SOURCE: "Okigbo's Labyrinths and the Context of Igbo Attitudes to the Female Principle," in Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, edited by Carole Boyce Davies & Anne Adams Graves, Africa World Press, Inc., 1986, pp. 223-39.

[In the following excerpt, Fido traces Okigbo's treatment of female characters in his poetry and links Okigbo's view of women to Igbo tradition and familial influences.]

Igbo culture is a complex entity, and the boundaries which define it are diffuse. Igbo people have intermarried with peoples along their borders, and the colonial intrusion and its aftermath has so changed things that it is hard even for scholars bent on determining essential facts to find them. The process of disentangling colonial influences and non-Igbo influences from the core of traditional Igbo culture is ongoing, but debates persist as to whether one element or another is old Igbo or is the product of a continually changing and adapting cultural ambience. To be sure, there are deep-seated blendings of the traditional and the modern and the Igbo have become known for their capacity to accept and absorb change. One major area of this debate concerns Igbo attitudes to women.

Christopher Okigbo was born at Ojoto, a town near Onitsha in which a local but powerful goddess, Idoto, had her shrine. Many of the riverine areas of Igboland and of Eastern Nigeria in general have goddess cults of various kinds, including the Mammy Water and the sea-goddess Owu-Miri, who is worshipped around Oguta and Egbema. This prevalence of female deities is in accordance with the theory that the Igbo traditional religion was based around the female principle, centrally around the Earth Goddess Ala, described by Michael Echeruo as the most likely deity to be called supreme god of the Igbos. This theory is not unchallenged since Chukwu, a male deity, is often described as having become more important than Ala. However, some theologians claim that this was only a response to Christian missionaries and Igbo Christian theologians need to find a supreme god amongst the Igbo pantheon (one is tempted to add a supreme male god). There is also a view that the Arochukwu people extended Chukwu's power in the service of their own aggressive expansionism. Other Igbo theologians argue that "the supremacy of Chukwu has never been challenged by any divinity in the Igbo religious pantheon." Whatever the precise history of Chukwu and Ala may be, the fact is that female deities figure largely in the culture and literature of the Igbo people, right up to this day and even in literature written by men in the English language.

Eastern Nigeria has produced a number of significant writers, including the most well-known of all African writers at this date, Chinua Achebe. It is notable that Igbo women as a group are the most numerous and productive of African women writers. Whilst it is difficult to say for certain what factors predispose Igbo culture to encourage the development of women as creative writers, it is clear that they exist, and it is also apparent that male Igbo writers are particularly concerned with the balance of male and female values in society and write about the results of inequities in male and female principles as being dangerous to social health. Igbo culture is favorable to the development of relative individualism, and the variations in dialects and customs between villages reinforce an impression of social flexibility, a factor which played a part in Igbo attitudes to established colonial rule and education. But beyond that circumstance which might give rise to female independence and development within cultural restraints, there are definite links made by Igbo people between strong women and specific social and cultural realities. For example, asking where the Igbo novelist Flora Nwapa was born, I was told that she comes from a place where the women are very strong (namely Oguta).

A few years after Okigbo was born, in 1932, a woman anthropologist published a study of Igbo women in which she detailed their close bonding with one another and their sense of independence and identity, as well as their closeness to the female Earth Goddess, acknowledged by their men [Sylvia Leith-Ross, African Women, 1939]. Her comment on Igbo male attitudes to women is important:

One hears it said that the Igbo man 'does not respect women'. He does: he even respects her in a way so original and so modern that Europeans have only just begun to think of it.

Leith-Ross' study covered both rural and urban Igbo communities and included Port Harcourt, Onitsha and the intervening area. Her findings importantly point to what amounts to a women's sub-culture amongst the Igbo, with councils which almost amount, she suggests, to the power of secret societies, belief in the fecundity of women being linked to that of the yam deity, and a relation to the male world which was easy enough to permit men to say they would not mind being reincarnated as women, which could scarcely be the case in a really sexist society. Leith-Ross' position also supports the current arguments of the Bendel Igbo dramatist Zulu Sofola who argues that tradition benefitted women more than the modern postcolonial situation. Furthermore, the research of the Yoruba historian J. F. Ade Ajayi corroborates the idea that colonialism worsened the situation of the African woman. This is not surprising since the British colonialist period was marked in Britain itself by strong sexism.

