Daphnisego in silvis hinc usque ad sidera notus,
Formosi
pectoris custos, Formosior1
begin with these words
taken from Vergil for a variety of reasons. First, it is necessary to
recall that Okigbo was primarily a student of Latin poetry. He did say a
great many charming things about his debt to Stephane Mallarme, Debussy
and Cubist painters. In mid career, he certainly profited from a
thorough study of Leopold Sedar Senghor’s Nocturnes and Yoruba
praise poetry. But we should acknowledge that he went through six years
of punishing undergraduate study of Latin scansion and translation. He
was admittedly not a great scholar. He lacked patience; loved the drama
of human intercourse and the freedom of the open air far too much; and
recoiled instinctively from the drudgery of undergraduate discipline.
But the wit and steady beat of Vergillan verse stayed in his imagination
all his life. He was not able to repeat that measure in English verse.
But even so he always tried to achieve syllabic regularity in his
versification. He insisted that every poem he wrote had a tune of which
he alone had the original score. Reviewing Heavensgate when it
first appeared, Ulli Beier dwelt almost exclusively on this musical
quality in the work. The poems, he said, were insufficiently visualized.
But we can hear
his verse, it fills our minds like a half-forgotten tune returning to
memory. Everything he touches vibrates and swings and we are compelled
to read on and to follow the tune of his chant, hardly worried about the
fact that we understand little of what he has to say.2
Beier thought, quite
erroneously, that what produced the music was the memory of African
ritual chants; and he went on to explain the obscurity of the poems in
terms of the inaccessibility of cultic rituals.
He (Okigbo) wants to carry us away on his
chant - or rather on his incantation. For incantation is, I think, the
best word one can find for Okigbo’s poetry. The moment you start to read
you feel that you have intruded into the sacred enclosure of a secret
cult. You have no right to be there, but you are too fascinated to
leave. The chanting can be understood by the initiates alone, but you
are receptive to its beauty.
It has often been assumed that the title of
Okigbo’s first volume of poems comes from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29;
and that the poet imagined himself as a fledgling
... at
break of day arising
from sullen
earth, (to) sing hymns at heavensgate
But Okigbo hardly ever
read Shakespeare. In any case, it is not the newborn poet who is at
heavensgate in these poems. It is the old self, precisely the situation
of Daphnis in the eclogue of Vergil which I cited.
The first
poem Okigbo ever wrote, ‘Debtor’s Lane’ was practically a translation of
the opening lines of Vergil’s Eclogue I. We shall see later that
in lamenting the death of Segun Awolowo in 1964, it was to an episode in
Vergil’s Aened V that he turned.
I have a
third reasoning for beginning with a reference to Daphnis at heaven’s
gate. The statement in that poem that Daphnis the poet is far more
lovely than his poems holds true of Okigbo. Everybody, or nearly
everybody, loved him. By his freedom from practical anxieties, his
willingness to try anything, and his intolerance of the hypocrisies of
good form, he had an unusual power of taking life’s burdens away. People
from all walks of life flocked round him: senior government officials,
university teachers, hawkers, house maids, foreign diplomats, army
officers ... His hospitality at Igbosere Street, Lagos and Cambridge
House, Ibadan was unstinting up till the middle of the month. When beer
could no longer be paid for, the very air of the house was still
intoxicating enough. His conversation was loud and extravagant. It was
the delight of utterance that moved him rather than the need to
communicate. Eager to please, he chose invariably the most outrageous
way to do so. It was easy, perhaps correct, to dislike him. Professor
David Knight, a fine Canadian scholar and novelist of exemplary
rectitude, began his commemorative sonnet for Okigbo with a strong
expression of distaste:
I remember you
sprawled in a deep wood armchair, with beer
On the flat arm,
bickering with your wife, not nicely, nastily.
