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A Shuttle
is the most illuminating.
For not only does it provide helpful contextual notes to the allusions
to very private experiences in the poems of the cycle, it also enables
the reader to link many of these allusions to other writings of Soyinka,
most especially the writings on the Nigerian civil war. This factor has
a lot to do with the fact that the “Chimes of Silence” cycle is probably
the most successful sequence of poems in Soyinka’s five volumes of poetry.
Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment
It is from this preface, for instance, that we get a sense of the ex-
treme desolation of the psychobiographical condition behind the arrest-
ing oxymoron in the section title contained in the conjoining of the word
“chimes” with its semantic inversion, “silence.” Apparently in order to
increase the psychological ennui of Soyinka’s solitary confinement, his
jailers at a certain stage in his imprisonment virtually sealed off all the
holes or breaches in the walls of his prison cell, thus literally transform-
ing the cell into the “crypt” of the title of the entire volume,
A Shuttle
in the Crypt
. This act of attempted psychological strangulation appar-
ently worked in the way that it transformed the “crypt” of the poet’s cell
into a harrowing echo chamber in which
all
sounds were magnified a
thousand fold. (“When it thunders, my skull is the anvil of the gods”) As
Soyinka remarks in that same preface: “Sounds. Sounds acquire a fourth
dimension in a living crypt. A definition which, as in the case of thunder,
becomes physically unbearable. In the case of the awaited but unheard,
psychically punishing (
).”
The three most successful poems of the section are “Bearings,” “Pro-
cession,” and “Seed.” They all derive their power from a dialectical
inversion of the psychic negations of life in the “crypt,” accomplished
through the incarcerated poet’s astonishing but highly disciplined acts of
imaginative and verbal extemporization of the unceasing and pervasive
experience of adversity. For instance in “Bearings,” the very act of
naming
other topographic sites of the prison complex which Soyinka cannot see
but from which sounds of various kinds invade his “crypt” yields the
arresting tropological titles of the five poems in the cycle “Bearings.”
These are “Wailing Wall,” “Wall of Mists,” “Amber Wall,” “Purgatory”
and “Vault Centre.” “Wailing Wall” is so named because the poet once
heard from a wing of the prison complex the sustained wailing of a prison
inmate who was apparently in his death throes, the wailing lasting all day
from dawn to dusk when the man finally died. This particular incident
must have left a lasting emotional impact on Soyinka because he has
alluded to it in powerful, recurrent terms in other works like
The Man
Died
and
From Zia with Love
. In “Wailing Wall,” the experience of being
an unwilling witness to this long, unrelieved cry of human anguish from
within the echo chamber of his “crypt” draws from the poet a power-
fully parodic juxtaposition of liturgical symbols normatively associated
with hope, faith and grace with images of scavenging birds of prey like
vultures and crows; the effect, given the primary allusion of the poem
to the hapless wailing, dying inmate, is a grimly sardonic vision of the
Wole Soyinka
overturning of the sustaining positive values of faith and grace preached
by all religious creeds:
Vulture presides in tattered surplice
In schism for collection plates, with –
Crow in white collar, legs
Of toothpick death plunged
Deep in a salvaged morsel. Choirmaster
When a hymn is called he conducts,
Baton-breaking their massed discordance
Invocation to the broken Word
On broken voices
Air-tramp, black verger
Descend on dry prayers
To altars of evil
And a charity of victims (
Shuttle
,
)
In “Walls of Mists” there is an even more dense and scathing marshaling
of metaphors and tropes of unregenerate evil, precisely because this
is the “wall” from which the poet daily hears prayers and hymns from
female prison inmates. Concerning this wall, Soyinka writes in the section
Preface: “From beyond the Wall of Mists the perverse piety of women,
that inhuman patience to which they were born, drifts across to lash
the anguish from the Wall of Purgatory (
).” The “Wall of Purgatory”
alludes to the torture and flagellation wing of the prison; its juxtaposition
with the “Wall of Mists” from which comes the prayers and hymns of the
female inmates needs no comment. But it is also the case that from the
“Wall of Mists” also comes to the poet the shrill laughter and keening cries
of deranged female inmates. Thus, the daily round of prayers (“vespers”)
of the religious sorority becomes for the “encrypted” poet, the “Witches
Sabbath” of the second stanza of the poem, a transmogrification worthy
of the most oneiric metamorphoses in Ovid or Dante:
Witches’ Sabbath what you hold
Vermilion lizards on sun orgies
Monster beetles in wall ulcers, broiled
In steam of mildew drying
Mists of metamorphosis
Men to swine, strength to blows
Grace to lizard prances, honor
To sweetmeats on the tongue of vileness (
–
)
Indeed, Dante is subtly invoked in “Purgatory,” the fourth poem in the
“Bearings” cycle. The allusion of this poem, as we have observed, is to
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