SOURCE: "Okigbo's Portrait of the Artist as a Sunbird: A Reading of Heavensgate (1962)," in African Literature Today, No. 6, 1973, pp. 1-14.

[In the excerpt below, Izevbaye delineates the interplay of sources Okigbo employs in Heavensgate and Limits.]

The year 1971 saw the publication by Heinemann Educational Books of Labyrinths with Path of Thunder, a collection which is in one respect the final edition of Okigbo's work although, because of the omission of the Canzones and at least two of the later poems, its finality consists not in completeness but in saving editors of Okigbo's poems the trouble of having to decide what the poet actually wrote or intended to write. An additional value of this collection is the poet's introductory interpretation or, as interpretations are never known to be final, a description of the design of the poems which should become the basis of future interpretations. By thus providing the reader with an outline map of Labyrinths, Okigbo has cleared some of the paths to his poetic experience and has probably helped to arrest the growing tendency to regard the experience as something that is not available to the reader. This view of the poems as an impenetrable territory has been encouraged by reports of Okigbo's early view of poetry as a type of cult from which the uninitiated is excluded and by the cautious critical explications—often necessarily cautious, admittedly—in which the critic and the reader are unmasked as intruders. This impression of a closed world has been a potential inhibition to response, and the poet has thrown down this psychological barrier by offering the elucidations in Labyrinths.

The poetry remains a genuinely difficult one by itself, of course. To be able to find their way through the labyrinths of allusions to personal myths and forgotten cultures many readers will have to rely on the thread of meaning provided in the introduction and the notes. However, this change in respect of the poet's attitude to the reader reflects the difference between Labyrinths and the discrete earlier versions of Okigbo's poetry. In the earlier versions the uninitiated reader is understandably excluded from the poetic experience because the poet is himself still being initiated. Labyrinths follows the path of exploration or inquiry leading to discovery or revelation. With the poet's discovery of the true pattern of his initiation the reader can now be taken through the different stage until he too is finally admitted into the sanctuary. Each of the earlier sequences is incomplete by itself because it is only an investigation of the poet's partial glimpse of an experience, and only the complete group of sequences can provide a reliable blueprint from which a reader might reconstruct the poetic experience. The earlier poems are not then the true gateways; or if they are gateways they often lead to blind alleys, though they are useful as reflections of the poet's own wanderings and losses of direction before the surer path of his pilgrimage is revealed in the continuity of Labyrinths.

The revisions which result in Labyrinths are, like most revisions, necessary for a clearer and more accurate statement of the poet's experience. Nevertheless the earlier poems are of value because they tell a fairly accurate story of the process of composition. An interpretation of the revisions shows that in addition to the need for an efficient performance the final version required the tailoring of the old poems in order to fit the new need. One of the most important changes in Labyrinths is the cutting out of 'Transition' from Heavensgate. Without necessarily committing oneself to a fallacy by describing as the poet's intention what is really an effect of the final revision, one may justify the excision of 'Transition' by arguing that its triumphant tone is not quite consistent with the humble and exploratory spirit of Heavensgate, and that this tone is contradicted, in 'Siren Limits', by the poet's use of the image of the shrub or the low growth which confesses a striving towards maturity rather than claim a full maturing of poetic powers. However if there is something inconsistent about the claims of 'Transition' in the light of the actual performance of Heavensgate this section of the poem is itself less out of place in the original sequence than it would have been in Labyrinths within which the Heavensgate sequence itself is mainly an introduction or a prelude. In other words it was necessary to eliminate an end which has turned out to be a true end no longer.

