Nigerians Writing in English: Christopher Okigbo and Afam Akeh

Christopher Okigbo

Christopher Okigbo (1932-1967)

Nigerian poet who wrote in English. Okigbo died in the civil war in Nigeria, fighting for the independence of Biafra. His difficult but suggestive and prophetic poems show the influence of modernist European and American poetry, African tribal mythology, and Nigerian music and rhythms. “Prophetic, menacing, terrorist, violent, protesting – his poetry was all of these,” S.O. Anozie wrote in Christopher Okigbo: Creative Rhetoric (1972).

Thundering drums and cannons
in palm grove:
the spirit is in ascent.
(from ‘Sacrifice’)

Christopher Okigbo was born in Ojoto in eastern Nigeria, which at that time was still Britain’s colony. His father, James Okigbo, was a primary-school teacher. Okigbo’s family was Roman Catholic, but his grandfather had been a priest of the river god Idoto. Okigbo studied at Umulobia Catholic School and in 1945 went for his secondary education to Umuahia Government College. Like other major Nigerian writers, including Wole Soyinka, Elechi Amadi, John Pepper Clark, and Cole Omotso, he entered the University College of Ibadan. Okigbo first planned to study medicine, but changed his major to Greek and Latin. He edited the University Weekly and translated Greek and Latin Verse. After graduating in 1956 he worked among others as a teacher and an assistant librarian at the new University of Nigeria. Fascinated by big business he tired to create career at the Nigerian Tobacco Company and the United African Company. He then served for two years as private secretary to the Federal Minister of Information in Lagos. In 1962 he became West African Manager for Cambridge University Press. Later he worked as an editor with the Mbara Press of Ibadan.

Bright
with the armpit dazzle of a lioness,
she answers,
wearing white light about her;
and the waves escort her,
my lioness,
crowned with moonlight.
(from ‘Water Maid’)

Okigbo published his first poems in the student literary journal Horn, which was edited by J.P. Clark. As a poet Okigbo made his breakthrough in 1962, when his works appeared in the literary magazine Black Orpheus. In the same year he also published pamphlet, entitled Heavensgate, and a long poem in the Ugandan cultural magazine Transition, which was published in Kampala. Okigbo’s early poems reflected the divided cultural heritage of his country, although first influences from Virgil, Ovid, Eliot, and Pound seem to be stronger than the oral literature of the Igbo. Heavensgate marked his return to the African part of his heritage and self-renewal through the goddess of the earth:

Before you, Mother Idoto, naked I stand
before your watery presence a prodigal

leaning on an oilbean
lost in your legend…

The1960s was a period of great political upheavals in Nigeria. The country became an independent republic in 1963 and four years later the eastern Ibo tribal region attempted to secede as the independent nation of Biafra. Although Okigbo followed keenly the social and political events in his country, his early poems moved on a personal and mythical level. Path of Thunder (1968) showed a new direction – its attack on bloodthirsty politicians (“POLITICIANS are back in giant hidden steps of howitzers, / of detonators”) and neocolonial exploitation (“THE ROBBERS descend on us to strip us our laughter, of our / thunder”) was also in tune with the rise of radical movements in the late 1960s. Okigbo won in 1966 the poetry prize at the Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, but he refused the prize because he did not believe that art should not be judged on racial basis. At the outbreak of the civil war Okigbo was working for an Italian business organization called Wartrade. With Chunua Achebe he planned to found a small publishing house. However, the events in his country made Okigbo change his plans, and he abandoned his job.

Okigbo joined in July 1967 the Biafran army as a major, refuring more secure posts behind the lines. He was killed one month later one of the first battles of the civil war near Nsukka. He was posthumously decorated with the Biafran National Order of Merit. The poems Okigbo wished to preserve were published posthumously by Heinemann as Labyrinths in 1971, with Path of Thunder, added. Okigbo left behind a wife and daughter, from whom he dedicated Labyriths. Forebodingly he had written in ‘Elegy for Alto:’ “O mother mother Earth, unbind me; let this be / my last testament, let this be / The ram’s hidden wish to the sword the sword’s / secret prayer to the scabbard -.” According to some sources, Okigbo was working on a novel before his death, but the manuscript has not been found.

