In the first two stanzas of Okara’s monologue, the speaker addresses an European colonialist that laughs at African way of life
In your ears my song
is motor car misfiring
stopping with a choking cough;
and you laughed and laughed and laughed.
In your eyes my antenatal
walk was inhuman, passing
your 'omnivorous understanding'
and you laughed and laughed and laughed.
The addresses emerges as a prisoner of the mind, trapped in a Platonic cave of his own deluded imagination. On the walls of this psychic cave, he observes vivid imaginaries that are no more than projection of the ugliness of his own post-industrial world, such as “motor car misfiring/ stopping with a choking cough.” Instead of the sound of music — the speaker’s “song” (chant, hymn, mantra) as a metaphor for all that is beautiful and true in his cultural expressions, with ears blocked , the white man laughs, because he can only hear the cacophonous rancor of broken machines of his post-industrial world. In Stanza 2, the phrases. “ante-natal walk” and 'omnivorous understanding', are deployed as vehicles for an attack on two of the major pillars of Eurocentrist racism and hegemony—social Darwinism and the exclusivist Eurocentrist claim to universality attacked in Achebe’s essay. “Colonialist Criticism.”
Stanza’s 3 and 5 are symmetrical patterns of repetition and parallelism that not only function in the monologue as refrains of the kind found in folk songs but also embody the key tropes of the lyric—song, walk, dance and inside—in their antithetical semantic relationships to the central trope of “laughter” by which they are linked in the overriding pattern of anaphoric repetition:
Stanza 3
You laughed at my song,
you laughed at my walk.
Stanza 5
You laughed at my dance,
you laughed at my inside.
It seems necessary at this stage to pause a while to take a close look at the key tropes identified above as they seem vital (and will indeed be shown to be vital) for a proper understanding of the mimesis and dioania of the monologue.
[Side Car] “Laughter” is a recurrent trope in postcolonial African writing. A code from the oral tradition for natural and meaningful human existence in the world, it is a trope that is shared in common by many other African, modernist, postcolonial poets of Okara’s generation such as Christopher Okigbo (1930- 1967), Kwesi Brew (1928-2007). Thus, in Okigbo’s Path of Thunder (1965-1967), the violent and bloody political crises arising from the betrayal of the hopes of independence in Nigeria in the early 1960’s is depicted in “Come Thunder” as “our laughter, broken in two”, the same postcolonial “broken laughter” that informs the great majority of the lyrics collected in The Shadows of Laughter, (1968) by Ghanaian poet Kwesi Brew. In An African Elegy, Ben Okri writes of the ‘strangled laughter’ caused by ‘political fevered and riggings’ (http://literature0305.bravehost.com/African.html). Further insight into the trope of “laughter” in postcolonial African writing may be gained from Doris Lessing’s (1992) memoir, African Laughter, recounting her four visits between 1982 and 1992 to the land of her birth, Zimbabwe, after a lifelong exile in South Africa and Europe. Commenting on the title, a reviewer, Robert Earle (2009) writes: The book is aptly named. Toward the end, Lessing records some whites wondering why it is that the blacks (or Affs) seem to enjoy themselves more, no matter how desperate their circumstances. Throughout these visits, however, good cheer is found everywhere among the Zimbabwean people--all, except, the whites who are "holding on," confused by the upside down world in which they find themselves, politically disenfranchised if still economically relatively prosperous. Part of the answer must lie in the benevolence of the climate and terrain in Zimbabwe, so much of which is fertile and life sustaining, but there is always the underlying truth that people who have little sometimes have less to worry about than people who have a great deal. As a modernist, postcolonial trope for natural and meaningful human existence in the world, it bespeaks of an attitude of “being in the world” that is reminiscent of Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology. Okeke-Ezigbo () has attempted a comparative study of Heidegger and Okara; but it is not necessary to engage in a systematic and comprehensive study the relation of Heidegger’s often abstruse philosopher to Okara’s mythos to apprehend the African sense of “laughter” as an expression of being in the word. Very little research has been done on human laughter as a type of mammalian lyrical vocalization rooted in the language instinct and the fundamental lyrical impulse that makes us human.
