Christopher Okigbo, Poetry magazine, and the "Lament of the Silent Sisters".(Critical Essay)

ABSTRACT

Christopher Okigbo thought highly enough of his "Lament of the Silent Sisters" to revise it and submit it to Poetry magazine in May 1963. "I have already been heard in Africa and in Europe, and would want, if possible, to have an audience in America," he wrote to the editor. The poem was not published, not least because of the magazine's policy of not publishing material previously published ... "anywhere, in any form." This article examines the revisions which Okigbo made to the earlier version of the poem both for the submission to Poetry and for Labyrinths. The revisions show Okigbo working and re-working his themes, generously incorporating material from other writers, and changing the argument and direction of his poem along the way. The paper draws attention to the complex processes that produced the poems and that are required to understand and evaluate them. Much more will be known about these processes when Okigbo's papers (such as survived the Biafra War) become available.

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Christopher Okigbo's "Lament of the Silent Sisters," first appeared in Transition 8 (1963): 13-16 as Part 1 of a projected larger work entitled "Silences," the second part of which, "Lament of the Drums" would appear in Transition 18 (1965): 16-17. The poem was mostly written from about May, and was substantially completed by November 1962, the date Okigbo affixed to the poem on publication in 1963. In an original essay, "The Emergence of the Poet of Destiny: A Study of Okigbo's 'Lament of the Silent Sisters,'" written in 1983 for his Critical Perspectives on Christopher Okigbo, Donatus Nwoga recalls that on a visit to Nsukka in 1963, Okigbo gave him a copy of "The Lament of the Silent Sisters" to read. Okigbo claimed to have "most recently finished" writing it, and wanted to know what Nwoga thought of it (120). Nwoga also notes that, unlike "Lament of the Drums" which appeared in at least four versions, "Silent Sisters" was revised only once afterwards, when it was being prepared for the Labyrinths volume, eventually published in 1971. The version Nwoga read could not have been the same as appeared in Transition 8, because Okigbo would not have referred to the poem as having just been completed. We now know that Okigbo revised "Silent Sisters" prior to the revision for Labyrinths, published posthumously in 1971. Okigbo had told Bernth Lindfors in early 1963 that he was not "entirely satisfied" with the Transition version and was revising it for submission to Poetry. The revision was not as extensive as that to be found in Labyrinths, but it was important enough at the time for Okigbo to declare it "the form in which I want the poem to be preserved," according to Lindors's notes. (1) Accordingly, in 1968, as arrangements for Labyrinths were being concluded, Bernth Lindfors suggested to Rajat Neogy, editor of Transition, that he should publish the original (1962) text and the revised (1963) version in Transition. "The canon of Okigbo should be set straight," Lindfors wrote, "before someone publishes his [Okigho's] collected poems" (Lindfors to Rajat Neogy, 17 Aug. 1968). The request was not granted. In any case, since Okigbo completed a major revision of the poem for Labyrinths, the "finality" of a (revised) 1963 version has become moot. However, because that version has never been published, it is reproduced below in parallel format with the original Transition version, and the final version in Labyrinths. For convenience of reference, the two versions will be referred to in this paper as "TRANSITIONSisters" and "LINDFORSMs."

On 20 May 1963, Christopher Okigbo submitted his revised version of "Lament of the Silent Sisters" to Henry Rago, editor of Poetry (Chicago) for consideration. Poetry, the poetry magazine founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe and supported by the Modern Poetry Association. Poetry, has always prided itself as the premier magazine for new poetry. The magazine's current editors recall its founder's "Open Door" policy, set forth in 1911: "to print the best poetry written today, in whatever style, genre, or approach":

 
   The Magazine established its reputation early by publishing the 
   first important poems of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, 
   Wallace Stevens, H. D., William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and 
   other now-classic authors. In succeeding decades it has presented, 
   often for the first time, works by virtually every significant poet 
   of the century. (2) 

In the fifties and sixties, Poetry had published many poets who later distinguished themselves, among them Daniel Berrigan, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Creeley, James Dickey, John Hollander, Ted Hughes, Howard Nemerov, Sylvia Plath, Delmore Schwartz, Langston Hughes, Hayden Carruth, John Ciardi, G. S. Fraser, and A. Alvarez--lines from one of whose poems, echoing Psalm 121:8, are repeated in the last four lines of Okigbo's "Elegy for Alto." Poetry had also published a number of French, Spanish, and Latin-American poets in translation, among them Paul Valery and Juan Ramon Jimenez, a major source of lines in Okigbo's poems. In submitting to Poetry, Okigbo was staking out for himself a place of recognition among the great Anglo-American modernists. Okigbo wanted to step beyond the appreciative but limited world of Black Orpheus and Transition to the elite (and esteemed) circle of new, even experimental, poets. Submitting to Poetry at that stage in his career was a very bold and brave gesture and Okigbo knew it. For the kind of poetry he was writing (and one need only read the other poetry published in Transition during those years to see the obvious difference) getting published in Poetry would have been the ultimate vindication. It was certainly well worth the try. "I have already been heard in Africa and in Europe," he wrote to Rago, "and would want, if possible, to have an audience in America." (3)

Actually, as of the date of his letter, none of Christopher Okigbo's poems had been published outside Africa, and Okigbo's claim could not have been valid in any literal sense. His published works at the time were Heavensgate (Ibadan, 1962), and "LIMITS" in Transition, (Kampala, 1962). Frances Ademola's Reflections (1962) was published in Lagos. Langston Hughes's anthology of Poems from Black Africa, which included Okigbo's "Lament of the Flutes (with Two Flutes)," did not appear till 1963. As far as I know, Okigbo's first public reading in the UK was of "Lament of the Drums" at the Commonwealth Arts Festival in Edinburgh in 1965, and the First prize in Poetry that he won (and rejected) at the Dakar Festival was in 1966. Modern Poetry from Africa by Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier was published in London by Penguin Books in 1970. Both Black Orpheus and Transition were, indeed, well known to literary communities in England associated with the literary renaissance in English-speaking Africa, and especially among the very active European contingent associated with Third World cultural revival. These and other supporters in Europe and the Continent had links with various cultural institutions interested in the promotion of various forms of "negro" expression. The Congress for Cultural Freedom which also supported these up-and-coming writers was thought to be associated (unhappily, in some instances) with the funding of Black Orpheus and Transition (Benson 160-76 and if; Echeruo).

The Makerere (Kampala) Conference of June 1962 came at a very auspicious time for Okigbo and provided him with a major outing. Following on the publication of the Heavensgate poems and "LIMITS," Okigbo had garnered a substantial reputation as a major African poet. That importance was earned by the novelty and power of his published poems. In reviewing the first issues of Transition, Lewis Nkosi claimed that Okigbo's poetry "overshadowed everything else," to quote…