Themes are universal ideas that are deducible in a literary work. They are the manifold suggestions of the writer’s persuasion besides the subject matter. In Syl Cheney-Coker’s “The Breasts of the Sea,” there are numerous themes that underlie the poet’s discussion of the Sea being a dump site of human corpses and scientific garbage. Prevalent among these messages in “The Breasts of the Sea” are the themes of long-standing wars, slavery and colonialism, disenchantment with the political class, discussed hereunder.
Long standing wars
The theme of war is one of the prominent themes in “The Breasts of the Sea.” A straightforward imagery on this premise is found in the opening line of the poem, “After our bloody century”. The all-encompassing, possessive adjective “our” in this line already suggests a universality about the casualty syndrome that opens the poem. Many death trap situations come to mind when we ponder the implication of “bloody” – war, disease outbreak, sea accident, etc., etc. are possibly the plague custom of the “century” in question: the 20th Century at the end of which the poem was written. More explicitly, the 20th Century was the age of Industrial Revolution, a precarious era foretold in the anxious poems of the Romanticists. A fine example is D. H. Lawrence’s “Bat.”
Anyway, it goes without saying that the World Wars I and II fought in Europe between 1914–1918 and 1939–1947 respectively laid bare a great insanity in the political affairs of powerful nations. Thus, the poem becomes a criticism of power and its attendant monstrosity in the episodes of war. Here in Africa, and there have been several wars fought in tow, all in the 20th Century. Among them are the following: Shifta War between 1963–1967; Bale Revolt between 1963–1970; Ethiopian Civil War between 1974–1991; Mozambican Civil War between 1977–1992; Nigerian Civil War between 1967–1970; First and Second Eritrean Civil Wars between 1972–1974 and 1980–1981 respectively; Ugandan Bush War between 1980–1986; Rwandan Civil War between 1990–1994; and Sierra Leonean War between 1991–2002, to mention a few!
On a larger scale, the poem now comes across as a criticism of Africa’s underdevelopment. It is a result of the conflicts among themselves which have allayed socio-economic growth from them. In Europe as in Africa, the repercussions of war are usually infinite, fatal, and afflicting. This is the meditation that occasions the poet’s mood throughout the poem, making it read as a gloomy flashback on the toll of ruin and degradation of the world through the lens of Europe and Africa’s long-standing wars.
Africa as the architect of her underdevelopment
The theme of underdevelopment is one of the discernible themes in “The Breasts of the Sea.” Unlike Europe where there are, at least, scientific breakthroughs to solve some of the problems of socio-economic ruins, Africa has not the sufficient civilisation. The adventure of self-governance has been a fiasco. The result has been wars, factionalism, degradation, ethnicity, feudalism and what not. While these problems subsist, Africa still grapples with the way forward. The problem of leadership and followership that has gripped her heart since the independence of her nations remains an unsettled issue. Consequently, political, social and economic advancements have met with unprecedented failures. Since gaining independence, Africa has held her soul together in the misery of underdevelopment. The poet seems to aver that there are no enough means to salvage Africa from her own, self-inflicted suffering.
But because Europe also shares this casualty syndrome, it is suggested that even he is a victim of this condition. Today, the discord among powerful nations of the world is Europe’s enormous affliction. It is a cul-de-sac for him too because the more disunited they are, the greater the anxiety and consequently, the impossibility of having a world safe to exist. The luxury of technology coupled with the urge to possess a world power tears European nations too apart. And this has seen the wars still being fought in response to external aggressions.
The world is forever aggrieved and in grief. But the poet is specifically sad for Africa because she has misappropriated all her resources needed to build herself into becoming the champion of social civilisation. This is suggested in the pessimism conveyed in stanza 2, lines 6-8: “Anything else is only a fractured chela/we cannot preserve, after the sea’s belly/has washed itself clean of our century’s blight.”
