SOURCE: "Christopher Okigbo," in Transition, Vol. 5, No. 22, 1965, pp. 18-20.

[Theroux is an expatriate American novelist, critic, and travel writer who has extensive knowledge of Africa and has set several of his works in Kenya and Malawi. In the following essay, he analyzes the theme of movement in Okigbo's poetry.]

Ordeal. Ending on the edge of new agonies. Beginning again. And the poet wrapped only in nakedness goes on, deliberately, mostly conscious because he is half-carried by the nightmare winds, half-carries himself with his own home-made, wild, tangled-wood tales.

'Logistics,' says Okigbo in the 'Initiation' section of Heavensgate, 'which is what poetry is.' The art of movement, says the dictionary. And here is the key—Okigbo's art is in moving, movement, being moved, a lived-through victimisation full of symbol and logic and accident and the poet's own plots. It is pure motion because he does not presume and force himself over the ordeal, but suffers it and summons at the end all his energy to resume and carry us all on to continuous illuminations all along the way to death.

At the beginning Okigbo finds himself before the 'watery presence' of Idoto. He is naked, a supplicant, offering himself as a sacrifice to his own poetic impulse; he is prepared to suffer creation.

And again, in 'Passage,' there are the classical 'Dark waters of the beginning,' 'Rays … foreshadow the fire that is dreamed of,' and

       On far side a rainbow
       arched like boa bent to kill
       foreshadows the rain that is dreamed of.

The rainbow, the Covenant, is seen as a snake, capable of both leading and devouring the poet. The symbol that will lead the poet is seen as the embodiment of good and evil. The dual vision of Okigbo's occurs all through his journey; the saint would see only the rainbow, the profligate would see the snake—but the visionary Okigbo sees both.

O. R. Dathorne wrote in Black Orpheus 15, 'Christopher Okigbo's poetry is all one poem; it is the evolution of a personal religion.' Dathorne goes on to say that Okigbo's poems are narrating the 'progress towards nirvana'. But, although Okigbo speaks of being cleansed and desires the 'cancelling out', it seems he is acting on a larger desire to work himself through the ordeal of accepted religiosity and mythology to a new way of seeing rather than to evolve 'a personal religion'. It is not so much evolution of a religion as the sublimation of religion in himself that he seems to seek. Surely he begins with all the religious trappings, but the objective is to be released from them, and this can only be had by a complete acceptance and understanding of them. The very fact that Okigbo is always left on the edge seems to indicate that he will never finish 'the eight-fold path' toward true nirvana. At the beginning of 'Distances' (Transition 16) he says:

       I was the sole witness to my homecoming.

Yet, many lines later, the last line of the poem is

       I am the sole witness to my homecoming.

This seems proof that there is more than one home and that the poet is doomed always to be the only witness to his arrival at a temporary state of perception. There are different layers of perception, but they must be continually obscured or the poet will be paralysed with all the new rituals of his 'religion'. Once found, the perception must be abandoned.

Okigbo has to conspire with God to reach a state of perception, but always it is the act of writing that serves to release him:

       Stretch, stretch O antennae
       to clutch at this hour
       fulfilling each moment in a
       broken monody.

At the beginning of 'Newcomer' he has begun to assume a new identity:

       Mask over my face—
       my own mask
       not ancestral—

He has thrown off the curses and blessings of the ancestral identities and says simply, 'Time for worship' several times in this first section of 'Newcomer'. The most meaningful and direct lines in the book come next:

       O ANNA of the panel oblongs
       protect me
       from them f—n angels
       protect me
       my sandhouse and bones.

Those 'f—n angels' that have become love-locked in a death-grip with so many believers must leave him alone. The strength of the above lines comes from his confident examination of his powers as a seer in the previous section, 'Lustra.' His spirit is 'in ascent' and with confidence he muses:

       I have visited
       on palm beam imprinted
       my pentagon—
       I have visited, the prodigal …

Throughout the poem he views himself as a prodigal, yet he returns again and again to confirm this in order to release himself in the confirmation. His visitations meditated upon in 'Lustra' give him the strength to cry out in 'Newcomer.' The voice in 'Newcomer' comes from a newly realised identity.

He has not become a 'newcomer' without sacrifice. He has been, as Dathorne says, crucified ('Initiation i'—the repeat of the crucifixion image, the impossibility of forgetting 'the scar of the crucifix') after becoming 'newly naked', and finally he ends the 'Initiation' section with the explicit:

       And he said to the ram:
       disarm.
       And I said:
       except by rooting,
       who could pluck yam tubers
       from their base?

Dathorne calls the reply 'the pain of self-knowledge'. It is the knowledge of lust's presence spoken in reply to a severe command. The ram can only become innocent, lamblike, by disarming; the disarming of the ram means the removal of his horns—the poet's reply shows us that he understands, for in both the command and the reply there are different castration images. The destructive and distracting sexual appurtenances must be removed. The poet replies in parable: he can only rid himself of 'yam tubers' by 'rooting', dig in order to pluck, immerse himself deeply in his own glands. This process of disarming would not be acceptable to the adherents of conventional religion who are supposed to pluck out the eye if it offends. The poet in 'Initiation' will pluck by digging, which implies a concentration on the damnable fixtures (Augustine stares at the sour flesh of a fat whore and achieves sainthood in the rejection of it). Okigbo is guilty of all the things he is capable of doing. A blind man can hardly be praised because he is not a peeping-Tom.

The next section is a 'Bridge' in the metaphorical-religious sense and also in the jazz meaning of the term—some music between the main choruses in the piece. And then

       in the teeth of the chill Maymore
       comes the newcomer.

