The Dance of Death: Nigerian History and Christopher Okigbo's Poetry (review)

The Dance of Death: Nigerian History and Christopher Okigbo's Poetry, by Dubem Okafor. Trenton: Africa World P, 1998. xv + 297 pp. ISBN 0-86543-555-3.

The genesis of The Dance of Death is Dubem Okafor's doctoral dissertation at the University of Minnesota (ix). Okafor describes his book as "a traditional narratological typology [. . .] which will quickly scan the cultural political history of Nigeria from the colonial period to 1996, and attempt to provide an explanatory backdrop for subsequent events" (3). The Dance of Death has a remarkably extensive breadth, going back to the slave trade. Its main focus, however, is on Nigeria's colonial history, her formidable "twin bane of ethnicity and corruption" (25) and "linguistic cacophony" (18), all of which, Okafor argues, create a dance of death that prevents her transformation from "ties of primordalism" to a nation (7). Okafor situates within all this sociopolitical scenario Christopher Okigbo, his uncle, as the man and the poet. And he draws on relevant, recent critical theory to illuminate his viewpoints.

The Dance of Death's historical documentation is in itself impressively refreshing. But the author's strategic act of positioning in relation to his entire matériel raises a number of critical questions. For clarity, the content of the book can be subdivided roughly into two intermingling parts: Nigeria's sociopolitical scenario and Okigbo as the man and the artist. Okafor's avowed intent is to highlight how "Nigeria did not heed the warning of its most articulate and bold poet-prophet [. . .] and is still paying dearly for that heedless obduracy" (253). His book moves between Nigeria's sociopolitical history and Okigbo's life, poetry, and criticism.

In Okafor's discussion of Nigeria's "linguistic cacophony" and the desirability of "a supraethnic medium of communication" (23) as "an icon of coherence and solidarity" (18), he deals also with the desirability of the use of indigenous languages in African literature. While cogently pointing to Achebe's "creative and artistic fine-tuning" of the English language (93), he highlights Geoffrey Davis and Hena Maes-Jelinek's clear-eyed statement that "no one will learn the language of a people without any economic or political power" (83). What really illumines The Dance of Death is such commonsensical perception. In his extensive refutation of what he considers to be "grievous misinterpretations" (242) of his uncle's poetry, Okafor's elucidating attempt becomes penetrating only when he pinpoints, for example, Sunday Anozie's structuralist invocation of "the Old Testament in order to understand or explain a self-sustaining cultural practice which predated the deleterious intrusion of Christianity" (167), or when he says Paul Theroux's criticism "illustrates how wrong-headed criticism can get when it imposes a cultural-cosmological system arbitrarily on another in an attempt to make sense of the cultural-literary products of the system" (168), or when he thinks Elaine S. Fido is "scavenging among Okigbo's poetry for clues to fit new-fangled psychosexual paradigms" (101). Such memorable insights touch deeply on cultural-literary theory and practice.

But the main thrust of his concern with his uncle's poetry and the general run of its criticism is apparently preoccupied with taking up the gauntlet against those critics whose "grievous misinterpretations" he (angrily) feels "deprecate the achievement of, and insult the memory of Africa's greatest poet" (118) and a "polymath" (160). His targets range from Ali Mazrui's "The Trial of Christopher Okigbo" (1971) to M. J. C. Echeruo's remark that Okigbo's "career [. . .] in teaching [is] simply a failure" (133). Of course, it is legitimate and proper for Okafor to correct any "grievous misinterpretations" of his uncle's poetry and life and also to exalt his life and poetic art. But the vehement finality of his refutation of one "misinterpretation" after another mostly on the basis of his familiarity with his uncle smacks of an anger that personalizes and...