Christopher Okigbo's Poetics and the Politics of Canonization

Matatu 49 (2017) 260–279

brill.com/mata

Christopher Okigbo’s Poetics and the Politics of Canonization

Abba A. Abba Edwin Clark University, Kiagbodo, Delta State, Nigeria [email protected]; [email protected]

Abstract

Christopher Okigbo conveyed in his poetry the sense of patriotism and personal anguish at the monstrosity of a benighted nation. Some critics have argued that Okigbo was not only obsessive in his depictions of metaphors that incarnated the recurring trope of death, but also embodied a death wish culminating in his death in the Nigeria– Biafra war. They further argue that he embodied a suicidal impulse that motivated his general conduct and death in that battle. Unfortunately, only a handful of scholars have sought to contest this view and to illuminate Okigbo’s self-immolation in the name of a higher duty. To be sure, suicide and martyrdom may go beyond the question of dying to the problem of laying one’s death dramatically at someone else’s door. Following Kant’s theory of the ethical act, this paper undertakes a critical intervention that reappraises some of Okigbo’s poetry as well as documented accounts of his life in order to identify him appropriately: is he a genuine martyr or a mere suicide who presides ritually over his own dismemberment, or both? Examining lines of his poetry that have been misread as embodying his ‘haunting’ death-wish, on the one hand, and evidence of his self-giving impulse, on the other, the paper seeks to articulate how Okigbo as a tragic poet transcends his destiny by submitting to it—victor and victim at once. In its conclusion, the paper reconciles Okigbo’s will to heroic action with the symbolic meaning that is locked in his poetry in order to justify his ascension to the rank of martyr.

Keywords martyrdom – suicide – death wish – heroism – patriotism

Introduction

Born into a Catholic family of the school headmaster Chief Ezeonyeligolu James Okigbo and his wife, Anna Onugwualuobi, in Ojoto-uno, Anambra state, Christopher Okigbo remains one of Africa’s most important poets. A teacher, librarian, and former Biafran soldier who died in the Nigeria–Biafra war in 1967, he is today acknowledged as an outstanding postcolonial African poet and one of the major modernist writers of the twentieth century. After graduating from the University of Ibadan, he took and changed jobs in such quick succession that his contemporaries described him as ‘prodigal’, a term with which he cat- egorized himself. Between 1956 and 1967, Okigbo worked as manager of the Nigerian Tobacco Company and the United African Company; as Assistant Sec- retary in the Federal Ministry of Research and Information; as a Latin teacher and sports coach at Fiditi Grammar School; as a librarian at the University of Nigeria Nsukka; as West African manager and Nigerian representative of Cambridge University Press; as the publisher, with Chinua Achebe, of Citadel Publishing Company; and as a major in the Biafran Army. Many scholars have argued that Okigbo brought to his poetry a representa- tion of the sense of personal anguish at death. Besides a few who have pointed to the sense of patriotism and disgust at the monstrosity of his benighted nation, many draw attention to what they call his fixation with the trope of death, arguing that he was not only obsessive in his deployment of metaphors that incarnated that experience, but was also an embodiment of the death- wish that eventually culminated in his death in the Nigeria–Biafra war.1 For instance, Obi Nwakanma has argued that Okigbo transgressed the rules of war by showing total disregard for personal safety in the course of the war. For him, although Okigbo was an adventurous and self-sacrificing soldier, he certainly brought death upon himself:

He was a bit reckless, because throughout the operations in the area of Isienum and Eha-Alumona, he didn’t care whether he lived or died. […] he almost always sat on the bonnet of the jeep whilst an operation is on—he would sit there with his rifle, his leg[s] thrown wide apart. Although that was not military, it never bothered Christopher. When you reprimanded him, he would just burst out into his loud laughter.2

1 Dan Izevbaye, “Living the Myth: Revisiting Okigbo’s Art and Commitment,” Tydskrif vir Let- terkunde 48.1 (2011): 22. 2 Fellow soldier, quoted in Obi Nwakanma, Christopher Okigbo: Thirsting for Sunlight (Ibadan: James Currey, 2010): 245.