Now to the antithetical tropes (“song”, “walk”, “dance” and “inside”), for the speaker, “song,” to begin with, does not simply mean chant, mantra or such other conventional denotations of the word as hymn, tune, or musical cry. It means “lyric” in its pristine sense of vocalization that reflects the lyrical impulse or the natural human instinct—in certain situations—to utter words that are expressive of intense personal emotion.
Like its antecedent “song,” the trope, “walk,” presents itself also as a polysemous code, in this case a a code for kinetic human activity whose multiple nuances are shared across the Atlantic with many African Diaspora communities. In many African languages, such as Okara’s native Ijo and the proximate Igbo, from which the trope has been appropriated into English, folk idioms with the matrix, “walk” are generally connotative of personal mannerisms, attitudes, behavior patterns, idiosyncrasies, and above strengths and weaknesses of character and all lifestyles. For example, in the folk iconography of the proximate Igbo, the kinetic idiom, ije agu (Leopold walk) draws a circle, as described by the proverb, okirikiri but ije agu (circular is the walk of the leopard). By the same token, in the Igbo idiom, ukwu-naije (feet-and-walk), the constituent sememes—feet (ukwu) and ije (walk)—are conjoined to form an expression that sums up the totality of human experience as the walk or journey of life. This cosmographic sense of “walk” appears to have been carried over wholesale to the Black Atlantic, not only in the idea of the solo in the folk song as the “walk” in the polyphonic or call-and-answer form comprising solo lines or verses (“walk”) alternating with choruses (“shout) (See Gordon, 19xx: 445-451) but in the common parlance, “walking the walk and talking the talk” as expressions of distinctive individual lifestyles defined in terms of a communality of shared world views in which one is the other and either is both, a traditional communalism that has survived in the Black Atlantic as “soul” in which, in walking hers or her walk of life, every person is at simultananeously projecting a personal mannerism and a communal ethos of shared identities. “Dance” is also a polysemous code for kinetic human activity with multiple nuances that are shared across the Atlantic with many African Diaspora communities. Finally, in the trope, “inside,” we have one of the central rhetorical figures in Gabriel Okara’s poetic vocabulary which I have elsewhere (Azuonye, 2012) described as “connotative of the spiritual, the numinous, the magical, the supernatural, and the shamanistic” and “as a poetic code for the supersensory powers that enable the human personality to tap into hidden strengths buried in the innermost recesses of the psyche.1 As I have also posited, “In addition to any other signification carried over by the poet from his native Ijo, as is his wont, the ‘mystic inside’ can be decoded from the perspective of the theories of Swiss psychiatrist and founder of Analytical Psychology, Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), as comprising the collective unconscious—the innermost recesses of the psyche, populated by archaic or primordial images which Jung calls archetypes and which, as he posits, are shared in common by all humankind. See Azuonye (1981), for a more detailed discussion of the collective unconscious and its archetypes, with reference to the poetry of Okara’s transnational, modernist, contemporary, Christopher Okigbo (1930- 1967). This innermost level of the psyche is separated from the outermost level—the conscious mind (the seat of our everyday thoughts and emotions) —by the personal unconscious (the seat of repressed traumatic personal experiences or complexes3 which may be re-lived by the individual if and whenever memories of the original trauma that gave birth to the complex are awakened by new trauma of the same kind). In its relation to “mystic” and “inside,” the word “drum,” in Okara, generally refers to the vibes felt by an individual when there is an intense surge of subconscious promptings from any of the two levels of his “inside.” Further research is needed to ascertain the consistency of all these with the idea of “the inside” in Okara’s native Ijo language and traditional system of thought.
In these stanzas, Okara’s speaker show through his reenacts of the robotic actions of the colonialist that the prison of the mind is a powerful magic circle with an ineluctable hold on a person under its charm. Every effort, in these stanza, through artistic performances of the highest excellence, described as “magic dance,” is not sufficiently persuasive to lure the prisoner out of the cave and the shadows that had become his reality. Shutting his “eyes” (symbolically blinding himself), he turns his back to true reality and returns to his familiar cave, her symbolized by his “car”:
Then I danced my magic dance
to the rhythm of talking drums pleading, but you shut your
eyes and laughed and laughed and laughed.
And then I opened my mystic
inside wide like
the sky, instead you entered your
car and laughed and laughed and laughed.
Stanza 6
You laughed and laughed and laughed.
But your laughter was ice-block
laughter and it froze your inside froze
your voice froze your ears
froze your eyes and froze your tongue ."
