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Wole Soyinka |
Soyinka's speech at the
Nobel Banquet, on December 10, 1986 speaks volume about his versatility in in
the knowledge of cultures and the business of letters.
Soyinka: Your Majesties,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It was inevitable that the Nordic world and the African,
especially that part of it which constitutes the Yoruba world - should meet at
the crossroads of Sweden. That I am the agent of such a symbolic encounter is
due very simply to that my creative Muse is Ogun, the god of creativity and
destruction, of the lyric and metallurgy. This deity anticipated your scientist
Alfred Nobel at the very beginning of time by clearing a path through
primordial chaos, dynamiting his way through the core of earth to open a route
for his fellow deities who sought to be reunited with us, mortals. I covered
that event for my publishers - well, taking a few poetic licences, naturally -
under the title IDANRE. You may have run into that reportage which has been
translated into Swedish under the title, OGUN SKUGGA. If you have not, I
recommend that you proceed to the nearest bookseller for this piece of
pre-history which makes Ogun, very definitively, the progenitor of your great
inventor, Alfred Nobel.
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Wole Soyinka reading his Nobel Prize speech in Sweden, 1986 |
I urge this especially
because, if you happened to take a casual walk through the streets, or peer
into the hotel lobbies of Stockholm, you might get the impression that my
nation, Nigeria, has tried to solve some of its many problems by shifting half
its population surreptitiously to Sweden. I assure you, however, that they have
merely come to satisfy a natural curiosity about the true nationality of this
inventor. For they cannot understand why their Ogun should have transferred
such a potent secret to a Swede rather than to his Yoruba descendants. The
mountains of Sweden are a tempting habitat for this deity, we know, but the
Swedish winter and long midnights are hardly congenial to his temperament. And
while the local acqua-vitae might help to infuse some warmth into his tropical
joints, we do know that he tends to stick to his favourite palm wine.
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Soyinka and wife, Folake |
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Soyinka as a teenager |
Soyinka has depicted his childhood in a little African village. His father was a teacher, his mother a social worker - both Christian. But in the preceding generation there were medicine men and others who believed firmly in spirits, magic, and rites of anything but a Christian kind. We encounter a world in which tree sprites, ghosts, sorcerer and primitive African traditions were living realities. We also come face to face with a more complicated world of myth, which has its roots far back in an African culture handed down by word of mouth. This account of childhood gives a background to Soyinka's literary works - a self-experienced, close connection with a rich and complex African heritage.
Soyinka made an early
appearance as a dramatist. It was natural for him to seek this art form, which
is closely linked with the African material and with African forms of
linguistic and mime creation. His plays make frequent and skilful use of many
elements belonging to stage art and which also have genuine roots in African
culture-dance and rites, masques and pantomime, rhythm and music, declamation,
theatre within the theatre etc. His first dramas are lighter and more playful
than the later ones - pranks, ironical and satirical scenes, pictures of
everyday life with telling and witty dialogue, often with a tragicomical or
grotesque sense of life as keynote. Among these early plays can be mentioned A
Dance of the Forests - a kind of African "Midsummer Night's
Dream", with dryads, ghosts, spirits, and gods or demi-gods. It is about
creativeness and sacrifice, with the god or hero Ogun as one of the performers.
This Ogun is a Prometheus - like figure - the demigod of iron and artistic
skill but also of war and battle, a double figure combining both creation and
destruction in his being. Soyinka has often reverted to him.
Soyinka's dramas are
deeply rooted in an African world and culture. But he is also a widely read,
not to say learned writer and dramatist. He is familiar with western
literature, from the Greek tragedies to Beckett
and Brecht. Also outside the field of drama he is well versed in the great
European literature. A writer like James Joyce, for instance, has left traces
in his novels. Soyinka is an author who writes with great deliberation, and
especially in his novels and poems he can be avant-gardistically sophisticated.
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Soyinka's modest home 'Ijegba', in Abeokuta, Ogun State, Southwest Nigeria. |
During the war years, his time in prison and afterwards, his writing takes on a more tragic character. The psychological, moral and social conflicts appear more and more complex and menacing. The book-keeping of good and evil, of destructive and constructive forces, becomes increasingly ambiguous. His dramas become equivocal - dramas which in the shape of allegory or satire take up moral, social, and political matters for mythical-dramatic creation. The dialogue is sharpened, the characters become more expressive, often exaggerated to the point of caricature, demanding denouement - the dramatic temperature is raised. The vitality is no less than in the first works - on the contrary: the satire, the humour, the elements of grotesquery and comedy, and the mythical fable-making come vividly to life. The way in which Soyinka makes use of the mythical material, the African, and the literary schooling, the European, is very independent. He says he uses the myths as "the aesthetic matrix" for his writing. It is thus not a question of a folkloristic reproduction, a kind of exoticism, but an independent and co-operative work. The myths, traditions, and rites are integrated as nourishment for his writing, not a masquerade costume. He has called his wide reading and literary awareness a "selective eclecticism" - i.e. purposeful and sovereign choice. Among the later dramas special mention can be made of Death and the King's Horseman - a genuinely, dramatically convincing work full of many ideas and meanings, of poetry, satire, surprise, cruelty, and lust. Superficially it is about a conflict between western morals and convention on the one hand, and African culture and tradition on the other. The theme moves around a ritual or cultic human sacrifice. The drama goes so deeply into human and superhuman conditions that it cannot be reduced to something that teaches us about breaches between different civilizations. Soyinka himself prefers to see it as a metaphysical and religious drama of fate. It is about the conditions of the human identity and realization, the mythical pact of life and death, and the possibilities of the unborn.
To Soyinka's non-dramatic
works belong the autobiographically inspired accounts The Man Died, from
his time in prison, and the novel The Interpreters, from intellectual
circles in Nigeria. The novel Season of Anomy is an allegory with the
Orpheus and Eurydice myth as framework, a somewhat complicated,
symbolic-expressionistic story with a background in brutal social and political
conditions of oppression and corruption. Outstanding among the poems are
collections with motifs from his time in prison, some of them written during
his imprisonment as a kind of mental exercise to help the author survive with
dignity and fortitude. The imagery in these poems is compact and rather hard to
penetrate, sometimes, however, with a laconic or ascetic concentration. It
takes some time to get to know them intimately, but they can then yield a
strange emanation that gives evidence of their background and role in a harsh,
difficult period in the poet's life - moving testimony to courage and artistic
strength.
As already mentioned, it
is chiefly the dramas that stand out as Wole Soyinka's most significant
achievement. They are of course made to be acted on the stage, with dance,
music, masques, and mime as essential components. But his plays can also be
read as important and fascinating literary works from a richly endowed writer's
experience and imagination - and with roots in a composite culture with a
wealth of living and artistically inspiring traditions.
Dear Mr. Soyinka, In your
versatile writings you have been able to synthesize a very rich heritage from
your own country, ancient myths and old traditions, with literary legacies and
traditions of European culture. There is a third component, a most important
component in what you have thus achieved - your own genuine and impressive
creativity as an artist, a master of language, and your commitment as a
dramatist and writer of poetry and prose to problems of general and deep
significance for man, modern or ancient. It is my privilege to convey to you
the warm congratulations of the Swedish Academy and to ask you to receive this
year's Nobel Prize for Literature from the hand of His Majesty the King.
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