If the 1962 version of the sequence would not fit into Labyrinths without modification it nevertheless has its own completeness, and the different sections have their justification for being in the poem, although the question that has most frequently been raised is that of the relevance of the parts. The organic unity of Okigbo's poems should seem a fairly commonplace idea by now, since it was emphasized in the earliest as well as in the most recent comments on the poetry—in Anozie's review [Ibadan, March, 1963] as well as in Okigbo's introduction. But although this underlying principle of composition has long been recognized it has not always been accepted as generally applicable to all the poems. For example, 'Newcomer', the fifth movement of Heavensgate, is sometimes seen as separate from the rest of the poem because its sections were originally composed as separate poems and at different times [O. R. Dathorne, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, July, 1968].

The ground for such a doubt is of course Okigbo's method of composition which creates the impression that each poem is an assemblage that may be dismantled and reassigned to the various sources, like Tutuola's Complete Gentleman. For example, it seems as if some of the units in an Okigbo sequence can comfortably be moved to other positions especially when, because of the omission of existing parts or the addition of others, a new relationship is created between the parts which makes it necessary to reexamine the meaning conveyed. Such a reassignment is evident in both Modern Poetry from Africa (1963) and Labyrinths where 'Bridge' is moved from its place in the middle of Heavensgate to the end in order to link the sequence with Limits. A discussion of Okigbo's poems therefore should assume the reader's acceptance of the essential looseness of structure arising from this method of composition. In this respect the sequences have a kinship with primitive epics because the poems appear to be a series of predetermined forms which attract independent poetic compositions to themselves. An important factor in the composition of extended traditional poems, especially primitive epics, is the fact that poems originally created as separate compositions cease to be considered independent units after they have been organized into larger units. The process of composition appears to be the adoption of a conventional, but fairly loose, structure within which individual experiences may establish a logical relationship with one another. The most favoured structures are usually those connected with social institutions or with religious or ritual performance. The relevance of this to a discussion of Heavensgate is obvious. The poem deals with the personal experiences of the hero. Its theme is the growth of a poet's mind. To the extent that the poem has a biographical—or autobiographical—structure, each of its movements represents the moments of crisis in the hero's life. So it is possible to regard any equivalent structure—like the basic stages of a man's life, Childhood, Adolescence, and Maturity—as the scaffolding around which the poem is constructed. The period of composition notwithstanding, poems about various experiences fit into the various stages whether as crises, or as the cause or the resolution of crises. The act of creation may thus be seen to consist mainly in a structural arrangement which makes each unit of the poem subordinate to, and a functional part of, the overall organization.

This emphasis of organization also makes it necessary to adopt a more flexible view of originality with regard to the problem of the literary influences or borrowings in the poems. For the purpose of this essay it is useful to make a distinction between literary echoes and literary borrowings. Literary echoes are resonances of an original, and to get a full experience of the poem the reader requires some knowledge of the original. And although such a poem might have an independent existence, like The Waste Land, the poems which it echoes are often part of the aesthetic experience of the poem, since the echoes are adaptations of an accepted context the knowledge of which, while not being essential, is invariably enriching.

In literary borrowing, on the other hand, knowledge of the original context contributes little or nothing to the experience of the new poem. It might in fact be a hindrance to proper critical response. The borrowed phrase or sentence is often used with little regard for its source, as in some of Okigbo's poems where not much is gained from a knowledge of the original poem. For usually Okigbo's interest in his borrowings seems limited to the beauty and the utility of the phrase itself, and the 'meaning' or 'experience' of the poem is often controlled by its immediate context. This is mostly true even when, as in the title Heavensgate, the borrowed word affects the reader's response in the right direction before the context has had a chance to do its work. The discussion which follows is based on the text of 1962….

The title Heavensgate appears to be a word abstracted from a context, and the context that readily suggests itself is Shakespeare's twenty-ninth sonnet where the bard is lifted from a mood of depression to sing 'hymns at heaven's gate' by the thought of love. There is the same movement from despair to elation in the two poems. In both cases the central symbol is a singing bird. Even the image of the importunate outcast at the ears of deaf heaven in the sonnet seems reflected in the prodigal's apparent return to a starting point after an abortive attempt at entry. But it is not essential to see the title as a literary echo in order to notice that the sunbird is the central image of the poem, or that the whole poem is conceived as a musical form in which much value is attached to the interplay of sounds.

