Human suffering and tragic contradictions in Amechi Akwanya’s Pilgrim Foot

Introduction

With research interests in literature and the phenomenology of language, which he has taught at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka for over three decades, Amechi Akwanya has undoubtedly produced many important texts that problematize and extend the frontiers of literature, religion, and philosophy. In creative writing, his novel Orimili (1991), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Best First Book Award (1992), and the three poetry collections, Pilgrim Foot: A Collection of Poems (2005), Moments: A Collection of Poems (2007), and Visitant on Tiptoe and Other Poems (2012) are especially notable. Combining his training as a professor of English and literary studies and as a Catholic priest, Akwanya endows much of his poetry with religious and philosophical imaginings that explore the history of being and existence. It is with Pilgrim Foot: A Collection of Poems, his first poetry collection, that we are concerned in this article.

From the classical conception of tragedy to modern interpretations, tragedy has gathered an ever-changing status which makes any definition fluid and indeterminate. As we travel through the complex and dynamic stream of literary discourse, the image of tragedy continues to branch off into many tributaries. However, what remains consistent in all the varying reconceptualizations of the subgenre are its finger-pointing timbre and enunciation of inexorable human suffering. The question of suffering has been the concern of many thinkers throughout recorded history, and to a large extent, Akwanya’s poetry is a contribution to the quest to understand the tragic contradiction that is embedded in human experience. His multi-modal consciousness as priest, poet, and scholar–critic, is easily identifiable in the wide canvas of his artistic imagination in Pilgrim Foot. Primarily, the selected inaugural sequence, “Behind the Blue Sky” questions belief in the existence of an all-loving creator in the midst of existentially threatened humanity. While examining the various directions at which fingers are pointed in the poems, my essay attempts to define human suffering as an experience that is reprehensible to the human spirit, an experience that problematizes and complicates the question of a loving creator who oversees human affairs. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” (1850), for instance, famously articulates the poet’s astonishment over how an unerringly good creator could have authored a world full of horrific violence, suffering, and waste: “Man […] trusted God was love indeed | And love Creation’s final law — | Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw | With ravine, shrek’d against his creed”. The disturbing imagining here is that Nature’s self-contradiction evident in human suffering reinforces the feeling that human trust in divine love appears already betrayed.

To be sure, many instances of human suffering that are connected to the tragic kinesis in Akwanya’s Pilgrim Foot have not yet received adequate critical attention. And although Florence Orabueze offers a reading which locates the central theme in the first poem of the inaugurating sequence titled “To the Master of the Universe” in man’s dispossession by his creator, she contends merely that Akwanya deploys the symbolism of the cross to signify man’s dispossession by forces beyond him (2015: 295). Her analysis does not address the tragic contradiction that is inherent in human experience in the presence of his creator in the poem. Again, Andrew Bula’s (2015) “The poetry of A. N. Akwanya: A formalist evaluation of its technique” merely offers a formalist analysis of Akwanya’s three poetry collections. However, the poet’s conception of the tragic contradiction surrounding the creator’s silence before an anguished humanity which we encounter in all eight poems that make up the “Behind the Blue Sky” sequence is what this article subjects to critical scrutiny. I should note that although all the poems in the collection together point to the scope of Akwanya’s presiding apprehensions and persuasions as to the tragic dimension of human suffering, my analysis is limited to the first sequence of eight poems. Engaging the tragic theoretical strategies in the analysis of human suffering in these selected poems, I seek to unveil the timeless paradox inherent in the creation myth.