The writer uses the Sierra Leonean experience as prototype for the pathetic and tragic situation of Africa as a whole – although Europe is just as doomed. All African nations that have fought one war or another are united by a common fate of a depleted continent flushing the remnant of its dignity into the insanity of power drunkenness. Developed nations can eke out on technology, but Africa has lost the capital of her resources to slavery mentality and bad leadership.
Slavery and colonialism
“The Breasts of the Sea” by Syl Cheney-Coker also focuses on the themes of slavery and colonialism. The poem is a historical record of Sierra Leonean (and by extension, African) history. The poet uses the index of slavery to further capture Africa’s subjection to inhumanity. In fact, this comes first. The death of millions of Africans in the trans-Atlantic slave trade is portrayed in the line, “Middle Passage’s cargoes” to show that Africa is a land of pain and grief as vividly detailed in Agostinho Neto’s “The Grieved Lands of Africa.”
The manifold consequences of this experience still afflict Africa, as a matter of underdevelopment. It here becomes a criticism of the colonialist mentality with which Europe related with African nations as minorities. Most significantly in this regard is the role the sea has played as a witness to this monstrosity and atrocity. It is important to recall that the adventurist nature of Europeans led to sea voyages and the mock discovery of hinterlands suited to their exploitative urge.
Thus, the poem berates Europe for a superiority complex that has ravaged the world through the medium of sea travels and colonialism. It lays bare the competition for survival into which the weaker nations have been plunged, as given in the imagery of “Darwin’s examination of the turtle’s shit” This allusion reminds us of Darwin’s evolution theory and the survival mechanism that organisms have to demonstrate in a competitive environment.
Man as a pollutant
The sea in this poem is projected as a dump site of human and scientific/industrial waste. The sea has witnessed the eyesore of innumerable corpses resulting from war, sea travel, shipwreck, slave mass suicide and related grievous events escaped on the sea. In addition, industrialisation has largely contributed to the pollution of major water bodies altogether, resulting in environmental degradation.
In effect, the poet laments the environmental ruin that industrial wastes and chemicals have fomented on the hydrosphere. It therefore strikes true that the poisonous gas “toxin” mentioned in the first stanza of the poem is both for human and, significantly, industrial dumps such as oil spillage on the sea and the ocean. Crude oil tankers are reported to despoil the ocean with two million tons of oil spills along their coastlines besides their collision that leave the sea and the ocean in a polluted state. Niyi Osundare discusses this as a major theme in his Eye of the Earth where he laments environmental pollution and its attendant grievous condition of man as being cut away from his source, the natural environment.
The pollution of the sea is the pollution of life because the water body is an origin of life; the sea also serves as a communal road and provision for the world at large. Therefore, the sea’s pollution significantly concerns the adulteration of her benefit as a life source and a journey medium.
Disenchantment with the political class
The poem largely condemns the ego of a few who identify as the ruling class. In examining this theme, it becomes relevant to import the utter disillusionment of the lower animals on Manor Farm in George Orwell’s classic, Animal Farm. In human society, leadership as a corporate enterprise has done more harm than good. The tussle for power dishevels our little world. Not only in Africa but also in Europe, Asia and the Americas does politics compound human problems.
There is no social conditioning or institution that has hampered, destroyed and devasted humanity like politics! With it comes stratification, feudalism, autocracy, totalitarianism, tyrannism and other social menace and malaise rending the heart of a continent.
In a more mercenary vein, the worst hit of the repercussions of political madness are the members of the lower class. Women and children who are not privy to the negotiations between the leaders near the brunt of the consequences when war breaks out. They are the first to die from diseases and pandemics.
The problem of leadership is not only prevalent in Africa but in the developed continents where their leaders are civilised enough to see war and the destruction of innocent lives as the surest way to prove a point! There is no sophistication to political madness: civilised Europe and presumably primitive Africa are cursed with a decadent socio-political structure by which humanity ebbs and ebbs away. In the words of the eminent African poet JP Clark, we are all casualties!
Further Reading:
- Poem: “The Breasts of the Sea” by Syl Cheney–Coker
- Analysis of Syl Cheney-Coker’s “The Breasts of the Sea”
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