There is some evidence that the traditional role of Igbo culture concerning gender might have been somewhat androgynous. Androgyny is defined in this sense as the capacity emotionally and intellectually to accept every human being as a mixture of male and female elements, with ideal human social relations permitting both sexes to utilize the 'other' in their nature freely and usefully. Certainly there is much psychological evidence that androgynous people are more mentally healthy than those who subject themselves to extremes of gender roles, and this may have an effect on creativity. Leith-Ross, at any rate, found that there was an androgynous flavour to Igbo culture: she describes "glimpses of some peculiar conception of sex or of a thread of bisexuality running through everything … or of a lack of differentiation between the sexes—or of an acceptance of the possibility of the transposition of sex." Chinua Achebe deals centrally with unbalanced maleness in Things Fall Apart, and Carole Boyce Davies argues that he seems to be saying that survival involves man in unifying male and female qualities [unpublished]. In one interview, Achebe said: "There is always some kind of war between the sexes, you know, but in the traditional society it was good-humored." This focus on male-female relations as the underpinning of society seems to characterize both female and male writers from Eastern Nigeria, such as Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Zulu Sofola, Christopher Okigbo, Cyprian Ekwensi and Onuora Nzekwu, who are Igbo and Elechi Amadi who is Ikwerre.

Yet for all the suggestions of possible advantages to women in traditional cultures, tradition was certainly not ideal, and modern influences such as British sexist colonialism further complicated gender relations. Some writers, like Amadi, have specifically written on women's issues, but only to reveal their own conflicts. Amadi's essay on the Nigerian civil war, Sunset in Biafra reveals his adherence to British-style army training, not surprising since he undertook that himself. But perhaps it partly explains why, when he talks of women, he sounds very much like a Western man:

Because man recognises instinctively that feminine powers are overwhelming, he is reluctant to concede any further powers and privileges to woman … This is the feminine sexual power which men fear. The women who oppose the feminist movement are mostly those who recognise this power …

The same authoritarian, anti-emotional tradition which shapes soldiers in the Western style also makes men incapable of giving up their rigid surface controls to enjoy intimacies and equalities with women. Okigbo, whilst not a professional soldier, was killed in the Biafran war and his poetry clearly articulates the stress of determining identity amidst cultural crisis and gender crisis. In his work, fear of women can also be clearly perceived. Anxiety about the female principle is in fact a strong element in male Eastern Nigerian writers' work, whereas in writers such as Flora Nwapa, there is a profoundly different perception, an engagement with the reality of trying to be female and an individual in a society which constantly tries to mythologize about women to distance any danger they might pose. Nwapa's Efuru shows a woman trying to come to terms with loss of husband and child through her relation to a water-deity, a sort of divine role-model who helps her to decide that childlessness is not the end of the world. There is a great difference between using myth to make reality more workable and endurable and using myth to create fantasies which deny the reality. Much recent critical work by women has found the latter tendency strong in male creative literature, and of course the anger which women have begun to express can sometimes lead to intense hostility to men, itself a social divisive force. Buchi Emecheta's work, influenced as it is by her British experience, is characterised by a greater element of what one might call Western style feminism than is true of other African women writers in Nigeria. So it is possible to see that on both sides, male and female, there is a mixture of dissatisfaction with present male-female relations based on the central belief in Eastern Nigerian cultures that society is built on these relations and that something is presently wrong. A variety of solutions based not only on knowledge of tradition but also on colonial and post-colonial cultural influences from Britain have further polarized the sexes.

Okigbo's poetry ought to be seen in this context, for his presentation of his own spiritual odyssey is framed by the developing images of a female principle which shapes and informs the adult male psyche. Labyrinths is a spiritual journey to rebirth as an adult consciousness and a creative voice. The creative artist who made the poetry was himself a collection of contradictory elements: poet and man of action who was killed in war; mystic with ambitions to be a financier; proud Igbo and yet lover of European poetry; a man ambivalent about négritude but extremely attracted to symbolism and committed to the rehabilitation of his race and culture after colonialism; and Christian trained yet an adherent of older religions. The creative process made it possible for him to find coherence in himself, and his poetry shows the stages of integration of the disparate elements of his vision.

