The Unfulfilled Dreams in Marrakech In the essay “Marrakech,” George Orwell paints a picture of a city stricken by poverty due to colonialism. The people are so poor that one may see them as being invisible. Orwell points out with the use of strong imagery that when these people who seem so different are in the presence of someone in a higher social class, they tend to be looked at more like stray dogs rather than human beings. At some point in time I’m sure many of these people had a dream, though. Unfortunately when a dream is put off due to the need of a job or something one must have to survive, it just sits there. Langston Hughes describes this in the poem “Harlem [2]”. “Marrakech” and “Harlem [2]” are directly related because “Marrakech” could be the outcome of what would happen if a dream was to be deferred. The essay “Marrakech” opens by describing a funeral in which a corpse is being taken to a shallow burial site and followed by a group flies. There is no real procession when it comes to death in Marrakech; it is merely a part of each day. The city is taken over by sickness as disease spreads like wildfire. The lives of these people are taken with a grain of salt. This sad truth was the reason that Orwell wrote “Marrakech” in the first place. He was trying to open people’s eyes to see that the natives of Marrakech, Morocco were human beings, too. When one of a higher social class saw these people who were living in such terrible conditions, it was not thought that the inhabitants of Marrakech could have had dreams at one point. The question is to where that dream goes once it is put off. “Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?” (lines 2-3) These
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lines relate to the file of old women, shriveled up and aged by the sun, who each carry a load of firewood down the road every day. Like their bodies, the women’s dreams have also become shriveled