Labyrinths

by Christopher Okigbo

Christopher Okigbo's words have often been described as prophetic and have inspired generations of writers in Nigeria and beyond. This extraordinary and powerful collection of interlinked poems, first published in 1971,showcases his rare talent. Each poem draws the reader into an arrestingworld ofmyth and intense contemplation. Killed during the Biafran conflict aged only 35, Okigbo says of these sequences that they amount to "a fable of man's perennial quest for fulfilment".

Genres: Poetry, Africa, African Literature, Nigeria, Western Africa, Fiction

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo (16 August 1932 – 1967) was a Nigerian poet, teacher, and librarian, who died fighting for the independence of Biafra. He is today widely acknowledged as an outstanding postcolonial English-language African poet and one of the major modernist writers of the 20th century.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful and tragic book. Okigbo was Biafra's Byron, slain on the field of liberty, with the wreck of his great poetry behind him. This book proves his enormous talent, and over the last week or so I've been continually sucked back into it.

Its most enticing aspect is its mystery, though this also made it difficult for me to give it five stars. Okigbo was clearly influenced by G.M. Hopkins and T.S. Eliot, and his poetry is mystical and abstruse. After a few re-reads, I feel like I have understood several of the sequences. Heavensgate is the record of a pilgrimage along the Idoto river, in which the speaker shuffles off his sense of self, and melds into the land. "Lament of the Silent Sisters" is a choral poem, in which a group of women sing to and about the sea, and the sea is an image for the truth of poetry. Having wrapped my head around these poems, I find them graphic and terse and moving. But the other verses in the book still escape me.

At its best, this poetry takes you into a strange world, where it is difficult to distinguish the mind from its surroundings: "And out of the solitude / Voice and soul and selves unite, / Riding the echoes" ... He evokes the strange wildness of Nigeria: "Do not wander in speargrass, / After the lights, / Probing lairs in stockings, / To roast / The viper alive, with dog lying / Upsidedown in the crooked passage ..." He takes you into the vast world of myth and religion, drawing together strands of Christianity, Igbo myth, ritual and stories and legends from across the world: "On an empty sarcophagus / hewn out of alabaster, / a branch of fennel / on an empty sarcophagus ..." His images are always suggestive. His turn of phrase is normally surprising. His sense of wonder and urgency is infectious. But all these sequences have a narrative, and if I haven't grasped the narrative I find it hard to make sense of the poems.

This edition has a fine introduction by the author, which introduces the first four sequences: Heavensgate, Limits, Silences and Distances. The final sequence, Path of Thunder, has no introduction, because Okigbo was killed on the battlefield before he could complete it. It is terribly sad to read: "The glimpse of a dream lies smouldering in a cave, / together with the mortally wounded birds. / Earth, unbind me; let me be the prodigal; let this be / the ram's ultimate prayer to the tether ..." This was indeed his "ultimate prayer."

We are lucky that this short-lived man left behind such a rich testament. These are poems to hold on to, and to recite in silence when the world feels clamorous and wrong.

[Sidney Davis]

I just ordered this book. Christopher Okigbo is considered one of the most celebrated of Africa's greatest thinkers on African spirituality and tradition. Okigbo believed that as the Hebrew Old Testament Bible was written for the Hebrews, so Africans must seek to know the Lost Scriptures of their ancestors written specifically for them. Only then can they find their true place in life and in the worlds religions.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

FOR BEYOND the blare of sirened afternoons, beyond the motorcades;
Beyond the voices and days, the echoing highways: beyond the latescence
Of our dissonant airs; through our curtained eyeballs, through our shuttered sleep,
Onto our forgotten selves, onto our broken images; beyond the barricades
Commandments and edicts, beyond the iron tables, beyond the elephant’s
Legendary patience, beyond his inviolable bronze bust; beyond our crumbling towers –

BEYOND the iron path careering along the same beaten track –

THE GLIMPSE of a dream lies smouldering in a cave,
together with the mortally wounded birds.
Earth, unbind me; let me be the prodigal;
let this be the ram’s ultimate prayer to the tether …

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

This is technically breathtaking poetry, playing off classical allusions, stuffing Igbo, Christian and classical references in every line. It is poetry written to sound good - read aloud the repition of rhythm is hypnotic. Okigbo clearly loved TS Eliot, but this feels more dramatic, more tempo-based to me.
And the poetry gets grimmer and increasingly matyreseque as the volume proceeds, and Okigbo's reality gets grimmer.
It's a good read - I read alongside a biography of Okigbo that helped me to identify some, at least, of the references and hence the meaning and intent. But the style leaves more colder than I would have hoped - the cleverness pushing distance not closing the gap.
Maybe I'm getting soft - with installation era poets who grab you by the throat. Okigbo's poetry dates to a time when the ability to revisit a memorised poem and find new depths was highly prized. The more you think about it, the better it gets.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first book of poetry I have read since retiring. Okigbo was a Nigerian poet who died fighting in Biafra. He is to African anglophone poetry what Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor is to francophone African poetry. Both are major postcolonial voices. The book collects poetry published between 1962-68.

In the introduction, Okigbo positions his poetry within the western literary tradition, clearly thinking of the audience that would read this book so as to tap into their knowledge base and through it introduce new work and a new literary voice from a former colony. Senghor positioned his poetry in the same way for the francophone world.