In his life, Okigbo had problems in his relations with women. He tried to save his marriage by making one last trip to visit his wife at Yola, a trip described in his preface to Labyrinths as being "in pursuit of what turned out to be an illusion". Yet women or the concept of the feminine in various forms shape the major images in his poetry. People who were close to Okigbo believe that the poems are all or almost all based on real relations with women. Yet the emotional tone of the poems is often agonized, as if when faced with the physical and emotional reality of sexual love Okigbo found great pain and self-doubt tormented him. Ideals and abstractions are, in that case, a good deal easier. Sunday Anozie has written that Okigbo adored his wife and daughter [Christopher Okigbo, 1972]. But that surely is too simple a statement. When the poetry is closely examined, there seems to be running through all of its emotional textures a tension between love and fear, desire to submit to intensities of emotional and physical love and desire to remain separate, adoration of the mother and terror of the sexual partner. Also evidenced is a need to restore the ancient mother-ruled images of traditional religious cults and so rid his culture of colonialism, countered by a need to be an adult male, independent of needs for softness and protection given by a woman. In many ways, Okigbo's twists and turns of desire are those characteristic of man in many if not all cultures, where mother-domination in early childhood creates a fear of woman's power and a desire to dominate women in order to be adult and a man. But there is a vital aspect of his agony which is particular to modern post-colonial African man, and indeed to Igbo man, with his history, it seems, of close and relatively balanced relations with the feminine. That is, while the feminine is closely intertwined with his idea of traditional religion, the male-dominated Christian ethos shaped his public idea of himself as a man in colonial and post-colonial society, and that is antithetical to Igbo tradition. In addition, British culture portrays the male poet as an effeminate man, someone less than fully developed as a masculine figure.

Okigbo's commitment to poetry coincided with his conviction that he was the reincarnation of his maternal grandfather, who was a priest of the goddess Idoto. Thus his ethnic and spiritual identity was bound up in his poetic development. His return to tradition was a return to the 'Mother' Idoto and a rejection of the male god of patriarchial Christianity. The very androgynous quality which often characterises highly developed creative writers is arguably the result of imaginative effort to transcend gender in order to create a full human canvas: Okigbo makes no attempt to depict real woman in his poetry, but instead deals with the mythic and symbolic qualities which she can hold for a male imagination. Yet his poet-protagonist's strivings for self-creation seem to point to a desire for androgyny, a sensuous and emotive union with the 'other'. Chukwuma Azuonye links Okigbo's woman symbols with Jungian psychology, but resists the idea that Okigbo expresses fear of the feminine. However, the masochistic quality noted in the poetry by Sunday Anozie derives its force from the painful dilemma of the sensitive man—whether to submit to sensuous experience and give up control of the woman or to risk the loss of self-possession which must come in surrender to sexual experience. The fear of woman which informs Okigbo's images of the Lioness is an ambivalent one, but nevertheless there is an anxiety within it that the man will be castrated by the act of surrender.

Let us examine the spiritual quest which shapes Labyrinths. Critics have discussed Okigbo's use of the Idoto cult and Christianity, and occasionally note has been made of Okigbo's references to ancient Middle Eastern cultures. But there is a major thread of meaning in the poems which relates to Okigbo's knowledge of ancient history and which ties Idoto to the cults of an ancient Egyptian goddess, Isis, who was in her various incarnations Isis, Ishtar, Inanna and finally, much reduced, the Virgin Mary, the most widespread deity in the ancient world. There are in fact three religions intertwined in the poetry: Idoto-worship and traditional Igbo worship of the feminine; Christianity and the worship of Isis-Ishtar.

