Gabriel Okara (Selected Poems from Collected Poems (2016)) [2027]

Okara presents the meeting of African and European worlds in 'Piano and Drums' and 'Were I to Choose' not as a contrast to be resolved but as a duality the speaker cannot — and will not — finally choose between. In both poems the form is the argument: 'Piano and Drums' through its antiphonal stanza-architecture, 'Were I to Choose' through its conditional refusal. Read together, they support a hybridity reading of Okara that also requires the postcolonial reading to live inside it.

'Piano and Drums' enacts the meeting as a confrontation of two musics. Okara gives the jungle drum its own movement — primal, bodily, hunting-paced, addressed to the senses before the mind — and then gives the piano its own movement: intricate, Western-classical, ending in the elaboration of a 'concerto'. The two stanzas do not merge. The antiphonal form, drawn from the call-and-response of African oral tradition, is itself a method imported into English: Okara writes the cultural meeting in the SHAPE of an African musical structure. The poem's lyric 'I' stands between the two musics and ends not resolved but lost — and Okara is careful not to convert that lostness into a moral. The duality is felt, not adjudicated.

'Were I to Choose' performs the same refusal at the level of grammar. The conditional title is the poem: the very framing announces that the choice the question seems to demand is impossible. Okara's weighted simplicity — short cadences, plain diction, none of the European literary ornament a poem on 'cultural identity' might be expected to import — is itself the postcolonial method. The plain English is not naive; it is a refusal to import the very inheritance the poem is interrogating. Where 'Piano and Drums' refuses synthesis structurally, 'Were I to Choose' refuses it grammatically.

The two poems in conversation support the hybridity reading: Okara dramatises the cultural meeting as the speaker's permanent condition, not as a problem to be solved. But the hybridity reading needs the postcolonial reading to complete it. The piano in 'Piano and Drums' is not just one music among two — it is the music of empire, of the European concert-hall that the colonised speaker has been taught to admire; the impossible choice of 'Were I to Choose' is impossible because the inheritance is asymmetric. To read the poems as a comfortable in-between is to underplay the political weight.

I would therefore argue that Okara presents the meeting of the two worlds as a doubled inheritance the speaker accepts as his condition — and that the form of both poems is what allows the hybridity reading and the postcolonial reading to be true at once. The price of this position is moral cleanness: it does not deliver the consolation of a chosen identity. But the poems do not deliver that consolation either. That refusal is what makes them characteristic Okara.

'Once Upon a Time' is one of Okara's most accessible poems and one of his most controlled. In a single short address, a father confesses to his son that he has learned to wear the masks of 'civilisation', and asks the son to RE-teach him an earlier sincerity. The method — the fairy-tale opening that is already elegy, the apostrophe to the son, the weighted simplicity of the diction, the reversal at the close — does the poem's work. The poem is the textbook Okara statement of the colonial encounter as something LEARNED, internalised and now passed down a generation.

Okara's first method is the framing of time. 'Once upon a time, son, / they used to laugh with their hearts' opens the poem with the formula of children's stories — but the past tense of 'USED to' is already an elegy. Before the second line ends, the poem has placed sincere laughter in a past that no longer exists. The fairy-tale opening, conventionally a promise of wonder, is converted into the form of a lament. The genre of the address — a father teaching a son — is also reversed: the older speaker has nothing to teach but loss.

The apostrophe is the second method. Okara's lyric 'I' speaks not to the reader but to the son, and that direction matters: the poem is an inheritance being handed across generations, in the same way that the masks themselves have been handed across. The intimacy of the address — 'son' — is also the form of the problem. The father will pass something to the son no matter what; the question is whether what is passed is the mask or the recognition that the mask is unwearable.

The controlling image is the mask: the laughs that 'no longer' reach the eyes, the handshakes without warmth, the welcomes without welcome. Okara is precise. He does not say the speaker has become inauthentic; he says he has LEARNED to be — that is the colonial encounter dramatised in the most domestic of registers. The mask is not a metaphor for colonial violence; it is the colonial encounter's residue, worn at home, in the family, in the smile.

