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“There is a belief in
the Yoruba tradition that a child must be rich in names whatever
happens later on, so uncles, grandfathers and great grandfathers all
give names so that the child is very wealthy and my names are...”
Wole Soyinka is solemnly speaking about his roots with a twinkle in
his eyes and reeling off a string of names. “…and one or two others
which I can't remember… in addition to our lineage. In the lineage
song, which has the interpolation of all those names, you feel like
a king.”
A poet, playwright, myth-maker, essayist, memoirist, translator,
Soyinka slips into each role with ease. “The subject generally
dictates the form in which it falls naturally.” On the lives of
ordinary human beings caught between opposing forces of creation and
destruction that form the basis of his writing, Soyinka said, “I
wouldn't think that my responses to the realities of existence and
the entire history of humanity can be based on this statement. I'm
passionate about the whole issue of human liberty, human freedom and
that all human beings are born with a fundamental attribute of the
spirit of choice, to formulate one's principles of existence and
follow them, as long as they are not inimical to the right of
others. I live in a continent, which is my immediate constituency
and is confronted by a robbery of fundamental rights, then I use
literature as my weapon with which I fight them.”
Intriguing mix
Dealing with political activism, human rights, he uses an intriguing
mix of Yoruba mythology and Western imagery and yet is playful,
humorous. “One of the things about religion and deities is that many
of these Gods have a marvellous sense of humour. This entire
creation is a piece of humour; the absurdity of human existence
strikes me as a big joke. The deities without humour are the
dangerous ones. Deities that represent the solemn, the profound, the
grave can sometimes dangerously exaggerate one of these elements,
which makes for a lack of balance, of letting the negative take over
the positive. It is the fundamentalists who lack a sense of humour
and are dangerous. It's important to see the comic side of existence
to be able to recognise the profundity of human life.”
It's been said that if the spirit of African democracy has a voice
and a face, they belong to Soyinka. He laughs; a self-deprecatory
chuckle. “That's flattering but one is never alone in the struggle
from democracy. People are constantly sacrificing themselves on the
battle front. This accolade has been equally earned by the people of
the African continent.”
Between Ake and You Must Set Forth at Dawn, which chronicle his life
and also are strong documents of Nigeria, does the country take over
the author? “If one allowed that, I'd be totally submerged in the
realities of the nation. I won't be able to write and I don't let
one substitute for the other. I have a strong sense of compulsion in
making people remember the passage of a nation's growth. To narrate
this is sometimes frustrating, sometimes amusing but the need is to
put it in perspective. This is what gives me the nerve to write
about myself. It's different in fiction where you can kill off a
character or change it but with a biography there is an enormous
burden of responsibility to truth.”
Soyinka calls his mother a wild Christian. “She was a deeply
religious woman, a disciplinarian and I found her devotion to
Christian religiosity wild. Everything was interpreted through her
Christian spectacles, her work, upbringing of her children, eating
habits, evangelic zeal, relationship with her neighbours… ”
In the face of so much tyranny, hope means, “It's a word I never
use. I am a realist and I'm obliged, as a citizen of sensibilities,
to confront seemingly overwhelming atrocities. So I don't use words
like hope.”
Paradox of tranquility
Being called a private artist and a compulsive activist, the split
embodied in his Yoruba God Ogun, Soyinka can be at peace and at war
at a pinch. “I recognise that Ogun expresses the paradox of
tranquillity and activism as a protagonist who hacked the way
through the jungle of time to reunite the past with primordial
humanity. Then he retreated into the mountains to complete
isolation. I recognised this essence and that is how I survived 21
months of solitary confinement. It was difficult, without human
company, without books. Yet I led a tranquil life and survived
mentally intact. The moment I came out, I was back to action.”
His writing and his themes resonate at various levels with today's
generation, Soyinka feels, “but I tell them when you set out to
write, to act, to express, you aren't attempting to gather a
followership. When it happens, it's secretly joyful because you
suddenly realise that you are a teacher. Some told me they set out
to be a Wole Soyinka. I told them you can't, in the same way that I
can't be Gandhi. You can be inspired but you have to find your own
voice…' |