Most of the symbols Okigbo has established in Heavensgate are repeated in the first section of 'Siren Limits' (the first 'part' of Limits). He is at the edge, 'talkative'

        like weaverbird
        Summoned at offside of
        dream remembered
        Between sleep and waking

And:

        Queen of the damp half-light,
        I have had my cleansing,
        Emigrant with air-borne nose,
        The he-goat-on-heat.

The ordeal has ended at 'offside of / dream remembered' yet he is sure of only his nose being 'air-borne'. His feet are planted on earth as he is aimed at a vague idea of perception. Certainly the cleansing is real (the best poems in Heavensgate come after the disconnected images of the vision fragments; he assumes the new strength immediately after purification), but the 'he-goat-on-heat' is the ram disarming himself in his own way (the ram trying to wrench his horns free in his moment of heat, oestrous). And he goes on 'feeling for audience'—both the audience of listeners that will not be present at his homecoming, and the 'audience' with the force that drives him on, up into his head.

With the new cleansing comes new agony. The poet does not let us forget:

        & the mortar is not yet dry
        Then we must sing
        Tongue-tied without name or audience,
        Making harmony among the branches.
        And this is the crisis point,
        The twilight moment between
        sleep and waking;
        And the voice that is reborn transpires
        Not thro the pores in the flesh
        but the souls back-bone,

The agony is again partially resolved, in the old way with a new consequence: the traditional groves of Heavensgate bathed with the hard light that he has realised in his passage. No one will watch, he must accept the anonymity of the artist and the visionary. Okigbo demands humility of himself, and so, soon after the 'crisis point', he calls for us to 'Hurry on down—'.

In the last section of 'Siren Limits' we glimpse how incomplete the cleansing has been

      AN IMAGE insists
      from the flag pole of the heart
      The image distracts
      with the cruelty of the rose …

Desire has led him back through the 'soul's backbone'. Sexual baggage, the pole, the rose insist on the memory of 'my lioness' (the same image as in 'Watermaid ii' of Heavensgate: 'Bright / with the armpit-dazzle of a lioness, / she answers'):

       Distances of your
       armpit-fragrance
       Turn chloroform,
       enough for my patience—
       When you have finished,
       and done up my stitches
       Wake me near the altar,
       & this poem will be finished.

In these eight lines Okigbo plunges backward into Heavensgate (the lioness) and forward into 'Distances' where the last four lines are used as an epigraph. The lioness, the whole sexual operation haunts the sensually anaesthetised poet. In realising that it is an image that has insisted and in giving way to this insistence he is again granted the perception. This perception turns into disappointment because no one is capable of sharing it. In the 'Fragments of the Deluge'

       HE STOOD in the midst of them all
       and appeared in true form,
       He found them drunken, he found none
       thirsty among them.

And later,

       They cast him in a mould of iron,
       And asked him to do a rock-drill:
       Man out of innocence—
       He drilled with dumb bells about him.

The 'Man out of innocence' drills through experience. 'Dumb bells' can be interpreted as the set of weights that strong men lift to show they are strong; or as 'dumb bells'—morons (American slang); or as instruments capable of producing sound, now silent. In the context it is actually all three!

In section VII of 'Fragments' he has reached the high point of the poem; the rest, as he says in Heavensgate, is 'anagnorisis'. In this section comes the deification,

      which is not the point;
      And who says it matters
      which way the kite flows,
      Provided movement is around
      the burning market,
      The centre—

The wisdom that he has practised throughout the poem comes upon him in a phrase, consciously; the logistics of staying near the flame no matter what the mask. This is more than an approach to sexual action—it is commitment to it. So we are not surprised to find in the vision of IX ('Then the beasts broke …') the careful preparation and final orgasmic violence ending in division and death. Neither does the final ambiguity of the return of the 'Sunbird', mixed with the image of 'Guernica', startle. He has entered 'the burning market' as he predicted. After it, a quiet moment:

       The Sunbird sings again
       From the LIMITS of the dream,
       The Sunbird sings again
       Where the caress does not reach

Quiet, though mixed with unspoken torment, for it is this 'caress' of the Sunbird (no longer the Lioness that he can devour) which he cannot manage that will release him from the Limits and press him into the 'Distances' where

       At this chaste instant
       of delineated anguish,
       the same voice, importunate,
       aglow with the goddess

..…

       strips the dream naked,
       bares the entrails;

The Sunbird still out of reach agonises him. And the litany:

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

The repeated pattern all through 'Silences,' Heavensgate, Limits and 'Distances' has shown the concern for movement through and not necessarily a movement to. The fat state of perceptivity has been gotten, he is 'symbiotic with non-being' (Dathorne) but it is a 'chaste instant', impermanent, and it is this short-lived purity that delivers him again into the pain of the 'homecoming', and that will continue to deliver him into pain.

It is impossible to do justice to Okigbo's erudition in such a short space. His sources can be found in Ibo mythology, the Bible, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, Pound's Cantos and in his own impeccable craft coupled with a soaring imagination. Okigbo, poet, prophet, prodigal; the consistency of his vision throughout his work.

He passes 'from flesh into phantom', from holy groves to the hospital bed. This is nirvana? No. It is a hell of revelation in which the reader sees Okigbo become a disembodied existential eyeball scorching itself on the ordeal. He cannot be picked up at random and thumbed through; we have to follow his progress from pain to perception and back to pain. Okigbo can be considered from the point of view of all theologies, mythologies—each yields an interpretation. But better we too suffer the ordeal, ending on the edge of new agonies.

Beginning again.

      after we had formed
      then only the forms were formed
      and all the forms were formed
      after our forming …