 | |
| Author | Gabriel Okara |
|---|---|
| Country | Nigeria |
| Language | English |
| Series | African Writers Series |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Publisher | Africana Publisher |
Publication date | 1964 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 127 |
| ISBN | 0-8419-0015-9 |
| OCLC | 1162390 |
The Voice is a 1964 novel by Gabriel Okara which was published as part of the influential African Writers Series. [1] [2] [3]
The novel is set in the 1960s, in post-independence Igboland in Nigeria. After studying, Okolo returns home to seek the truth. The Chiefs exile him for fear that he might topple them down. [2] [4] [5]
An editor at, Encyclopædia Britannica noted that "Okara translated directly from the Ijo (Ijaw) language, imposing Ijo syntax onto English in 'order to give literal expression to African ideas and imagery. The novel creates a symbolic landscape in which the forces of traditional African culture and Western materialism contend... Okara's skilled portrayal of the inner tensions of his hero distinguished him from many other Nigerian novelists.". [1] Okara style exhibit the true nature of the power hungry individual. [6]
Thomas Hinde writing for Times Literary Supplement stated The Voice is a "morality tale rather than a novel" and that "its characters have the flatness of symbols" [3]
Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, and critic who is regarded as the dominant figure of modern African literature. His first novel and magnum opus, Things Fall Apart (1958), occupies a pivotal place in African literature and remains the most widely studied, translated, and read African novel. Along with Things Fall Apart, his No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964) complete the so-called "African Trilogy"; later novels include A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). He is often referred to as the "father of African literature", although he vigorously rejected the characterization.
Benin City is the capital and largest city of Edo State, Nigeria. It is the fourth-largest city in Nigeria according to the 2006 census, after Lagos, Kano, and Ibadan, with a population estimate of about 1,500,000 as of 2016. It is situated approximately 40 kilometres (25 mi) north of the Benin River and 320 kilometres (200 mi) by road east of Lagos. Benin City is the centre of Nigeria's rubber industry, and oil production is also a significant industry.
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Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo was a Nigerian poet, teacher, and librarian, who died fighting for the independence of Biafra. He is today widely acknowledged as an outstanding postcolonial English-language African poet and one of the major modernist writers of the 20th century.
Gabriel Imomotimi Okara 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."
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Rivers State, also known as Rivers, is a state in the Niger Delta region of southern Nigeria. Formed in 1967, when it was split from the former Eastern Region, Rivers State borders include: Imo to the north, Abia and Akwa Ibom to the east, and Bayelsa and Delta to the west. The state capital, Port Harcourt, is a metropolis that is considered to be the commercial center of the Nigerian oil industry.
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Onuora Nzekwu also known as Joseph Onuora Nzekwu was a Nigerian professor, writer and editor from the Igbo people. He is author of the 1961 novel Wand of Noble Wood and the 1963 novel Eze Goes to School which was among the African Writers Series.
"The Snowflakes Sail Gently Down" is a poem by Nigerian writer Gabriel Okara. It contemplates its speaker's feelings on having left Africa and its culture. Okara wrote the poem in 1959 after seeing snow for the first time in Evanston, Illinois, while he was studying journalism at Northwestern University and researching at the Atomic Research Station's Public Information Department outside of Chicago.
"You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed" is a poem by Nigerian writer Gabriel Okara. One of the most popular in his oeuvre, it is a frequent feature of anthologies, such as A New Book of African Verse edited by John Reed and Clive Wake. "The piece belongs with the best of Senghor's nostalgic verse," wrote Michael J. C. Echeruo in a tribute to Okara on the occasion of his 70th birthday, "with the militancy of many of David Diop's lyrics, and certainly with J. P. Clark's 'Ivbie', another of my favorite African poems. Okara's poem is more relaxed than these, however, more ironic, less tortured. In some ways, of course, it is less urgent, less strident, less involved. If Clark's 'Ivbie' was complex and for good reason, You laughed, and laughed, and laughed seemed also appropriately straightforward: proud without arrogance, hurting without showing it, and blunt without rudeness." The first of Okara's poems that it was Echeruo's pleasure to read, it was also in his opinion the most enduring. The poem is sometimes wrongly attributed to South African writer Dennis Brutus.
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