African Poetry of the Living Dead: Igbo Masquerade Poetry (review)

Romanus Egudu’s most recent book, African Poetry of the Living Dead: Igbo Masquerade Poetry, presents, with parallel English translations and notes, the texts of fifty-seven Igbo masquerade chants recorded by the author on various “ceremonial” occasions over the past few years. The texts all come from the author’s hometown, Ebe, in the Enugu State of Nigeria—the source of his own contributions to Poetic Heritage: Igbo Traditional, co-edited with the late Donatus Nwoga. The book is divided into five “chapters.” Chapter 1 is a “General Introduction” while chapter 2 offers a survey of “Igbo-Masquerade Cult and Poetry.” Each of the remaining “chapters” presents the texts and English translation of poetry performed by one type of masquerade or another, as follows: “Okunaagbaachala-Masquerade Poetry” (ch. 3), “Inyiagbaoku-Masquerade Poetry” (ch. 4), and “Odo-Masquerade Poetry” (ch. 5). In each of the last three chapters, the texts and translations are preceded by a brief “Introduction” describing the character and functions of the type of masquerade by which they are performed, the occasions of performance, and the subject matter of the poems.

The general introduction (ch. 1) is as useful and informative as it is distracting and misleading on the cultural and aesthetic ambience of Igbo masquerade poetry. It is divided into three sections designed to lead the reader systematically from a broad general survey of “Igbo traditional thoughts” (1–16), through a bird’s eye view of “Poetry in Igbo oral tradition,” including the masking tradition to which the texts specifically belong (16–26), to a brief examination of the principles adopted by the editor in his “translation” of the poems (27–28). In the first section, Egudu draws from Igbo names and such other cultural indicators as proverbs in his survey of the Igbo worldview and its relation to Igbo social organization, but some of his best insights are obfuscated by a tendency to seek “universal” validity for Igbo traditional ideas by reference to European ideas even when the names and sayings he cites are clearly sufficient in themselves to establish the coherence and complexity of the Igbo beliefs and thought-patterns in question. For example, on p. 2, we are subjected to the following pointless comparison between a traditional Igbo view of life and Western existentialist philosophy even when the author knows (and actually says) that there is no link at all between the Igbo and the Western ideas:

The traditional personal name, “Uwadiegwu” (The world is dreadful) [. . .] though it sounds existential, has nothing to do with in its origin with that branch of Western metaphysics called existentialism. Indeed it has been used by the Igbo as a proverb and given as a personal name among them for several centuries before Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre and other exponents of European existentialism were born! It is a statement (every Igbo name is a statement, rhetorical question, solicitation, suggestion, or supposition) by means of which the people have from time immemorial expressed their perception of the human world and the life in it. That some Western philosophers much later perceived the world in the same way and expressed their perception in similar terms (the doctrine of angst, dread or fear is cardinal to existentialism) points, inter alia, to the common humanity among peoples of diverse races.

(2)

One paragraph later, Egudu declares with reference to such proverbs as uwa bu olili (“Life is a visit”):

These imagistic presentations of the concept of the transience of human life compare favorably with those in which William Shakespeare expressed it. As if Igbo ideas must “compare favorably” with Western ideas to be of value.

(Emphasis added)

But Egudu is not satisfied with this mishmash of references to Igbo ontology, Shakespeare, and, by implication, “imagism”—a movement in British and American art (c. 1912–18) associated with T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound. Indeed, he seems so enamored of the word “imagistic” that he uses it ever so...