Ogun

The speaker begins by introducing his uncle, a woodworker who was diligent in creating household staples. Braithwaite begins “Ogun” by stating, “My uncle made chairs, tables, balanced doors on, dug out/ coffins, smoothing the white wood out,” in line 1. Throughout the next few lines, he describes the working of his uncle. He uses onomatopoeia to mimic the sounds of carpentry. Braithwaite states, “He was knock-knee’d, flat-/footed and his clip clop sandals slapped across the concrete,” in lines 7-8. The reader grasps the noise that they might hear had they been in the room with the speaker’s uncle through phrases like “knock-knee’d” and “clip clop.” This helps to accentuate the imagery of the scene that the speaker is describing.
At first, the tone of the poem is nostalgic and reverential. The speaker seems to be thinking back on his uncle in a very positive light. There is an overtone of admiration and praise in the speaker’s memory of his uncle. He believes in the natural talent and his ability to create these objects without machinery. This is the cause of the turn in the poem, which begins in the last section, starting on line 21. The conjunction “but” signifies the turn in the poem, as it lies between the former tone and the present. At this point, a more negative overtone is introduced in the poem. In lines 23-26, the speaker says “spine-curving chairs made up on tubes, with hollow/ steel-like bird bones that sat on rubber ploughs,/ thin beds, stretched not on boards, but blue high-tensioned cables, were what the world preferred.” Here, the speaker discusses the turn in worldly events. After the Industrial Revolution, carpenters like the speaker’s uncle were no longer needed because of the invention of machinery. The phrase “spine-curving,” as stated in line 23 to describe a chair, could instead refer to the feelings of the speaker and his uncle. This shows the pain that the duo felt when this occurred, and the talent the world had abandoned.