Human suffering and tragic contradiction

Tragic contradiction may refer to the sense of ontological conflict embedded in human experience. It is part of the moral ambiguity which has been identified as the very essence of tragedy. The theory of cyclical process which underlies the development of Heraclitus’ philosophy offers a guide in our examination of the tragic contradiction that surrounds human suffering. In his fundamental argument, which hinges on the premise that “all has at all times the opposite in itself” (Nietzsche, 2000: 7), Heraclitus postulates that all things exist through strife, and that the existence of one thing depends upon the cessation of another: “We must know that war is common to all and strife is justice and that all things come into being and pass away through strife” (1943: Fragment 62). He further contends that the wish that strife should pass away can hardly be realized because all things exist only in the midst of strife and under conditions of inward and outward tension. He affirms the world as the game of Zeus, the game of fire with itself: “All things are an exchange for fire and fire for all things even as wares for gold and gold for wares” (1943: Fragment 22). That is, all things exist only with the cessation of other things.

Heraclitean philosophical argument that the conflict between two elements is the ultimate condition of all things influenced other philosophers, including G. W. H. Hegel, Tao Tse Mao, and especially Friedrich Nietzsche. For instance, Hegel appropriated the notion of tragic contradiction and placed it at the heart of his philosophical thoughts. For him, human suffering is to be located in the tragic contradiction that is embedded in human history. Similarly, Mao appropriated the Hegelian dialectics of the logos as a unity of opposites. But whereas Hegel believes that there would emerge a state of affairs in which contradiction would be overcome, Mao insists that contradiction cannot be resolved, and that it is in fact the very “truth” itself; that there would always be a dissident remainder. Mao contends that any notion of a complete and perfect “system” is merely an Apollonian illusion. This way, he sees contradiction as abiding in each particular and amid the universal All, without which not only would nothing exist, but also nothing would continue to exist:

Contradiction is universal and absolute; it is present in the process of development of all things and permeates every process from beginning to end […]. By the former we mean that contradiction exists in and runs through all processes from beginning to end; motion, things, processes, thinking — all are contradictions. To deny contradiction is to deny everything. This is a universal truth for all times and all countries, which admits of no exception. (Mao, 1937: iii)

Thus, in contradistinction to Hegel, Mao regards the notion of a permanent resolution of this contradiction as a mere surrender to the ever-present possibility of death.

Although both Hegel and Mao have sought to reaffirm the presence of tragic contradiction in human experience, it is in Nietzsche that we encounter the closest reaffirmation of the Heraclitean dialectics. Nietzsche’s vision of reality in The Birth of Tragedy indicates that reality is a “flood of suffering and troubles” (2000: 57), which is animated by a strife or ambiguous relationship between two opposite forces that inhere in a reality that has neither origin nor foundational principle. These two opposites Nietzsche names after two mythological deities, Dionysus and Apollo. Acknowledging the union of Dionysian and the Apollonian as the natural forces which give birth to tragedy (2000: 57), Nietzsche contends that the fundamental weakness of what he regards as “Socratism” is the postulation that reality has a rational foundation that is discoverable through reason. While reality must be understood as a painful and absurd flux of passing phenomena, the world should be seen as a fluid entity that cannot be improved through knowledge and intellectual dialectics. And rather than trust in the elusive good, one should seek to understand how to confront the existential pain caused by the endless stream of things that go and come (Nietzsche, 1996: 8). What Nietzsche proposes is the human capacity to face existential contradictions. If Nietzsche seeks to enunciate how tragic art mediates and creates the possibility of living with the truth of an absurd reality while denying refuge in a world of meanings, and a world without suffering, he equally finds in tragic poetry the capacity to show that life at the bottom of things, in spite of the passing of phenomena, remains indestructibly powerful and pleasurable. Hence, for him, tragedy is a more significant cultural force than the church or the state because tragedy builds the capacity to face the truth and live with it in full dignity. It is within this theoretical framework that this article locates its notion of human suffering and tragic contradiction in “Behind the Blue Sky”, a poetic sequence which does not only foreground the omnipresence of tragedy in all human affairs but also recognizes that suffering is inseparable from human existence.

