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The Achievement of Wole Soyinka

By Abiola Irele

Opening address presented at the Wole Soyinka conference, organised by the Wole Soyinka Festival Foundation and held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in April 2004

In any appraisal of a writer’s work, we need to consider two factors that are, I believe, of primary importance for an evaluation of its significance. The first factor has to do with language, which is the determining medium of literary art, so that the very fact that a writer works in and through words provides the immediate basis of judgements of his work. It is his gift of language, the assured manner of his deployment of its resources to establish a distinctive tone of address, that first strikes us about a writer as being worthy of attention and marks him out for serious consideration.

It must be said at once that the command of language, viewed in its proper bearing upon the evaluation of a writer’s work, implies more than is customarily thought of as style. It extends beyond the topical effect of a skilful arrangement of words to the larger sense of form that is the controlling principle of significance in the literary work. It is essential that we feel the words as they are deployed by the writer, that they function in a unified context of meanings that either reach out towards an explicit reference or carry the charge of deep intimations. It is not therefore a question of the ostensible craft which the writer displays, not the "textual strategies" which lie at the technical surface of his gesture towards meaning, but one of the fundamental quality of expression indicative of a profound engagement with experience.

The second factor I have in mind emerges at once from those observations. The writer’s mode of involvement with language and his appropriation of form in the comprehensive sense suggested by his bringing both to bear on experience, reflect the degree of intensity of his responses to the world, of his awareness of certain truths about it by which his intelligence and the whole of his inner life are solicited, so that his voice is challenged into as potent an utterance as his command of language will allow. There is thus an essential imbrication of theme and language, vision and expression – a connection between the writer’s advance upon language and the impulse that moves him to testify about the world. By way of consequence, the relation between his demands upon language and the quality of his testimony is an equally determining one, for the exploration of language, going with the concern for significant form, presents iself not only as a striving for a proper adequation of expressive means to the promptings of the imagination but also as a mode of entry into the living context of experience by which that imagination is conditioned. Language and form are thus bound up with the imaginative temper and the particularised vision manifested in a writer’s work, such that the range and power of his evocations as embodied in his text provide pointers to his heightened consciousness of life in its variousness and of experience in its fullest human implications.

"For Soyinka writing is the active working out of a moral project through an attentive preoccupation with the vicissitudes of the communal existence"

I have thought it necessary at the outset of this homage to Soyinka, to insist, by way of restatement, upon these elementary considerations, in order to set out a measure for the appraisal of his work, one that seems to me appropriate to its context of elaboration and its specific orientation. However limited it may appear, a restatement of this kind is particularly called for at this time and on an occasion like this, as we celebrate decades of Soyinka’s singular career and achievement, in order to fully appreciate the nature and scope of that achievement.

There is a special reason, perhaps even an urgent one, why the necessary, and I daresay organic, relation of the literary imagination to life requires restating at this time in our own African context. For as anyone who has been following the course of contemporary literature in the major European languages is well aware, the dominant spirit in what is regarded as its representative direction has been marked by a deliberate disengagement of this literarture from experience, a refusal to acknowledge its referential import in any obvious relation to human significance. This phenomenon is accompanied by a preoccupation with the complexities of expression as such, without a correspondence to the human subject, to such an extent that the procedures of this literature have come to imply a denial of the possibility of communication through language at any but the most elementary level. We are thus presented with the unsettling paradox of language itself being employed to negate the indices of our humanity. This is not of course all there is to be said about contemporary Western literature, and I am aware that in its abruptness, the observation I have just made and the judgement it entails need to be qualified – there are important ways in which the procedures of oblique and opaque expression in literature reflect a sharp awareness of the ambiguous character of language itself as a medium of communication. But I am concerned here with the general import of the development I’ve been examining, which strikes one as a turning in of language and with it, literary form, upon itself, in a gesture of recoil from the world. And it is significant to note that this development has been in no small way responsible for fostering a conception of language as a closed system of signs without any necessary correspondence to a process of designation by which the universe we inhabit and which impinges upon our ordinary consciousness is realised or made sense of.

