How does "Telephone Conversation" by Wole Soyinka urge readers to consider racial prejudice?

Simply put, the narrator in Soyinka's "telephone conversation" is looking for a place to live—that is the "experience." This experience is tainted by his foreknowledge that the color of his skin is likely to be a problem for his prospective landlady.

The poem emphasizes the ridiculousness of racial prejudice by means of the very strange question that is asked by the woman on the other end of the phone. Upon the narrator revealing that he is black, the woman showcases her aversion to dark skin by asking if he was "light or very dark."

In response, the narrator explains to readers of the poem that his body is not monochrome—that some parts of him, such as the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet—are far "whiter" than other parts of him.

How does "Telephone Conversation" by Wole Soyinka urge readers to consider racial prejudice?

"Telephone Conversation" by Wole Soyinka urges readers to think about racial prejudice from several perosnal perspectives that for some readers are unfamiliar territory while for other readers they are a shared territory of experience. Firstly, the fact that the conversation is set in England ("public hide-and-speak. / Red booth. Red pillar-box.") removes the conversation out of the familiar landscape of racial discussion for American, Canadian and African readers (for any reader not in the UK).

The fact that the conversation is conducted at a public pay phone and neither at home nor in person, adds a feeling of intimacy: the reader is privy to a cloistered and private moment rendering the poetic speaker's emotions and reactions all the more powerful and authentic.

That the poetic speaker is forced by the "Lipstick coated ... / Cigarette-holder" to qualify the darkness or lightness of his skin opens an internal perspective of self-examinatioin and -evaluation that is rarely revealed by anyone to anyone. In these ways, "Telephone Conversation" urges the reader to think about and saddly contemplate racial prejudice.

Is "Telephone Conversation" by Wole Soyinka a poem about racism?

The central conceit of Wole Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation" is to examine racism purely as an obsession with the exact color of a person's skin. It is normal to talk as though "Black" and "white" are clear, mutually exclusive categories. However, although the conversation the speaker has with his potential landlady is clearly ludicrous, it effectively brings out an important truth. No one has skin that is perfectly Black or white. Instead, people come in a vast range of colors, meaning that skin color is a continuum rather than a binary opposition. The speaker tells the lady that different parts of his body are different colors and describes his overall skin tone lyrically as "West African sepia." These rhetorical strategies destabilize the very idea of skin color.

Ironically, the landlady, though logically inconsistent, appears to be less racist than others the speaker has met. He tells her that he is African because he wants to avoid "a wasted journey." This suggests that he would not be at all surprised if she simply refused to rent accommodation to a Black person. Her unexpected determination to interrogate him about how Black he is exposes the absurdity both of her criteria and of the prejudices the speaker has previously encountered and has now come to expect.