I didn’t like you...3
Yet, with all his
contradictions, Okigbo remained for his innumerable friends the finest
example of that abundant indiscriminating love which Badeliare called
“the holy prostitution of a soul that gives itself utterly with all its
poetry and charity... to the passing unknown.” His one perfect and
unforgettable poem was himself.
Okigbo
started writing poetry late in life when he found himself in terrible
difficulties; and those difficulties throw a light upon the nature of
his poetic aims. He wrote nothing as a university student. He had come
to Ibadan trailing the clouds of an awesome reputation as a cricketer,
footballer, hockey player and pianist. Even in those early days, he had
begun to cast his eyes on the possibilities of the wider world with its
great careers, great loves, and great fortunes. He socialised, talked
and played the piano. That he chose to study Latin and Greek literatures
meant that he had ambitions in humane learning. But he could not become
a scholar because he was an athlete. Nor could he become an athlete
because he dabbled in the bogus politics of Professor Chike Obi’s
Dynamic Party. Nor could he be a political activist because he was
tempted by the urbane dissipations of a man of leisure. He was incapable
of that merciless lopping off of the heads of sundry distractions upon
which solid achievement must depend.
The same
multiplication of interests followed him to Lagos when he took up an
administrative position in the Ministry of Information. He was at the
same time close confidant and private secretary to the minister, chief
operations officer of Kitson and Partners doing shadowy business with
the Italian firm of Bozotti, athlete, politician, and supplier of goods
and services to several foreign companies.
To further
lengthen the odds, Okigbo always defied the nature of things. When he
drove a car, he insisted on changing gears without using the clutch
padal. It was a form of play on which he exercised considerable
patience. When his wife sent him a horse (which he names Satan), he
immediately sped to the polo field, was carried up by the horse and,
clutching the animal’s neck, he galloped round as a polo player. He
could not get off his bed the morning after their frolic.
It has
generally been said that Okigbo joined the Biafran Army at the outbreak
of civil hostilities in 1967. Professor Ali Mazrui has even convened a
court of immortals to try the poet for getting involved in tribal
warfare. Unfortunately almost all wars are tribal wars. And Okigbo did
not, in fact, join the Biafran Army. He simply went to the war front as
thousands of students flocked to the Balkan Wars of 1912/13 and to the
Spanish Civil War of 1936/39. He wanted, like Xenophon during the
Persian invasion of Greece (499-449 BC), to write his Anabasis.
But he did not merely wish to report the historical struggle. He was
determined to match his untutored military instincts, not against
Federal troops, but against Sandhurst-trained Biafran officers. “I am
going to disprove Sandhurst,” he said. As it happened, Sandhurst-trained
officers were cagy and survived. He wasn’t and did not. In 1971 at
Oxford, I saw in a dream a long line of soldiers stretching block after
block and marching to the tune of the Beef Eaters. Carried upon their
shoulders was a single super-gun which also stretched block after block.
And beside the soldiers sauntered Okigbo whistling tunelessly. As I
began to laugh and cried out “He has done it again!” I woke up still
laughing.
Even in his
approach to the writing of poetry he was piratical. He did not deign to
supplicate the Muse and learn her ways. He did not consider that she is
a shy young lady to be approached in stages. His purpose always was to
take her by storm.
In 1958,
however, realities took their revenge. Okigbo’s commercial companies,
which had only existed notionally, folded up. His marriage, contracted
that year with a most charming girl, was in difficulties. He was thrown
out of his position in the Information Ministry; and he did not have a
penny to his name. His expense account at Kingsway Stores was stopped.
Other misfortune followed with attendant complications.
In the wake
of the crisis, Okigbo retired to Fiditi in Oyo State to teach in a
grammar school. He needed that quiet corner to recuperate and make a new
beginning. More importantly, he needed to re-examine himself and find
the resources to build a new life. It was here in Fiditi that he turned
to the poetry of T.S. Eliot and started writing poetry.
