|
Visionary mythopoesis in fictional and nonfictional prose
bureaucratic elite, hypocrisy and mediocrity among middle-class profes-
sionals and technocrats, naked social climbing and casual callousness in
the entire gamut of groups and classes within the populace. These pro-
files provoke varied attitudes in the “interpreters” ranging from cynical
scorn (Sagoe) and willful aloofness and self-absorption (Egbo) to acts of
great sensitivity, compassion and faith (Bandele). The sly invitation to
the reader in the differentiations between these profiles of the protago-
nists’ own responses to the social and moral morass surrounding them
is to make his or her own choice of whichever evil is less egregious in
the vast canvas of decadence and sterility exposed by the narrator of the
novel. At the end of the narrative, it is the mixture of moral hypocrisy
and casual callousness in the Oguazors and Lumoyes of the national
pseudo-bourgeoisie – especially toward the plight of the young and the
female of this “new” nation – which seems ranked by the narrator as the
worst or deadliest of the social evils depicted so graphically in the novel,
since this is what provokes from Bandele – the most equable, the most
compassionate among the “interpreters” – the terrible imprecation: “I
hope you all live to bury your daughters” (
). This is a malediction
which in the imaginative scheme of the novel metonymically stands as
a terrible judgment on the whole tottering moral and spiritual edifice of
the new age.
In more concrete and all-embracing terms, the weight of such gener-
alized profiles of dystopia and decadence is constructed on the narrator’s
graphic if fragmentary account of the slow and inexorable entrenchment
of mediocrity at the highest levels of commercial, bureaucratic and po-
litical decision-making institutions of the new nation-state. This receives
perhaps its most telling and unforgettable depiction in the harrowing fate
of Sekoni, a gifted engineer who returns home from professional studies
abroad fired by dreams of engineering inventiveness which, he hopes,
will combine with the efforts of like-minded compatriots to transform the
physical environment of the country and better the lives of the people.
With great naivet´e and the faith of the eternal optimist, he overcomes the
intense frustration of his confinement to a pen-pushing desk job by his
bureaucratic bosses and even his transfer to a rural backwater where it is
hoped that the flame of his idealism would be doused by the arid realities
of his posting. But Sekoni is undaunted and he builds an electric power
station out of scrap materials with an aim to bring electrification to his
new rural community. In a final
coup de grace
, his unrelenting bosses back
at the capital ensure the power station is not commissioned and put to
use by spreading a false and destructive rumor that the plant will explode
Wole Soyinka
and destroy the village if any attempt is made to test its workability. Told
in this dry paraphrase, this seems a conventional allegory of the morbid
fear of genius by mediocrity, but Soyinka’s
manner
of telling the story is
anything but schematic.
On a deeper level, the weight of the narrator’s portentous negative
indictment of the new post-independence age is validated by Soyinka’s
meticulous and imaginative attentiveness to the impact of the moral
order of the new elite on the inner, psychic lives of the “interpreters”
and other finely drawn characters like Monica Faseyi, Joe Golder and
Lazarus, the “aladura” prophet who claims, like his Biblical namesake, to
have risen from the dead. Among the “interpreters,” Sekoni experiences
great, traumatic suffering and after going through a period of nervous
breakdown, emerges from that region of ineffable anguish and disori-
entation with immense artistic power and spiritual grace. Joe Golder,
the near white African-American homosexual consumed by an intense,
race-driven self-hatred and sexual frustration, cannot possibly find ful-
fillment, even solace, in
this
debilitating human milieu. Monica Faseyi,
alone among the expatriates and foreigners in this novel, is totally free of
either the reactionary bigotry of colonial whites like Pinkshore and the
unresolved racial complexes of condescension and over-effusive “love”
of blacks like Peter, the German journalist slumming it through black
Africa; Monica suffers a lot from her marriage to Ayo Faseyi, an insuffer-
able prude and ingratiating social climber, but she retains a remarkable
control over her inner psychic life. The claim of the albino “prophet”
Lazarus to have risen from the dead is of course unverifiable, but as
Bandele remarks of him, whether or not his claim is true, he seems to be
a person who has undergone a searing, traumatic experience. Like all the
“aladura” prophets in Soyinka’s works, the taint of charlatanism hangs
heavy around his person, but his ministry of redemption and rehabilita-
tion of the social dregs of a fallen, degraded world strikes a deep chord
of responsiveness in Kola, the artist. Indeed, Lazarus’ cry of anguish at
the failure of his attempted conversion of Noah, the petty thief, carries
a powerful resonance with the diverse struggles of the “interpreters” to
find a transformative meaning in the surrounding sea of shallowness,
cynicism and predatoriness:
‘What is truly important to me is that I know the arithmetic of religion. The
murderer is your future martyr, he is your most willing martyr. Few fools know
that.’
‘Tell me, how did you convert Noah?’ Kola was only half-attentive, and the
albino’s reaction shattered his concentration.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
