Mystic Drum by Gabriel Okara

MYSTIC DRUM

                   -Gabriel Okara

                             The Mystic Drum is Okara’s love lyric. The Mystic Drum evinces a tripartite ritual pattern of imitation from innocence through intimacy to experience. By comparison to the way of zone as manifested in the experience of Zen master, Chin Yuan Wei-Asian this pattern resolves itself into an emotional and epistemic logical journey from conventional knowledge through more intimate knowledge to learn of experience empowers the lover to understand that beneath the surface attractiveness of what we know very well may lie an abyss of the unknown and unknowable belching darkness. But experience teaches us at this stage of substantial knowledge not to expose ourselves to the dangers of being beholden to this unknown and unknowable reality by keeping our passions under strict control including the prudent decision to ‘pack’ the ‘Mystic Drum’ of our innocence and evanescence making sure that it does not ‘beat so loud anymore’.

          Okara mentions in one of his interviews that “The Mystic Drum” is essentially a have 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.

The Mystic Drum and Lines:-

      “The mystic drum beat in my inside

          And fishes danced in the rivers

          And men and women danced on land

          To the rhythm of my drum”

                        “But standing behind a tree

                             With leaves around her waist

                       She only smiled with a shake of her head.”

          “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 man 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 is used in the poem for western imperialism that was 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 the imposed existence. The outside at first only has an objective role standing behind a tree. Eventually, she intrudes and tries to behave 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.