Christopher Okigbo, Print, and the Poetry of Postcolonial Modernity

The poet and publisher Christopher Okigbo has often been interpreted in terms of a shift from "Euromodernist" to "oral African" poet, from alienated cosmopolitan to committed Biafran. Demonstrating a fresh approach to Okigbo that attends to the print contexts of his poetry and his own involvement with publishing, this essay argues that Okigbo was both engaged with national politics and situated in transnational networks throughout his career. Enabled by a new biography of Okigbo, it first locates him as a member of the Mbari generation, who aimed to shape postcolonial modernity through their aesthetic, cultural, and political practices, then offers a critical reading of three episodes in his poetic career. By examining the periodicals in which his poems appeared and exhuming his little-discussed final poem, this article reveals the interplay among the local, the national, and the transnational across Okigbo's work.