Eliot was a
particularly appropriate choice for a man in Okigbo’s situation. For he
spoke about the emptiness of all worldly striving, about the wreckage
which litters the shores of time, about the soundless withering and
wailing of all life. It was heart-warming to identify with this
distinguished writer who repudiated all the enterprises from which
Okigbo had just retired. With its intellectual refinement, its casual
references to German, French, Italian, Latin and Greek literatures in
the original languages, its acquaintance with Bhagavad Gita, Dante, St.
Augustine and the chants of Siberian shamans, its unsettling existential
wit, its mastery of both expository and lyrical poetic forms, Eliot’s
poetry both tranquilized the heart and stimulated Okigbo’s active
emulation.
Reading
poetry can be a truancy from real life. For poetry often deals with
wonderful things that did not happen and could not happen. Eliot speaks
about the glorious life of the spirit; and this could easily become, for
Okigbo, a continuation of the romantic dreaming which vitiated
everything he attempted. The change from sport, dream business empires,
and dream loves to poetry could easily be no change at all.
But writing
poetry is also a practical activity. It imposes its own strict code of
discipline. And it habituates the mind to hardwork and self-criticism.
By hindsight we can see that writing poetry changes Okigbo’s life by
giving a legitimate outlet to the turbulent poetic stream in his nature
and by confining it within accepted limits.
It is well,
however, to realise that Eliot’s poetry is practically inimitable. Its
fine conceits and paradoxes, its fires that burn and save, its splendid
earth studded with sapphire and garlic, its silent sister supremely
ignorant and wise, are not conceptions one can take away and re-locate
elsewhere. They are part and parcel of a specific philosophical,
religious and anthropological outlook. You cannot take the imagery and
leave the outlook behind.
In reading
‘Lament of the Lavender Mist,’ for example, we easily begin to see that
Okigbo’s thoughts and the Eliot imagery which he occasionally borrowed
are in conflict. The events in the love affair on which the poem is
based are not described. But the disconcerting emotions of the real-life
drama are clear enough. However, as we begin to encounter phrases like
“lightning without rain: or “thunder without smell of water”, phrases
which come from ‘The Wasteland’ and ‘Ash Wednesday’, the situation
becomes confused. The problem is not that of assigning meanings to such
phrases. The problem is that the meanings we do assign cannot be
reconciled with the religious context in Eliot’s poetry. Okigbo would
seem to be putting Eliot’s ascetic words to jocular sensual uses. The
effect is that ‘Lament of the Lavender Mist’ fails to hang together as a
poem. Yet it ends in a magnificently sustained lyric on the decay of
unfulfilled passion which is one of the best things Okigbo ever wrote.
Heavengate composed in 1961/62 at Nsukka is a re-working of the
theme of ‘Lament of the Lavender Mist’. In doing this longer set of
variations on the same theme, Okigbo resolutely suppressed the personal
elements in the experience. Indeed, it is these personal matters which
are the unavowed secret:
Secret I have told into no ear,
save into a
dughole, to hold, not to drown with -
Secret I have planted in the beachsand.
The suppression is, however, not complete.
‘Watermaid’ in the Heavensgate sequence is a fine lyric indeed. The
central image of a bright angelic presence is beautifully sustained. And
there is a wistful melody which harmonizes the conception. The basic
idea must have been suggested by the description of Mary in ‘Ash
Wednesday’ as
One who moves in
time between sleep and walking, wearing
White light folded, sheathed about her, folded;
But there are a few
images in the poem which do not relate to an inspiring presence. For
instance, the phrase
gold crop
sinking ungathered
can only refer to
sexual opportunity missed; and it makes nonsense of the Eliot quotation
and to Okigbo’s extra-textual references to Grave’s ‘The White Goddes’.
The problem which faced Okigbo
as a new poet still learning his trade was two-pronged. He needed a
poetic idiom capable of raising his own personal experience to the
intensity of great art. The famous poets he studied could teach him
something about the basics of the trade. But they could not teach him
how to create musical phrases and how to invent the imagery appropriate
to his own individual expression. Secondly, Okigbo did not want to speak
as an individual in his poetry. He wanted to be the voice of a universal
music in which the timeless concerns of mankind are turned into song. So
far he could not master this art by reading Eliot. So far his own
obsessive brooding with a cruel past obstructed him. But the art of T.S.
