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partisan in his political identifications and, side by side with this, he is
on occasion unapologetically mystical or metaphysical in some of his
visionary projections. These intricacies of his poetry and his activism
indicate that if for now and for a long time to come there can be no final
word, no definitive summation of his impact and legacy, we can at least
review the nature, sources and stress points of his considerable influence
in contemporary African literature and the Anglophone writings of the
world. In the final chapter of this study, we now turn to this topic.
“Things fall together”: Wole Soyinka in his Own Write
The Will of man is placed beyond surrender. Without the know-
ing of Divinity by man, can Deity survive? Oh hesitant one,
Man’s conceiving is fathomless; his community will rise beyond
the present reaches of the mind. Orisa reveals destiny as SELF-
DESTINATION
Wole Soyinka, “The Credo of Being and Nothingness”
The very vocabulary of chaos – disintegration, fragmentation,
dislocation – implies a breaking away or a breaking apart. But the
defining thing of the Modernist mode is not so much that things fall
apart
but that they fall
together
.
James McFarlane, “The Mind of Modernism”
In his important book,
Forms of Attention
, the English scholar and critic,
Frank Kermode, has suggested that the fate of literature, the survival of
literature, depends ultimately on the degree to which it continues to be
talked about.
Consistent with the title of the book, Kermode also makes
the qualification that a lot depends, not just on literature continuing to
get talked about, but also on
how
it is talked about, on the “forms of
attention” that individual authors and entire literary traditions receive.
The works and career of Soyinka amply demonstrate that it is also of
significance
who
talks about literature or the corpus of a particular author
with regard to its sources, impact and legacy.
At least a decade before either of them received the Nobel prize for lit-
erature, Derek Walcott made a comment on the stature of Wole Soyinka
as a writer which gives a fair, though indirect indication of one important
“form of attention” that Soyinka has received from his own contempo-
raries. The comment was made in the context of an interview with
Walcott on the relative differences between influence by a member of
one’s own generation and influence by great authors of the past. I do
not think Walcott has ever made the kind of comment that he makes on
“Things fall together”: Wole Soyinka in his Own Write
Soyinka about any other living or dead contemporary writer – except
perhaps Borges and St. John Perse – in the following quote from the
interview:
(
): What about Soyinka as a master?
(
): I’m not saying that there aren’t emerging black writers who could not be
great, that there are not masterpieces among the emerging literature. I
consider
The Road
a masterpiece. But the man is a contemporary of mine;
we have gone through the same evolution in terms of writing in countries
where, previously, there had not been a large body of recorded literature. So
this masterpiece, any masterpiece created by a contemporary is his. There
is no one among my contemporaries who I wish to apprentice myself to.
At its most apparent level, the disavowal by Walcott in this quote of
any influence by Soyinka and more generally any “intra-generational”
influences from his own contemporaries is unremarkable, for it is a very
rare occurrence in literary history for writers of the same generation
to admit to tutelage within and among cohorts. What makes Walcott’s
observations in the quote remarkable is the fact that a writer of his stature
found it necessary to disavow tutelage to Soyinka, much as he admired
the Nigerian author’s writings. This, I would argue, indirectly reveals
an aspect of Soyinka’s impact on his own society and his own times
that is often overlooked by most students of his writings. This is the fact
that among postcolonial African writers, Soyinka is probably the closest
approximation there is to what could be described as “the writers’ writer,”
the writer in whose corpus “writing” stands out clearly in its own right, as
a percept, a value which exercises tremendous, if heterodox fascination
for other writers. This dimension of the impact of Soyinka’s writings
reveals the significance, of how and
by whom
his works have been talked
about by his contemporaries. For among all groups of commentators
on Soyinka’s writings, it is among other writers that there has been
the most enthusiastic praise for Soyinka’s writings as
writing
and thus
the weakest link in the chain of resistance to the alleged “complexity”
and “difficulty” of his works. Among the many major contemporary
African and non-African writers who, with due caveats and the usual
qualifications, have given eloquent testimony to the power of Soyinka’s
writings are Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Wilson Harris, Walcott
himself in another context entirely different from the quote above, John
Arden, Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare and Caryl Philips.
There is an aspect of this “writerly” form of attention on the writ-
ings of Soyinka which is more indirect, more subliminal and therefore
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