Christopher Okigbo (1932-1967) was one of Africa's foremost poets whose life was cut short by the Biafran civil war. This book represents a definitive re-reading of Okigbo's poetry and a foregrounding of its importance as prophecy and warning to Nigerians (nay, Africans!) and the misrulers of Nigeria against continued national misdirection. Locating the poet squarely with all communalistic traditional African poetics, in which aesthetics and social functionality are coordinate components of art, the author discusses Okigbo as a poet of destiny, whose identification with the people—the "quadrangle" of his geometric characterology—was total. The continuing cleavages and tension between the ethnic and the national have tended to foreclose the very possibility of ethnic-popular solidarity and nation-building in Nigeria. Okigbo's project included a sustained critical introspection, and his indignation, militancy, despair, and ultimate martyrdom do not constitute a pessimistic closure. his final prophecy of repetition represents a warning which, if heeded, as capable of breaking the cycle of national doom—the "dance of death"—and transforming the dream of nation into reality.

     "The most comprehensive weaving together yet of Okigbo's private life and politics, and the turbulent character of the Nigerian nation...the integration of history,
      biography, and criticism is masterful...[The Dance of Death] promises to intrigue and educate the critic, the historian, the political scientist, and the psychologist
      of culture about the value of poetry, and the poet..."

                              —Prof. Chimalum Nwankwo, North Carolina State University

Dubem Okafor teaches post-colonial literatures in the English Department at Kutztown University, Pennsylvania. In addition to his poems and essays  in magazines and journals, he has also edited Jungle Muse, a selection of poems by contemporary Nigerians and Meditations on African Literature, a collection of essays and has co-edited, with Chinua Achebe, Don't Let Him Die; An Anthology of Memorial poems for Christopher Okigbo.

CATEGORIES:

Literary Criticism, Biography, Politics, Africa