It is useful and especially instructive of the particular significance of Soyinka’s work to place it against this external background. The conventions prevailing in a certain kind of contemporary literature in the Western world and the philosophical and critical positions they appear to endorse enter into our purview, if only because, by reason of language and the inheritance of form that goes with it, Soyinka’s work bears a relation to the general movement of literature outside our continent. But the point of taking into account that relation is to establish a contrasting measure of its appraisal and to insist on its specific affirmative character, its refusal to espouse the fundamental nihilism inherent in the cutting off of literature from concrete experience. The external reference challenges us further to an emphasis upon a fundamental aspect of Soyinka’s work: the wholehearted engagement with experience in its human dimensions assumes in his work a communal significance that makes manifest its essential grounding in a comprehensive ethos. For Soyinka, then, writing is not simply a withdrawal into a private world of sensations and self-contemplation, a world not brought into immediate relation with the rest of the life in which the consciousness is located. Still less is it a dispassionate contemplation of human existence, but the active working out of a moral project through an attentive preoccupation with the vicissitudes of the communal existence.

These observations lead us to a conundrum that is at the heart of Soyinka's work: the fact that a considerable part of Soyinka's achievement resides in his effort to resolve the problems posed to his creative endeavour by the primary divergence between language and cultural reference. These are problems with which every African writer who employs a European language is confronted, for the language question has for our writers a significance that goes beyond the requirements of formal expression. With Soyinka, the wrestling with language as medium of expression presents itself as the very condition for his affirmative purpose: to endow anew with coherence our fragmented consciousness as Africans caught in the unsettling movement of the historical process. Indeed, the cultural obligation to employ an alien tongue for his expression forms part of the historical predicament upon which his work is centred, is in itself a symptom of the fragmentation of the African world with which he is concerned: of the thought processes, distinct sensibility and of the modes of discourse that correspond to the particular order of life within that universe. It is indeed pertinent to observe here, that one of the strategic areas of our confrontation with Western imperialism has been that of the universe of discourse. Frantz Fanon has drawn attention to the way in which the battle of words engaged in with the coloniser in his own language has had a crucial importance for the outcome of our struggle for an autonomous place in history and an acceptable mode of existence in the world.

Soyinka’s work does not of course belong as such to the literature of combat, both imaginative and ideological, that went with our nationalist assertion, but it draws particular significance of its own from the same conditions which called it forth, and of which the linguistic situation is an important marker. This situation, as we know, is that of diglossia, considered broadly as a juxtaposition of two series of languages – on one hand, the vernaculars forming a single linguistic cluster, so to speak, and on the other, the imported language, standing in direct opposition to them. The opposition marks a state of disjunction, not only for the class of individuals who have been directly incorporated into the colonial system, but within the society as a whole. To use a term proposed by the Russian critic and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, the colonial situation is a logosphere in which the divide between two contending visions of the world is marked by the tension between the vernacular and the imported official language.

It is obvious that in such a situation, the second, imported language cannot fully exist for the colonised writer as a natural and spontaneous medium through which to convey his responses to the world. It first becomes available to him therefore only as a possibility, offering a provisional means for a process of mediation between two realms of experience, two orders of life, for the transposition of the images and metaphors contained within the structures of his vernacular language into the semantic and symbolic field proposed by the second language. For Soyinka, this process of mediation that takes place at the level of language, and by extension, of form, has involved a double artistic and ideological burden. It has meant for him not only a question of making the English language fully expressive of his disposition to the world as a focus of sentience and awareness, but also of achieving a field of discourse that, as a writer, he creates out of the resources of the second language, the sense of a new integration within a third realm of consciousness and being. In other words, the engagement with language has for Soyinka an existential significance.

