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Summary English Home Language Poems - Zulu girl
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Sufficient summaries and analysis for Zulu girl - the poem, grade 12 curriculum.
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The Zulu Girl by Roy Campbell: Critical AnalysisThe poem Zulu Girl is a powerful recreation of the hardship and endurance
of the South African people..
The poem has four lined stanzas. The speaker provides us detail of the
plight of the Zulu girl. The observation made by the speaker is influential.
It is during the daytime that the sun sheds its hot rays on the ground -“the
hot red acres”. The farm seems to be under the powerful heat of the sun.
It is so parching that the hot red acres –African landscape-seem to be
ready to burst into flames. In the field is the “gang”. The word “gang” as
of course frequently used in this connection, suggests that its members
have no individuality and identity, are treated rather like prisoners, or are
being made to undertake forced labour: certainly they have no personal
pride or pleasure in the work they are doing, and are actually under some
kind of the compulsion.
Now the observation is focused on the girl who flings down her hoe, which
can be seen as an act of defiance of authority, which exacts her
subjection, a turning from mass production to the responsibilities of
reproduction. Then she unslings her child from her shoulder. The child
besides being “tormented by flies” is also in need of nourishment, for the
girl takes him to a patch of thin shade nearby to feed him at her breast.
While the child feeds, the girl passes her hand caressingly through his
hair. It is significant perhaps that the mother is referred to as a ‘girl’: this
may suggest that she is not a wife and belongs to the vast number of
black South Africans who have lost their traditional ways of life and have
been caught up in the chaos of the modern world.
In stanza three, four and five the poet goes on to give his impression of
the relationship and feeling between mother and the child in more than a
merely physical sense. The child is ‘grunting’ as he feeds, that is he is
feeding greedily and expressing his simple, but deep satisfaction. Not only
does he take in physical nourishment, however, for during this process of
feeding, her own deep feelings ‘ripple’ and are conveyed little by little into
his frail, infantile nerves. The poem admirably suggests the strong
intimate mother-and- child relationship developed by breast-feeding
(often, of course, lost or destroyed in more ‘advanced’ cultures). The word
‘languours’ is important. It tells us that the girl appears rather weary,
unenthusiastic, and hopeless, as though expressing a deep despair and
resentment against the whole situation in which she finds herself.
Nevertheless, even in her mood of hopelessness, her motherhood and the
latent satisfaction she has in feeding her child, seem to arouse in her a
kind of pride, ‘the old unquenched, unsmotherable heat’: a feeling
perhaps that her life has some value, that she is taking part in an
important life process; that she is not alone and abandoned; she belongs
to an old enduring tradition of human struggle and survival; her ‘tribes’
though ‘curbed’ and ‘beaten’ for the time being, ‘have a dignity’ in their
‘defeat’; and still retain their self-respect, and are ready to ‘rise again’.
, As the poem develops, we seem to move gradually closer to the mother,
until in the final stanza we are looking up at her, almost as though
through the eyes of the child himself; and she appears as an impressive,
statuesque figure, shielding and protecting her helpless infant. In the two
last lines of all, after being compared to a ‘hill’, she is likened to a great
storm cloud which “bears the coming harvest in its breast”.
Without appealing to our emotions directly or blatantly (as a propagandist
might have done), the writer arouses our sympathy for the Zulu Girl in the
hardships of the existence; this leads on to an admiration for the
endurance and for the strength of life that is seen in her. This in its turn,
through the concluding simile, leads to a kind of prophetic hint that the
scene we have witnessed is not final, and that a different and better state
of affairs is bound to come in the future. We notice that this hope is not
conveyed by plain, prose statements, as a matter of fact: it is glimpsed
imaginatively by the poet’s intuition and conveyed in the form of this
indirect suggestion.
The poem begins with a fairly simple observed situation, and as the poet
develops and reflects upon it, its references broaden out until it is of
world-wide significance. The first strong impression we are given in the
poem is of the heat which scorches the landscape where the girl is
working: the acres, we are told, are red, which we know is the
predominant colour of the African earth, but ‘hot red’, and obvious pair of
adjectives suggest in our mind something similar- ‘red hot’ the epithet
usually applied to heated iron. This together with the - and could almost
burst into flames. We are given other details that emphasize the
unpleasant nature of the ‘gang’s’ work: they are ‘sweating’; the child is
‘tormented by the flies’.
At last she flings down her hoe. She does not just ‘drop it’ or throw it
down: the word ‘flings’ suggests impatience and exasperation. An
interesting point to notice in the first stanza is the way in which the
rhythmic and rhyming pattern emphasizes the physical effort made by the
girl when she takes the child form her back. “When in the sun the hot red
acres smoulder / A girl flings down her hoe, and from her shoulder /
Unslings her child, (tormented by the flies).”
In stanza two, we read how the mother, in the meagre shade of the thorn
trees, is searching the hair of her child for ticks – again a detail which
suggests the poverty and unsanitary conditions under which these
labourers live. We notice that her sharp nails are ‘purpled with the blood”
of the parasites. In fact, the phrase ‘purpled with the blood of ticks’ is
grammatically out of place; it is intended presumably to relate to its head
- word ‘nails’, but the nails are introduced by the conjunction ‘while’ and
cannot strictly be governed by a loose phrase which lies outside the
clause together. Nevertheless, this slight dislocation of syntax is easily
forgiven as our attention is held by the metaphor ‘prowled’, which
suggests that her fingers are like a fierce animal searching through the
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