The conception of the poem as musical form is apparent in the opening invocation which is used as a prelude to introduce the main motif of the piece. This function is more apparent in the anthology by Moore and Beier where the adopted title 'Overture' provides an apt musical analogy by emphasizing the introductory function of the invocation as well as describing the relationship between the suppliant and the goddess. Since the first movement, 'Passage', deals with the period of passage from boyhood to manhood, the prelude is appropriately a physical dramatization of an attempted entry into a spiritual or aesthetic state. The central movements of the poem are concerned with such attempts in the present time. The events of the present are explained in the past, which is the period dealt with by the first two movements, 'Passage' and 'Initiation'. 'Transition', which is the coda to the whole sequence, anticipates the hero's passage into a future state, a state which is never really achieved in Okigbo's poetry except in 'Distances.' Although 'Transition' foretells a state which 'Distances' enacts, the vision which it presents—the uninhibited release of unlimited song—is not achieved in the poem itself, as is made clear in the structure of Heavensgate. In fact the effective mood of Okigbo's first two sequences is not fulfilment but anticipation. So that even by the end of 'Siren Limits' the resolution of the crisis is deferred to future time:

                When you have finished
                & done up my stitches,
                Wake me near the altar,
                & this poem will be finished…

'Passage' as a whole deals with the hero's early childhood responses to experience. But although there is an attempt, in 'Passage (ii)', to recapture childhood experience by reproducing sounds mimicked by the boys, both 'Passage' and 'Initiation' deal with experience in retrospect. Although 'the young bird at the passage' is the observer of the spectacle in 'Passage (i)' (probably the onset of a thunderstorm), it is the mind of the mature artist which now interprets this scenery as a reproduction of the creation scene, and takes us back to that period 'when we were great boys' and 'sang words after the birds'.

This second section is central to the first two movements of the poem because of the way it uses the symbols of bird and light establishes their significance for the rest of the poem. After the associations built up by this section, light and bird would together herald the lyric impulse in both Heavensgate and Limits.

Meanwhile 'Passage (iii)' picks up the image of the bird with which the preceding section closes, and with it defines and enlarges the theme of creation with which the first section opens. It does this by presenting the two major forms which the boy's introduction into the act of creation has taken. These are represented as at play at the blacksmiths' forge, and at work with the teacher at school. Since these introductions to experience take the form of response, there is possibly a third situation in which it occurs—that of worship in church. But this is not introduced until later.

The emphasis on response as the main factor in the boy's formative period shows that in 'Passage (ii)' the boys are passing through a period of pupilage. Those gifts which are to survive into their adult life are already in evidence here—the fascination which song holds for them is evident in their imitation of bird sounds—'kratosbiate'. There is also the identification of these sounds with other fascinating sounds the children are made to imitate at school, as in their dutiful response to the sing-song recitation of their teacher, 'Etru bo pi a lo a she…' The metonymy, 'white buck and helmet', shows the teacher himself as seen through childhood eyes. As if to show that both experiences are really part of the same experience in spite of their separate locations at school and at play, the flames of the forge become metaphor for the shaping influence of school where boys are pulled through innocence, and the smith's workshop becomes a new setting for learning. The boys show a preference for the latter setting, since the symbols of school influence are consigned to the flames. That is why 'burn' is possibly ambiguous in the following extract:

        And we would respond,
        great boys of child-innocence,
        and in the flames burn
        white buck and helmet
        that had pulled us through innocence….

The lines would normally be read to mean, 'we would burn white buck and helmet in the flames'; but it could also imply, 'we would burn [be shaped] in the flames'.