Published in 2005 by New Generation Books, Pilgrim Foot is a poetry collection of six sequences of varying stanza lengths. The inaugurating sequence, “Behind the Blue Sky”, which is the focal point of this article, comprises eight poems. In the first poem, “To the Master of the Universe”, the poet poses a rhetorical question about human suffering to establish the Master of the Universe as an omniscient being whose all-knowing capabilities astound both those who believe in him and those who do not. Apparently, the poet sees him as capable of solving, resolving, or even warding off suffering which he identifies as the central human problem:

You know

what neither the mockers

nor your most optimistic votaries

can perform? (Akwanya, 2015: 2) ¹

First, the poet asks the Master if he is aware of the performance of those who mock him and those who are devoted to him. Both groups know that suffering is an experience the human heart abhors. But why is the Master not bothered about it? With this question, the poet seeks to establish that human opinions are already divided about the Master due to many existential problems in the world. Many have even denounced him on account of this. And in order to underscore the magnitude of these experiences which he captures as “suffering”, he offers this human problem the status of a stand-alone stanza:

Suffering. (2)

The poet enumerates the various shades of disasters that confront man daily while the creator looks on. These are experiences which descend upon their human and ecological targets without much warning, suspending the whole of planet earth in warfare; they are the varying afflictions of epic proportion which often culminate in seemingly indiscriminate death, bringing both the guilty and the innocent to ruin:

Sometimes it’s the flood;

then a draught and famine

or a plague on a test run

after re-writing its softcode

with new lethal capabilities,

and newly upgrading (2)

All these problems are cast as integral in the abiding constraints that reduce human efforts to nothing. He imagines that the terrible experience which humans face suggests that they are being used for experiments to test-run new codes and upgrades and to measure the capacity of those dangerous phenomena like flood, draught, famine, and plague. This way, the Master of the Universe epitomises the scientist who brings dangerous breakthroughs that torment mankind in the name of development and civilization. And it seems then that human wilfulness derives from human attempt to imitate cosmic wickedness. The poet reveals:

[T]hen a desert extending its empire

chases out man and beast

with sand dunes and dust storms;

elsewhere, an earthquake lays waste human effort

kept up over centuries,

or a tsunami swallows up everything

and in one vast surge of sea

restores sway to ancient chaos. (2)

This is primarily a poetic critique of the same question of strife which Heraclitus contends is ever present in the essence of things. Why would a loving Master of the Universe supervise such incomparably destructive actions? Natural disasters have been personified to foreground the connection between cosmic and human actions. We see the cruelty of the desert as it chases out humans and beast from their abodes, and a tsunami as it swallows up everything in sight. Given his capacity to curb the tide of these ancient evils, the Master’s silence about human suffering suggests that he views such experiences as necessary to sustain a cosmic balance. We see the poet’s perceptive treatment of a chaotic world and his appreciation of radical contingency in natural history.

If the intimate relation between reason and the common good implies that all forms of evil in the world spring from ignorance, then every symbol of worldly evil can, at least potentially, be overcome when the world is ordered according to the ideas revealed by reason. But reality appears to be a flux that is not governed by any order, and in which no order can be discerned, so that what human beings confront is a world that undergoes “a perpetual cycle of destruction” (Luchte, 2019: 6), a destruction that is complicated by the actions of human beings who curiously and naturally are themselves a bundle of contradictions. Using a long rhetorical question, the poet juxtaposes natural calamities and human-generated disasters which also operate without any form of logic:

What’s to be said

of the young man seized by an unheard-of

blood disaster

at the very door of his future

after he had schooled with an iron will

to break inherited poverty’s iron law

or the bread-winner cut down

by cancer

or even more briskly by an unlicensed cyclist

forced off the road by a big car

that couldn’t stop

because of a party fifteen minutes away? (2)

Akwanya’s representation of disease reminds us of mankind’s belief that medical technology and inoculation can eradicate epidemiological threat to human bodies. But it is easy to discern that plague, blood disease, and cancer are some ailments that have confronted humanity ceaselessly, and which medical science seems not fully prepared to handle. For the poet, they are experiences beyond human control. Yet, they are not any different from accidents caused by human thoughtlessness such as when “an unlicensed cyclist” is “forced off the road by a big car | that couldn’t stop | because of a party fifteen minutes away?” And why would the Master watch while his creations were destroyed by unsettling human and impersonal forces? The poet recognizes that the Master in his grandeur could forestall even human-induced disasters if he designed humans to exist without strife.

