Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo was born on the 16th of August, 1932. He died in September, 1967, some months into the Nigerian Civil War. He was only 35 years old, but because of the energy he put into his existence, Okigbo remains an unforgettable figure in history and literature. Today we are gathered here at Uyo Book Club to affirm the immortal worth of Okigbo by celebrating his work and personality, as well as his enduring legacies. Okigbo was many things when he was alive; a poet, a publisher, an editor, a teacher, a business man, a librarian and a soldier. Indeed, his life showed that we can be more than what we are and still be successful, we can have multiple talents and still excel, we can be young and still live forever.
My first encounter with Okigbo was in the University when we were introduced to poetry; Nigerian Poetry and African Poetry by my able, amiable and intellectually capable teachers, including Professor Friday Okon (representing Professor Joseph Ushie as the Lead Speaker) and Dr Bernard Dickson who are present here today. Indeed, Okigbo (his poetry) asserted itself as a challenge to us students who grappled with his poems and those of the other so called obscurantists, Wole Soyinka and John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo. However, with the availability of intellectual resources and the explanations made by our professors, we were able to obtain the knowledge required to understand these poems.
One of such intellectual resources is N. J. Udoeyop’s Three Nigerian Poets, first published in 1973, which provides a detailed explication on the poetry of the three obscurantists; Soyinka, Clark and Okigbo. Through this work, we understand the various dimensions to the meaning of Okigbo’s poetics. For one, Okigbo is one of the African modernist poets who followed the pioneer poets. In keeping with this tradition, Okigbo’s poetry draws from the Modernist European poetry tradition, including obvious influences from Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and William Wordsworth (Iroro, 2017, p. 155; Udoeyop, 1973, p. 101), though Wordsworth is a Romantic poet. Of course, the Romantic influences in Okigbo’s poetry are seen in the preponderance of Nature and how Nature is deployed to mirror the human condition in his poems.
Okigbo’s linguistic resources are modernist in the sense that they are drawn from different literary traditions. This, perhaps, explains the wide array of allusions in his poems, including classical, biblical, historical and literary allusions. The opaque nature of his poetry arises from the deployment of a salad of symbols, images and tropes taken from the Greco-Roman traditions and combined with African and European ones, as well as the modernist tendency to foreground poetic meanings in myths, rituals and legends. Thus, Okigbo’s poetics can be described as a hybrid; representative of the changing and the shifting cultural ethos of the poet’s lived experiences.
As a modernist African poet, Okigbo is concerned with themes arising from colonialism, including the search for identity and cerebral wholeness in a culturally dislocated space. Okigbo’s poetry rests on humanity’s constant need to contemplate their existence in relation to their environment and their place in that environment. Hence, Okigbo’s poetry is not only deeply personal, but also psychological. At the personal level, Okigbo uses poetry to negotiate his existence, identity and place in the scheme of things. At the psychological level, Okigbo finds in poetry the tool needed to reflect on life and its meanings.
With the opportunity granted me to read a poem by Okigbo, I would like to read and explicate on one of Okigbo’s early poems entitled ‘Song of the Forest’, thus:
Song of the Forest
(with Urbo)
You loaf, child of the forest,
beneath a village umbrella,
plucking from tender string a
song of the forest
Me, away from home, run –
away, must leave the border of our
land, fruitful fields,
must leave our homeland.
But you, child of the forest,
loaf beneath an umbrella,
teaching the woods to sing a
song of the forest.
(Lagos, 1958; based on Virgil’s Tityrus).
Okigbo’s ‘Song of the Forest’ is found in Moonglow and other Poems published in 2017 as the 50th Demise Anniversary Commemorative Publication in honour of Christopher Okigbo. The poem is in the Part One of the anthology under Four Canzones (1957-1961). It is the first poem in the Four Canzones section. The word canzone means song and this is how the poems in this section should be viewed or perceived. There is an instruction beneath the title that the poem be sung with Urbo (Ubo), which is an indigenous musical instrument in the form of a (thumb) piano.
Structurally, ‘Song of the Forest’ is organised in three stanzas of four lines each; meaning that the poem is written in quatrains and has a total of 12 lines. The poem is also written in free verse and makes use of enjambment, meaning that an idea in one line tends to flow into another as most of the lines have soft punctuation marks at the end.
The title suggests or even gives away the pastoral texture of the poem. Pastoral poetry celebrates the solitude and peace found in the rural environment, as well as the humble lives of the people (shepherds) there. The poem was written in Lagos in 1958, with Okigbo drawing inspiration from Virgil’s Eclogues, which is a set of classical pastoral poetry also known as the Bucolics, organised in ten books. It should be noted that, having studied Classics at the University of Ibadan, Okigbo was influenced by the classical poetry tradition, of which Pastoral poetry is a part. In fact, given the arrangements of the poems in Moonglow and other Poems, Okigbo was carefully following the footsteps of great poets before him, including Virgil (Classical Period) and Edmund Spencer (Renaissance) who began their poetry career by writing humble verses represented in pastoral poetry before graduating to writing the epic which was at the apex of the poetry-craft. Thus, it is understandable that Okigbo begins by writing humble verses seen in the Part One of the collection before moving on to write a more serious poetry in the Part Two of the anthology.
