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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 iden- tify 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 con- clusion, 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 © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/18757421-04902002Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:30:45AM via free access christopher okigbo’s poetics and the politics of canonization 261 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. Matatu 49 (2017) 260–279 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:30:45AM via free access 262 abba 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 dif- fers 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 cer- tainly 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 pos- sible 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 adventur- ous 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 affirma- tion 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 mar- tyrdom 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 with- out, 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.
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