Christopher Okigbo’s Poetics and the Politics of Canonization
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| Lament of the Silent Sisters articulates cogently the persona’s sense of hurt, anguish, and protest. It is obvious that the poet seems to unite into a single vision the drowning of the Franciscan nuns and the sacrifice of children to the Canaanite Moloch and to compare them to the cruelty of African military dictators. Lament of the Silent Sisters, Okigbo says, was inspired by the death of Patrice Lumumba and the Western Nigerian crisis of 1962. In its articulation of the persona’s anxieties, there is a hovering between silent sorrow and delusory peace of mind. The crier in the opening stanza asks rhetorically: Is there … Is certainly there For as in sea-fever globules of fresh anguish Immense golden eggs empty of albumen Sink into our balcony Lament of the Silent Sisters 39 Robert Fraser, The Achievement of Christopher Okigbo,” in Critical Essays on Christopher Okigbo, ed. Uzoma Esonwanne (New York GK. Hall, 2000): Christopher Okigbo, Introduction to Okigbo, Labyrinths with Path of Thunder (London: Heinemann, 1971): xi. 34 Sunday O. Anozie, Christopher Okigbo: Creative Rhetoric (Ibadan: Evans, 1972): Downloaded from Brill.com06/12/2023 10:27:53AM via free access 272 abba Matatu 49 (2017) The tragic matrix of the situation is enfolded in the question How does one say no in thunder …” That the problem is resolved in silence shows the persona’s awareness of the absence of an escape ladder and the hopeless condition that is expressed in where is therefor us an anchorage.” The persona’s tragic condemnation to hang on by shallow sand banks,” killing time with the choir of inconstant dolphins outside the gates of life, and his inability to tap the deep fountains of experience, are all apparent. According to Okigbo, the Silent Sisters are […] sometimes like the drowning Franciscan nuns of Hopkins The Wreck of the Deutschland, sometimes like the ‘Sirenes’ of Debussy’s Nocturne […] although […] sure of spiritual safety, the ‘immense golden eggs that promise comfort are globules of anguish without albumen.’35 The images of protective double arches and the scented shadows of the church they see are mere shadows. There is no anchorage in the face of the storm that confronts them. In its imaginative exploration of this existential aloneness, Lament of the Silent Sisters truly embodies the spirit of Mallarmé’s poetry. Mallarmé’s sonnet, which Okigbo appropriates as a viable model, evokes a haunting sense of death and decay. We read of a room with nobody in it […] in a night made of absence and questioning, without furniture except for the plausible shape of vague console- tables, the dying frame of a mirror hung at the back with its stellar and incomprehensible reflection of the Great Bear, which alone connects this dwelling abandoned by the world to the sky.36 These images convey an empty and hopeless existential night. Man is portrayed as a dreamer who seeks a mystery which he does not know exists and which he will pursue fruitlessly forever. Okigbo identifies similar instances that suggest hopelessness in the presence of death in the African symbolic world that he explores. Nonetheless, in Lament of the Drums, a poem inspired by the imprisonment of Obafemi Awolowo and the death of his eldest son, there is an attempt to 35 Christopher Okigbo, Introduction to Okigbo, Labyrinths with Path of Thunder, xii. 36 Stéphane Mallarmé, letter to Henri Cazalis (18 July 1896), quoted in Anthony Hartley, Mallarmé (Baltimore md: Penguin, 1985): Downloaded from Brill.com06/12/2023 10:27:53AM via free access christopher okigbo’s poetics and the politics of canonization 273 Matatu 49 (2017) reformulate historical events which come to us wearing new meanings. The connection among Awolowo, Lumumba, Tammuz, Christ, and Palinurus is deliberate. They are, according to Fraser, a tragic pantheon whose ordeals the long drums lament In Okigbo’s variation on the Lament of the Flutes of Tammuz” Fraser recognizes the moment of tragic invocation representative of the perfect distillation of that power, shared by mystic and artist alike, to triumph over sheer negativity, which Okigbo found so appealing Although he seeks to inaugurate universal paradigms in his transcultural references, he is disgusted with the threat of human treachery. We behold his anguish at the decay of both human and natural cycles in the concluding section of the poem: For the far removed there is wailing: For the far removed; For the Distant … Download 153.51 Kb. Share with your friends:
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