Christopher Okigbo’s Poetics and the Politics of Canonization

christopher okigbo’s poetics and the politics of canonization
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Matatu 49 (2017) 260–279
tle formations, strategy, weaponry, position, and even the number of soldiers,
stressing instead the preparedness of soldiers to die in battle. Pierre responds:
“Man can be master of nothing while he is afraid of death. But he who does not fear death is lord of all. If it were not for suffering, man would not know his limitations, would not know himself.”27
It is edifying to point out that after his early poetry, on which critics like Chin- weizu and others heaped scathing criticism, Okigbo was to divest his poetry of borrowed elements, finding his authentic voice and occupying himself with the fate of common humanity. In his defence of the style of Okigbo’s early poetry,
Okafor has argued:
Okigbo was simply being a true internationalist symbolist poet whose poetry was characterized, like the best of the symbolist school, with its overwhelming concern with the non-temporal, nonsectarian, non- geographic, and non-national problem of the human condition the confrontation between human mortality and the power of survival through the preservation of the human sensitivities in the art forms.28
But beyond this, Okigbo in his later poetry also sought to apply his poetic hammer to Nigerian political leadership, especially comprador politicians and the military, whose blindness, greed, and divisive ethnocentrism led Nigeria into genocide. His prophetic delineation of the apocalyptic turn of events in
Path of Thunder was to be fulfilled in the debacle of 1966–1970. It was during that war, which threatened the Igbo with extinction, that this poet of destiny”
took up arms in defence of humanity, freedom, and the Biafrans’ right to self- determination. Unfortunately, three months into the war, he paid the ultimate price on behalf of his endangered community. In an interview with Obiageli
Okigbo, Chris Okigbo’s daughter, she noted that at the time of his death Okigbo had many projects in mind which he had outlined passionately, and so a person with such great ambitions could hardly have been wanting to die.
Despite his death in August 1967 at the age of thirty-five after eight years of serious poetry writing, he was recognized as the most important poet from
Africa. The quality and resonance of his poetry can only be compared to
27
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, tr. Rosemary Edmonds, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, vol. 2: 1000.
28
Dubem Okafor, Cycle of Doom Selected Essays in Discourse and Society (Lulu.com, Downloaded from Brill.com06/12/2023 10:27:53AM
via free access

270
abba
Matatu 49 (2017) the works of the great poets of the English literary tradition. Three factors that account for the depth of his idiom are his exposure to a wide range of intellectual disciplines his Catholic upbringing, which also contributed to the ritual expression and liturgical structure of his poetry and immersion in his indigenous culture and religion, of which he was a hereditary priest. All these were to endow his poetry with a haunting ritual and lyrical quality. If Okigbo is obsessed with the theme of death in his poetry, it is not because he seeks to show the desire for death rather, he seeks the symbolism of African rites of passage as viable models for mourning as well as rousing heroic chants to sublimate that experience In his reconfiguration of Mallarmé’s poetic model,
Okigbo finds in African elegiac tradition the exaltation of the human spirit which makes his poetry an integral part of the complex rites of passage that canonize the worthy dead in the afterlife.30
The themes of these elegies and dirges hover around death, its mystery, cruelty,
inevitability, and the fact that the dead live on even in the consciousness of the living. And the apparent defeat of a death is countered by the invocation of the immortal glory of the clan, a heritage to which the deceased contributed and through which he can lay claim to personal immortality. Thus, the tradition offers Okigbo occasions for mourning, celebration, and exhortation to greatness. If death and bereavement engender the most sober confrontation with life, they equally interrogate man’s stubborn desire for immortality. And dirges, while sublimating the terrors of death and broadening the capacity of the human spirit, translate the fear and pain of death into artistic victory.
At the threshold of his poetic endeavour, then, we witness why some scholars argue that much of his poetry is suffused with the aura of death or the death-wish. Okigbo’s choice of the elegiac tradition already foretells that death will bean overriding trope. In Lament of the Silent Sisters, for instance, we hear a universalistic shriek of fear and horror at the senseless emptiness of human activity This is why Robert Fraser observes that the real theme of
‘Silences’, succinctly stated, is the triumph of the authentic tragic conscious-
29
Diala 94.
30
Diala 94.
31
Donatus Ibe Nwoga, The Emergence of the Poet of Destiny A Study of Okigbo’s Lament of the Silent Sisters in Critical Perspectives on Christopher Okigbo, ed. Donatus Ibe Nwoga
(Washington dc Three Continents, 1984): Downloaded from Brill.com06/12/2023 10:27:53AM
via free access

christopher okigbo’s poetics and the politics of canonization
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Matatu 49 (2017) 260–279
ness over the demeaning facts of decay and death And in Limits, Distances,
and Silences, we encounter two sets of mourners who explore the possibilities of poetic metaphor in an attempt to elicit the music to which all imperishable cries must aspire. The confrontation between life and death remains a central trope in Limits and Distance. Okigbo himself suggests that both are mans outer and inner worlds”
projected—the phenomenal and the imaginative, not in terms of their separateness but of their relationship—an attempt to reconcile the universal opposites of life and death in alive die proposition one is the other and either is both.33
The protagonist in Siren Limits is in pursuit of illusion, symbolized by the
“white elephant This protagonist is the poet himself in a state of self-reflection at the end of a journey of several centuries from Nsukka to Yola in pursuit of what turned out to bean illusion. Yet, white elephant need not always suggest an illusion, for, as Sunday Anozie has contended, the white elephant (like the lioness the “watermaid,” and the rose) is a symbolic pawn in Okigbo’s conception of humankind’s spiritual quest for fulfilment (as well as a poetic equivalent to the poet’s private sensuality).34

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