SOURCE: An interview in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 9, July, 1970, pp. 28-37.

[In the following excerpted interview, which originally took place in March, 1965, Okigbo discusses such topics as négritude, religion, African culture, and his own poetry.]

[Whitelaw]: Christopher, do you think of yourself as an African poet?

[Okigbo]: I think I am just a poet. A poet writes poetry and once the work is published it becomes public property. It's left to whoever reads it to decide whether it's African poetry or English. There isn't any such thing as a poet trying to express African-ness. Such a thing doesn't exist. A poet expresses himself.

What about poets who express négritude?

Yes, but that is different because it is a particular type of poetry. It is platform poetry. It is platform writing. It is just like being invited to deliver a lecture on a particular subject. But it is valid as poetry when it is good, because we do in fact have this sort of thing in our own poetry in the oral tradition. The poetry of praise, for instance. Platform poetry. You go to a king's palace to praise him, and you build up images in praise of him. That sort of poetry is valid provided it is good.

In other forms of poetry … the most regular form that is written by young African poets, writing in the English language, is in fact written to express, to bring out a sense of an inner disturbance. We are trying to cast about for words; whether the words are in Ibo or English or in French is in fact immaterial … We are looking for words to give verbal concreteness, to give verbal life to auditory and visual images … I think this is a separate form of poetry from platform poetry. It just happens that one form is written more here, among English-speaking poets, and one more among French. But the two forms are valid, and I don't quarrel with négritude….

You say you go back to village festivals—I know you write a great deal about these.

Yes, I do. And I do not feel that in fact as a Christian I have ever been uprooted from my own village gods. We have a goddess and a god in our family, our ancestral gods. And although I do not worship these actively, in the sense of offering them periodic sacrifices, I still feel that they are the people protecting me.

But the way in which I think Christianity can be reconciled with this aspect of paganism is that I believe in fact all these gods are the same as the Christian God—that they are different aspects of the same power, the same force.

What shape do these gods take in your family?

Well, we have a carved idol representing a man, and another carved idol representing a woman, and the man we call Ikenga, and the woman we call Udo. And the man is the father of the entire family, for several generations back; the woman is the mother of the whole family, several generations back. And in a large extended family we have just these two gods, Ikenga and Udo.

We offer sacrifices to them periodically. I am here at Ibadan; I don't live at home at Ojoto. So my parents or my uncles will offer sacrifices to them periodically. And the women of the family will from time to time scrub the walls of the shrine where these gods are housed, with fresh mud (the walls of the shrine would be of a mud mixture, a very satisfactory and inexpensive building substance), and the men of the family will repair the thatched roof to prevent it leaking. And once in a while they offer a white hen, or eggs laid by white hens, or kola nuts, or pods of alligator pepper. And I feel, you know, that we still belong to these things. We cannot get away from them.

This is purely a family shrine, is it?

This is a family shrine. We have the ones worshipped by the whole town. The whole town, for example, worships the python and the tortoise. The python, I imagine, represents the male deity, and the tortoise represents the female deity. And the whole town worships these two idols, and they (the creatures) are sacred to the whole town. I mean they are sacred to their particular shrines, and we cannot kill them. If in fact you find a python that is dead, you give it a ceremonial burial. Oh, yes. This still happens, even now. And Christianity cannot wipe this out.

What does the python symbolize, then?

The python represents the penis. And the tortoise represents the clitoris. One for the male organ and the other for the female.

Do you also go to the Christian church?

I haven't gone to church for a long time.

Neither have I. This is a rather theoretical question … But you think of yourself as a sort of nominal Christian, do you?

I think that over the years I have tried to evolve my own personal religion. The way that I worship my gods is in fact through poetry. And I think that each poem I write is a ceremony of innocence, if you like. The creative process is a process of cleansing. And since I began actively to write poetry, I have never gone to church. So I don't think it would be right for me to say I am a Christian or I am a pagan. I think my own religion combines elements from both….

Do you think that for a lot of Africans today it is difficult to be African?

