SOURCE: "From the Labyrinth to the Temple: The Structure of Okigbo's Religious Experience," in Okike: An African Journal of New Writing, No. 24, June, 1983, pp. 57-69.

[In the following essay, Ogundele argues that Okigbo's religious views, as expressed in his works, were much broader and more autobiographical than critics have considered them to be.]

The exact place and function of 'religion' in Christopher Okigbo's poetry has been until lately, generally misrepresented. The misrepresentation of course stemmed from what critics and some writers held, in the last two or so decades, to be one of the imperatives of the then nascent neo-African literature: cultural assertion. Even when the writers themselves, Okigbo inclusive, insisted to the contrary, their views were either derided, denounced with anger or pity, or simply judged to be of no account in the whole business of discovering relevances and functions.

This theoretical distortion led to two types of Okigbo criticism. First are those critics who represent Okigbo as rejecting one religion for another; second are those others who pitch meaning against imagery in the poems—most notable in this group are Ali A. Mazrui and the Chinweizu troika [in Zuka, September, 1967, and Transition, Vol. IX, 1975]. For the purpose of its arguments the first group chooses to define and understand 'religion' in a narrow sense, thereby inadvertently projecting Okigbo as a negritude poet. [R. N. Egudu, African Literature Today, Vol. 6, 1973] for instance sees evidence in the poems that Okigbo could not be accommodated in the Catholic faith and he therefore went back to revive the indigenous one. He concludes his own defence of Okigbo's "defence" as follows:

The 'good' for him is traditional African culture with its own religion, and the native African talent in him which has enabled him to revive and preserve that culture irrespective of the efforts of the foreign agencies to suppress it.

This is far from being true of either the mind or art of Okigbo the poet. Worse still, the impression created of the poetry by this kind of interpretation is that the poet had settled his religious conflicts prior to the poetic experience—that in fact the poetry is only an account of the conflict, in which traditional religion triumphed. This may be biographically true, but the poetry presents it otherwise. The conflict and aesthetic sensibilities are presented, rather, as two kinds of consciousness, indistinguishable from one another, and forming an indissoluble compound. Secondly, Egudu's interpretation contains the implicit view that the experience of one religion is fundamentally different from, even hostile to, that of another. But such hostilities between the foreign and the traditional gods were, needless to recall, created by missionary zealotry; the deities themselves were not averse to assimilation or shared accommodation, and mutual strengthening.

Okigbo right from the start intuitively perceived this, seeing that the corrupting element in the foreign religion was its earthly agents and the elaborately irrelevant impediments they had set up, and not in the spiritual experience itself: the ecclesiastical intermediaries block that creative encounter between man and god, thereby preventing the experience of divine presence that is at the core of the truly spiritual conversion.

Thus the poet-protagonist acquired protestant inclinations which he carries back with him to the traditional rites and belief. The poetry, right from "Four Canzones" up to "Distances," is shot through with intellectual, emotional, and spiritual ambivalencies, therefore: denial of Christianity even while assimilated by, and assimilating, it; acceptance of indigenous religion as desirable, but in a form modified to suit personal purposes. Okigbo's poetry is therefore a long exploration and casting off of these inimical contrarieties, and a search for personal belief. It demonstrates in the process that all religions, indigenous or foreign, collective or personal, have a common structure of experience; that religious experience can be identical with aesthetic experience; and too that the language of religion can also be the language of poetry.

It is of course true that Okigbo's poetry is the poetry of quest for the vanishing African traditions and forgotten gods; it is also true that the poems record the wanderings of the exile amidst alien idols and his return to roots; but no less true is it that this poetry is essentially an autobiographical excursion into a past that acquires significance only because personal, and into a present that is not totally communal. It is also important to remember that both in fact exist more in the psyche of the poet than in reality—that is, the past has been poetically recreated through individual memory. The quest itself is a lonely one undertaken, not on behalf of the community but of the self—and into his own soul.

