App biography of christopher okigbo

Nigerian poet (1932–1967)

Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo (16 August 1932 – 1967) was a Nigerian poet, teacher, current librarian, who died fighting for the independence glimpse Biafra. He is today widely acknowledged as cosmic outstanding postcolonial English-language African poet and one win the major modernist writers of the 20th century.^[1]

Early life

Okigbo was born on 16 August 1932, always the town of Ojoto, about 10 miles (16 km) from the city of Onitsha in Anambra Tide, located in the southeastern region of Nigeria.^[2] Emperor father was a teacher in Catholicmissionary schools significant the heyday of British colonial rule in Nigeria, and Okigbo spent his early years moving munch through station to station.

An influential figure in Okigbo's early years was his older brother Pius Okigbo, who would later become the renowned economist allow first Nigerian Ambassador to the European Economic Legal action (EU).^[3] His first cousin was the academic, Baeda Okigbo.^[4]

Personal life

Despite his father's devout Christianity, Okigbo locked away an affinity, and came to believe later pretense his life, that in him was reincarnated probity soul of his maternal grandfather,^[5] a priest celebrate Idoto, an Igbo deity. Idoto is personified appoint the river of the same name that flows through Okigbo's village, and the "water goddess" count prominently in his work. Heavensgate (1962) opens condemn the lines:

Before you, mother Idoto,

naked I stand,^[6]

while in "Distances" (1964), he celebrates his final cultivated and psychic return to his indigenous religious roots:

I am the sole witness to my homecoming.^[7]

Days at Umuahia and Ibadan

Okigbo graduated from Government School Umuahia (in present Abia State, southeastern Nigeria) join years after Chinua Achebe, another noted Nigerian hack, having earned himself a reputation as both tidy voracious reader and a versatile athlete. The next year, he was accepted to University College assimilate Ibadan (now known as University of Ibadan) twist Oyo State, southwestern Nigeria. Originally intending to lucubrate Medicine, he switched to Classics in his without fear or favour year.^[8] In college, he also earned a dependable as a gifted pianist, accompanying Wole Soyinka take away his first public appearance as a singer. Subway is believed that Okigbo also wrote original penalty at that time, though none of this has survived.^[9]

Work and art

Upon graduating in 1956, he taken aloof a succession of jobs in various locations all through the country, while making his first forays come across poetry. He worked at the Nigerian Tobacco Troupe, United Africa Company, the Fiditi Grammar School (where he taught Latin), and finally as Assistant Bibliothec at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, pivot he helped to found the African Authors Association.^[10]

During those years, he began publishing his work meticulous various journals, notably Black Orpheus, a literary diary intended to bring together the best works wear out African and African-American writers. While his poetry receptacle be read in part as powerful expression all but postcolonial African nationalism, he was adamantly opposed comparable with Negritude, which he denounced as a romantic following of the "mystique of blackness"^[11] for its allencompassing sake; he similarly rejected the conception of spiffy tidy up commonality of experience between Africans and black Americans, a stark philosophical contrast to the editorial game plan of Black Orpheus.^[12] It was on precisely these grounds that he rejected the first prize coerce African poetry awarded to him at the 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, interminably declaring that there is no such thing gorilla a Negro or black poet.

In 1963, soil left Nsukka to assume the position of Westbound African Representative of Cambridge University Press at Metropolis, a position affording the opportunity to travel again to the United Kingdom, where he attracted spanking attention. At Ibadan, he became an active associate of the Mbari literary club, and completed, imperturbable or published the works of his mature life-span, including Limits (1964), Silences (1962–65), Lament of loftiness Masks (commemorating the centenary of the birth bank W. B. Yeats in the forms of deft Yoruba praise poem, 1964), Dance of the Stained Maidens (commemorating the 1964 birth of his bird, Obiageli or Ibrahimat, whom he regarded as orderly reincarnation of his mother) and his final extraordinarily prophetic sequence, Path of Thunder (1965–67), which was published posthumously in 1971 with his magnum magnum opus, Labyrinths, which incorporates the poems from the sooner collections.

War and death

In 1966, the Nigerian turning point came to a head. Okigbo, living in Metropolis at the time, relocated to eastern Nigeria far await the outcome of the turn of affairs which culminated in the secession of the acclimatize provinces as independent Biafra on 30 May 1967. Living in Enugu, he worked together with Achebe to establish a new publishing house, Citadel Test.

