Panel: Life Writing and the Colonial and Postcolonial “Native
Intellectual”
Copanelists: Dan Chima Amadi and Ghirmai Negash
Next year, 2008, marks the fiftieth anniversary of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The novel is today one of the most significant books in the world, a milestone in African literature and an archetypal modern African novel in English, read in schools and universities in Africa, Europe, and North America. In India and Australia, it is probably the most famous African novel. It annually sells more than a million copies, and is considered Achebe’s magnum opus.
It is also forty years since Christopher Okigbo (1932–1967), a Nigerian poet, died fighting for the independence of Biafra. His collected poems, Labyrinths, stamps Okigbo as the outstanding postcolonial English-language African poet, and one of the major modernist writers of the twentieth century. His papers have been listed by UNESCO in its World Memory Register, the only African on that list. Recently four Ivy League colleges in the United States of America organized an international conference at the University of Massachusetts on his life and poetry.
However, Okigbo is described as obscurantist, prompting a study of his collection from an auto/ biographical angle. I intend to contrast Okigbo with Achebe by showing that while Okigbo struggles to put himself in the text, he ends up becoming, in the hands of critics, not the subject but the object of his collection. Because his poetry does not yield all the details about his life, he becomes the ellipses in his own poems, providing absences and thus the need to fill in those spaces. In contrast, though Achebe does not name himself in his novels, he is their invisible object, whose mind and perceptions define the drift and structure of his books. And because of the invisibility of the novelist in the text, he becomes, like Okigbo, the subject to deal with in the biographies that have been written about him. He is the vanished novelist, the self in space (outside the text), but whose absence overwhelms his creative writing and stamps him in the readers’ minds.
How successful are these two writers in their chosen points of view? Is there a meeting point between the two in Okigbo’s Path of Thunder? What difference does this make to his poetry?
Uduma Kalu is an Mphil student at the University of Ibadan. He received his BA in English from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and MA in English from the University of Ibadan. A multiple award winner for his poetry, essays, journalism, and prose fiction, Kalu has been honoured by such organizations as the Association of Nigerian Authors. He is the Literary and Book Page Editor of The Guardian, in Lagos.