The reversal at the close is the third method and the poem's argument. The father asks the son to teach him how to be sincere again. The traditional direction of transmission — older to younger — is inverted, and the poem becomes a confession that the only hope of un-learning lies with the generation that has not yet been taught. Okara's diction here is at its weighted-simplest: plain English, no European literary ornament, the postcolonial method by refusal.

In the selection, 'Once Upon a Time' is the central poem of the colonial-encounter cluster. Read against 'You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed' — the speaker mocked by the European listener — it completes the argument from the other side: the African speaker who has internalised the laughter and now wears it himself. Where 'You Laughed' presents the encounter as humiliation from without, 'Once Upon a Time' presents it as the mask learned within. The two poems argue the encounter from both directions, and 'Once Upon a Time' is the more devastating because the violence is now domestic.

The proposition is largely right, but it is one term of a richer truth. Okara's poetry neither mourns the meeting nor celebrates it; it presents the meeting as an inheritance whose tone refuses both consolation and refusal. To argue that the poems 'mourn' is to honour the elegy that runs through 'Once Upon a Time' and 'You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed'; to argue that they 'celebrate' is to honour the structural insistence of 'Piano and Drums' that the two musics belong in one poem. The strongest reading is that Okara's poetry HOLDS the meeting rather than judging it — and that the form, in poem after poem, is what makes that holding possible.

The elegiac case is real. 'Once Upon a Time' opens in the past tense of fairy tale and uses the rest of its lines to grieve a sincere laughter the speaker no longer has. The masks of 'civilisation' are not abstract: they are domestic, worn at home, taught by the father to himself. The poem's closing reversal — the father asking the son to teach him how to be sincere again — turns the lyric into a confession of loss. Read with 'You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed', which dramatises the African voice mocked by a European-figure listener whose refrain enacts both humiliation and relentlessness, the cluster of colonial-encounter poems carries an unmistakable note of mourning.

But 'Piano and Drums' will not let mourning be the whole story. Okara gives the jungle drum its own stanza — bodily, primal, hunting-paced — and the piano its own stanza — intricate, classical, ending in a 'concerto'-like elaboration. The form does not pick a side. The speaker stands between the two musics and ends not 'mourning' the meeting but unresolved within it. The poem refuses to convert the duality into elegy or into synthesis. Hybridity, for the speaker, is the condition of the lyric 'I'; the form is the politics. To call this mourning is to import a verdict the poem withholds.

A third poem, 'The Call of the River Nun', complicates the proposition from a different direction. The river of the Niger Delta calls the speaker back to his Ijaw origin; the poem is private, sensory and rooted. There is no European music in it. The selection contains poems whose subject is not the meeting at all but the home from which the speaker writes — and any reading that says the poetry mourns the meeting must explain what to do with the poems that simply ARE the home.

A purely mourning reading of Okara is therefore too one-key. The hybridity reading honours the structural refusal of 'Piano and Drums'; the postcolonial reading honours the elegy of 'Once Upon a Time'; the formal/translational reading shows how Okara's English is shaped to carry African resonance — which is itself a kind of structural celebration, an insistence that the meeting can be HELD in one prosody. The poems do not present a single position on the meeting.

I would therefore agree that mourning is one of Okara's tones — perhaps his most poignant — but argue that the deepest movement of the selection is to refuse a verdict on the meeting at all. The poems hold it: in elegy where elegy is true, in antiphonal architecture where neither side will yield, in homecoming where the meeting has not happened or no longer applies. The price of this reading is the satisfaction either side of the question promises: neither mourning nor celebration. But the poems do not deliver those satisfactions either. That refusal is what makes the Collected Poems a Collected and not a single argument.

'You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed' is Okara's most direct dramatisation of cultural mistranslation — the moment when an African speaker offers his voice and is met with a European laughter that cannot, or will not, hear it. The poem's central method is the title-as-refrain: the threefold 'laughed' of the title is the structural device that makes the whole poem. The repetition enacts both the relentlessness of the colonial laughter and the humiliation of the speaker who keeps speaking. The poem is the textbook anti-romance of the cultural encounter — and one of the strongest texts in the selection for a postcolonial reading.

