SOURCE: "The Poet and His Inner World: Subjective Experience in the Poetry of Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka," in UFAHAMU, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1979–80, pp. 23-41.

[In the following excerpt, Maduakor examines the retrospective quality of Okigbo's poetry and comments on its significance in relation to modern African poetry.]

In an interview with Marjory Whitelaw published in 1965, the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo made a distinction between what he called "platform poetry," and the lyric mode he referred to as the poetry of "inward exploration." Platform poetry, he felt, is declamatory and rhetorical; but it deserves, nevertheless, the labour of the poets who write it. Still, it is a less difficult kind of poetry to write than the poetry of inward exploration:

Much more difficult … of course is inward exploration. I hope that ultimately people will start doing that sort of thing in Africa. They haven't started doing it yet. [Journal of Commonwealth Literature, July, 1970]

Okigbo believed, on the other hand, that his poetic career began with a poetry that is inwardly oriented. As he says, "the turning point came in 1958, when I found myself wanting to know myself better, and I had to turn around and look at myself from inside." Without doubt, Okigbo has the question of his own identity as an African poet in mind in this declaration; but the confession has a relevance that is applicable too to his inner world. In his first published work Heavensgate (1962), the assertion of his own identity is very much in evidence. But in such pieces as "Siren Limits" and "Distances" the poet journeyed inwards.

The self that Okigbo wished to explore is susceptible to forces that fragment:

When I talk of the self, I mean my various selves, because the self itself is made up of various elements which do not always combine happily. And when I talk of looking inward to myself, I mean turning inward to examine myselves.

The tragic tone of this passage may account for the mood of despair that pervades much of Okigbo's poetry. The various elements of which the self is made up do not always combine "happily." There is here an echo of the Yeatsian theory of the divided self, and the consequent search for unity of being.

The conflict within is for Yeats the human inheritance of the Fall. He refers to it in the poem "Vacillation" as "those antinomies / Of day and night." Okigbo seems to subscribe to this opinion when he says that the poetry of inward exploration is written "to bring out a sense of inner disturbance." Such a poetry explores the poet's inner world, which is a world of conflict and tension. Thus, Okigbo can talk of the "self that suffers, that experiences." The suffering self is, in his case, the creative self; and its agony is of a dimension that amounts almost to a physical dissolution of the self. Equilibrium may be regained only when the poet is exorcised of the demon that lacerates his inner being.

The creative artist's constant warfare with the demon within may explain Okigbo's admiration for legendary heroes, such as Aeneas and Gilgamesh. Okigbo admires their heroic exploits but he is even more fascinated by their courage to dare the abyss within. That confrontation with the dark forces of the self is mythologized in the motif of descent into the underworld of death. Witness Maud Bodkin in Archetypal Patterns in Poetry:

Before any great task that begins a new life and calls upon untried resources of character, the need seems to arise for some introversion of the mind upon itself and upon its past—a plunging into the depths, to gain knowledge and power over self and destiny. It is, I think, of such an introversion that the underworld journey of Aeneas is symbolic.

The literary counterpart of the epic heroes is Orpheus. Okigbo mentions him twice in the Introduction to Labyrinths. The poet-protagonist in the volume is an Orphic figure, a personage with "a load of destiny on his head," and one who "is about to begin a (creative) journey." In his study, Descent and Return, the German critic, Walter Strauss, sees Orpheus as the traditional image of the agony of poetry. That agony is linked up with Orpheus's descent into the underworld of death. The descent is for Strauss a metaphor for the creative artist's journey into the world of his own interior:

Orpheus is not only poetry; he has become, in modern times, the agony of poetry…. He is the figure, the myth, entrusted with the burden of poetry and myth. His metamorphosis is the change in poetic climate itself, placed against an ever-darkening sky in which poetry recedes more and more toward secret and unexplored spaces, spaces that are obscure and must be illuminated by constellations of the mind ever threatened by disaster and extinction.

In the companion poems, "Siren Limits" and "Distances," Okigbo descends into the spaces of the mind in the effort to reconcile the discordant elements of the self. The inner disturbance that plagues the poet originates from a sense of his own creative sterility. Okigbo believes that the creative thoroughfare can be opened to the questing poet only when he has annihilated his being. The annihilation is a prelude to rebirth. Therein lies the paradox of what he calls the "live-die proposition":

"Limits" and "Distances" are man's outer and inner world projected—the phenomenal and the imaginative, not in terms of their separateness but of their relationship—an attempt to reconcile the universal opposites of life and death in a live-die proposition: one is the other and either is both.