Even the most scientific breakthroughs which humans have created to ward off or postpone disasters are often rendered ineffable, thus exposing them to enormous suffering:

And you know

how often

our greatest achievements

of civilization

and science

striving to get the better of pain

and push back

one year or six months

death’s relentless career

were sent back to the starting-line

like an aborted hundred-metre sprint. (2–3)

Drawing attention to scenes of sublime terror, the poet considers this attack on human achievements as an act of vindictiveness. This is something that we also see in Giacomo Leopardi’s “Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander” (1982). Regarded as the finest Italian poet after Dante, and as a man who was influential in the making of modern culture, Leopardi was a prodigious scholar of classical literature and philosophy whose unprecedented brilliance led to his categorization among four “very strange and truly poetic human beings in this century” (Sigurðsson, 2010: 4). His “Dialogue Between Nature and an Icelander” is a poetic dialogue whose primary focus interrogates the hostility of Nature towards her creatures. The persona, an Icelander who cuts off all distracting connections with society in search of a place filled with peace however finds a hostile environment everywhere he goes, till he finally comes in confrontation with the beautiful but terrifying Mother Nature herself. Frustrated by Nature’s hostility to her creatures, he accuses her: “You are the slaughterer of your own family, your own children, and your own flesh and blood” (1982:120). This disenchantment with Nature’s indifference to human plight connects Leonardi’s poetic dialogue to Akwanya’s poetry. While anticipating a rational world that is well ordered, both personae find instead a world replete with the “fearful, evil, enigmatic, destructive, disastrous” fluctuation of passing phenomena, which have neither order, law, nor form (Nietzsche, 2000: 7). But if the Icelander is assertive in his accusation against Mother Nature, Akwanya’s persona approaches the Master in delusion and terror.

Although “Beyond the Bright Blue Sky” concedes to the Master all moral authority over his creation and what he does with it, the existence of existential chaos in the world puts the myth of a benevolent creator to the test. The poet casts allusion to his Christian ethics:

No doubt

you have excellent reasons,

but doesn’t it all become a lot more difficult

when you explain

and show a model,

like your Christ

with his cross!

Then we can’t hold back

our cry of despair:

who can believe what we have heard,

what we have seen … ? (3)

The poet’s gesture of delusion is shown more clearly in his evocation of this image of caring Christ who took up suffering on the account of sinful mankind. It is significant to note that the poet’s Christian orientation privileges a logical world which unfortunately is denied here. Nietzsche’s idea of Christianity is that it is a “Platonism for the people” which seeks to suppress the Dionysian and to exalt the salvation of the individual soul. Platonism seeks to replace uncertainty with faith and tragedy with comedy; unlike the terrible destination of the tragic, it sets forth a predictably happy ending. This way, the culture of the merely Apollonian is the culture of the redemptive artwork which shields the individual in an illusion, concealing the terrible truth of existence and the ever-constant reality of suffering and death.

In the second poem of the sequence titled “Joy”, the poet seems to recover from his earlier search for an ideal world without troubles. In this mono-stanza poem, he acknowledges the notion of the helplessness of man in the face of the inexorable. Yet, he holds three agencies culpable for human woes: nature, man, and God. All of these, according to the poet, constitute eternal constraints against human endeavours:

With life,

There is much you can’t change;

With your friends,

It is joy to do your best.

