Bessie Head s Snapshots of a Wedding is a perfect illustration of inordinate utilizations of imagination, which undertakings thoughts and constructs in my head. The chief implicit in constructs and comparing are that of tradition and modernness. Bessie Head undertakings multiple positions on the issues of tribal tradition and modernness. The overall tone, nevertheless, topographic points little, yet turning, sums of modernness in a traditional universe. The set is Neo placed in the folk and universe of Kegoletile.
Neo, Kegoletile s future married woman, is surely non traditional. And every bit good, she is educated. In many civilizations, an educated married woman would be looked at as a good thing, nevertheless in this civilization, a good married woman would be one with good manners, and house working. Neo would ne’er be the sort of married woman who went to the lands to plough. She already had a well-paid occupation in an office as a secretary.
An astonishing effort achieved by Bessie Head, is her attending to the senses of who of all time is reading the book. She used imagination that stimulated non merely sights, but sounds and other senses as good. She dropped to her articulatio genus before the bride, clenched her fists together and pounded the land hard ( pg. 369 ). Her utilization of words like buffeting and her sentence building, mom
ke me experience the buffeting on the land, make the whole reading experience that much more apprehensible and personal. This quotation mark besides leaves me kind of experiencing the unhappiness and defeat of the aunt in the changing civilization, while watching her nephew be wed off from his life into modern ways.
Something that truly caught my attending in the narrative was the engagement of the aunts on both sides. Aside from Neo and Mathata, they were the representation of tradition and modernness in the narrative. Kegoletile s aunts stand foring the civilization and what is lost. They exemplify the importance of manners and tradition in the civilization. That miss has no manners! the relations would note. What s the good of an instruction if it goes to person s caput so severely they have no regard for the people? Oh, she is non a individual ( pg. 367 )
Through Snapshots of a Wedding, Bessie Head uses linguistic communication to project a general tone for the narrative. Wordss like haunting, moistness, impossible, and dim express unhappiness, and kind of a dark attitude, nevertheless assorted into the sad and dark words are happier and more alive words such as gleefully, swell, smiling, and reasonably. To me, this demonstrates my point once more. Bessie Head is non showing a point or a stance on the issues, she is simply showing something that is traveling on in the civilizations of Africa. Whether it is good or bad, it is the truth.