A Mother in a Refugee Camp
Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe
Where can one start if one does not start by saying that practically every English literature student on earth has read Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" - an award winning novel based on his own life experiences in Nigeria. The novel focuses both on the savagery of British colonisation and home-grown military dictators. Achebe died in March 2013, aged 82. Google his name and you'll find what you're looking for (and all the more so if you type 'New York Time' alongside!).
A Mother in a Refugee Camp
One stanza free verse poem
Employment of sentences of varying lengths and enjambment suggests the reader has difficulty creating controlled lists of details. He talks, intimately, thoughtfully, caught up in the act of remembering. The lack of punctuation shows he doesn't know where to stop. The use of ellipsis underline when the speaker 'drifts off" as though lost in his own thoughts and grief.
In the first three line, before the use of ellipsis (...) the speaker summarizes the poem.
No Madonna and Child could touch
Her tenderness for a son
She soon would have to forget...
This religious image instantly raises the mother and child to a religious level of exemplary purity and devotion. Remember, Mary, too, would lose her child.
The writer is clearly using pathos here to make us feel sorrow, however we should also respect the woman for the dedication she shows towards her son in times of adversity. Note, indefinite article 'a' used twice in title emphasizes the universal message of the poem: this is a mother in a refugee camp.

Pathos
The power or quality in literature to arouse feelings of pity or sorrow.
The use of ellipsis... suggests the speaker is faltering in his speech, is unable to complete the sentence and/or is using this time to recall the moment/to take us back to the moment when he first saw them.
Note, this poem is in simple past tense, which creates the sensation that the speaker visited the camp and took a photograph or video. The speaker has watched the woman and her child long enough to see the mother combing her son's hair. The poem doesn't take us up to the moment of his death, but the listener realises his death is inevitable: tiny grave.
Language
Achebe appeals to and challenges our senses to follow him into the scene:
smells; odors of diarrhea, unwashed children, dried up bottom,
touch: tenderness,
silent sound: humming in her eyes
sight
The images of the other children are heart wrenching:
unwashed children with washed out ribs (how ironic, how pitifully ironic)
and dried up bottoms waddling in laboured steps behind blown-empty bellies (starvation has actively blown their bellies empty like we would blow balloons full of air). Note the alliteration of 'b' - such alliteration holds us in place, we cannot turn away.
Try and imagine the children using Achebe's description. They children have become disjointed body parts: ribs, bottoms that waddle behind bellies.
The Memory
You have to read the poem carefully to see that the mother, like the speaker, is transported back into a memory. As she 'held a ghost smile between her teeth' and (held) in 'her eyes the memory of a mother's pride'. What was the moment of past pride? When she 'had bathed him and rubbed him down with bare hands". Note the use of past perfect (had bathed) which indicates distant past. She has NOT just bathed him, she is remembering how proud she felt at that moment and the memory brings a 'ghost smile' to her mouth - she has to hold the smile in her teeth to keep it in place!
Inside her Mind
The speaker is presenting himself as an outsider, but here he clearly becomes omniscient, all knowing, as he is imagining the memories that caused the woman to smile. There is no indication the narrator interviewed her).
Humming in her Eyes
Like the 'ghost smile,' the humming is unusual. The woman is not humming with her mouth (there is no sound). The 'humming is in her eyes.' She's replaying the action from the past in today's world:
In their former life this was perhaps
A little daily act of no consequence
Before his breakfast and school
We are reminded that they are in a refugee camp. The son was not born poor, civil war ha displaced his family and upset his life. Also, note, we are talking about a boy and not a baby. He had breakfast and went to school.
The Little Daily Act
She took from their bundle of possessions
A broken comb and combed
The rust-coloured hair left on his skull
And then - humming in her eyes - began to carefully part it.
'their' = they belong together
'broken' = the comb is like them, broken, but she has not thrown it away
comb + combed = her action is logical
rust-coloured = obviously, metal rusts and his body is rusting away (from lack of water)
his skull = its no longer a head, but a skull
began to part it = the irony is mother and son will soon be parted / we part children's hair to make them look smart, to prepare for an outing.. and so she is preparing her son for the ultimate outing of life into death.
A Tiny Grave
Now she did it (combed and parted his hair)
Like putting flowers on a tiny grave
She has already started her mourning process. She has 'not long ceased to care' (like the other mothers). Her son's head is now a skull and so the hair decorates its deadly resting place. Note, the grave is tiny but, and I repeat myself, this poem is about a boy (who went to school) and not a baby. The grave is tiny because he, like the other children have 'washed out ribs'.
The fact the mother has a 'ghost-smile between her teeth' clearly suggests she will soon follow him on his final journey.
Closing emotions
How can we feel anything else but admiration for the woman's sense of dignity and her undying devotion to her son, even in the face of death?
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