Often recurring images in Okigbo’s poems are dance (“dance of death”, “iron dance of mortars”), thunder (“thunder of tanks”, “the thunder among the clouds”), and sound of drums (“the drums of curfew”, “lament of the drums”). Gradually Okigbo started to see himself as a singer-musician, who speaks with the ancient, pre-literate language of drums: “I have fed out of the drum / I have drunk out of the cymbal…” In ‘Overture’ (1961) Okigbo was a “watchman for the watchword / at heavensgate” and in ‘Hurrah for Thunder’ a “town-crier, together with my iron bell” (from Paths of Thunder, 1968). Okigbo shared with T.S. Eliot a vision of a spiritual quest, which takes the poet to the realm of ancient myths and to his spiritual self: “Before you, mother Idoto, naked I stand…” Okigbo used often repetition, the rhythm is songlike, and the words flow melodiously, as if the poet were listening and interpreting distant sounds. From the four elements Okigbo chooses water, the dwelling place of Idoto: “Under my feet float the waters: / tide blows them under.”

For further reading: The Chosen Tongue by G. Moore (1969); Whispers From a Continent by W. Cartey (1969); The Trial of Christopher Okigbo by Ali A. Mazrui (1971); Christopher Okigbo: Creative Rhetoric by Sunday O. Anozie (1972); The Breast of the Earth by K. Awoonor (1975); Don’t Let Him Die: An Anthology of Memorial Poems for Christopher Okigbo, ed. by Chinua Achebe and Dubem Okafor (1978); World Authors 1970-1975, ed. by John Wakeman (1980); Critical Perspectives on Christopher Okigbo, ed. by Donatus Nwoga (1984); Dance of Death: Nigerian History and Christopher Okigbo’s Poetry by Dubem Okafor (1998); Postcolonial African Writers, ed. by Pushpa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne (1998) – For further information: Christopher Okigbo: An Overview; Christopher Okigbo

Selected works:

• Heavensgate, 1962 (Mbari Publications)
• Limits, 1964 (first published in Transition, July-August 1962, Mbari Publications)
• Silences, 1965
• Path of Thunder, 1968 (in the literary magazine Black Orpheus)
• Labyrinths with Path of Thunder, 1971
• Collected Poems, 1986

 

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I return to Ikigbo: A Tribute

By Afam Akeh

It was one of those tropical noons – the sun up there and all that passed for normal in the world on parade below. But this world, my world, was about to change. Father, a publisher, had returned from a promotional trip. Nothing unusual there. He was often away and just as often returned – a coming and going that was much felt because when he was there he was powerfully there. This time he had returned with a present for me. A book. It was a gift but also a sign I had been waiting to see. For some days before he travelled there had been no communication between us. We were officially in disagreement. In our peculiar domestic arrangement – unspoken but understood – a book gift was welcome evidence that this latest of our father-son conflicts was finally over. That fine noon when he made his book offering, it should have been just another gesture in the long history of signs and symbols by which we frequently renewed our much tested relationship. But the book he offered that day would affect my life and choices in a way he could never have totally planned or approved. The book in his hand that memorable noon was Labyrinths, that singular achievement of the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo.

I was at the time reading and writing a lot of poetry but not exactly ready for the encounter with Christopher Okigbo and Labyrinths, his posthumous 1971 collection from the Heinemann African Writers Series. It was, perhaps, this fact of my poor preparation that ensured I would be so totally taken by him. I think I died to the life around me when I began to read that book. Many pages later, when I looked up, I was a changed person. I had become acutely aware of the poverty all around me. So I buried myself again in the majesty of those words. Father had primed me for a first literary tryst and I had fallen heavily for the lyricism of Okigbo. I still don’t think there is a poet, living or dead, with a keener sensitivity to tone and rhythm or the lineal representation of experience in its multiple associations and significations. And I have read a few hundred poets from different times and traditions since that first encounter with Okigbo – read them, heard them, seen them, appreciated them all, differently.

