Ritual and the Quest for Selfhood in Okigbo’s Labyrinths and Brathwaite’s Masks

Abstract

Christopher Okigbo (Nigeria) and Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados)are two poets of the African post-colonial experience who, in their works,display a keen awareness of the intricate histories of their people. Theycombine the autobiographical, social, and vatic dimensions of poetry to evokedeep historical and imaginative perspectives in their studied allegorizationof the predicament of the black race through their individual journeys ofself-discovery. They are the cultural and spiritual exiles who, on the onehand, engage in a ritual search for the recovery of a communal African authenticityand, on the other, who undertake what would seem to the reader as an ambiguousadventure, in which the poetic soul attempts a discovery and understandingof itself as it simultaneously examines the flaws inherent in Africa and theAfricans to which one could attribute the continent’s historical predicament.