Gordimer's mother had a black maid and it is likely that this made her sensitive to the inequality between the two communities (Gordimer et al. 1990).
On the other hand, What it's Like to be a Black Girl explores the psychological pressure and turmoil that a young black girl living in an urban society has to go through. Her identity is shaped by her consciousness of her physical appearance and how different it is from the white-skinned acceptable norm of society. She also has to deal with her developing sexuality and the responses that elicits from people in her community. The poem shows how the young black girl has to accept her fate as a passive sexual being to satisfy the needs of the male.
Compared with Thebedi, the young girl in What it's Like to be a Girl is aware of the societal demands of her and how she is to bear herself. Thebedi has to learn this through experience.
Comparative Analysis of Form
Both the texts deal with the theme of racism but go about it in different forms. Country Lovers is a short story written in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is an important story because it explores apartheid from a woman's point-of-view. This is significant because according to Sullivan and Stevens (2010), women who lived through apartheid interpret their experiences through the lens of male experiences. This story, like others by Gordimer, reflects theme of "the struggle" between exploited and exploiter (Attridge & Jolly, 1998, p. 66). The short story typically deals with unity of time and place. However, the story in Country Lovers spans over several years following the life of the two main characters from childhood to adulthood. Covering this longer period is important to show how the racist norms and attitudes of the society affect the minds of individuals by the time they have matured into independent individuals. When they are children, Paulus and Thebedi can be friendly with one another and play together. However, as they grow older they fall in love but learn to hide it from their communities. Towards the end when they are mature adults, they end up having nothing to do with one another and their lives are headed along completely separate paths.
The unity of place is maintained throughout the story in the form of the farm community. The South African farm has been used in South African literature to depict the colonial conflict and white supremacy in the country (Devarenne, 2009). This unity helps to emphasize the consequences that challenging racist social norms can have on individual lives and their standing in the community. The lives of Thebedi and Njabulo are not much affected by the scandal since they have low social status. However, the life of Paulus and his family has been affected because the scandal has brought shame to their good name. The changing nature of relationships has also been shown through the stages of exposition, rising action, crisis, resolution and denouement. Initially, Thebedi and Paulus are friends; the friendship then grows into young love. The love leads to a crisis in their lives in the form of a lovechild that can have grave consequences for their families if the identity of the father is discovered. This leads to the murder of the lovechild by the father bringing on a scandal that involves the entire district. The conflict is resolved when the father is acquitted of murder at the trial. In the denouement stage, both the central characters have gotten over the feelings of their childhood and adolescence. They have accepted the demands of the racist social norms and have resigned to their fate. Both have become involved in their normal lives and consider their past relationship as merely a thing of their childhood.
What it's Like to be a Black Girl is a poem written in free verse. It is not divided into formal stanzas and does not have a predictable rhyme or meter. Somers-Willett (2009, p. 134) categorizes this form of explicit poetry as slam poetry and interprets this form as a rebellion against...
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