AP Success - AP English Literature Poetry Analysis: "Ogun"
Question 1
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
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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