SOURCE: "Okigbo's Technique in 'Distances I,'" in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 17, No. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 73-84.

[In the essay below, Haynes analyzes Okigbo's poem "Distances I," offering a line-by-line account of its meanings and techniques.]

The following commentary deals with "Distances I" from the point of view of Christopher Okigbo's handling of reference, allusion, textual unity, and speech acts. But I begin with some preliminary remarks by way of justification, since Okigbo's work has been the subject of much polemic. He is said to be obscure, un-African, and elitist and to rely too heavily on an unassimilated modernism derived from the American poets, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. The last charge, when directed at the earlier books of Labyrinths, is well founded, but in the "middle" work which includes "Distances," Okigbo transcends his earlier imitativeness and writes some of his best pieces. Unlike Goodwin (Understanding African Poetry, 1982), I find "Distances" successful. Also, it provides the philosophical center to Okigbo's quest. The other charges—obscurity, un-Africanness, elitism—seem to me to be somewhat confused in conception.

Okigbo's central philosophical idea deeply involves modernity and its mixture of clash and mesh with his traditions. Okigbo adopts a modernist technique as his way of articulating that radical undercutting of older foundations and certainties that even the fullest independence cannot reinstate. True, Okigbo derives his style from the West, but two points must be remembered about this: first, that the imagist method he uses came to the West itself largely from China and Japan; second, that modernist verse is not the monopoly of elitist and/or capitalist-oriented poets. The communists, Mayakovski, Macdiarmid, and Neruda—all employ modernist styles; and in the first phase of Bolshevik rule, modernist art and literature were equated in their radical disruptiveness and their subversion of received (bourgeois) canons as a further expression of the political revolution. It is with the rise of Joseph Stalin and the demise of the original conception of the Soviet that doctrines of writing which in effect went back to nineteenth-century realism became "official," and modernism was seen by Lukács as a symptom, not now of radical departure, but of bourgeois decadence.

Okigbo's obscurity is attacked now by African critics who count themselves of the left (not the only critics of his obscurity, of course) for the same reasons that Lukács attacked Joyce and Kafka or the surrealist poets of the 1920s. While this criticism has stimulated our interest in forging a radical populist poetry—with all the technical problems that brings—it would be a mistake to take such poetry as the only kind worth reading, especially for the radical. It may be argued that the "simple" neo-Soviet kind of poetry (sometimes simplistically aligned with traditional oral poetry in Africa) is, in fact, more conservative, ultimately, than modernism. The latter is subversive of received commonsense categories as encoded in habitual language usage. This common sense, after all is what our rulers have taught us. A really revolutionary poetry must help its audience to think and to perceive in new ways, not merely to invert or to reshuffle the old "certainties." This kind of poetry is necessarily philosophical and demanding, but not necessarily "elitist." Philosophizing is not intrinsically elitist: it is so only in certain societies where not working with the hands is overrewarded and overprivileging.

It is often said that Okigbo is "obscure" by critics who seldom look into what this obscurity might consist in. In fact, as I hope to show later in this account, obscurity certainly cannot be taken in an absolute way, as "in" the poems. Perhaps the more important aspect of Okigbo's difficulty is his use of the English language rather than Igbo. His own command of English can seldom be matched, especially in more recent times, by second-language speakers who not only do not acquire English until after their earliest intimate years, when rhythm and intonation loom so large, but also do not use English as a language of affect and intimacy. The present paper aims to interpret the complexity of "Distances I" by looking into the language which the art of poetry, "simple" or not, demands almost by definition, poetry being utterance that realizes the "grain of language" itself, and thus undercuts all other discourses.