With God,

Only look back. (4)

Inferring that human suffering is inevitable given that man can hardly change the fate that is inscribed in his history as a tragic being, the poet also laments that neither human friendship nor total dependence on God can help. E. L. Quarantelli argues that perceptions of human suffering have gone through three crucial historical phases. First, suffering was originally seen as an act of God, thereby holding the supernatural culpable, “with the implication that nothing could be done about their occurrence” (2001: 3). This view was later to be replaced by the new knowledge capital of the Enlightenment secularism which led to the reconceptualization of human suffering as an act of nature. In a more recent phase of the reconceptualization, these sufferings are attributed to the acts of man (2001: 4). Yet, in the Middle Ages, “solar eclipses and comets were seen as catastrophes because they were interpreted as signs of divine anger against human sins, as were earthquakes and volcanic eruptions” (Furedi, 2007: 483). Akwanya tacitly re-appropriates this vision in his poem as the persona holds God, man (friends), and nature (life) accountable for human woes.

In the third poem in the sequence, “Your Eyes are Far Away”, the poet meditates on the tragic notion of eternal return. The title itself is elegiac, with its sense of yearning after a tragic loss. The poem belongs to the tradition where, during the Christmas period, many Christians return home for renewal. This is also a time to relive the memories of traditional practices around fetching water from the spring during which people met and interacted with one another. Now another Christmas is approaching and he is conscious that his mother has died and will not be there to receive him with her warmth and joy:

Next Christmas will pass

like all the rest,

and I shall make the yearly pilgrimage

to the hearth

It’s a miracle to skid ten points

down the stairwell,

and not see it

because your eyes are far away (5)

The symbolic resonance of the annual Christmas visit is also to be found in the poet’s idea of life as a pilgrimage with its pains and botched expectations. Now the pain he bemoans is that of the loss of his mother. He will travel again soon but will not meet his mother, the very reason he is always enthusiastic about travelling home. She is gone forever, and her “eyes are far away”. Despite the horror with which he remembers her loss, he must not think about her death any more, this decision being a way to evade the unbearable crisis of memory:

I shall come to you

though I have folded my hands across my chest,

and won’t let your eyes into mine

as before,

to unlock the shared memories: (5)

He accepts unwillingly too, that death is a price everyone must pay. He must learn to forget the pains and not to expect anything different. “I shall come to you” signals a resolve to endure the strife and contradictions to which all humans are condemned. It is a resolve that also reaffirms Sigmund Freud’s observation that “one of the gratifying and exalting impressions which mankind can offer is when in the face of an elemental crisis, it forgets the discordances of its civilization and all its internal difficulties and animosities, and recalls the great common task of preserving itself against the superior power of nature” (1927: 21). Henceforth, he must forge on despite the overwhelming grief of his mother’s death which we see in the folding of hands across his chest:

From now on,

let us remember nothing:

it’s obvious enough

you are not what you were

with mother gone. (5)

That he sees human beings as susceptible to the order of necessity no doubt connects to the recently emerged narrative of vulnerability which shows that human communities are “vulnerable to the vagaries of the environment” (Westgate and O’Keefe, 1976: 61). Pointing in the concluding section of the poem to the fruitlessness of human pursuits, the poet demonstrates the existential paradox that year in and year out, the pilgrim spends time seeking human fulfilment which ultimately turns out to be a delusion:

Also I know you’ll mistake the vacancy

of a year I’ve spent

chasing the pleasantest word

of a dream

to no avail. (5)

If the elegy is addressed to the persona’s dead mother whom he misses greatly, she also symbolizes the indifferent Nature who should logically intervene in the ordeal of her offspring. But as the title suggests, the addressee’s eyes are far away. This is a sign of indifference, an attitude by which the Master has been identified. His assertion “from now let us remember nothing” is an invitation to perseverance in the midst of human strife rather than ignorance, for ignorance is the fruit of that suppressed dialectic which encourages agony.