I have deliberately described my first encounter with the poetry of Okigbo in religious and romantic terms. This is because I am also interested here in noting some similarities in the redemptive roles of art, faith and romance. Okigbo, or poetry, was a stabilising influence at a highly combustible period of my youth. Poetry was however, the reason I also walked out of a university law programme after three study years determined to win for myself a life in writing. But more on that first encounter with Okigbo. For the first time I was reading poetry without labour, with a pleasure uniquely its own. I had discovered poetry! I was like a blind man with eyes suddenly open, like a child offered the freedom of the land of sweets. I was greedy for light. I was greedy for life. I was bathed in this sudden sweetness of light and life. Now I knew: Poetry was not only to be consumed in solitude and then regurgitated with much rumination … Poetry was the very song of life. And in Okigbo, poetry was markedly African like me. It jigged to its very own unchained melodies. Poetry, I had now discovered, could have feelings, sometimes fart, and rage, and also pray. And it could be a dirge so uplifting it felt like a ballad. Or a hymn. No, poetry was not lawless. But it could also fly. You couldn’t clip its wings with rules. This engaging poetry I was being introduced to was an energetic art. In Okigbo it leapt out of the limitations of its pages – at you.

I had discovered freedom, and what an elating time that first week with the master was. I was laughing in the bath just thinking of Okigbo’s lines. I took the book everywhere. In those early days I could fire Okigbo at every problem and come through victorious. I must have read or loved Labyrinths fifteen times, cover to cover, in that first week, not counting the stolen glances or kisses. I read every full stop, every semi-colon. I learned to treasure punctuations by reading Okigbo. My encounter with Labyrinths was like the Nigerian way with the cow. Nothing of that precious animal is wasted or considered useless. Not the hide or the horns. Not even the dark, malodorous shit. A cow slaughtered for festive Nigerian cooking will be fully consumed from head to hooves, its innards and rubbery skin not excluded. Yes, the hooves too. They are apparently medicinal, curing everything from the common cold to cancer – according to the authority of those traditional healers who trade in them. I think that when some Nigerians see the cow they think of pepper-soup rather than milk. I confess that I had that pepper-soup mentality towards Labyrinths in my first week. I consumed the poems greedily, no thoughts for the future. No word was left unchewed. Even a cover quote “The versions here … are final” became pure poetry for me. That simple excuse by which Okigbo had sought to placate critics who playfully scolded him for serially revising even his published poems became for me a mantra of inimitable excellence. I kept repeating it to myself. The versions here are final! The versions here are final! How exquisite, I thought. How so like Okigbo to come up with the precise and desired words.

Even now it is easy to see why Labyrinths had such a hold on me and is still much fancied by many aspiring Nigerian poets who encounter it in their youth. It is a book of poems with unusually gripping lines. In the biographical notes to their Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry [1998], the editors Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier observe: “Okigbo’s fastidiousness as a poet and the urgency of his lyrical voice have exercised a great – perhaps too great an – influence on some younger Nigerian poets, who find it difficult to escape from his shadow.” Well, it isn’t progress to spend a lifetime imitating Okigbo but who can blame a young African poet for falling for such physically engaging, almost tangible lines like these I have randomly selected from the pithy poems of Labyrinths:

And the horn may now paw the air howling goodbye …
The smell of blood already floats in the lavender-mist of the afternoon …
Silences are melodies / Heard in retrospect …

Or these lines in which Okigbo the consummate artist playfully winks at his reader:

If I don’t learn to shut up my mouth I’ll soon go to hell,
I, Okigbo, town-crier, together with my iron bell.

