Download our SSCE Study Guide Bundle
Examine the conflict between tradition and modernity in “New Tongue” by Elizabeth Kamara
“New Tongue” by Elizabeth Kamara presents tradition and modernity as two opposing worlds locked in conflict; a conflict in which modernity emerges triumphant, but at a devastating cost to identity, family, and community. This conflict is established primarily through contrasting imagery and diction.
We can find this friction in the opening lines of the poem, where the new generation speaks “a new tongue,” dances “new dances,” and has minds “battered into new modes and shapes.” This is pitted against the image of “the old songs,” now reduced to “disregarded dreams” and “remnants of a past.” The contrast between the vibrant, dominant present tense (“they speak,” “they dance”) and the past-tense dismissal of tradition (“disregarded,” “remnants”) dramatises how thoroughly modernity has displaced what came before.
This conflict plays out most painfully in the rupture of family and communal bonds. Traditional society, in the African context, prizes family ties, respect for elders, and continuity between generations. The poem shows all of this collapsing. Ties of “family and friendship” are “loosened, broken, burnt.” There is “no room for elders… not even on the edge of their minds.” The deliberate exclusion of elders, who are without doubt the traditional custodians of culture and wisdom, is evidently an illustration of how the new pushes out the old.
Kamara also frames the conflict in the communicative sense. The new generation’s “ears blocked to the old tongue / and ways of doing things” indicates a willful refusal to listen to ancestral wisdom. Yet this same generation is “glorying in their newness of a borrowed tongue and culture”. The word “borrowed” is key. It implies that what they have embraced is not authentically theirs. It gives us a sense of authentic heritage versus an imitated, foreign identity mistaken for advancement.
This conflict is further intensified through violent natural imagery: “a strange coldness descending like snow covered mountain,” gusts of wind “falling trees” and “carting roofs away.” These images of upheaval and destruction mirror the social and emotional devastation wrought by the clash between old and new. The transition from the former to the latter is thus depicted as disruptive.
The poet uses the allusive “red sea” to dramatise the conflict by likening the break from tradition to a momentous, supernatural event. The poem’s resolution of this conflict is unambiguous and bleak. Modernity wins decisively, as the new generation “hangs the last lock on their culture” and “glides into the future without a backward glance.” We see no synthesis of the old and the new.
In examining this conflict, Kamara does not even say modernity is inherently evil. She is clearly critical of the uncritical, wholesale rejection of tradition that often accompanies it. The poem’s tone reveals that her sympathies lie with a vanishing world of communal values, family bonds, and inherited wisdom, now displaced by a generation enthralled by borrowed and rootless modernity.
Related:
- Multiple Choice Questions on “New Tongue” by Elizabeth L. A. Kamara
- Q & A: Discuss the central theme in “New Tongue” by Elizabeth Kamara
Receive Literary Updates through our Social Media Channels:
- WhatsApp: Literature PADI or Literature-in-English with LP
- Telegram: Literature PADI
- YouTube: @literaturepadi
- Facebook: Literature PADI
