The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP) have long brought writers of international stature to the Greatest Small City for the Arts. Many of these writers are Nigerian, and include recent workshop graduates Adedayo Agarau and Romeo Oriogun, recent IWP participant Wana Udobang, and (through the School of Journalism and Mass Communications) Munachim Amah, the administrator of the prestigious Afritondo Short Story Prize. This wealth of talent bespeaks a global trend, what Yogita Goyal has called a renaissance of “Afropolitan” literature in English by writers from Africa and of the African diaspora.
Christopher Okigbo’s seminal poetry collection Labyrinths, originally published in 1971 and intermittently hard to find in the decades since, has just been reprinted in a new edition with an introduction by the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Peter Nazareth, professor emeritus in the UI Department of English and an important Ugandan novelist and literary critic, takes the title of his novel The General is Up from some lines of Okigbo’s. Okigbo himself (1932-1967) was a hypereducated, Virgil-loving, piano-playing poet, teacher and publisher who died tragically young while fighting for the breakaway state of Biafra, an eastern region of Nigeria, during the Nigerian Civil War.
Okigbo’s poetry is modernist in the extreme. Drenched in the influence of T.S. Eliot — and sometimes leaving sense behind in the kind of verbal breakdancing associated with Gertrude Stein — the poetry documents the inner and outer quest of, in Okigbo’s words, “an Orpheus-like personage” (but one “much larger than Orpheus”). Take a deep breath, please: in the course of this quest, the poem weaves together Igbo mythology, Catholic imagery drawn from Okigbo’s colonial education, allusions to the Epic of Gilgamesh, a veiled elegy for the assassinated Congolese liberation leader Patrice Lumumba, a mystical episode Okigbo had after having surgery under anesthesia, and a hypnotically recurrent array of elusive yet undeniably charged poetic symbols, including but not limited to: incense, dolphins, an “oblong-headed lioness,” a rosary made of “globules of fresh anguish,” kola nuts, orange groves and the Pope. As Okigbo describes the collection, in the closing words of his own introduction: “The present dream clamoured to be born a cadenced cry: silence to appease the fever of flight beyond the iron gate.”
Any questions?
A good one might be: what does all this sound like? As you might imagine, the poetry is hard to quote successfully. All its best effects are the consequence of accrued rhythm, subtle repetitions and alterations of sound and sense. But individual stanzas strike strange and affecting chords all the same. Like this: “So, like a dead letter unanswered, / Our rococo / Choir of insects is null / Cacophony…” Or like this, taken from a climactic moment in the sequence (this is not the kind of poem you can spoil): “For in the inflorescence of the white / chamber, a voice, from very far away, / chanted, and the chamber descanted, the birthday of earth…”
If Labyrinths, the major work of Okigbo’s too-short life, might sometimes be accused of flaunting its erudition, this reviewer is tempted to rejoin: go on, then, flaunt. Whatever the book might lack in the synthesis of a fully mature poetic vision, it more than compensates for through its demonstration that innovative, demanding art and deep political conviction are not mutually exclusive.
The three main poetic sequences of Labyrinth were originally published in the groundbreaking literary “little magazines” of Africa during the Cold War period, such as Black Orpheus and Transition. In the pages of Transition‘s eighth issue, for instance, Okigbo appears side by side with the future Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and the aforementioned Nazareth. In her respectful introduction, Adichie writes that today, “young poets are heavily influenced by” Okigbo. To read Okigbo today is therefore to dream beside one of the brightest literary minds of Africa’s immediate postcolonial moment, and to bone up for further exploration of African poetry being written today — including in our community.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s May 2024 issue.