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Retracing Nwakamma’s critical steps in a different idiom, Ali Mazrui con- demns Okigbo for renouncing the universal in preference for the ethnic. For him, Okigbo is neither a hero nor a martyr, because the measure of a poet differs from the measure of “ordinary” humankind.3 Mazrui holds both the suicide and the martyr guilty of their own death and argues that the martyr is proba- bly more reprehensible because he revels in having another assume the guilt for what is in reality his/her will to self-destruction. He notes that in many claims to martyrdom, there is a disguised self-regard, a lust to attain the Godhead, which therefore interrogates the very pretension to self-sacrifice.4 But Mazrui seems to be speaking from the other side of his mouth when he acknowledges that the predictability of a gallant soldier’s death at the moment of his acceptance of his ghastly mission enhances public adulation of him. Similarly, Olusegun Obasanjo, the General Officer Commanding the 3rd Marine Commando Divi- sion of the Federal Army, sees no act of heroism in Okigbo’s actions during the war. In fact, he dismisses his actions as mere folly and “unnecessary bravado.”5 However, the General Officer Commanding the Biafran Army, Major General Alexander Madiebo, endorses Okigbo’s heroic impulse in his memoir on the war:

The greatest disaster of that [Nsukka] operation was the well-known poet, Major Christopher Okigbo, one of the bravest fighters on that sector, who died trying to lob a grenade into a ferret armoured car.6

Similarly, in a note to Isidore Diala, Ben Obumselu observes that Okigbo was driven by a heroic spirit that was typical of him and recalls that Okigbo fought heroically in the war side by side with Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu, and certainly chose to fight to the death, as he had told Obumselu that he would not withdraw from Opi, where he was eventually killed. Obumselu points to a possible heroic tradition in Okigbo’s family by recalling that Pius Okigbo, Christo- pher Okigbo’s elder brother, had said that Christopher had been born with a mark on his neck, which was thought to be a relic of a bullet wound sustained

3 Ali Mazrui, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo (London: Heinemann, 1980): 3. 4 Ali Mazrui, “Sacred Suicide,” Atlas 11.3 (1966): 165. 5 Olusegun Obasanjo, My Command: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970 (London: Heinemann, 1980): 18, quoted in Diala, “Okigbo’s Drum Elegies,”ResearchinAfricanLiteratures 46.3 (Fall 2015): 108. 6 Alexander Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1980): 165–166.

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 260–279 10:30:45AM via free access christopher okigbo’s poetics and the politics of canonization 263 by his ancestor.7 He “defied all our categories and rejected the postulate that life set limits beyond which he could not venture.”8 Isidore Diala, for whom Okigbo is undeniably a martyr, equally observes that Okigbo could have been located in Mazrui’s typology but for Mazrui’s prob- lematic definition of the “universal” and the “tribal.” Okigbo, Diala argues, was capable of self-sacrificial commitments that typically extended to his adventurous career as a soldier. His temper was heroic and the trajectory of his poetry is a movement from the renunciation of Christian martyrdom to an affirmation of self-giving courageous action.9 And if Nwakamma acquiesces in the fact that Okigbo “didn’t care whether he lived or died,” he ironically acknowledges Okigbo’s total self-giving in the conduct of that war. The distinction between martyrdom and the death-wish shows that such intriguing self-sacrifice as martyrdom is a heroic action that invites public admiration:

While, then, thanatos or the death wish is a compulsion, rather than a choice, martyrdom, typically, is the acceptance, after due reflection, of the need to glorify an idea by dying for it. In its ideal Christian form, martyrdom is complete self-abnegation, a total self-giving that especially prospers the Christian cause.The aureole of martyrdom is its reward without, however, being its remote motivation. But while blood necessarily seals the pact of martyrdom, not even in war is the loss of life indispens- able to establish heroism. Martyrdom, therefore, is no mere analogue of heroic action as martyrs do not fight: they accept and find fulfilment in suffering. Yet heroism is life affirming in its defiance of death but, unlike martyrdom, requires no religious idea as a basic motivation.10