Here is the poem itself:

        1 FROM FLESH into phantom on the horizontal stone                        (1)
        2 was the sole witness of my homecoming …
 
        3 Serene lights on the other balcony:       (2)
        4 redolent fountains bristling with signs—
 
        5 But what does my divine rejoicing hold? (3)
        6 A bowl of incense, a nest of fireflies?     (4)
 
        7 I was the sole witness to my homecoming …             (5)
 
        8 For in the inflorescence of the white    (6)
        9 chamber, a voice, from very far away,
       10 chanted, and the chamber descanted, the birthday of earth,
       11 paddled me home through some dark
       12 labyrinth, from laughter to the dream.
       13 Miner into my solitude,             (7)
       14 incarnate voice of the dream,
       15 you will go,
       16 with me as your chief acolyte,
       17 again into the anti-hill …
       18 I was the sole witness to my homecoming …           (8)

I begin with a discussion of the way in which Okigbo represents the situations of this poem. Although Okigbo frequently does not refer to an immediate physical situation, we know from his introduction to Labyrinths that the scene in "Distances" is an operating theater. The scene is represented by the poet from the viewpoint of himself as a patient on the "horizontal stone," or operating table, under anesthetic. At the same time, and in the same words, Okigbo also refers to an inner dreamscape experienced by the patient as he moves into unconsciousness. The skill Okigbo shows here is in the double reference to an outer physical world and an inner psychic one.

This is particularly clear at the beginning of the poem when the outer world is still near to consciousness. As the poet sinks from consciousness, the inner world too sinks deeper, becoming a traditional shrine and then, further into the psyche, a mythical landscape.

Let us first look at this double reference. It is realistically motivated, since it follows the course of actual anesthesia (a variation on the idea of the poet's vision as being a dream). The first two lines set the double scene clearly enough. "From flesh into phantom," from the bodily to the intangible and imagined, as if the body is dissolved and the utterer becomes a ghost. "Phantom" has connotations also, of course, of surgery—connotations of "phantom limbs." But in addition it suggests the world of spirits and death, which anyone undergoing surgery feels much closer to. In the same line Okigbo's metaphor of the "horizontal stone" represents both the actual operating table and an altar, perhaps pyre. That it is an altar is encouraged by similar depictions in other parts of Labyrinths. For example, in "Siren Limits IV" which, in some ways, preludes "Distances," Okigbo writes

      When you have finished
      & done up my stitches,
      Wake me near the altar,
      & this poem will be finished
                                            (27)

And in the poem immediately following "Distances I," we read

      And in the freezing tuberoses of the white
      chamber, eyes that had lost their animal
      colour, havoc of eyes of incandescent rays,
      pinned me, cold, to the marble stretcher
                                             (54)

where the "white chamber" is the scene of the "marble," or stone, "stretcher."

This first line, then, makes simultaneous reference to a modern operation and to an "altar" in a traditional religious ceremony. In each situation the poet lies passively under the ritual attendance of figures in special clothing, with specialized skills. The "white chamber" is equally interpretable as a shrine or an operating theater.

However, these very similarities also highlight the contrast between modern scientific medicine and traditional worship. In his anesthetized fantasy the speaker moves back, or "down," to an earlier stage in his biography, to a prescientific and un-Western "homecoming," an inner journey back in cultural time and individual experience. It is solitary because the experience, encompassed in the dream, is inaccessible to anyone else. The wanness of Okigbo's refrain, "I am the sole witness to my homecoming," testifies to the fact that this homecoming in fantasy is by no means the same thing as an actual resumption of earlier norms or an earlier sense of cultural certainties. The refrain, too, comes from a voice which is not in the scenes "within" the poem. It is an artistically self-conscious comment on the experience of the poem as a whole, totalizing, and addressed to a reader.

The poem moves on to mention "serene lights on the other balcony." This also may have double reference, as the lights of the operating table, "serene" because seen with anesthetized vision; but also the illuminations in the religious scene, in the "white chamber" thought of as a shrine. "Signs" may also be religious, or scientific in the sense of screens, dials, charts, and so on. The "divine rejoicing" represents, together with the "laughter" of line 12, the effects of the gas and also a religious experience. "Incense" also suggests religious ritual but may also stand for the scent of the gas; the speaker inhales both. The "voice from very far away" is both priestly "chant" and "descant" and also the request and reply as the surgeon calls for this or that instrument whose name is repeated by the assistant who hands it to him, another ritual.

