for instance:
A while back on Next, the poet Chimalum Nwankwo offered evidence that Okigbo had plagiarized 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/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."
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…."
this is an instance in which...i plagiarized ikhide. he did the heavy lifting, and i just copied.
which he did from nwankwo.
ken
p.s.(go read the whole thing if you want the argument, at http://xokigbo.wordpress.com/tag/okigbo/)
pps. i always found sandberg boring; now he comes alive!
On 3/4/13 9:47 AM, Ikhide wrote:
"From a critical point, and having studied Okigbo's work quite closely, I'm generally amused by those who keep talking about Okigbo's "plagiarism." Plagiarismn occurs when you do not acknowledge your sources. What Okigbo does is radical misprision, to sometimes upturn, decontextualize and recontextualize an extant poetic line or imagery, and in refashioning it give a newer more authentic feel to sometimes flat or obscure lines. Okigbo was a bold experimentalist, far ahead of his time in his form of intertextual integration. It was a poetic practice and method based on the notion later noted by postmodernist theorists which Okigbo put into practice by a system of collages, revisisons, reproductions, and re-interpretaions, of the boundedness of language; or as Derrida would put it: "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte." Okigbo, I think, is to modern poetry, what Picasso is to the Arts."
Obi,
Thanks for sharing. These conversations generally devolve into defensiveness, etc. I think that charges of plagiarism re Okigbo are not lightly dismissed. I have a copy of the book and in my view influences are to be distinguished from outright copying. Okigbo does not address what he was trying to do by basically using other folks' works and passing them on as his. The lifting is not a line or two, but pretty extensive. He should have more specifically acknowledged the authors and the works. Today, if a student came before you with works so blatantly lifted, I would hope that you would give the student a zero and another chance to produce something truly original.
My interest is not to diminish the gift that was Okigbo. I am fascinated that many African scholars choose look at that issue (plagiarism charges) with a little more than a sideways glance. That issue is an integral part of Okigbo and addressing it in any work on Okigbo raises the importance and usefulness of that work. This is one reason I love to read obituaries by Western journalists. If you read the obituaries of Dim Ojukwu in the NYT and the UK Guardian, you are blown away by the depth and breadth of the work that went into it. Contrast them with the silly hagiographies from Nigerian newspapers and you shake your head. Much of the work on Okigbo has been adulatory, useful, but not rounded.
Clearly one has to be careful about throwing around charges of plagiarism. There are clearly influences in writers' works. It is perhaps impossible to avoid influences and reasonable people can infer the difference between influences and outright plagiarism. A couple of days ago, I wrote this short piece about my maternal uncle Momodu and I used two terms: "he traveled light", and "How did Uncle Momodu die? He died." Ten words out of a 400 word piece. The first term is from something I read in James Hadley Chase many many many moons ago, and Ola Rotimi groupies will remember the words of the old man Alaka in the play, The Gods are not to Blame. At the time I was writing the piece, the influences did not occur to me. I have been reflecting on that since I wrote that piece. But then, much of my works is influenced by the oral. I try to give credit when I can but it is never enough. My point in this rambling response to you is that we could have a thoughtful sensitive conversation about Okigbo's influences, plagiarism, etc, etc.
Be well, man.
- IkhideStalk my blog at www.xokigbo.comFollow me on Twitter: @ikhideJoin me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide
From: Rex Marinus <rexmarinus@hotmail.com>
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sunday, March 3, 2013 10:16 PM
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Okigbo - Mythmaker & towncrier at Heavensgate
--In his interview with Robert Serumaga at the Transcription Center in London in 1963, Okigbo acknowledged that he took from other poets and integrated these into the texture of his poetry in answer to the question about "Limits." Okigbo absorbed a variety of poetic airs from the classical to the modern; he restates the same fact clearly in the introduction to his collection Labyrinths acknowledging the poets from whom he had taken to integrate into his poetic expression. There is a great echo of Tchicaya U'Tami's Brushfire published by the Mbari books in 1965 in "Path of Thunder," and in fact in rejecting the Langston Hughes Prize in Dakar in 1966 of which Derek Walcott was 2nd runner-up and which was later awarded the African American Poet Robert Hayden, Okigbo wrote, suggesting that it be given to U'Tamsi, "a better poet than I." He was clear about himself and had not the impiety of self-regard as a poet.
