Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Okigbo - Mythmaker & towncrier at Heavensgate

"Bro Chidi,

What Baba Castro was saying in the 1960s is that the so-called
royalties to authors are too meager to worth the lives of real human
beings. If given the choice of being constrained by copyrights and the
duplication of books for the training of barefoot doctors, what would
you choose? Human lives all the time. In the case of Baba Soyinka, we
are being reminded that stories belong to the commons and so anyone
who claims the copyright over the tales of the wise tortoise would be
laughed off the village square. When the Japanese copied Harleys and
called them Hondas and when South Koreans plagiarized same and called
them Hundais, there was no suit in court. So what is holding back the
descendants of the scientists that amazed the world with Ojukwu
buckets but without giving a rat's nyass about royalties? Na you sabi.

----Biko"

Biko,
Excuse my motor park mentality again(and bad grammar). The "barefoot
doctors" situation would be an exception not the rule. The tales may
belong to the tortoise, but the weaving of the tales into what can be
called Literature requires talent, it is the talent that must be
rewarded and protected from plagiarism. What is the meaning of
plagiarism by the way? Can your hunda and hundais examples be defined
as plagiarism? I ask because, I no go school too much.

CAO.


On 5 Mar, 04:34, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote:
> pius
> it's a bit complicated for me. i know about beyala because i was writing
> a book about feminism and african women writers. she was one of my key
> figures, and her early fiction was subversive, which worked well with
> fem theory of the time, esp since i was working through french
> feminists. but with Le PEtit prince de Belleville, a certain cutsy
> description of parisian africans crept into the style, and eventually it
> emerged she had plagiarized from howard buten's When I was Five I Killed
> myself. I actually got the buten book in french and english, and tracked
> down all the plagiarisms. it became a big affair, and when i read her
> next novels, i then noticed more, and read about more. her attitude was
> what struck me, and i was trying to figure out how to understand the
> whole issue within a feminist perspective, to work on disrupting
> phallocentric--logocentric readings, including those of plagiarism.
> her denials made the whole issue pertinent in terms of dominant social
> values--in terms of irigaray, primarily, who was looking for a feminist
> way to disrupt phallogocentrism. beyala more and more adhered to those
> values, comforted her reader where previously she was the bad girl.
>
> with okigbo, i only quoted ikhide who wrote a whole piece on it. he put
> the texts side by side, and i can say it is quite fascinating what
> okigbo does with it. i certainly have no trouble with someone taking a
> text and playing with it. it is the dissemblances that disturb, and i
> have no idea whether he tried to get away with stealing, or was open
> about, or even what the culture of publication was at that time. i only
> have ouologuem to hold up as a kind of model.
> comparing this with t.s. eliot or joyce, for example, would be wrong. at
> that time, we, the readers, were expected to recognize all their
> references: they weren't hiding anything, they were doing the modernist
> intertextual thing. but i don't think okigbo was doing that. he was
> playing a kind of magical riff on the poems, and who knows, maybe he
> thought that was within the ethic of publishing in his day. it would
> take someone who was really researching this thing to figure it out, and
> maybe rex already has it sorted out when he stated that okigbo
> acknowledged his sources.
>
> if someone did this with art or music, we would have no trouble. if they
> broke copyright law by selling the albums without getting permission,
> that would be different. again, i have no idea what okigbo, and his
> publisher, had worked out over this, or what the law was at that time
> ken
>
> On 3/4/13 7:19 PM, Pius Adesanmi wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Ken, Deopka Ikhide:
>
> > I'm curious. Why are you calling Beyala's spade a spade and Okigbo's
> > an undefined digging object? Ken, how does what you are condemning in
> > Beyala become "delicate sensibility" in Okigbo? Deux poids, deux
> > mesures? I also wrote extensively about the Beyala case at the time.
> > If you are convinced that they look alike, why are you and Deopka
> > Ikhide dancing kpalongo around your conviction? Because somebody is
> > wielding misapplied postmodernist fioritura all over the place? I
> > haven't placed Okigbo's intertexts side by side his work to make a
> > pronouncement but you and Deopka Ikhide have and I don't understand
> > this hedging if your conclusion is that he pulled a Beyala. If I did
> > and arrived at that conclusion, I would say it as it is.
>
> > Pius
>
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > *From:* kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu>
> > *To:* Ikhide <xoki...@yahoo.com>
> > *Cc:* "usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com"
> > <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
> > *Sent:* Monday, 4 March 2013, 10:09
> > *Subject:* Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Okigbo - Mythmaker &
> > towncrier at Heavensgate
>
> > let's talk examples.
> > 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
> >> <https://www.facebook.com/ikhide/posts/10151786497904616> 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.
>
> >> - Ikhide
> >> Stalk my blog atwww.xokigbo.com<http://www.xokigbo.com/>
> >> Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
> >> Join me on Facebook:www.facebook.com/ikhide
> >> <http://www.facebook.com/ikhide>
>
> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >> *From:* Rex Marinus <rexmari...@hotmail.com>
> >> <mailto:rexmari...@hotmail.com>
> >> *To:* usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
> >> <mailto: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;
>
> ...
>
> read more »

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