Or, finally, these, with the poet prophetic and painfully concluded:

An old star departs, leaves us here on the shore
Gazing heavenward for a new star approaching;
The new star appears, foreshadows its going
Before a going and coming that goes on forever…

Like Wilfred Owen, the poster poet of the British sense of loss at the First World War, Christopher Okigbo would also die young, at the flowering of his creative abilities and career possibilities – killed in combat early in the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970.

The nature of his sacrificial death may account for some of the nostalgic and emotive responses to his poetry and person. But, even more than the negritude movement’s Leopold Senghor, Okigbo has been the most influential African poet, providing inspiration for generations of African poets and other writers, including his peers.

As noted by Moore and Beier, he continues to have a cult following in his native Nigeria. There have been prizes named after him. Literary events, groups and publications have been established in his memory. But Okigbo’s influence goes beyond Nigeria. His voice echoes as a presiding spirit in Tides of Time (1996), the selected poems of Kenyan poet, Jared Angira. From his UK base, the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson would offer respectful reference to Okigbo in ‘If I Woz A Tap Natch Poet’, a poetic manifesto included in his collection My Revalueshanary Fren: Selected Poems (Penguin, 2002). There are also memorable lines for Okigbo in the Collected Poems of Chinua Achebe (Anchor Books, 2004), in the poem ‘A Wake for Okigbo’. The scholar Ali Mazrui’s imaginative work, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, was an early instigator of a dialogue, which has continued, about what to make of Okigbo’s decision to fight in the Nigerian Civil War. Is the writer who takes up arms lost to art? Is it a case of betrayal? Which is the greater cause – art or one’s people? Is that level of political commitment not a waste of the writer’s creative talent or genius? And does that kind of intervention really make a difference, resulting in lasting change?

Decades after Okigbo’s death, incidents in the experiences of some African admirers of his work still refer to his life and work. One of such Okigbo-related incidents is narrated by Robert Fraser in Ben Okri: Towards the Invisible City, his introduction to the work of the novelist. Okri’s respect for the work and memory of Okigbo was a precipitate factor in that minor 1991 incident at Cambridge University. Indeed Okigbo’s influence is significantly evident in Okri’s first collection of poems, An African Elegy (1992). I believe it is fair to observe that though Leopold Sedar Senghor was identified as the early champion of the African way of modern poetry, it was actually Chris Okigbo and Okot p’Bitek who provided the great poems of that poetic. But Okigbo the internationalist might have denied that dubious honour. Not that p’Bitek and Okigbo were the only capable African practitioners, or that other attempts at styling modern African poetry are inauthentic, but that in ‘Song of Lawino’, ‘Song of Ocol’ [Okot p’Bitek] and ‘Paths of Thunder’ [Chris Okigbo], the modern poetry of Africa found its earliest authentic masterpieces, its great show poems, or “anthem poems” as Nigerian critic Pius Adesanmi might call them.

From Okigbo to the other legendary voices of African poetry is actually more travel than might be expected by the initiate. Wole Soyinka, Augustinho Neto, Dennis Brutus, Tchicaya U Tam’si, Jean-Baptiste Tati-Loutard, Lenrie Peters, Kwesi Brew. Gabriel Okara, Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, David Rubadiri, Mazisi Kunene Kofi Awoonor, Clark-Bekederemo, Birago Diop, David Diop, Arthur Nortje, Oswald Mtshali, Mongane Wally Serote, Jack Mapanje and even younger pathfinders like Niyi Osundare, Odia Ofeimun, Dambudzo Marachera, Tanure Ojaide, Syl Cheney-Coker and Kofi Anyidoho are all of the same African tradition of poetry as Okigbo. But they also offer other exciting interpretations or possibilities of that variable poetic. This is an incomplete list, of course, not including some other significant Africans who have also written poetry, sometimes winning awards for it – writers like Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ayi Kwei Armah and Micere Mugo, who have been better received and honoured as novelists or playwrights. Other things can be observed about the list. It is unconsciously patriarchal. Recent poetry from continental Africa has moved to include, publish and appreciate more of the practice from women. From the Molara Ogundipes to the Kola Boofs, Toyin Adewale-Gabriels, Lebo Mashiles and Gabeba Baderoons, and the many others playing overseas venues principally as performance poets, poetry from African women is becoming just as varied and empowered as the poetry from African male writers.