In its contribution to the potent issue of canonization, this paper reappraises Okigbo’s poetic engagement and his general conduct and death in the Nige- rian–Biafran war in order to critically consider, in particular, the relationship of his poetry to the circumstances leading to his death in a personal confrontation with an armoured tank. Immanuel Kant’s interpretation of suicide and martyrdom provides the framework for the analysis of some of the documented accounts of Okigbo’s life and a selection of his poetry. The analysis seeks to

7 Isidore Diala, “Okigbo’s Drum Elegies,” 93. 8 Ben Obumselu, “Christopher Okigbo: A Poet’s Identity,” in The Responsible Critic: Essays on African Literature in Honour of Professor Ben Obumselu, ed. Isidore Diala (Trenton nj: Africa World Press, 2006): 58. 9 Isidore Diala, “Okigbo’s Drum Elegies,” 88. 10 Diala, “Okigbo’s Drum Elegies,” 87.

Matatu 49 (2017) 260–279 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:30:45AM via free access 264 abba identify him appropriately either as a genuine martyr or as a mere suicide who presides ritually over his own dismemberment, or both. Although some lines of his poetry have been misread as embodying his ‘haunting’ death, some evidence of his self-giving impulse seems to position Okigbo as a tragic poet who transcends his destiny by submitting to it, thus becoming victor and victim in a single gesture. In its conclusion, the paper reconciles Okigbo’s will to heroic action with the symbolic meaning that is locked in his poetry in order to justify his ascension to the rank of martyr.

Heroic Drive to Martyrdom

Suicide and martyrdom, to be sure, may go beyond the question of dying to the problem of laying one’s death dramatically at someone else’s door. Immanuel Kant, in The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, discusses the ethics of morality in relation to man’s duty to himself and to his body and argues that, generally, every rational being exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by the will of others. The nature of a rational being already marks him out as something that is not to be used merely as a means; hence, there is imposed thereby a limit on all arbitrary use of such beings, which are thus objects of respect.11 Following Kant’s teleology as regards the concept of necessary duty to oneself, the man who contemplates suicide will ask himself whether his action can be consistent with the idea of humanity as an end in itself. The first duty of man to himself as an animal being is therefore the preservation of himself in his animal nature. The opposite of such self- preservation is suicide (autochiria; suicidium), which is the deliberate total destruction of one’s animal nature. Thus, suicide involves a transgression of one’s duty to other men by forsaking the station entrusted to him in this world without being recalled from it:

To destroy the subject of morality in his own person is tantamount to obliterating from the world the very existence of morality itself; but morality is, nevertheless, an end in itself. Accordingly, to dispose of oneself as a mere means to some end of one’s own liking is to degrade

11 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue: Part ii of the Metaphysics of Morals, tr. James Ellington (Indianapolis in: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964): 83. Excerpt repr. in Margaret Pabst Battin, comp., The Ethics of Suicide: Historical Sources (London: Oxford up, 2015): 427.

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the humanity in one’s person (homonoumenon), which, after all, was entrusted to man (homophaenomenon) to preserve.12

Kant raises three important questions: Is self-murder intended to save one’s country? Is martyrdom—the deliberate sacrifice of oneself for the good of mankind—also to be regarded as an heroic deed? Is committing suicide per- mitted in anticipation of an unjust death sentence from one’s superior? For Kant, it is no suicide to risk one’s life against one’s enemies, and even to sacrifice it in order to observe one’s duty towards oneself:

The sovereign can call upon his subjects to fight to the death for their country, and those who fall on the field of battle are not suicides, but the victims of fate. Not only is this not suicide; but the opposite, a faint heart and fear of the death which threatens by the necessity of fate, is no true self-preservation; for he who runs away to save his own life, and leaves his comrades in the lurch, is a coward; but he who defends himself and his fellows even unto death is no suicide, but noble and high-minded; for life is not to be highly regarded for its own sake.13

