A Passage to Africa

• I saw a thousand hungry, lean, scared and betrayed faces - emotive language
• hungry, lean, scared and betrayed - listing: adjectives
• but there is one I will never forget - emphasis on trauma: intriguing
• I was in a little hamlet just outside Gufgaduud - scenic stereotype setting
• In my notebook I had jotted down instructions on how to get there - remote city
• like a ghost village - simile & metaphor
• In the ghoulish manner - metaphor
• hunt for the most striking pictures - unempathetic
• no longer impressed us much - apathy
• is like the craving for a drug - simile
• Pictures that stun the editors one day are written off as the same old stuff the next - unempathetic
• This sounds callous - short sentence
• comfort - contrast
• wild, edible - evokes emotion: pathos
• two young girls lying on the dirt floor of their hut - emotive
• Habiba had died - emotive short sentence
• No rage, no whimpering - anaphora
• No rage, no whimpering, just a passing away - common
• simple, frictionless, motionless - rule of 3: triplets
• the smell of decaying flesh - imagery
• V-shape of a boomerang - imagery
• It was rotting; she was rotting - parallel sentence structure
• And there was the face I will never forget - 1 sentence paragraph for emphasis & importance
• My reaction to everyone else I met that day was a mixture of pity and revulsion - oxymoron
• Yes, revulsion - short sentence: agreement
• degeneration of the human body, sucked of its natural vitality bythe twin evils of hunger and disease - emotive language
• We never say so in our TV reports - short sentence: brutal honesty
• surreptitiously to wipe your hands on the back of your trousers after you’ve held the clammy palm of a mother who has just cleaned vomit from her child’s mouth - unsympathetic
• utter despair, dignity - juxtaposition
• Or the old and dying man who keeps his hoe next to the mat with which, one day soon, they will shroud his corpse, as if he means to go out and till the soil once all this is over - pity
• I saw that face - importance
• a fleeting meeting - reflects lifespan
• how could it be? - rhetorical question: disjointed sentence
• What was it about that smile? - rhetorical question: disjointed sentence
• I had to find out - short sentence: clarity
• He came back with an answer - short sentence: clarity
• And then it clicked - short sentence: clarity
• The journalist observes, the subject is observed. The journalist is active, the subject is passive - reflection
• cut to the heart - hyperbole
• between me and him, between us and them, between the richworld and the poor world - reflection