Tidewash . . .  Memories

                fold-over-fold free-furrow,

                mingling old times with new.

Tidewash . . . Ride me

                memories, astride on firm

                saddle, wreathed with white

lilies and roses of blood ...

Sing to the rustic flute:

                Sing a new note . . .

                                “Lament of the Flutes,” 1962)

            One chill and glooming late afternoon just before Christmas 1967 I had occasion to telephone a former Nsukka colleague who was then teaching at a college in upper New York State. For many reasons, this is hardly the best means of giving or receiving news of a friend’s death, but that is how I came to learn that Christopher Okigbo had been killed almost at the beginning of the war against Biafra. When the conversation finished and the receiver had been replaced, the thought that Christopher was dead only reinforced the gloom and chill of that December evening.

            Any death of one assumed with reasonable security to be still among one’s living, if far-distant and long-silent, friends must leave a sad disorientation in the mind. This death came as a particularly severe shock, for Christopher was still only in his middle thirties and I remembered him as one who radiated life, energy, and a voracious zest for living -- however remote, meditative and even melancholy as his poems may sometimes have appeared. I remembered, too, our last meeting in Cambridge and in London, where he had played the generous host to my sister and me as a gracious representative of the Cambridge University Press. He and she had taken to each other instantly, and she remarked to me later, “I don’t think I’ve ever met a person so alive!”

            Liveliness and generous hospitality: these were the public marks of the man, as of his family and most of the Igbos I had encountered during my five rewarding years in Nigeria. Following his removal to Ibadan, my house at Nsukka had become Christopher’s regular habitation when his official travels brought him back that way; when I could visit westwards, his home was always at my disposal, whether he is there or not. As a correspondent he was, to say the least, dilatory, as a host, elusive. But his rare letters were contrite and delightful -- and when we did meet it was as if we had spent mere hours apart instead of months or seasons.

            Once, in Enugu, I met Christopher with his father and all his brothers and remarked afterwards on the great warmth of affection that seemed to unite them all. They had good cause, he said. The old man (formerly a schoolmaster in Ekwulobia, near the river town of Onitsha) had seen to it that all his sons should receive the best education possible and then had left it to their own inclinations what sort of careers they would pursue, without any pressure on his part. From government work and school teaching Christopher had moved to librarianship, and then become a poet and a publisher. Bede was an agriculturist, first at Ibadan and then at Nsukka. Pius, in those days, was an important economist in Enugu, married to a lovely French-speaking West African, Georgette, for the birth of whose third child (and first son) the poem “Comes the Newcomer” was added to Heavensgate:

In the chill breath of the day’s waking

comes the newcomer,

when the draper of May

has sold out fine green garments

and the hillsides have made up their faces,

and the gardens, on their faces a painted smile:

such synthetic welcome at the cock’s third siren;

when from behind the bulrushes

waking, in the teeth of the chill May morn,

comes the newcomer.

              (Labyrinths, p. 18)

            Simple and tender though this poem seems on the surface, it nevertheless permits us a glimpse behind Okigbo’s public mask of mischief and bonhomie at the sad, questing spirit it was worn to protect. In his fine study of Okigbo (Christopher Okigbo, African Publishing Corp., N.Y., 1972), Sunday Anozie describes him as one who was “deep down alone and a rather sad person . . . constantly striving towards a certain meaningful and creative synthesis of his life” which he never quite achieved. Feeling himself vulnerable, such a man will shade his true emotions with an ironic smile, as in that image of a “synthetic welcome” laid on the hillsides and gardens by “the draper of May” (as if spring were a dealer in cloth and dry goods).

