By ABBA A. ABBA
Introduction
Many scholars have argued that Okigbo brought to his poetry a representation of the sense of patriotism and his personal anguished feeling about the monstrosity of his benighted nation. In fact, some have drawn attention to what they call his fixation with the trope of death, arguing that he was not only obsessive in his depictions of metaphors that incarnated that experience, but was also an embodiment of the death wish that eventually culminated in his death in the Nigeria-Biafra war (Izevbaye 22). Obi Nwakanma, one of Okigbo’s critics has argued that Okigbo transgressed the rules of war by showing total disregard for personal safety in the course of the war. For him, although Okigbo was an adventurous and self-giving soldier, he certainly brought death upon himself:
He was a bit reckless, because throughout the operations in the area of Isienum and Eha-Alumona, he didn’t care whether he lived or died. . . . [H]e almost always sat on the bonnet of the jeep whilst an operation is on—he would sit there with his rifle, his leg[s] thrown wide apart. Although that was not military, it never bothered Christopher [Okigbo]. When you reprimanded him, he would just burst out into his loud laughter” (qtd. in Nwakanma 245).
Retracing Nwakamma’s critical step with a different idiom, Ali Mazrui condemns Okigbo for renouncing the universal in preference for the ethnic. For him, Okigbo is neither a hero nor a martyr because the measure of a poet differs from the measure of “ordinary” humankind (3). In an article entitled “Sacred Suicide,” Mazrui holds both the suicide and the martyr guilty of their own death and argues that the martyr is probably more reprehensible because he revels in having another assume the guilt for what is in reality his/her will to self-destruction. He notes that in many claims to martyrdom, there is a disguised self-regarding lust to attain the Godhead which therefore interrogates the very pretension to self-giving (165). Yet, as Mazrui acknowledges, the predictability of a gallant soldier’s death at the moment of his acceptance of his ghastly mission enhances his public adulation. Similarly, Olusegun Obasanjo, the General Officer Commanding the 3 Marine Commando Division of the Federal Army, does not see any act of heroism in Okigbo’s actions during the war. In fact, he dismisses his action as mere folly and “unnecessary bravado” (18; qtd in Diala 5).
However, that Okigbo’s impulse is not suicidal but heroic is a position which the General Officer Commanding the Biafra Army, Major General Alexander Madiebo, validates in his memoir on the war: “The greatest disaster of that [Nsukka] operation was the well-known poet, Major Christopher Okigbo, one of the bravest fighters on that sector, who died trying to lob a grenade into a ferret armoured car” (165–66). Similarly, in a note to Diala, Ben Obumselu observes that Okigbo was driven by a heroic spirit that was typical of him and recalls that Okigbo fought heroically in the war side by side with Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu and certainly chose to fight to the death, as he had told Obumselu that he would not withdraw from Opi, where he was eventually killed. Obumselu pointed to a possible heroic tradition in Okigbo’s family by recalling that Pius Okigbo, Christopher Okigbo’s elder brother, had said that Christopher had been born with a mark on his neck, which was thought to be a relic of a bullet wound sustained by his ancestor (Diala 93). He “defied all our categories and rejected the postulate that life set limits beyond which he could not venture” (Obumselu, “Christopher” 58).
Isidore Diala, for whom Okigbo is undeniably a martyr, observes that Okigbo could have been located in Mazrui’s typology but for Mazrui’s problematic definition of the “universal” and the “tribal.” Okigbo, Diala argues, was capable of self-sacrificial commitments that typically extended to his adventurous career as a soldier. His temper was heroic and the trajectory of his poetry is a movement from the renunciation of Christian martyrdom to an affirmation of self-giving courageous action (5). And by noting that Okigbo “didn’t care whether he lived or died,” Nwakanma ironically acknowledges Okigbo’s total self-giving in the execution of that war. Diala, drawing a distinction between martyrdom and the death wish, notes that such intriguing self-sacrifice as martyrdom is a heroic action that invites public adulation:
While, then, thanatos or the death wish is a compulsion, rather than a choice, martyrdom, typically, is the acceptance, after due reflection, of the need to glorify an idea by dying for it. In its ideal Christian form, martyrdom is complete self-abnegation, a total self-giving that especially prospers the Christian cause. The aureole of martyrdom is its reward without, however, being its remote motivation. But while blood necessarily seals the pact of martyrdom, not even in war is the loss of life indispensable to establish heroism. Martyrdom, therefore, is no mere analogue of heroic action as martyrs do not fight: they accept and find fulfilment in suffering. Yet heroism is life affirming in its defiance of death but, unlike martyrdom, requires no religious idea as a basic motivation (6).
