Name: Jayati Thakar
Paper no: 14- The African Literature
Roll. No. 30
Assignment Topic: Discuss the poems: ‘New York’, ‘Mystic Drum’, and
‘Telephone Conversation’.
Submitted to: S. B. Gardi Department of English, M. K. Bhavnagar
University.
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‘New York’ Leopord Senghor
New York is the commercial capital of America. Therefore it stands an emblem of financial stability and exponential growth. The poet Leopold Sedar Senghor exclaims that at first the beauty of New York held him spell-bound as it was superficial. It was limited to physicality of the “great long-legged golden girls.” The poet appears to be timid at the first sight of the City of Skyscrapers. Firstly, owing to his inferiority complex as the city held him in awe. Secondly, he could not confront the “blue metallic eyes”.
The adjective “metallic” has various connotations here. The term may refer to the lifelessness of the eyes. It may also allude to the nerve of steel. Furthermore, it points to the frigidity of the eyes. The phrase”frosty smile” appears to be a simile from a consumer society. The poet refers to the depth of the skyscrapers, when he should be talking about the height of the same. The line “lifting up owl eyes in the sun’s eclipse” reveals how the warmth of life is denied to them. The adjective “sulphurous” indicates pollution.
The skyscrapers seem to defy ‘cyclones’ as if challenging the very notion of God. The stone of the skyscrapers has weathered well against the climatic conditions. The sidewalks of Manhattan seem bald as compared to the grassy areas of nature. There are wells and pastures. All the birds seem to limit themselves to terraces. Nothing is deemed innocent here in this pretentious sophistication, pseudo-modern existence. No child’s laughter is to be heard, no mother suckling her baby. Only “legs in nylon” and “breasts with no sweat and smell.” In a consumer society, mouths are lipless due to lack of genuine expression and communication; what ultimately matters is profit and gain. Hard cash buys even love as people confine themselves to mercantilism.
No books are to be found that impart wisdom, as people are reluctant to part with wisdom too. The poet goes out to criticize European art asserting that the painter’s palette is filled with crystals of coral. The nights in Manhattan are characterized by insomnia. People give in to their impulsive needs. The term ‘hygienic loves’ refer to contraceptives, as they floated in the dark waters. The sanctity of love is treated as sewage.
The poet warns the superficial world to pay attention to the heeding of God-“signs and reckonings.” In Apoc., ii, 17, manna symbolizes the happiness of heaven. It is with hyssop that the blood of a bird offered in sacrifice is to be sprinkled for the cleansing of a man or a house affected with leprosy (Lev. 14: 4-7, 49-51).Senghor states that it was high time for manna and hyssop, the time for heavenly purity to descend on earth. The poet entreats with them to listen to the heart beating to the rhythm of one’s own blood, thereby making a distinction between the self and the conscious. The poet sees Harlem humming with sounds, solemn color and flamboyant smells. The three sensory perceptions are subject to artificial stimulations. This is the only interval to the man delivering pharmaceutical products. The pseudo-artificial products come into focus. The night holds more truth as compared to the day. The true colour of all things come to the fore .It is the purest form that sets life germinating before memory. All the amphibious elements-those pertaining to water and land are shining the suns.
Harlem is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, which since the 1920s has been a major African-American residential, cultural, and business center. The term “Harlem” refers to the Amalgamation of African-American life as it was expressed, and as it stood for. Therefore the “corn springing from the pavements” represent the marriage of Africa and America, of nature and sophistication It stands for the assimilation of the ‘white rum” and “black milk.”The masks adorned are “fabulous masks” as one cannot tell apart the African from the American.”
I have seen the sky at evening snowing cotton flowers and
wings of seraphin and wizards plumes
Listen, New York listen to your brazen male voice your
vibrate oboe voice, the muted anguish of your tears
falling in great clots of blood
Listen to the far beating of your nocturnal heart,, rhythm
And blood of the drum, drum and blood and drum.
This drum stands for the spiritual pulse of African traditional life as echoed in Gabriel Okara’s “Mystic Drum.” The alternation of the words “drum” and “blood” reflect a pulse-like rhythm that emphasizes the same.
Senghor claims that unity is to be discovered in the reconciliation of the Lion, the Bull and the Tree; the wild, the domestic and the vegetative world. Eventually he comes to comprehend that there is no significant meaning to this sort of life. The end becomes the means. The meaning of the journey no longer holds significance in a fast-forward life. In fact, they do not have possess a heritage at all; therefore, there is no need “to invent the mermaids”. America is always questioned regarding a history of its own, its roots and tradition. Senghor asserts that there is no need to indulge in a culture of myth that they do not possess in the first place. The life prevalent there is based on the formula of success, in an era of competition. Life has lost its true purpose and rusted in the ‘steel articulations”. The steel articulations refer to the Industrial Revolution. Besides, it may also allude to the steel nerve of the colonizers. It connotes their rigid stanc
e and policies. The poet wants the black blood to
act as a lubricant and life-force in such a situation.
