Christopher Okigbo, Print, and the Poetry of Postcolonial Modernity

Abstract

the poet and publisher Christopher Okigbo has often been interpreted in terms of a shift from "Euromodernist" to "oral african" poet, from alienated cosmopolitan to committed Biafran. Demonstrating a fresh approach to Okigbo that attends to the print contexts of his poetry and his own involvement with publishing, this essay argues that Okigbo was both engaged with national politics and situated in transnational networks throughout his career. Enabled by a new biography of Okigbo, it first locates him as a member of the Mbari generation, who aimed to shape postcolonial modernity through their aesthetic, cultural, and political practices, then offers a critical reading of three episodes in his poetic career. By examining the periodicals in which his poems appeared and exhuming his littlediscussed final poem, this article reveals the interplay among the local, the national, and the transnational across Okigbo's work. DEAD: Christopher Okigbo, circa 37, member of Mbari and

Colonial Modernity: Progress, Development, and Modernism in Nigeria

“….of primary control by Africans over political and cultural representation. 47 Suhr-Sytsma's use of "development" here, as a process of local creation, is a radical departure from the deficit model of theorists like Akanle and from (superficial) benevolence that revisits the "kingdom of abundance promised by theorists and politicians in the 1950s," which Arturo Escobar has warned against. 48 As Escobar contends, "the discourse and strategy of development produced its opposite: massive underdevelopment and impoverishment, untold exploitation and oppression."…”

“….inspired by oral African resources." 55 In looking at Okigbo's writing, it is not difficult to see how the critical divide arose between an early, derivative Okigbo, and a later, authentic Okigbo. Much of Okigbo's poetry, especially his earlier work, can appear obviously, even deliberately modernist in comparison with Western poets like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.…”

“…It is, to be sure, highly likely that Okigbo's political interests inflected his work, but Suhr-Sytsma argues that Biafran cultural identity was essential to Okigbo throughout his life as a writer, and that any rigid division of the poet's life and work is an oversimplification: "It is time to admit the analogous complexity of Okigbo's career, to recognize that the political conflicts of the mid-1960s did not cleanly shift Okigbo from alienated cosmopolitan to authentic nativist." 66 When this shift is posited as a binary distinction, the text often presented as the signal of Okigbo's newly discovered nativism, where the poet "firmly returns to his Igbo roots," 67 is his late sequence "Path of Thunder: Poems Prophesying War," written between 1965-7. As Oyeniyi Okunoye has written, this work "must be seen as belonging to that phase of [Okigbo's] poetic engagement marked by a high sense of social responsibility."…”

“….for the invocation of 'the oral tradition' to function as the badge of a poet's authenticity, understood as his or her continuity with the precolonial," because African oral tradition was always in some way intertwined with the written. 78 To contend that "Path of Thunder" is Okigbo at his most authentic, is also to argue that his other work is inauthentic-that it is characterized by a lack. This is a deficit model of poetic development closely aligned with deficit models of economic development like Akanle's, a trajectory of Okigbo's writing in which he overcomes his early imitative work and advances toward an objectively commendable communal engagement.…”