Thus, the quest plot, the autobiographical design, and the allegorical trope of the prodigal son, all combine to make Okigbo's poetry a poetry of personal responsibility and salvation, the concomitants of which are self-revelation and personal search for transcendent absolutes. This claim may appear rather large, especially in view of the slimness of his output; it should however be remembered that the vast and rapid cultural changes brought about by colonialism did create a metaphysical vacuum in the African's universe. Okigbo in his poetry embarks on a quest for salvation through a personal encounter with a chosen deity and in the process fills his own little space in the vacuum. But he attains salvation not outside but within the historical realities produced by subjugation and colonialism, and by a demonstrated autonomy of an intensely conscious and creative mind which synthesizes traditional with Christian modes of apprehending the metaphysical as well as ontological dimensions of reality.

Okigbo's mode of resolving and transcending his dilemmas—and of apprehending higher realities—is the ritual mode, a mode that fuses the religious with the aesthetic. Annemarie Heywood has recently tackled Okigbo's poetry as ritual in an illuminating and instructive essay, "The Ritual and the Plot: the Critic and Okigbo's Labyrinths" [Research in African Literatures, Spring, 1978]. Characteristics of this "poetry as ritual" (her emphasis) are: the non-communicative and non-expressive function of language that is yet concrete but not natural; and the manipulation of words for their sensuous impact rather than logical meaning. This mode calls for simultaneous use of verbal and nonverbal forms of self-expression such that the resulting performance is a "medium of revelation and ritual." The whole poem is, in other words, one long ritual performance or extended dramatic symbol, enclosing smaller symbols.

On meaning, Heywood's observations are also noteworthy: the plot enacted by Okigbo's ritual experience is that of "the heroic monomyth," with definite universal patterns. This plot, she goes on, accords with the immemorial historical purpose of rituals and ritual poetry: "a means of participating in the sacred and attaining the divine." Thus Okigbo, through deliberate manipulations of symbols, magic, and ritual gestures, re-establishes the primordial kinship between man and god; through a reenactment of the sacred drama of pain and suffering, he metamorphoses into the latter.

Furthermore, the ritual nature and form of the poetic experience helps the protagonist achieve several aesthetic ends. In the first movement of "The Passage," the prodigal is in the sacred grove, weak, naked, and leaning on an oilbean for support, and waiting. In these positions and gestures are expressed the attitudes of humility, absolute contriteness on the one hand, and expectancy on the other. Also aroused are the contradictory emotions of regret and despair, and hope. All these are yet canalised in a particular direction:

       Under your power wait I
       on barefoot,
       watchman for the watchwood
       at Heavensgate;
       out of the depths my cry:
       give ear and hearken …

Thus even at this moment of total passivity and surrender, an activity more intense and of a superior kind is going on: physical and emotional contraction facilitates the expansion and availability of being to the other world. One must bear in mind that this section deals as much with childhood awakening of aesthetic sensibilities as with the early awareness of "hidden possibilities and potentialities" [B. Gunn, Journal of Religion, July, 1970], behind common reality.

But as made clear in "Initiations," this incipient disposition was diverted and stultified, hence the long and tortuous journey he undertakes is not just for the recovery of this pre-recognition, but also for the realisation, in adult life, of such possibilities. Therefore, even though the poetry is ritual, it is not ritual performed along established, orthodox lines to link yet again man with god; its plot and structure are those of a man in search of an altogether new deity whose presence he alone has felt in ways no inherited metaphors can exactly capture. It is unique also in the sense that Okigbo the sensualist refused to give way to the redeemed prodigal who has renounced the world ("Four Canzones") but instead, deftly performs the synthetic operation of making the deity sensual—

       Shadow of rain over sunbeaten beach,
       shadow of rain over man with woman.

with he himself an incontinent god—

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

The ritual structure explores these uniquely contradictory desires while its holistic plot dramatizes the pursuit of the deity.

"Religion," maintains John E. Smith, "wherever we find it, manifests a threefold structure that can be set forth in generic terms" [Religious Studies, October, 1965]. The three elements of the structure are: the Ideal, the Need, and "the saving power"—the Deliverer. To summarise very briefly, the Ideal is the absolute and goal of life against which actual life is measured. Through the resulting "contrast-effect," personal limitations are realised and possibilities of fulfilment known. Its nature provides guiding principles for realisation of fulfilment while participation in it is the ultimate, teleological end hoped for. It is possible to know its nature because it makes itself manifest in phenomena which it at the same time transcends. The Need starts from awareness that both present life as it exists, and the self living it, are flawed. The flaw is first sensed as a void, the urge to fill it leads to recognition of its nature as a gulf separating the self from the Ideal. Once recognized for what it is, this obstacle must then be encountered and overcome. This is the office of the Deliverer who, in helping to overcome the Need, "establishes the Ideal on the far side … of distorted existence." The nature and functions of the Deliverer are of course determined by the nature of the Ideal that needs to be established, and in turn by the nature of the obstacle that stands in the way. Where the self can on its own overcome that obstacle, he is his own Deliverer.