I don't see why it should be difficult. I don't think there is any culture in the world that doesn't have borrowed elements. There is this multivalence in all cultures. Africa happens to be a new society, new in the sense that people are just beginning to know about Africa. So this multivalence is emphasized. It is just like holding something under a microscope—it becomes enlarged. Africa is now under the world's microscope; everybody sees Africa, and nobody bothers to look at any other place.

I think most Europeans have the idea that if any writer should be 'committed' (to use this literary cliché) it should be the African writers. I mean committed to writing about social change, about discovery of identity—that is, he should not be working in isolation, in an ivory tower; he should not have removed himself from the preoccupations of the people of his own time.

Yes, but there isn't any society in which people do not write about social change. Social change is not only taking place in Africa; it's taking place everywhere in the world.

Yes, but in North America particularly there are writers who feel that the writer has a duty to discover himself rather than to discover the world. Thirty years ago writers like Thomas Wolfe were writing about the great panorama of American life, but today they seem, many of them, to be isolated from their contemporaries, to be concerned with self-exploration. They feel no responsibility whatever to their own society. Now the point I want to make is that we in the West might suppose that (because Africa is under such violent pressures of change) it would be difficult for African writers to evade this responsibility.

Yes, but I don't think that this sense of responsibility is fulfilled only by writing directly about the change in society, about social change. I believe that any writer who attempts a type of inward exploration will in fact be exploring his own society indirectly. Because the writer isn't living in isolation. He is interacting with different groups of people at different times. And any inward exploration involves the interaction of the subject with other people, and I believe that a writer who sets out to discover himself, by so doing will also discover his society.

I don't think that I like writing that is 'committed'. I think it is very cheap. I think it is the easy way of doing it. Much more difficult than that, of course, is inward exploration. I hope that ultimately people will start doing that sort of thing in Africa. They haven't started doing it yet.

What would you say, then, is the function of the writer in Africa?

Oh, the writer in Africa doesn't have any function. That is, personally I can only say what I conceive as my own function. I have no function as a writer; I think I merely express myself, and the public can use these things for anything they like. I mean … you read a poem to a child; a child may weep. You may read the same poem to other people, and they may burst out into laughter. I don't in fact think that it is necessary for the writer to assume a particular function as The Messiah or anything like that … Well, as an individual he could assume this sort of role, but I don't think that the fact that he's a writer should entitle him to assume a particular role as an educator. If he wants to educate people he should write text books. If he wants to preach a gospel he should write religious tracts. If he wants to propound a certain ideology he should write political tracts….

Who reads your poems?

I don't know. But I've read my poems to different groups of people. I went to Kano once (in the Northern Region [of Nigeria]) and I was invited to give a talk at a school, to the whole school. And because I had not prepared a talk, I read one or two poems, and the children burst into tears. I felt that … at least they had had experience of the agony I had gone through … You know the process of writing the particular poems I read to them had been agonizing. And I thought that they had had a share of the agony of composition. I don't know who reads my poems and I don't think I care. I think that once I've written a poem I've given it a life of its own and the poem should go to anyone it likes. Anybody who is prepared to open his door to it.

The poem should go to anybody it likes …?

Well, anybody who is willing to let it in. After all, if you go to somebody's house and knock on the door he may open the door or he may not; he may open the door and say, 'Good afternoon; I am sorry, I'm resting, I'm busy.' Well, I mean the poem should just be treated as a person having its own life, a life of its own. This is the way in which I think of my work.

I think that when a word is committed to print it develops legs, wings even, and goes anywhere it wants to go. It is the same as a talking drum. You may want to speak to someone in a different village; when you play the drum and give him the message, he is not the only one who is listening to it. Anybody who is awake at the time listens to it. And those who wish to take the message will take it. I think the poem has this sort of existence, quite apart from the author.

How old were you when you wrote your first poem?

My first published poem … Well, my first poem, I believe I was about fourteen. But I haven't preserved it. When I was at school, I contributed poems to our school magazine, but I believe most people did that. We were just learning to speak English at the time. But my first published poem was written when I was twenty-five. My first published poem—it was very short. It is in a back number of Black Orpheus.