Okigbo's statement here has far-reaching implications. Opposites, he implies, are mutually interdependent: the inner world is related to the outer; life recalls death. The reconciliation of these opposites is the synthesis from which the cycle begins again. Thus, although "Siren Limits" and "Distances" explore Okigbo's inner world, the surfacing from the depths of the poet's own interior brings him into contact with the world of physical reality. The surfacing may take the form of an awakening from dream, or it may imply that consciousness has been regained, and that the poet is once more in contact with the material world. In the case of Okigbo, to whom physical dissolution is a metaphor for the struggles of the creative mind, the awakening or the return from the journey into the interior signals the end of creative agony. Borrowing a phrase from Joyce, Okigbo calls this condition "a state of aesthetic grace":

The self that suffers, that experiences, ultimately finds fulfilment in a form of psychic union with the supreme spirit (muse) that is both destructive and creative. The process is one of sensual anaesthesia, of total liberation from all physical and emotional tension, the end result, a state of aesthetic grace.

Dream and trance prepare the way for Okigbo's entry into the inner landscape of creative tension. Yeats refers to this landscape as the imagination's dim Kingdom, and he holds that all visionaries have entered into it in a state of trance [Essays and Introductions, 1969]. In Okigbo's "Siren Limits I," the poet-protagonist is "Summoned at offside of / dream remembered." The subsequent stanzas insist on the importance of dream-condition as a necessary prelude for the poet's exploration of his inner world:

       Between sleep and waking
       I hang up my egg-shells
       To you of palm grove.

The Nigerian critic, Donatus Nwoga, has noted that the function of "Siren Limits I" is "prefatory." It creates, in his own words, "a pervading atmosphere of time and setting, describing a state of half-dream, half-reality" [Journal of Commonwealth Literature, No. 7, June 1972]. The atmosphere evoked in the verse in question is predominantly oneiric. The "you" of the last line is the personage addressed later in the poem as "Queen of the damp halflight" [Labyrinths]. She is the poet's muse, or Mother Idoto. In the Introduction to Labyrinths Okigbo associates her with Robert Graves's "White Goddess."

The image of "half-light" locates the poet further in the twilight zone between night and day, and between dream and reality. To enter into this zone of experience, the poet must be "disembodied," that is, go out of the body. The elimination of the body is what Okigbo talks of as hanging up "my egg-shells." One will recall that Okigbo said in the Introduction to Labyrinths that his protagonist would become "disembodied" in his pursuit of the white elephant.

In Okigbo's "Siren Limits," the exploration of the landscape of the poet's inner world begins in section II:

       Into the soul
       The selves extended their branches,
       Into the moments of each living hour
       Feeling for audience
 
       Straining thin among the echoes.
                                        [Labyrinths]

Poetry such as this, wrote [Wole] Soyinka in an indirect homage to Okigbo, is the work of a poet who can confront the "world beneath the matter, the realities of the mystic kingdom in which other black writers are wont to explore lineaments of body or soul" [African Forum, No. 1, Spring, 1966]. Other critics have associated this stanza with Okigbo's need for a literary audience at one time in his career. This view is not being contested. But important too is the fact that Okigbo must have been convinced that the kind of work which would rank him among the great authors of the past (those referred to as "poplars" in a preceding stanza) must be of a quality that is born out of the anguish of the soul. For, did not Yeats say that "all the great poems of the world have their foundations fixed in agony" [Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, Vol. 1, 1970]. In the first stanza of "Siren Limits II," Okigbo is "a shrub among the poplars." In order to attain to light (to grow to the size and stature of the "poplars") his plant-roots must seek the "sap" of life from the soil of his own soul:

       FOR HE WAS a shrub among the poplars,
       Needing more roots
       More sap to grow to sunlight
       Thirsting for sunlight,
 
       A low growth among the forest.
                                        [Labyrinths]

The line "Thirsting for sunlight" in the above quote, and "Straining thin among the echoes" in the previous, are metaphorical expressions of the agony of composition. Caught up in a similar creative throes in Heavensgate, Okigbo lamented "Stretch, stretch, O antennae." In "Siren Limits I," the agony of the dance is no longer stated but dramatized. The self descends into the soul's abyss in order to fulfill "each moment in a / broken monody." "Straining," "thirsting," and "stretching" are metaphors for the artist's battle with himself. Okigbo wrote in the Introduction to Labyrinths that such battles can be as fierce as the "swell of the silent sea, the great heaving dream at its highest, the thunder of splitting pods." The high moments of this interior battle he calls the "crisis point" in "Siren Limits III":

       And this is the crisis point,
       The twilight moment between sleep and waking.

