Answer to Question #220013 in English for Tanya msimango

Question

The breezes of the West African night were intimate and shy, licking the hair, sweeping through cotton dresses with unseemly intimacy, and then disappearing into the utter blackness. Daylight was equally insistent, but much more bold and thoughtless. It dazzled, muddling the sight. It forced through my closed eyelids, bringing me up and out of a borrowed bed and into brand new streets.

After living nearly two years in Cairo, I had brought my son Guy to enter the University of Ghana in Accra. I had planned to stay for two weeks with a friend of a colleague, settle Guy into his dormitory, and then continue to Liberia to a job with the Department of Information.

Guy was seventeen and quick. I was thirty-three and determined. We were Black Americans in West Africa, where for the first time in our lives the color of our skin was accepted as correct and normal.

Examine the verbs used in the first paragraph. What effect does the choice of verbs have on the meaning that the writer conveys in this paragraph.

Answer 1

The writer's choice of verbs conveys how she has been seduced by the life in Africa, a place that comes to feel more like home than home itself. The words also reveal the almost physical connection that the writer has forged with her ancestral homeland. The connection is also spiritual, an intimate joining together of souls. West Africa loves the writer and she loves it back. The feeling of oneness with the writer's surrounding stands in stark contrast to the isolation she feels when she is in the United States where racial prejudice is rampant. In West Africa, the writer feels like she belongs, that she is accepted for who she is as a person and that her black skin is treated as perfectly normal.