Eliot remained with him almost permanently as an example.
In speaking
of his models, Okigbo almost inevitably mentioned the nineteenth-century
French poet, Stephane Mallarme. He did indeed read the poet in the
Penguin French text with English prose rendering. But these prose
translations were no use at all in dealing with an extremely difficult
poet who insisted so much on condensation and refinement of form. And
Mallarme would have been a congenial guide. Like Okigbo, he had no use
for any philosophical, religious, or mythical consolations. He totally
condemned the kind of poetry that has a message. The glory of the poet’s
art lay, for him, in the intensity of the poetic process itself, which
like God or Edomite princes, was capable of creating out of nothing. The
poet, in this view, needs nothing to raise his art to the highest pitch;
the intensity is in the art itself. This was a possible answer to the
question Okigbo was asking in 1961/62. But there is no simple echo of
Mallarme in his work. With his love of curiosities, it is easy to
imagine the play he would have made of the idea of the poem as “I enfant
d’une nuit d’Idumee...”
By the time
that ‘Lament of the Lavender Mist’ was written, Okigbo had aready
started reading the poetry of Leopold Sedar Senghor. Senghor was a
founding member of the Committee for Black Orpheus; and from the
beginning that journal based in Ibadan featured his work. The June 1961
edition had ten of Senghor’s poems taken from the last collection titled
Nocturnes. Senghor’s poetry, as Okigbo read them in Ulli Beier’s
English translation, was as sustained in its eloquence as T.S. Eliot’s.
And it shows a similar unity of theme and imagery. But the structure and
the rhetoric of Senghor’s poetry are radically different from the
American poet’s. Senghor does not use the symphonic form; and his
imagery is a shower of brilliant sparks which dazzle the reader by their
variety of colour and trajectory. Moreover, Senghor’s verbal tropes are
not the foci of his meaning in the same way that Eliot’s rivers, fires,
and mythical thunder claps focus his Christian concerns. Senghor’s
images are truly incidental, exaggerated in tone, and sensual although
the sensuality is modified by the subtleties of a style which, as
Senghor’s French biographer Armand Guibert pointed out, “sustain the
posture and illusion of chastity” without the substance. Instead, they
widen connections and associations to create a shadowy zone of unstated
meanings round the subject matter of the poem. This is the so-called
surrealistic imagery which, in Senghor’s own account, is an African
thing not deriving from Andre Breton and the French surrealists but from
the Wollof and Serer griots of Senegal from whom he learnt his trade.
Senghor’
Nocturnes (which contained five elegies) introduced Okigbo to the
“elegies” and “laments” which dominate his subsequent work. They taught
him to “score” his poems for traditional musical instruments. Above all,
they demonstrated the “surrealistic” image which is capable of raising
any and every poem to the pitch of art without mythological or
philosophical props.
From 1962
onwards, Okigbo produced a series of fine poems: ‘Lament of the Silent
Sisters,’ ‘Lament of Drums,’ ‘Elegy of the Wind,’ ‘Elegy of Slit Drums,’
‘Elegy for Alto’ and ‘Distances’ in which the new kind of image he found
in Senghor was put to use. Of these poems, ‘Lament of the Wind’ is one
of the most fully realised and perhaps the most memorable. It surveys
the poet’s past life, admits his failures and discouragements, and looks
forward exultantly to future creative possibilities. In this new
confidence to use all the resource of the various traditions he
inherited in speaking about his own life, his convictions and dreams lie
true originality. As we read ‘Elegy for the Wind’, we are aware, of
course, of some allusions to Senghor’s ‘Elegie de Circoncis’. It
is through Senghor that we discover the connection between sexual
mutilation in the circumcision ceremony, the demolition of home and
country in order to rebuild them, and the mutilatioin of words in the
search for new poetic forms.
