Raymond Character Analysis

Not all the songs were like “Barbara Allen.” Some were modern, about war and injustice and oppression and nuclear destruction. But always in between there were the older, sweeter melodies. These were the ones I waited for, but in the end the voice linked the two kinds of song, linked the maidens and lovers and sad deaths of bygone times with the people of today who were oppressed and about to die. It was make-believe—I never doubted that. You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time. You couldn’t sing songs about the end of the world unless—like the other people in that room… African mats on the floor and African hangings on the wall and spears and masks—you felt that the world was going on and you were safe in it.

“Yvette goes on about the boys’ uniforms. But that’s the army background, and the mother’s hotel background […] The boys in the Domain have to wear theirs. And it isn’t a colonial uniform—that’s the point. In fact, everybody nowadays who wears a uniform has to understand that. Everyone in uniform has to feel that he has a personal contract with the President. And try to get the boys out of that uniform. You won’t succeed […] We have all these photographs of him in African costume nowadays […] I raised the issue with him one day in the capital […] he said ‘Five years ago, Raymond, I would have agreed with you […] But times have changed. The people now have peace. They want something else. So they no longer see a photograph of a solider. They see a photograph of an African. And that isn’t a picture of me, Raymond. It is a picture of all Africans.’”

“Such a work, if adequately prepared, might well become the handbook for a true revolution throughout the continent. Always you can catch that quality of the young man’s despair […] Always you have that feeling that the damage can never perhaps be undone. Always there is that note, for those with the ears to hear it, of the young man grieving for the humiliations of his mother, the hotel maid […] I don’t think people know that earlier this year he and his entire government made a pilgrimage to the village of that woman of Africa […] Can you imagine the humiliations of an African hotel maid in colonial times? No amount of piety can make up for that. But piety is all we have to offer.” “Or we can forget,” Indar said. “We can trample the past.” Raymond said, “That is what most of the leaders of Africa do. They want to build skyscrapers in the bush. This man wants to build a shrine.”

A race riot in the capital in the 1930s—that ought to have been a strong story […] hysteria and terror in the African cités. But Raymond wasn’t interested in that side. He didn’t give the impression that he had talked to any of the people involved […] He stuck with the newspapers; he seemed to want to show that he had read them all and had worked out the precise political shade of each. His subject was an event in Africa, but he might have been writing about Europe or a place he had never been. His article about the missionaries and the ransomed slaves was also full of quotations, not from newspapers, but from the mission’s archives in Europe. The subject wasn’t new to me. At school on the coast we were taught about European expansion as though it had been no more than a defeat of the Arabs and their slave trading ways. We thought of that as English-school stuff; we didn’t mind. History was something dead and gone […] and we didn’t pay too much attention to it.

Not all the songs were like “Barbara Allen.” Some were modern, about war and injustice and oppression and nuclear destruction. But always in between there were the older, sweeter melodies. These were the ones I waited for, but in the end the voice linked the two kinds of song, linked the maidens and lovers and sad deaths of bygone times with the people of today who were oppressed and about to die. It was make-believe—I never doubted that. You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time. You couldn’t sing songs about the end of the world unless—like the other people in that room… African mats on the floor and African hangings on the wall and spears and masks—you felt that the world was going on and you were safe in it.

“Yvette goes on about the boys’ uniforms. But that’s the army background, and the mother’s hotel background […] The boys in the Domain have to wear theirs. And it isn’t a colonial uniform—that’s the point. In fact, everybody nowadays who wears a uniform has to understand that. Everyone in uniform has to feel that he has a personal contract with the President. And try to get the boys out of that uniform. You won’t succeed […] We have all these photographs of him in African costume nowadays […] I raised the issue with him one day in the capital […] he said ‘Five years ago, Raymond, I would have agreed with you […] But times have changed. The people now have peace. They want something else. So they no longer see a photograph of a solider. They see a photograph of an African. And that isn’t a picture of me, Raymond. It is a picture of all Africans.’”

“Such a work, if adequately prepared, might well become the handbook for a true revolution throughout the continent. Always you can catch that quality of the young man’s despair […] Always you have that feeling that the damage can never perhaps be undone. Always there is that note, for those with the ears to hear it, of the young man grieving for the humiliations of his mother, the hotel maid […] I don’t think people know that earlier this year he and his entire government made a pilgrimage to the village of that woman of Africa […] Can you imagine the humiliations of an African hotel maid in colonial times? No amount of piety can make up for that. But piety is all we have to offer.” “Or we can forget,” Indar said. “We can trample the past.” Raymond said, “That is what most of the leaders of Africa do. They want to build skyscrapers in the bush. This man wants to build a shrine.”

A race riot in the capital in the 1930s—that ought to have been a strong story […] hysteria and terror in the African cités. But Raymond wasn’t interested in that side. He didn’t give the impression that he had talked to any of the people involved […] He stuck with the newspapers; he seemed to want to show that he had read them all and had worked out the precise political shade of each. His subject was an event in Africa, but he might have been writing about Europe or a place he had never been. His article about the missionaries and the ransomed slaves was also full of quotations, not from newspapers, but from the mission’s archives in Europe. The subject wasn’t new to me. At school on the coast we were taught about European expansion as though it had been no more than a defeat of the Arabs and their slave trading ways. We thought of that as English-school stuff; we didn’t mind. History was something dead and gone […] and we didn’t pay too much attention to it.