This paper reappraises Okigbo’s poetic engagement and his general conduct and death in the Nigerian-Biafran war in order to critically consider, especially the relationship of his poetry with the circumstances leading to his death in a personal confrontation with an armoured tank. Immanuel Kant and Terry Eagleton’s interpretations of suicide and martyrdom provide the framework for the analysis of some of the documented accounts of Okigbo’s life and a selection of his poetry. It is after the analysis that we can identify him appropriately either as a genuine martyr or a mere suicide who presides ritually over his own dismemberment, or both. Examining also, some lines of his poetry which have been misread as embodying his ‘haunting’ death wish on the one hand, and evidences of his self-giving impulse, on the other, the paper would seek to understand how Okigbo as a tragic poet transcends his destiny by submitting to it, thus becoming victor and victim in a single gesture. In its conclusion, the paper would seek to reconcile Okigbo’s will to heroic action with the symbolic meaning that is locked in his poetry in order to justify his ascension to the rank of a martyr.
Heroic drive to martyrdom
How can we identify a martyr and how does he differ from the suicide? To be sure, suicide and martyrdom may go beyond the question of dying to the problem of laying one’s death dramatically at someone else’s door. Immanuel Kant, in his work entitled The Ethics of Suicide, discusses the ethics of morality in relation to man’s duty to himself and to his body and argues that generally, every rational being exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by other will. He defines rational beings as “persons inasmuch as their nature already marks them out as ends in themselves, i.e., as something which is not to be used merely as means and hence there is imposed thereby a limit on all arbitrary use of such beings, which are thus objects of respect” (427). Following Kant’s teleology as regards the concept of necessary duty to oneself, the man who contemplates suicide will ask himself whether his action can be consistent with the idea of humanity as an end in itself. The first duty of man to himself as an animal being is therefore the preservation of himself in his animal nature. The opposite of such self-preservation is suicide (autochiria; suicidium) which is the deliberate or intentional total destruction of one’s animal nature. Thus suicide involves a transgression of one’s duty to other men by forsaking the station entrusted to him in this world without being recalled from it. Kant asserts:
To destroy the subject of morality in his own person is tantamount to obliterating from the world the very existence of morality itself; but morality is, nevertheless, an end in itself. Accordingly, to dispose of oneself as a mere means to some end of one’s own liking is to degrade the humanity in one’s person (homonoumenon), which, after all, was entrusted to man (homophaenomenon) to preserve (427).
Kant ostensibly raises three casuistical questions: first, is the self-murder intended to save one’s country? Second, is martyrdom—the deliberate sacrifice of oneself for the good of mankind— also to be regarded as a heroic deed? And finally, is committing suicide permitted in anticipation of an unjust death sentence from one’s superior? For Kant, it is no suicide to risk one’s life against one’s enemies, and even to sacrifice it, in order to observe one’s duties towards oneself:
The sovereign can call upon his subjects to fight to the death for their country, and those who fall on the field of battle are not suicides, but the victims of fate. Not only is this not suicide; but the opposite, a faint heart and fear of the death which threatens by the necessity of fate, is no true self-preservation; for he who runs away to save his own life, and leaves his comrades in the lurch, is a coward; but he who defends himself and his fellows even unto death is no suicide, but noble and high-minded; for life is not to be highly regarded for its own sake (428).
