John Carlo G. Lucido                            Afro-Asian Lit.

BSED-2N

An Essay on Vultures by Chinua Achebe

                  Chinua Achebe, the black poet, has written a lot of novels and poems that changed the view of the world of a lot of people who as read it. One of it was his ground breaking novel Things Fall Apart, which went on to sell more than 12 million copies. But there is one of him that stricken me the most was his poem Vultures. The poem was about the struggling nature of good and evil. And as a person, I believe that what the poem is telling or showing us is true. And it also shows us more than that. It is about the good and evil living side by side inside of every person. Why does the world see one person as either good or bad? Such as the German Commandant in the poem who gassed and kill a lot of people every day in the concentration camps and then stopped at a store to buy a chocolate for his child on the way home. And this poem shows that good and bad resides on every person, and that they can surprise you. That even if the most cruel or evil, shall I say, person on earth still have something good in them. Even if it’s a little. Funny as it is, I myself do bad things, but not that bad, just the naughty ones. And I can say that even you, or anyone of us has done a naughty thing in their lives, one way or another.

                 Even if the most cruel person who ever lives, or lived has o “glow worm” or goodness inside them. And it is clearly shown in this poem. Just like the vultures that achebe used to explore his thought of ideas of war and was introduced and described as disgusting and repellent, still they appear to love and care for each other. And as we people, we should believe that goodness and love will always overcome the evil inside of us.