Christopher Okigbo One of the Greatest Poets in History

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju Compcros Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

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Christopher Okigbo From The Christopher Okigbo Foundation http://www.christopher-okigbo.org/gallery.php Accessed 13/10/2015 2

Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo (1930–1967) is one of the greatest poets in history. He is also a pioneer in animistic mysticism, the pursuit of union with ultimate reality through identification with a natural phenomenon understood as a sentient agent, as demonstrated by the first section of his collection Labyrinths, which begins with his invocation to Idoto, the deity of the stream of his village, Ojoto, in South Eastern Nigeria, an invocation that takes him from the convergence of the elements- "dark waters of the beginning/rainbow on far side/arced like boar bent to kill/foreshadows the fire that is dreamed of/..foreshadows the rain that is dreamed of", to an encounter with the primordial geometries that structure existence "a triangle inscribed in a square with a hollow centre -all the forms were formed after our forming", to the union with the Goddess in the depths of the earth "come into my cavern/shake the mildew from your hair/let your ear listen/my voice calls from a cavern", achieving a homecoming to the Goddess, who has become, from the deity of his village stream, the "water spirit that nurtures all creation". His political poetry in "Path of Thunder" is some of the most exquisite political poetry anywhere, as he sketches the growing crisis in 1960s Nigeria and anticipates future catastrophes "when they share the meat/let them remember thunder...a thing unnamed and unnanamble/ a night of deep waters/ a nebula immense and immeasurable/ a path of stone", culminating in his magnificent closing lines of a prescient figure watching unfolding events from a cave as the cycle of human destructiveness unfolds "the mortally wounded birds...../a coming and going that goes on forever", summarising one way of looking at his work using lines imperfectly recollected but whose beauty remains thrilling. 3

Okigbo belongs in the great tradition of poets who unify the spiritual and the political, of which the Italian Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–1321), is perhaps the greatest exemplar, and of which the Nigerian Wole Soyinka (1934-) is also a remarkable example. His work demonstrates the purification of self and the unification of various realms of being in the self in order to better engage with social reality in its cosmic context which Dante demonstrates par excellence. In terms of the telescoping of epic ambition into a tighter scope, he is comparable with the Anglo-American poet T.S.Eliot’s (1888 –1965), great achievement in Four Quarterts, Eliot being a disciple of Dante. In relation to exquisite encapsulation of vast universes within a highly concentrated form, he can be compared with Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694), Japanese master of the haiku and for mystical lyricism, he shares a place with Spanish luminary St. John of the Cross (1542 – 1591).

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