The man who shortens his life by intemperance is guilty of imprudence and of his own death, but his guilt is not direct: he did not intend to kill himself; his death was not premeditated. He is not a suicide, because what constitutes suicide is the intention to destroy oneself. Although intemperance or excess may shorten life, if we raise it to the level of suicide, we lower suicide to the level of intemperance. Imprudence, which does not imply a desire to cease to live, must, therefore, be distinguished from the intention to kill oneself. Serious violations of our duty towards ourselves produce an aversion accompanied either by horror or by disgust, and “by it man sinks lower than the beasts.”14 And while the suicide is looked upon as carrion, our sympathy goes forth to the martyr. There are instances of heroic suicide, but the rule of morality does not admit of suicide under any conditions, because it degrades human nature “below the level of animal nature.”15 Thus privileging martyrdom, Kant notes

12 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, tr. James Ellington, 83. Excerpt repr. in Battin, comp., The Ethics of Suicide, 427. 13 Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics: Duties Towards the Body in Regard to Life, excerpt repr. in Margaret Pabst Battin, comp., The Ethics of Suicide: Historical Sources (London: Oxford up, 2015): 430. 14 Kant, Lectures on Ethics, excerpt repr. in Battin, comp. The Ethics of Suicide, 430. 15 Kant, Lectures on Ethics, excerpt repr. in Battin, comp. The Ethics of Suicide, 431.

Matatu 49 (2017) 260–279 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:30:45AM via free access 266 abba that if a man cannot preserve his life except by dishonouring his humanity, he ought, rather, to sacrifice it. St. Augustine’s formulation of the suicide-martyr model anticipates Kant’s stance. For him, the acts and the ends toward which the acts themselves are directed must be considered: “Is the act in doubt ordered to the voluntary death of the individual or not? Is the act a ‘success’ or a ‘failure’ if the individual lives?”16 While the act of suicide itself is ordered to the death of the individual, the act of the martyr itself is not ordered to the death of the individual. That is, the suicidal act is programmed to the death of the individual, perhaps to end suffering or shame, but in the case of the martyr, his action is not ordered in such a way that death becomes the ultimate objective. Though it is true that one is not a martyr unless one has died, most martyrs hope to live, which differs from the objective of the suicide. Slavoj Žižek typically supports Kant’s thesis that martyrdom may be an ethical act motivated by a supreme disinterestedness that sets aside personal interests in the name of a higher duty. And for him also, “subjective destitution is death, for only when one considers oneself dead to the existing order will one be able to actually act freely with regard to it.”17 A martyr wills to give up his life as that which he conceives as precious. Although he does not seek death directly, death becomes the unavoidable consequence of his action. Thus does he make a statement out of his dying; that his death may hasten the emancipation of his people. The greatness of the martyr’s action lies in the preciousness of life:

If nothing is meaningful enough to die for, what is the point of living? […] In dying, you force a contrast between your own mortality and the imperishability of what you die for. […] You do not die after all, since this incorruptible Cause is the kernel of your own existence, the form in which you will live forever.18

In this way, the martyr differs from the suicide who engages in self-contradic- tory actions, proclaiming that even death would be preferable to his wretched form of life. For Terry Eagleton, therefore, death is a solution to his existence as well as a commentary on it. And by affirming his absolute sovereignty over himself, he wipes himself out of existence and the price he pays for his supremacy

16 Father Ryan Erlenbush, “The difference between martyrdom and suicide,” The New Theo- logical Movement (9 February 2012): online. 17 Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays On September 11 (London: Verso, 2002): 260–264. 18 Terry Eagleton, Holy Terror (New York: Oxford up, 2005): 93.

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 260–279 10:30:45AM via free access christopher okigbo’s poetics and the politics of canonization 267 is non-being.19 And because suicides in most 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 go of everything in defence of his perishing community. In T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, for instance, Thomas à Becket acknowledges that the apparent paradox of true martyrdom “is that only by contemplating the fruits of your action can it prove fruitful.”20 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 for a 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, 94. 21 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, paraphrased in Eagleton, Holy Terror, 94. 22 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, paraphrased in Eagleton, Holy Terror, 94.

