Imagery has a solid appeal to readers and is often used in poems to construct a sensual experience for readers. Poets seek to spark off the readers’ senses using figurative language that involves vivid and vibrant descriptions. According to DeGuzman, the aim is to enhance the reader’s experience of the writing by engrossing them more intensely by engaging their brains. This paper seeks to describe the application of imagery in two main poems; Bougainvillea Ringplay by Marion Bethel and Fat Black Woman Remembers by Grace Nichols.
In the poem Bougainvillea Ringplay, Marion Bethel takes the reader back to the youthful days. She narrates the poem on the imagination of children who are anxiously waiting for the school bell to ring. Once the bell rings, the teenagers run out of their classes in celebration and enjoy singing and dancing in the school compound. Marion Bethel, a Bahamian lawyer and poet engages the reader by the organized choice of words to signify a world full of performances. The poem also involves duality, where all things display one thing but underneath signify a different meaning. The traditional game of ring play can be turned into an adult’s armament of choice for illuminating what lies underneath the innermost depths. However, hiding it behind the superficially innocuous kids’ game is possible to “get away with it.”
In the subsequent lines of the poem, the reader later realizes that this is not the customary game of ring play. The reader is progressively introduced into a world of thorns, vines, and impending vulnerability behind an otherwise attractive flower. Henceforth, the poem typically refers to the existential fact that all things under the sun have two sides of the same story, such as plants or natural occurrences, including typhoons and cyclones (DeGuzman). Rather than chastising the hiding of one and the diffusion of the other, Bethel rejoices in duality by keeping it in a type of chiaroscuro, where prettiness lies in vagueness.
Bougainvillea Ringplay symbolizes the adult ring play where there is no stretched camouflage or dualism. There is a sense of cool jeopardy in its place, toughened by the compensating effects of maturity. The hysterical playfulness of infancy comes to be hardened and therefore strengthened, but even so with the crux and intent of youngsters. By the line, “I come to you straight/ shaping vision beyond sugar-in-aplum/ winding my waist tight in your face,” Bethel arouses a sense of intimidation together with sensuality and joy, features that are characteristic of ring play and celebration. The splendor of this imaginative upheaval lies in the fact that the voice and manifestation of the poet cannot be muzzled, for it is in the background of child play and festival.
Bougainvillea Ringplay reenacts the traditional Bahamian song and dance of ring play. Bethel enacts a creative use of words to express the events through the poem. She engages with terms and arranges them in a way where there are no daunting rules to tell us how to read the poem. She behooves the use of words through which she carefully crafts the pressures and the pace so seamlessly as to never cause vagueness or lack of common meaning. Despite being a lawyer before becoming a poet, Mario Bethel has ruled supreme using poetry to portray classiness, articulateness, and brevity of words representative of one who exercises the law. Bougainvillea Ringplay narration takes the reader back and forwards the endless dance through an interplay of words.
Grace Nichols also portrays imagery through her poem, The Fat Black Woman Remembers. The title evokes three outstanding socials typecasts: being fat, being black, and being a woman. In some way, her title embroils controversy as the poem embodies a direct challenge to dare conformist (white) male descriptions of black women. She also evokes some form of redefinition of the black female distinctiveness in new and bewildering ways. Grace Nichols characterizes an aptitude to fashion unconventional spaces in which black female know-how is to have a transformative bearing. The flow of the poem is considerably based on her pledge to the body as an endowing implement to define one’s partiality and cravings. As opposed to being shown by fixed and unwavering cultural writings, this new body gives the impression of an active medium that is infinitely fashioning itself through many acts and varied connotations. In such a spectacle, the female body turns out to be a site of a semiotic skirmish between the forces of masculine control and feminine opposition, capitalism, and demotion of preferred objects and desirous subjects.
Instead of mimicking a monumental account of black female works and casts, Nichols insists on the choice of biases capable of fabricating repeating practices with current demonstrations of race and gender. Additionally, these depictions echo a self-affirmation of women’s uniqueness in which the female body, as a stimulant for female writing, epitomizes a dominant dialogue to re-inscribe the world. Nichols’s “fat black woman’s body” can be regarded as a cultural allegory that seeks to open up the likelihood of including new females’ bodies and voices in overriding philosophical backgrounds. In the end, the poet’s act of self-affirmation inexorably poses a battle between a shared body and an individual one. Such a predicament is engrained in politics of gender and race that endeavors to depict diversity and discrepancy of black involvements and individualities. Within this frame, the improvement of her body is not only directed near the manifestation of a feminine spirit and modification, for this would suggest a particular univocity and regularity of the class of “woman.”
The poem The Fat Black Woman Remembers creates an overall impression that constitutes the essence of her strength, vigor, and spiritual power. Her black female experience grips a deliberate struggle to indifference and disaffection. Even though it is in the first section of the text that Grace Nichols mainly relies on the physicality of a woman’s body, the rest of her poems correspondingly mirror a range of physical acts, exemplified by a delicate cognizance of rhythm, movement, and extension (DeGuzman). The poem’s depiction of a fat black body rises above bodily traits and can be stretched out to the narration of the poem and its broad content.
The discussion has elaborated on the use of imagery to bring out the strong message intended by the poets. Mario Bethel’s poem mirrors dualism through the use of the child’s game at school. Grace Nichol brings out the power and strength of feminism by describing her poem through the fat, black woman. However, Grace may have erred in engaging in racist connotation by preferring to use black women. The poets successfully convey their message that the reader has to uncover by profoundly considering the language used and the intention. The authors succeed in the use of vibrant imagery in both poems.
Works Cited
DeGuzman, Kyle. “What Is Imagery — Definition & Examples in Literature & Poetry.” StudioBinder, 2021, Web.