The ordeal has its own reward; for the dissolution of the self is a prelude to rebirth:

       And voice that is reborn transpires,
       Not thro' pores in the flesh, but the soul's backbone.

"Transpire" may at first suggest evaporation. But Okigbo has in mind the gradual emergence of the reborn voice (the art-work itself) into light:

       And out of the solitude
       Voice and soul with selves unite
       Riding the echoes,
 
       Horsemen of the apocalypse;
 
       And crowned with one self
       The name displays its foliage
       Hanging low
       A green cloud above the forest.

That inner turmoil out of which works of "changeless metal" are born (to quote Yeats once more) is suggested with images of combat in "Limits IV." A poetic image rooted like a flagpole in the poet's own heart clamours for articulation, but this privilege is denied the poet until he has done battle with the "supreme spirit that is both destructive and creative." That spirit is the muse to whose cruelty the poet surrenders himself willingly as a gesture of self-immolation:

        AN IMAGE insists
        From flag pole of the heart;
        Her image distracts
        With the cruelty of the rose …
 
        Oblong-headed lioness—
        No shield is proof against her—
        Wound me, O sea-weed
        Face, blinded like strong-room—

Creative effort is for Okigbo as difficult as the attempt to recapture the outlines of an important but elusive dream. As he puts it in the Introduction to Labyrinths:

The present dream clamoured to be born a cadenced cry: silence to appease the fever of flight beyond the iron gate.

In the first stanza of the passage from "Siren Limits IV," the poet's clamouring voice is muffled by the indifference of the midwife muse who is unwilling to assist the pregnant poet at the moment of labour. The images that suggest the struggles of the creative mind in stanza two include "shield," "wound," and "lioness." Since the battle is not a physical one (the poet is still in a state of trance) the scene is as internalized as the soil of the heart on which the poetic flagpole is rooted. The interior struggle here is the counterpart of the descent movement in "Limits II." Here, however, the trance is prolonged. There is no surfacing as yet from the deep. The poet is still exiled to the limits of his interior world. "The LIMITS," Okigbo wrote elsewhere, "were the limits of a dream" [Transition, No. 5, 1962]. Thus both the poet himself and the reader await his final resurrection. "Siren Limits" comes to a close on this note of waiting:

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

The transitional links between "Siren Limits" and "Distances" are provided by Okigbo both in his Introduction to Labyrinths and in the main body of "Siren Limits" itself. In the Introduction he writes:

"Distances" is … a poem of homecoming, but of homecoming in its spiritual and psychic aspects. The quest broken off after "Siren Limits" is resumed, this time in the unconscious.

The poetic quest is broken off at the point when Okigbo says at the end of "Siren Limits":

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

The elliptical periods at the end of the last line suggest that the quest has been suspended.

Okigbo says that the quest in "Distances" has taken place in the unconscious, by which he means the world of the interior. I have argued on the evidence of the poem itself and on the evidence of Okigbo's testimony elsewhere that the experience related in "Siren Limits" took place also in a world of the interior. On the question of connection between the two poems, there is this significant passage from "Siren Limits":

      Distances of her armpit-fragrance
      Turn chloroform enough for my patience—

These lines occur in one of the closing stanzas of "Siren Limits." From the first word of the above verse, Okigbo borrowed the title of the poem "Distances" which is the culmination of the experience begun in "Siren Limits." The word "Distances" has a connotation that is related to "Limits." Both suggest that which is distant and far away. In both poems the poet is spiritually away, lodged in imagination's dim kingdom. The dream motif is what Okigbo calls the "spiritual and psychic aspect" of his quest.