There remain serious performance, translation, literacy and economic challenges to the production and appreciation of African poetry but the poet of Labyrinths, accused of elitism in his time, might be pleasantly surprised today at how varied and inclusive, if not quite populist, his favoured art has become. In rediscovering or recovering poetry through Okigbo, it is important to remember that he loved and lived his art. He often revised his work, hunting that moment of mastery which might have eluded his resolve at earlier attempts. Older Nigerian writers and other intellectuals who were associated with Okigbo in his lifetime agree that he was in love with his poetry. This might seem unsurprising. All poets love their art, don’t they? Well, not quite. You commit to nurturing what you love. You will hone it to brilliance. You would never think of poorly presenting or representing that thing you love in the public domain. But it is the case, these days, because of the ease of publication, multiplicity of media and the greater exposure of everything and everyone to everything and everyone else, that a greater temptation now exists for would-be poets to focus not on the perfection of their craft but on its placement, on playing the system. There are opportunity providers outside Africa, who are sometimes inundated with unsatisfactory material from young African writers and left with no option but to help and allow passage to whatever is seeking passage or approval. But marking up Africans or African initiatives because the material is out of Africa is just as bad as marking down Africans for the same reason. It is not on record that Okigbo’s poetry won many prizes and was thus dependant on that kind of validation. For him, there were no unmerited media appearances and references for work or an oeuvre still evidently at an inchoate stage of development. His work recommended itself and it continues to be studied, revisited, emulated, reviewed and honoured many years after his death, by his peers and by the generations after them.

Some degree of self-packaging and promotion is unavoidable in the writing trade. But more important to Okigbo was his commitment to excellence and the craft. It is never quite possible to wholly recapture that early flush of excitement with which a romantic liaison begins. But none of those I know who encountered Okigbo in their youth, and were smitten in much the same manner as I was, has become bitter and bored with the relationship. Some of the excitement may wear off with the years, but a lot of respect for Okigbo is still leftover is what I generally find. You can, as I did, outgrow Labyrinths. In my case, I went on to have other equally satisfying but less intense affairs with the poets Derek Walcott, Pablo Neruda and T. S. Eliot. But the power of outstanding poetry is that it also marks your choices in poetry criticism, so that whichever side you sway you are never really indifferent to the conditioning of those defining marks. I think that my interest in poetry criticism was actually kindled when I stumbled on an amusing but quite ruthless essay by the poet-polemicist Karl Shapiro. That essay ‘What Is Not Poetry?’ was part of a work, In Defence of Ignorance (1960), and Shapiro’s rage in the essay is directed against restrictive academic poetry criticism, which he referred repeatedly to as “modern criticism”. Shapiro, writing outside the discourse modes and constructs of recent theory, was deliberately provocative, opinionated and maddeningly illogical sometimes in his essay. A poet, he wrote, “ recognises the limitations of human language and is always slightly outside language.”

Shapiro was focusing on somewhat different matters but his words instructed me on what makes good poetry great. I understood then what made Okigbo’s poetry so special. Labyrinths was more than just pages of language. Beyond all that excellence in expression, in the celebration of language, the real creative power of the poet of Labyrinths, as might also be observed of Shakespeare, lay in his affecting and successful realisation of the very life from which he sourced his work. His lines came alive as you encountered them, filling you, making you, moving you, not letting you get away without feeling their tangible presence. You felt the love. You lived the rage. You saw the beauty. You did not merely read words. Those lines of his poems had character, emotion, attitude, intelligence. They possessed you as you read them. They were awe-inspiring in parts, filling you with their sounds and smells and errors and arguments, with all the worlds of experience represented in and by them. If you managed to pull yourself away from those words they still wanted to follow you wherever else you wanted to go for the rest of your life. Like devotional literature, great literature affects and stays with the reader as a living companion.