From a critical point, and having studied Okigbo's work quite closely, I'm generally amused by those who keep talking about Okigbo's "plagiarism." Plagiarismn occurs when you do not acknowledge your sources. What Okigbo does is radical misprision, to sometimes upturn, decontextualize and recontextualize an extant poetic line or imagery, and in refashioning it give a newer more authentic feel to sometimes flat or obscure lines. Okigbo was a bold experimentalist, far ahead of his time in his form of intertextual integration. It was a poetic practice and method based on the notion later noted by postmodernist theorists which Okigbo put into practice by a system of collages, revisisons, reproductions, and re-interpretaions, of the boundedness of language; or as Derrida would put it: "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte." Okigbo, I think, is to modern poetry, what Picasso is to the Arts. The genius of Okigbo is that you might hear or sense say Carl Sandburg, say in "Silences" and yet be confounded at its purity and novelty in Okigbo. A prolix line of poetry recovered from their langor becomes better, fresher, more categoprical in Okigbo, because Okigbo gives it a new order of movement and a force which only the most powerful poetic imagination is capable. Meanwhile, he does it better than Eliot, who can also be accused of serial poetic "immitation" and "plagiarism" for indeed we see in the body of his modfernist work, lines, words, and echoes that are stolen and borrowed. Poets know, that all poetry has been written. Sometimes, to renew poetry true poets must act as canivores of language and be piratical in their search for it. Okigbo was a master of the intertext. His poetry is a testimony, even in its leaness, of a highly scribal agency of which only few are capable at any moment in history.
Obi Nwakanma
Date: Sun, 3 Mar 2013 12:13:29 -0500
From: harrow@msu.edu
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Okigbo - Mythmaker & towncrier at Heavensgate
i once wrote at great length about beyala's plagiarisms, about ben okri's pain at being plagiarized by her, etc etc. what struck me most was her denial (in the face of overwhelming evidence), her weaseling over the issue, her cheesy exploitation of "african oral literature" as an excuse. it was in striking contrast with ouologuem's wonderful, in your face "Lettre a la france negre" in which he bravely asserted his revolutionary defiance of capitalist copyright ownerships of texts. (the spirit of 1968).
the topic is indeed interesting, fascinating--not the space for pure legalism or tedious moralism, nor for dumb pretentiousness. we use the term "intertext" in lit crit to signify that relationship between an original text and a later version. shakespeare had his famous intertexts, and, in fact, there is no such thing as any work of literature that does not ground itself, in one way or another, in that which preceded it. okigbo used poems that had already appeared in print, and i've read ikhide's essay on this, and applaud him for signalling it. we can place the one poem next to the earlier version of the other, and see how okigbo's delicate sensibility led him to change this word or that. we might have liked it better if he had said something like "in tribute of..." as djibri diop mambety does to "the great old man," durrenmatt, on which he based his masterpiece Hyenas. anyone who has actually read durrenmatt's Visit of the Old Lady will note that the borrowing was significant, not at all loose. the acknowledgment a sign of djibril diop's integrity.
my great amusement over the beyala affair, when she was being sued by ben okri's publisher, was that she won the Grand PRix du Roman, the highest award in france, given by the academie francaise in 1996, the same year that one of the members of the academie that voted her the award was himself also charged with plagiarism!! she plagiarized from many sources, some extremely extensively. again my shock was in discovering that one of her prime sources was from dangarembga herself, Nervous Conditions having been translated into french. maybe she figured anglophones wouldn't notice.
ken
On 3/2/13 1:17 PM, Ikhide wrote:
--"The enduring legacy of Labyrinths can be traced to a number of reasons. The romance of the poet's life and death. Also, the uncontainable and uncontaminable passion of Okigbo lovers. But in the main – and this is the point – because, in th...e words of one of his protégés, "Okigbo wrote damn good poetry." "O mother mother Earth, unbind me; let this be/The ram's hidden wish to the sword the sword's/secret prayer to the scabbard." In other words, we have in Okigbo that vintage poetry that makes "broadcast with/eunuch-horn of seven valves": the poetry that remains evergreen."
- Dr. Hyginus Ekwuazi, poet and writer, lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts, University of Ibadan
I very much enjoyed this essay on the poet Christopher Okigbo, very fascinating ( I can't get enough of Okigbo so ignore me). I do think though that scholars should also endeavor to talk about the plagiarism issues that plagued Okigbo and his works. A few years back, I wrote an essay on the issue, Christopher Okigbo's voice. Rather than diminishing him, such conversations would only add to the rich complexity that is his life.- IkhideStalk my blog at http://www.xokigbo.com/Follow me on Twitter: @ikhideJoin me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide
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