Okigbo Agonistes: Postcolonial Subjectivity in "Limits" and "Distances"

Abstract

Among Africa's leading twentieth-century poets, Christopher Okigbo occupies a most interesting space. Born to Igbo Roman Catholic parents in Eastern Nigeria, Okigbo studied the Classics and began to write poetry as a means of re-identification with his primal world. Yet both his life and his poetry staked a claim to a universalist impulse, and, as a colonial subject interpreting the postcolonial moment, Okigbo rejected a narrow, essentialist categorization of either himself or his poetry. He rejected the Africa Prize in 1966, claiming that "there is no such thing as African poetry, there is only good poetry or bad poetry." Okigbo appropriated signs and tropes from a vast range of sources, emphasizing the cosmopolitan, hybrid, transborder nature of signs and language in the postcolonial text. Yet Okigbo's poetry exhibits the recursive fantasy, displacement, and disorientation of a problematic imaginative cosmos. I argue in this essay that Okigbo, especially in the poems "Limits" and "Distances," was expressing his attempt to engage in an agonistic search, a quest for some stable identity. In interpreting the chaotic space of postcolonial experience, the poet Okigbo reflects what Homi Bhabha describes as a "mixed and split text of hybridity" – the double-toned voice of postcolonial anxiety.