Matatu 49 (2017) 260–279 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:30:45AM via free access 268 abba 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.23 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.24 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 war26 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 manli- ness 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, 99. 24 Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, “Christopher Okigbo, Print, and the Poetry of Postcolonial Moder- nity,”Research in African Literatures 43.2 (Summer 2012): 56. 25 Pius Okigbo, “Christopher Okigbo: AToast” (1994), in Critical Essays on Christopher Okigbo, ed. Uzoma Esonwanne (New York: G.K. Hall, 2000): 324. 26 Michael J.C. Echeruo, AConcordancetothePoemsof ChristopherOkigbo(WiththeComplete Text of the Poems, 1957–1967) (Lewiston ny: Edwin Mellen, 2008): 2. See also Echeruo, “Christopher Okigbo, Poetry Magazine, and the ‘Lament of the Silent Sisters’,” Research in African Literatures 35.3 (Fall 2004): 8–25.

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 260–279 10:30:45AM via free access christopher okigbo’s poetics and the politics of canonization 269 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, non-sectarian, 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, 1957), vol. 2: 1000. 28 Dubem Okafor, Cycle of Doom: Selected Essays in Discourse and Society (Lulu.com, 2005): 51.

Matatu 49 (2017) 260–279 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:30:45AM via free access 270 abba 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.”29 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 be an 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.”31 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): 117.

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 260–279 10:30:45AM via free access christopher okigbo’s poetics and the politics of canonization 271 ness over the demeaning facts of decay and death.”32 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 “man’s 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 a live–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 be an 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 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

32 Robert Fraser, “The Achievement of Christopher Okigbo,” in Critical Essays on Christopher Okigbo, ed. Uzoma Esonwanne (New York: G.K. Hall, 2000): 243. 33 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): 2–3.

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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 there for 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 question- ing, 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 for ever. 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): 88.

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 260–279 10:30:45AM via free access christopher okigbo’s poetics and the politics of canonization 273 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.”37 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.”38 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 …

The wailing is for the fields of crop: The drum’s lament is: They grow not …

The wailing is for the fields of men: For the barren wedded ones: For perishing children …

The Wailing is for the Great River: Her pot-bellied watchers Despoil her Lament of the Drums 50

The ancestral spirits are symbolized by the long drums whose lament is launched by the invocation of the elements which make them up, and by imploring evil forces to keep off the rostrum. These ancestral spirits emerge from the bowels of the earth in which they are confined, “soot chamber,” “cinerary tower” (first strophe), not to rejoice but to lament (second strophe). Thus, we witness a poetry that is steeped in Igbo myths of reincarnation, the symbolic deaths and resurrections common in Igbo folklore and the symbolic

37 Robert Fraser, “The Achievement of Christopher Okigbo,” 248. 38 Fraser, “The Achievement of Christopher Okigbo,” 248.

Matatu 49 (2017) 260–279 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:30:45AM via free access 274 abba births, deaths, and rebirths inherent in African rites of puberty. Diala suggests that the mysterious interchange between the drums denotes the centrality of the transformation of mourning into morning through the invocation of the spirit of spring:

Drawing on the Igbo heroic tradition expressed in the drum poetry of the abia slit-drum and the centrality of music (egwu) in the Igbo person’s symbolic attempt to mitigate the terror (egwu) of death, Okigbo typically digs beyond the formulaic wit of the African drum for a surrealistic idiom to transform the sobriety of the funeral occasion to a rousing affirmation of the enduring value of human life. The poet is thus uplifted by his recognition of the possibility of tragic redemption.39

Thus, Okigbo’s poetry, with its rousing drums, apprehends death as medium for the celebration of life. The person embraces the full range of his mortal condition and this embrace endows him with the courage that sublimates the terrors of death. It is here that the poet and his persona coalesce into the soldier who, in defiance of death, will chose in the end to face an armoured vehicle alone:

