English Language And Literature

1. Presented by Hinaba
Sarvaiya
Post-colonialism in Gabriel
Okara’s poem Piano and
Drums

2. ● Paper 206: The African Literature
● Roll Number: 09
● Enrollment Number: 4069206420210032
● Submitted: Department of English MKBU
● Email I’d: hinabasarvaiya1711@gmail.com

3. About Poet
● Gabriel Okara, in full name is a Gabriel Imomotimi
Gbaingbain Okara.
● Born April 21, 1921, Bumodi, Nigeria—died March 25,
2019, Yenagoa, Nigeria.
● Nigerian poet and novelist whose verse had been
translated into several languages by the early 1960s.
● In 1953 his poem “The Call of the River Nun” won an
award at the Nigerian Festival of Arts.
● Some of his poems were published in the influential
periodical Black Orpheus, and by 1960 he was
recognized as an accomplished literary craftsman.

4. ● He was called as the ―Nigerian Negritudist. He is known for his celebrated poems ‘The
Fisherman‘s Invocation‘, ‘Once Upon a Time‘, ‘You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed‘ and
‘Piano and Drums‘.
● Most of his manuscripts were lost during the Nigerian Civil War.
● Okara thinks that when traditional African culture faces the European culture then it reshapes
and alters the post-colonial African man.
● This hybridity of the two different and opposing cultures confuse the black identity and make it
spurious. He wrote about cultural hybridity and loss of identity.

5. Post-colonialism
● Postcolonialism, the historical period or state of affairs representing the aftermath of
Western colonialism; the term can also be used to describe the concurrent project to
reclaim and rethink the history and agency of people subordinated under various forms of
imperialism.
● It shows the effect on the native people who have been subordinated by the colonial rules
in different parts of the world resulting in one of the biggest chapters of the history of
mankind.
● The postcolonial African literature deals with traditions, rootlessness,liberation, racism,
displacement, culture and colonialism.
● As a result of colonialism in Africa, the country witnessed a radical transformation and
maladjustment in the society.

6. Post-colonialism in Gabriel Okara’s
poem Piano and Drums
● In the poem ‘Piano and Drums‘, the poetic person depicts and portrays the contrast
between the traditional lifestyle of Africans and the modern world. He shows the purity of
African culture that is interfered by the colonizers and European civilization. He laments it
through the instruments in poetry. He thinks that the sound of drums creates quickness of
action and agility. He symbolizes the drum to the life of traditional Africans and piano to
the European civilization.
● “When at break of day at a riversideI hear jungle drums telegraphing the mystic rhythm,
urgent, raw like bleeding flesh, speaking of primal youth ”
● Here, the poet has used the heavy beat of the drum to show his ‘primal youth‘. The
memory of his native land is full of action as shown by the words such as ‘snarling‘,
‘pounce‘ and ‘bleeding‘. The word ‘telegraphing‘ represents that the poet is no longer part
of the beating of the drum.

7. ● “at once I’m walking simple path with no innovations,rugged, fashioned with the naked
warmth of hurrying feet and groping hearts in green leaves and wild flowers pulsing.”
● The glorification of childhood runs throughout the above lines. However, the path the
poet shows us right now was simple and without any innovation but definitely it was the
moment of maxim blissful state, the absence of reason and only the presence of
blessed season.
● The scene then develops from the lap of mother to the process of learning how to walk
which in fact metaphorically means how to stand on our own feet in the life to come. He
then wonderfully expresses how the baby captures the images of green leaves and
wild flowers through his innocent eyes and stores in his immature yet developing brain.
● “Lost in the labyrinth of its complexities, it ends in the middle of a phrase at a
daggerpoint”
● This piano symbolizes the west and their culture and ways. This piano has a soothing
music for Europeans but for him it is distasteful. The word ‘daggers point‘ intensifies
the fear of the gradual loss of the indigenous culture after the influence of colonizers.

8. ● Mikhail Bakhtin states , “ The… hybrid is not only double-voiced and double-accented…
but is also double-languaged; for in it there are not only (and not even so much) two
individual consciousness, two voices, two accents, as there are socio-linguistic,
consciousness, two epochs… that come together and consciously fight it out on the
territory of the utterance…
● “And I lost in the morning mist of an age at a riverside keep wandering in the mystic
rhythm of jungle drums and concerto”
● At the end of the poem our poet is lost, wandering aimlessly as the music of the two
instruments meld around him, so mingles the two cultures. The poem ends without the
end of the dilemmatic condition of the poet’s mind.
● Thus, in the poem Piano and Drums we can vividly visualize the cultural dichotomy
between the primitive Culture and the European Culture beautifully symbolized by the
two musical instrument the piano and the drums.

9. Work Citation
● Amir, Fatima. “A Postcolonial Critique of Gabriel Okara‟s Once Upon a Time, You Laughed and
Laughed and Laughed and Piano and Drums.” Vol. 1, no. 2, May 2021, pp. 87–98.,
https://doi.org/https://literaryhorizon.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/A-Postcolonial-Critique-of-
Gabriel-Okaras-Once-Upon-a-Time-You-Laughed-and-Laughed-and-Laughed-and.pdf.
● Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Gabriel Okara". Encyclopedia Britannica, 17 Apr.
2022, Sha https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gabriel-Okara. Accessed 9 March 2023.
● Gupta, Prayash. “Cultural Dichotomy in Okara’s Piano and Drums.” Edited by Dr. Siddhartha
Sharma, vol. 2, no. 1, June 2016, pp. 305–
313.,https://doi.org/http://tlhjournal.com/uploads/products/31.prayash-gupta-article.pdf.
● Ivison, Duncan. "postcolonialism". Encyclopedia Britannica, 13 Nov. 2022,
https://www.britannica.com/topic/postcolonialism. Accessed 9 March 2023.
● Mikhail Bakhtin, Discourse in the novel, in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination,
trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, Austip,1981, p 360

10. Thank You!