That the transition achieved earlier in "Siren Limits" from life to death, from the physical world to the spiritual, and from the external landscape to the interior, is still in force in "Distances" is indicated by the strategic statement in the first line of the poem that "flesh" has been transformed into "phantom":

        FROM FLESH into phantom on the horizontal stone
        I was the sole witness to my homecoming …

The second line strikes the note of homecoming, of the poet's arrival at the palace of his muse. The first line is only a brief suggestion of the trials that must accompany that final moment of spiritual illumination. Still, the motif of departure is central in "Distances" in its overall effect:

For in the inflorescence of the white chamber, a voice from very far away, chanted, and the chamber descanted the birthday of earth, paddled me home through some dark labyrinth, from laughter to the dream.

"Laughter" is for Okigbo a feature of the waking life, while "dream" is associated with the unconscious. Okigbo's muse, whether she is "lioness" or "Idoto," seems to have been abstracted into the single image of "white goddess" by the evocation in the above stanza of the image of "white chamber." Okigbo betrays this tendency when he says that

several presences haunt the complex of rooms and ante-rooms, of halls and corridors that lead to the palace of the White Goddess, and in which a country visitor might easily lose his way.

The "country visitor" is the questing poet; and the "rooms and ante-rooms" stand for what Yeats called the "still cave of poetry." They are the "dark / labyrinth" through which the poet is to be paddled home to the celestial palace of the muses. This palace is a place of joy and of song. Its chambers are lighted, and they resound with the song of life: "the birthday of earth." Ironically, however, the poet can reach it only after he has passed through the gates of hell symbolised by the image of "anti-hill" (abyss):

        Miner into my solitude,
        incarnate voice of the dream,
        you will go,
        with me as your acolyte,
        again into the anti-hill …

Okigbo will descend a second time into the underworld of his being for such is the penalty that awaits the creative endeavour of every subjective artist. "Distances II" is therefore pervaded by images of death and of self dissolution. Okigbo speaks in this section of his "anguish," his "solitude," and of his "scattered / cry". Death, who had ambushed both the questing poet and his fellow pilgrims at the beginning of this section, has, by the end of it, literally torn them to pieces:

        At her feet rolled their heads like cut fruits;
        about her fell
        their severed members, numerous as locusts.
        Like split wood left to dry, the dismembered
        joints of the ministrants piled high.
 
        She bathed her knees in the blood of attendants
        her smock in entrails of ministrants …

The image of "crucifix" in Sections III and IV reemphasizes the ordeal of the suffering poet. In his quest for poetic secrets, the poet must journey through what is called in "Distances IV" the "hollow centre" of awareness. The creative secret itself Okigbo couched in a language that is both magical and esoteric: "the catatonic pingpong / of the evanescent halo …" Engulfed within the "intangible void" of the self, the poet pictures himself in "Distances V" as a mule trying to ascend the edges of an abyss:

       SWEAT OVER hoof in ascending gestures—
       each step is the step of the mule in the abyss—

Poetry, which is the objective of his quest, is invested with multiple attributes. It is the "music woven into the funerary role," the "water in the tunnel," the "open laughter of the grape or vine," the "question in the inkwell." The poet, we are told is heading

      to that sanctuary at the earth's molten bowel
      for the music woven into the funerary rose
      the water in the tunnel its effervescent laughter
      the open laughter of the grape or vine
      the question in the inkwell the answer on the monocle
      the unanswerable question in the tabernacle's silence—

The "sanctuary at the earth's molten bowel" becomes a "cavern" in "Distances VI," to which the poet is summoned by his muse:

      Come into my cavern.
      Shake the mildew from your hair;
      Let your ear listen:
      My mouth calls from a cavern …

The summoning implies that the poet who has been hovering on the twilight zone between sleeping and waking is to regain full consciousness. His awakening from dream, an awakening the reader may have awaited from the end of "Siren Limits," is accompanied with a rhythmic intensity appropriate for a moment of an illuminating creative epiphany. In the second half of "Distances VI" the awakened poet is "darkening homeward" from dream into consciousness, from hell into outer space, from the interior landscape into the external, with the energy of a startled wolf:

       And at this castle instance of delineated anguish,
       the same voice, importunate, aglow with the goddess—
       unquenchable, yellow, darkening homeward
       like a cry of wolf above crumbling houses—
       strips the dream naked,
       bares the entrails.

Having been so uproariously aroused, that is, fully inspired, the poet-lover can boast of gaining entry into the muse's bridal chamber:

       I have fed out of the drum
       I have drunk out of the cymbal
       I have entered your bridal
       chamber; and lo,
       I am the sole witness to my homecoming.