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Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment
“Conversations at night with a cockroach” is a long poem of eighteen
stanzas which combines lyric, dramatic and narrative poetic modes.
In external form, the poem is structured by a conventional strope-
antistrophe dialogical interchange wherein the poet (the voice in the
strophe) speaks the stanzas which recall the idealistic, utopian attempts
of his generation to forge a just, cohesive social order out of the diverse,
plural communities making up his newly independent nation, and the in-
truder cockroach in his prison cell speaks the stanzas recalling the forces
which not only thwarted those efforts but are now consolidating and ex-
panding their reign of terror and mediocrity (antistrophe). Typical of this
pattern is the following exchange between one long stanzaic “strophe”
and two short refrains of “antistrophe” from the opening section of the
poem:
(Strophe)
In that year’s crucible we sought
To force impurities in nationweal
Belly-up, heat-drawn by fires
Of truth. In that year’s crucible
We sought to cleanse the faulted lodes
To raise new dwellings pillared on crags
Washed by mountain streams; to reach
Hands around Kaura hills, beyond
Obudu ranges, to dance on rockhills
Through Idanre. We sought to speak
Each to each in accents of trust
Dispersing ancient mists in clean breezes
To clear the path of lowland barriers
Forge new realities, free our earth
Of distorting shadows cast by old
And modern necromancers. No more
Rose cry and purpose, no more the fences
Of deceit, no more perpetuity
Of ancient wrongs
(Antistrophe)
But we were wise to portents, tuned
As tinsel vanes to the dread approach
Of the visitation. And while the rumble yet
Was far, we closed, we spread tentacles.
We knew the tread and heard
The gathering heartbeat of the cyclone heart
And quick our hands to forge coalitions new
Of tried corruptions, East to West, North to South.
Wole Soyinka
Survival was insured in policies to embrace
The degree of wavering weather vanes.
Our sirens poised inked talons on the open
Cheques, their songs inflamed each hidden longing
. . .
(
–
)
It is an educated but safe guess to suggest that the twice-repeated
phrase, “in that year’s crucible” of the first four lines of the “strophe” is
an allusion to the popular political rebellions in western Nigeria leading
up to the military coup of January
, two events which Soyinka, with
due reservations about their internal contradictions, has defended and
celebrated in his writings, notably in
The Man Died
and
Ibadan
. Indeed,
the whole section making up what we’ve called the “strophe” is the closest
we get to a baldly partisan and explicitly political expression by Soyinka
in any of the poems in
A Shuttle
. In this regard, while the “antistrophe”
inscribed in the two shorter stanzas may also be said to be partisan, this is
a partisanship which the poet finds reprehensible, which he in fact casts in
a strongly ironic light. For the partisanship here is on behalf of the alliance
of the conservative regional governments of the West and the North,
especially in the way that both tone and imagery in the stanzas recall the
contempt that top members of the NNDP government of S.L. Akintola,
the premier of the western region, openly expressed toward the populace
on which they had imposed their tyrannical misrule. Finally, since both
“strophe” and “antistrophe” deploy related images of a looming political
explosion – “force impurities
. . .
belly-up, heat-drawn by fires of truth”;
“while the rumble yet was far”; “the gathering heartbeat of the cyclone” –
it is very likely that the allusions here are to the coup and the countercoup
of January and July
respectively. Thus, like Christopher Okigbo’s
“Path of Thunder,” “Conversations at Night” is a poem which allegorizes
the fateful events that took place between
and
in Nigeria in
unambiguous poetic accents. And again as in Okigbo’s last group of
poems, “Conversations at Night” demonstrates that eschewal of obscure
diction and radically disjunct syntax does not lead to the sacrifice of a
complex vision of the sociopolitical crises engaged by the poet. All the
same, Soyinka is never one to stick to an uncomplicated structure, and
so in the course of the poem he finesses the agon between the poet and
his unwelcome interlocutor by transforming the cockroach, on account
of its habits of foraging and scavenging in sewers and other sites of
putrefaction, into a sort of grotesque, vulpine witness to the atrocities and
massacres which took place in northern Nigeria in May and September
of
. This transforms the cockroach into an accuser who can shift
moral responsibility for the carnage to the poet as a representative citizen
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