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Wole Soyinka
perhaps even more significant than direct commentary or praise. This is
the incidence of perceptible echoes of Soyinka’s writings, or of Soyinka
as a literary figure, in the works of other living authors. Perhaps the most
obvious examples of this pattern in contemporary writing are to be found
in Francis Imbuga’s
Betrayal in the City
and Gloria Naylor’s
Linden Hills
,
each respectively from the canons of contemporary Anglophone African
and African American literatures. In the Kenyan dramatist’s
play,
the youthful rebels of a burgeoning social movement dedicated to ending
the neocolonial tyranny and corruption in their country name and in-
voke the example of Soyinka and his works as one of the intellectual and
spiritual sources of their inspiration. In an almost identical pattern in
Gloria Naylor’s
novel, Willie, a fledgling poet, the more conscien-
tious and sensitive of the two protagonists of the novel, invokes Soyinka
as one of a body of living and dead poets who are his mentors in a list
which includes names like Keats, Whitman and Baraka. Soyinka himself
has written about the indirect, “ghostly” influence that writers exercise
on one another across generations, cultures and literary traditions.
It
is a safe guess that in time, patient, careful scholarship will uncover the
significant direct and indirect influence that Soyinka has exercised on
writers of his own emergent postcolonial African writing and on writers
elsewhere in world literature in the English language of the last quar-
ter of the twentieth century and beyond. Meanwhile, one can venture
a tentative but secure opinion on some of the most likely candidates:
Femi Osofisan, Bode Sowande, Niyi Osundare, Ben Okri and the late
Dambudzo Marechera.
And yet in spite of this “writerly” dimension of Soyinka’s influence and
appeal – or rather because of it, because he takes all levels and forms
of writing seriously – there is an “Everyman’s” Soyinka that has wide,
popular appeal but nonetheless entails as much wit and sophistication
as can be found in his most ambitious and complex works. For if it is
the case that two particular poems of Soyinka, “Abiku” and “Telephone
Conversation,” are perhaps the two most widely and consistently an-
thologized and popular poems in modern African poetry, it is also true
that these are poems crafted with considerable skill and eloquence of
expression. This point is equally true of the dramatic sketches in the
famous “Before the Blackout” series which Soyinka himself designated
“shotgun” pieces. By this he meant that they were topical, extemporized
pieces devised to meet specific demands of protest and social criticism
and nothing more. From all accounts, these were as memorable and effec-
tive as artistic expressions as they were wildly and wickedly funny barbs
“Things fall together”: Wole Soyinka in his Own Write
directed at corrupt, demagogic politicians of the
s in Nigeria. And
going farther afield in the Soyinka corpus, plays like
The Trials of Brother
Jero
,
Jero’s Metamorphosis
,
The Lion and the Jewel
and
The Swamp Dwellers
which have all become favorite dramas of amateur theatre groups on the
African continent, all evince considerable dramaturgic skill. The con-
clusion is thus inescapable that Soyinka’s observance of the demands of
craft and technique in writing is so consistent that he probably could not
write down to the popular masses even if he tried to do so. Indeed, in
the essay “Drama and the Idioms of Liberation,” there is an extensive
and cogently argued theorization of the pitfalls of condescension toward
the popular masses in much of the work of middle class writers who
consciously and overzealously set out to write for and to the masses.
In an essay on Soyinka that raises some of these issues, Nadine
Gordimer has made a point similar to this same cautionary observation
of Soyinka, but more generally with regard to the relationship between
modern African writers and their relatively newly constituted teeming
readerships on the continent:
Soyinka is a sophisticate whose making free use of the tricks and techniques of
European literatures are seen by some as a contradiction. I have heard him criti-
cized by black writers for being too difficult to be read by ordinary black people;
you must understand, there is an uneasy conflict among us, in Africa, between
the genuine and determined desire to extend the mind-opening pleasures of
literature to millions who have had to regard these as the privilege of an elite,
and the sure knowledge that you stunt and stultify that literature, to the millions’
eventual deprivation, if you ask writers to limit complexity of thought, reduce
vocabulary, trim codes of reference to some accessible common denominator
of comprehension.
In another context, I have demonstrated that the racialization of the
problem by Gordimer in this quote is only one side of the story.
For it
is also the case, as I hope to have shown in parts of this study, that quite
a number of Euro-American scholars and critics have also expressed
impatience and frustration with Soyinka’s complexity as a writer, either
because, consciously or unconsciously, they have come to expect only
“simplicity” from an African writer, or because on the basis of a rearguard
hostility to modernist and postmodernist avant-gardism, they simply
expect and demand “simplicity” and “coherence” from
any
writer, Euro-
American, African or Asian.
It is my hope in this study to have demonstrated that the issue of “com-
plexity” and “obscurity” in Soyinka’s writings is not the overdetermining
or regulative problem that it has been made out to be in four decades
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