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) is non-being.19 And because suicides inmost cases attempt to masquerade as holy warriors, such terms as sacrifice martyr and martyrdom should be used with caution. Certain modes of revolutionary temper need to be hedged about with a thick mesh of caveats because what is beneficial about them is also what is dangerous about them.
We can easily locate Okigbo’s self-giving impulse within Kant’s theory of the ethical act, which views the martyr as transformed and reborn for the community, which through his action will be redeemed. Unlike the suicide who dies with one eye fixed on absolute freedom from the crises that surround his miserable existence, Okigbo lets goof everything in defence of his perishing community. In TS. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, for instance, Thomas Becket acknowledges that the apparent paradox of true martyrdom is that only by contemplating the fruits of your action can it prove fruitful Unlike many who were prepared to die for religion many centuries ago, what Okigbo,
with his sense of patriotism, was prepared to die, and actually died, for was the nation. According to Benedict Anderson,
Nationalism is a lingering trace of transcendence in a secular world. Like god, the nation is immortal, indivisible, invisible yet all encompassing,
without origin or end, worthy of our dearest love, and the very ground of our being. Like God too, its existence is a matter of collective faith.21
All around the world, many cultures celebrate those willing to sacrifice their lives fora cause. And in the history of nations and their conflicts, the martyr is the ultimate source of pride. But as we can see from the life of the suicide, the power to will oneself out of existence is an experience which shows that life progresses transgressively, unhinging all systems of meaning and significance,
fore-closing the possibility of reasonable political action.”22
Augustine, Slavoj Žižek, and Terry Eagleton validate Kant’s theoretical framework in which we locate Okigbo. For the most part, Okigbo, beyond his poetry of engagement, demonstrated in the warscape the passion of a soldier who has a strong sense of duty and a willingness to sacrifice all for the common good. His confrontation with the armoured tank before which he is laid low is psychologically equivalent to the experience of a soldier who jumps on a grenade to absorb a blast and protect the vulnerable. This is neither an attempt
19
Eagleton, Holy Terror, 90.
20
Eagleton, Holy Terror, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, paraphrased in Eagleton, Holy Terror, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, paraphrased in Eagleton, Holy Terror, Downloaded from Brill.com06/12/2023 10:27:53AM
via free access

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Matatu 49 (2017) to glorify suicidal gestures nor a psychic wish to die but a heroic drive to transcendence. For, if the psychic suicide is biologically alive, he is equally dead to the symbolic coordinates of social, political, and economic life he is an individual who is placed in the suicidal outside of the symbolic order Okigbo’s heroic drive towards transcendence incarnates his defiance of death and affirmation of the immortality of the human spirit.
It has be to be made clear that the curious contestation that Okigbo’s death was a mere suicide arises from a failure to appreciate the redemptive human dimensions of the Biafran cause for which Okigbo gave his life Pius Okigbo,
endorsing his younger brother’s self-sacrifice, affirms that the greatest demand of the Biafran situation was the ultimate self-giving which his younger brother willingly embraced:
Only someone versed in the most abstruse form of taxidermy could have lived through the Eastern Nigeria of 1966 to 1970 and pretended that the psychopathology and trauma of the society could not touch him and that his life would ever remain the same or that he could just go about writing inanities while the life experience around him betrayed the most desperate craving.25
Echeruo’s affirmation that, apart from his folk-canonization, Okigbo was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Order of the Republic of
Biafra for his gallantry in the war illuminates the public respect for his sacrifice. According to Echeruo, Okigbo was among the gallant Biafrans killed in the course of the war who were celebrated as heroes and martyrs. Significantly also,
Obumselu connects Okigbo’s conception of war as the ultimate test of manliness to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He finds Okigbo’s action in the war justified in the novel’s suggestion that war entails defiance of death and abandonment of the rules of logic. Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, for instance, reveals to Pierre
Bezukhov that the secret of victory in battles involves de-emphasizing bat-
23
Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Christopher Okigbo, Print, and the Poetry of Postcolonial Modernity Research in African Literatures 43.2 (Summer 2012): Pius Okigbo, Christopher Okigbo: A Toast (1994), in Critical Essays on Christopher Okigbo,
ed. Uzoma Esonwanne (New York GK. Hall, 2000): Michael J.C. Echeruo, A Concordance to the Poems of Christopher Okigbo (With the Complete

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