Okara's first method is the framing of the encounter as an OFFERING refused. The African speaker gives his song, his voice, his world — and the European listener gives back laughter. The asymmetry is the subject: the encounter is not a meeting but a one-way humiliation in which the colonised speaker is heard, but not understood, because the listener has no category in which the speaker's voice could be serious. The poem does not let the reader experience this as a problem to be solved; it lets us hear the laughter return.

The threefold structure of the title is the second method. 'Laughed' three times is hyper-emphatic: once is contempt, twice is contempt insisted on, three times is contempt as relentless refrain. The repetition is the form of the encounter. When the title returns as a refrain inside the poem, the device does what the colonial encounter does — keep coming back, regardless of what the speaker says. Refrain in Okara is rarely decorative; here it is the structure of a humiliation.

The third method is the speaker's position. Okara's lyric 'I' does not collapse. The poem does not end with the speaker silenced; it ends with the speaker asserting his world against the laughter, his dignity in the face of misrecognition. This is what saves the poem from straight victimhood: the speaker is mocked, but the poem does not adopt the mocker's judgement. The reader is positioned with the speaker, not with the laughter — and Okara's plain, unornamented English is the weighted method that holds the speaker's position.

The poem's place in the selection is decisive. Where 'Once Upon a Time' presents the colonial encounter as internalised — the speaker has LEARNED the masks of 'civilisation' and now wears them himself — 'You Laughed' presents the encounter from outside, as the listener's refusal to hear. The two poems are the two faces of the cluster: the laughter that won't listen and the African voice that has begun to laugh with it. Read together they make Okara's account of the encounter complete.

In AO5 terms, the poem is the strongest single textual case for a postcolonial reading of Okara — the encounter as asymmetric, as humiliation, as the relentless return of misrecognition. The hybridity reading is harder to anchor here: the speaker is not in a comfortable in-between but on the wrong end of an asymmetry. A reading that holds hybridity AND postcolonial asymmetry together must honour 'You Laughed' on its own terms — and the poem is part of why hybridity, in Okara, can never be a smooth abstraction.

The proposition is sharper than it sounds, and I will defend it with one important refinement. Okara's poetry does make form the site of its postcolonial argument — but the argument the form makes is not a single thesis. It is the holding together of hybridity AND asymmetry, of the home AND the encounter, in a single English that has been deliberately shaped to carry African resonance without importing European literary ornament. I will read 'Piano and Drums', 'Once Upon a Time' and 'The Call of the River Nun' as three moments of that argument, and end by weighing what the formal reading captures and what it loses.

'Piano and Drums' is the obvious case. Okara gives the jungle drum its own stanza — primal, bodily, hunting-paced, addressed to the senses before the mind — and gives the piano its own stanza — intricate, Western-classical, ending in 'concerto'-like elaboration. The two stanzas do not merge. The form is the colonial encounter inscribed: the African and the European in one poem but refusing synthesis. Beneath this antiphonal architecture is something subtler: the call-and-response structure of the poem is drawn from African oral tradition. Okara is not contrasting Africa and Europe in a European form; he is writing the encounter in the shape of an African one. That is the formal/translational reading at its strongest: the form IS the postcolonial argument, because it imports an African structural inheritance into the written English lyric.

'Once Upon a Time' makes a different formal argument. The poem's diction is the work: weighted simplicity, plain cadences, no metaphors imported from a European poetic tradition that would falsify the domestic intimacy of the address. When the father says 'they used to laugh with their hearts', the past tense and the bodily simplicity of 'with their hearts' do everything; an English lyric of the European nineteenth century would have ornamented this with abstraction or simile. Okara refuses the ornament. The refusal is the postcolonial method: an English shaped, line by line, to carry the African register without the colonised idiom. Form here is not stanza-architecture but a deliberate diction.

'The Call of the River Nun' is the case that pressure-tests the proposition. The poem is a private lyric about the river of the Ijaw delta calling the speaker home. There is no European music in it; no colonial encounter is explicit. If the proposition is right, the formal argument must be visible here too — and it is, in the apostrophic address to the river. Okara speaks TO the Nun, importing the spoken, the ritual, the African-oral into the written lyric. The form makes the river not background but interlocutor. Even without the colonial encounter as subject, the poem's form positions an African worldview at the centre of the lyric — which is the postcolonial argument at its most positive.