Was there a stage in your life when you decided that you definitely wished to be a poet?

There wasn't a stage when I decided that I definitely wished to be a poet; there was a stage when I found that I couldn't be anything else. And I think that the turning point came in December 1958, when I knew that I couldn't be anything else than a poet. It's just like somebody who receives a call in the middle of the night to religious service, in order to go and become a priest of a particular cult, and I didn't have any choice in the matter. I just had to obey.

From where did the call come?

(Laughing) I don't know. I wish I knew. I wish I knew. I can't say whether the call came from evil spirits or good spirits. But I know that the turning point came in 1958, when I found myself wanting to know myself better, and I had to turn around and look at myself from inside.

And when you say 'self', does this mean not only self but also the ancestors, the background?

(Emphatically) No. I mean myself, just myself, not the background … But you know that everything has added up to building up the self. So when I talk of the self, I mean my various selves, because the self itself is made up of various elements which do not always combine happily. And when I talk of looking inward to myself, I mean turning inward to examine myselves. This of course takes account of ancestors … Because I do not exist apart from my ancestors.

In fact I am generally believed, at home, to be a reincarnation of my maternal grandfather, my mother's father … although I don't know if this is true, because I didn't meet him in this world. But I know that people return to the world after they are dead, in different forms.

But when I talk of myself, I mean the whole—everything that has gone to make me what I am, and different from somebody else. And this takes account of the ancestry. One cannot escape from that fact. And I don't think this is an entirely African idea.

No, no. I am much involved with my own ancestors.

It is unimportant that I don't go to the family shrine to sacrifice the fruits of the soil. My creative activity is in fact one way of performing those functions in a different manner. Every time I write a poem, I am in fact offering a sacrifice. My Heavensgate is in fact a huge sacrifice.

As I said, I am believed to be a reincarnation of my maternal grandfather, who used to be the priest of the shrine called Ajani, where Idoto, the river goddess, is worshipped. This goddess is the earth mother, and also the mother of the whole family. My grandfather was the priest of this shrine, and when I was born I was believed to be his reincarnation, that is, I should carry on his duties. And although someone else had to perform his functions, this other person was only, as it were, a regent. And in 1958, when I started taking poetry very seriously, it was as though I had felt a sudden call to begin performing my full functions as the priest of Idoto. That is how it happened.

The opening passage of Heavensgate, my first volume of poems published in 1963, is as follows:

      Before you, mother Idoto,
      naked I stand,
      before your watery presence,
      a prodigal,
 
      leaning on an oilbean,
      lost in your legend …
 
      Under your power wait I
      on barefoot,
      watchman for the watchword
      at heavensgate;
 
      out of the depths my cry
      give ear and hearken.

And there is another part of Heavensgate. This is entitled 'Lustra', in other words, the rites I perform periodically. And I wrote this when I moved from one house to another. This was the first one I wrote in the new place. And I had to start once more, performing these functions. I will read a part of it and then explain it so that you will understand my own idea of the creative process. There wasn't any question of my taking a decision, you see. It is that I found myself some time ago ready to assume the full responsibilities of a religious priest—a religious priest in the very serious sense of the word:

       So would I to the hills again
       so would I
       to where springs the fountain
       there to draw from
 
       and to hilltop clamber
       body and sou!
       whitewashed in the moondew
       there to see from
 
       So would I from my eye the mist
       so would I
       through moonmist to hilltop
       there for the cleansing
 
       Here is a new-laid egg
       here a white hen at midterm …

(Here Christopher stopped reading and began once more to talk.) And the new-laid egg of course is the poem. And the white hen at midterm is the poem … And this poem in fact appears in the middle of Heavensgate. A white hen at midterm—I mean midterm in the sense of this poem being written in the middle of a longer work. (Long pause.)

I take my work seriously because it is the only reason I am alive. I believe that … I believe that writing poetry is a necessary part of my being alive, which is why I've written nothing else. I hardly write prose. I've not written a novel. I've not written a play. Because I think that somehow the medium itself is sufficiently elastic to say what I want to say, I haven't felt the need to look for some other medium.