I’m going to say something really obvious. Reading a book of poetry is not the same experience as reading a novel. I know this, but my predilection when I open a book–probably any book, at this point–is to read for narrative. As much as I would have liked to read through Labyrinths–as if Okigbo was developing a consistent story line–poetry requires the reader to interact with the language differently and be cognizant of other logics (allusion, metaphor, symbol, metonymy, synecdoche) rather than latch on to the headlong flight of narrative. There is much returning, rereading, and slow reflection to allow those other logics besides narrative to manifest themselves. I am not the best reader of poetry, because I prefer the straightforward logic of narrative and don’t always have the patience, or the imagination(?), for the more circuitous path of poetry.

There is an arc to the book or at least an end point toward which it moves: the Nigerian Civil War(1967-70), also known as the Biafra War, a postcolonial secessionist war initiated by the Igbo people in southeast Nigeria. Okigbo fought and lost his life in the war, and the Igbo people lost their bid for an independent nation. In the last section of Labyrinths, “Path of Thunder,” Okigbo writes extensively of the signs of a coming war (thunder, tanks, predatory eagles), but he includes those signs (symbols, metaphors) throughout the book foreshadowing the coming conflict.

The first section is “Heavensgate,” and the poem “The Passage” feels like the start of an epic, because it invokes a muse, the village stream, Mother Idoto, and water (rivers, seas) is inevitably a transitional medium out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary. The poet is naked before the stream, noting various forms of passage (e.g., a bird’s flight) and crossroads, “festivity in black.” He is headed out of the village into the larger postcolonial world to encounter the cultural clashes created by colonialism. Once he leaves the village, through a series of metamorphoses, he is prepared for this larger world. In “Initiations,” the poet is the initiate, his body scarified, an everyman, a crossroads, really, where forces gather, move, and disperse. In “Watermaid,” the poet stands on the edge of the sea ready for his queen, the watermaid, to sacrifice him and send him into a new realm. In “Lustra,” the poet has moved to the hills, where there is, once again, water (springs, fountain, dew, mist) and the hint of a second coming and war. Through symbol and metaphor, the poet becomes more and more part of the land, the landscape, the geography. In the final poem, “Newcomer,” Okigbo introduces his new being, product of this transitional arc as the poet and prodigal–same person–takes on the transitions–movement, passages, change–to become something, a warrior and hero?

In the second section–Limits I-IV, Limits V-XII, Fragments out of the Deluge–the poet continues on his path of becoming part of the larger world. He becomes animal (bird) and plant (vines, roots)leansed. He moves further from the singularity of his village self to the multiplicity of many selves. To achieve all of this becoming, the poet finds himself in a liminal state between waking and dreaming, a place of neither/nor. Yet, while experiencing all this fluidity, the poet is concerned with a brick structure that is being built, where “the mortar is not yet dry”: an altar to the lioness, his Queen, who has sacrificed him. He wants to be near this unfinished, still wet, place of worship. Within this context, Okigbo references Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s companion, who dies as retribution after the two kill the Bull of Heaven. They aspired to too much and paid the price. At this point in the book, the focus shifts from the poet’s becoming to death. Referencing Melville’s Moby Dick, Okigbo begins the last poem of the section, “Fragments Out of the Deluge,” with a coffin floating on the sea. Again, the poet-hero is sacrificed, after which eagles kill, leading to the death of the gods, after which Okigbo invokes Picasso’s Guernica. Auguries of war.

The next section, “Silences,” is made up of “Sisters of Silence” and “Lament of the Drum.” I’m just going to say that I couldn’t make sense of “Sisters of Silence.” Rereading and reflecting on this section did not manifest any meaning or connections– any metaphors, symbols, or metonymies–that made sense of what Okigbo was attempting. Perhaps I needed to reread and reflect longer or do more cultural and historical research to understand Okigbo’s references. I found “Lament of the Drums” much more comprehensible, perhaps because drums are such a familiar sign of African culture. Not only do the drums “talk” of death, but they return back to the beginning, unifying the arc of the poet from the village to the coming conflict.

Okigbo frames the final set of poems, “Path of Thunder: Poems Prophesying War,” as precursors to the Biafra War, poems full of the imagery of the destruction to come. Yet the entire book functions as prophecy. In which case, the poet is not becoming a warrior or hero but a prophet, more Teiresias or Cassandra rather than Achilles or Odysseus. So if this book begins in the village at the inception of an epic journey, from the village out Okigbo predicts the inevitability of post-colonial conflict The outcome of Labyrinths is not what I expected when I started, which was the story of a hero rather than a prophet.

[Paul]

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. The amalgam of Classical, Igbo and Christian myth is breathtaking.

[Cooch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful music

The poetry gets better and better. The strength is in the music of the words. There are some gorgeously sonorous lines.

[Jeff Laughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

One dips one's tongue in the ocean;
Camps with the choir of inconstant
Dolphins, by shallow sand banks
Sprinkled with memories...

But ya'll wanna read a bunch of boring ass newbies talking about birds and trees? I'ma ride with Okigbo's dolphins, you can keep those boring ass wrens and shit.

[Shannon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I must confess, my sole motivation for reading Okigbo's collection was for a postcolonial seminar. While inaccessible poems hardly faze me, I struggled to understand exactly what Okigbo's poems were about. Lovely detail, rich diction, few tangible things for a reader to anchor the images on. The primary reading was accompanied by an article by Maik Nwosu, who explores how Okigbo negotiates the dilemma of writing "African" versus assimilating to western culture, and how he can adapt Christian references to his African religious roots. While enlightening for the poems for which Nwosu did a close reading, the article failed to shed substantial light on Okigbo's work as a whole, using ideals and traditions in general instead of something more tangible and specific.