Christopher Okigbo and the Postcolonial Market of Memories

Abstract

The association of Christopher Okigbo's poetry with Anglo-American modernist poetics has often attracted two main types of evaluation: the failure of ideology and Eurocentrism. But Okigbo demonstrates literary dexterity in the manner in which the deep structure of his poetry troubles the historical overvaluation of the white sign and the devaluation of the black sign manifest in the colonial market of memories between Europe and Africa. Historical dialogism or a postcolonial market of memories—involving the invocation of both the local and the foreign, the specific and the universal—is a strategic feature of Okigbo's poetry. He ultimately creates a third signifying field via a conjunction of two signifying systems, the native and the colonial, into a new state of consciousness rooted in a traditional African mythic code.