Analysis

In “Piano and Drums”, Okara employs the idiom of music to discuss the subject
of culture conflict. Piano represents Western culture that was introduced by
European colonialists, while drums stand for the indigenous African culture.

The poet-persona is born into an African culture that is in close proximity to

nature, which is evoked in the first two stanzas.

“Then,” the word that begins the third stanza, introduces a strange rhythm
produced by a piano, a foreign musical instrument. The introduction of a foreign
beat brings confusion into the life of the poet-persona, for the natural “mystic
rhythm” with which he is familiar clashes with the “complex ways” of the “wailing
piano.”

In the fourth and last stanza of the poem, he is lost and left in the lurch, wandering
in the convoluted rhythms of the two cultures. It is in that state of confounding
double consciousness that all educated Africans find themselves and stuggle to
cope with problems of hybridity.

A negritude poem, the lyric explains the crisis of identity that confronts Africans
who live a double life as a consequence of the colonial conquest and the imposition
of a foreign way on them.

In every area of culture in contemporary African society — architecture, burial,

education, ethic, fashion, wedding, religion, technology or creative writing — there
is conflict. The autochthonous clashes with the imported. Only inheritors of the
ambiguous heritage who are able to blend the two cultures, to which the Asian
mode has been added, synthesise and harmonise all the diverse influences can live
a relatively happy life.

The indigenous traditions have not died and the foreign have not been assimilated.
The result is that people keep doing a difficult and strenuous balancing act that
causes many to be bewildered, fall and fail.

The tragedy of Africa is not so much the problem of hybridity of culture as that of
loss of control, for the foreign way is hegemonic and constitutes a threat to the
indigenous and destroys it. For example, the indigenous way is communalistic in
contradistinction to the foreign that is individualistic. The “solo speaking” piano is
a metaphor for the Western lifestyle.

Capitalism divides society into two opposed classes and breeds enmity, hate, crime
and violence, which are sources of discomfort and pain represented by the image
of “tear-furrowed concerto” in the third line of the third stanza.

The labyrinthine complexities of the foreign way, which are regarded as

civilization and as superior to the simple African cultural patterns, unfortunately,
lead to a cataclysmic and tragic ending. As the last clause in the third stanza puts it,
the historical progression made possible by a dizzying scientific and technological
revolution “ends in the middle / of a phrase at a daggerpoint.” The instability of the
historical movement is represented by the image of “a daggerpoint,” which also
symbolizes extreme aggression.

Think of the perfection of military weapons and the possibility of sudden

destruction of the world in a nuclear war. The “morning mist” in which the
protagonist is lost is to be understood in the sense of the climate of angst, fear and
terror that hangs over the world. All humanity is caught in the thick cloud of
uncertainty.

Industrial revolution has caused a monumental problem of environmental pollution

that endangers continued existence of the human race. Many rare animal and plant
species are now extinct.

Historians regard the age of primitive communalism as the Golden Age of

humanity. As represented in the first two stanzas of the poem, the age of primitive
communalism is the period of infancy in human history, of “primal youth and the
beginning.” It is “urgent, raw / like bleeding flesh,” that is, lively, natural and
vigorous, unlike the modern and mechanized age that is artificial.

The last three lines of the first stanza are powerfully alliterative, dramatic and
energetic:

I see the panther ready to pounce,

the leopard snarling about to leap
and the hunters crouch with spears poised
Gabriel Okara, Piano and Drums.

The life of a hunting tribe is no doubt hazardous and demands a great deal of
bravery and manly strength. Work tools available for use are not sophisticated,
compared to the highly effective precision instruments produced in an industrial
culture.

Worthy of attention is the rapid movement of the lines in the first two stanzas. The
swiftness of the lines is most realized in the first three lines of the second stanza
that sum up the biological and historical processes that lead to the birth of the
protagonist.

The remaining five lines of the second stanza further delineate defining features of
the age of infancy of humanity — simplicity (“walking simple / paths with no
innovations” on “naked” feet); hardiness and toughness (“rugged”); and
naturalness (“green leaves and wild flowers”).

The poet does not romanticize the indigenous culture. The fact that the mode is
“rugged,” people hunt wild beasts with ordinary spears, and hearts are “groping”
indicates that it is hard, rough and full of uncertainty. However, its simplicity
limits the amount of havoc that it is capable of wreaking on humans that could be
exterminated by nuclear power in few days. The images are affirmative of Thomas
Hobbes’ view that human life in a state of nature is “nasty, brutish, and short.”

The riverside location is important. It draws attention to the poet’s nativity and
recalls his poem “The Call of the River Nun” that won a prize at the Nigeria
Festival of Arts in 1953.

Professor Segun Adekoya