Ah! mouir a
I’enfance, que meure la poeme se deint la syntaxe, que s’abineux
tous les mots
qui ne sont pas essentials.
Le poids du
rythme suffit, pas besoin de mots-ciment pour batir sur le roc la cite
de demain.
Okibgo’s words about circumcision are quite
explicit:
The chief
priest of the sanctuary has uttered
the
enchanted words:
The bleeding
phallus, Dripping fresh from the carnage cries out for
the medicinal
leaf...
The application of this description to the
preparation for his own belated maturity is clear enough. There are no
verbal debts to Senghor. The poem is totally individual in its idiom and
verbal and musical excitement; and it confidently proclaims the poet’s
awareness of his place in the world.
Generally
speaking, the effect of Senghor’s poetry on Okigbo was liberating. It
taught him a new kind of eloquence and turned his attention back to the
African tradition. The direct impact of Senghor’s Gallic refinement was
perhaps lost in Ulli Beier’s English translation; but that only enabled
Okigbo to rely on his own poetic resources.
There now
remains one important stream of poetic ideas to discuss before
concluding this review of what Okigbo inherited. Beginning from his very
first poem, he could only take the form of an exotic African decor. But
with the dawning of the Yoruba poetic revival in the early sixties, new
possibilities presented themselves. By 1964, a large corpus of
oriki,oriki orile, ijala, iwi, odu Ifa, ege, rara chants, and poetic
plays was generally available thanks to the efforts of Professor S.O.,
Bakare Gbadamosi, Ulli Beier, Timi of Ede, Duro Ladipo, Kola Ogunmola et
al. The contributions of Duro Ladipo deserve special mention. He was one
of the first persons to give systematic study to traditional Yoruba
poetic technique and to demonstrate its viability for contemporary
creative uses. His Oba Koso, premiered at Oshogbo in 1962 and
acclaimed at the Berlin and Commonwealth Festivals in 1964, was a
revelation to every Nigerian poet of the new possibilities of indigenous
tradition. Okigbo closely studied the oriki collections of Bakare
Gbadamosi, Ulli Beier and the Timi of Ede. So impressed was he by what
he read that when Professor Desmond Maxwell invited him to write a
centenary poem in honour of W.B. Yeats, he based his tribute very
closely on the praises of Oba Olunloye of Ede. From that moment on the
technique of the oriki became a part of his poetic resources.
What astonished Okigbo in
Yoruba poetry is its creative freedom, its utter disregard for reason,
plausibility, realism, decorum and even the modesty of nature, in the
creation of expressive forms. In the hunters’ songs collected by
Professor Babalola, the baboon is apostrophized as
Eni iya re wo,
wo, wo, t’obu s’ekun
O I’ewa n’ io p’omo oun,4
He whom his
mother gazed and gazed upon and burst out weeping,
Saying her
child’s handsomeness will be the ruin of him.
Of palm wine, the
akewi affirms:
You are that
which the horse drank
Drank, drank, and forget his horns;
You are that which the cock drank
Drank, drank, and forgot to urinate;
You are that which the guinea-fowl drank
Drank, till a cry pierced his throat
And he took to the wilds.5
The oriki of the
leopard is different in kind but no less elevated in its imaginative
flight.
Gentle hunter
his tail plays on the ground
while he crushes the skull
Beautiful death
who puts on a spotted robe
when he goes to his victim.
Playful killer
whose loving embrace
splits the antelope’s heart.6
The terrible creature
is contemplated serenely as it presents itself to pure imagination
without regard for human concerns. Yet there is real tension in these
poems. They can surely stand side by side with any poetry in the world.