If religion does not feature as an important influence in those two sections it sounds the dominant note in the rest of 'Passage' and 'Initiation', and helps to define the unpleasant experiences which force the prodigal to accept the necessity for homecoming. In 'Passage (ii)' the real centre of the Christian procession is the overwhelming bewilderment which the poet feels on arriving at a crossroads or a turning point in his development. This mood is achieved through an emphasis on the solemnity and on the mourning colour which marks the procession and which identifies the poet's mood with the traditional feeling of loss and alienation associated with mournings. The fragments of melody, the appeal to a personal saint, 'Anna of the panel oblongs', and the refuge in the cornfields among the wild music of the winds complete the mourner's feeling of a broken emotional anchor. Thus begins the prodigal's progress from separation through bewilderment and alienation which are the preludes to his renunciation of the Christian religion.

'Passage (iii)' outlines the hero's initial objections to Christianity; its foreign origin is emphasized in the drama of the seven-league boots striding over distant seas and deserts; its oppressiveness is implied in the designation of Leidan as 'archtyrant of the holy sea' (an obvious pun); and the aversion which he feels for Christian ritual and its reward is present in the report on the fate of people like Paul, who, after conversion, become subjected to the:

        smell of rank olive oil
        on foreheads,
        vision of the hot bath of heaven
        among reedy spaces.

Having had a foretaste of various forms of experience in 'Passage' (play, education, religion), the poet recalls, in 'Initiation', his formal introduction into the adult world of religion, poetry, and sex. His introduction to the first takes the form of a ritual initiation, but his introduction to the other two areas of experience occurs as a form of discovery. As might have been anticipated in the previous section, the prodigal's first significant experience of religion takes the form of a painful initiation which he sees rather resentfully as a branding that has the claims of a legal agreement:

       Scar of the crucifix
       over the breast
       by red blade inflicted
       by red-hot blade on right breast
       witnesseth

The pain itself is not the cause but the consequence of his resentment. The cause stems from his conception that ideally, the initiated should be

       Elemental, united in vision
       of present and future,
       the pure line, whose innocence
       denies inhibitions.

Instead of this promised transformation the initiated ones turn out to be worthless or corrupt adherents whom the poet has arranged in categories which include lifeless morons, fanatics, and self-seekers. This perversion of good intentions is imputed to cultural differences. Maybe that is why the hero seeks refuge in the memory of a childhood experience in the third section.

The second and central theme of the poem is presented in 'Initiation (iii)' and 'Initiation (iv)'. 'Initiation (iii)' returns us the poet's childhood. The theme is music making, with Jadum the minstrel singing cautionary songs from the fairyland of youth till late into the night. The opening lines are a suggestion that Jadum got his name from the sound of his music, 'JAM JAM DUM DUM'. The emphasis is not so much on his madness as on the music he makes. The power of his minstrelsy over the childish listener is the theme of the section. And yet the fact of his madness is important too, for the identification of poetry with madness is also the theme of 'Newcomer (ii)' where the hero is 'mad with the same madness as the / moon and my neighbour'.

'Initiation (iv)' focuses attention directly on the art of poetry by formulating a poetic. The formulation takes the form of a dialogue with 'Upandru'. The first item defines Okigbo's technique, his delight in mystifying the reader with recondite references. Obscurity is a technique for hiding the poet's thoughts: 'Screen your bedchamber thoughts / with sunglasses'. The second item, the view that only poets may penetrate beyond this mask, might explain why, as was once reported, Okigbo claimed, 'I don't read my poetry to non-poets':

       who could jump your eye
       your mind-window?
       And I said:
       The prophet only,
       The poet.

The bedchamber is introduced in the fifth section where the poet screens his thoughts with a riddle. In this introduction of the third theme, the sexual, the poet rejects the Christian call of 'Initiation (i)' for a 'life without sin'. In his conviction that freedom from lust can come only through indulgence the prodigal has found a philosophy to live by. By this rejection of an alien religion and the adoption of poetry and of a personal code of existence, the prodigal-poet considers his initiation into a new personal world complete, and feels ready for union with Water-maid. 'Bridge' represents this stage of the anticipation of her influence.

