Yinka Olatunbosun writes on the life and times of Gabriel Okara, a pioneering poet and novelist who died on March 25 at his hometown in Bayelsa State.
My river’s calling too!,
“Its ceaseless flow impels my found’ring canoe down its inevitable course.
“And each dying year brings near the sea-bird call, the final call that stills the crested waves and breaks in two the curtain of silence of my upturned canoe.
“O incomprehensible God!
“Shall my pilot be my inborn stars to that final call to Thee.
O my river’s complex course?”
Thus, Gabriel Imomotimi Okara concluded his poem, “The Call of the River Nun”. The poem, published in 1957 in the influential University of Ibadan-based African Literature periodical, Black Orpheus, is one of his widely read poems.
The grand old man of the Nigerian, or indeed African, literary scene breathed his last in the late hours of Sunday, March 24 at the Federal Medical Centre in the Bayelsa State capital,…