Applying this structure to Okigbo's religious experience as embodied in his poetry up to and including "Distances," several interesting discoveries are made. First, the deity Mother Idoto, though cultural, is not so traditional after all. Second, Okigbo's religious experience is in character closely bound up with contemporary Africa's experience: it is both ontological and temporal. It cannot therefore be a return to atavism—the logical implication of the arguments about the poet's defence of and return to traditional religion. In short, Okigbo's "religious poetry" contains the truth about contemporary African experience because, to quote Smith again, "it acknowledges the reality of time and relates the progress of human life to the cosmic process of redemption." Third, Okigbo is his own Deliverer whose ultimate self-discovery is metamorphosis into god, as is underlined by his use of the Egyptian belief about the Pharaohs, the Gilgamesh-Enkidu myth (Limits V), and Calvary.

To start with the Ideal. Her identity is very clear: Mother Idoto, the stream deity of Okigbo's village community. But in the poems she is a veritably complex deity with many facets and aspects. She is muse and embodiment of poetic sensibilities and illuminations. Since the poet-protagonist's quest is for the psychic, creative self sundered and lost in early life, she also stands for the lost self and the unity to be effected. Since this unity can only come through a return to cultural roots, she is the "cultural mother"—the source and origin of creative intuition. Furthermore, she is the sole reminder of that Elysian past when harmony between man, nature, and god obtained:

       etru bo pi alo asshe e anando we quandem …
 
       And when we were great boys
       hiding at the smithies
       we sang words after the bird—
 
       Kratosbiate …

Her nature too is sufficiently delineated:

       BRIGHT
       with the armpit-dazzle of a lioness,
       she answers,
 
       wearing white light about her;
 
       and the waves escort her,
       my lioness

In spite of this fierce moral purity, she is a woman sexually desired

       Her image distracts
       With the cruelty of the rose …
 
       Distances of her armpit-fragrance
       Turn Chloroform enough for my patience—

ardently pursued and eventually possessed:

       I have entered your bridal
       chamber; and lo,
 
       I am the sole witness to my homecoming.

Sexual penetration, which consummates the hunt, brings the quest to an end. In symbolic terms, this sacred sexual union between man and deity does not only signify interpenetration of the two realms for this poet-prophet, it also means ascent into the divine plane and assumption of divinity. Sensual yet puritanically pure, Mother Idoto stands for the abundant life of the senses which, cultivated, is an avenue to perception of ontological realities, and for the continual self-sacrifice of the poet to his vocation in order to attain immortality through the poem. Thus she embodies the total meaning of the poet-pilgrim's religious and aesthetic search, plus the goal and ultimate purpose of his life.

From the above then, the watermaid is a new deity evolved as a result of a combination of several spiritual and creative needs. In all such exigencies, the need to draw sustenance from cultural roots and thereby re-establish continuity, is a constant. This goddess has been created anew and invested with tremendous powers, much like the Umuaro communities got together and created Ulu at a time of acute stress. Hence, some of the items of worship are traditional:

       Mask over my face—
 
       My own mask, not ancestral—I sign:
       remembrance of calvary,
       and age of innocence,…

But the form is not and accordingly, the Need is also different for the quester. Limits, "Silences" and "Distances", are the poems which reveal the nature of the Need through history. Their contents need not delay us here, but their religious and aesthetic modalities must be dwelt upon. The three groups of poems project "man's outer and inner worlds" which, to Okigbo, are equivalents of the phenomenal and the imaginative. In other words, reality is not restricted to mere sense-data experience but, symbolist that he is, Okigbo feels it as 'presences'. Thus the three sequences present instances of a religio-aesthetic view of the universe. The factual journey from Nsukka to Yola becomes a mythic quest "of several centuries." Real characters and places are also mythicised and invested with dark, mysterious powers. In "Siren Limits (III)" it is the Cable Point at Asaba while in "Fragments out of the Deluge (VII)" it is Flannagan and the nuns who drowned in 1875:

