The Modernist Phase
We
have already said that the achievement of modem African poetry in the presence
of indigenous traditions of poetry-making has not been linear. Thus the kind of
experimentation under the influence of metropolitan writers like Eliot and
Pound that we observe in the poetry of Okigbo can be compared to the
experimentation already evident in the pioneering work of Senghor. The
elaborate verse line that Senghor had borrowed from people like Claudel had
enabled him to incorporate into his poetry the rhythms of the music of the
Khalam. By the modernist phase, therefore, we are referring to the awareness,
under the impact of early twentieth-century metropolitan practices, that poetry
need not come in the conventional nineteenth-century garb of regular metre and
rhyme.
This
awareness led to the experimentation with oral material, such as the
translation from Ewe dirges which abound in Kofi Awoonor’s poetry in the 1960s.
A similar sense of liberation and experimentation can be seen behind the work
of Okigbo, although he was strongly influenced by the imagist practices of
Pound and Eliot. But even before the remarkable evidence of poems like “Path of
Thunder”, it is clear that his familiarity with the myths, ceremonies and
rituals of his people was transforming his idiom, if not his rhythms. In East
Africa, experimentation took a more deliberate form very early in the work of
someone like Okot p’Bitek, who started by collecting folk tales and songs in
the vernacular.
Following
these examples of songs, he composed his first original poetry in Acholi before
translating them into English. Perhaps the outstanding characteristic of this
phase of modern African poetry is in the poets self- conscious search for
techniques from native traditions as a means of extending and authenticating
their sensibility. The result of this search can be seen with varying degrees
of success in the works of people like Soyinka, Awoonor, Kunene, Okigbo and
Okai.
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