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

"In my readings of important works on Okigbo by Dubem Okafor and
Sunday Anozie, I was taken by how they deified him but ignored a
conversation of this important side of him. I think that was a
mistake".
-------Ikhide.

It was not a mistake, the problem is that too many scholars have
written too many eulogies of Okigbo, so, anything on the contrary will
erode their credibility, hence the conspiracy of silence on his
plagiarism and the sophistry usually put up in the form of
defence(justifications) of this action of his whenever the matter
manages to raise its head. Anyway, Okigbo would continue to be a
reference point in Nigerian poetry, above better Poets like Gabriel
Okara, at least the University Of Ibadan and Government College
Umuahia Fraternities will continue to ensure that.

CAO.


On 5 Mar, 15:20, Ikhide <xoki...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Kenn, Pius,
>
> I have clearly said that what Christopher Okigbo did is plagiarism and it is wrong. I don't go as far as you Kenn, in seeming to excuse the behavior. I have also consistently said I am interested in the context for what Okigbo did, partly because it is so pervasive in his work. I also acknowledged that it is complicated. I have to say these days I have trouble quoting Okigbo because I am not sure if I am quoting someone else through him. But in instances like this I ask questions that provide clarity for me in my judgment. If I was a professor and I was presented with this evidence, would I call it plagiarism? Absolutely, I would.  So, I have his book, and in the lengthy introduction, he not once mentions Carl Sandberg or Miguel Hernandez as influences, not once. But he offers badly copied versions of their poems. It is hard to justify calling it less than plagiarism. In my readings of important works on Okigbo by Dubem Okafor and Sunday Anozie, I was
>  taken by how they deified him but ignored a conversation of this important side of him. I think that was a mistake. I do have a very good essay, Plagiarism and Authentic Creativity in West Africa by Donatus I. Nwoga and he courageouslybut politely provides compelling evidence for what we are talking about. I highly recommend it.
>
>
> - Ikhide
>
> Stalk my blog atwww.xokigbo.com
> Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
> Join me on Facebook:www.facebook.com/ikhide
>
> ________________________________
>  From: kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu>
> To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
> Sent: Monday, March 4, 2013 10:34 PM
> Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Okigbo - Mythmaker & towncrier at Heavensgate
>
> 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,
>
>                   athttp://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 radicalmisprision, 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
>
> ...
>
> read more »

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