                In an unguarded moment Christopher’s expression could be profoundly melancholic, like that in  the frontispiece portrait in Anozie’s book. It did not take me long to see why so many of his poems made such profoundly sad, often nostalgic, music. For one thing there was his wife, Safinat, “bonded” to a school in the North, up near Lake Chad. “Every time I meet her,” he told me once, “I fall in love all over again.” And I shall never forget his radiant face and contagious joy when he announced the birth of his daughter, Ibrahimat -- Labyrinths is dedicated to them both” “mother and child” -- though I suspect he also had in mind the figurative Muse-Mother and Poet-Child of Heavensgate,”Mother Idoto” and Okigbo her “sunbird” son.

            Then there was the matter of his professional work that kept him from his writing far too often and the worse problem of wanting to write but feeling unready or unable. That was what brought us together over the making of ‘Heavensgate,” and perhaps lies behind the inscription on a typescript version of “Limits” still in my possession, from which I took the epigraph for this chapter: “I could never have written this if I did not meet you.” Talking with me, or having me read to him, would somehow set him to work again, or temporarily exorcise the paralysis that beset him.

            One such conference, quite early in our association, helped produce one of the most flawless of all Okigbo’s poems, the “Watermaid” vision already mentioned in my chapter on figures of the Muse, where I recalled how Christopher and some of my student-poets saw a connection between my own “Arthurian Lady of the Lake” and the “Mammy-Wota” of Igbo folklore. The result remains, for me, one of the most succinct statements about poetic inspiration to be found in modern literature:

Bright

with the armpit-dazzle of a lioness,

she answers,

wearing white light about her;

and the waves escort her,

my lioness,

crowned with moonlight.

So brief her presence --

match-flare in wind’s breath --

so brief with mirrors around me.

Downward . . .

the waves distill her;

gold crop

sinking upgathered.

Watermaid of the salt-emptiness,

grown are the ears of the secret.

            Sunday Anozie calls this “the finest movement of all” in the “Heavensgate” sequence (now incorporated into Labyrinths, p. 10), finding it “remarkable for its beautiful synthesis of lyrical mood, poetic vision and a sense of tragedy.” (Christopher Okigbo, p. 58) It is also a fine example of how this poet rode both his memories and the echoes of other poets into a music distinctively his own, for behind this matchless moment of “intuitive pulsion” lies a short poem of Robert Browning’s (“Meeting at Night”) that was a particular favourite of Christopher’s. The narrator lands his boat on a moonlight beach, where waves leap “in fiery ringlets,” and crosses the fields to a nearby farm for a meeting with his sweetheart. When he arrives outside her window there is “A tap on the pane, the quick sharp scratch/And blue spurt of a lighted match” -- and poet Okigbo had his “match-flare in wind’s breath” glimpse of his Muse, escorted by waves and wearing white moonlight for a crown as he stood there “with mirrors around” him.

he typescript of “Limits” mentioned above was handed to me in April 1962, the revised copy for Labyrinths being prepared by Christopher in Ibandan in October 1965 -- by which time, perhaps, he could sense, if not his own death, some shape, at least, of the troubles that were to come upon the rapidly disintegrating Federation of Nigeria. Images of blood sacrifice, for example, which become explicit in “Path of Thunder” (subtitled “Poems Prophesying War”), are already hinted at in “Distances II,” where “Death lay in ambush that evening in that island” while he and his friends were “talking of such commonplaces/and on the brink of such great events” -- and the “politicians in tall wood” of “Distances III” will return with the eagles and the robbers in an “iron dance of mortars” in the “Elegy for Alto” that concludes the book.

            This, alas, has been the pattern of events in too many newly independent African nations in recent years: hard on the heels of the initial euphoria of emancipation has come, first, disillusionment with the new regime, and then bloody massacres or a series of coups that leave the country more ravaged, weary and sick at heart than ever it was before. As one former student wrote to me a while ago, “not only are the beautiful ones not yet born but it seems they may never be.”