It should be noted that though pastoral poems depict the countryside and the life there, they were not necessarily written in the villages. In fact, most practitioners of pastoral poetry did so as a way of coping with the stress and noise in the urban centres, and as a way of expressing their nostalgic feelings towards the either faraway pastoral landscape or its complete loss through urbanisation. This explains why Okigbo stays in Lagos and muses about his separation from the peace and beauty of village life.
The first stanza of Okigbo’s ‘Song of the Forest’ reads: ‘You loaf, child of the forest/beneath a village umbrella,/plucking from tender string a/Song of the forest’.
In this stanza, the persona recalls the rural environment through the agency of memory. The dominant imagery in this stanza is visual imagery, as can be seen in words like ‘loaf’, ‘child’, ‘forest’, ‘village’, ‘umbrella’ and ‘string’. These sight words help us to appreciate the setting of the poem as well as invoking the peace and quiet often associated with village life. The image of the child suggests innocence; indeed, Okigbo is recalling his childhood days in Ojoto his hometown. The child is depicted in a rural environment, sitting or, perhaps, standing under a tree with a huge shade ‘umbrella’ and playing an indigenous musical instrument (perhaps urbo or ubo) ‘plucking from a tender string’. The word ‘loaf’ could be a redacted form for ‘loafer’ which is a fun way of referring to a child who wiles away his time in pleasure instead of working. The reader should notice the caesura in the first line of the stanza exemplified in the comma in-between ‘loaf’ and ‘child’. The expression ‘village umbrella’ is a metaphor for a shady tree. Other instances of metaphor in the stanza are ‘child of the forest’ and ‘song of the forest’ which refer to the poet as a village boy and the art of (pastoral) poetry itself, respectively.
The second stanza of the poem reads: ‘Me, away from home, run – /away, must leave the border of our/land, fruitful fields,/must leave our homeland.’
In this stanza, the persona bemoans the loss of homeland through migration or absence. It is in this stanza that the reader experiences the nostalgic feeling towards home. It should be recalled that Okigbo wrote this poem while in Lagos, thus he is ‘away from home’. His leaving is against his wish and plays into the larger narrative of the postcolonial mobility of the colonial subject. However, the persona’s attachment to homeland is felt in the lines so limned. Perhaps, it is this love and attachment to homeland that would make Okigbo fight to the death in order to defend the land and the people during the Nigerian Civil War. This stanza is replete with kinetic imagery seen in words like ‘away’ which is also a repetend/repetition in the poem, ‘run’, and ‘leave’. The expression ‘fruitful field’ is an instance of alliteration which helps to enrich vocally the wealth and splendor of the land left behind.
The third and final stanza of the poem reads: ‘But you, child of the forest, /loaf beneath an umbrella, /teaching the woods to sing a /song of the forest.’
In this stanza, the persona deploys contrast as a poetic device to express the fortunate circumstances of the child in the village compared to the persona who now stays in the city, separated from home. The contrast is signalled in the word ‘But’ which begins the stanza. The stanza is equally a simple but creative repetition of the first stanza of the poem, as well as providing a fitting conclusion to the poem.
Conclusion/Appreciation
In conclusion, Okigbo’s image as a poet of global renown lives on in his works and are remembered by lovers of literature all around the word. In ‘Song of the Forest’ we see Okigbo’s humble beginnings as a poet, his birthplace in Ojoto, his movement from the rural and provincial space to a metropolitan area (Lagos), his love and nostalgia towards home and his rememory of home in verse. This poem continues to speak to the contemporary readers given the realities of migration in our time. This has made this poem, just like the other poems of Okigbo, to be at once timeless and universal.
I thank Dr Udeme Nana, the Founder of Uyo Book Club, for his inspiring leadership, encouraging me to join the Club and warmly welcoming me to the Club. I appreciate my teachers, Prof Friday Okon and Dr Bernard Dickson, for the timeless lessons I received at their feet during my days as a student in the Department of English, University of Uyo, Uyo, and for their love and encouragement over the years. Special thanks to Dr Martin Akpan, my mentor, who first introduced me to Uyo Book Club. I thank Pastor Michael Bush, a veritable source of inspiration, for always being there for me. I was elated to see Mr Thomas Thomas, Secretary ANA Akwa Ibom State Chapter and Media Aide to the Governor of Akwa Ibom State, at the August event. I must acknowledge the presence of Akparawa James Edet, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Information and Strategy, Akwa Ibom State, at the reading session.
I appreciate my students, Edikan Okon, Abiebiet Paul, Inyene Robert, Nelson Edem and Etefia Sampson who joined me at the Book Club meeting. Indeed, it is more rewarding for them to be at a book club than at a night club. I appreciate Ama Ntekim for always encouraging me to attend the meetings of the Club. I was happy to meet Mrs Mfon Ebebe (Mama G) at the Club. I was equally excited to meet Mrs Helen Ebi (Mummy) of the National Library, Akwa Ibom State Branch, and her lieutenant, Mrs Glory William, at the event. To all the members of the Uyo Book Club and Distinguished Guests, especially Barr. Sylvester Okonkwo (Guest of Honour) and Dr Ekong Sampson (Patron), who made the event a huge success, I thank you all.