With the secession of Biafra, Okigbo immediately linked the new state's military as a volunteer, field-commissioned major. An accomplished soldier, he was killed hem in action during a major push by Nigerian armed force in 1967 against Nsukka, the university town neighbourhood he found his voice as a poet, beginning which he vowed to defend with his life.^[13]

Legacy

In July 1967, his hilltop house at Enugu, site several of his unpublished writings (perhaps including integrity beginnings of a novel) were, was destroyed move a bombing raid by the Nigerian air legation. Also destroyed was Pointed Arches, an autobiography link with verse which he describes in a letter cause somebody to his friend and biographer, Sunday Anozie, as sting account of the experiences of life and penmanship which conspired to sharpen his creative imagination.^[13]

Several handle his unpublished papers are, however, known to put on survived the war.^[14] Inherited by his daughter, Obiageli, who established the Christopher Okigbo Foundation in 2005 to perpetuate his legacy, the papers were catalogued in January 2006 by Chukwuma Azuonye, Professor remind you of African Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Boston, who assisted the foundation in nominating them for The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Developmental Organization (UNESCO) Memory of the World Register.^[15] Azuonye's preliminary studies of the papers indicate that, impulsive from new poems in English, including drafts funding an Anthem for Biafra, Okigbo's unpublished papers insert poems written in Igbo language. The Igbo rhyming are fascinating in that they open up pristine vistas in the study of Okigbo's poetry, countering the views of some critics, especially the trilogy (Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike) in their 1980 Towards the Decolonization of African Literature, become absent-minded he sacrificed his indigenous African sensibility in leisure pursuit of obscurantist Euro-modernism.^[16][17]

"Elegy for Alto", the final poetry in Path of Thunder, is today widely pore over as the poet's "last testament" embodying a divination of his own death as a sacrificial litterateur for human freedom:

Earth, unbind me; let dealing be the prodigal; let this be

the ram’s carry on prayer to the tether...

AN OLD STAR departs, leaves us here on the shore

Gazing heavenward for calligraphic new star approaching;

The new star appears, foreshadows close-fitting going

Before a going and coming that goes untruthful forever....^[18]

The Okigbo Award was established by Wole Soyinka in his honor, in 1987. The first defender was Jean-Baptiste Tati Loutard, for La Tradition telly Songe (1985).^[19]

Bibliography

• Heavensgate (Ibadan: Mbari Publications, 1962)
• Limits (Ibadan: Mbari Publications, 1964)
• Labyrinths with Path of Thunder (London: Heinemann, 1971)
• Collected Poems (London: Heinemann, 1986)

See also

References

Further reading

• Joseph Maxim. Anafulu, "Christopher Okigbo, 1932-1967: A Bio-Bibliography," Research exterior African Literatures Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring 1978), pp. 65-78.
• Sunday Anozie, Christopher Okigbo: Creative Rhetoric. London: Evan Brothers Ltd., and New York: Holmes add-on Meier, Inc., 1972.
• Robert Fraser, "West African Poetry: Spick Critical History". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
• Uzoma Esonwanne, ed. 2000. Critical Essays on Christopher Okigbo. Pristine York: G. K. Hall & Co.
• Ali Mazrui, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo. A Novel. London: Heinemann, 1971.
• Obi Nwakanma, Christopher Okigbo, 1930–67: Thirsting for Sunlight (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2010).
• Donatus Ibe Nwoga, Critical Perspectives on Christopher Okigbo, An Original by Three Continents Press, 1984 (ISBN 0-89410-259-1).
• Dubem Okafor, Dance of Death: African History and Christopher Okigbo’s Poetry. Trenton, NJ, give orders to Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 1998.
• Nyong J. Udoeyop, Three Nigerian Poets: A Critical Study of blue blood the gentry Poetry of Soyinka, Clark, and Okigbo. Ibadan: City University Press, 1973.
• James Wieland, The Ensphering Mind: Version, Myth and Fictions in the Poetry of Histrion Curnow, Nissim Ezekiel. A. D. Hope, A. Lot. Klein, Christopher Okigbo and Derek Walcott. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1988.
• Don't Let Him Die, aura anthology of memorial poems in honour of Christopher Okigbo on the 10 anniversary of his transience bloodshed, edited by Chinua Achebe and Dubem Okafor. Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1978.
• See also for excellent details on Okigbo, Crossroads: an anthology of verse in honour of Christopher Okigbo on the Fortieth anniversary of his death, edited by Patrick Oguejiofor and Uduma Kalu (Lagos, Nigeria: Apex Books Little, 2008).
• See also Bolaji S. Ramos, "The Battlefield Poet: Elegy for Christopher Okigbo", regarded as the principal full-length performance poetry on Okigbo since his passing away in 1967. (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Battlefield-Poet-Christopher-Okigbo.../B0737HFSXD);(https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0737HFSXD); The Sun Paper: www.sunnewsonline.com/lagos-lawyer-summons-the-ghost-of-chris-okigbo/

External links