SOURCE: "Death and the Artist: An Appreciation of Okigbo's Poetry," in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring, 1982, pp. 44-52.

[In the essay below, Izevbaye examines the ways in which the theme of death influences the form of Okigbo's poetry.]

The attempt to understand death and the need to master its sorrow have given birth to various African forms of artistic expression, whether these occur as "the ambivalence, often found in funeral songs, [which] helps to adjust the shock and grief which death brings to the living" [Gerald Moore, Africa, Vol. 38, 1968], or as a representation of the language of the dead in the speech of mmonwu, the masquerade. Such a representation is logical in the context of Uche Okeke's view [Tales of the Land of Death, 1971] that the basis for the representational art of the mask makers may be found in the Igbo world view that the land of the dead corresponds in pattern to the land of the living, having "its own kind of activities and things similar to these that exist in the land of the living." Furthermore, the dead could not possibly have gone into oblivion, and their land is the eventual home for the living.

The two kinds of response to death—the probing of its nature and the attempt to master the grief of death—influence the imagery and the form of Okigbo's poetry. The subject of death produces two basic forms in his poetry: the lament for the dead, and the poem that has its setting in the land of the dead.

Generally, in literature, the lament can take the form of a dirge, a form that concentrates on the lot of the dead person, or an elegy, with its concern for the effect on the living of the loss of the deceased. The concern for the dead is less important in Okigbo's poetry than the attention paid to the living, as in his "Lament of the Silent Sisters," a poem about social reform and individual responsibility. The closest that we get to the dirge-like concern for the dead is in Canto III of "Lament of the Drums," his most formal poem. Even "Elegy for Slit-drum" and "Elegy for Alto," the two poems that he composed in May 1966 soon after the killings, are more about the politics of the living than the fate of the dead. Although the tone is that of the dirge, the theme of death alternates with reference to the political background of the theme. In "Elegy for Slit-drum" he writes,

       The elephant has fallen
       the mortars have won the day
       the elephant has fallen
       does he deserve his fate
       the elephant has fallen
       can we remember the date—
 
       Jungle tanks blast Britain's last stand—

The social and political background remains constant in Okigbo's laments, although the earlier, revised poems do not contain the kind of topicality we find in the last line of the above quotation. Still, the social concern remains in the "Silences" group of laments, especially in lines like "how does one say NO in thunder?" and "Her pot-bellied watchers / Despoil her…." So, although Okigbo's favorite form is the elegy or lament, poems in this genre are at once an expression of public grief and a criticism of society. The one exception is his poem on Yeats, "Lament of the Masks," which is not a true lament but an oriki or praise poem, being a less mournful poem than "Silences." "Lament of the Masks," is really a panegyric because it contains only two short references to death in Canto III ("For we had almost forgotten / Your praise-names—", and "[You] will remain a mountain / Even in your sleep….").

Although "Lament of the Masks" is less social and more personal in its tributes than "Silences," it is less despairing because it draws consolation for the living from the idea of the poet's literary legacy. This idea is conveyed in the allusion to an African folktale about how Dog brought fire to man as protection from the harmattan. In the context of the panegyric this allusion implies that the legacy of poetic technique left by Yeats for the generation of poets coming after him has made their work easier for them. The dead poet is thus given the status of Prometheus among poets.

The second kind of response to death, the attempt to probe and understand its nature, produces the other kind of poetic form we find in Okigbo's work: the personal pilgrimage to the land of death. We find this form in the Heavensgate—"Siren Limits"—"Distances" group. These poems differ from the Laments in two respects. First, they are not about the bitter effect of death on the living, but about the useful experience of death. Consequently, not only are they not about grief, they are about "divine rejoicing" at the hero's homecoming. Their tone is one of exultation; the tone of "Distances" is even ecstatic and celebrative, in contrast to the mood of despair and world-weariness of "Silences."

Ecstacy at finding oneself in the realm of death is not unusual in the literature of Africa. By chanting the theme, "may death be familiar to your spirits," Samba Diallo, the hero of Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure, seeks to mark out an area of central concern for Africans influenced by the materialism of the West. In traditional Igbo literature, the heroic stature of man is ultimately measured by his exploits in the land of the dead. Ojadili, like Uko, is the hero who "wrestled in the land of the dead [and] … beat the dead in their land." Okigbo makes such a venture into the underworld the basis for deifying his hero, and such journeys always have a fruitful conclusion in his poems:

        On an empty sarcophagus
        hewn out of alabaster,
        A branch of fennel on an
        empty sarcophagus….