            Among the gifted young writers who, in recent years, have added West African Literature to the international map, this disillusionment has produced both scathing satire on the corruptions of society (like the work of Ayi Kwei Amah quoted by my friend above) and a searching of traditional values and mythologies for some illumination of the spirit by which to direct their own lives and those of their fellow Africans. The poems, plays and prose works of Wole Soyinka are the record of such a quest undertaken, as it were, in public, on behalf of the Yoruba people of Western Nigeria. The collected poems of Christopher Okigbo are a more personal, inward or private account of a similar spiritual journey, undertaken by an Igbo of Eastern Nigeria equally steeped in the folklore and mores of his own people, and equally conversant with the religion and culture of the white men whose schools and missions, politics and language, are still forces in the land.

            The story told in Labyrinths, then, at least to the end of “Distance,” is similar to that adumbrated by Robert Graves in his poem for his son, “To Juan at the Winter Solstice”: the one to which “all lines or lesser gauds belong/That startle with their shining/Such common stories as they stray into.” The pattern traced by that story is the circle followed by Joseph Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces, crossing the threshold between outward appearances and inward reality on a night-sea journey to a sacred marriage with a mother goddess (the Watermaid), and thence to a kind of home-coming, transfigured and restored, where in the light of common day the poet-hero offers his gift of insight and inspiration (his “boon,” or “Elixir of Life”) to all who are willing and able to receive it.

            To unfold that story as it happened to him, Christopher draws upon Christian imagery, classical and Sumerian mythology, Igbo folklore and ritual, and personal reminiscence elavated to the level of myth. “Limits,” for example, employs more than one reference to the Epic of Gilgamesh (including Irakalla, Sumerian Queen of the Underworld), to Picasso’s Guernica (based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur), and to Christopher’s childhood nurse, Eunice, “known for her lyricism.” “Lament of the Drums III” (from “ Silences”) names “Celaeno and her harpy crew” and Aeneas’ drowned pilot, Palinurus, in an elegy of exceptional plangency and charm:

It is over, Palinurus, at least for you,

In your tarmac of night and fever-dew:

Tears of grace, not sorrow, broken

In two, protest your inviolable image;

And the sultry waters, touched by the sun,

Inherit your paleness who reign, resigned.

(Labyrinths, p. 47)

“Distances”and “Heavensgate” both combine Christian and Igbo sacrifices -- and “Heavensgate” includes such Ekwulobia notables as Kepkanly the teacher, Jadum the half-mad minstrel, and Upandru, the linguist, or explainer. Another well-known local figure, Father Flannagan, first principal of Christ the King College, Onitsha, appears in “Limits VII” as one who “preached the Pope’s message” in the village orchard -- and in a poem later dropped from “Heavensgate” (much to my regret) Christopher also recalled his learning by rote of Greek and Latin tags; and of the English nursery rhyme “Little Bo-Peep,” which came out as “etru bo pi” in his Igbo attempt to master the alien words.

            That he did eventually master the alien words (and with them the modes of thought) not only of English but also of Latin, Greek and French, becomes very clear from a study of the verse techniques employed in any of the poems in Labyrinths. From the beginning Christopher was strongly allusive, if not derivative, in his writing; at its best, however, when the echoes of Virgil, Eliot and the others have been subdued to the tones of his own distinctive voice, it is also “the poetry of an African, a native.” Only an African, however cosmopolitan, could have composed the “Watermaid” sequence in “Heavensgate”; only an African who had mastered much other knowledge could have produced the  complex image of poetic growth that is “Limits II”:

            For he was a shrub among the poplars,

                Needing more roots

                More sap to grow to sunlight,

                Thirsting for sunlight,

                A low growth anong the forest.

Into the soul

The selves extended their branches,

Into the moments of each living hour,

Feeling for audience

Straining thin among the echoes;

And out of the solitude

Voice and soul with selves unite,

Riding the echoes,

Horsemen of the apocalipse;

And crowned with one self

The name displays its foliage,

Hanging low

A green cloud above the forest.

