By Prairie Schooner
Published March 30, 2019
One of the great writers of our time has passed away.
The writer, Gabriel Okara, was born into a noble family, the son of Ijaw chief and businessman Samson G. Okara and Martha Olodiama Okara, a homemaker, on April 24, 1921 . His birthplace was Bumoundi, situated in the Niger Delta.
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Okara’s first published poem was “The Call of the River Nun,” firmly establishing his literary identity within the landscape and waterscape of his Delta home. The poem won the Silver Cup in Poetry at the 1953 Nigerian Festival of the Arts at Lagos and was published in the 1957 inaugural issue of Black Orpheus, the first English-language journal of African literature.
The poem and its publication marked a turning point in the history of Nigerian poetry in English, establishing Okara as one of the first writers to fully realise what an African poetry written in English could achieve.
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After publication of “The Call of the River Nun,” Okara continued to build his literary reputation. His first book was a novel, The Voice. It was a linguistic experiment in which Okara translated directly from the Ijaw language, imposing Ijaw syntax onto English in order to give expression to African ideas and imagery.
The Voice was published in 1964, and in the years that followed, Okara’s life and writing were interrupted by the Biafran War for Independence, which was waged from July 1967 until January 1970. During this time Okara, in moments when he and his family were forced to flee, had to abandon many of his personal effects and papers — poems, short stories, essays, as well as a second novel.
Not all was lost, however, and the poems that survived were included in his first collection, The Fisherman’s Invocation, published in 1978. The title poem won Britain’s 1979 Commonwealth Prize for best poem of the year, the first poem by an African poet to do so.
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In the years that followed, Okara wore many literary hats. He was the director of the Rivers State Publishing House in Port Harcourt, he wrote books for children such as Little Snake and Little Frog and An Adventure to Juju Island, and he also continued to write and publish poetry.
Okara’s work as a poet was gathered by the African Poetry Book Fund in 2016 in the form of Collected Poems, a career-spanning volume edited and introduced by Brenda Marie Osbey. The inaugural Gabriel Okara Literary Festival took place the next year, in 2017.
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Celebrations of Okara’s incredible legacy will no doubt continue in the years to come. While we at the African Poetry Book Fund and Prairie Schooner are saddened by his departure, we wish him a blissful transition. On that note, we’ll leave you with a passage from Okara’s poem “To a Star”…
I strain my tired voice in song
to reach up to the star by the moon
a song I vowed never more to sing;
But from sundown to sunrise
I seek a union continually
which breaks my vow and I sing
a silent song to the rhythm of aging drums
drums not heeding constraints of fear
Bear the song tenderly toward an ear.
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