Like the Christian image of an empty tomb at Easter, the fennel on an empty sarcophagus is the hero's victory over death; and the alabaster material of the sarcophagus, like the horizontal stone that similarly opens "Distances," is not treated as a barrier, but as a gateway through death to a new life. This suggests that death is being treated not as a termination but as a transition. The importance of death in Okigbo's poetry may be seen in the fact that even Heavensgate, a pastoral, was "conceived as an Easter sequence" according to Okigbo in his introduction, thus implying that life comes after death or that death comes before life. The heavensgate of the poem is the physical expression of the hero's passage from innocence to knowledge. Heavensgate is prevented from being completely idyllic by the presence of various symbolic suggestions of death on the path of the hero's progress, beginning with the wagtail-sunbird's retreat into mourning in an orangery, through the memorial silence for Kepkanly and "for him who was silenced," to the deathly image of man in the acknowledgement that man's body is merely "sandhouse and bones."

Thus, unlike the laments, poems about the hero's personal pilgrimage describe, by anticipation or by speculation, the experience and knowledge of death. "Distances" is the key poem on this theme, for it attempts to convey both a sensory experience of death and its imagined physical form. "Distances" cannot be read at a purely literal level, as can Heavensgate, for example, because ordinary persons and events are continuously identified as the avatars of death throughout the poem. Okigbo tells us that this poem is based on his "experience of surgery under general anaesthesia," but the surgical atmosphere ("camphor iodine chloroform / ether") and the presence of the surgeon ("in smock of white cotton") are identified with the presence of death. The hero's loss of consciousness becomes both a figurative recreation of the original experience and a different imaginative experience. The section itself seems an ironical anticipation of the death of Okigbo himself:

        Death lay in ambush that evening in that island;
        voice lost its echo that evening in that island.
 
        And the eye lost its light,
        the light lost its shadow….
 
        until my eyes lost their blood
        and the blood lost its odour.

The vision of the priestly figure of Death is reproduced in a clear and memorable portrait:

        and behind them all,
        in smock of white cotton,
        Death herself,
        the chief celebrant,
        in a cloud of incense,
        paring her fingernails….
 
        At her feet rolled their heads like cut fruits;
        about her fell
        their severed members, numerous as locusts….
        She bathed her knees in the blood of attendants;
        her smock in entrails of ministrants….

This section of "Distances" uses death as a metaphor for the aesthetic cleansing or purification of the poet's language and emotion. If "Siren Limits" (which employs the same technique of superpositioning to effect the coexistence of the original experience and its value as a poetic image) contains some of the most effective writing among this group of poems, it is difficult to deny to "Distances" the power to reveal the meaning of Okigbo's spiritual pilgrimage.

It has been argued above that the main forms Okigbo's poetry takes—the elegy or lament and the pilgrimage-poem—have been influenced by two kinds of response to death, the expression of grief and the attempt to unriddle the character of death. Because the expression of these two responses occur in Okigbo as forms of public statements and private explorations, they may appear as two distinct aspects of his poetic development. It is necessary to show the continuity between the two by suggesting that Okigbo is like Okolo the wrestler:

Eze the chief … ordered Okolo to go to a smithy who lived in the land of the dead and bring back the famous twin gongs….

[In the land of the dead] Okolo seized a pair of gongs and sneaked out of the spirit's house….

Okolo … reached the land of the living. He beat his shrill-sounding gong triumphantly. All the villagers rushed out to welcome him and dance to the music from the gong.

If we use this folktale as a metaphorical interpretation of "Distances" in relation to Path of Thunder and Okigbo's influence on the work of the younger Igbo poets who have been writing since the beginning of the Civil War, the private poetic quest to death's realm can be seen as Okigbo's preparation for duty as town crier.

To restate part of this argument in more prosaic and factual terms, it can be seen that the poems about the hero's personal pilgrimage generally retain and make use of the original occasion for their composition, especially in the references to persons like Kepkanly, Haragin, and Upandru. The method is at its most effective in "Siren Limits" where the images operate simultaneously at different levels.

