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What social commentary does Olive Senior's poem "Colonial Girls School" present?
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Olive Senior's poem "Colonial Girls' School" provides a critique of the colonial education system that sought to erase native identity and culture, and instill European norms and values. The poem highlights the alienation of the girls from their own heritage, as they were taught foreign histories and languages, while their own were deemed inferior. However, the poem also symbolizes resistance and eventual liberation from colonial oppression, as represented by the breaking mirror and the emergence of Anansi, a figure from native folklore.
Olive Senior's poem "Colonial Girls' School" is a social commentary on the colonial school system into which native girls were forced, a system in which there was "nothing about us at all." She criticizes the fact that the system was seemingly an attempt to make the girls white: it "willed our skins pale," "dekinked our hair," "erased us." She details how the syllabus focused on the histories of people who were not the girls' own, "Kings and Queens of England," "Wheatfields of Canada," rather than the landscape with which the girls were familiar.
Senior does note that elsewhere in the world there was a sense of rejection of this kind of schooling—"They were talking of desegregation"—but for the girls in question, there was no such promise on the horizon. Instead, their schooling taught them that their own language was "bad talking," and it was not until they were adults...
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that they felt able to free themselves from this systematic oppression when "the mirror broke" and "let Anansi from his bag." "Anansi" here is symbolic of an entire system of belief now breaking into the open again after years of oppression by an immoral colonial system which sought to stamp out the girls' own heritage from them.
The poem is about the erasure of native identity that colonial education sought to achieve. "Colonial Girls School" denounces that the subjects treated at school have nothing to do with the geographical and cultural landscapes of the Caribean. Colonialists (identified through the metonymies "those pale northern eyes and/aristocratic whispers) aim to destroy the culture, the behavior and even the physical features of the natives. Elements referring to these multiple destructions are interwoven throughout the poem. Yet, after a list of colonial abuses, the poem cites Garvey, desegregation in the American education system and the Congolese revolutionary Lumumba as evidence of resistance to colonial domination. The image of the broken mirror refers to the breaking of the colonial yoke and the final lines reverse the significance of the word "pale". While earlier on in the poem the word was used as in an expression denoting the power of the colonizers, it now means that their oppressive teachings will one day seem pale (insignificant).