Timi Nipre, a self-identified protege of the late poet, Gabriel Okara, revisits his debut poetry collection, The Fisherman’s Invocation.
There are books you read and forget. Then there are books that enter your bloodstream, rewire your spirit, and leave you haunted forever. Gabriel Okara’s The Fisherman’s Invocation belongs to the latter. It was not just another literary encounter for me, it was personal.
As a protégé of Okara, the master poet who taught me that language can bend like the tides of the River Nun, carrying both ancestral memory and the burden of modernity, I feel quite honored to have the privilege of reviewing this book.
This collection is a storm trapped in verses. Okara casts his net across history, myth, and the restless soul of Africa, and what he drags ashore are questions we cannot escape.
Gabriel Okara’s The Fisherman’s Invocation is not merely a collection of poems; it is a haunting voyage into the turbulent waters of memory, colonial disillusionment, and the spiritual ache of a people searching for balance between the ancestral and the modern.
It is one of those books that does not simply ask to be read, it insists on being experienced, tasted like fresh palmwine in the mouth, where sweetness and sourness coexist.
At its core, the collection draws us into the voice of a fisherman, but not just any fisherman. This figure becomes a seer, a prophet, a wanderer who throws his nets not only into rivers but into time itself, seeking to retrieve lost values, fractured identities, and voices drowned in history’s tide.
Okara’s language, steeped in the cadences of Ijaw oral tradition, summons both gods and ghosts, ancestors and unborn children.
Each poem feels like an invocation—half prayer, half lament—calling upon the river deities, yet also wrestling with the invading gods of modernity.
What makes this book breathtaking is its ability to hold contradictions without breaking. Okara captures the ache of colonial and postcolonial Africa: the silence of rivers polluted not only by oil but by forgetfulness, the cries of men who fish all night yet return empty-handed, the mockery of imported religions that promise salvation but strip the soul of rootedness.
He does not write as one who has resolved these tensions; instead, he plunges us into the storm, asking us to stand knee-deep in the floodwaters of cultural displacement and ask ourselves: Who are we when our rivers no longer recognize us?
One of the most arresting qualities of Okara’s poetry is his insistence on language as ritual. He bends English into African rhythms, forcing the colonial tongue to sing in ancestral cadences. In doing so, he demonstrates that poetry can be both a weapon and a healing staff, cutting through imposed silences, but also soothing wounds with remembered melodies.
What fascinates me even more about Okara—and what I strive to even in his passing still learn from him—is the way he forces English to dance to African rhythms like I mentioned earlier.
In “Spirit of the Wind,” he gives us an untamable force, a wind carrying ancestral echoes. Yet today, that same wind is carrying our brightest minds out of the country, scattering them across Europe, America, and the Gulf. The ancestors still speak, but Nigeria, it seems, prefers earplugs.
In the title poem, “The Fisherman’s Invocation,” the fisherman performs a ritual of survival, calling on unseen forces before casting his net. I think of Nigeria each time I revisit these lines. Are we not also this fisherman? Casting policy after policy, election after election, praying without planning, invoking gods while refusing to mend the holes in our nets? And then we return, empty-handed, shocked at our own emptiness.
Reading The Fisherman’s Invocation as his protégé is both privilege and burden. Privilege, because I drink directly from the well of his vision. Burden, because his words expose how little we have learned.
The questions he asked decades ago still hang unanswered:
—What is the price of a river lost to greed?
—How long can a people sell their gods and expect protection from strangers’ gods?
—Can a nation row its canoe in opposite directions—tradition and modernity—and still hope to reach shore?
And yet, Okara’s genius lies in his irony. He shows us the fisherman invoking gods before casting nets, and we cannot help but see ourselves. Nigerians are a people of invocations—we pray before we cheat, take oaths to offices we plan to embezzle, fast before we steal, build churches on stolen money and mosques with looted funds.
We love the ritual, but neglect the repair. We polish the net, but ignore the gaping holes. And Okara’s fisherman, with his quiet humility, stands as a mirror to our absurdity.
This collection is deeply political, though never in a shallow, propagandist sense. Its politics lie in the choice to remember when forgetting would be easier, to sing when silence is safer.
Every line is an act of resistance against erasure. When Okara invokes the fisherman’s net, he is also invoking the African artist’s task: to haul out of the dark waters those fragments of dignity, memory, and vision that risk being lost forever.
Reading The Fisherman’s Invocation today, one cannot help but feel its urgency. In a world where rivers are still poisoned, where cultures are still commodified, and where voices are still silenced under the guise of globalization, Okara’s fisherman remains painfully relevant.
The questions he poses are the questions we still wrestle with: What is the cost of progress if it leaves our souls bankrupt? How do we return to the river without drowning in nostalgia? Can modernity and tradition share the same canoe without capsizing it?
This is not an easy book. It demands patience, attentiveness, and surrender. But once you let its waters wash over you, it becomes unforgettable. Like the fisherman casting his net, the reader emerges from Okara’s lines with both treasures and wounds.
The Fisherman’s Invocation is not just a book of poems, it is a prophecy. It is Okara whispering across time:
“if you lose your rivers, you lose your soul. If you silence your ancestors, you silence yourselves.”
As his protégé, I cannot shake this truth. Each time I open the book, I hear him warning: “Do not let Nigeria become a canoe adrift without paddle or prayer.”
The Fisherman’s Invocation is a spiritual storm-song—a breathtaking confrontation between memory and forgetting, past and future, silence and song. It is one of Gabriel Okara’s most powerful gifts to African literature, a timeless reminder that poetry is not just art, but invocation, survival, and prophecy.
I stand where Gabriel Okara once stood, listening to the wind, hearing the river. As his protégé, I know my task is to keep the invocation alive. So today, speaking as one who drank from Gabriel Okara’s gourd, every word I write now when telling my stories, is a continuation of his invocation.