Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye
1 August 2004
opinion
Last month, Tuesday, July 13, to be precise, Professor Wole Soyinka, playwright, poet, novelist, essayist and rights activist, the first black African to win the distinguished Swedish national award, the Nobel Prize for Literature, was 70. And for the past few weeks, the nation has risen to celebrate with characteristic ostentation and flourish, this writer of immense talent, accomplishment, and "universal relevance." In fact, the pleasant drum beats are still loud and beckoning, the dancers are still pounding the square with amazing strength, the loud ululations have reached fever pitch, and the sweet notes of the oriki are still permeating the entire ambience with caressing impact. Indeed, the Soyinka Festival, put together by faithful members of the tribe, has thrived and flourished.
I think that Kongi deserves even more than these. In my own widely published oriki last year to mark Soyinka's 69th birthday, I had insisted that nothing short of an elaborate ceremony would befit Soyinka at 70. Although I got a number of virulent attacks because of that essay, I still insist that any genuine celebration of Wole Soyinka must take into account the divergent facets of his art and person that lend him his unique personality and enigmatic status.
When I talked of an elaborate ceremony for Soyinka, at no time did I envisage what the bizarre and immensely talented clown, Mr. Charlie Boy, and like minds did for Kongi at a rowdy ceremony at a Lagos hotel recently, where eighteen girls were "mandated" to each give the distinguished writer a peck on the cheek. I felt highly disgusted on behalf of the "trapped" Nobel laureate who had to sit there, in the very presence of Madam, and allow his nose be assaulted by the conflicting scents that oozed from eighteen obviously sweating girls! But from most of what I have read these past few weeks, those who claim to be very close to the Prof are saying that he is very accommodating, even of the worst of fools.
I do not know how Professor Ali Mazrui will react to such a view, but I have also read that Soyinka is generous to a fault; he, in fact, at considerable personal costs and discomfort, can go out of his way to maintain his acquaintance with people even when they become serious pests, leeching and sponging on him. I think that this is a commendable quality which has before now been largely glossed over by Soyinka critics and fans.
However, I have taken my time to make a note of all those that spoke so glowingly about Soyinka's generosity, especially with supporting testimonies of their personal experiences in that regard, and equally examined their assessment of the man and his work. To my surprise, I saw a clear bandwagon, with predictably identical views about the man. When criticism is inspired by base consideration, literature and scholarship become the ultimate loser.
No doubt, I have thoroughly enjoyed myself savouring with relish the several pieces about Soyinka published in the media in the past few weeks.
I do not know whether it actually worries Soyinka that majority of those who "interpret" his themes, messages and place in African Literature have never bothered to read him. They insult Soyinka by making him appear very predictable, like a flat character. In other words, once you look at Kongi, you should be able to know what he believes in, what his works say, even when you have not read them!
In fact, it is painful, that Soyinka has had to carry this burden for decades, and may continue to carry it, so long as anyone who attempts to hint at even a counterpart approach to Soyinka studies is hurriedly branded and taken to the gallows, unless perhaps, the person is a Femi Osofisan or a Biodun Jeyifo, who derive immunity from the "geographically correct" names they bear.
Like I said last year, anyone wishing to appreciate this dilemma about Soyinka would find help in the illuminating essay by Professor Stanley E. Fish captioned: "What Is Stylistics And Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?" (in the book, Essays in Modern Stylistics, edited by Donald E. Freeman, and published by Soyinka's own publishers in London, Metheun and Co., 1981, pp. 53-78).
The essay is not talking about Soyinka, but in it, Stanley Fish submits that stylisticians in their desperation to give "scientific" and "empirical" interpretations to literary texts as opposed to what they call the "impressionistic" views of literary critics, derive their meanings not as a result of the capacity of the examined texts to yield them but simply as a result of their eagerness, predisposition, and "ability to confer" the meanings.
They therefore arrive at what I have termed "critical imposition" of meanings as opposed to meanings derived purely from close, critical evaluation of texts. This has equally been the main problem of a major slice of Soyinka criticism, as I see it. But a lie remains a lie, no matter the good intentions and prodigious talent of the fellow who concocted it.
We sometimes give the impression that we are scared of appreciating the very rich roundedness in Soyinka's art and person, a quality that would greatly enrich the scope of his studies.
May be, doing that would explode our cherished myth and give us an equally impressive reality that may not fit into our preferred stereotype. Professor Femi Osofisan started us on a very sound note some few week ago when he said in a brilliant interview with TheNEWS magazine that the "only thing constant about (Soyinka) is his productivity." If we would at least concede to Soyinka that he is indeed a conscious artist, who carefully chooses his themes and messages, then there would be no point quarrelling over the fact that the inconsistencies and contradictions critics often point out in the man and his art, are intentional outputs deserving critical acclaim.
The preference by Soyinka critics, especially those largely inspired and motivated by predictable considerations, to not transcend intelligent guesses in their "interpretation" of Soyinka, sometimes makes a lot of them look utterly stupid. I will cite one instance.
In an early number of the journal, African Literature Today (in 1968 or so), Derek Elders wrote a review of Soyinka's THE INTERPRETERS in which he wondered what really the book had to offer to justify the pains one took to burrow through the massive heaps of impenetrable clauses. But in his prefatory note in the same edition of the journal, Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones, the Editor, and one of those distinguished scholars who had done so much to spotlight Soyinka's work, overtly growled that Derek Elders's opinion did not go down well with him, and threatened to publish a counter-view. And to hurriedly atone for his "critically incorrect" remarks, Derek Elders came back in the very next issue with another review, this time descending with blind fury on G.D. Killam's book on Chinua Achebe, dismissed it, Achebe's books, and in fact almost everything written by African writers at that time. Then he declared magisterially that, perhaps, only Soyinka's novel, THE INTERPRETERS (the same novel he had earlier sent to the bin) could qualify for a novel in the real sense of the word among all the novels published by Africans at that time.
Reason? Soyinka's portrayal of the Oguazor party in the book was superb. Wonders! Well, Professor Eldred Jones still made good his threat and published what he called, "Reading Notes On Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters," but what indeed did he say?
Professor Sola Adeyeye told us in a recent interview that Soyinka calls himself Ogun's son.
That is entirely within his rights, except that his fanatical adulation of Ogun, a blood-thirsty tyrant, does untold damage to the democratic credentials his boys force on him. As hero of his lengthy poem, IDANRE, Ogun revels in extreme militarism and boundless dictatorship, and kills just to satisfy his blood lust. Soyinka does not even try to disguise his boundless fascination with this reprehensible character.
Sadistic orgy
After killing his enemies, he turns around, in a fit of sadistic orgy, to kill his own people, the Ire people. Imagine the wanton, gruesome slaughter of the wine-girl! Yet, Soyinka celebrates all these with incredible flamboyance. One searches in vain for the minutest tinge of resentment for this character. Even in Soyinka's other play, THE ROAD, Professor has the same Ogun image: power-drunk and ruthless. And instead of lampooning these characters, Soyinka celebrates them with wild excitement.
Today, we can afford to debate Soyinka's place in African Literature because there is an African Literature as a result of a few people's conscious, selfless effort. It has become convenient to forget that while writers like Achebe argued at every forum that African literature is real, and a very rich corpus with its own standards, ethos, rhythm and identity, others were prostrate before the Western literary "lords" pleading to be accepted as "universal" writers, swearing that their Africanness was a mere coincidence, and that they were too big to be confined within the crude fences of African literary aesthetics.
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