The very title, Labyrinths, is best interpreted through the ancient Cretan culture which Okigbo himself refers to in his preface. The Cretan goddess is of course connected to the legends of the Labyrinth and Nor Hall has explained it well:

A Minoan statue of the mother goddess from Crete embodies this message in archaic form … With a snake in one hand and a tool (her double-edged axe) in the other, the goddess connects the chthonian realm of matter (the Mother) and the upper world of the sky-god, who calculates, measures and perceives …

The axe came to mean many things. It is called labrys and is related to labyrinth, the underground dwelling of the goddess. In order to pass through the labyrinth it was necessary to make a full 360-degree turn, to turn completely round on oneself to go out the way one came in. In the ancient world this action was meaningful on what we would call a psychological level, as evident in the conjecture that it was the crossing sweeper Labys who is credited with the maxim 'know thyself'.

Okigbo links the double-edged axe of Crete with the Aro culture of the Igbo people in his preface, thus connecting the ancient Middle East/North Africa together with his own ethnic traditions. The labyrinth is of course the ancient symbol of the womb, and there is a strong theme of rebirth and initiation in Okigbo's poem cycle. But that initiation takes place in the world of the Mother, opposed to which, in Labyrinths, is the measuring, geometric world of Kepkanly, the primary school teacher of the colonial Mission school. Earth and sky, the water goddess and the Christian sky god, are the poles of spiritual existence at the beginning of Labyrinths.

Okigbo's poems are obscure, symbolical, full of personal allusions and unexplained references to foreign poets and to political events or Igbo cultural traditions. Nothing is clearer than Okigbo's intention not to be fully understood, even to himself. There has been complaint about this. But perhaps it is best to accept that when a writer is deliberately obscure, out of competence rather than out of failure to be clear, there is good reason. Then, perhaps, the most appropriate way to approach Okigbo's work is as if he was writing the kind of mystical, gnomic verses which characterize ritualistic poetry in African cultures, e.g. in Ifa worship amongst the Yoruba. Okigbo's relation to spiritually tormented poets like T. S. Eliot (who also uses the symbol of a powerful and threatening woman associated with myth in his poetry) has long been recognized. If the complexity of spiritual truths felt and explored by a finely tuned intelligence is added to the complexity of Okigbo's socio-political and historical context, then it is not particularly surprising that his work is difficult.

The relation of the three religions in Labyrinths is difficult to disentangle for Okigbo's method of composition is associational and he does not provide explanatory links. But much of the imagery has several layers of meaning which connect religious traditions at a deep symbolic level. For example, the Igbo folktale which tells of a monkey dazzled by the armpit of a lioness until he destroys himself clearly accounts for the image of the 'armpit dazzle of the lioness' in Labyrinths. But it is also true that one of the titles of Isis, Queen of Heaven, was Lioness of the Sacred Assembly, and that Sakmet was the lioness-headed goddess of Ancient Egypt who was symbolic of war and pestilence and who annihilated her enemies. Similarly, eggs, which are important in the worship of Igbo water-goddess and which figure largely in the ritually important symbolisms of the poetry, were one of the important symbols of Isis. White light, which surrounds the Watermaid in Labyrinths is not only the dazzle of the Lioness, but the moonlight which has always been associated with female deities, including Isis and her various forms. Other clusters of images have this syncretic overtone, including those of water, the sea, corn and associated golden objects (the gold crop, ears of the secret, amber, golden eggs, yellow memories), Nature, snakes and birds. Most of these are strongly associated both with Igbo traditions and with Isis and goddess worship in the ancient world.

It is important to place these connections in the context of Igbo legends that the Igbo people came originally from Egypt. These legends, which are said to explain the celebrated terra-cotta skin of many Igbos as well as their relatively small land area and their migratory tendency to resettle and intermarry with other peoples, as well as their sense of being different from other peoples in Nigeria, might well have been the original impetus behind Okigbo's fascination with ancient history.

