Background to the poem
The poem is informed by the war in Uganda and the vicious brutality inflicted on its people by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Markham uses a powerful metaphor in describing how the little vulnerable kitten is torn apart by wild dogs. At one point he compares the savagery of the dogs explicitly to ‘a Lord’s Resistance Army’. The claws and barking of the wild dogs mirror the weapons of death carried by the soldiers – machetes, spears and rifles.
The use of the kitten inevitably invites comparison with children. A feature of the way the Lord’s Resistance Army operates is that they target children, with thousands abducted, tortured and used as child soldiers.
Notice how Markham talks of the yard where the kitten died as being ‘unfenced’. Are there echoes here of the defencelessness of a people who are being terrorized by the rebel army? What is the impact of Markham’s use of repetition with the line ‘This is where the kitten died’?
Consider the effect of the haunting last line, significantly separated from the rest of the poem:‘Where the dogs still lie in wait.’
About E.A. Markham
E.A. Markham was born in the West Indies and came to England in 1956. He was a lecturer at Kilburn Polytechnic and then founded the Caribbean Theatre Workshop, which toured in the West Indies in the early 1970s.
Markham is best remembered for his witty, sagacious, playful poetry, found in over twenty collections, and his ability to inhabit different personae. He prefaced one collection of poetry with an autobiographical note entitled ‘Many Voices. Many Lives’, which neatly sums up his life and work.
He edited two major anthologies of Caribbean writing and also wrote highly regarded short stories. He held creative‑writing fellowships at various universities and was made Professor Emeritus at Sheffield Hallam in 2005.
Markham always travelled extensively and worked for periods in Germany and Papua New Guinea. He lived for most of his life in England although he moved to Paris three years before his death in 2008.
Read more about E.A. Markham in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
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