New
York! I say New York, let theblack blood flow into your blood Cleaning the rust from your steel articulations, like an oil of life.
It is also said to be the “oil of life”. Blood is red in colour, and is therefore universal. Here the poet renders this blood unique by attributing it with the adjective “black”. But again, it acts as the “oil of life”;or sustains life that is a universal phenomenon.
Analysis
of "THE MYSTIC DRUM’ by Gabriel Okara
About the poet
Gabriel Okara, in full Gabriel Imomotimi Gbaingbain
Okara (born April 21, 1921, Bumodi, Nigeria), is a Nigerian poet and novelist.
His verse had been translated into several languages by the early 1960s.A
largely self-educated man, Okara became a bookbinder after leaving school and
soon began writing plays and features for radio. In 1953 his poem “The Call of
the River Nun” won an award at the Nigerian Festival of Arts. Some of his poems
were published in the influential periodical Black Orpheus, and by 1960 he was
recognized as an accomplished literary craftsman. Okara’s poetry is based on a
series of contrasts in which symbols are neatly balanced against each other.
The need to reconcile the extremes of experience (life and death are common
themes) preoccupies his verse, and a typical poem has a circular movement from
everyday reality to a moment of joy and back to reality again. Okara
incorporated African thought, religion, folklore, and imagery into both his
verse and prose. His first novel, The Voice (1964), is a remarkable linguistic
experiment in which Okara translated directly from the Ijo (Ijaw) language,
imposing Ijo syntax onto English in order to give literal expression to African
ideas and imagery. The novel creates a symbolic landscape in which the forces
of traditional African culture and Western materialism contend. Its tragic
hero, Okolo, is both an individual and a universal figure, and the ephemeral
“it” that he is searching for could represent any number of transcendent moral
values. Okara’s skilled portrayal of the inner tensions of his hero
distinguished him from many other Nigerian novelists. During much of the 1960s
Okara worked in civil service. From 1972 to 1980 he was director of the Rivers
State Publishing House in Port Harcourt. His later work includes a collection
of poems, The Fisherman’s Invocation (1978), and two books for children, Little
Snake and Little Frog (1981) and An Adventure to Juju Island (1992).
About the poem
The Mystic Drum,” evinces a tripartite ritual
pattern of initiation from innocence through intimacy to experience. The drum,
in African poems, generally stands for the spiritual pulse of traditional
African life. The poet asserts that first, as the drum beat inside him fishes
danced in the rivers and men and women danced on the land to the rhythm of the
drum. But standing behind the tree, there stood an outsider who smiled with an
air of indifference at the richness of their culture. However, the drum still
continued to beat rippling the air with quickened tempo compelling the dead to
dance and sing with their shadows. The ancestral glory overpowers other
considerations. So powerful is the mystic drum, that it brings back even the
dead alive. The rhythm of the drum is the aching for an ideal Nigerian State of
harmony. The outsider still continued to smile at the culture from the
distance. The outsider stands for Western Imperialism that has looked down upon
anything Eastern, non-Western, alien and therefore, 'incomprehensible for their
own good' as 'The Other'. The African culture is so much in tune with nature
that the mystic drum invokes the sun, the moon; the river gods and the trees
began to dance. The gap finally gets bridged between humanity and nature, the
animal world and human world, the hydrosphere and lithosphere that fishes
turned men, and men became fishes. But later as the mystic drum stopped
beating, men became men, and fishes became fishes. Life now became dry, logical
and mechanical thanks to Western Scientific Imperialism and everything found
its place. Leaves started sprouting on the woman; she started to flourish on
the land. Gradually her roots struck the ground. Spreading a kind of parched
rationalism smoke issued from her lips and her lips parted in smile. The term
'smoke' is also suggestive of the pollution caused by industrialization, and
also the clouding of morals. Ultimately, the speaker was left in 'belching
darkness', completely cut off from the heart of his culture, and he packed the
mystic drum not to beat loudly anymore. The 'belching darkness" alludes to
the futility and hollowness of the imposed existence. The outsider, at first
only, has an objective role standing behind a tree. Eventually, she intrudes
and tries to weave their spiritual life. The 'leaves around her waist' are very
much suggestive of Eve who adorned the same after losing her innocence. Leaves
stop growing on the trees but only sprout on her head implying
'deforestation." The refrain reminds us again and again, that this Eve
turns out to be the eve of Nigerian damnation. Okara mentions in one of his interviews
that "The Mystic Drum" is essentially a love poem: "This was a
lady I loved”. And she coyly was not responding directly, but I adored her. Her
demeanor seemed to mask her true feelings; at a distance, she seemed adoring,
however, on coming closer, she was, after all, not what she seemed." This
lady may stand as an emblem that represents the lure of Western life; how it
seemed appealing at first but later seemed distasteful to the poet.
