Prodigal's Progress: Jay Wright's Focal Center

Jay Wright concludes his poem "Beginning Again," the last in his first volume titled The Homecoming Singer, with the following lines: And now my ancient rhythm calls me, out of ashes and fraternal death, "Before you, mother Idoto, naked I stand ... a prodigal ... lost in your legend ..." An aching prodigal, who would make miracles to understand the simple given. The lines cited within the above passage were actually taken from the opening lines of the late Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo's sequence "Heavensgate" in his first collected volume, Labyrinths. The first poem of that sequence represents an initiate's act of submission as he begins his ritual cleansing and self-dedication to the guiding spirits of his clan. I quote the entire poem: BEFORE YOU, mother Idoto, naked I stand; before your watery presence, a prodigal leaning on an oilbean, lost in your legend. Under your power wait I on barefoot, watchman for the watchword at Heavensgate; out of the depths my cry: give ear and hearken ... (19) I think that Wright's citation of Okigbo's lines is significant in a number of respects, some of which have to do with the contexts within which he defined his creative agenda. Born in Albuquerque, he grew up there and in San Pedro, California, achieving full maturity in California in the sixties when many African Americans were raising intense questions about who they were and where they fitted within the larger American society. Many of the artists found their answers in the cultural lines of communication that had opened up between African Americans and Africans in the years of the Black Renaissance. Langston Hughes aided the process by editing two anthologies of African writing in the early sixties, thus introducing his fellow Americans to the urgent voices, new and not so new, that were then drawing the attention of the world to the unfamiliar outlooks--and the often fierce sentiments--of peoples gradually shedding the yoke of European colonialism. Christopher Okigbo had published most of his poetry by the mid-sixties. In a style that may have suited the temperament of Jay Wright, he addressed himself in his poems to rather intense questions about the relationship of traditional African culture to ideas and outlooks that colonialism had introduced into his society. Much of his earlier poetry was therefore set within the structure of a ritual experience in which these various influences were brought into a mantic confrontation with one another. At the end of this long, searing mystical experience, in the final movement of the sequence "Distances" (69-76), the poet re-emerges to declare that, although he cannot pretend to have solved the conundrums raised by the clash of images in his personality, he remains beholden to the protective forces of his community from which he would seemed to have strayed.(1) Wright published The Homecoming Singer in 1971, four years after Okigbo's death while fighting in the Nigerian civil war. No doubt he had encountered Okigbo's poetry well before this publication date, and recognized a certain affinity in both men's sentiments and visions. In appropriating Okigbo's lines into his own inaugural volume, the African American poet would seem to have gained some inspiration from his African counterpart as he sought to articulate his own creative mission. Before Singer, Wright had published a short pamphlet of poems titled Death as History. Roughly half the poems in this collection eventually found their way--with minor revisions--into Singer, among them the piece entitled "Destination: Accomplished," the final poem in the former volume. In this poem, we get a sense of the poet's persona reaching a point of determination in which he resolves to get Back to these history books, to my stroking of these beautiful, discarded masks I keep. …