"Siren Limits" can be read, for example, at the literal or autobiographical, the psychological or emotional, and the imaginative or aesthetic, levels. The image of the "siren" recalls the original alarm bell of the ambulance conveying the poet to hospital, but the experience is also given a sexual meaning in the dream of the queen who bewitches the hero and thereby turns him into a "he-goat-on-heat." The merging of these two experiences in the idea of "Siren Limits"—i.e., the original experience of the poet on the ambulance stretcher with the allusion to Ulysses straining at the mast of his ship—produces a complex image that suggests the imaginative life at the frontier of fulfilment:

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

The link between the private quest and the public pronouncement now becomes clearer. What needs to be eradicated from the former kind of poem is the private element. Still using the image of Ulysses tied to the mast, Canto IV of "Siren Limits" begins with the theme of self-surrender, the painful and enforced giving up of self-esteem for the greater glory of the muse:

        An image insists
        From flag pole of the heart;
        Her image distracts
        With the cruelty of the rose….

In the elegies, on the other hand, what Okigbo refines out of existence is the immediate occasion for the poem's composition, that is, those elements that would emphasize the topicality of the poems. The second part of Limits, "Fragments out of the Deluge," is an exception in this regard, being an experimental attempt to fuse personal involvement with public issues. Path of Thunder is also an exception because, although it is unrevised, there is good reason to believe that the group is a new and more effective attempt than "Fragments" (which in fact anticipates Path of Thunder) to combine the private statement with the use of the poet-as-public-hero. The antithesis of the truly private poems are the sequences in "Silences" in which there are no explicit references to the immediate subjects of the two laments, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Patrice E. Lumumba.

In other words, there have been two separate but related strands of development in Okigbo's poetry: the private, concerned with the perfection of his art, and the public, aimed at making pronouncements on the public issues of the day. Path of Thunder is an integration of both strands. The fact that the poet was killed before revising these last poems suggests that perhaps the problem was never quite solved for him. Not wanting to be like Usu the Bat who survived a war by being neither bird nor beast, Okigbo abandoned his poetic calling to answer the call to arms. There he tasted the forbidden food of the dead and that, ironically, yielded to him the true and final knowledge of Death herself.

The literary and critical reactions to Okigbo's death contain themes and motifs that we commonly find in many African folklore explanations of the origin of death. Two folktale motifs in particular recur in these reactions—those which Frazer once described as the Two Messengers and the Two Bundles [The Worship of Nature, 1926] to which one might add a third, that of the Forbidden Fruit and the Tree of Death.

The theme of the Wrong Message, that of death delivered to Man by the faster of two messengers, occurs in J. P. Clark's threnody, "Death of a Weaverbird" [Casualties, 1970], where, in a reference to the clear-voiced Weaverbird, Clark says that

        When plucked,
        In his throat was a note
        With a bullet for another.

In the motif of the two bundles, Man is offered two bundles and asked to choose one. Man chooses the bundle containing death and becomes mortal thereafter, unlike the serpent who can cast off his old skin and live eternally because he chose the right bundle. Certainly, the recurrent motif of death in Okigbo's poems sometimes makes one feel that like Samba Diallo, he is seeking to make death familiar to men's spirits by constantly singing about it. In The Trial of Christopher Okigbo Ali Mazrui raises the issue of the poet's responsibility to his art and presents the choice between art and social involvement in the riddle of the two bundles, like all questions about the rightness of a poet's choice of a warrior's role. Mazrui's presentation makes Okigbo's choice a questionable one, for which he sets up judges in After-Africa to try the poet. A different interpretation of the choice occurs in a poem by Obiora Udechukwu, one of the second generation of Nsukka poets who were still writing under the influence of Okigbo by the end of the civil war. Udechukwu addresses Okigbo in his "Lament of the Silenced Flute" as

        YOU.
        Who changed your lunar flute
        for a gun
        that future generations
        might not bite the sand.

A slightly more ironical verdict occurs in Soyinka's "For Christopher Okigbo" in which the choice that leads to martyrdom is justified—with some qualification in the tone—with emphasis on the poet's role as a torchbearer who has to tell his society plain truths as they are revealed to him.

Choosing to speak out plainly is itself enough of a hazard for the committed poet at certain periods in society's history. Okigbo saw the possibility of a purely literary alternative to social action in the obscure language of private poetry that he equated, in "Lament of the Silent Sisters," with the making of musical patterns or the choice of silence. The penalty for eating off the tree of knowledge is the fall of man. This much is acknowledged in the closing couplet of "Hurrah for Thunder" that welcomed the army coup of January 1966:

        If I don't learn to shut my mouth I'll soon go to hell,
        I, Okigbo, town-crier, together with my iron bell.