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AP Success - AP English Literature Poetry Analysis: "Ogun"

Question 1

Essay

In the poem 'Ogun' by Edward Kamau Brathwaite, the speaker describes a craftsman’s physical and emotional engagement with his work and materials.

Read the poem carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Brathwaite uses imagery, sound devices, and structure to convey the complex relationship between the craftsman and his craft, and how this reflects larger themes of cultural change and personal identity.

In your response you should do the following:
• Respond to the prompt with a thesis that presents a defensible interpretation.
• Select and use evidence from both poems to support your line of reasoning.
• Explain how the evidence supports your line of reasoning.
• Use appropriate grammar and punctuation in communicating your argument

Source 1.1

Ogun^1 by Edward Kamau Brathwaite

My uncle made chairs, tables, balanced doors on, dug out

coffins, smoothing the white wood out

with plane and quick sandpaper until

it shone like his short-sighted glasses.

The knuckles of his hands were sil-

vered knobs of nails hit, hurt and flat-

tened out with blast of heavy hammer. He was knock-knee’d, flat-

footed and his clip clop sandals slapped across the concrete

flooring of his little shop where canefield mulemen and a fleet

of Bedford lorry drivers^2 dropped in to scratch themselves and talk.

There was no shock of wood, no beam

of light mahogany his saw teeth couldn’t handle.

When shaping squares for locks, a key hole

care tapped rat tat tat upon the handle

of his humpbacked chisel. Cold

world of wood caught fire as he whittled: rectangle

window frames, the intersecting x of fold-

ing chairs, triangle

trellises, the donkey

box-cart in its squeaking square.

But he was poor and most days he was hungry

Imported cabinets with mirrors, formica table

tops, spine-curving chairs made up of tubes, with hollow

steel-like bird bones that sat on rubber ploughs,

thin beds, stretched not on boards, but blue high-tensioned cables,

were what the world preferred.

And yet he had a block of wood that would have baffled them.

With knife and gimlet care he worked away at this on Sundays,

explored its knotted hurts, cutting his way

along its yellow whorls until his hands could feel

how it had swelled and shivered, breathing air,

its weathered green burning to rings of time,

its contoured grain still tuned to roots and water.

And as he cut, he heard the creak of forests:

green lizard faces gulped, grey memories with moth

eyes watched him from their shadows, soft

liquid tendrils leaked among the flowers

and a black rigid thunder he had never heard within his hammer

came stomping up the trunks. And as he worked within his shattered

Sunday shop, the wood took shape: dry shuttered

eyes, slack anciently everted lips, flat

ruined face, eaten by pox, ravaged by rat

and woodworm, dry cistern mouth, cracked

gullet crying for the desert, the heavy black

enduring jaw; lost pain, lost iron;

emerging woodwork image. of his anger.

Ogun is the Yoruba and Afro-Caribbean creator-god.

Florry: truck

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