Against this formal reading, a biographical reader could insist that Okara's politics are explicit elsewhere — in his Biafran-War poems and in his alignment with Biafra during the civil war — and that to read 'form is the argument' is to miss the political clarity of the man behind the poems. There is force in this. Okara was a literary partisan; reading him as a pure formalist underplays the survivor's voice.

But the formal reading is not formalism. It is the claim that Okara's English is itself the site of his postcolonial work — a claim consistent with his prose experiment in The Voice (1964), where he wrote English in Ijaw syntax. The biographical reading is the politics of the poet; the formal reading is the politics of the page. They are not alternatives; the page is where the politics arrives at the reader.

My judgement, then, is to defend the proposition with the refinement that the form is the argument BECAUSE the form is the holding-together of hybridity AND asymmetry AND home. 'Piano and Drums' holds the encounter; 'Once Upon a Time' holds the inheritance; 'River Nun' holds the home that exists alongside both. The English that does all three is, line by line, the postcolonial achievement. The price of this reading is the satisfaction of a single political verdict: Okara's poetry will not give one. But the form is what allows it to refuse, and that refusal is itself the deepest postcolonial argument.

'The Snowflakes Sail Gently Down' is the diaspora poem of Okara's selection — the moment when the African speaker, who in 'Piano and Drums' and 'Were I to Choose' stood between the two musics at home, is now physically in the European landscape, with the foreign falling on him. The poem's genius is that it stages displacement not as drama but as the quietest sensory register, and the methods — the apostrophic image, the gentleness of the verb, the held inner landscape — make the displacement felt before it is interpreted. The poem offers a reader at least three plausible readings, and the form is what allows all three to be true at once.

Okara's first method is the image and its verb. The snowflakes 'sail gently down' — and 'sail' is the chosen word, not 'fall' or 'drift'. 'Sail' gives the snow agency, motion, almost grace; 'gently' makes it not assaultive but continuous. Okara is precise about NOT making the foreign landscape hostile. The snow is given softness — which is more devastating than hostility would be, because the speaker cannot resent something that means him no harm. The displacement is in the speaker, not in the snow.

The second method is the held inner landscape. The speaker's inwardness in the poem is tropical, African, of the Ijaw rivers and the warmth of home. Okara does not say this in argument; he lets it be the texture of the speaker's perception — the snow is encountered by an interior that already has a different climate. The poem's lyric 'I' is the form of the diaspora: an interior whose categories are African, in a landscape whose weather is not. The displacement registers as a quiet mismatch of sensorium.

The third method is the refusal of complaint. The poem does not lament; the snow is registered with attention, even tenderness. Okara's weighted simplicity is at work here: there is no European literary ornamentation of homesickness, no demand that the reader weep, no opposition between 'good Africa' and 'bad Europe'. The poem holds the diaspora as a sensory condition, not a moral verdict. This is the formal/translational reading at its quietest — the diction is the diaspora.

The interpretive choices the poem offers are real. A postcolonial reading takes the snowflakes as the European literary inheritance falling on an African speaker who has been carried abroad by colonial geography; the gentleness of the snow is the seductive form of the empire's afterlife. A hybridity reading takes the poem as the diaspora condition the lyric 'I' has now arrived at — neither rejected nor embraced, simply lived. A biographical reading would place the poem in Okara's specific encounters with the European world. All three responses are anchored in the same image and the same verb.

The poem's significance to the selection is twofold. First, it locates the cultural encounter geographically: the speaker who in 'Piano and Drums' heard both musics at home now stands physically in the European landscape and hears the foreign as weather. The encounter has moved from idea to climate. Second, the poem refuses the consolation of either rejection or assimilation; it presents diaspora as inhabited rather than judged, which extends Okara's signature refusal of synthesis (visible in 'Piano and Drums') to the geographical scale.

My judgement is that the poem is best read with the hybridity reading in dialogue with the postcolonial one. The snow is gentle, and the speaker is displaced; both are true, and the form holds them together. 'The Snowflakes Sail Gently Down' is the poem in which Okara's refusal of moral verdict is at its most demanding — there is no obvious villain — and the deepest method is the sensory plainness that lets the diaspora be a weather, not an argument.