Recognising that real poetry is richer than the words by which it is often expressed, that indeed the poetic experience is inclusive of language but not exclusive to it, meant that I was trained early to engage without fear such representations and elements of the poetic some may consider marginal, underground, ‘too experimental’ or ‘not poetry’. I have known poetry written, spoken, made and demonstrated in various media and through even more varied instruments, not all of them human. I have learned to engage with all, loving some, grading them differently according to their kind. The following is also poetry – these words tattooed on the naked back of a woman, who, in an accompanying photograph to the poem, was doing exactly what the poem said she was doing:

She is / riding me, facing / away, and I am / deep inside her. / The moles / and freckles / on her back / are an unknown / constellation. / On the other side, / too far away / and far / too dark to see /
there are / her perfect breasts / her face / her closed eyes. ‘The Balcony’, David Brooks, Poetry Salzburg Review No. 7

But this poetry is not the poetry of ‘Burnt Norton’ (Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot), or of The Heights of Macchu Picchu (Pablo Neruda). It is not the poetry that made Rabindranath Tagore at least an equal Indian in historical importance with his compatriot and great contemporary, Mahatma Gandhi. ‘The Balcony’, or just the third part of it quoted above, is a different poetry, but poetry still. It is of, and speaking to, a differently valid and valuated experience of the human from that which is the source of the great Psalms of the Christian Bible. This later devotional experience, allowing for the significant differences in faith, is also the ruling experience of the ‘Hymns of Homer’, “a group of thirty-three songs composed to honour the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greek pantheon,” and attributed to the poet of the Iliad and Odyssey (The Homeric Hymns, Jules Cashford and Nicholas Richardson, Penguin Classics, 2003). That homage to Sappho above isn’t momentous poetry. It is a poetry of the moment. It isn’t about the past, present and future. It is about the now and nothing else. It has to be said that ‘The Balcony’ is a five-part poem that actually reveals David Brooks (Walking to Point Clear, 2004) as a more accomplished and involving poet than would be evident in the part quoted above. For a real encounter with the kind of trench or underground poetry merely indicated in ‘The Balcony’, my education has depended on other more fully visceral sources – like a collection of phone poetry that goes by the promising name Verses that Hurt: Pleasure and Pain from the Poemfone Poets (Jordan and Amy Trachtenberg, eds, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1996).

There is enough experimentation with the form of poetry to last poetry all its lifetime and beyond. In the years 1978-1981, Charles Bernstein and his close associates at the long defunct journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E unleashed a way of seeing that in more recent years have led to the uncertain poetics that informed The Best American Poetry 2004 (David Lehman, Series Editor). What is the worst nightmare of an Okigbo-loving reader of postmodern poetry? Incoherence elevated as intelligence, non-sense becoming the new sense, every kind of representation and utterance not at all needing to mean anything or be accomplished in any way, all of that becoming accepted as poetry, the more denatured the better for its claim as the new poetry. It is no longer a spelling mistake if we say it is poetry, not a learning deficiency once we have anthologised its disassociated meanings as poetry. It is no longer just enough to write prose poems, and recognise poetry in prose. It is the new reality, at least in the extended illogic of some that poetry is prose and prose also poetry. Not ‘can be’ but ‘is’. Any kind of prose, intended or rendered as such, however colourless and ineloquent the language, may in this thinking now also be accepted as poetry. No difference. The treasure is in the interpretation, the representation being now of less consequence.

