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Chimalum Nwankwo
is a professor of Literature at the North Carolina A & T State
University, Greensboro, USA, and a notable scholar and poet whose
career of three decades has produced five poetry collections and a long
list of scholarly essays. The last of those collections, a 189-page
magnum opus titled ‘Of the Deepest Shadows and the Prisons of Fire’,
was just freshly published when he visited Nigeria from May to June
2010 and undertook a reading tour of some of the country’s
universities, among other literary engagements. He spoke to NEXT about
literary and educational issues, including his controversial charge of
plagiarism against the celebrated poet, Christopher Okigbo.

Could you share your mission to Nigeria and its highlights?

I came to respond
to the invitation of some schools to read and talk about my new book,
‘Of the Deepest Shadows and the Prisons of Fire’. The principal campus
was Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, where there is an ongoing
discussion for a joint MA degree program in English between them and my
base University, North Carolina A & T State University, Greensboro.
I read at Nassarawa State University, Keffi. I spoke comparatively
about education in Nigeria and the USA on [television]; I also read at
the French Cultural Centre, Abuja. I moved on to read at the University
of Nigeria, Nsukka, and Nnamdi Azikiwe University.

What makes your new poetry collection an improvement on previous ones?

A Professor of
History at Nassarawa State University called the work “the best
marriage ever between Literature and History through poetry.” The work
is really more than an improvement because of the new tangent. I was
looking for a metaphoric podium which many different people can see and
enjoy and appreciate. A different kind of politics is at work in the
poetry, a politics of personal commitment and public meaning.

Having been
active as a poet and scholar for about three decades, what do you
consider the attributes of a good poem, especially from an African
perspective?

A good poem places
you on an emotional precipice from which you can look at the world and
the human condition multi-perspectivally—a subtle initiation into
truths taken for granted. The African poet has so much in stock, and
new or potential invention because of the beauty and diversity capsuled
or ingrained in the numerous African modes of reading and knowing the
world.

A fallout
of your recent visit to Nigeria was a publication in a newspaper in
which you reportedly alleged that the poet Christopher Okigbo was a
plagiarist. Some poets and scholars have contradicted that allegation,
including the eminent Niyi Osundare. What is your reaction to that?

I did not know
that anybody of substance contradicted me except Professor Osundare. He
is a seasoned academic and also another well-respected scholar-poet.
Osundare was nuanced in his reaction. He responded like one familiar
with what we all call the Critical Tradition. As for my suggestion of
plagiarism, kindly look at these two poems, and if you have any
godliness in you, tell the world what you see, truthfully. Here is part
of a poem, “For You,” written in the 1920s by the American poet, Carl
Sandburg: “The peace of great doors be for you./Wait at the knobs, at
the panel oblongs./Wait for the great hinges.//The peace of great
churches be for you./Where the players of loft pipe organs/Practice old
lovely fragments, alone//The peace of great books be for you,/Stains of
pressed clover leaves on pages,/Bleach of the light of years held in
leather.//The peace of great prairies be for you./Listen among
windplayers in cornfields./The wind learning over its oldest music.”

Here is part of
Christopher Okigbo’s “The Passage”: “O Anna at the knobs of the panel
oblong,/Hear us at the crossroads at the great hinges/Where the players
of loft pipe organs/Rehearse old lovely fragments, alone-//Strains of
pressed orange leaves on pages/Bleach of the light of years held in
leather://For we are listening in cornfields/Among the
windplayers,/Listening to the wind leaning over/Its loveliest
fragment….”

How many of
Okigbo’s words in the above poem belong to his creativity? I am going
to let readers call the above what they want, but they must please use
their dictionaries and see the meaning of the word “plagiarism.” While
at it, remember that Wole Soyinka, one of our biggest academic stars
ever, referred to Okigbo’s work at another international forum as
“derivative.” Okigbo’s one-time friend and house mate, the really
unsung late great novelist, Nkem Nwankwo, was less gracious; he
referred to Okigbo’s practice as theft. I have nothing more to say
about this issue, but if you are still curious, wait for my full
article on African Writers and the West in the 2008 Harvard University
International Conference publication, which will be out soon.

You started
off writing and lecturing in Nigeria. How would you compare the
experiences of operating at home and in exile as a writer and lecturer?

As a writer,
working at home, my creative impulse is razor sharp. Abroad, I strain
to harmonise audience and resources. Reception abroad is less
predictable. At home I know what will move or send my audience to
sleep. Lecturing is no different. The African young student is hungry
for knowledge and anxious to learn. Abroad, you are a great teacher
when the student is awarded an A, and you are a demonic jackass if the
grade is unflattering.

Are there ways in which writing from exile has affected the authenticity of your work in terms of content and style?

