MEDITATION ON OKIGBO'S LABYRINTHS

This film is inspired by my explorations of ideas in endogenous African systems of thought under the inspiration of the poetic cycle Labyrinths by the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo. I was struck by his bold correlation of Idoto, the water goddess of his village, Ojoto, in South Eastern Nigeria with what he described as the “water spirit that nurtures all creation”. He thereby correlates a conception of a local deity with the ideas of a universal sustaining ground of existence. This suggests possibilities of developing endogenous African systems of thought in terms of a transposition of their spatial and ideational boundaries into broader categories as emerged in the transition between the Vedas and the Upanishads in the development of Hinduism and Indian philosophy.

It is a short, contemplative film that develops its effects through associations between images, written texts and music. The texts used include selections from Okigbo’s poetry. These are juxtaposed with evocative expressions of the philosophical and artistic significance of underwater life and its photography by the great underwater photographer David Doubilet, texts of the Upanishads as well as from the poetry of the Christian mystic St John of the Cross, which deploy the imagery of water in terms of the mystical expression to which Okigbo gives Idoto in describing Her in cosmic terms.

The visual images are represented by the haunting landscapes of the Russian artist Nicholas Roerich, the poetic underwater photography of David Doubilet and other images evocative of the conjunction of mystery and concreteness that Okigbo’s poetry suggests. The film employs a musical score that derives from Christian Gregorian chant and Sanskrit chants from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita in order to evoke the numinous resonances of Okigbo’s work. The lyrics of the music will not have lexical intelligibility for many people, but as Rudolf Otto argues in The Idea of the Holy, the essence of the numinous is not in discursive intelligibility but in the stimulation of a sensitivity to that which can not be fully cognized by conventional cognitive modes.

This film is an expression of my interests in the contemporary significance of endogenous African systems of thought. This interest belongs to a larger project where I investigate relationships between phenomena and the ground of being primarily through relationships between religion, philosophy, the visual and the verbal arts.