SOURCE: "Epitaph to Christopher Okigbo," in Africa Today, Vol. 14, No. 6, December, 1967, pp. 22-3.

[Povey is an English educator, critic, and the editor of African Arts. In the following excerpt, he surveys Okigbo's works, highlighting the poet's lyricism and praising his wide emotional range and subject matter.]

Okigbo was a far-ranging writer, eclectic, with a poetic strength which moulded the apparently piecemeal sources of his inspiration into a personal and sensitive vision. He is acknowledged as an intellectual poet, making the fullest statement through rigidly cerebral images that recall inevitably that old imagist master, Ezra Pound. Yet this assertion may exaggerate Okigbo's difficulty and make us underrate the tenderness that flecks his work and that directness of vision which takes beauty as its aim. There is an immediate loveliness in the half jocular spring image of:

      when the draper of May
      has sold out fine green
      garments; and the hillsides
      have made up their faces….

The following lines, though both verbally and intellectually compressed, have that same directness of the emotively visual:

      now breaks
      salt-white surf on the stones and me,
      and lobsters and shells in
      iodine smell—
      maid of the salt-emptiness.
      sophisticreamy, native …

The most famous image in all Okigbo's poetry evokes Africa's tense glaring beauty:

        Bright
        with the armpit-dazzle of a lioness,
        she answers,
        wearing the light about her;
        and the waves escort her,
        my lioness,
        crowned with moonlight.
        So brief her presence—
        match-flare in wind's breath—
        so brief with mirrors around me.

But one can almost imagine that Okigbo cautiously suspects such lushness. He uses it consciously, even while he recognizes that it directs his poetry into forms that may be self defeating. In the following lines one recognizes how carefully selected are the critical verbs:

      An image insists
      from the flag pole of the heart,
      The image distracts
      with the cruelty of the rose …

Okigbo seeks a more precise evocation than the sensual one, though one wonders whether the repetition of his definition of poetry exposes a partial doubt about an interpretation that would deny so much of his work.

       And I said:
       The prophet only,
       the poet.
       And he said:
       Logistics.
       Which is what poetry is.
       Which is what poetry is.

Okigbo's created style must encompass his dual experience. Although the division in the heart of the African has become the worst kind of sloppy cliche, it has the validity that rests at the center of any truism. Okigbo stands between those two cultures of which he is inevitably and brilliantly the dual heir. He is an African educated within the European tradition, for better or for worse, and the double channels of historical theology press into all his work. He can begin Heavensgate with an impassioned celebration of the tribal figure Idoto:

       Before you, mother Idoto,
       naked I stand,
       before your watery presence,
       a prodigal
       leaning on an oilbean;
       lost in your legend….

But before the brief poem concludes, there is the anguished Christian cry, "out of the depths …" Okigbo can begin a poem with "Lacrimae Christi" and go on to the "Messiah will come again, / Lumen mundi…." but the last verse of this lyric takes one into that African dimension of:

      Fingers of penitence
      bring
      to a palm grove
      vegetable offering …

And he contemplates himself with that ultimate self-awareness, recognizing that if, as for all social men, there must be, "Mask over my face," it will not be the traditional one. It will be, "my own mask / not ancestral—"

It is this new poetic self behind its own "persona" which brings together a duality of belief and a multiplicity of style that must speak of the nature of modern Nigeria. It succeeds with a prescience so exact that it must be an accident of revelation rather than the foreknowledge of event. In describing the eternal disaster he appears to describe his experience during the last few weeks.

       And they took the hot spoils off the battle,
       And they shared the hot spoils among them;
       Estates among them;
       And they were chosen
       mongrel breeds,
       With slogan in hand, of
       won divination …
       And you talk of the people
       And there is none thirst among them.

The last published lines in Okigbo's book raise a noun that was once the ultimate evocation in Europe, "Guernica." It became, in the thirties, a symbol of the senseless cruelty of man—and during a civil war. The young people today, hardened to mass slaughter, must smile to imagine our concern with such relatively minimal damage from the sky; such small bombs. But that symbol stays though the dimensions of destruction expand; the protests of other poets thirty years ago, remain just as valid as ever. That is why the word Guernica is so evocative still in the lines of this young African poet, a baby during the Spanish war. His nation has been able to learn from history only by the painful penalty of reliving history's suffering.

       The Sunbird sings again
       From the LIMITS of the dream,
       The Sunbird sings again
       Where the caress does not reach,
       of Guernica,
       On whose canvas of blood,
       The newsprint-slits of his tongue
       cling to glue …
       and the cancelling out is complete.

"The cancelling out is complete." So must it remain with Okigbo.

Yet although he personally died fighting for a savage partitioning of his country, his spirit ranged more widely than the tribe into a totality of brotherhood. Perhaps the urge for brotherhood in such shattering civil strife seems almost madness. If so Okigbo beautifully accepts that madness for it joins him to his neighbor in a tender unity that moves above politics. In a poem for Peter Thomas the last lines are infinitely gentle, yet no less strong:

        I am mad with the same madness as the
        moon and my neighbour,
        I am kindled from the moon and the
        hearth of my neighbour.

Such lines take on a different dimension of hope in these dark days but that must be for others, not Okigbo in this absurd and tragic death.

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

But Christopher Okigbo will never wake and all his poems are finished.

In a context far removed from war but now so desperately relevant he once wrote:

       Thundering drums and cannons
       in palm grove:
       the spirit is in ascent.

This statement becomes both the opening and concluding stanza of a brief lyric, so significant does the poet find its emphasis. We wish that we could share the optimism as we hear those cannons that tear Nigeria. It asserts the poet's capacity to range above the narrowness of day-to-day events. Later there must be an ascent of spirit that will reaffirm its continuance amongst the horrors of a civil war. That spirit, alas, will not be that of Christopher Okigbo but it will declare the same idealistic priorities for all men.