We come readily to an understanding of this significance of the language question to Soyinka’s work when we consider the specific environment of its development. To do this, we need to take account of the fact that the Yoruba language which stands as the linguistic hinterland to his investment of the terrain of English exerts a constant pressure on his expression. I hardly need point out that this is not simply a matter of the occasional transliteration of figures of speech or turns of phrase, but rather of a pervasive colouring of his idiom. The Yoruba hinterland of expressive modes exerts a direct pressure on Soyinka’s work. Here, it is important to note the vivid sense of language, the reverence for words, that characterises practically all traditional African cultures. However, we can distinguish between those that cultivate a Spartan, laconian use of words, at one extreme, and at the other, those that accept them as a gift of the gods, to be revelled in and expended with delight. Yoruba culture belongs very much to this latter category, and the attitude to language that prevails within it makes its impact forcefully felt in Soyinka’s expression. We must go further in examining this impact, for the linguistic conditioning of Soyinka’s immediate environment finds its most achieved expression in the oral literature which enters directly into those ceremonial forms of cultural expression where it has the central function of intensifying experience. Words achieve at this level a new symbolic intensity in their mode of reference. In ritual, especially, they acquire a hieratic dimension. To refer to this is to indicate at once a primary source of Soyinka’s inspiration and expression. I shall consider in a moment the significance of this for his work.

We recognise in the compulsive exploration of language that Soyinka displays in his work the way in which the influence of his linguistic and cultural background works itself into his handling of English, which can be described as his second language in a sense that is only and strictly technical. The nature of the Yoruba language and the peculiar hold it exerts upon its native speakers condition a fascination in an almost literal sense with words, with a delight in their sheer combination in speech and with their potency as the elements of enunciation, a fascination that Soyinka has transferred to his use of English. I have remarked elsewhere on the way in which this grounding spirit of the Yoruba language places Soyinka in an immediate relationship to both Daniel O. Fagunwa and Amos Tutuola, but it is clear that in his case, there is a more intimate association between the aesthetic elaboration of language as a medium, and the visionary purpose of expression. It is significant in this regard that Soyinka should have created the character of Professor in The Road, a character whose quest for "the word" represents both a psychic compulsion and at the same time a probing into the mystery of being.

We must also take into account as a significant part of the total environment in which his work has developed, the evolution of the Yoruba language and culture in contemporary times, and his immersion in a field of expression marked by a dynamic interrelationship of forms. We may illustrate the phenomenon by remarking that Soyinka’s drama has links not only with the indigenous forms but also with the evolving tradition of the Yoruba travelling theatre represented by the work of the veteran Hubert Ogunde, taken up and extended by Kola Ogunmola and Duro Ladipo. His drama takes in elements from these areas, and as Dan Izevbaye has observed, derives inspiration as well from the popular culture of the day in his own background. And in his newly published magisterial study, Biodun Jeyifo has drawn attention to his appropriation of these popular forms to supplement his message. We can observe that in Soyinka’s work, this complex background of his indigenous inheritance merges into his Western legacy denoted by his relationship to the English language. Soyinka bridges the distance between his two worlds in a way that can only be considered unique, and we sense this precisely in his manipulation of English: in the special effects he wrings upon the language of Shakespeare and the inflections he brings to its very movement. We might specify this linguistic prowess by remarking that his work enacts a lively interaction between the exuberance of Yoruba and the robustness of English. Anyone who is familiar with the two languages, with their distinctive tonalities and registers, can feel the way in which Soyinka’s idiom commands an intimate collaboration between them for powerful effect. The supreme instance of this achievement remains for us Death and the King’s Horseman, where it is seen to proceed from conscious representation of the forms of life associated with the thematic reference of the play. It is important to observe however, that the language of the play is the result of a continuous refinement of a basic quality of Soyinka’s expression, carried here, unmistakably, to a point of triumph.

It is necessary to invoke Bakhtin once again, in order to place the remarks I have been making on Soyinka’s relationship to language in what seems to me their proper theoretical perspective. As we consider the diversity of his sources, we are struck by the way in which his work integrates them into a sustained polyphony of expression. It is significant in this respect to note that the context of elaboration of his work is associated with a marked situation of heteroglossia, in Bakhtin’s sense of a tension-filled space of contending discourses and the points of view, world visions and valuations that they signify. If then we refer to Soyinka’s integration of a controlling impulse in his use of language, it becomes possible to identify a feature of his work that seems to me to constitute the sustaining condition of his achievement, the awareness from which his entire expression proceeds, that his double relation to two languages and to the two worlds they designate, far from being a limiting factor of his creativity, affords him rather greater scope of expression in an expanded universe of imaginative discourse.