In anticipation of his robust cultural nationalist defense of his indigenous African heritage in the following stanza (8), the speaker attacks the iciness and unnaturalness of the arrogant colonialist’s “laughter,” In this stanza, the speaker contrasts his own natural “laughter” with the artificiality of that of the mocking colonialist:
And now it's my turn to laugh;
but my laughter is not
ice-block laughter. For I
know not cars, know not ice-blocks.
The colonialist’s laughter is not only icy (comparable to “ice-block”) it is also, by default, comparable to mechanical products of European industrialism by dint of the litotes that recall Aime Cesaire’s disavowal of the world of industrial invention and machines which, from his romantic primivistic4 eye, constitutes the authentic African way of life: Hooray for those who never invented anything; Hooray for those who never discovered anything; Hooray for joy! Hooray for love! Hooray for the pain of incarnate tears. My Negritude is no tower and no cathedral It delves into the deep red flesh of the soil. In the final stanza of the lyric, this romantic primitivism will be restated even more vehemently as the summation of the renascent African’s answer to the arrogant European imperum.
In this stanza, the speaker defends his indigenous African heritage as “laughter” (meaningful human existence in the world) which he compares, by dint of extended and hyperbolic metaphor, to the four elements (“fire”, “earth”, “air” and “water”):
My laughter is the fire
of the eye of the sky, the fire
of the earth, the fire of the air,
the fire of the seas and the
rivers fishes animals trees
and it thawed your inside,
thawed your voice, thawed your
ears, thawed your eyes and
thawed your tongue.
As meaningful human existence in the world, the speaker’s “laughter” is particularly identified with “fire” (in its varied manifestations as light, heat, flames, blaze, bonfire, conflagration, combustion, or inferno). To begin with, it is compared to the primal thermonuclear energy of the sun—the “eye of the sun” (as it is known in the author’s native Ijo and in Igbo)—that sustains life on earth. Secondly, it is “the fire of the earth,” the energy associatedwith the birth of human civilization in world-wide myths about its theft by a daring culture hero from the deities by whom it was originally monopolized. Thirdly, it is “the the fire of the air.” Finally, it is “the the fire of the seas.” Thus, in the running metaphors within the overarching and whorled metaphor, the poet’s “laughter” is associated with all the key sacerdotal and deified entities in the poet’s indigenous culture—the sun (the Sun-God), the earth (the Earth-Goddess) the air (the Airy and Sky Deities), and the sea (the Water and Sea Deities). We can see some of the bases of these associations in “Ogboinba: An Ijo Creation Myth,” a version of which was recorded and published in English translation by Okara himself in 1960. Implied by these mythic associations is a nativistic, naturalistic and transcendentalist (albeit idealistic and romantic) claim to belonging to an autochthonous human civilization whose anteriority and pride of place in the origins and evolution of cultures can neither be demeaned nor denied by any Eurocentrist arrogance. The link with the sun and the divine light of creation is particularly stressed. In the poet’s native Ijo, as in Igbo and many other West African Kwa and Semi-Bantu languages, the sun is not only “the eye of the sun” but the archetype and source of the heat of natural human passion. Imbued with this archetypal heat, the speaker presents himself as possessing the pristine and natural human energy (shared in common with “the seas and the /rivers fishes animals trees”) that does in the end overcome and thaw the “cold” unnaturalness and pretensions of Eurocentrist cultural arrogance, in all its psychological and sensory ramifications—“inside” (psychological), “voice” (vocal),”ears” (auditory), “eyes” (visual), and “tongue” (linguistic).
At last, in this stanza, the mocking colonialist is awakened to the value of the African cultural heritage he mocks and forced to ask the most important question of all (“Why?”) to which he receives an answer that bespeaks of the poet’s unwavering commitment to his indigenous heritage:
So a meek wonder held
your shadow and you whispered:
'Why so?'
'And I answered:
'Because my fathers and I
are owned by the living
warmth of the earth
through our naked feet.'
But generally, in the discourse on the perennial dialectic between the thesis of indigenous African culture and the antithesis of European takeover through Christianity and colonialism, Okara’s position is that, in the matter of the culture of the colonizer and the colonized, we are left with no choice one way or the other, but the inevitability of reconciliation between both—the absolute inevitability of the acceptance of a postcolonial synthesis.