This work, first published in The Fisherman’s Invocation (1978) but written much earlier, is the best-known and the most anthologized of Gabriel Okara’s poems. It is also representative of his poetry because it engages the conflict of cultures, a major concern of Okara’s poetry. It dramatizes the conflict that the African lives with who has been exposed to Western values. The poem, set in the riverine area of the Niger delta, presents the persona’s experience as a metaphor for the experience of the entire society.

The poem relates an occurrence at the center of which stands the persona, who talks about hearing familiar sounds (“jungle drums telegraphing / the mystic rhythm,”) that he immediately associates with his own culture. While still thinking about this (and “the simple paths” that he associates with those rhythms), he hears another sound, produced by the piano, which (“speaking of complex ways”) strikes him as strange.

He then goes on to reflect (“in the morning mist”) on the significance of each of the two for him. He is left “lost,” “wandering,” and confused as to whether he should relate more to the drumming he first heard or to the piano, which came much later.

The poem dramatizes the conflict of Westernized Africans: whether to identify with African values of “green leaves and wild flowers” or with the Western values as a result of their education (“new horizons with / coaxing diminuendo, counterpoint”). There is also a sense in which the experience of the persona can be taken as representing the situation of African peoples in general: colonialism introduced a new way of life that has made the African identity a hybrid consciousness.

Piano and Drums harmonizes theme and technique. The poem relies basically on symbols in realizing its theme. Drums represent African ways and traditions that the persona inherited, while the piano symbolizes foreign cultural practices and assumptions that the colonial encounter has bestowed on Africa. The poem suggests that the attempt at reconciling these conflicting cultural orientations normally leaves the persona perplexed.

The word choice reinforces the thematic interest of the poem. For instance, the “jungle drums” produce a “mystic rhythm,” while the piano produces a “tear-furrowed concerto.” That such musical terms as diminuendo, counterpoint, and crescendo are applied to Western culture suggests that its “complex ways” are out of the ordinary and mystifying to the African.

It is also significant that the third stanza, where the persona shifts his focus to the encounter with the West, starts with Then. The abrupt transition that this word introduces seems to suggest that the African experience can be divided into two periods, with the intrusion of the West being a major event having enduring cultural and historical consequences.

Categories: Literature, World Literature

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