Abstract
Notable critics, including Sunday Anozie and Robert Morsberger, have
branded Christopher Okigbo’s Labyrinths as allusions to the Nigerian
crisis of 1965, and the civil war that followed in1966, as well as Ibo
traditional religion, the historical and personal idiosyncrasies, and as
a literary work from Theocritus and Vergil to Howl. This article veers
from such imputations into a hitherto untrodden ground. It subjects
behaviours of the persona in Labyrinths –from “Heavensgate” to
“Limits” and “Silences”, and from “Distances” to “Path of
Thunder” to clinical and qualitative inquiries and concludes: the
poetics are not only symptomatic of mania, the obscurities are couched
in methods