The operating theater and the shrine, in modern terms, contrast with one another, but not in a traditional context, where they are not distinguished. Both spiritual and physical, science and spell, aim at a more global healing than does the surgical. Okigbo's inner journey begins, naturalistically, in the modern medical world and moves toward what is both deeper and nearer to his youth. The return to the traditional shrine might seem to comprise the "homecoming," but such an interpretation is premature because the journey continues, deeper than the individual biography, psyche, culture, till it comes to a fundamental, mythical ambience, which may be related to Jung's "collective unconscious" in which certain mythical stereotypes, the "archetypes," express the deepest levels of the human mind, beyond any particular culture. For Jung, civilization depends on the individual's gaining this contact with archetypal images. In presenting this idea Okigbo is not, of course, necessarily committed either to an adherence to Jung's notions or to the idea that any actual man can really live outside, or beyond, a specific society. The poetic image represents an impossible archimedean point which may be imagined in order to throw actual lives and cultures into sharper perspective, thus to bring out their contingence.

The double reference remains more sporadically now, as Okigbo, for the mythical journey, relies on allusion. The double reference can still be felt in the "voice from very far away," but this "voice" now begins to carry us forward, allusively, into the mythical landscape—"paddled me home through some dark / Labyrinth"—on a journey by water. The allusion appears to be to the "Epic of Gilgamesh," which Okigbo suggests elsewhere by mention of the names of various gods and men in that myth. Here the connection is more tenuous, but a number of factors suggest it.

Gilgamesh himself makes a journey to the land of death, and it ends in failure, like Okigbo's "journey of several centuries from Nsukka to Yola in pursuit of what turned out to be an illusion" (Labyrinths), the illusion in Gilgamesh's case being the belief that a man may achieve immortality by dint of effort and determination. He too makes a journey over water in this quest and meets the figure of Utnapishtim, who is known as "The Faraway," a name echoed in the "voice from very far away" which guides Okigbo here, as Utnapishtim acts as Gilgamesh's guide. Furthermore, Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh that the gods had decreed that he, Utnapishtim, should "live in the distance," again echoing Okigbo's poem, this time its title. Perhaps too, in the earlier part of the poem, the Gilgamesh motif is foreshadowed in the "horizontal stone," which we have seen as an operating table and an altar, but it is also similar to a sarcophagus, which is similarly associated with the journey into death in the ancient Egyptian cosmology. This sarcophagus is mentioned in "Fragments out of the Deluge" (Labyrinths), and the title suggests the Middle Eastern myth of the flood which occurs in a nonbiblical form in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim being the equivalent of Noah (Nuhu). Almost in the same breath, in "Fragments out of the Deluge," Okigbo mentions Enkidu, the "wild man" who, he says, is the "companion and second self of Gilgamesh." This interpretation of Enkidu as Gilgamesh's alter ego is not to be found in the myth itself. It represents a modern psychoanalytical approach put forward by Jung in "Symbols of Transformation," where he refers to "the higher and lower man, ego-consciousness and shadow, Gilgamesh and Enkidu," and says of this myth, that it "could probably be paraphrased thus: just as man consists of a mortal and an immortal part, so the sun is a pair of brothers, one of whom is mortal, the other immortal." Gilgamesh, of course, is identified by Jung as a "sun hero."

Just as Okigbo as the poet-hero ("sunbird") enters the underground realm of the labyrinth after a sea journey and comes to the "anti-hill," so Gilgamesh makes a similar sea journey and comes to the mountain that leads to the underworld, symbolizing, for Jung, the unconscious. This mountain is called "Mashu," and Sandars notes, in his glossary, that it has twin peaks and is regarded as the place of the sun's return to the world in the dawn, and it was identified with the "Anti-Lebanon Mountains." "Anti-Lebanon" seems to be echoed in the otherwise very puzzling "anti-hill."