            The tree imagery here remind Echeruo of Ezra Pound’s “A Girl.” In its symbolic identification with the poet’s needs and aspiration, however, it is closer to the chesnut tree in Hervey Allen’s novel, Anthony Adverse, or the great oak in John Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown. As for the “Horsemen of the Apocalypse” who ride the echoes of all the other poets in the forest of the mind, they have become for Christopher voices of revelation, pointing the way home to his own voice, his true poetic self. Until its name can display its foliage, no longer “a shrub among the poplars” but “A green cloud above the forest” of now resolved identities.

            This is precisely the explanation of the Minotaur myth offered by Joseph Campbell at the conclusion of his first chapters, on “Myth and Dream,” in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, 1949, p. 25). In his view, the apparently solitary quest is not so lonely, or so terrifying, after all:

for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known ... And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had  thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with the world.

How close this comes to Christopher’s final comments in his beautifully lucid (and elucidating) Introduction to Labyrinths. The book is, he says, “a fable of man’s perennial quest for fulfilment,” owing as much to Igbo as to Cretan mythology, and directing the reader to the palace of the White Goddess through “the complex of rooms and ante-rooms, of halls and corridors ... in which a country visitor might easily lose his way.” It assumes throughout “a poet protagonist” whose affinities reach beyond Orphesus to Gilgamesh and Aeneas, Captain Ahab and the Fisher King: “one with a load of destiny on his head.” Necessarily, therefore, the work is “a cry of anguish -- of the root extending its branches of coral, of corals extending their roots into each living hour.” Reading Labyrinths is like “telling the beads of a rosary” composed of “globules of anguish strung together on memory.” “The present dream,” he concludes, “clamoured to be born a candenced cry: silence to appease the fever of flight beyond the iron gate: -- which, in Andrew Marvell’s “Lines, to his Coy Mistress,” locks us into life and time.

            The nature of that flight is preserved in a poem dropped from Labyrinths but which appears at the end of the Mbari version of “Heavensgate”:

Drop of dew on green bowl fostered

on leaf green bowl grows under the lamp

without flesh of colour;

under the lamp into stream of

song, streamsong,

in flight into the infinite--

a blinded heron

thrown against the infinite--

where solitude

weaves her interminable mystery

under the lamp ...

                                (Heavensgate, 1962, p. 39)

When the “streamsong” there engendered broadened into the music of “Distances” it struck a curiously somber note as the solitude seemed increasingly lonesome and sacrificial. “From flesh into phantom on the horizontal stone,” he tells us, “I was the sole witness to my homecoming” and goes on to recall the imagery of Baudelaire’s prose poem “Les Bienfaits de la Lune” which I had adapted as “The Moon’s Godchildren” just before leaving Ghana:

For in the inflorescene of the white

chamber, a voice, from very far away,

chanted, and the chamber descanted, the birthday of earth,

paddled me home through some dark

labyrinth, from laughter to the dream.

                          (Labyrinths, p. 53)

            That voice returns, plangent and direful, in the sixth and final movement, calling the poet to “Come into my cavern/Shake the mildew from your hair” as Nigeria moves closer to disintegration and her distracted “acolyte” finds that he has entered her “ bridal chamber” only to be “ the sole witness to my homecoming.” Then follows “Path of Thunder: Poems Prophesying War” in which Christopher prays to become a “man of iron throat” and caustically realizes “If I don’t learn to shut my mouth I’ll soon go to hell/I, Okigbo, town-crier, together with my iron bell.”

            On the opposite page to that scurrility appears “Come Thunder” (p. 66), a seer-like jeremiad as eerie in its surrealism as the lovely lamentation “Silence IV” (p. 42), which I quoted in an earlier form in my memorial tribute to Okigbo published in African Arts (UCLA, Summer 1978, pp. 68-70). The older version told how “wild winds cry out against us” (Igbos everywhere) and ended on a questioning refrain:

Will the water gather us?

As deep and profound as scented shadows,

Silences are loud like mountain waterfalls.

--Will the water gather us ...

Gather us ... gather us ...

