THE ACHIEVEMENT OF WOLE SOYINKA

 

Smt. C. VIJAYASREE

Department of English, Osmania University

 

            The award of Nobel Prize in Literature for 1986 to the African writer Wale Soyinka did not come as a surprise in the literary circles but was received with a nod of approval as it was a rare recognition meted out to the thoroughly deserved. Soyinka’s literary genius manifested itself in a variety of forms: drama, poetry, novel, autobiography, criticism and essay. To every form he tried his hand at, Soyinka made significant contribution.

 

            Soyinka was born at Abeoukuta, Western Nigeria, in 1934. His mother-tongue is Yoruba and young Soyinka was thoroughly engrossed in Yoruba tradition. He attended Abeokuta Grammar School; Government College, Ibadan, and University College, Ibadan. He graduated from the University of Leeds and worked as a Play Reader at Royal Court Theatre, London for some time. Soyinka’s dramatic genius must have received an impetus and a sense of direction here. He was only twenty-three when his plays were first staged and it did not take long for him to grow in stature to become an important writer on the world’s literary scene.

 

            The literary career of Soyinka has indeed been meteoric. He is the most prolific and versatile writer from the contemporary Africa. A mere list of his works would run to several pages. Promi­nent among his dramatic works are The Swamp Dwellers, The Lion and the Jewel, The Strong Breed (1963); A Dance of the Forests (1964) The Trials of Brother Jero (1964) The Road (1965), Kongi’s Harvest (1965), Madmen and Specialists (1971) Death and the King’s Horse Men (1975). Soyinka worked on his poems too simultaneously. His first collection Idanre and Other poems appeared in 1967 and this was followed by another volume of poems A Shuttle in the Crypt in 1972. The two novels of Soyinka to date are The Interpreters (1965) and The Season of Anomy (1973). While Soyinka’s prison experiences were recorded in The Man Died (1971) his autobiography A’ke was published in 1983. Besides, he contributed a number of articles on a variety of subjects ranging from Yoruba Gods to the Nigerian Civil War.

 

            Soyinka’s works are firmly set in the contemporary African society. But there are backward glances into past and visions of future as well. What emerges, consequently, is a portrayal of African experience in its totality. Soyinka’s works make a successful attempt to apprehend the African world in its full complexity – its tradi­tional beliefs and structures, conventions and superstitions, con­temporary progression as well as distortion. However, Africanness to Soyinka is neither a nostalgic recapitulation of the pre-colonial past of Africa nor a mere splashing of local colour but a matter of ontological relationship. The achievement of Soyinka lies in his ability to make the world view life through African eyes. In his works, he tries to define African ontology through an interpretation of Yoruba myths and rituals. Discussing the potentiality of mythology Joseph Campbell aptly remarked: “It has always been the prime function of mythology to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forwards...”.1 It is this potentiality that Soyinka profitably exploits in his works. What he tries to do, as a writer, in his own words is “to transmit through analysis of myths and ritual the self-apprehension of the African world”.2 It is this mythopoetic imagination of Soyinka that lends peculiar charm, complexity, richness and strength to his works.

 

            Soyinka’s world view emerges clearly from the vast corpus of his writings. It is essentially home based – that which he has inherited from his Yoruba origin. His vision of human existence is basically a tragic one: To him, human life is an act of sacrifice and an individual is engaged in an incessant struggle to be absorbed into the Cosmic Oneness but there exists a vast abyss in which the human endeavours for transition often ends.

 

            This vision of Soyinka is nowhere better presented than in his plays. His plays explore the adventures of man’s metaphysical self. They reflect through symbolic means man’s struggle to com­prehend reality. Soyinka enriches the texture of his drama through an effective use of a variety of art forms like verse, dance, song, masque and pantomime. Dance, to him is the visible expression of interplay between one plane of existence and another, music is the language of tragic reality, and masque and mime recreate the world of spirits. All these together are expected to create an atmosphere, a situation of heightened emotions where the spectators in rapt atten­tion can share the intense spiritual experience which the writer wishes to communicate.