Perhaps I have said enough to establish a prima facie case for taking Okigbo's technique of allusion, whatever else it may suggest, to be related to the Gilgamesh epic. This, of course, widens the significance of the poet's individual journey and suggests an intercultural dimension to what began as a personal confrontation with the unconscious and a visit to the kingdom of death (Okigbo refers to the Sumerian goddess of the underworld, Irkalla [or Ereshkigal].) This is an image of a universal psychic depth and, in this sense, a kind of "home." It suggests what Okigbo calls a "nameless religion" (Labyrinths). There is, of course, every danger that what seems to be universal may turn out to be a Western imposition. But the process of the poem shows a progression from the concrete individual in the operating theater to the first culture, and beyond; so we see the archetypal end in terms of, and we reach it through, the particular contingent culture. And the whole mission is placed in the mind of a specific African.

Characteristic of Okigbo's technique is the use of grammatically disjointed sentences, a technique particularly associated with modernism, especially imagism.

Sentence 1, for example, trails away into dots and is not overtly connected to sentence 2, which is moodless (without subject or finite verb) and also breaks off, this time in a dash. Two questions follow, which are related by their parallelism, sentences 3 and 4. Sentence 3 seems to be connected to sentence 2 by the conjunction, "But." However, this is a slightly unusual type of "but," since it is brought to bear by fiat of the poet, rather than by the internal logic of the connection. The difference may be illustrated by

(1) He put on his hat. But it didn't fit.

(2) He put on his hat. But that was foolish.

(2) uses "But" to represent the speaker's judgment, while (1) marks the internal logic of the two sentences.

Sentence 5 breaks in on the second of these questions, sentence 4, and also ends in dots. Sentence 6 begins with a conjunctive "For," similarly motivated to the "But" in sentence 3 but more attenuated (A suggestion as to what is linked by "For" is made later).

The relation between sentences 7 and 6 is more straight-forward than has been the case so far because they have the same topic, "voice" for which "miner" is a near synonym. But still there is no other connection besides this one through vocabulary. Then sentence 7 ends with more dots and is itself broken into by the refrain, sentence 6, closing the poem and ending in dots also.

Okigbo's sentences are thus consistently disjointed, except in the two cases where conjunctions occur between them. But these conjunctions are themselves somewhat untypically used, and the links they make are not immediately obvious. This disjunction, in fact, sends the reader the more intently back to the vocabulary, making him read it more imaginatively than he might otherwise, in order to find the dynamic "thread" of meaning. The reader begins to notice, for example, that "miner" in line 7 is semantically related to "labyrinths" (sentence 6), to "homecoming" (sentence 5), which also occurs in sentences 1 and 8. "Homecoming" is more remotely connected to "birthday" and more closely to "home" (sentence 6). "Voice" in sentence 7 harks back to sentence 6 which contains "laughter," "descanted," and "chanted," the last two of these being associated with religion and so with "acolyte" (sentence 6, or line 16), and with "incense" in sentence 4 and also to "voice" itself. In sentence 7, also, "dreams" recalls "dream" in sentence 6, "serene" in sentence 2, and "phantom" in sentence 1; and these are related contrastively to "incarnate" in sentence 6, line 14, and "flesh" in sentence 1.

It is on the basis of these lexical ties that we can construct the representational narrative, as this affects the relations between sentences. The sentences are linked, also, in a different way, which we can see if we consider the basis of a recital for the poem from the point of view of its potential intonation.

I shall not attempt an analysis of a performance of the poem, mainly because an intonational analysis would not reveal the meanings carried. And there is the complexity that a number of intonational interpretations are possible. Yet the essential dynamic of the poem, which will be realized in performance by one intonational pattern or another, can be traced by looking at the text as a succession of speech acts. Although the individual sentence is not necessarily a unit of intonation (and certainly is not in sentences 4 and 6), it can be taken as a speech act unit, at least at the primary degree of complexity, which reveals the main lines of the poem's interpersonal (or attitudinal) development, the succession of emotional attitudes and roles.

In the first sentence the poet speaks in the first-person role and adopts a totalizing perspective. The speech act may be described as "revelation" in which the poet addresses his audience or reader directly. This role differs from all the other roles in the poem, except, of course, where the refrain is repeated. It is as if the poet alternates between the roles of chorus and actor. The repetitions of the refrain change in significance as they accumulate. First, there is an annunciative force to it, then it becomes reassertive, and in the last line retrospective, the fact of repetition modulating the meaning each time.