In “Dedication”, the next poem in the sequence, the poet draws attention to the contradiction that is inherent in the human will to sacrifice. This is a poetic offering on the 25th anniversary of the poet’s father’s death which took place on 23 June 1993 at Awkuzu, Anambra State. He recalls the passion that drove his father 28 years earlier to offer one of his sons — the poet himself — for enrolment in priestly training at All Hallows Seminary, Onitsha. On that day, the father had been in high spirits to see the realization of an ambition he had nurtured for a long time:

He brought me, twenty-eight years ago

A little boy doubling alongside

His determined Christian strides

On a visit to All Hallows

Seminary, there to impress

Upon my soul a long nursed flare. (6)

However, the poet questions his father’s motives, observing the irony that by being sacrificed as a Catholic priest, he has been denied the opportunity to father a priest himself since Catholic priests were sworn to a life of chastity:

He voiced his wish with Christian zeal

And took his chance with an advantage

I wasn’t to have

If his words convinced: he would give a son of his to serve

In the church; even more pleasing

Was the thought to give up the first. (6)

It takes the poet some considerable moments to realize the irony when the creator’s abode is described in a seminary song as a lovely place. How is this love realized in a world full of suffering? He has seen also the bondage which the seminary represents: a prison in which he has been trapped and the terror of “the circling wall” which life itself is:

“How lovely is your dwelling place,

Lord God of hosts” they roundly chanted.

It was years, of course, before I made out

What the words said; by then I’d seen

How high and close the circling wall. (7)

His father’s early death raises another important question on the essence of things: did his father die fulfilled in the decision he took, given his early death? People aspire to have children to procreate and maintain the family line. So, he wonders if his father considered this before taking the decision to send off his son in sacrifice:

Father had too close a bargain

With life, and went early;

And it’s today he must answer:

Did he find peace, giving away

What a man may lean on, as his,

Certainly, but never could own? (7)

His now deceased father was convinced of the decision he took and did not hesitate to let him know that he had made the right decision and had no regrets whatsoever. To be sure, this life is about giving and taking, winning and losing, which follows the order of necessity that those who keep back their children will still be separated from them some day. No human decision is free of sorrows. His father’s response is seminal:

What a thing to ask, he returned:

Need I have walked with a Muse

To wish it my best friend? (7)

For the poet, then, his father’s early demise points to the reality of tragic forces which always stand between humans and the fulfilment of their desires. His father, however, appears unconcerned that he died so early as it does not even make any worthwhile difference if he died later.

That life metaphorically is a pilgrimage of strides and falls, peace and war, is the theme of the next poem, entitled “Pilgrimage”. As in the earlier poem, “Her Eyes Are Far Away”, readers are offered a poetic meditation on the cyclical homecoming that Christmas ushers in: a moment for the pilgrim to return home and renew himself. But does coming and going, “back and forth | in a time-belt” not prefigure the inevitable recurrent kinesis of life, death, and rebirth? The poet recalls that period in the past when the people rushed to fetch water from the spring, taking an opportunity “to catch the fountain at the ancestors’ feet” as they treaded the bountiful rocks and water’s roots, with smiles and fresh water, after which they returned “home reincarnate”. It was also a period when:

Sometimes clay pots were broken

and fights ensued

when we shoved and pushed

to catch the fountain

at the ancestors’ feet (8)

Life is a mixture of war and peace, of accidents, battles, and various conflicts against which humans struggle. However, much of these struggles and the elements necessitating them undergo constant change. Although science and technology as the infrastructure of modernity may have now reduced the endless trips to the spring with the emergence of pipe-borne water; and although the pilgrimage seems to have ended, with the closure of the “ancient path of return”, the sighs and footpaths remain the symbolic gestures of battles won and lost:

Now

we know what we endured

making those endless trips

and getting bruised

at the spring (8–9)

The cyclical kinesis of human pilgrimage which the poet articulates in “Pilgrimage” continues in the next poem, “Endangered Species”. The repetitive evening flight of wood pigeons from one branch of trees to another as they search through the grass for “wild beans and negligent worms” prefigures that ancient struggle by which human life is defined. This movement is inaugurated by a “sudden flapping of a hundred wings | in a round over the trees | and back again.” Like these wood pigeons, humans are endangered from cradle to grave:

