AFRICAN POETRY Discuss the use of symbolism in Okara's Piano and Drums?

Answer Details

Gabriel Okara's Piano and Drums is built almost entirely on symbolism. The two musical instruments of the title stand for two ways of life between which the African persona is torn.

The drums as symbol

• The drums, heard at daybreak, symbolise Africa's traditional, indigenous heritage. They are described as jungle drums telegraphing the mystic rhythm of the persona's roots.
• They call up images of the primal, the simple and the natural: hunters, leopards, spears, and a mother-lamb world of clear, direct instinct. The drums stand for a life that is raw, urgent and spontaneous.
• Their beat makes the persona's blood ripple and take flight, showing how deeply the ancestral call is felt in the body.

The piano as symbol

• The piano symbolises Western civilisation, culture and refinement. It is complex, learned and, in the poem, a little cold.
• Its music is described as coming in concerto, wailing and misty, full of far-away lands and new horizons. This suggests sophistication but also confusion and distance from the persona's roots.
• Where the drums are direct, the piano is winding and intricate, symbolising a modern life of subtlety, technology and complication.

Symbolism of the persona's position

• Standing between the two sounds, the persona symbolises the modern African caught between tradition and Western culture.
• The daybreak setting symbolises a moment of choice and awakening, while the closing image of being lost in the morning mist of an age at a riverside keep symbolises the persona's confusion and inability to belong wholly to either world.

Conclusion

Through the controlling symbols of the primitive drums and the sophisticated piano, Okara dramatises the cultural conflict of colonialism, leaving the persona, and the reader, aware that the modern African is suspended uneasily between two heritages.