AFRICAN POETRY Discuss the clash of cultures in Okara's "Piano and Drum".

Answer Details

Gabriel Okara's Piano and Drums dramatises the clash of cultures between traditional Africa and the modern, Western world. Using the contrasting music of the drums and the piano, the poet explores the tension felt by an African caught between two ways of life.

The drums as symbol of African tradition. The poem opens with the persona hearing the beat of the jungle drums at daybreak. The drums represent primitive, natural, communal African life, simple, direct and full of raw vitality. Their sound is described as "telegraphing" urgent, primal messages, and it awakens in the persona memories of an unspoilt past, of "green leaves and wild flowers", hunting, and the instinctive rhythm of the ancestral world. This culture is warm, familiar and rooted in nature.

The piano as symbol of Western civilisation. Against the drums Okara sets the music of the piano, symbol of Western culture. Its notes are "tear-furrowed", "complex", "wailing" and full of "labyrinths". Where the drums are simple and clear, the piano is sophisticated, refined but confusing. It represents modern civilisation with its complexity, its technology, its learning and its bewildering intricacy.

The persona caught between two worlds. The heart of the poem lies in the persona's response. Drawn on the one hand to the innocent vitality of the drums and on the other to the complex allure of the piano, he is left confused, "lost in the morning mist of an age at a riverside". He can belong wholly to neither. This confusion captures the predicament of the modern African, educated in Western ways yet shaped by African roots, unable to reconcile the two.

Technique and effect. Okara conveys the clash through vivid contrasting imagery, sound and diction: the earthy, active language of the drums against the intricate, melancholy language of the piano. The very structure of the poem, moving from one music to the other and ending in bewilderment, enacts the cultural conflict it describes.

Significance. The poem does not simply reject one culture for the other; it honestly presents the pain of divided identity that colonialism and modernity have imposed on Africans. The clash of cultures is thus both a personal and a collective African experience.

In conclusion, through the opposing symbols of drums and piano, Okara powerfully renders the clash of cultures, leaving the African persona suspended and confused between the natural simplicity of his heritage and the complex civilisation of the West.