SOURCE: "Christopher Okigbo," in Transition, Vol. 5, No. 22, 1965, pp. 18-20.

Theroux is an expatriate American novelist, critic, and travel writer who has extensive knowledge of Africa and has set several of his works in Kenya and Malawi. In the following essay, he analyzes the theme of movement in Okigbo's poetry.

Ordeal. Ending on the edge of new agonies. Beginning again. And the poet wrapped only in nakedness goes on, deliberately, mostly conscious because he is half-carried by the nightmare winds, half-carries himself with his own home-made, wild, tangled-wood tales.

'Logistics,' says Okigbo in the 'Initiation' section of Heavensgate, 'which is what poetry is.' The art of movement, says the dictionary. And here is the key—Okigbo's art is in moving, movement, being moved, a lived-through victimisation full of symbol and logic and accident and the poet's own plots. It is pure motion because he does not presume...