WOLE SOYINKA'S GIFT TO THE WORLD
Author:
Date: Sunday, October 26, 1986
Page: B3
Section: FOCUS
When Wole Soyinka, the 52-year-old Nigerian writer who was recently awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature, was jailed and later exiled for his
involvement with Biafran secessionists in the 1960s, the result was a powerful
nonfiction book, "The Man Died." His 20 books in print include poetry, plays,
his memoir, "Ake: The Years of Childhood," and several novels. The Nobel
announcement characterized him thus: "He has his roots in the Yoruba people's
myths, rites and cultural patterns, which in their turn have historical links
to the Mediterranean region. Through his education in his native land and in
Europe he has also acquired deep familiarity with Western culture. His
collection of essays, 'Myth, Literature and the African World' make for
clarifying and enriching reading."
Some excerpts from his works:
``The sprawling, undulating terrain is all of Ake. More than mere loyalty
to the parsonage gave birth to a puzzle, and a resentment, that God should
choose to look down on his own pious station, the parsonage compound, from the
profane heights of Itoko. . . .
On a misty day, the steep rise towards Itoko would join the sky. If God did
not actually live there, there was little doubt that he descended first on its
crest, then took his one gigantic stride over those babbling markets -- which
dared to sell on Sundays -- into St. Peter's Church, afterwards visiting the
parsonage for tea with the Canon. There was the small consolation that, in
spite of the temptation to arrive on horseback, he never stopped first at the
Chief's, who was known to be a pagan; certainly the Chief was never seen at a
church service except at the anniversaries of the Alake's coronation. Instead
God strode straight into St. Peter's for morning service, paused briefly at
the afternoon service, but reserved his most formal, exotic presence for the
evening service, which, in his honour, was always held in the English tongue.
. . ."
From "Ake: The Years of Childhood," by Wole Soyinka, Random House (C) 1981.
"I made a strange discovery this morning. I am pregnant.
For a long time I looked down on the evidence, wondering how it came to be.
For there it was, firmly rounded and taut, an egg of a protuberance that had
no business at all on my waist-line.
Considering my sex, it should not happen to me at all. Of course, stranger
things have been known to happen. Sex change could creep up slowly on a man,
unnoticed in such an asexual atmosphere. . . .
Could it be kwashi-okor?
No. The pictures of kwashi-okor I have seen are huge calabashes which
commence from the region of the lower chest, balloon evenly outwards then -- a
sharp ingress towards the scrotum. My pregnancy begins just below the navel,
it is hard as stone, small and compact. . . It is contradictory because the
rest of my body is skin and bone -- this is the fifth week of the new cycle of
fasting. . . .
I resolve to take a walk and ponder the strange phenomenon of my body. The
act of getting up solved it at once. I caught myself automatically expanding
my belly to fill the huge gap in my trousers. The longer I fasted, the wider
the gap of course and the harder my lower belly strained to fill it. I seem to
have built up over the months what must be in proportion to the body the
largest abdominal set of muscles anywhere in the world. . . here under the
navel was bunched a wad of rich, superabundant muscles, ready to step into any
Mr. Universe contest of the abdomen."
From "The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka," by Wole Soyinka, Harper
& Row (C)1972.
". . .on the second last visit to the hospital it rained. The deluge was a
strange unreal awakening. I had forgotten wind and flood as denizens of open
spaces. This was clean spring water, engergized in endless cosmos, not mere
cold venom from an iron-ringed hole in the sky. Until now I had locked out all
intrusion of this new extended space into the mind, branding it alien and
dangerous, inimical to the future that lay after the brief excursion into a
simulated liberty. . . .
Until the rains crashed through the barrier of insulation. An exhilarating
storm, it penetrated all defences physical and mental, crushed the capsule to
release the wild sweet scent of liberty. I gave into it, turning to the
strength of a thousand combative resolves that rushed out one after the other.
. . It had to do with liberty but not with the gaining of it. It was a
passionate affirmation of the free spirit, a knowledge that because of this
love, my adversaries had lost the conflict. That it did not matter in the end
for how long they manoeuvred to keep my body behind walls, they would not,
ultimately, escape the fate of the defeated. At the hands of all who are
allied and committed to the unfettered principles of life."
From "The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka," by Wole Soyinka, Harper
& Row 1972.
"There were a few who escaped the first whirlpool of blood. They were
sucked gratefully into the next, a quiet limbo of the mind where nothing
happened and time stood still. The youth who walked as if eternally trapped in
the tunnel spikes. . . anything was welcome with that weight of fear behind.
They impaled themselves on the broken-glass tops of the walls and battered the
metal-studded gates. A mother took her child by the legs and swung it over the
walls. It fell short, was hooked in the fanged tunnel. It lacked the sense to
lay still. Last vision of the mother before the mob got her. . . the soft
flesh of the child and the metal barbs sinking deeper."
From "Season of Anomy," by Wole Soyinka, The Third Press, Joseph Okpaku
Publishing Company, Inc., 1974.
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