This, no doubt, is a long way from Okigbo. Or Eliot. Or Neruda. Or Walcott. But mere rage is an inadequate response to the reasoned otherness of an alienating poetic. It is more effective to engage each innovative way of seeing on its own terms, according to its chosen differentials. Rooted in Okigbo, who was not only African but also cosmopolitan in many of his aesthetic choices, what has been my response to the more extreme representations of postmodern poetry? First it was important to listen to the thought itself, to engage representative variants of its authorising poetic. There is an implied insensitivity towards questions of value and vision that is soon evident in the following much discoursed Bersteinian ‘prayer’ for the absolute freedom of form from meaning and judgement, especially in its privileging of interpretation and indeterminacy: The poetry for which I correspond represents less a unified alternative poetics than a series of sometimes contentiously related tendencies, or proclivities, and, especially, shared negatives (concerted rejections) of American official verse culture. For truly these projects-in-language are not restrictive or exclusive; there is no limit to those who can, or have, or will participate in this work, which is open-ended and without prescriptions: not a matter of Proper Names but of Works, and perhaps not even a matter of works but of how readers read them. My Way: Speeches and Poems, 1999. I am in favour of experimentation in poetry.

I am a great admirer of the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, whose idea of Social Sculpture is supported by the belief that there is a universal aesthetic of life, that art is present or possible and valuable in all things. For ‘Art’, I tend to read ‘Poetry’. I am interested in the possibilities for artistic collaboration in poetic representation and performance along public art lines. Clearly defined as such poetry is still identifiable, still valuable as itself. But to say that poetry or art is possible in anything is not the same thing as suggesting that anything is art or poetry. Imaginaries of the poetic, which construct indeterminacies of meaning and representation, so that judgement becomes either impossible or differently invented for each reading and each reader, edge poetry practice into a negativism in which all kinds of possibilities for the anti-poem exist. A radical poetic that would celebrate even the anti-poem should be vigorously interrogated especially in poetry economies with severe limitations in the public funding and appreciation of poetry. If Poetry should actually accept that it is as bereft of recognisable meaning and standard or any homogeneous or harmonising features as the more radical ‘new’ poets suggested it is, it would not only be incapable of judgement but also too deprived of its unities to even exist as an identifiable program by which to engage, explain and possibly honour the poetry and poets of postmodernism. If poetry is just anything, those who say it is can expect to receive, or be received by, just anything when they introduce themselves as poets or say that what they offer is poetry.

But a poet with roots in Okigbo must not panic at the more extreme representations of postmodern era poetry. The avant-garde exists to challenge accepted values and standards. These challenges are part of the constant review of human progress. They are necessarily suspicious of conformity but they are also open to and often moderated by dialogue. It has been a long journey from that teenage encounter with the poet Okigbo, but even now one cannot read a line of his verse without the heart skipping. One returns to Okigbo as one returns to water after many sugary fluids. There is a thirst only water can quench, and, as in the work of Okigbo, the pure spring of poetry is universally available for all poets and poetry lovers who still thirst after the real drink.

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Letter Home

Afam Akeh

in the fourteenth year

Where the largeness of the dream
is touched by the smallness of one’s England
there are travel guilts a wayfarer sheds
like loose feathers or discarded skin.
The flight so far is full of fret.
This island is a perch to many birds,
home of sorts to the travel worn,
lost in transit, storied swallows
and things out of touch with their beginnings,
harried between exclusions and inclusions,
tortured by absence,
as spoiled for options but without choice.

One day grown is soon a decade.
What was closest becomes farthest,
what was precious, rooted, loving,
what assumes presence because always absent.
The longing glows for
the woman who was my beginning,
and her man my familiar flesh.
I list losses, claim my gains,
in places where memory is always loud,
between the furies caged in silence,
between the present and past elsewhere.

