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Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment
indifferent world, a world of “millions fugitive from truth,” a world where
“mere forms usurp the hearts” of otherwise decent people, turning their
feeble protests against tyranny “out there” in Africa “mere rasps.” That
Soyinka can in this and other poems in this volume turn the towering
anger of his despair at the human cost of the brutal misrule of tyrants
in Africa on the world of “outsiders” (the title of the volume) is both be-
cause our world is so interconnected now that “outsiders” and “insiders”
are co-implicated in the state of things everywhere in the world, and
equally important, because Soyinka is totally unsparing on the culpa-
bility, the responsibility of the “insiders” of his homeland and continent
for the desolation caused by the long, seemingly interminable misrule of
the tyrants.
“The Children of this Land” and “Pens for Hire” are nearly un-
bearable for the power of their evocation of this desolation in Abacha’s
Nigeria and much of contemporary Africa. In the introduction to the
volume, Rudolph Byrd writes of “majesties of language” in this volume;
perhaps nowhere else in the volume are these more evident than in these
two poems. “The Children of this Land” attempts a reckoning of the
scope of loss and dispossession that are the bequest of the young of a
country whose great historical misfortune it is to fall prey to marauding
rulers who come in an unending succession of one brutal and mediocre
tyrant after another. Part elegy for loss on this monumental scale and part
righteous excoriation for those whose complacencies and lack of acuity
have made ruination and desolation of such proportions possible, “The
Children of this Land” is ultimately a cautionary, prophetic national al-
legory. This particular dimension of the poem assumes its most graphic
and chastening expression in the fourth of the five stanzas of the poem:
These are the offspring of the dispossessed,
The hope and land deprived. Contempt replaces
Filial bonds. The children of this land
Are always in holed crafts, all tortoise skin
And scales – the callous of their afterbirth.
Their hands are clawed for rooting, their tongues
Propagate new social codes, and laws.
A new race will supersede the present –
Where love is banished stranger, lonely
Wanderer in forests prowled by lust
On feral pads of power,
Where love is a hidden, ancient ruin, crushed
By memory, in this present
Robbed of presence (
–
)
Wole Soyinka
“Poems for Hire” shows that perhaps the terrifying advance phalanx
of the “new race (which) will supersede the present” is already here
and ensconced in the most unlikely of places – in the ranks of writers
and journalists and those who deal in the currency of language and
the word. For the “hired pens” of this poem are those who take up the
cause of murderous tyrants and dictators and proceed to distort facts
and truths and fabricate lies and falsehoods, especially against the de-
fenders of freedom and the foes of their patrons. Of these there were
many both surprising and unsurprising figures in Abacha’s Nigeria.
In
the logic of this poem, the targeting of opponents of tyrannical regimes
and their symbolic assassination through words and language prepares
the way for and justifies the literal assassinations, the bloodbaths which
keep tyrants in power. More concretely, the immediate context for the
poem is the massive propaganda apparatus which the Abacha regime
set up between
and
which entailed an expenditure of hun-
dreds of millions of dollars to “buy” willing spokespersons at home and
abroad in this period when the regime faced almost total international
censure and opprobrium largely as a consequence of the hanging of Ken
Saro-Wiwa in November
. The list is long of respected or influential
journalists, American congressmen and women, and publicists who be-
came apologists for the regime of terror in Nigeria.
For good measure
this poem contains a fierce excoriation of such “hired pens,” but in the
final analysis the measure of the poem is etched not in the condemnation
of those who chose to speak flattery and blandishments to power, who
became complicit with illegitimate and dehumanizing power; rather, it
is the revelatory power of the poem that stands as its real achievement as
it startles the reader into a territory of ineffable human and social wreck-
age hidden behind the lies and equivocations concocted by the “pens for
hire”:
Some, we have come to know. They served
And were served in turn. Some believed,
And others cashed their souls in make-belief.
But both are immunised against the testament
Of eyes, and ears, the stench and guilt of power
And anomy of reddening rain, of plagues of locusts
Deaths of firstborns, seven lean years and
Yet again the eighth and sequent round –
Of death and dearth.
(
–
)
There couldn’t be two more dissimilar poems than “Hours Lost, Hours
Stolen” and “Calling Josef Brodsky for Ken Saro-Wiwa,” the fourth and
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