He died as he lived, making, by his own choice, an impossible stand- alone against the advance of an armoured column. All his life had been a storming of barricades. And he had the generosity to give himself.40

Through Okigbo’s experience, we recognize the distinction between an exhibitionistic gesture which inflates the ego and a tragic death, in which the ego is sublimated in order that the values of life may be extended and reborn. A reap- praisal of his death and its significance would reveal. then. that he does not seek a beautiful death that offers the individual liberation from the mundane trivi- alities of life. The trajectory of such an exhibitionistic impulse typically unfolds the smallness and futility of suicidal gestures which serve no purpose save as a selfish proclamation of principles pushed too far. That Nigeria is conceived as a doomed nation is clear from the Path of Thun- der sequence. We can easily see the connection between national history and the poet’s personal narrative, both of which the sequence mourns in anticipation of their tragic outcome. According to Diala, “personal narrative coalesces

39 Isidore Diala, “Okigbo’s Drum Elegies,” 96. 40 Ben Obumselu, “Christopher Okigbo: A Poet’s Identity,” 59.

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 260–279 10:30:45AM via free access christopher okigbo’s poetics and the politics of canonization 275 and assumes a singular tragic trajectory especially with the latter’s assumption of responsibility to influence the former.”41 Thus, “Elegy for Slit-Drum” both explores the political hiccups of the First Republic and creates a picture of grief- stricken mourners. The refrain “Condolences” which is widespread in the poem connects up with the tradition of African dirges in which mourners and consol- ers share the burden of sorrow at the scene of bereavement. The persona is not expressing a death-wish but is merely interpreting “the general upheavals that were a forerunner to the coup as ominous portents that heralded an imminent doom, worse than a coup, for the nation.”42 What he foresees is similar to the Yeatsian rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born:

And a great fearful thing already tugs at the cables of the open air, A nebula immense and immeasurable, a night of deep waters— An iron dream unnamed and unnameable, a path of stone […] And the secret thing in its heaving threatens with iron mask The last lighted torch of the century “Elegy for Slit-Drum,” in Path of Thunder 66

Obumselu, however, establishes connections between Okigbo’s “Elegy of the Wind,” Lorca’s “Preciosa and the Air,” and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” which he locates at the heart of European poetry. Though fully acknowledging Okigbo’s originality, Obumselu argues that throughout his career Okigbo inte- grates insights from various cross-cultural influences and then subjects them to an original synthesis. It is particularly through the metaphor of Oedipus that Okigbo privileges the personal danger and public veneration that are possible consequences of accepting the call to a perilous public, saving intervention.43 Once the persona has become transformed into the poet himself, “Elegy of the Wind” will ultimately constitute a poem of passion, sober resolution, prepara- tion for ultimate heroism, and leave-taking:

The passion that precedes the definitive act of self-giving necessarily needs to be set in relief for either the moment of ultimate heroism or martyrdom to be seen and appreciated in its full and proper perspective

41 Isidore Diala, “Okigbo’s Drum Elegies,” 100. 42 Diala, “Okigbo’s Drum Elegies,” 102. 43 Ben Obumselu, “Cambridge House, Ibadan, 1962–1966: Politics and Poetics in Okigbo’s Last Years,”Research in African Literatures 41.2 (Summer 2010): 14.

Matatu 49 (2017) 260–279 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:30:45AM via free access 276 abba

and consequently set apart from the mere suicidal gesture. In Okigbo’s case, there is no enthusiastic heedless leap to embrace death, only a chastened contemplation and acceptance of the statutes of manhood.44