       And to the cross in the void came pilgrims;
       came, floating with burn-out tapers;
 
       Past the village orchard where
       Flannagan
       Preached the Pope's message,
       To where drowning nuns suspired
       Asking the key-word from stone;

About the cable trope, Anozie has commented that the "Rockpoint of cable" image "may serve as a good illustration of the quasi- religious fascination which physical presences near the sea had for Okigbo" [Christopher Okigbo, 1972]. While still retaining its sense-data thingness, the point shows itself as a mysterious presence and landmark in the quester's psycho-spiritual journey: its super-natural quality is enhanced by the purely symbolic (non-material) level on which the journey has up to that point proceeded, by the hauntingly repetitive hypnotic phrase "Hurry on down." Similarly, through the poeticization of a historical character Okigbo exhibits an aesthetic that responds to the general and the metaphysical essence that exists behind the particular. The source of the drowning nuns image is a religious one. Hopkins has already mythicized the actual event and seen it as a manifestation of God's mysterious ways. His aesthetic experience is of course totally spiritual, and as the poem expands, his increasingly ecstatic response to nature produces an intuitive awareness of Divine power and mystery. In working transitive events into the structure of myth, Okigbo like Hopkins, sees beyond the temporality of things into their permanence. Okigbo's aesthetic experiencing of things therefore combines with his symbolistic creed of seeing reality as a revelation of "supernal presence" to produce a poetic belief in the essence of things. "Lament of the Drums" especially testifies to this conviction that ontological reality is of supreme importance. His disclaimer on the drums is therefore within the logic of his overall aesthetic. The drums and the sisters have become independent realities. It is their essence as spirits of the ancestors that is invoked:

       Lion-hearted cedar forests, gonads for our thunder,
 
       Antelopes for our cedar forest, swifter messengers
       Than flash-of-beacon-flame, we invoke you:
 
       Many-fingered canebrake, exile for our laughter

Particularly apposite is the gonad image—an organ producing other substances. This is further underlined in sequel II where the messenger drums declare themselves

       Liquid messengers of blood,
       Like urgent telegrams,

Okigbo's ritualization of factual events and their integration into a mythical epic (The Aeneid) which stresses the spiritual over the material, shows the paramountcy of ontological reality in his poetic.

What all these point to is that Okigbo's ritual mode is not just a technique for writing poetry; rather is it a mode of perceiving and apprehending reality such that all are categorized and given meaning. Two categories emerge: experiences of the Ideal and those of the present, flawed world; or those of the sacred and those of the profane. These two worlds are, in the poems, distinct but not mutually exclusive—experiences of the secular world constitute the obstacles the poet-pilgrim must encounter in his ascent to the sacred peak. Both types of experience are integrated in ritual action, which progresses through the labyrinth into the temple. The two symbols and their variants respectively express the two categories of experience and they are worth considering at some length.

The symbols and their archetypes circumvent the entire quest, which begins in a shrine (a grove of trees) with the acolyte in a rite-of-passage act of homage. This grove, with its totemic symbols, is a microcosm of the unpolluted African past, culture and Religion and the world. Within it all actions and items are symbolic: the contrite posture of the priest in "Passage (i);" his return to the hill-top in "Lustra" (i) and (iii) with offerings:

       Fingers of penitence bring
       to a palm grove
       vegetable offering with five
       fingers of chalk.

His priestly ministrations create an air of expectation. Thus the ceremonial hero in "Passage (i)" is not just leaning and awaiting the divine word; he actually expects the goddess. The expectation also takes a teleological form:

       Dark waters of the beginning
 
       Rays, violet and short
       piercing the gloom,
       foreshadow the fire that is dreamed of.

