The Loss of Innocence and Authentic Feeling in Gabriel Okara's Once Upon a Time

The phenomenon poet, Gabriel Okara, in his confessional lyric Once Upon a Time, writes a father's open letter to his son in a Nigeria reshaped by colonial encounter and post-independence urban life. The speaker remembers a time when laughter and welcome were unfeigned, when handshakes meant warmth and faces spoke truth, and contrasts it with the present, in which the same gestures have hardened into masks. The poem reads as both lament and request, ending with a plea that the son teach the father how to recover the innocence the father has lost. This essay argues that Okara dramatises the loss of innocence and authentic feeling through the contrast between remembered warmth and present coldness, through the recurring imagery of faces as masks, through the father's painful self-recognition, and through a closing appeal that places the future of authenticity in the child.

Point — Okara first stages the loss through the contrast between a remembered time of warmth and a present time of practised coldness. Evidence — The speaker recalls when people "laughed with their hearts / and laughed with their eyes," and sets this against a present in which they "laugh only with their teeth / while their ice-block-cold eyes / search behind my shadow." Technique — The poet uses juxtaposition and visual imagery of light and ice. Explanation — The contrast is anatomical: laughter once travelled the whole body and now stops at the mouth; the eyes that used to confirm warmth now perform suspicion. By locating innocence and its loss in physical detail, Okara makes the change irrefutable. Link — The remembered warmth and present coldness therefore set the thesis on the body itself, where the loss of authenticity is felt before it is named.

Point — The poem deepens the loss through its recurring imagery of faces as removable masks, which becomes the central symbol of inauthentic life. Evidence — The speaker confesses that he has learnt "to wear many faces / like dresses — homeface, / officeface, streetface." Technique — The poet uses extended metaphor and cataloguing. Explanation — Identity is reduced to a wardrobe, and the self becomes a sequence of costumes selected for the social occasion at hand; the metaphor is bitter because the speaker himself has acquired the skill he condemns. The list of faces is also a confession that the speaker can no longer locate, in the heap of social roles, the one face that was once continuous with feeling. Link — The mask imagery therefore extends the thesis from observation to self-indictment, exposing the speaker as a fellow participant in the very inauthenticity he laments.

Point — Okara sharpens the loss further through the speaker's recognition of his own polite phrases as empty rituals. Evidence — He admits that he has learned to say "Goodbye" when he means "Good-riddance," to "Glad to meet you" when he is not glad, and to "It's been nice talking to you" after boredom. Technique — The poet works through ironic juxtaposition and a register of everyday speech. Explanation — The polite formulas of a westernised social life have replaced the older, more honest acknowledgements of feeling; the speaker is fluent in a language designed to hide him. The bitterness is doubled by the fact that the speaker hears himself using these phrases and cannot stop. Link — Through this self-aware mimicry, Okara makes the loss linguistic as well as emotional, showing that an entire vocabulary of authenticity has been quietly retired.

Point — The poem ends not in despair but in a turn to the son, in whom the father places the hope of a recovered face. Evidence — The speaker pleads with his child, "I want to be what I used to be / when I was like you. I want / to unlearn all these muting things." Technique — Okara uses an apostrophe to the son and a final imperative voice of pleading. Explanation — The plea exposes the depth of the loss — the father must turn to the child to remember the self he himself once was — but it also rescues the poem from cynicism, suggesting that what has been lost can in principle be relearned. The closing image of being shown "how to laugh" by a son places the future of authenticity in the next generation. Link — The closing apostrophe therefore advances the thesis decisively: innocence may have been lost, but Okara refuses to declare the loss permanent.

This study probes to analyse how Okara, through contrasted warmth and coldness, an extended mask metaphor, a recognition of empty polite formulas and a closing plea to the son, dramatises the loss of innocence and the disappearance of authentic feeling in a society reshaped by colonial habits and urban life. The remembered laughter, the wardrobe of faces, the hollow phrases and the appeal to the child together build a poem in which inauthenticity is exposed as an acquired skill that can in principle be unlearned. The deeper insight is that Okara writes not as a moralist but as a participant; the poem is most powerful when it confesses that the father, too, has become what he laments, and when it asks the son to teach him a forgotten honesty. Once Upon a Time endures, therefore, as both elegy for a lost authenticity and a quiet, almost embarrassed prayer for its return.