested as being an object.
This theme of disregard for human life is echoed in the next stanza with the phrase “…dragged Danladi out.” This suggests that they just pulled him along the floor as they would a heavy, lifeless object. But of course this is a human being.
Three repetitions of a “chorus” in “…business” makes it seem as though the poet has an urge to stress these words as much as he can. The whole “chorus” is a question, but it is split into three lines to stress its urgency, this is a link between the way this poem was written and the way “Hurricane…” was written, because both use short lines to suggest the urgent and frantic nature of the poets’ story.
In this “chorus”, the line,
“So long they don’t take the yam, From my savouring mouth.” suggests that as long as it doesn’t directly affect him, he won’t get into any harm, but as the end of the poem shows, his mere knowledge of what is happening, makes him a target for these people, who throughout the poem are only referred to as “they”.
All through, “Hurricane..” the writer uses links to her homeland, the line,
“O why is my heart unchained?” suggests that she yearns to know why she wanted to be free from her homeland because she now really misses it. The term “old tongues” suggests an old language that maybe she used to speak in her homeland, but now doesn’t understand.
Towards the end of the poem, she realises that she needs to go home and joins forces with the storm. The line,
“I am aligning myself to you, ”suggests this notion.
“I am following the movement of your winds,” suggests the narrators’ intentions of travelling back home with the storm.
The line in the last stanza,
“Come to break the frozen lake in me,” suggests that she is warming to the storm, and she thinks that she has become cold to her homeland; in that she pays it very little thought.
The last lines of this poem, “Come to let me know, That the earth is the earth is the earth” This idea reinforces the notion that she believes that the storm has come to take her home and inform her that her and her homeland are still on the same planet, the tripled repetition suggests that she knows this very well and is trying to enforce this point within a reader.
In the third stanza of “…Business”, the oppressors come in the day time, In the first and second stanza’s they are different times as well, this could well be to show that these people can come along at any time of day. The fourth and final stanza contains no ‘chorus’. This suggests that everything changes in the poem because everything in the man’s life changes and ends, so indeed does the poem.
The line,
“A knock froze my hungry hand.” Suggest that he is hungry but following this knock he is too terrified to eat. Fantastic emotive words such as “Froze” suggesting he was so shocked and worried that he simply couldn’t move, are used in this last stanza and all through this poem.
The last lines of this poem emphasise the confusion surrounding why they are there. The line,
“The jeep was waiting on my bewildered lawn” is personification which suggests that no-one, not even his lawn, knows why it’s happening. And then a repetition of the word “Waiting” makes it seem as though the men have to do a lot of waiting and that time maybe seems to go so slowly because of these things that are happening.
Both of these poems are excellent at enforcing their own point in their own ways, “Hurricane…” through tactile emotional words and beautiful yet violent images of the storm, and “Not My Business.” through blatant disregard for human life depicted through the eyes of a hunted man, who is hunted because he knows what is going on. All in all two excellent and well thought out poems, each with their own perfectly presented message.