Never! I am a
thorough Igbo man. I hear women and village maidens singing inside me.
I hear the atilogwu and its lilting mesmerising flute as clearly as I
see the sadness of people in want roaming the streets of “home.”
Luckily, some of the songs from childhood which I remember stay fresh
and vibrant in my inner ear. Quite a few, of course, I deploy in some
of my poems.

In your
preface to Of the Deepest Shadows and the Prisons of Fire’, you object
strongly to your being compared with Okigbo “at this stage” in your
career. Was there a stage in your career at which you would have
embraced such comparison, and why?

My first outing,
Feet of the Limping Dancers, imitated everybody from all over the
place: Africa, Europe, America. Comparing my first work with Okigbo’s
is like comparing imitations with an original. That is crazy. And
crazier, at this point when I have generated what I conceitedly call my
own “aerial zone.” Okigbo and the pioneers were the past. We are the
present.

There are hints of
a strong affinity with African/Black heroes and with the radical
impulse, not to mention a thinly veiled nostalgia, in ‘Of the Deepest
Shadows and the Prisons of Fire’. What is the relationship with the
development of your poetic art and sensibilities?

Academics today
say that one should always speak “truth to power.” That is exactly what
it should be. I am therefore, most times, in support of radicals who
challenge a negative status quo. That is the kind of sensibility which
informs most of the poems in this new book. The poet searches for
beauty always but a beautiful world has to house that beauty.

Some
literary critics or analysts may describe your poetry as Nerudismo on
account of what appears to be its dominance by arcane personal imagery.
How would you respond to such a description?

The more
unfamiliar a world is, the more arcane certain things seem. Neruda’s
“Macchu Picchu” and quite a few other poems of his dig deep into the
past in exciting myth-making exercises. I do virtually the same. The
holy tree, ogilisi, features in a couple of my poems. It is an Igbo
holy tree used to mark graves and boundaries and so forth. Nzu, which
I, for linguistic convenience, refer to as “chalk” in my poems when I
speak of “inviolable chalkways,” is another ritual marker. If you
encounter those expressions and objects without cultural understanding,
they become classified as “arcane.” Such habits call for patience and
diligence in a reader. Soyinka’s most powerful plays, like “The Road”
and “Dance of the Forests,” cannot be understood without his Ogun-ism.
Do readers flee because these plays look arcane to the “outsider”? No.
You bend down and study.

What would
you say is Chimalum Nwankwo’s contribution to Nigerian, African or
world literature, his literary or artistic legacy if you like?

Chimalum Nwankwo
is the poet of the aerial zone, the zone of bright lights and of
biggest possibilities. Those possibilities in art must initiate from
the African world. If I meet the West where ever the possibilities take
me, fine. If not, that is because we live in different worlds, powered
by different realities. I am an African poet, in agreement with almost
all the issues raised by Chinweizu and his friends about decolonising
African Literature. I am more inclined to follow Susan Wenger to the
great Yoruba mysteries around Oshogbo or follow Uche Okeke, Obiora
Udechukwu, and Tayo Adenaike towards the silken trails of Uli. I will
follow Soyinka to the great brotherhood where Ogun and Amadioha rule.
If I am not happy with these Nigerian brethren, I will head to Ghana to
read the great poetic psalms in the drums of Atukwei Okai’s ‘fontomfrom
fontomfrom’. African culture is very rich and the diversity means
endless possibilities. When Ezra Pound was laying the foundation stone
for what we call the Pound Era in European poetry, he did not enjoin
Eliot and his friends to go and start astral travel. Pound declared the
European practice jaded, and screamed a deafening “Make it new!” Our
newness steers us away from the stilted and unwieldy cultural chains of
our colonial masters. The African battle cry, our own make it new, is
there in ‘Toward the Decolonization of African Literature’. And it is
very loud and clear. If I use anything from the West, I do it with the
caution of our immortal Mbonu Ojike, after only carefully “boycotting
all boycottables !!!” I therefore do not care about World Literature as
artistic target and legacy. When Chinua Achebe was writing ‘Things Fall
Apart’, I do not believe he was aiming at a World Literature. See where
we are now.

Poetry used
to be the dominant literary genre. But it is now generally regarded as
an endangered species compared to the other literary genres. What do
you think can be done to improve its fortunes and possibly restore its
waning glory?

Police the gates
of creativity. Do not allow charlatans, loud mouths, and half-educated
English teachers to slip by. If you do, the vicious circle continues,
from bad teachers to bad student writers who produce discouraging bad
poetry. Who wants to listen to a bad poet? Or buy a book of bad poetry?

What is your advice to younger poets, published and unpublished?

Make yourself and
your work available for criticism always. Learn to suspend your ego. If
you are better than one or nine professors, never let anybody hear you
say it. Those professors or their friends may be in a position to
destroy your creative career with one secret paragraph of negative
assessment to somebody. Even if your works have won a hundred prizes,
remember what W. H. Auden wrote in his memorial for W. B. Yeats: “The
words of a dead man/Are modified in the guts of the living.”