STRUCTURE
The poem has three different parts-an initial
phase of conventional knowledge when men are men and fishes are fishes;(line
1-15) a middle phase of more intimate knowledge when men are no longer fishes
(lines 16-26) and a final phase of ‘substantial knowledge’ when men are once
again men and fishes are once again fishes, with the difference that at this
phase, the beloved lady of the lyric is depicted as ‘standing behind a trace’
with “her lips parted in her smile”. It is more decidedly a philosophical poem
in which the dynamics directions and management of ‘the mystic drum’ of passion
that beats in the poet’s inside are dramatically re-enacted. At the initial
level of conventional knowledge (lines 1-7), the speaker sees people as people
and fishes as fishes. At this level, the love relationship between the lover and
his beloved is still at a primary phenomenal and mundane level of innocent
physical and sexual attraction. As at the end of the first and second phases,
the beloved is no longer simply ‘standing behind a tree/with leaves around her
waist’, only smiling “with a shake of her head”. She is no longer silent but
active, combustive, mysterious and even ominous. At this climax of his
emotional and epistemological initiation, the lover finally decides to ‘pack’
his ‘mystic drum’ turning away from an over-excited involvement in love
relationships, determined ‘never to beat so loud anymore’. The mystic drum and
the transformations are projected to the personality of the beloved who
acquires extra-ordinary powers that effectively transform her into a
supernatural being, indeed a goddess, invested with the powers “of the things
of the ground” (earth) of the “the eye of the sky/the sun and moon”(heaven) and
of the ‘river gods’(water). (htt23)
“Telephone Conversation”- Wole Soyinka
Wole Soyinka’s “Telephone Conversation” is an eloquent exchange of dialogue between a dark West African man and his British landlady that inexorably verges on the question of apartheid. The poet makes use of the most articulate means to air his views, through that of a telephone conversation, where there is instant and natural give-and-take. It exhibits a one-to-one correspondence between the two. The interaction between a coloured and a white individual at once assumes universal overtones.
At the outset, the poet says that the price seemed reasonable and the location ‘indifferent’. Note that as a word, even though the word “indifferent” denotes being ‘unbiased’, it is a word with negative connotations. However, as we come across the Landlady’s biased nature; the word ‘indifferent’ gains positive overtones, as it is better than being impartial. The lady swears that she lived ‘off premises’. Nevertheless, the very aspect of his colour poses a problem to her, far from her promise to remain aloof. Nothing remains for the poet, he says, but confession. It gives a picture of him sitting in a confessional, when he hasn’t committed any crime….his crime is his colour, his remorse is solutionless. He tells the lady that he hates a wasted journey. Perhaps his words connote more than he literally signifies. The poet seems to be tired of his life conditioned by racist prejudices. As he mentions that he is a West African, the lady is crammed with silence, but a silence that speaks volumes. A telephone is an instrument that primarily transmits voices, here it becomes a medium for silence also. The so-called civilized world, has these silent powerful issues that need to be voiced. Here, the silence echoes. It is a silence that is the consequence of her sophisticated upbringing. However, her prejudices transcend her to primitivism, living in the superstitious narrow-mindedness of caste and colour.
When the voice finally came, it was ‘lip-stick coated’,well made-up and diplomatic to suit an affected atmosphere. The inevitable question finally comes cross:” ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?”The poet views it as button B or Button A. The question places two alternatives before him: dark or light; The truth or lies. The first option would obviously shut off all doors to him. The term Button B also is the button in the public telephone box to get the money back. Button A is the one to connect the call. The poet first ponders on Button B to get out of his predicament. He then realizes that escapism is not the solution, and decides to face the situation. The words: “Stench /Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak” signify the claustrophobic nature of the questions rather than the atmosphere.
The colour ‘red’ in “Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered” forebode caution. The questions were too naked to be true. The speaker at last brings himself to believe them. His response is very witty: “You mean–like plain or milk chocolate?” This is the most apt response as dark chocolate is certainly more tempting than plain chocolate. Her disinterested approval of the question was like that of a clinical doctor made immune to human emotions through experience. Human pain and misery its own saturation point; after a certain point people tend to joke at their own agony. As the saying goes: Be a God, and laugh at Yourself. The speaker therefore begins enjoying the situation and confuses the lady on the other side. He asserts: “West African sepia”, to further confuse her.
Silence for spectroscopic
Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent
Hard on the mouthpiece. “WHAT’S THAT?” conceding
“DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT IS.” “Like brunette.”
“THAT’S DARK, ISN’T IT?” “Not altogether.
Facially, I am brunette, but, madam, you should see
The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet
Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused–
Foolishly, madam–by sitting down, has turned
My bottom raven black–One moment, madam!”–sensing
Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap
About my ears–“Madam,” I pleaded, “wouldn’t you rather
See for yourself?”
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Works Cited
<http://rukhaya.com/poetry-analysis-leopold-sedar-senghors-new-york/>.
<http://liveloveliterature10.blogspot.in/2015/04/analysis-of-mystic-drum-by-gabriel-okara.html
>.
<https://litxpert.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/analysis-telephone-conversation-by-wole-soyinka/
>.
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