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The late great
Christopher Okigbo once said of his poems’ similarities to other
people’s works, “It is surprising how many lines of my limits, I am not
sure are mine and yet do not know whose lines they were originally. But
does it matter?” I think it matters. A while back on NEXT, the poet
Chimalum Nwankwo offered evidence that Okigbo had plagiarised some of
his poems. He quoted Carl Sandberg’s poem, ‘For You’, “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/Practise 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.”

He contrasted it
with 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….” Nwankwo has been harshly criticised for his views, but he
has a point.

Many Nigerian
thinkers that I greatly respect and admire point out Okigbo’s youth and
observe that “derivation” of others’ works was common practice at the
time. But then if someone had shown me Sandburg’s lines without
attribution, I would have sworn that it was Okigbo’s voice. Which begs
the question: How much of Okigbo’s voice is borrowed or “derived”?
Derivation is nothing new. The late Ola Rotimi made it very clear that
his play ‘The Gods Are Not To Blame’ was an adaptation of the Greek
tragedy, ‘Oedipus Rex’. Wole Soyinka has been careful to make the
connections between his plays and external influences. So is Okigbo
guilty of plagiarism? Yes, I agree with Nwankwo. There is no
attribution as far as I can tell; if there had been notes explaining
this, it would be reasonable to see this as an experiment.

A poem is a
spiritual journey undertaken by the poet-priest, a deeply personal
journey that finds voice in poetry. If I was to take a renowned
writer’s work and incorporate it into mine, I would be required by
traditional conventions to cite the source. If I was to come up with a
copy of it, using most of the language, without attribution, it is
possible that it would speak to a reader as the original spoke to me.
If the reader was to find out that indeed, this new story used language
and themes virtually lifted (in Okigbo’s case, about 80 percent) from
the original, the reader would feel a certain sense of disappointment.
There would also be questions as to whether indeed the writer undertook
that journey personally. There is a software out there that determines
how much of a student’s work is similar to work out there. Okigbo’s
piece would have been unacceptable today were it to have been submitted
as original work, no ifs, no buts about it. More importantly, it raises
reasonable questions in my mind about how much of the spiritual
journeys in his works were his journeys. I think that is an important
question.

Donatus Nwoga
wrote an excellent paper on the subject, titled ‘Plagiarism and
Authentic Creativity in West Africa’. The paper showcases several other
instances of plagiarism by Okigbo. Take this piece by Miguel Hernandez,
the Spanish author of ‘El amor ascendia entre nosotros’: “Love ascended
between us like the/moon between two palms/that have never
embraced;/Love passed like a moon between/us and ate our solitary
bodies/ And we are two ghosts who seek one another/And meet afar off.”
Here is Okigbo’s “Lament of the Lavender Mist”: “The moon has ascended
between us—/Between two pines/That bow to each other;/Love with the
moon has ascended,/Has fed on our solitary stem;/And we are now
shadows/That cling to each other/But kiss the air only.

Here are lines
from Alberto Quintero Alvarez: “What departs leaves on the shore/Gazing
seawards at the star foreseen;/What arrives announces its
farewell/Before a coming-and going that goes on for ever.” Here is
Okigbo: “An old star departs, leaves us here on the shore/Gazing
heavenward for a new star approaching;/The new star appears,
foreshadows its going/Before a going and coming that goes on forever…”
These pieces and several other instances in Nwoga’s excellent paper
offer evidence of plagiarism; if it is “derivation”, it is actually
poorly done, with little attempt at creativity.

I believe my friends who assert that these forms of imitation were
common practice at the time but it would be impossible to defend this
conduct today. I am in awe of Okigbo and I doubt that the day will come
when someone would convince me that he was anything less than a genius.
But let’s call what he did by the real name: Plagiarism. And it
matters, because it was wrong.