Drawing a distinction between the suicide and the martyr, Kant states that a man who shortens his life by intemperance is guilty of imprudence and indirectly of his own death; but his guilt is not direct; he did not intend to kill himself; his death was not premeditated. He is not a suicide because what constitutes suicide is the intention to destroy oneself. Although intemperance or excess may shorten life, if we raise it to the level of suicide, we lower suicide to the level of intemperance. Imprudence, which does not imply a desire to cease to live, must, therefore, be distinguished from the intention to murder oneself. Kant insists that serious violations of our duty towards ourselves produce an aversion accompanied either by horror or by disgust, and by it man sinks lower than the beasts. And while the suicide is looked upon as carrion, our sympathy goes forth to the martyr . He however, acknowledges that there are instances of heroic suicide but the rule of morality does not admit of suicide under any condition because it degrades human nature below the level of animal nature (431). For Kant also, it is better to sacrifice one’s life than one’s morality, for to live is not a necessity; but to live honourably while life lasts is a necessity. Thus privileging martyrdom, Kant notes that if a man cannot preserve his life except by dishonouring his humanity, he ought rather to sacrifice it. In a similar reformulation of the suicide-martyr model, St. Augustine sets up a parameter for determining whether an act is suicidal or self-giving. Contending that martyrdom and suicide are radically different, he asserts that the acts and the ends toward which the acts themselves are directed must be considered: “Is the act in doubt ordered to the voluntary death of the individual or not? Is the act a “success” or a “failure” if the individual lives? While the act of suicide itself is ordered to the death of the individual, the act of the martyr itself is not ordered to the death of the individual. That is, the suicidal act is programmed to the death of the individual, perhaps to end suffering or shame, but in the case of the martyr, his action is not ordered in such a way that death becomes the ultimate objective (The City of God 12.1). Though it is true that one is not a martyr unless one has died, most martyrs hope to live, which differs from the objective of the suicide. Zizek typically supports Kant’s thesis that martyrdom may be an ethical act motivated by a supreme disinterestedness that sets aside personal interests in the name of a higher duty. And for him also, “subjective destitution is death, for only when one considers oneself dead to the existing order will one be able to actually act freely with regard to it” (260-64).
A martyr wills to give up his life as that which he conceives as precious. Although he does not seek death directly, death becomes the unavoidable consequence of his action. Thus does he make a statement out of his dying; that his death may hasten the emancipation of his people. The greatness of the martyr‘s action lies in the preciousness of life: “If nothing is meaningful enough to die for, what is the point of living? Death forces out a contrast between “mortality and the imperishability of what you die for…You do not die after all, since this incorruptible Cause is the kernel of your own existence, the form in which you will live forever” (93). He differs from the suicide who engages in self-contradictory actions, proclaiming that even death would be preferable to his wretched form of life. For Eagleton, therefore, death is a solution to his existence as well as a commentary on it. And by affirming his absolute sovereignty over himself, he wipes himself out of existence and the price he pays for his supremacy is non-being (90). Some suicides in most cases attempt to conceal their personal problems and masquerade as holy warriors for which reason the use of certain terms like “sacrifice,” “martyr” and “martyrdom” should be with some caution. Certain modes of revolutionary temper need to be hedged round with a thick mesh of caveats because what is beneficial about them is also what is dangerous about them.
We can easily locate Okigbo’s self-giving impulse within Kant’s ethical act theory which views the martyr as transformed and reborn for the community who through his action will be regenerated (qtd in Eagleton). Unlike the suicide that dies with one eye fixed on absoeverything including the hope of salvation. In T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, for instance, Thomas acknowledges that the apparent paradox of true martyrdom is that, it is by not contemplating the fruits of your action can it prove fruitful. Unlike many who were prepared to die for religion many centuries ago, what Okigbo, with his sense of patriotism, was prepared to die, and actually died for was the nation. According to Bennedict Anderson,
Nationalism is a lingering trace of transcendence in a secular world. Like god, the nation is immortal, indivisible, invisible yet all encompassing, without origin or end, worthy of our dearest love, and the very ground of our being. Like God too, its existence is a matter of collective faith. (in Eagleton 94).
What defines the modern notion of Nation involves “filling out the empty place of the supreme Good” (Zizek 222). All round the world, many cultures celebrate those willing to sacrifice their lives for a cause. And in the history of nations and their conflicts, the martyr is the ultimate source of pride. But as we can see in the life of the suicide, the power to will oneself out of existence is a twin ability both to imitate God and to oust him. It is an experience which shows that “life progresses transgressively, unhinging all systems of meaning and significance, fore-closing the possibility of reasonable political action” (ibid).
Locating Okigbo’s self-giving impulse within Kant’s theoretical framework which Augustine, Zizek and Eagleton validate, we can see that for the most part, Okigbo beyond his poetry of engagement, demonstrated at the warscape the passion of a soldier who has a strong sense of duty and a willingness to sacrifice all for the common good. His confrontation with the armoured tank before which he laid low is psychologically equivalent to the experience of a soldier who jumps on a grenade to absorb a blast and protect the vulnerable. This is neither an attempt to glorify suicidal gestures nor a psychic wish to die but a heroic drive to transcendence. For if the psychic suicide is biologically alive, he is equally dead to the symbolic coordinates of social, political and economic life; he is an individual who is placed in the suicidal outside of the symbolic order (Zizek 99). Okigbo’s heroic drive towards transcendence is a demonstration of a defiance of death and affirmation of the immortality of the human spirit. Despite his death in August 1967 at the age of 35 after eight years of serious poetry writing, he was recognized as the most important poet from Africa (Okafor 46). The quality and resonances of his poetry could only be compared to the works of great symbolist poets of the English literary tradition. Three factors that account for the depth of his idiom include his exposure to varying intellectual disciplines, exposure to his Catholic upbringing which also contributed to the ritual expressionlute freedom from the crises that surround his miserable existence, Okigbo the martyr lets go and liturgical structure of his poetry; and exposure to his indigenous culture and religion, of which he was hereditary priest. All these were to endow his poetry with a haunting ritual and lyrical quality.