In Labyrinths, Okigbo interweaves Christianity complexly with Igbo traditions. In the opening cycle of poems, the protagonist submits to Idoto as a 'prodigal' with all the Biblical overtones of that term. He thus points to the conflict within him which is again expressed strongly when he begs his dead, saintly mother, Anna Okigbo, to protect him from "them fucking angels." Anna is a particularly important name itself to carry ambivalences if one remembers … that Anna was not only Okigbo's mother's actual name but a major part of Jung's 'anima' term. Yet again, Christianity significantly appears as the colonialist eagles who rape Igbo culture, bringing with them their God who silences the longdrums and causes the forest gods to be forgotten and their shrines abandoned. Yet their violence is in the service of a religion which teaches love (and we know from Achebe the impact of a new faith which could release some Igbos who felt themselves persecuted by Igbo religious principles). Similarly the old cults of Isis could involve the sacrifice of males. So men must have feared the power of women within that context. There is therefore a good deal of violence in Labyrinths, much of it linked to female cruelties to men via the dangerous experience of sexual attraction as well as to the Christianizing/colonising experience. Christianity first taught toleration and love, then suppressed women, of course, with increasing ferocity, waging a war on the remnants of pagan cults which often reflected the place of women in the ancient world and which seemed to give them greater power and freedom than Christianity was willing to permit. Instead of a sexually active ideal of women, Christianity created an ideal of virginity/chastity and motherhood and Okigbo's poetry communicates these images together with a great deal of ambivalence toward female beauty (linking it to power and cruelty to men). Sunday Anozie quotes a passage from Robert de Montesquieu which deals with the story of John the Baptist in a way very reminiscent of Okigbo's treatment of male fear of women:

The secret is none other than that the mystery of her being is to be violated by John, who catches sight of her and pays for this single sacrifice with his life; for this free spirited virgin will only feel pure again, when she is holding the head of an executed man …

This passage seems to be to capture Okigbo's spirit of fear in the poems which relate to sexual woman. But, Christianity, after all, suppressed women so much so that such violence against men was virtually impossible to conceive of, and the sexual strictures against women subdued their sexual nature to the service of their god. Celibacy replaced sexuality as the spiritual centre of physical devotion to God.

The relation of sexuality to religion is crucially important in Labyrinths. The poet-protagonist develops from his rebirth as Idoto's returned son to a sexual awakening with the Watermaid and afterwards as agonised adult experience with the Lioness, which culminates in his 'homecoming' as the bridegroom of this powerful and destructive female presence, seen paring her fingernails amidst the carnage of dismembered limbs and blood. Even small details in the poetry bring the reader to link violence, sex and religion. In the poem to Awolowo 'Lament of the Drums', the reference to Celaeno and her harpy crew, the image of the sea as raped and the waters as sultry all conjure up a disturbed female sexuality, which is either threatening or violated and thus hurt. The language of the poetry abounds with images of the fruitfulness of the goddess, of her connection with water, and with powerful and threatening nature, as in 'Distances III' where she is associated with a molten centre of earth and her labyrinths are connected with violence. The androgynous forest gods are raped. There is a strong castration theme which runs through the poetry, and which links it with the old world of self-castration associated with the cult of Cymbele, a Greek version of Isis, and Attis, who was castrated and who gave rise to the custom of self-castration by priests of Cymbele.

The origins of this connection between sexuality, religion and violence was the necessary death and rebirth of vegetation along the Nile valley as the great river ebbed and flowed. The river was Isis, the vegetation Osiris, who died and was resurrected each year. The legend went that Osiris, Isis' brother-lover was torn to pieces and Isis put his body together again, but his penis was missing. She created him whole and blew life into him and he caused her to conceive her son, the god Horus. Afterwards, the goddess' husbands and lovers were always associated with death and rebirth. But the Babylonian goddess, Ishtar, had as her consort her son, Tammuz, whose death she did not cause but rather mourned. Okigbo includes in Labyrinths the lament of Ishtar for Tammuz, which was identified by Dan Izevbaye as a virtual translation of an ancient Sumerian song [The Critical Evaluation of African Literature, 1973]. In Biblical times, Hebrew women performed a ritual lament for Tammuz, showing how ancient traditions of goddess worship had permeated even their male-oriented religious culture. It is plain that historically, men gradually resisted the self-surrender and death-rebirth myths associated with the goddess' consort. The myth of Gilgamesh, often described as the first epic, tells how Gilgamesh refuses to become the goddess' lover, saying that Ishtar has hurt too many lovers before. He goes off to become the first patriarchal hero and Enkidu is sacrificed in his stead. Okigbo weaves mention of the Gilgamesh epic into 'Fragments out of the Deluge'. Christianity was the triumph of male ascendency and also the triumph of a gentle, loving god-figure in Christ himself, yet of course it has been a bloody and oppressive religion to those ground down by colonialism and slavery and forced to accept the god of those who exploited them. Okigbo's sense of conflict in relation to his Mother Idoto and to the powerful goddess images is made very clear by his references to Christian violation of Igbo culture and even by references to the drowning nuns who represent womanhood totally submissive to a god who does not save them.