England is not unloved.
To kiss the nipple of an English dawn
is betrothal not betrayal, is memorial,
is the heart content, disarmed by birdsong.
One thinks mostly of smells and touch,
of Spring on treetops,
broadcast voices with memorial roots
in a childhood of wonder and dream –
the certainty then through the uncivil war
that life was English, peace English,
the future Cotswolds, English
as the rhymes one clung to for life,
dreaming beyond the uncivil war,
practising English for an English day.

England is not unlived.
Cakes, ales, but also carnival,
England is not only the English.
Think of Summer blown across the seas
bringing the sounds of other climes,
not just birds but tales of loss.
Much sacrifice in the histories
from which some come,
bearing their grief and many gifts,
a vision of London distant from Trafalgar
as the Trafalgar Square.

Pub life, punt life, “inn-keeping with tradition.”
Alone with dumplings, I announce my face.
I am a separate table, I know I am.
Humour is the unseen enemy,
pointing, probing, defining traditions,
ruling the tongues of engagement.
Suddenly shrunk by laughter,
the others to whom I am not present,
a mirror one sees into without seeing,
lab rat, cuddly toy, a Christie mystery,
something exotic as elsewhere.
They are laughing in English,
sharing a refuge in language.
Me too – I think in English.
My laughter is the alien dumpling.

“En-ger-laand! En-ger-laand! …”
This sense of being owned and not owning,
not being English in England,
some kind of circus watched every turn,
the transitory sun in its setting,
waking as from a dream with sounds of absence,
that vacant road travelled on promise
and Earl Grey tea,
discounting day trips to the regatta,
and castles, races, football at the terraces
- En-ger-laand! En-ger-laand! -
dressed English by a dream of England
the counties never dream of their greens.

Interpretations, interpretations…
Of knowing and not knowing
what is preferred or denied,
a word out of rank a call to arms,
that common refuge in weather talk,
the secret codes of natives in conversation.
And so, to the weather those who care,
to lightning flashes and storms over Dover,
skies with burst bladders
on mornings of graft and cappuccino,
to the safety of rains and heavy coats,
to muffins, gardens and estrangement.
This sense of having and not having,
knowing and not knowing England.

So one dreams of home and sunshine,
familiar odours, common folk
and their common talk, the lingering lust
for days of colour and vocal chords,
children playing, mothers calling,
streets loud-speaking their wares.
Then travellers and revellers,
a carnival one grows an ear for,
this dream unspoiled
until waking to familiar reports.
Then broken people, lost causes,
death, despair, the stories one mulls over
tea and croissants and tears.

Let it be told of this moment in our story
how the gecko, finding no life
among its kind, sensing
the warmth behind other doors,
forsook the wild and fled its own,
seeking refuge in a distant compassion,
living at the border of a new life.
Let no one detest its choice.
Pain is the chief guide,
the road out of death primal choice.

That road also the first lie.
Life without death, without dirt.
Infants suck at it.
Manic monkeys swing for it.
In Summer light, Bonn Square,
Oxford drunks disputing like dons
thread their vision of a world without law.
But the living is the dying,
one day emptied into another,
that rolling of shifts also in England
as in that distant familiar
one imagines now
as a dream, another dream.

And sometimes you think you know,
sometimes you know you don’t.
The familiar is not long familiar.
What is not soon becomes, then is not again,
Home is not only hearth but also heart,
where the breath is and where the wreathe is laid,
spaces with remembered voices, tales untold,
times without record… home is finally only place
and place has the stories of all in it.

Oxford bells its people to lunch.
They queue for sushi and sundry fries,
sandwiched lives bridging the distance
between the pie and the burger.
They come from everywhere
with laundered lives, and laughters
echoing the differences of silence.
Many are lunchtime lovers, friends,
substitute families for the hugs frozen
in postcards and remembered pasts.
In rain or snow, out for sandwiches and more,
adopted by a city that cannot feel them,
they are home in generous Oxford
and also travellers, in harmony but also not.
Always the distant country,
home is a hunger beyond lunch.