Review of the call of river nun

Paralleling the legacy of oral verse, modern African written poetry developed through a series of generations, each coming to prominence in successive eras encompassing the colonial, liberation, and independence periods. As a result of the political and cultural impact of European colonialism during the first half of the twentieth century, the path to poetic recognition involved writing in the dominant colonial languages, which influenced poetic style and form: English (anglophone), French (francophone), and Portuguese (lusophone). Some of the principal poets born between 1900 and 1930 were the Madagascan (francophone) Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo; the Senegalese (francophone) Annette M’Baye d’Erneville; Ghanaians (anglophone) Gladys May Casely-Hayford, Michael Dei Anang, R. E. G. Armattoe, and Kwesi Brew; Nigerians (anglophone) Dennis Chukude Osadebay and Gabriel Okara; the Kenyan (anglophone) Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye; and South Africans (anglophone and indigenous language) H. I. E. Dhlomo, Benedict Wallet Vilakazi (who published poems in Zulu), and Dennis Brutus. Highly recognized, Rabéarivelo employed Madagascan song forms and techniques of the French Symbolists. In 1953, Okara’s poem “The Call of the River Nun” earned for him the Nigerian Festival of Arts award. Banned under apartheid, Brutus’s Sirens, Knuckles, Boots appeared in 1963. The lusophone poets of this period include Jorge Barbosa of Cape Verde, Antonio Agostinho Neto and Antonio Jacinto of Angola, Alda do Espírito Santo of São Tomé, and Noémia de Sousa of Mozambique, the first African woman poet to be internationally recognized. North Africa also produced a number of poets, such as imprisoned and tortured Algerian Anna Gréki (1931-1966), who published in Arabic and French.

The aphoristic form has many predecessors – Butler Yeast, John Donne, Shakespeare, and African Griots, but Okara uses it for his own purposes. It allows him to combine range and concentration. In less than four stanzas, he rolls through life from beginning to the end. Each stanza is a monad, complete in itself yet related to every other. The poem is about almost everything: politics, education, society, personality, epistemology, symbolism, religion and time. The poem moves by endless free association primary source, like the process of actual thinking, like life itself. Yet, it is the expression of a cultured and controlled intelligence, artful, playful and witty. It is uniquely personal, yet it cites or quotes traditional wisdom in every stanza. It is far from the form of linear academic treatise as one could get it; it is an outcry against most of what passes for college teaching; rhyming, and yet it could only have been written by a lecturer in an African University in the early twenty-first century. Among the many things it signals is the aching need to embrace the whole, to break down the walls of academic specialization, to reunite the separated. And its very form is a means to and expression of that reunion.

In this short poem, where so much is going on, one cannot assert the finality of any one interpretation. The poem is among other things, a protest against literalism. It looks very simple but very deep in interpretation.

Any reader of such a poem is bound to be one-sided, determined as much by the reader’s problems as by Okara. With this idea in mind, let me develop a few of the themes in the poem that have been especially illuminating to me.

First is the very richness of texture itself, in large part brought on by the simultaneous use of several very different vocabularies. The two most extensively used vocabularies are derived from environment and religion. A variety of other vocabularies – political, symbolic and ritual emerge from time to time.

The environmental position of the poem covers the first three stanzas:

The other set of vocabularies emanate from the last stanza which makes references to the Almighty God who cannot be understood…The call of the river nun has a distinctly religious flavor. There is, in the first place, the use of the word ‘nun’, which has an obvious religious connotation in the context of Christianity. (Ngara 1990: 24)

On the other hand, “the river nun” could be a mysterious creature, a mermaid or a god. Okara may be using the word with several meanings in mind, and reviewers may agree with him or not by extending a lot of other meanings for analysis. With regards to the Christian sense, of the word, Ngara is of the view that, there is in fact an allusion to Gerald Mantley Hopking’s poem The Wreck of the Deutschland which deals with the drowning of nuns, one of whom calls out like Okara;s nun. In this sense, as the river nun moves towards a bigger river, may be the sea, as the Sea-bird calls the river, through the inevitable course, the river nun is duly going to lose its identity.

Whatever meaning the reader assigns to the word “nun”, and are perfectly acceptable, Okara’s poem ends in a prayer. The call of the river nun is therefore transformed into the call of the protagonist’s “river”.

Okara uses the poem to encourage the hero to confront “death” whether literal or figurative, and in this case, “The Sea-bird”. This reminds us of our mortality, through a journey we have no control. The protagonist enters this journey fully aware of losing his identity in due course.

The immortal sea which is mentioned here; intimately give moments of oceanic feeling; one sea of energy or instinct embracing all mankind, without distinction of race, language, or culture; and embracing all the generations of Adam, past, present, and future, in one phylogenetic heritage; in one mystical or symbolic body. Symbolism is the link between conscious and unconscious, it is the way out of all dividing literalisms, it is the road to resurrection; the antinomy between mind and body, word and deed, speech and silence, overcome. Everything is a metaphor; there is only poetry. (Bella 1991: 236)

I consider this time in history a strange time to come across a poem so moving hand in hand with life. While employing subtle analysis and cosmic learning, this poem is a strange living word. Instead of the profound mystery and horror that seem to have gripped so many of our most sensitive minds, we find here a mood beyond horror. With this poem, we are already coming out of the wilderness and beginning to enter our sacred inheritance. The last times are at hand as we journey in age. The very alarms and disasters give the signs.

A profound poem has required a profound poetry review. Among many interpretations of Okara, this is only one. Least of all am I convinced that I have understood the ‘real’ Gabriel Okara. Indeed, I am certain that The Call of the River Nun represents a major contribution to the reintegration of our differentiated and fragmented culture, where the religious has been alienated from the secular and the poetic from the scientific.