Nothing's Changed — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Nothing's Changed
The poems
What you need to know
Nothing's Changed by Tatamkhulu Afrika (1994): a man returning to District Six in Cape Town, cleared of its people under apartheid, and finding a whites-only restaurant there, and how Afrika uses the senses, contrast and rising anger.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the collection it compares well with, and on which themes.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Small round hard stones click / under my heels', 'in tall, purple-flowering, / amiable weeds', 'No board says it is: / but my feet know', 'and the hot, white, inwards turning / anger of my eyes', 'Brash with glass, / name flaring like a flag', 'whites only inn', 'No sign says it is: / but we know where we belong', 'working man’s cafe sells / bunny chows', 'leaving small mean O / of small mean mouth', 'Hands burn / for a stone, a bomb'.
Form and structure: short free-verse lines, the senses before sight ('my feet know'), the repeated 'No board says it is' and 'No sign says it is', the inn set against the working man's cafe, and a title that returns as the last line.
Language: harsh sounds of stones and weeds, the inn personified as brash and squatting, glass as the barrier between the two worlds, the speaker's breath on the window, and violent verbs at the end.
Context: Afrika (1920–2002), who lived in District Six, refused to be classed as white and opposed the area's destruction and apartheid; District Six declared whites-only in 1966, its houses bulldozed and over 60,000 people moved out to the Cape Flats; and the poem's publication in 1994, the year apartheid ended.
Compares well with: London (anger at injustice in a city), Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan (identity and belonging), Where the Picnic was (returning to a changed place) and Absence (a place where nothing has changed but the speaker has).