The heart warms

for a whole school of wood pigeons

completing their evening rites

when they soar to the high branches in pairs,

demand from branch to branch

and win promises,

then rejoin the swelling number in the field

hastening over the grass

for wild beans and negligent worms. (10)

The stark reality of life is that it may begin on a happy and beautiful note only as part of a process of death-making. Indeed, the once beautiful wood pigeon will soon be discovered dead:

[T]his, surely, is life —

these jubilant tails

spread out like banners with their uniform trimmings,

a black band of close needlework,

and a border of white lace —

it fully recovers you from the shock

of a shrivelled up one

hanging from a branch by dried out talons:

your mind assures you

it is death by natural causes,

and you soon forgive. (10)

The pigeon’s life is inaugurated in joy and beauty, as nature’s artwork. But this is short-lived as the same beautiful young pigeon soon gets killed and stuck to a tree branch. That is an end which no one can question because “it is death by natural causes”. That pigeon symbolizes man at the beginning and the end of his life, as an endangered being. Human beings are exposed to diseases, pains, and terror that crash down from the sky without the slightest warning. Like the wood pigeons, humans are unquestionably formed to face this experience, and as “endangered species, dying in ones and twos | no longer makes news” (11). It is part of what makes them human.

In “Observations Upon a Fruit Tree”, the poet further draws attention to the contradictions that surround the beautiful things of life and the impossibility of their full realization. He addresses the fruit tree, portrayed as a haughty old man looking down on everyone with derisive laughter. The poet sees ripe fruits dangling freely each time he passes the tree. But these fruits are out of the reach of missiles, no matter who casts the projectile.

Hungry men and bats stare at and fantasize helplessly about the tempting but out of reach fruits:

You dangle your daylight glory

before the longing necks of hungry men

and the ravenous eyes of clean-shaven faces

that daren’t notice a missile;

at night,

you let bat screech and swoop in vain. (120)

Accusing the symbolic tree of dashing people’s hopes and only releasing the fruits when they are rotten, the poet concludes that humans are necessarily alienated from nature’s goods:

Night after night he comes,

so strong is his hope;

and when I pass by

and recall you never let go

till the pulp is good for none but greenbottles,

I concede to you

quite willingly:

nature’s produce, like kingdom,

is mine,

I mean,

ours for the taking by violence. (13)

The poet’s argument here is in line with the credo of contradiction which we encounter in all the poems that form this sequence. Why are the beauties of this world hidden from human reach? That a loving creator ought to make them easily available to his creation is an illusion on the grounds that life is a network of contradictions. For this, the poet insists that nothing is freely given and that freedom and victory come only from struggle.

In the poem that wraps up the sequence titled “A Tangle of Words”, the poet announces his conviction that our names are our “masks” and “shields” as well as the containers of all those values and traditions of “our familial past”. This points to the Igbo conception that a man’s name plays a significant role in his life. We are told that

There is something then in a name

and as the Igbos have always known,

a word’s utterance

when it lays out a life, as it did for Theban Oedipus

is the inspiration of a tragic play. (14)

In Igbo proverbial cosmology, for instance, the vulture claims that “children began to call him vulture only because those that grew up with him have all died out” (Opata, 2019: 11). Thus, he is regarded as cursed. And satisfied with the name because it saves him from the anguish of being killed and eaten, he prays for “elders not to die off so that children will not call him a kite which is a delicacy” (2019: 11). It is the name the vulture bears that determines whether he is to be spared or killed for meat. He is happy with the name of the cursed because it spares his life. The poet here connects this lore to the Oedipal tragedy in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Oedipus is the Theban king whose name (“Oedipus” literally means ”swollen foot”) provides a clue to his identity. At birth, he was taken to the mountains with his feet bound. Thus, his name and the “bound feet” are to play a symbolic role in the tragic matrix that culminates in his defeat. Since the Igbo believe that a man’s name can influence his life, naming seems to be a strategy to ward off an unkind destiny:

