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The Road
. If we remember that this
play was written and first staged at about the same time that many of
the poems in
Idanre
were written, it does matter for our consideration
of Soyinka as a poet to read the poetry in
The Road
intertextually with
the formal verse in
Idanre
. Certainly, one of the most compelling poetic
sequences in the play in this regard is Professor’s harrowing, mocking
prose-poem at the moment just before his death, a peroration which
constitutes the last, eschatologically bleak words of the play:
Be even like the road itself. Flatten your bellies with the hunger of an unpro-
pitious day, power your hands with the knowledge of death. In the heat of the
afternoon when the sheen raises false forests and a watered haven, let the event
first unravel before your eyes. Or in the dust, when ghost lorries pass you by and
your shouts your tears fall on deaf panels and the dust swallows them. Dip in
the same basin as the man that makes his last journey and stir with one finger,
wobbling reflections of two hands, two hands, but one face only. Breathe like
the road. Be the road. Coil your self in dreams, lay flat in treachery and deceit
and at the moment of a trusting step, rear your head and strike the traveler in
his confidence, swallow him whole or break him on the earth. Spread a broad
sheet for death with the length and the time of the sun between you until the
one face multiplies and the one shadow is cast by all the doomed. Breathe like
the road, be even like the road itself
. . .
(
CP
,
–
)
The imperative, apodictic tone through which this passage commands
acceptance of, or identification with Professor’s vision of the road’s,
or life’s, barren destructiveness tremendously amplifies the mocking,
supercilious malevolence of “A First Deathday” and “Abiku.” But here, in
the context of the denouement of a play which both ritualizes and mourns
the fear and terror of death with exuberance, wit and humor, Professor’s
“abiku” pose is far more suggestively ambiguous, far more open to
Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment
aporetic, contradictory readings than anything we find in either poem.
In the present context, I offer two mutually opposed readings. First, at
one level, the projection of the banality and impersonality of death on
the road in this passage is underscored by Professor with an unmiti-
gated, even misanthropic despair whose intention seems to be to under-
mine the search for, and faith in hopeful portents that (all) travelers –
in actual, literal travels and metaphorically in the journey of life – start
out with and struggle to retain in the course of an actual journey or the
symbolic travel of existence. This reading is authorized by attentiveness
to the way in which Soyinka in the passage catachrestically conflates
divinatory and predatory metaphors which, in the poems in
Idanre
are
kept apart: “Dip in the same bowl as the man that makes his last journey
and stir with one finger, wobbling reflections of two hands” (an image
drawn from the practice of consulting an Ifa priest before setting out on
an important journey) and “Coil yourself in dreams, lay flat in treachery
and deceit and at the moment of a trusting step, rear your head and
strike the traveler in his confidence” (an image of a serpent’s fatal strike
at an unwary farmer or hunter in the bush). But another contradictory
reading of the passage is possible, one in which there is a subtle message
of stubborn, ironic hope in Professor’s bleak, nihilistic conceits: if the
road, as literal highway for commerce and travel and as metaphor for
the journey through life, is destructively treacherous, to “breathe like
the road,” to “be even like the road itself ” is to live without illusions, to
become equal to the destructiveness of the road. The first reading entails
a sympathetic projection into the ritual and sacrificial “mythemes” em-
bedded in that conflation of divinatory and predatory metaphors which
we have identified, while the second reading in fact entails a scrupulous
separation and demythologization of precisely these same metaphors.
What is important about this is the fact that such conflicting inscriptions
find in Soyinka’s plays embodiment in memorable, riveting characters in
ways that are generically foreclosed to the isolated poem in his vol-
umes of poetry. Thus, what seems intractable or confounding in one
genre (formal verse) is almost effortlessly consummated in another genre
(drama).
Apart from “Abiku,” “A First Death-day” and the title poem “Idanre”
itself, the only other poems in this first volume of Soyinka’s poetry volume
which can be adjudged to have a heavy freight of mythologization about
them are the first two poems in the volume, “Dawn” and “Death in
the Dawn,” together with “Easter.” Definitely, there is nothing remotely
esoteric and mythologizing about the eight incredibly whimsical, almost
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