Sentence 2, being moodless, has no explicit speech role, since no "person," in the grammatical sense, is mentioned. Just this serves to express lack of person, lack of finiteness, a floating disorientation, mirroring the subjective experience of the speaker sinking into his dream. This disorientation is replaced, in the third and fourth sentences, by self-questioning, a self-doubt which perhaps is also doubt about the status of the self. Then in sentence 5 the refrain returns, reassertively. Sentence 6 follows this refrain with narrative explanation, this being the basis of the function of interpersonal "For" at the beginning of it. Then sentence 6 switches to the third person, with the poet now in the role of observer in relation to the "voice," the poet's "I," for the first time takes a subsidiary position, recurring in line 11 with "me" as one part of the main topic, which is the "voice." In sentence 7 the speech role changes yet again, the poet now adopting a second-person position and addressing the "voice" in an assertion of commitment to it. Leaving aside the comprehensive point that ultimately the whole poem is addressed to a reader, since it is a poem, we can still distinguish, within the poem's world, a difference between the poet as observer, hearer of the voice, and its more intimate relation to him in sentence 7. The difference is between an I/it relation and an I/you one. The tone of commitment contrasts too with the earlier disorientations and self-questionings. It matches the more detached definiteness of the refrain which ends the poem, sentence 8. The sequence of attitudinal meanings is summarized below.

SENTENCE	SPEECH ROLE	ATTITUDE
1	First person to reader	Prospective, annunciative revelation
2	No person or time (tense)	Disorientation
3-4	First person to self	Questioning self-doubt
5	First person to reader	Reassertive revelation
6	Third person to self and reader	Narrative explanation
7	Second person to voice	Commitment
8	First person to reader	Retrospective revelation

Clearly, once the poem has been understood at the lexical level, a recital which brings out these shifts in role and speech act can perform a unifying function similar to that often, but not here, performed also by nonlexical types of cohesion. The speech act unity of poems has been little studied as yet, possibly because critics tend to think in terms of the written page and possibly because those aspects of sound they do take into consideration, such as rhyme and "stress," are to be found at definite points in the text, while the rise and fall of intonational pitch contours is not; it is cumulative and overarches other more atomistic units of language. In this overarching lies its unifying function, a kind of unity which is more often associated with music, perhaps.

The techniques we have looked at are, of course, related to Okigbo's obscurity, but not necessarily so. It is quite possible to employ double reference and allusion without causing problems for readers. But such an achievement depends on the readers' having a common "community," both culturally and intellectually speaking, which the poet can rely on their drawing upon when he makes his oblique references and allusions. For the reader who happens to know about Okigbo's village and about the mythology he alludes to, his poems are, of course, not obscure. This is true, even though, in practice, there may be relatively few such readers. They may be dubbed "elitists," but looking at intellectual interests in this way, as I have already suggested, is to presuppose a necessary connection between thinking and privilege, since this obtains in particular societies.

I suggest, also, that many of the attacks on Okigbo's obscurity are motivated by a dislike of, and a lack of perception of the relevance of, his sources, of what I have over-simplified as his affinity for Jung's ideas. We need only look at a different kind of allusion such as the following from Idi Bukar's poem "Necessity."

      They forgot
      that truth's necessarily illegal
      that the torturer's breath falls upon it
      He tests it on the expensive dials of pain
      in memory of Lenin
      who had warned them
      him
      in 1903
      when there were still fourteen more years
      of that same uncertain and dangerous necessity
      still to survive

The allusions to Lenin's "What Is to Be Done?" will be plain to the Marxist reader. But—and this is perhaps the point—it will be seen as an educative and "relevant" allusion which the student who does not pick up can explore to extend his knowledge of the poem's community because the poem is, in part, a lesson, the poet a teacher, and learning about Lenin is valid in a way learning about Jung and Sumerian mythology is not. It seems to me, however, that what Okigbo says through his "depth" allusions is, in fact, valid for the African Left, but here is not the place to argue that case.

What I have tried to do here is, perhaps, merely to suggest that, even though our ideas are not quite the same as theirs, we can learn from our ancestors.