Christopher Okigbo and the postcolonial market of memories.

ABSTRACT

The association of Christopher Okigbo's poetry with Anglo-American modernist poetics has often attracted two main types of evaluation: the failure of ideology and Eurocentrism. But Okigbo demonstrates literary dexterity in the manner in which the deep structure of his poetry troubles the historical overvaluation of the white sign and the devaluation of the black sign manifest in the colonial market of memories between Europe and Africa. Historical dialogism or a postcolonial market of memories--involving the invocation of both the local and the foreign, the specific and the universal-is a strategic feature of Okigbo's poetry. He ultimately creates a third signifying field via a conjunction of two signifying systems, the native and the colonial, into a new state of consciousness rooted in a traditional African mythic code.

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In the poetry of Christopher Okigbo, perhaps the most intriguing modern African poet, dialogism or the postcolonial market of memories figures in the constant conversation between the local and the foreign, the specific and the universal. In 1966, while rejecting the first prize for poetry at the Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Okigbo had remarked: "There is no such thing as Negro Arts; there is no African writing--that's all. African literature is simply literature in Africa." Elsewhere, in a 1962 Transition questionnaire, he had said of "Heavensgate" and "Limits": "I wrote several parts of HEAVENSGATE under the spell of Debussy, Cesar Franck and Ravel. [...] It is surprising how many lines of the LIMITS I am not sure are mine and yet do not know whose lines they were originally. But does it matter?" (Response12). In a qualified sense, it does not. There is a universalizing current at the core of the literary imagination that ultimately defines it beyond cultural boundaries. However, there may not always be an agreement across cultures and ideologies on the value of particular literary styles or artifacts. Modern African literature, for instance, is largely a literary return-to-the-origins stimulated by the nature of the European colonial presence in Africa and the consequent need to assert the existence and validity of a distinct African philosophy and culture. In this postcolonial atmosphere, Okigbo's relative Eurocentrism has earned him a reputation, or notoriety in some circles, as perhaps the most obscure modern African poet as well as one of the most un-African in his ideological and aesthetic orientation. On the contrary, Okigbo demonstrates literary sophistication and dexterity in the manner in which the deep structure of his poetry troubles the historical overvaluation of the white sign and the devaluation of the black sign manifest in the colonial market of memories between Europe and Africa. Okigbo creates a third signifying field via a conjunction of two signifying systems (the native and the colonial) not merely into a state of hybridity (not wholly African or European) but a new state of consciousness rooted in a traditional African mythic code.

Okigbo as an interstitial child of Europe and Africa that remains fundamentally a hometown poet is a result of the manner in which the European contact with Africa impacted on his life and on the life of his imagination. The missionary influence in Africa is evident in his Catholicism, which is related to his father's vocation as a Catholic primary school teacher. The influence of colonial education is writ large by his university degree in Classics. Okigbo's favorable disposition towards European "classicism" had been signaled early when he won the Latin Prize, at seventeen, as a high school senior. His taste in music, arts, and literature spanned the ventilatory recesses of European avant-gardists: the Impressionist composers in music; Picasso and the experimentalists in the plastic arts; T. S. Eliot and the Anglo-American modernists in literature. Sunday Anozie, his literary biographer, remembers that Okigbo "used to talk rather distractedly then but with real passion about Pablo Picasso and especially of the Spanish painter's avant-gardism and his remarkable capacity for trapping the structure of the World War crisis within bold geometrical lines. If any single painting influenced Okigbo at the early stages of his poetic career it was undoubtedly Picassos 'Guernica " (95). Picasso was also interstitial in his self-positioning as an artist. His collage technique, one of the links between cubism and modernism, was essentially connective of seemingly disparate elements. Marjorie Perloff points out that "[t] he first collages, Picassos Still Life with Chair Caning and Braque's Fruit Dish, were both made in 1912, although collage technique is prefigured in cubist painting at least as early as 1908" (8). A year earlier, Picasso had produced Les demoiselles, in which he broke away from the classical norm of the human body and--as Okigbo does in Labyrinths--from "the spatial illusionism of one-point perspective" (Fry 13). Cubism was, of course, significantly influenced by traditional African art, a pointer to the travel of the sign not only from the sphere of European culture or memory to the African but also in a reverse direction within a globalized market. But Picasso has never been claimed by African art or been parenthesized within the European canon because his ideological positioning is within a Spanish globalization in which Guernica appropriates some non-European cultural forms in its interpellation of a chapter in the Spanish civil war.

Okigbo's "echoing" of Eliot is evident in many ways, including the patterning of the title of his Four Canzones after Eliot's Four Quartets. Unlike Chinua Achebe, whose title patternings usually signpost cultural attitudes to be de-constructed, Okigbo's in this case is an indication of the depth of his immersion in Eliotic or Anglo-American modernist aesthetics. This immersion was in part informed by Okigbo's conception of himself (especially in his early poetry) as a modern poet--both in an African and a non-African sense. As Michael Echeruo explains, with reference to Okigbo's attempts to publish "Lament of the Silent Sisters" in the US-based Poetry magazine: "In submitting to Poetry, Okigbo was staking out for himself a place of recognition among the great Anglo-American modernists. Okigbo wanted to step out beyond the appreciative but limited world of Black Orpheus and Transition to the elite (and esteemed) circle of new, even experimental poets" ("Christopher Okigbo" 9-10). The correspondences between Okigbo's (early) poetry and Anglo-American or Eliotic poetics sometimes even seem like mirror-work mimeticism, as if Eliot is a literary mirror in which Okigbo somewhat sees himself. In "On the New Year," for instance, the lines "Where then are the roots, where the solution / To life's equation?" (Collected Poems 4) speak to Eliot's "Where are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?" in The Waste Land (Eliot, Collected Poems 63). Okigbo's privatism (obscurantist self-indulgence) and eclecticism (miscellaneous, cross-cultural borrowings) in his early poetry generally evoke Eliot. Like Eliot, in Four Quartets, Okigbo obviously believes that "[t]here is no end, but addition" (Eliot, Collected Poems 207). In his famous charge in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot challenges the writer to write with a historical sense, which "involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence [...] not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence" (38).

Okigbo certainly has this sense of history that incorporates the literary tradition of Europe and beyond. His relative "Europeanness" is also apparent in his adoption of the orthography instituted by colonial linguists for his native Igbo language, as in his use of "Ibo" instead of "Igbo" (Collected Poems xxvi)--a form of spelling occasioned by the absence of the gb consonant in the English language. But Okigbo's incantatory rhythm, or musicality, even in his early…