There is, it seems to me, a direct connection between this character of Soyinka’s work revealed by his engagement with language and the sense of completeness that his work evinces. The variety of thematic approach, the range of reference and vitality of the creative impulse in this work – these are the qualities that we have come to recognise as distinguishing elements of Soyinka’s achievement. They derive significance from the personal urgency of his preoccupation with the realities of his time and place, and the imperatives of his moral and ideological project he has undertaken in relation to his situation. There is manifest in Soyinka’s work a vivid awareness of the historical process which has produced among us the dislocations, the consequences of which we continue to live with. It is not, I think, a simplifying view of his work to observe that it arises from a profound sense of mission, of the human responsibility of the artist.

I cannot here undertake the kind of comprehensive review of Soyinka’s writing that would bring out the point of my statement.

Beginning with Eldred Jones’s seminal study, the critical literature on Soyinka has now grown to considerable proportions, and has now been brought to a new level of exegesis and insight by Jeyifo.

I intend therefore to focus here on one aspect of his thematic preoccupation which, it seems to me, is the obvious determining principle of his work – the effort to overcome the disabling stresses of our historical condition and transcend them in a new vision of life. In considering this theme, it is first necessary to dispel a misconception about Soyinka’s work – the notion that his is not concerned, or hardly so, with the colonial problem, that he is indifferent in fact to the question of racial retrieval and the revaluation of African culture. This notion has been promoted by the hostility he displayed in his early years towards the concept of Negritude which he famously described as "this magnitude of unfelt abstractions". As we know, he has reconsidered his earlier position as evidenced by his chapter on Leopold Senghor in his Harvard lectures. If his remarks do not amount to a return to Canossa, at least they indicate a reconciliation with Negritude. In his examination of Negritude literature, Soyinka was obliged to acknowledge the effort to name a felt condition: the response to the denial of humanity to blacks and denigration of our culture, and the effort to repair the psychic damage occasioned by the colonial experience. But what I have called his reconciliation with Negritude seems to me logical, inherent in all his work from the very beginning, as the general remarks I have proposed already indicate. But it is important to stress that the theme of racial protest is already apparent in his early play, The Invention, which has just been unearthed by the South African scholar, Zodwa Motsa. It is of considerable interest here to observe the developing sense of disaffection toward the western paradigm as embodied in the scientific culture. For it is a profound distrust of science as an organising system that underlies Soyinka’s bitter satire of racism in this play. There is already apparent here a view of western rationalism as not merely inadequate but in a fundamental sense, dismal. It is the impoverished life that the western paradigm promotes that is countered by an evocation of the fullness of being that Soyinka associates with the black singer in the poem of that name:

Cold wreath of vine, darkly
Coiled about the night; echoes deep within
Bled veins of autumn

A votive vase, her throat
poured many souls as one; how dark
The wine became the night

Beyond the expressionism of the poem, we sense an ecstatic identification with the female black that Senghor would not have disavowed. But the project of communal retrieval develops in Soyinka’s work on a much broader front than this celebration of blackness suggests. It has to do rather with a reappraisal of the global African situation in the aftermath of slavery and colonisation, of our existential condition as we confront the pressures of an imposed modernity. Given this historical and metaphysical perspective, the project of reconstruction could not but declare itself at first in a negative way, in the critical stance of the writer’s outlook on the confusions that have attended the political and social developments in Africa, and the cultural dislocations of which they are the sign. The critique focuses in particular upon the effects of social arrangements in which the individual is called upon to realise his or her being. There is thus a sense in which Soyinka may be said to be concerned with the African lifeworld.

Soyinka’s critical approach is evident as much in the comic and satirical plays as in the serious and reflective ones, the two veins constituting together a means of establishing what one might call an axiology. It has been said in rebuke of Soyinka that his satire in particular presents a limited and distorted view of humanity he deals with and that, in a play like The Lion and the Jewel, for instance, it leads to a conservative and even reactionary position. An accusation that he was also to encounter with regard to Death and the King’s Horseman. It could be argued that the use of satire in presenting a situation of cultural disorientation is a necessary part of the demonstration that Soyinka is intent upon making, especially in the political plays. Thus, the character Konu, in The Detainee declares: "I had yet to learn that tyrants cannot afford a sense of humour. It’s the weapon they fear most." It is this conception of the critical import of satire that presides at the inspiration of A Play of Giants: in which Soyinka sends up three infamous African tyrants, Idi Amin, Jean Bedel Bokassa and Mengistu Haile Mariam. It must be said, however, that there are situations where the effect of satire can be limited, where a more earnest tone is required in order to fully convey the weight of the issues at stake. A Play of Giants probably required a different treatment of its political theme, such as we find in, for example, Pedro Calderon’s The Mayor of Zalamea. Indeed, this grave perspective is indicated in the preface to Soyinka’s play and I have always felt it should be read by an actor as a prelude to the action.

