The Imagery of Masks, Faces and Laughter in Gabriel Okara's Once Upon a Time

The phenomenon poet, Gabriel Okara, in his confessional lyric Once Upon a Time, organises an entire diagnosis of post-colonial social life through a single sustained image — the face — and its three variants: the laughing face of childhood, the masked face of adult life, and the rediscovered face of the son. The poem moves between these three faces as if turning a single portrait under different lights, and the moral argument of the verse is delivered almost entirely by the imagery rather than by direct statement. This essay argues that Okara constructs his case through the imagery of authentic laughter as remembered childhood, through the imagery of faces as removable masks, through the contrast between laughing with the eyes and laughing with the teeth, and through the closing imagery of the son as the face the father wishes to recover.

Point — Okara first establishes the imagery of authentic laughter as a remembered feature of childhood, in which the whole face was involved in feeling. Evidence — The speaker recalls a time when people "laughed with their hearts / and laughed with their eyes." Technique — The poet uses synaesthetic imagery and a register of remembered embodiment. Explanation — A laugh that travels from heart to eye is a laugh that occupies the whole body; the imagery insists that authentic feeling, before its corruption, used the entire face as its instrument. Okara places this picture at the start of the poem so that the masks to follow will be felt as departures from it. Link — The remembered laughter therefore prepares the thesis: the poem's imagery system begins with a face still continuous with its feeling.

Point — The imagery is deepened by the central metaphor of faces as removable masks, in which identity becomes a wardrobe. Evidence — The speaker confesses that he has "learned to wear many faces / like dresses — homeface, / officeface, streetface." Technique — Okara uses extended metaphor and cataloguing. Explanation — The image of the wardrobe is precise and bitter; a face that can be changed for the social occasion has ceased to be a face in the older sense and has become a costume. The cataloguing — home, office, street — exposes how thoroughly the speaker has internalised the practice, until even the most intimate setting receives a tailored mask. The imagery converts the poem's argument into a portrait of a self in disguise. Link — The mask imagery therefore extends the thesis: the face has not merely lost its feeling, it has become a tool of social management.

Point — Okara sharpens the imagery through the contrast between laughing with the eyes and laughing with the teeth, which divides the face along moral lines. Evidence — The speaker reports the present-day laugh "only with their teeth / while their ice-block-cold eyes / search behind my shadow." Technique — The poet uses oppositional facial imagery and visual coldness. Explanation — A laugh of teeth without eyes is the literal anatomy of insincerity; the lower half of the face performs while the upper half investigates. Okara's imagery makes inauthenticity visible at the level of muscle, and the ice in the eyes converts the laugh into a hostile act rather than a friendly one. Link — The facial opposition therefore advances the thesis: the imagery has not merely diagnosed inauthenticity but located it in the very surfaces of the body.

Point — The closing imagery turns to the son's face as the rediscovered original, the face the father wishes to learn from again. Evidence — The father pleads, "Show me, son, / how to laugh; show me how / I used to laugh and smile / once upon a time when I was like you." Technique — Okara uses imagery of borrowed restoration and an apostrophe to the child. Explanation — The son's face becomes the poem's last and most hopeful image; it is the face that has not yet learned to be three faces, and the speaker, having confessed to his own masks, asks for permission to copy it. The imagery of the child's face is therefore the imagery of repair, the visible promise that the older face has not been entirely lost. Link — The closing imagery advances the thesis decisively: the masks can in principle be unlearned because the unmasked face still survives, on the son's side of the table.

This study probes to analyse how Okara, through the imagery of remembered laughter, the extended metaphor of masks, the oppositional anatomy of teeth and eyes and the closing image of the son's face, conducts his entire diagnosis of inauthenticity through the human face. The whole-face laughter, the wardrobe of masks, the cold eyes and the child's smile together form a poem in which the face becomes the moral terrain of an entire society. The deeper insight is that Okara treats the face as something held in common between people; what one face does, others learn, and the only way back to authenticity is through a face that has not yet been taught the masks. Once Upon a Time endures, therefore, as one of African anglophone poetry's clearest cases of an argument conducted entirely in imagery.