Labyrinths

Labyrinths (1971) by Okigbo Christopher derives its name and meanings from the ancient Greek word ‘labyrinthos’ –a massive, complex and deliberately designed structural passage meant to slow down the mind of any potential enemy , Minotaur, the monster in particular, from killing King Minos of Crete at Knossos in 400 BC. A close-ancient-Greek-contextualization tinkered with broad-oracularinterpretation projects Okigbo’s Labyrinths as a confused journey of the split mind. The mind, as Steven Pinker puts it, is like the spacecraft, ‘designed to solve many engineering problems, and thus is packed with high-tech systems each contrived to overcome its own obstacles’ (1997, 4). The journey begins with inner mind initiations to bargain easy access to some focal points, but disastrously ends, at the very points of beginnings, with obscure ratings. The mind, poetry, and obscurity epigraph with which this essay opens ultimately begins with the persona, and ends with the persona. The epigraph owes nothing to the personality of the writer. To further disambiguate the mind from the personality of the poet, poetry is employed here to theorise the mind. Obscurity of the mind, in this sense, highlights possible difficulties arising from psychodynamic indices in interpreting behavioural actions, and by extension identifying and classifying the behaviours of the persona in Labyrinths as communicating the mind to the reader. In this way, evaluating the mind gives vent to behavioural problems in poetry

Quotes

Today-for tomorrow, today becomes yesterday: How many million promises can ever fill a basket..."
- Okigbo, "Hurrah for Thunder
later grew into a ceremony of innocence, something like a mass, an offering to Idoto, the village stream of which I drank, in which I washed, as a child; the celebrant, a personage like Orpheus, is about to begin a journey”
- Okigbo 1971, xi
the drums speak in broken and disjointed tunes reminiscence of invocation: ‘We are tuned for feast-of-seven-souls’
- Okigbo 1971, 45
Obscurity and impenetrability in the mind of the persona are obvious in ‘after we had formed/ then only the forms were formed/ and all the forms/ were formed after our forming
- Okigbo 1971, 57
The entrapped is not only stripped of dignity and identity in the mind, the

meaninglessness of the trap makes the persona suddenly become ‘talkative like the weaverbird’, and in ‘Between sleep and waking’ abruptly brandishes ‘A tiger mask and nude spear….’ ** Okigbo 1971,23

If I don’t learn to shut my mouth I’ll soon go to hell. I Okigbo, town-crier, together with my iron bell’
- Okigbo 1971, 67
Okigbo accompanies us the oracle enkindles us’ and ‘Okigbo accompanies us the rattles enlighten us’
- Okigbo 1971, 69
‘O mother mother Earth, unbind me; let this be my last testament’
- Okigbo 1971, 71
‘foreshadows its going /Before a going and coming that goes on forever…’
- Okigbo 1971,73

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