The
oriki, of course, has its own special qualities; its coinage of
portmanteau words very similar in nature and intention to Zulu
izibongo, the piling up of proverbial sayings and other parallel
constructions; the exploitation of homophones, alliterations, assonances
and other sound effects; and the exploitation of sexual and even
excremental humour. Some of these effects get lost in translation and,
as it is often said, what is lost is the poetry. But Okigbo found his
own love of irrational imaginative leap re-enforced and legitimized by
Yoruba poetry. He also felt free at last, liberated, to give up the
lofty pose of T.S. Eliot’s ascetic verse and come close to a colloquial
idiom.
I will cite
just one passage from Okigbo’s centenary poem for W.B. Yeats to show how
excited he was with the qualities of the oriki. Of Yeats he says:
You who
converted a jungle into marble palaces who watered
a dry valley and weeded its banks -
For we have almost forgotten your praise names -
You who transformed a desert into green pasture,
You who
commanded highways to pass through the forest -
And will remain mountain even in your sleep.7
What the oriki
of Oba Olunloye, in the Timi of Ede’s translation, had said was:
The son of
Olunloye, who converted
A thick jungle into a habitable place;
Who made impassable bush
Into a broad trodden path...8
Okigbo turns these
words into an intoxicating chant in English. He keeps close to the basic
idea; but we note that his last line which appears to be an original
concept is, in fact, an adaptation of one of praises of the elephant.
Erin
Laipo, oro labebeija
Elephant, you
are a mountain even while crouching.9
Lastly, it
is time to have a taste of Okigbo’s performance in the middle of his
career by considering one of his poems a little closely. For this
purpose, his favourite ‘Lament of Drums’ would be appropriate. Written
in 1964 at the height of the Western Nigerian crisis, this poem
commemorates the imprisonment of Cheif Obafemi Awolowo and the death of
his eldest son in a road accident. But no explicit reference is made to
these events. No anecdote or statement of any kind is envisaged in the
poem. The object is song, or as Stephane Mallarme would have it “ to
paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces.”
The form of
the poem is symphonic, with five movements contrasted in their imagery
and rhythmic flow. But to speak of a symphonic form might easily suggest
that the poem is European in its conception. This is not so. The idea is
to create an episodic structure in which the different units are
variations on a common emotional theme. Far from being in the European
tradition, ‘Lament of Drums’, as the name implies, is conceived as
funeral drumming in an African village. The first section is, in fact,
an adaptation of Professor J.H. Nketia’s translation of the prelude of
an Akan drum dirge. Its purpose is to introduce the elements which make
up a drum orchestra: the wood of the drum heads, the antelope skin of
the tympanum, the cane drum-sticks, and the ensemble of elephant ivory
trumpets. In making this roll call, the poem uses, at least in Okigbo’s
own reading of it, spondaic line endings to imitate the sound of
drumming in such lines as
Give us our
hollow heads of long drums
and Thunder of
tanks of giant iron steps of detonations.
Indeed the last line is
not organised so much for its meaning as for the crowding of dentals (d’s
and t’s) to give the effect of drum music.
In the
second section of the poem which is also introductory, the drums are
brought down from the smoky attic in which they are kept. Towards the
end of the section the gruff choir of masquerades is heard
Like a web
of voices all
rent by javelins.
Typically,
however, Okigbo’s setting is all human history in every culture and
every period. Accordingly, there are references to the “high buskin” of
Greek tragic actors whose ordeal refers back to the passions of the god
Dionysus, to the “chaliced vintage” of Christ’s last supper, and to the
fourteenth century “Babylonian” captivity of the papacy in Avignon. The
character of the poem in this regard is reminiscent of Eliot.
The third
section of the poem is the slow movement. It is slow on account of the
longer slower lines. It is slow on account of its dwelling upon the
details of one episode. It is slow also on account of the solemn elegaic
mood which it induces. There are no drum beats here. The underlying
substance is the story in Vergil’s Aeneid V in which Aenea’s
sleeping helmsman is swept overboard and drowned. The later reference to
Celaeno alludes to an episode in Aeneid III in which a swarm of
harpies descending upon the sailors’ dinner
With filthy
claws the sumptuous meal they eat
And mix their loathsome ordures with the meat.
