At Lime Street itself, not even a drunk staggers
Out perhaps announcing his newly acquired
Cornerstones. Only recorded voices bid you
Come again before the engulfing impenetrable
Crowds. But the maddening quiet soon recedes
Locating a bright tarnished face once known. (34)Thus values of technology in their most sophisticated stage may be desirable, they are
nonetheless not without their deficits which principally authorize an aura of artificiality
and “walling” between social interactions and deplete humanity at the same time.
Reminiscent of Senghor’s “New York”,^45 this poem raises questions about the limits of
technology with respect to what happens when its operations override the values of
human interaction. The otherness that modernity creates through technology between the
colonizer and the colonized is thus reversed through a re-inscription that holds up the
fault lines of mutual human estrangement. The “maddening quiet” that results from the
transportation arrangement thus fails in a way to assure social interaction, a natural and
defining attribute of humanity which ordinarily should be taken for granted. The imagery
of a space in which “men obviously build more paper/ Walls against other men” goes to
the very root of the earliest signification of industrial revolution which promoted
individualism and deemphasised communalism. If this then was considered a giant stride
for humanity, the subsequent uses for which modernity deploys technology in the West
betrays an overkill of its practice. Such experience renders suspect modernity’s apologia
and affirmation that it “promised to liberate humanity from irrationality... and the ‘dark
side of human nature’” (Alfred Zack-Williams 2004: 22). Where technology-based
liberation turns out to be an estrangement of man from man, then such liberation can as
well be gleaned as counter-productive as it is nothing but an unwitting captivity of
humanity to the thraldom of machinery. Its rationality is no less suspicious. Relying on a
consistent deployment of figures of contrast, Mapanje in this poem illustrates with
imagistic conjuring of the antimonies of cold individualism and the excited but
interactive values of communal existence, leaving the reader in the end to locate where he
stands, especially in a context where the appreciation and social practices of modernity
are taken too far. That is, by contrasting interactive activities of home and the cold,
exclusionary structures of communication in London metropolis, Mapanje exploits the
45
See John Reed and Clive Wake 1965.