Hello readers
This blog is my classroom thinking Activity this activity given by Yesha Mam. I would like to talk about the poem
You laughed and laughed and laughed
About Poet
Gabriel Okara :-
Gabriel Imomotimi Okara (24 April 1921 – 25 March 2019) was a Nigerian poet and novelist who was born in Bumoundi in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, Nigeria.
The first Modernist poet of Anglophone Africa, he is best known for his early experimental novel, The Voice (1964), and his award-winning poetry, published in The Fisherman's Invocation (1978) and The Dreamer, His Vision (2005).In both his poems and his prose, Okara drew on African thought, religion, folklore and imagery,and he has been called "the Nigerian Negritudist". According to Brenda Marie Osbey, editor of his Collected Poems, "It is with publication of Gabriel Okara's first poem that Nigerian literature in English and modern African poetry in this language can be said truly to have begun."Okara's equally well-known poetry is also poised between European and African modes of expression.
You laughed and laughed and laughed
This poem is written in 1950, it was later published in 1957 in the influential Ibadan University-based African literature periodical Black Orpheus and has remained one of his most widely read poems.
In this poem you means white people and laughed and laughed and laughed means white people are making fun of dance, colour , culture, sounds and actions of black people.
This poem focuses on how white people laughed at African people. There is loss of happiness due to conflict of the African cultures with the Western cultures, subjugation of the African people accompanied by loot, rape and pillage, the loss of identity of the African people, their homes being devastated, the imposing of the cultural norms of the colonizer on the colonized and the imposition of the colonizer’s language on the colonized. The literature of the African people talking about their state of freedom in the pre-colonial times contrasted with their state during the colonial times and then the promise of freedom in the deplorable state of affairs holds for them. Here is the poem,
Themes
- Colonialism
- Racism
- Cultural conflict
- Modernism
- Nationalism
Live Burial Poem
Wole Soyinka
Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 at Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria. During the civil war in Nigeria, Soyinka appealed in an article for cease-fire. For this he was arrested in 1967, accused of conspiring and was held as a political prisoner for 22 months until 1969. Soyinka has published about 20 works: drama, novels and poetry. He writes in English and his literary language is marked by great scope and richness of words.
Wole Soyinka is best known as a playwright. Alongside his literary career, he has also worked as an actor and in theaters in Nigeria and Great Britain. His works also include poetry, novels, and essays. Soyinka writes in English, but his works are rooted in his native Nigeria and the Yoruba culture, with its legends, tales, and traditions. His writing also includes influences from Western traditions - from classical tragedies to modernist drama.
Poem Analysis
The poem Live Burial explicitly tries to explain the painful torture of what the military government at the time in Nigerian tried to impose on Soyinka's mind while the poet was
imprisoned for two years.
The footsteps in the poem emphasizes the severe limitations that the walls place on his freedom, and the acknowledgement of pacing, especially with such exact numbers to reveal the poet's restless energy to seek any outlet possible, which brings us to the opening stanza of the poem the "Sixteen paces by twenty-three," to explain the space available to live in for 24 months.
The government denied him reading and writing materials so he had to use toilet papers make up items to write and free his mind. The poet takes this experience into this poem "Live Burial" as a reflection on his prison of what the government intended to do to his mind, kill it and that ultimately buries him alive.
Themes
Sadism
- Tricks to torture
- Government officials
- Guards
- Doctors
- Voice of rebellious people
- Psyche of sadism
- Galileo genius
Greed Mythology
- Antigens
- Stygian
- Muse
Imprisonment
- Space of cell
- Guards
- Tortures
- Doctors and their statment
Metaphor
- Three gaurds
- Doctors
- Government of Nigeria