And the rest, as for Hamlet, was indeed silence. In “Come Thunder” the scene has darkened even further as “The smell of blood already floats in the lavender-mist of the afternoon” and “The death sentence lies in ambush along the corridors of power.” Then, in an image reminiscent of Yeats’s “slouching beast” from Spiritus Mundi in “The Second Coming,” the poet senses “a great fearful thing” tugging “at the cables of the open air ... An iron dream unnamed and unprintable, a path of stone.” The poem concludes on a note of terrible foreboding:

The arrows of God tremble at the gates of light,

The drums of curfew pander to a dance of death;

And the secret thing in its heaving

Threatens with iron mask

The last lighted torch of the century ...

s Sunday Anozie points out in the Introduction to his book, Okigbo’s poetry is as “difficult” to grasp with any assurance as that of T.S. Eliot, whom Christopher both admired and imitated. (And, since its quality as “a poetry of echoes” has already been allowed, I cannot forebear to note an Achebe title embedded in “The arrows of God” line above.) Like Eliot, he wrestled with “complex and difficult themes, near to the boundaries of thought.” (Christopher Okigbo, p.1) Nevertheless, as each sequence unfolds we can see not only the recurrent involutions of the poet’s thought but also its immense importance to all men of feeling and imagination. For Okigbo was a generous spirit, addressing himself to men of good will the world over, albeit in the tones and idiom of an African who knew and loved well both African and the English language he found most convenient to use.

            A mathematician as well as a classical scholar, a keen athlete as well as a highly intellectual poet, Christopher employed his knowledge, his experience, and the full range of his enthusiasms to map for us the “perennial quest for  fulfilment” he had undertaken as both an artist and a human being. For this reason, while the Labyrinths poems proper depict his pilgrimage in search of integration (union with the Watermaid, the “White Goddess”), many of them are already as political in their implications as those in “Path of Thunder” -- a sequence which confirms Theodore Rosak’s plea for a Blakelike “politics of the imagination” (Pol Ndu’s “unprogrammed imagination”) to counteract the technocratic trap that today is fast encircling even Africa in its omnivorous maw.

            Prophet and seer as he was, Okigbo had a strong sense of obligatioin to the poor and the oppressed; for those who suffer in the wars “the Big Men” oblige us to wage. From being a “Sunbird” he became in turn both “town-crier” and “prodigal”-- speaking out on behalf of his fellow-countrymen and finally risking death, passionately peace-seeking though he had been, for the vision he cherished of a free, united and enlightened Igbo people. The “romantic” nature of this sacrifice, as Anozie indicates in his Conclusion, was typical of the man: a dynamic and dedicated young writer who, in a little more than seven years, earned a deservedly international acclaim for himself as spokesman for a neglected people -- and for all that is finest in the aspirations of mankind.

            In the few years he was granted there, Christopher Okigbo established himself as “the prophet of Nsukka”: a reputation now enhanced by the nature of his death as well as his accomplishments. That the mystery he so passionately sought to penetrate is not only interminable but also cyclical he seems to have realized by the end of “Path of Thunder,” whose concluding image is as nobly resigned to the patterns of change as that of the gathering swallows in Keats’s Ode to Autum:

            An old star departs, leaves us here on the shore

                Gazing heavenward for a new star approaching;

                The new star appears, foreshadows its going

                Before a going and coming that goes on forever ...

Here and elsewhere in Labyrinths Okigbo speaks “as one having authority”: an authority he worked hard for and had come so close to achieving before he was killed. As Adrain Roscoe puts it in Mother is Gold (C.U.P., 1971, p. 69), “The civil war brought Okigbo’s career to a tragic and untimely close. But his influence lives on and his achievements stand acknowledged” among his survivors and successors as a fructifying legend and a beacon to their path.

Culled from Songs of Gold,

an unpublished manuscript of a  book by Professor Peter Thomas,

this piece initially appeared in Songs for Idoto,

the book-catalogue published by Onix Publishers in

commemoration of the Christopher Okigbo memorial exhibit in 1996/97.