The target here is the
Nigerian government in 1964; and it is typical that they are not just
classical monsters, but also the beggar masquerades of Ibadan streets.
The whole section is scored for two voices like Vergil’s Eclogues I
and V.
There is no
need, however, to insist upon the story line in Vergil. The poet
resolutely refuses to indulge in any narrative; and the hints he offers
deliberately differ from line to line. We are not dealing, however, with
African cult secrets, as Ulli Beier thought. We are dealing instead with
a poetry of mood evoking regret and sympathy through suggestions of
desolation, abandonment, grief without redress, despair, and death. The
narrative hinted at and constantly shifted, only provide the pegs for
fine elegaic poetry in which all the traditions which Okigbo inherited
come together. The last stanza
Fisherman out
there in the dark - O you
Who rake the waves and chase their wake –
Weave for him a
shadow out of your laughter
For a dumb child
to hide his nakedness
is utterly memorable in
refusal to commit itself to denotative meaning. There is no real sense
in which fishermen “chase the wake” of sea waves or “wave” shelters out
of their laughter. The art depends on sound effects (the a’s in the
second line for example) and the control of suggestion.
After a
drum recapitulation in the fourth section, there follows in the fifth a
concluding coda, ‘Ishthar’s Lament for Tammuz’. The title suggests that
another lament similar to the drowned man in the preceding section will
follow. Instinctively the poet realised that the ambitious symphonic
structure he had chosen required that the “sea” movement should be
complemented by a “vegetation” movement in which images of a wasted land
could be explored. The rich Tammuz Ishthar Myth, found in all the
archaic cultures of the Middle East from Summer to Israel, Greece and
Egypt could provide a good opportunity for political images to complete
the structure. But no effort to do this is made; nor is there any
treatment of the theme of the eternal return of the season which is the
core of the myth. There is one casual reference to the withering of the
crops and no more. The poem has already run its course.
‘Lament of
Drums’ is not an entirely satisfactory poem. It shakes out a vast
territory which it cannot fill. But poems that are entirely satisfactory
are very few indeed. Looked at closely, even great works of art remind
us of Hemingway’s old fisherman who brings back to land only the bones
of the shark as evidence of the battle he had fought. Fusing within one
poem the tragic sorrows of so many lands pre-historic, classical, and
modern, and giving them their place in an African funeral dirge is
impossible of realisation. It is a scheme that would not appeal to men
who play polo without knowing how to ride a horse.
But
extravagance is not at issue here. The issue is the irrationality of the
creative process itself, the dark inscrutable workmanship (as Wordsworth
phrased it) which controls our moments of creativity. Okigbo was
particularly sensitive to the turbulent and contradictory demands of his
own nature, and sensitive too to the manifold cross-cultural pressures
on his generation. By playing before us his own reconciling images,
images charged with melody and gem-like luminosity, he stimulates our
imaginations to a similar effort of reconciling our conflicts.
Okigbo
devoted his short life to the pursuit of whatever seemed great or
beautiful in human achievement. In the sport field, in social and
business life, in intellectual activity and the arts, he was incapable
of resisting the solicitation of great deeds. He did not sit back to
appreciate and enjoy these things. He received from their appeal
inspiration and energy to do likewise. He read and wrote poetry for just
five years, and that short interim, in the practice of any serious art,
could only be a period of apprenticeship. His enormous promise remains
in the end largely a promise. But even so, what he wrote was so charged
with the greatness and beauty of his extraordinary spirit that they have
communicated to African youth in almost every English-speaking country
the inspiration and energy to do likewise. No poet is better known or
more sedulously copied by young poets. His spirit, therefore, lives on.
The words
of Vergil with which this paper opens might well stand at the wooded
roads junction where he died:
In these woods I
lie
Known from here
to the sky
Christopher
illustrious in
every thing
but more so in
my being.
Notes:
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