Poem Analysis of Night Racing by Samuel Wagan Watson
Construct a close reading of this poem that demonstrates your awareness of the poet’s body of work.
1,207 Words
Cars and roads traverse the poetry included in the anthology, Smoke Encrypted Whispers, by Samuel Wagan Watson, a self-identified aboriginal man of German and Irish descent. The narrators of the poems are frequently on or beside the road, and the bitumen itself becomes a metaphor for everything from addiction and memory to the search for love. The poem Night Racing is present in the second half of the anthology, in a section that deals primarily with race and issues surrounding racial tension. The car in which the narrator rides facilitates an attack on the colonisation of Australia by the “white man” in the 18th century, as well as the centuries of oppression that followed it. In this sense, the poem utilizes the motif of a car to enable a “reverse invasion” of sorts, with the Aboriginal driver and his passengers intruding upon the tranquil nature of the suburban neighbourhood. This invasion is empowered by an appropriation of the “white” technology of the car, and can be interpreted as a challenge to the “dream” that this neighbourhood represents, furthered by extensive use of visual and auditory imagery, metaphor and simile, in conjunction with the ideologies presented through the collective body of work, Smoke Encrypted Whispers, in order to effectively shatter the middle-class respectability on which the people of suburbia function.
The poem is effective in its use of vivid imagery, both visual and auditory, and offers the reader a unique perspective of the neighbourhood, consistent with many other poems included in the anthology. The imagery is used to demonstrate to the reader how to construct an opinion of the white neighbourhood, using negative phrases in conjunction with the city such as the “menacing glow” or haunted by… urban myth”. This in turn acts to justify the invasion of the white suburbs, so that, rather than criminalising
1,207 Words
Cars and roads traverse the poetry included in the anthology, Smoke Encrypted Whispers, by Samuel Wagan Watson, a self-identified aboriginal man of German and Irish descent. The narrators of the poems are frequently on or beside the road, and the bitumen itself becomes a metaphor for everything from addiction and memory to the search for love. The poem Night Racing is present in the second half of the anthology, in a section that deals primarily with race and issues surrounding racial tension. The car in which the narrator rides facilitates an attack on the colonisation of Australia by the “white man” in the 18th century, as well as the centuries of oppression that followed it. In this sense, the poem utilizes the motif of a car to enable a “reverse invasion” of sorts, with the Aboriginal driver and his passengers intruding upon the tranquil nature of the suburban neighbourhood. This invasion is empowered by an appropriation of the “white” technology of the car, and can be interpreted as a challenge to the “dream” that this neighbourhood represents, furthered by extensive use of visual and auditory imagery, metaphor and simile, in conjunction with the ideologies presented through the collective body of work, Smoke Encrypted Whispers, in order to effectively shatter the middle-class respectability on which the people of suburbia function.
The poem is effective in its use of vivid imagery, both visual and auditory, and offers the reader a unique perspective of the neighbourhood, consistent with many other poems included in the anthology. The imagery is used to demonstrate to the reader how to construct an opinion of the white neighbourhood, using negative phrases in conjunction with the city such as the “menacing glow” or haunted by… urban myth”. This in turn acts to justify the invasion of the white suburbs, so that, rather than criminalising