It is equally a poem that calls for courageous, manly resolve. The poet’s apprehension of danger inherent in the vocation of town-crier leads to the prayer in “Thunder Can Break”: “Earth, bind me fast” (63). It also elicits the admoni- tion to caution in “Hurrah for Thunder”: “If I don’t learn to shut my mouth I’ll soon go to hell, / I, Okigbo, town-crier, together with my iron bell” (67). But in his anguish at his country’s headlong dash towards destruction and his own tragic heroism, the poet resolves to commit the totality of his life to his mission despite the obvious danger. The caution that if he does not learn to shut his mouth, he will soon go to hell is an apprehension of the danger of arrest and incarceration for his outspokenness by the marauding military beasts. If the poet in “Elegy of the Wind” desires union with cosmic mystery and prays for ultimate union with mother earth, in “Elegy for Alto” he reverses the prayer with the sudden realization of his capacity for regeneration. His choice of the ram rather than the lamb comes as a consequence of his belief in confronting the technicians of terror rather than exhibiting sheepish humility before them:

O mother mother Earth, unbind me; let this be my last testament; let this be The ram’s hidden wish to the sword the sword’s Secret prayer to the scabbard “Elegy for Alto,” in Path of Thunder 71

Many who have interpreted these prayers as evidence of the poet’s death-wish seem to have ignored the fact that the ram’s secret submission to the sword is not death but freedom and the sword’s secret submission to the sheath is also freedom. The persona’s secret prayer is to be free from earthly attachments that prevent man from taking action in the face of forbidding destiny. The “iron path careening along the same beaten track” is Okigbo’s metaphor for the ineluctable movement of the country to destruction. Although he is aware of the merging of “eagles” and “robbers” and of “politicians” and soldiers (“New stars of iron dawn”) and poetically intuits defeat, he believes in the capacity of the titanically striving individual, struggling because he must even in the face

44 Isidore Diala, “Okigbo’s Drum Elegies,” 102.

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 260–279 10:30:45AM via free access christopher okigbo’s poetics and the politics of canonization 277 of defeat. He remains focused on nature’s abiding powers of self-regeneration despite the hopelessness that confronts the nation and its political leadership:

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 “Elegy for Alto,” in Path of Thunder 72

The poet’s sense of gloom at the impending national catastrophe, his will to tragic heroism, and the transformation of the military into a monster—all this leaves him in a state of disgust and destructive anger. For him, then, it is better to die fighting than to live in the awareness of national woes: “And the horn may now paw the air howling goodbye.”45

Conclusion

The contestation that Okigbo’s death was simply suicide rather than an act of self-sacrifice belongs to the political competition over the canonization of the worthy dead. Many historical events generate struggles over meaning, especially with regard to such ultimate evaluations as condemnation and canonization. Some heroic deeds inspire memorials essentially because the victims died for a cause, and the cause, rather than the victim, spurs sanctifica- tion. Importantly, how acts of self-immolation are viewed over long periods of time requires critical intervention. As this paper has hopefully demonstrated, Okigbo conveyed in his poetry a keen sense of patriotism and personal anguish at the upheavals in his homeland’s polity. But despite critical observations that his work is suffused with the trope of death, it is not evident either from his poetry or from historical circumstances that his death in that war was a mere suicidal act. Motivated by his self-giving impulse, his poetry and death embody the symbolism of African rites of passage as viable models for mourning as well as rousing heroic chants sublimating that experience. Suicide is a phe- nomenon that reaches beyond the question of dying to the problem of laying one’s death dramatically at someone else’s door. Viewed through the Kantian prism of ethical action and self-immolation in the name of a higher duty, Okigbo’s poetry and the trajectory of his life classify him appropriately as a gen-

45 “Elegy for Alto,” in Path of Thunder, 20.

Matatu 49 (2017) 260–279 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:30:45AM via free access 278 abba uine martyr who gives his life in the service of his community. Evidence from his poetry shows that what is misconstrued as a haunting death-wish is actually the poet’s paradoxical sense of envitalizing dejection over the impending national catastrophe, his will to tragic heroism, and the transmogrification of the military into a monstrous force, all of which leaves him in a state of disgust and destructive anger. Thus are we left with the realization that there is a clear boundary between the death-wish and the desire to fight to the death. And for offering himself to fight to the death rather than watch in idiotic humility the genocide perpetrated against his community, Christopher Okigbo fully merits the rousing paeans sung in his honour as one of the greatest martyrs of our age.

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