If Okigbo is obsessed with the theme of death in his poetry, it is not because he seeks to show through his poetry the desire for death, rather he seeks “the symbolism of African rites of passage as viable models for mourning as well as rousing heroic chants to sublimate that experience” (Diala 94). As Diala further argues, in his conception and adoption of Malarme’s poetic model, “Okigbo finds in African elegiac tradition the exaltation of the human spirit which makes his poetry an integral part of the complex rites of passage that canonize the worthy dead in the afterlife” (94). The themes of these elegies and dirges hover around death, its mystery, cruelty, inevitability, and the fact that the dead live on even in the consciousness of the living. And the apparent defeat of a death is countered by the invocation of the immortal glory of the clan, a heritage to which the deceased contributed and so can lay claim to personal immortality. Thus the tradition offers Okigbo the possibility of occasions for mourning, celebration and exhortation to greatness. If death and bereavement engender the most sober confrontation with life, they equally interrogate the inordinacy of humans’ inward delusions of immortality. And dirges while sublimating the terrors of death and broadening the capacity of the human spirit translate the fear and pain of death into an artistic triumph.
Christopher Okigbo: The Man and His Commitment
Born into a Catholic family of school-headmaster, Chief Ezeonyeligolu James Okigbo and Mrs Anna Onugwualuobi in Ojoto-uno, Anambra state, Okigbo remains important and influential to this date. After graduation from the university of Ibadan, he took and changed jobs in such quick succession that his contemporaries described him as “Prodigal,” a term that agrees with the poet’s own self-categorization. Between 1956 and 1967, Okigbo had worked as Manager of Nigerian Tobacco Company and United African Company; Assistant Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Research and Information; Latin teacher and Sports Coach at Fiditi Grammar School; Librarian at the new University of Nigeria Nsukka; West African Manager and Nigerian Representative of Cambridge University Press; Publisher, with Chinua Achebe, of Citadel Publishing Company; and Major in the Biafran Army (Okafor 46).
It has be to be made clear that the curious suggestion that Okigbo’s death was a mere suicide arises from a complete failure to appreciate the redemptive human dimensions of the Biafran cause for which Okigbo gave his life (Suhr-Sytsma 56). Pius Okigbo, endorsing his younger brother’s self-sacrifice affirms that the greatest demand of the Biafran situation was the ultimate self-giving which his younger brother willingly embraced:
Only someone versed in the most abstruse form of taxidermy could have lived through the Eastern Nigeria of 1966 to 1970 and pretended that the psychopathology and trauma of the society could not touch him and that his life would ever remain the same or that he could just go about writing inanities while the life experience around him betrayed the most desperate craving (324).
Echeruo’s affirmation that apart from his folk-canonisation, Okigbo was given a posthumous award of the Distinguished Service Order of the Republic of Biafra for his gallantry in the war (2) illuminates the public adulation of his sacrifice. According to Echeruo, Okigbo was among the gallant Biafran heroes assassinated in the course of the war who were celebrated as heroes and martyrs.
Significantly though, Obumselu connects Okigbo’s conception of war as the ultimate test of manliness to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He finds Okigbo’s action in the war justified in the novel’s suggestion that war entails defiance of death and abandonment of rules of logic. Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, for instance, reveals to Pierre Bezuhov that the secret of victory in battles involves deemphasizing battle formations, strategy, weaponry, position, and even the number of soldiers, but stresses instead the preparedness of soldiers to die in battle. Pierre declares: “Man can be master of nothing while he is afraid of death. But he who does not fear death is lord of all. If it were not for suffering, man would not know his limitations, would not know himself” (1000).
To be continued
Being paper presented at The Christopher Okigbo Conference by Abba A Abba, PhD, Department of English and Literary Studies, Edwin Clark University, Kiagbodo, Delta State.