The desired union with Watermaid is however not consummated in the third movement. There is a stage missing in the ritual of the prodigal's return, and that is, an identification of the source to which he is returning, and a performance of the requirements for readmission. 'Initiation' has turned out a misleading experience. What he describes in the first section is merely an abortive initiation; and although he achieves something in the first two sections by completing the renunciation of his prostituted allegiance, he does not go further than an examination and a discovery of his own purposes in the last two sections. In fact no adequate preparation for the meeting with Watermaid has taken place. That is why, as the poet discovers, 'Bridge' has been a premature stage in his homecoming. So although the goddess responds to the prodigal's cry, the revelation is too evanescent to be of permanent value to the poet who now watches the loss of the harvest:

       So brief her presence—
       match-flare in wind's breath—
       so brief with mirrors around me.
 
       Downward …
       the waves distil her:
       gold crop
       sinking ungathered.

The lament in 'Watermaid (iii)' involves not merely alienation but also a loss of the expected harvest. In 'Watermaid (iv)', for example the departure of the stars is used not only as a backdrop to the isolation of the poet, it is also a reference to 'Watermaid (i)' in which poetic blessing is expected when the eyes of the prodigal 'upward to heaven shoot / where stars will fall from'. That is why the prodigal-poet strives to recapture the fleeting strains of poetic inspiration in a passage that anticipates the second movement of Limits:

       Stretch, stretch, O antennae,
       to clutch at this hour,
 
       fulfilling each moment in a
       broken monody.

The reason for the failure to achieve full union with Watermaid has been revealed earlier where the suppliant hid the secret in beach sand. The goddess has discovered that the candidate for initiation is ritually unclean and therefore unfit for her presence. All he has done is to go through an adapted form of Christian confession without using a priest—an unsuitable ritual, for Watermaid is unambiguously presented as 'native'—in a renunciation of the Christian experience. That is why, in spite of being from the sea, she is 'Watermaid of the salt emptiness'. Salt water has become distasteful because of its supposed association with the baptismal rites of primitive Christianity:

       so comes John the Baptist
       with bowl of salt water

Since Watermaid is not a Christian goddess we may assume that she belongs mainly to a non-Christian, even pre-Christian, religion or community.

It follows, then, that the particular defilement we are concerned with is non-Christian and even non-ethical, and that the state of impurity should not be linked with the prodigal's rejection of Christian insistence on continence in the 'Initiation' movement. In fact the recurrence of the he-goat-on-heat motif in Limits reinforces this view that the uncleanliness which drove Watermaid away from contact with pollution, and makes the 'Lustra' movement of Heavensgate necessary, is a ceremonial rather than an ethical or moral purification. Ritual offering is necessary only because the poet-hero has been a prodigal and is therefore technically a stranger requiring ritual cleansing before being readmitted into communion with his goddess.

It is this purification feast that is variously celebrated in the three parts of 'Lustra': first the traditionally prescribed objects of purification in the first part; then the spirit's hopeful ascent towards acceptance to an accompaniment of ceremonial drums and cannons in the second part; finally, the vegetable and chalk that are offered in the third part as an act of penitence to complete the requirement partially fulfilled by the performance in the earlier sections. Although the offerings are all traditional ones, they possess the attributes of moistness and whiteness which have been associated with the goddess. Also like the goddess, the attitude is 'native'. It will be noticed that in the line, 'white-washed in the moondew', a common Christian moral attitude has been purged from the word, 'whitewash', which is now reinvested with a non-Western, traditional ritual meaning. We may assume that his renunciation is final at this stage.

In the third section the poet adopts the underlying faith of the religion from which he is a refugee; the rejection of the source of the faith is explicit in the attitude of 'After the argument in heaven'. The doctrine has relevance for the prodigal because it provides reassurance in the analogy drawn with the Christian belief in the Second Coming—the reappearance of his Watermaid, after the fulfilment of the lustral requirements.

