Collected Poems of Gabriel Okara

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       from the Introduction by Brenda Marie Osbey:

“.... Ijaw cosmology holds that prior to physical birth, human beings dwell for a time among water spirits. After departing that watery generative and dormative realm, and throughout earthly life, the people carry out specific rites, prayers, and public observances including dance, song, masque dramas, and processions in order to insure that their earthly community remains in harmony with the host spirits among whom they first lived. Religion and cultural tradition thus emphasize the necessity not only of maintaining balance between human and natural environments, but of active recognition and vigilance, contribution to and protection of the life-giving Delta. Traditionally then, water, and rivers in particular, hold an appropriately sacred place in Ijaw identity and sensibilities.... With publication of this first poem, [“The Call of the River Nun,” 1953], Gabriel Okara would establish his literary identity firmly within the landscape and waterscape of the Delta. His body of work, in poetry and prose, is replete with riverine imagery and an abiding consciousness of union with the natural environment. Among the most anthologized works by any Nigerian poet, it has generally been interpreted as a poem of nostalgia, .... In the half-century since its publication, it has nevertheless become touchstone, prayer, protest, and lyric anthem for the restoration and protection of the unified natural and human habitat of the Niger Delta.

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.... it is a nostalgia not only of “the ghost of a child / listening,” but of the mature speaker anticipating that future when he will “watch / my mirrored self unfold.” The river would thus appear to function as literal, figurative, and projected reflector of human memory and desire. The speaker and the river, however, are far more intimately related. To read the river as mere setting or even place to which the speaker returns is to miss the most basic expression of this poem in which river and speaker call out and address one another in their shared, native riverine language, a language unique within the surrounding and related terrain.

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The poem opens with the speaker’s impassioned reply: “I hear your call! / I hear it far away; / I hear it break the circle / of these crouching hills.” Each stanza is a more urgent reply, until the fourth and longest, when the speaker exclaims plainly, “[m]y river’s calling too!” The language of the poem – the English language in which the poet composes – is thus a translation of the mother tongue of river and man, who are not only interdependent, but are, in fact, kin.

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Composed in 1950, “The Call of the River Nun” garnered the silver cup in poetry at the 1953 Nigerian Festival of the Arts at Lagos, and was published in the 1957 inaugural issue of Black Orpheus, the first English language journal of African literature. Indeed, it is with publication of Gabriel Okara’s first poem that Nigerian literature in English, and modern African poetry in this language can be said truly to have begun.

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