AFRICAN POETRY What does Clark find fascinating about the dancer in "Agbor Dancer?"

Answer Details

In "Agbor Dancer," J. P. Clark expresses his fascination with a young female dancer whose graceful, instinctive performance embodies a wholeness and rootedness in tradition that the poet-observer feels he has lost. His admiration is tinged with longing and even envy.

• Her natural, effortless grace. The dancer moves in perfect harmony with the drums, "seeming to sink and rise" with the rhythm. Her body responds instinctively to the beat, and Clark is struck by the ease and beauty of her movement. She dances "as the full-length flight of the swift," a simile suggesting free, spontaneous, soaring motion.
• Her unity with tradition and her people. The dancer is completely at one with her culture. She embodies "the past," the communal life and the ancestral rhythms of her people. Clark admires the way she is wholly absorbed into the dance and into the traditions it expresses, dancing to "the ancestral core." She belongs fully to her world in a way the poet does not.
• Her instinctive, unselfconscious devotion. The dancer performs with a kind of religious or trance-like absorption, "stretched flat" in devotion, giving herself entirely to the moment. Her spontaneity and total surrender to the rhythm captivate the poet.

What deepens the fascination is Clark's sense of his own alienation. Educated and shaped by foreign influences, he feels cut off from the instinctive cultural belonging the dancer enjoys. In the final stanza he wishes that he too could "draw the wells" of his roots and be caught up in the dance as she is, but his "mothered" heart, conditioned and constrained, cannot respond so freely. The dancer thus fascinates him partly because she possesses the rooted, whole identity he yearns for but has lost through Western education and self-consciousness.

Significance. The dancer becomes a symbol of unspoiled African tradition and of a natural, integrated way of life. Clark's fascination is therefore not merely with her physical beauty but with what she represents: cultural authenticity, spontaneity and belonging. His admiration carries an undertone of regret for the divided, self-conscious modern self that cannot recover such wholeness.

Conclusion. Clark finds the Agbor dancer fascinating for her effortless grace, her complete unity with the rhythm and traditions of her people, and her instinctive, whole-hearted devotion to the dance. Above all she embodies a rooted cultural identity that the alienated, Western-educated poet longs to share but feels he can no longer attain.