It is this expected second coming of Watermaid which makes the fifth movement, 'Newcomer', a necessary conclusion for Heavensgate. Having lost his first opportunity to achieve communion with Mother Idoto, it is only in 'Newcomer' that the poet gets another opportunity to hold himself open to poetic inspiration from his native muse, after his blunder in the 'Watermaid' movement. Although 'Newcomer' suffers from repetition in the context of the poem since the first two sections take the reader over some old ground, on the whole it moves us a step further towards the close of the hero's development. For example, in the opening lines the peals of the angelus recall the prodigal's state of exile, and the involuntary sign of the cross which accompanies these bells becomes transformed into a gesture of defiance against the usual response. It also serves him as a protective mask to insulate his new individuality from being swamped by communal values:

       Mask over my face—
       my own mask
       not ancestral—

Thus, the internalized allegiance which makes it irresistible for the Christian to respond spontaneously at the sight or sound of Christian symbols is tested against the hero's new-found identity. The appeal to the personal 'Saint', Anna, for succour is a desperate step which he takes because he is threatened by the danger of succumbing to the Christian call to worship.

'Newcomer (ii)', by no means the happiest section, repeats the theme of identity just presented in the first section. It is dedicated to a kindred spirit. Both 'spirits' are isolated from the generality of men by their madness—for what is madness but a deviation from commonly-accepted norms of behaviour. It is this common 'insanity' of creative spirits which unites the hero and Peter Thomas with Jadum, the mad minstrel of 'Initiation (iii)'.

The final section of 'Newcomer' is also a dedicatory piece: 'For Georgette', written as a kind of nativity poem. Although, like the section dedicated to Peter Thomas, this piece was originally occasional, it finds a logical context in Heavensgate. Its burden is the final arrival of the much-longed-for inspiration which gave the whole of the Heavensgate sequence its exploratory structure and the strongly expectant tone first dictated by the 'Watchman for the watchword' in the overture. But this section is not a description of the composition of Heavensgate, as Anozie pointed out in the review. It only heralds the arrival of poetic inspiration, for Heavensgate is an account of its own uncompleted quest only, and the reader is left at that point of elated expectancy just as inspiration descends—a point just one stage ahead of 'Watermaid (i)', and one behind 'Watermaid (ii)', A suitable setting to have the muse delivered has been created in 'May', 'green', and 'garden'. The 'synthetic welcome' suits the experimentation with words and form which gets the poet ready to welcome inspiration when it arrives.

We are now ready for the actual manifestation of the poetic impulse. The blinded heron of 'Transition' proclaims the birth of song, and anticipates the fulfilment of the goal towards which Heavensgate has been developing. The poem closes by the use of images with which the poet initially dramatized the problems of creation. The heron is of course the 'sunbird' of 'Passage' now developed into a mature bird, and it is to become the talkative weaver-bird of 'Siren Limits'. We are also to meet him in 'Fragments out of the Deluge' as the martyred songster who arose, like the phoenix from its ashes, to hymn new songs of its own immortality.

The song of Heavensgate ends as darkness descends over the setting, a contrast with the sunrise scene of the opening movement. This is achieved by a tempering of the dominant colours of the poem—transparency replaces the brilliant white of 'Watermaid', and soft leaf green replaces the bright, violent colours of the creation scene—i.e. the red, violet and orange of 'Passage (i)'. Natural phenomena, too, undergo this change: the moon goes under the sea—and it will be remembered that in 'Newcomer (ii)' the moon is the source of madness and inspiration, and that the sea is the home of Watermaid, goddess of inspiration. When the song is over, the inspirer goes home to rest, leaving the poet spent but sane; leaving only the shade to cloud the play of colour and sound.

And we have to wait until Limits when the poet is seized in a new poetic frenzy, his tongue having been liberated after appropriate purification.