By Obi Nwakanma
Last week at Canton, New York, I read poetry with Mr. Gabriel Okara. I had the indescribable pleasure of sharing the same podium with the legendary poet, one of Africa’s most renowned and established voices of the 20th century.

We were guests of the Writers Series of St. Lawrence University, Canton in upstate New York. Thanks to the kind regard of Nigeria’s famous painter and poet, Obiora Udechukwu, Dana Professor of the Fine Arts and Coordinator of the African Studies program at St. Lawrence University, I was invited alongside Okara, who of course was the star bill.

St. Lawrence is a fine Liberal Arts university; the oldest co-educational university in the state of New York, founded in 1856 by Unitarian ministers on liberal principles. The village of Canton itself lies a good two hours drive westward from Syracuse towards the Canadian border.

It is in fact, just slightly over an hours drive coming from Ottawa. Its winters are blistering. Its summers are pleasant. It is a pleasant little New England town; much like Nsukka, I was to remark later to Professor Udechukwu who had ensured adequate arrangements for my visit.

I had driven late into the night from Syracuse and met the next morning at the Westin University Hotel on Pomoda drive with Udechukwu who came to ensure that one was properly tucked-in. He also quickly re-acquainted me with Gabriel Okara and hurried on to his full day of class.

We met at breakfast – the poet Okara and I, and it was a re-union of sorts. I had of course known Gabriel Okara first through his poems; we grew up on them.

He was also that looming and legendary figure of letters, one of those Umuahians who came for homecoming and triggered possibilities in our young minds many years ago in boarding school at the Government College Umuahia. I had also met him occasionally thereafter, once at his old home on Rumuibekwe and another at his later home in Abuloma, Port-Harcourt. He remembered.

And that is the wonder of it all: at 89 Gabriel Imomotimi Okara, poet of the delta not only had his mind intact, he was sprightly, in perfect health, and bouncy for his age.

The great dome of his head framed by wooly white hair. As we sat for a long, lingering breakfast, overlooking a golf course and a mild sun in descent, we went down memory lane, I prodding gently to retrieve the fragments of a remarkable life; a rich and textured life, and long. He said, very humorously, over a generous spread of hash-brown, eggs and sausage, “you see, I eat slowly. I have to be careful now how I chew otherwise my teeth will fall all out.

They are quite old now!” Here was a subject for a biography, and my instincts were awakened to the curiosities of that life. Men like Gabriel Okara are the “living laboratories” of their age, to quote another remarkable member of his generation, Adegoke Adelabu. Okara was born in Nembe, by the River Nun.

He attended the prestigious Government College Umuahia in 1935. Among his Umuahia classmates were the late Dr. B.U. Nzeribe of Awo-Omama, of the famous Nzeribe Hospital in Aba; Dr. Ijoma, one time Medical Director of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Umuahia; the famous Sports Administrator, Jerry Enyeazu; and Mr. Obuh, one-time Nigeria’s Postmaster-General.

Most have gone on to immortality. “Ben Enwonwu taught me Fine Arts at Umuahia in 1937” Okara recalled. This is an important and hardly known aspect of Gabriel Okara’s life – that he is, before he was a poet, a talented painter. His work was mostly in water colors. Most are lost.

He, in fact, had a famous exhibition of his water colors in Lagos in the 1940s. Okara is a consummate artist; a man of the imagination. Among the quartet of Nigeria’s greatest poets of the 20th century his works speak to a passing time; a landscape on which is preserved, much like his lost paintings, a rich and magical world.

He was Obiora Udechukwu’s boss in Biafra – there in Ogwa – where much poetry was made in the direst of situations, when suddenly the ack-ack of roaring guns from fighter planes would burst open the sky. The poet was visiting his son, Ebi, a clinical psychologist living with his family in another Canton, this in Massachusetts, and who has been resident in the United States since 1973 when he came to attend Vanderbilt University.

The poet is also billed to speak at an international forum on peace in the Niger Delta in New York City.

After breakfast, I took Gabriel Okara driving around the neighbouring town of Potsdam, and around the neighborhoods of Canton. After lunch we met with the poetry class of the poet, Sarah Baber, and entertained questions from young student writers on matters of craft.

It must have built up enthusiasm for the evening’s reading at the theatre in the Humanities building, which had a good crowd when we arrived to read. Billed also to read that night were *Margaret Gaas and *Peter Ponce – two of St. Lawrence University’s resident writers. Gabriel Okara kicked off the evening, reading from his classic collection,

The Fisherman’s Invocation, with such poems as the famous “The Call of the River Nun” a nostalgic poem about the landscape and river of Okara’s childhood; at that point a sort of absent force, it is an account of longing for the consolations of the familiar past and motion of the river, written atop the crags of the Milliken hills, when Gabriel Okara was living in Enugu.

“Snow flakes Sail Gently by” is written from Okara’s first experience of snow in the winter of the windy city, Chicago, while he was on a year of academic fellowship at Northwestern; “One Night at Victoria Beach” is an acute observation of the religious and mystical life at Bar beach, Lagos, in the 1960s, and so on. Okara’s voice was strong; without the breach of years, and its timbre was modulated by the power of experience.

Margaret Gass, an African-American woman, who works in non-fiction read from a new memoir of her life as a black, Southern intellectual navigating the mysteries and boundaries of language and identity in America.
Ponce whose stories have appeared in various magazines, read from his unpublished new work.

I read from the Horsemen and Other Poems and an excerpt from my new, unpublished work, “Indigo Street” in which Hermes the African – magician, thief, archivist, braggart, slippery and recondite inventor of the hermeneutics, as well as classical immigrant and illegal alien, makes his appearances. It was generally, a lovely evening, and we retired afterwards to the home of Obiora and Ada Udechukwu for a little repast.