If deep despair

Drove a man to call his son

Obierika,

Can he forget

He foists upon this offspring to grow

Two or three more personalities

To keep him company? (14)

However, a man’s happiness does not wholly depend on his name. A man driven by agony may give his son a name that requires that the bearer must anticipate and assume some enormous responsibilities. If he names him “Obierika”, which literally may mean “the human mind is profound” or “the heart is capable of enduring all things”, the individual should anticipate multifarious dimensions of existential strife.

Sadly, like roots, names outlive their bearers. It seems, then, that men may be reduced to nothing, to a mere mass of words despite the great names they bear. For it is the landlord, the Master after all, who decides whether or not a man is to live beyond his name. The poet tells us:

You do not live,

But outside of words

And names. No longer shall I ask

Who am I. (15)

Although there could be a link between a name and the bearer, human beings may live beyond the assemblages of words that constitute the names they bear. If Oedipus represents all men in his tragic image, the search for his authentic self would rob him of his eyes, whether in Thebes or in Igboland because, as his experience reveals, man is naturally a bundle of contradictions.

The poet’s reference to the Igbo name “Obierika” is significant. Different from its variant “Obi-erika” which refers to “large homestead”, its use here is also an allusion to the Igbo myth of man as an enduring being. During the funeral of a hero in many parts of Igboland, two gags-men are often invited to remove the heart of a ram offered for the performance of the burial rites. The ram does not bleat while this torture goes on; it merely hums in a tone of endurance, “mm-mm”, until the heart falls out of its body. It does not die immediately but continues to resist. This resistance foregrounds the Igbo belief in man as a warring and enduring being who resists relentlessly in the face of the misery that is inscribed in the essence of things. The ram, wholly crushed but which fights on, is the Igbo variant of Nietzsche’s “titanically striving individual” (Nietzsche, 2000: 72) who struggles because he must. As such, we see at the concluding segment of the sequence the poet’s invitation to fortitude in the face of those contradictions that surround human existence; an invitation to live through a spiritual growth which ends at that point “where the hero’s ordeal begins” (Diala, 2019: 1), an invitation to affirm the invincibility of the human spirit in the midst of terrible circumstances.

Conclusion

Akwanya’s “Behind the Blue Sky” points to the scope of the poet’s presiding anxieties and convictions about the myth of divine affection. Its central thematic vision of human suffering and tragic contradiction is situated primarily in the Heraclitean notion of the unity of opposites. The varying appropriations of Heraclitean ideation on contradiction offer adequate discursive strategies for apprehending the complex and paradoxical interactions between human suffering and tragic ambiguities in the selected poems. Taking us through a series of experiences which confront mankind, the poet establishes that both life and human suffering are inseparable. He interrogates the logic of ascribing love to the Master of the Universe who watches indifferently as human beings confront terrible experiences, which range from natural disasters to incurable diseases, from acts of human cussedness to failed hopes and aspirations, and from unrewarded self-immolation to fruitless struggles for survival. In fact, humans are humbled daily by the omnipresence of tragedy. The irrationality of the universe shows that life itself is an embodiment of contradictions and to expect anything other than this would lead to frustration. Akwanya’s poetry is a reaffirmation of a world in which opposite things transform reality in their confrontation with each other, a world where historical opposites like creation and destruction relate to each other in a very ambiguous manner. They fight against each other, and yet they are driven towards each other, because, ultimately, they belong to each other. The poet, however, intimates that the human heart ought to be large enough to endure, to bear this burden which he cannot cast away. This idea, which he appropriates from the Igbo myth of man as an enduring being, easily connects to the Nietzschean notion that, rather than seeking the rationale for human suffering, such experiences should be confronted and endured. It is in facing these troubles that human freedom is reaffirmed.