Vulture by Chinua Achebe

Hello everyone,

This blog is a response to the task assigned by Yesha Bhatt Ma'am as part of a thinking activity. In this blog I am going to share my understanding of the poem 'Vulture'.

Introduction of poet:- 

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 , occupies a pivotal place in African literature and remains the most widely studied, translated, and read African novel. He is often referred to as the "father of African literature", although he vigorously rejected the characterization.

Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian poet and novelist. He is known for crafting his fiction around elements of reality– similar to how, in Vultures, he uses nature and human beings to depict abstract concepts like love, light, darkness, good and evil.

Introduction of Poem:-

Published by Chinua Achebe in 1971, Vultures is a poem of four uneven stanzas, written in free form. It discusses the elements of love and evil in the world, using a comparison of vultures with the Commandant at Belsen Camp to highlight the link between humans and nature.

The poem starts with a dull, gloomy setting. It is a grey dawn, and the despondence isn’t diffused even by the vultures perched on the branches of a dead tree. There are two of them- presumably mates– nestled close together, and one of them has a pebble on a stem tangled its unkempt feathers. Yesterday, those vultures had found a corpse in a trench, and had picked away its eyes and eaten everything of its bowel. After being full and satisfied, they found a place to rest close by, so that the remnants of the body were still in their line of sight.

After this description, the perspective switches from the vultures to thoughts about the peculiarity of love.  The second section shows the rebellious nature of love and how love always will be present. 

The third section focuses on the love a concentration camp commandant shows to his family, having spent the day burning human corpses, he buys his child sweets on the way home.

The poet comments on the strangeness of love existing in places where one would not expect. The final section ruminates on how even in the most evil person, love can take shape.

The conclusion of the poem is two sided. On one hand, Achebe praises God and providence that even the cruellest of creatures can show love. On the other hand, these creatures show love for their families only and continue to commit cruel acts towards others.

Themes:-

VULTURE AS METAPHOR:-

Commandant as Vulture:-

In the poem there is some line where we find comparison between Commandant and Vulture. As we all have stereotypes about Vulture as it eats the human body but here the writer tried to show us how man also does the same thing consciously. 

'Thus the Commandant at Belson camp going home for the day' 

This line shows that the commandant from the Belson camp who is also a father to his children does evil actions while working at a concentration camp.

Vulture is better than Human:-

In the poem the poet tried to show us the nature of love with the example of human and animal - bird. In the case of birds they don't have the ability to think and morality but humans do have. But here we can see that commandant consciously killing people sake of his duty which he can denied to do by his morality and vulture who eat the dead bodies, it wasn't killing people, it is wait for the human to died and after the death of human it is eaten by them. So here the poet tried to show us that one who doesn't have Idea of morality and thinking capability still somewhere in their heart love remains but man does not.

Little love in Vulture V/S Little love in Commandant:-

In the poem, the third stanza talked about the core nature of love.

Thus the Commandant at Belsen

Camp going home for

the day with fumes of

human roast clinging

rebelliously to his hairy

nostrils will stop

at the wayside sweet-shop

and pick up a chocolate

for his tender offspring

waiting at home for Daddy's

return...

Where With the example of Charnel house poet tried to give Idea of love. How love can exist in dirty place too. Vulture who eat dead bodies have love for his beloved and other side Commandant who killed people for all the day, who don't forget to  buy chocolates for his child who eagerly waiting for his daddy to came. Child don't know about his daddy's job and love him without any kind of greed of benefits.

Nazism:-

So here one can find the theme of Nazism. How violence has happened in the name of nationality and religion. Here the character of Commandant shows us the nature of rulers like Hitler. The location of the Concentration camp also one can take as a symbol of it, where people have been killed by violence and starvation.

Idea of prison and prisoners also there. The prison situation became like where death is a better option than life. Where One choose to died in prison that much tortured they faced during the war period.

Ecology:-

Vultures are often overlooked and perceived as lowly scavengers, but they play a crucial role in the environments in which they live. These scavengers do the dirty work of cleaning up after death, helping to keep ecosystems healthy and prevent the spread of disease.

Vultures have an extremely corrosive stomach acid that allows them to consume rotting animal corpses. These scavenged leftovers are often infected with anthrax, botulinum toxins and rabies that would otherwise kill other animals. Therefore, when vultures consume carcasses, they keep diseases in check.

Conclusion:-

The vultures, described in such a disparaging; grim fashion could be construed as a metaphor or the people responsible for the atrocities in Belsen and in particular the Commandant.It is the longest part of the poem and this is not a coincidence.The first stanza is a metaphor for the Commandant’s predominant personality traits and this is why it dominates so much of the poem’s content. The third stanza, the scene with his child, represents a far smaller portion of the poem and this is a metaphor for his spark of humanity.The form of this poem is very clever as it creates a grim and deathly image, it creates a glimmer of hope in the second and third stanzas and then ends on a hopeless and fatalistic note emphasising the futility of the situation. Difference between the vultures and the commandant: Vultures feed on corpses. That is their instinct. It is not something that they choose to do. The Commandant is not acting on instinct. He has the ability to choose. He chooses to be evil.