Fertility, associated of course with creativity and therefore with the poet, is associated with the female deity. In the lament for Tammuz, there is mention of special concern for the loss of various kinds of fruition: 'fields of crops', 'fields of men', children in reference to 'barren wedded ones' and 'perishing children'. The sinister 'potbellied watchers' who despoil 'her' in this poem suggest a male violation of the goddess' plenty. Here Okigbo's sympathy appears to be with a hurt maternal Nature, but he seems to have ambivalence towards the feminine in many other places. When the poet-protagonist finally achieves his 'birthday of earth', there is an overtone still of fear and adoration at the same time for the goddess who has been his inspiration and his mate. It is as if the poet risks his manhood and his existence to achieve his poetic vocation through union with the Lioness. In the sensuous passage of sexual encounter with the Watermaid, the poet is a submissive and loyal subject. Even the sea is 'spent', presumably from loving her. When he washes his feet in the 'maid's pure head' at the end of Labyrinths, he is afraid of her variegated teeth. These tensions are characteristic of the poetic journey of the protagonist, in which he becomes, for example, a skeletal oblong, (the oblong is associated with both his mother Anna through the church organ panels, and with the Lioness' head), a shape created by his attraction to the female deity he follows but reduced to a skeleton. For patriarchy depends on potency, on domination of women, in fact, and the poet stands between the matriarchal world of Idoto and the patriarchal colonial one of Christian education and culture: submission to woman risks potency, yet provides fusion with the Igbo traditions which the poet desires, and also promises a delicious and masochistic pleasure of domination by another and release from the responsibility of domination.

The geometric shapes which are a linked series of images in the poems are connected to notions of rigidity and excess, hypocrisy and exploitativeness found in both religious and secular leaders and men of responsibility. The cross itself functions as a complex symbol, and a huge fiery cross links itself with geometric shapes in the poet's mind as he dreams in 'Distances' IV. Initiation ordeals, including the knife (circumcision and also the old Igbo ritual of cutting the face to prove endurance on the part of the initiate) are linked with the idea of Christian ritual. Kepkanly, who presides over the initiation of the young poet into the Catholic catechism, is the god of the schoolroom, but the world he promises is one where precise thinking and rigid attitudes (symbolised by various geometric shapes) seem to Okigbo to betray the mysteries of the spirit and put pragmatisms, and therefore moral corruptions, to the forefront. The fiery cross of 'Distances' is reminiscent of the KKK, the racist American organization which more than any other has publicized the Christian involvement with prejudice and hatred, including killing innocent people because of their colour or ethnic identification. The young poet is scarred by Christianity in the way that the old Igbo ritual scarred its initiates to prove courage on their part. In 'Distances' IV there is a surreal vision of geometric shapes in a cosmic setting, and in V Okigbo links the 'kiss' which is so much associated with Christ to the scar, and to two swords. As in the Isis myths and in Igbo religion, Christianity is a mixture of violence, sexuality and spiritual purity, a dangerous environment for the unwary.

