Collected Poems

The Igbo people around my hometown, Ogidi, had an annual observance called Oso Nwanadi. On the night preceding it, all able-bodied men in the village took flight and went into hiding in neighboring villages in order to escape the ire of Nwanadi or dead kindred killed in war.

Although the Igbo people admire courage and valor they do not glamorize death, least of all death in battle. They have no Valhalla concept; the dead hero bears the living a grudge. Life is the “natural” state; death is tolerable only when it leads again to life—to reincarnation. Two sayings of the Igbo will illustrate their attitude toward death:

A person who cries because he is sick, what will they do who are dead?

Before a dead man is reincarnated an emaciated man will recover his flesh.

A Wake for Okigbo

This poem is an elaboration of a traditional Igbo dirge.

In some parts of Igbo land the death of a young person was first publicized by members of his or her age grade chanting through the village in a make-believe search for their missing comrade, who they insisted was only playing hide-and-seek with them.

The refrain of their chant, nzomalizo, is made up of zo, which means hide, and mali, which is a playful sound. The repeat of zo and the linking mali complete the effect of hiding in play. Ugboko is the personification of the tropical forest, while Iyi personifies the stream. Ogbonuke is the embodiment of ill will and catastrophe.

Love Song (for Anna)

LINE 8: Leaves of cocoyam come in handy for wrapping small and delicate things. For instance, before storage, kola nuts are wrapped in cocoyam leaves to preserve them from desiccation. However, cocoyam leaves are not for rough handling as Vulture learned to his cost when he received from the hands of an appeased Sky a bundle of rain wrapped in them to take home to drought-stricken Earth.

Beware, Soul Brother

LINE 10: abia drums beaten at the funeral of an Igbo titled man. The dance itself is also called abia and is danced by the dead man's peers while he lies in state and finally by two men bearing his coffin before it is taken for burial; so he goes to his ancestors by a final rite de passage in solemn paces of dance.

Misunderstanding

The Igbo people have a firm belief in the duality of things. Nothing is by itself, nothing is absolute. “I am the way, the Truth, and the Life” would be meaningless in Igbo theology. They say that a man may be right by Udo and yet be killed by Ogwugwu; in other words, he may worship one god to perfection and yet fall foul of another.

Igbo proverbs bring out this duality of existence very well. Take any proverb that puts forward a point of view or a “truth” and you can always find another that contradicts it or at least puts a limitation on the absoluteness of its validity.

Lazarus

LINE 12: Ogbaku: Many years ago a strange and terrible thing happened in the small village of Ogbaku. A lawyer driving on the highway that passes by that village ran over a man. The villagers, thinking the man had been killed, set upon the lawyer and clubbed him to death. Then to their horror, their man began to stir. So, the story went, they set upon him too and finished him off, saying, “You can't come back having made us do that.”

Those Gods Are Children

The attitude of Igbo people to their gods is sometimes ambivalent. This arises from a worldview that sees the land of the spirits as a territorial extension of the human domain. Each sphere has its functions as well as its privileges in relation to the other. Thus a man is not entirely without authority in dealing with the spirit world nor entirely at its mercy. The deified spirits of his ancestors look after his welfare; in return he regularly offers them sustenance in the form of sacrifice. In such a reciprocal relationship one is encouraged (within reason) to try to get the better of the bargain.

Lament of the Sacred Python

LINE 10: acknowledged my face in broken dirges: One of the songs that accompany the dead to the burial place at nightfall has these lines:

Look a python! Look a python!

Python lies across the way!

LINE 24: creation's day of gifts: We all choose our gifts, our character, our fate from the Creator just before we make our journey into the world. The sacred python did not choose (like some other snakes) the terror of the fang and venom, and yet it received a presence more overpowering than theirs.

Their Idiot Song

The Christian claim of victory over death, is to the unconverted villager, one of the really puzzling things about the faith. Are these Christians just naive or plain hypocritical?

He Loves Me; He Loves Me Not

Lines provoked by the news that a street in the Nigerian city of Port Harcourt had been named after Britain's prime minister Harold Wilson.

Dereliction

This poem is in three short movements. The first is the inquirer (onye ajuju); the second, the mediating diviner (dibia), who frames the inquiry in general terms; and the third is the Oracle.