 

            Soyinka resurrects the mythic patterns, persons, and values and shows their relevance to the contemporary Africa. For instance, in a number of his plays, Soyinka asserts the significance of the Ogun to the contemporary psyche. Ogun, is the questing God of War and creativity in Yoruba mythology. In Soyinka’s description he is “the first creation”.3 Just as Ogun crossed the abyss seeking union with the human, each individual should try to enter into a mystical communion with the comic oneness. This precisely, is the dominant motif of much of Soyinka’s dramatic writing.

 

            Soyinka’s plays gain much of their strength from their mythical structure but they always show a concern with the contemporary and a preoccupation with the future. As Soyinka himself holds strongly, an African writer should not be a mere chronicler as “part of his essential purpose is to write with a very definite vision ... he must at least begin by exposing the future in a clear and truthful exposition of the present”.4 Soyinka always keeps this social purpose too in mind when he writes. Myth and message, hence, evolve along­side in Soyinka’s works.

 

            One of the essential thematic strands in Soyinka’s dramatic matrix is a criticism of the contemporary political scene. He exposes the deceit, suffering, violence and hypocrisy that characterize the contemporary human situation not to denigrate mankind but to warn them duly. For instance, Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests a play presented on the euphoric occasion of Nigerian Independence is a bold satire showing the possible pitfalls lying in the path of infant independent, Nigerial satire becomes his powerful weapon in countering the evils of society. Thus, in Soyinka’s plays a symbolic presentation of man’s metaphysical quest is paralleled by a satiric treatment of the contemporary socio-political situation. Metaphysics and politics, myth and message, the eternal and the contemporary, the universal and the local do not eliminate each other but co­exist. This is what makes Soyinka the vital voice of our times.

 

            Soyinka’s poetry and fiction too evolve from a similar all encompassing vision. His early poems are satiric expositions on a variety of social problems like colour complex, racial prejudice, injustice and political upheavals. Some of these poems like The Telephone Conversation are refreshingly original without any traces of axe-grinding. However, his major poetic works like Idanre revolve round his favourite themes like quest and transition. Here again, Soyinka draws considerably from Yoruba cosmology and projects an essentially tragic vision which may be summed up in his own words as follows: “The ripest fruit was the Saddest”. 5

 

            Soyinka’s two novels The Interpreters and The Season of Anomy are oblique attacks on the political situation of the post-independence Africa. He has done away with uni-linear plots and lone heroes. A number of equally important characters are shown to be engaged in independent courses of action whose lines only intersect occa­sionally. As a result the novels become extremely complex but astonishingly original.

 

            Soyinka’s work, in brief, is a major breakthrough in modern literature. Bernth Lindfers seems to have foreseen the distinction Soyinka had in store when he complimented Soyinka twelve years ago as follows: “His imagination, vision and craft distinguish him as a creative artist of the very first rank, as a writer of the world stature”. 6

 

            Soyinka’s Nobel Prize has an added significance. He is the first writer from the New Literatures in English to have been awarded this distinction for creative work in English. It is the world’s acceptance of the fact that these new literatures have come to stay and that they merit attention.

 

NOTES

 

1 Joseph Campbell: A Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Princeton University Press, 1973) p. 63.

2 Wole Soyinka: Myth Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) P. ix.

3 Wole Soyinka: Myth P. 145.

4 Wole Soyinka, “The Writer in a Modern African State” in The Writer in Modern Africa. Ed. Per Wastberg (Uppsala: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies 1968) P. 120.

5 Wole Soyinka, “Abika” in Idanre and other poems (London: Methuen, 1967) P. 30.

6 Bernth Lindfers. “The Early Writings of Wole Soyinka” in Critical perspectives on Nigerian Literature (U.S.: Three Continents Press, 1975) P. 190.

 

 

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