The Mystic Drum:
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.
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