In this holy space all items and actions are symbolic of the primordial beginning. Time is isolated and holy, acquiring the dimension of stillness. Because of this multidimensional holiness, it is to the temple that the hero always runs:

       So would I to the hills again
 
       there for the cleansing

and is actually purified:

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

As an isolated, holy place, it emphasizes spatial and temporal limit, edge and closure, in Limits (XII)—the limit beyond which profanity cannot go, a place of order at the edge of chaos, and the home of the Sunbird. It is also the spatial equivalent of the spiritual solitude and dream state that is the womb of creativity and prophetic power, as already made clear in "Initiations (iv)" through Upandru's advice. In "Distances" the temple symbol takes the architectural form of a maze-like chamber whose sanctuary is at the nave of the chapel. Here it is home, emphasized again and again:

       I was the sole witness to my homecoming …

As home then, the temple becomes the pilgrim's resting place, centre of the world and of the self. It is here that the psychic self takes over to effect the spiritual rebirth much sought after:—the resurrection that is prelude to apotheosis:

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

The climactic union with the watermaid also makes the temple symbolic of desire gratified.

Starting at the shrine, the quest ends in another holy place—the bridal chamber. Between these two terminal poles is the labyrinth, a continuum and a state of becoming. "Passage" represents several episodes of wandering. The first of which is the innocent wanderings of the "great boys" in their rural setting—"Initiations (ii)." While this one may be right but pathless, the others are both an error and in lost directions. In (iii) it is "Silent faces at crossroads" and in (iv) it is in wasted landscape. The initiatory experiences are dramatized as circular wanderings in a poetic landscape, or labyrinth; they also present their own images of wandering: Jadum the mad minstrel advises against wandering "in speargrass / after the lights." In Limits and "Distances" the labyrinth symbol rises to new levels. Limits is both a temporal and a spatial journey the fruitlessness of which is emphasized by its labyrinthine nature. It is a journey between two temples—between the edges of sleep, or two sacred spots. The wanderings here thus become, for the protagonist, a state of continual growth or becoming:

       For he was a shrub among the poplars
 
       A low growth among the forest

The interaction of the temple and the labyrinth symbols enables Okigbo the conscious artist to use his own personal quest as pivot around which motifs from different myths revolve. The labyrinth symbol for instance allows the quester to re-experience the colonial invasion by representing it as an intrusion of the profane world of commerce and lust into the Sunbird's hallowed precincts of essences. The disaster is seen apocalyptically—the gods are dead and abandoned, not in the shrine but behind it—and penetration of the temple by the profane world of labyrinths marks the end of a cosmic order. Hence "the cancelling out is complete"; but the Sunbird resurrects in a new form.

Also at work in "Lament of the Drums," this same symbol allows the poet to mythicize political happenings of the day. It also facilitates integration of public, external events into the motifs of quest for personal fulfilment. The analogy between Aeneas' pelagic wanderings and the tragic fate of Palinurus his helmsman, with Nigeria's own political journey and the misfortunes of one of her helmsmen becomes a metaphor of public lament for unreached destinations and the consequences thereof.

These twin symbols of temples and labyrinths emphasize Okigbo's conception of time. His poetic attitude, says Anozie, "moves spiritually round a belief in the restoration of a peaceful social and moral order, a new epoch; sometimes it affirms a disintegration of all existing social and moral codes in favour of a new and more sublime creative reality." That is, between an apocalyptic vision and an eschatological one. The symbols express between them these visions of personal versus collective history and time. Through Heavensgate to "Distances" Okigbo sees history as a unity moving through not so different labyrinths toward one templar end. So it is that in Okigbo's poetry everything participates in the sacred.

By consistent and sustained employment of the ritual, the poet's ultimate purpose is of course abolition of the entire profane time, which purpose is in keeping with both the "heroic monomyth" theme of the poems, and the self-deification purpose of the quest. It is also consistent with the autobiographical design: memory used to discover the self, redeem time, and reintegrate both. Which is what the parable of the prodigal son is about.

Taking our cue from both John E. Smith and Annemarie Heywood, we have sought to demonstrate that poetic experience and religious experience are indeed consubstantial in Okigbo; that the poet in him perceives and feels reality (history and politics inclusive) religiously; that Okigbo does not push any particular creed, indigenous or foreign, but instead is creatively eclectic in his choice of means for responding to and framing the welter of historical and cultural realities within and without. It is also clear that the autobiographical design infuses the poems with a self-consciousness that makes Okigbo the inventor and artificer prevail over Okigbo the submissive worshipper—this revolutionary apperception quickly grows into a revelatory experience the consequence of which is the creation of a monoreligion with he himself as the object of worship.