The Piano and The Drums:-

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 and The Dreamer, His Vision. In both his poems and his prose, Okara drew on African thought, religion, folklore and imagery, and he has been called "the Nigerian Negritudism". 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."

Introduction of Poem:-

In the poem, the piano and the drums, the poetic persona shows the difference between the normal lifestyle of Africans and that of the modern world. The setting of the poem, from the advent of civilization to the modern time. The central theme of the poem hinges on the effect of foreign culture on Africans. This theme he elaborates using the effect of music on the poetic persona as an analogy. The poem tries to emphasise the purity of African content before the interference of civilization. In essence, Gabriel Okara perceives the desecration of the African way of life from the musical perspective, and comes out to lament about it through the instrument of poetry.

The poet discusses the confusion that is created when western culture mixes with African culture. Any attempt to unify the two results in confusion and disorder. Therefore, one is keenly advised to avoid such a lifestyle. If you want to be African, be it, otherwise, live like the white man.

The poetic persona is not against choosing any of the cultures, but don’t mix them together. Indirectly, he warns us against becoming whiter than the white themselves or more civilised than civilization.

The poem is a post-colonial poem that focuses on the contrast between two cultures (African and western culture). The poet puts the culture side by side to emphasise the comparison between the two cultures.

Themes of the Poem:-

Nature - African Nature:-

Poems start with the jungle drum sound then the poet talks about intelligent animals.This sound of drum he feels is mystical, that is, there are so many supernatural things that come with it. The sound of the drum to him, creates agility, strength and quickness of action. This can be seen from lines 3 to 4 as he runs into imagination to the primordial time picturing what this sound would do to the jungle residents. Everything about this stanza depicts the freshness of nature and life as of the old. Basically he wanted to say how nature responds to him and how he feels the warmth of nature.

Mystic Rhythms:-

In the first and second stanza the poet gave the idea of playing drums. He says that it is not easy to play the drums.   

In “Piano and Drums”, Okara employs the idiom of music to discuss the subject of culture conflict. Piano represents Western culture that was introduced by European colonialists, while drums stand for the indigenous African culture.

The poet-persona is born into an African culture that is in close proximity to nature, which is evoked in the first two stanzas.

Motherland:-

Theme of motherland we find in the second stanza where the poet remembering his childhood where he was wandering and talking about his rural life. He also talked about path of his village with no innovative here we can see that how poet indirectly compare both the culture by saying that

And my blood ripples, turns torrent,

topples the years and at once I’m 

in my mother’s laps a suckling;

at once I’m walking simple

paths with no innovations

rugged, fashioned with the naked

warmth of hurrying feet and groping hearts

in green leaves and wild flowers pulsing

Once again, the poet remembers years back when he was still an infant in his mother’s laps suckling her breast. Suddenly, he is walking the paths of the village with no new ideas of a way of life different from the one he is born into.

Childhood Nostalgia:-

In the second stanza the poet remembered his childhood and talked about how happy he was in his rural life.

Dilemma:-

The immediate effect is that the African finds himself in a cultural dilemma. Should he follow the new foreign culture and abandon his own or is there a way for him to create a form of synergy between the two? This is the new African dilemma. He is in a state of confusion and has been struggling ever since to rediscover himself.

What to choose....

Piano - Western Culture

Drum - African Culture

Dilemma is about what to choose. Here we clearly see how the poet  is obsessed with both cultures as he tries to compare his culture with the African Culture. Aa there he belongs to African Culture but he likes the Western Culture. The poet discusses the confusion that is created when western culture mixes with African culture. Any attempt to unify the two results in confusion and disorder. Therefore, one is keenly advised to abhor such a lifestyle. If you want to be African, be it, otherwise, live like the white man.

Cultural Conflict:-

In the poem, the poet talked about two different cultures - African Culture and Western Culture.  Piano represents Western culture that was introduced by European colonialists, while drums stand for the indigenous African culture.

In every area of culture in contemporary African society — architecture, burial, education, ethics, fashion, wedding, religion, technology or creative writing — there is conflict. The autochthonous clashes with the imported. Only inheritors of the ambiguous heritage who are able to blend the two cultures, to which the Asian mode has been added, synthesise and harmonise all the diverse influences can live a relatively happy life.

The indigenous traditions have not died and the foreign have not been assimilated. The result is that people keep doing a difficult and strenuous balancing act that causes many to be bewildered, fall and fail. Capitalism divides society into two opposed classes and breeds enmity, hate, crime and violence, which are sources of discomfort and pain represented by the image of “tear-furrowed concerto” in the third line of the third stanza.

In essence, Gabriel Okara perceives the desecration of the African way of life from the musical perspective, and comes out to lament about it through the instrument of poetry.

Word Count:-2243