We have to recognise, however, that for Soyinka, satire is in essence, a tentative form of statement, the means to the establishment of a human norm within the common framework of moral reference.

The visionary direction of Soyinka’s work arises from this moral grounding of his expression. If we consider the relationship between Soyinka’s interest in the fate of the individual set against the collectivity in such plays as The Swamp Dwellers and The Strong Breed, and his preoccupation with the collective destiny in A Dance in the Forests, Kongi’s Harvest and Madmen and Specialists, we understand that the fundamental question in all these plays, as indeed in all his works, is that of moral choices in a situation where the structure and conventions of life have been disrupted and a new code of reference, pointing to a new order of existence, has not yet emerged. Taking cue for Soyinka himself, Oyin Ogunba has examined his work from the perspective of its involvement with "the movement of transition".

It is indeed the tensions set up by this movement that Soyinka’s work dramatises, and his purpose in doing so is to propose a larger meaning of the collective life in which they can be exorcised. I use the word "exorcised" advisedly, for it becomes clear that the purpose of the work and the meaning Soyinka attaches to it, have ultimately a spiritual dimension. His recourse to the ritual modes of symbolic expression is an indication of the visionary intent of his work, which as we know has been concretised in the myth of Ogun. Soyinka provides an intellectual formulation, in "The Fourth Stage" of this myth, and of its significance in the context of the traditional Yoruba world. We are not obliged to accept his interpretation either of the myth or of a Yoruba collective consciousness he posits in association with they myth as having a factual, objective value, but we cannot overlook its importance for the ritual and symbolic connotations it determines in his work, and its correspondence to the visionary purpose of his creative effort. I would for my part qualify the mythic or mythopoeic element of Soyinka's thought and imagination as being essentially the foundation for his elaboration of a large metaphor of an organic wholeness of life and consciousness. Myth thus serves in his work as the mediating image and principle of a responsive disposition to the currents of life in the universe which hold out a promise of communal regeneration. The vitalism that this vein conditions in his work, especially in the poetry, testifies to the spirit of celebration that, despite the tragic sense of life his work so often displays, illuminates his expression. This aspect of Soyinka’s work is most evident in the poetry.

Soyinka once described the writer as "the voice of vision in his own time". He has more lately reformulated this idea by specifying the vocation he ascribes to the writer in terms of the bardic function that belongs properly to the poet. Thus he writes: "Unlike the theologian, who takes his voice from the realms of deities, the poet appropriates the voice of the people and the full burden of their memory."

His poetry, in its affirmative tone, is best described as the exploration of the rituals of life, of those areas of creative endeavour and realms of consciousness in which are anchored the collective identity of his people. The recognition that our human existence is inserted within an organic cycle by which nature manifests itself is conveyed in the poem "Season" which begins:

Rust is ripeness, rust
And the wilted corn-plume;
Pollen is mating-time when swallows
Weave a dance of feathered arrows
Thread corn-stalks in winged
Streaks of light.

The poem ends with these lines:

Laden stalks
ride the germ’s decay – we await
The promise of rust.

The organicism to which this poem testifies is more fully dramatised in the invocation that the poet addresses to his newly born daughter in the poem "Dedication", which takes the form of the symbolic order that authenticates the ritual gestures during the Yoruba naming ceremony:

Camwood round the heart, chalk for flight
Of blemish – see? It dawns – antimony beneath
Armpits like a goddess, and leave this taste

Long on your lips, of salt, that you may seek
None from tears. This, rain-waster, is the gift
Of gods – drink of its purity, bear fruits in season.