The image of the Mother is crucial to the poems. Idoto is the deity who is symbolic mother to the young poet returning to his culture and to his spiritual base. But also Anna, the poet's earthly mother, whose funeral is the theme of the lovely poem "SILENT FACES at crossroads", in "The Passage", becomes associated by the shape of the oblong with the Lioness herself. 'Distances' V brings together the idea of form as a cosmic and religious frame for the soul with the 'panel oblong', associated with the church organ and the coffin of Anna's burial and the Lioness' head, and the sanctuary at the centre of the earth where Mother Earth will receive her children, where water runs through tunnels (with the obvious suggestion of female sexual secretions), and this looks forward to 'Distances' VI. There is a constant interweaving of symbols and thus the sexual overtones of the Lioness are interwoven with the maternal aspects of Idoto/Anna. It is interesting that Isis cults, too, had this dualism, where the female deity was both protective and nurturing and destructive and threatening to man. Similarly also Isis worship was finally destroyed (her temples sacked) and her identity subsumed into the Virgin Mary by Christianized Rome in much the same way as Idoto and the forest gods were destroyed by Christian British imperialism and its local Igbo adherents. In 'Fragments Out of the Deluge' Okigbo makes reference to the Flood, which was associated with the goddess before it was Biblical (she is supposed to have sailed on the waters in a crescent moon boat and her symbols included the dove). Also in this poem, Okigbo mentions the Lioness and in a footnote explains that she had killed the hero's second self, which is a clear reference to the epic of Gilgamesh and a clear identification of the poet with Gilgamesh himself (the sacrificed Enkidu being the second self of Gilgamesh). So there is here a dualism within one poem which is repeated over and over again in Labyrinths: the female principle becomes the creative-protective-destructive cosmic centre of the universe.

Fear plays a major role in Okigbo's poetry, whether it is fear of the void or the abyss, fear of woman, fear of becoming or of dying. The fear is caused by the ambivalence which a person such as the poet-protagonist must feel, for his psyche is partly shaped by colonialism and Christianity which he regards as "fireseed", i.e. destructive to him. Of course his attitude to woman must be equally ambivalent, for she is essential to his being as well as on an ongoing threat to his potency and domination. The fear motivates the poetry in creative and constructive ways, for courage, whether creative or physical is not the absence of fear but the capacity to act despite it. Labyrinths was a brave thing to do, just as Okigbo's involvement with Biafra was direct and cost him his life. He was never a coward. In his last poems "Path of Thunder", he returns to the image of the ram tethered for sacrifice as presenting his own situation in the War, and in a moving and prophetic statement, indicates knowledge of likely death:

        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 player to the scabbard—

Once again, the Mother image becomes instrumental in presenting the realities of the poet's psychic condition: he is victim again, and in need of the protection of "Earth", of becoming once more the 'prodigal', and the hints of parallels with Christ's Passion which are prevalent in Labyrinths seem relevant again here. The poet is one of the "stars" which come and go, as poets, prophets and leaders come, do their work and die. Okigbo's presentation of the religious vocation of poet brings him to perceive suffering and even death as a necessary offering of experience which has to be made by those who seek greater understanding and knowledge, and who seek to serve their culture in times of stress. His ambivalence about Christianity does not prevent him from seeing the isolation, self-discipline and suffering of Christ himself as a model for the fate of the poet-prophet in other conditions and times. In the syncretic world of Okigbo's poetry, however, the Christ figure is close to the male sacrificial victims of the old goddess cults, where the death and resurrection of a chosen man meant renewal of crops and life for the community, a necessary triumph for the life principle in defiance of seasonal changes. The effect of the power of the goddess in Labyrinths on the poet is like the relation of Isis and Osiris, so that the submission to her cruelty, her deathly aspect and her power is like a voluntary self-sacrifice in the service of greater knowledge and poetic experience. The poet becomes, as it were, the earthly servant of both Idoto and the other female deities who inhabit the poetry, and in this way becomes a kind of Christ-victim figure, serving a lone apprenticeship in preparation for his own Calvary, and being ultimately sacrificed, not, as in Labyrinths, in a psychic and sexual sense subsumed into the goddess' power in order to rise again, but in the final sense of his mission being completed, his star leaving the heavens, as a casualty in war.

Okigbo was self-consciously a mystic, fully accepting of the romantic ideal of the poet as seer. His own comment on the composition of his work, although perhaps misleading given the erudite texture of borrowings from European and American poets which characterizes his earlier work, suggests a reconfirmation of the spiritual core of his poetry:

… all I did was to create the drums and the message they deliver has nothing to do with me at all.

It remains true that his work is essentially religious and mystical, but it should be recognised that the centre of that mysticism is the poet's complex relation with a series of female deities and with his own maleness in that context.