Fruits then to your lips: haste to repay
The debt of birth. Yield man-tides like the sea
and ebbing, leave a meaning on the fossilled sands.

The dialectic of birth and death that portends the cycle of renewal in nature, ironically denoted by the figure of Abiku, assumes a positive significance in the culture, a significance that the poet assumes on his own behalf. And it is the denial of this natural order that he laments in the sequence "October 66" in the volume Idanre and Other Poems, a sequence in which the spectacle of destructive forces taking over African lives darkens the poet’s vision. As the play Madmen and Specialists indicates, this grim reality of our contemporary tragedy has occupied his attention ever since, and forms a recurring theme in his poetry. The tenacious hold on his mind and the imagination of the African nightmare is projected in the section entitled "Elegies" in his recent volume Outsiders and Samarkand, as is evidenced by such poems as "Elegy for a Nation" and "Children of this Land". And even while in the "Ah, Demosthenes!" he dedicates himself anew to the vocation of the poet as gadfly, he comes near to despair when the contemplates the despicable causes for which writing can be enlisted:

The pen may dip
In inkwell and emerging,
Drip with blood

But in one of the interludes by which the volume is marked, there is a restorative vision as he draws on the resources of nature, as in "Visiting Trees":

To step within a tree is not so arduous, indeed
No harder than thought, involuntary as
Walking, placing left foot after right, except
There are no limbs. Not even a floating sensation – there is no body.

Sanctuary assured, monarch of time and space
He is guardian to distant lives of human pulses
Somewhere, he knows, life takes wing, floats past
On hair thin filaments in ritual rounds of song and wind
Antic celebrations of absence, he learns, are one
With the cyclic dance of renewal.

Soyinka returns in this poem to the mystic experience of "Idanre", to that deep connection with nature (the French connivence is a better word) from which he derives a full sense of being. It is the indigenous background of myth and ritual that has secured the intuitions to which his poetry, as indeed all his work, gives expression.

Myth thus serves in his work as the mediating image on a principle of a responsive disposition to the currents of life in the universe which hold out a promise of communal regeneration. The vitalism that his vein conditions in his work testifies to the spirit of celebration that, despite the tragic sense of life his work so often displays, constantly illuminates his expression. There is then a purposive energy in Soyinka’s work which carries the import of a revolutionary will in his attitude to the world. Soyinka’s refusal to accept the facile conventions of social arrangements has caused him to be branded an anarchist. But it is plain that he has worked from a deep and intense sense of community, conceived as a compact between individuals regulated by authentic values. In its specific reference to the historical situation he confronts, his work is intended as a remodelling of our contemporary consciousness, to move us beyond the ambiguities and confusions of the present dividedness of our collective self. It stands out in this light as a charter of moral imperatives and of a re-orientation of our collective existence towards a new dispensation.

I started this homage to Wole Soyinka by alluding to the contemporary disengagement of literature from experience in the Western world, and by setting out a different measure for the appraisal of his work. I have endeavoured here to justify my point that the ruling canons of critical reception of literature challenge us to a dissenting view of its function in society. I’d like to go back on to the double perspective on imaginative creation with which I started – on the necessary relationship between the human relevance of a writer’s work, its reference to and engagement with life in either its concrete aspects or its numinous implications, on one hand, and on the other, the aesthetic dimension of his work, the quality of expression by which his vision is projected and sustained. Soyinka’s work has an exemplary value for us in this regard. It is profoundly implicated in the total experience in which the African continent is involved, an experience for which he has sought to be a witness, perhaps even a prophet, in the anguished but heartfelt commitment of the literary imagination to issues of the collective existence. At the same time, the work is distinguished by an elaboration of poetic values as an essential dimension of the collective awareness. Here, his reference to the ancestral inheritance of belief an spirituality invocation serves to ground his apprehension of life and to extend his vision in a transcendental system of reference. He has thus reanimated the guiding myths that have given meaning to life and consciousness in the traditional world. And it is this remarkable conjunction of intense social consciousness and of an aesthetic sensibility allied to spiritual vision – it is this that constitutes for me his signal achievement.

Abiola Irele is professor of Afro-American Studies and Romance Languages and Liteature at the University of Harvard. He was also editor of Research in African Literatures until 2003.