Wole Soyinka

1) His Biography:

Wole Soyinka was born on July 13, 1934, in Abeokuta, a city in western Nigeria close to Ibadan. Following his pre-university studies at a Government College in Ibadan in 1954, he pursued his studies at the University of Leeds, where he later earned his PhD in 1973. He worked as a dramaturg at the Royal Court Theatre in London from 1958 to 1959 during his six years in England. After receiving a Rockefeller scholarship in 1960, he went back to Nigeria to study African play.

He also taught literature and drama at several institutions in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where he had been a professor of comparative literature since 1975. He founded the theatre companies “The 1960 Masks” in 1960 and “Orisun Theatre Company” in 1964. He has also produced his own plays and performed in both groups’ productions. He has occasionally served as a visiting professor at Yale, Cambridge, and Sheffield universities.

Soyinka called for a cease-fire in an article during the Nigerian civil war. Due to this, he was detained in 1967 on suspicion of plotting with the Biafra separatists and incarcerated as a political prisoner for 22 months, from 1967 to 1969. There are roughly 20 works by Soyinka, including plays, books, and poetry. He uses an expansive and verbally complex literary style when writing in English.

As a playwright, Soyinka has drawn inspiration from a variety of authors, including the Irish writer J.M. Synge, but his work is most closely associated with the traditional popular African theatre, which combines dance, song, and action. Ogun, the god of iron and war, is at the centre of the Yoruba (his own tribe) mythology on which he bases his writing. His early plays, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel (a light comedy), which were produced in Ibadan in 1958 and 1959 and were published in 1963, were written when he was living in London.

His satirical comedies include Kongi’s Harvest (performed in 1965, published in 1963), The Trial of Brother Jero (performed in 1960, published in 1963), A Dance of the Forests (performed in 1960, published in 1963), Jero’s Metamorphosis (performed in 1974, published in 1973), and Madmen and Specialists (performed 1970, published 1971).

In addition to “The Swamp Dwellers”, serious philosophical plays by Soyinka include The Road (1965), Death and the King’s Horseman performed 1976, publ. 1975), and The Strong Breed (performed in 1966; published in 1963). He rewrote The Bacchae of Euripides (1973) for the African stage, and in Opera Wonyosi (1977; published 1981), he drew inspiration from John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. The most recent theatrical works by Soyinka are Requiem for a Futurologist (1985) and A Play of Giants (1984).

Six Nigerian intellectuals discuss and interpret their experiences in Africa in Soyinka’s two novels, The Interpreters (1965), which is a narratively complex work compared to Joyce’s and Faulkner’s, and Season of Anomy (1973), which is based on the author’s thoughts while he was imprisoned and contrasts the Orpheus and Euridice myth with Yoruba mythology. The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972) and Aké (1981), a memoir of his early years, are entirely autobiographical and prominently feature his parents’ tenderness and involvement in their son.

Collections of literary essays include Myth, Literature, and the African World (1975). Idanre, and Other Poems (1967), Poems from Prison (1969), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972), the lengthy poem Ogun Abibiman (1976), Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems are collections of Soyinka’s poems that have a strong relationship to his plays.

2) Main Works:

The Lion and the Jewel:

Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel was first presented in Ibadan in 1959. It was presented at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1966. In the drama, the lion Baroka battles with the contemporary Lakunle for the opportunity to wed Sidi, the play’s titular Jewel. Lakunle is portrayed as the more civilized counterpart to Baroka. He takes it upon himself to modernize his society and alter its social mores simply because he can. Oxford University Press initially released the play’s transcript in 1962. Through the play, Soyinka emphasizes the corrupted African cultural issue and how young people should embrace the original African culture.

Season of Anomy:

This book draws inspiration from Soyinka’s time spent behind bars. The book discusses the part that individuals can play and how they can influence social change. The four main protagonists take numerous efforts to combat Nigerian society’s corruption.

The Strong Breed:

One of Wole Soyinka’s most well-known dramas is The Strong Breed. It is a tragedy that results in a person giving their life for the good of the group. The drama is based on the Yoruba festival custom of egungun, in which a villager serves as the community’s scapegoat and is banished from society after carrying out its wickedness. The main character in the drama, Eman, accepts the role of “carrier” while knowing it will lead to punishment and banishment. He does this to save a young imbecile from suffering the same fate. As Eman runs away, the ceremony takes an unexpected turn. His assailants lay a trap for him, which leads to his demise.

The Interpreters:

The book takes place primarily in Lagos in 1960s post-independence and pre-civil war Nigeria. The protagonists of the book are Egbo, a clerk in the foreign ministry, Bandele, a professor at a university, Sagoe, a journalist, Sekoni, a sculptor who used to be an engineer, and Kola, an artist. They were buddies in high school, traveled to other countries to study, and then came back to Nigeria to begin middle-class careers.

Madmen and Specialists:

Soyinka’s play Madmen and Specialists, which explores “man’s inhumanity and pervasive corruption in structures of power,” is regarded as his most depressing work. The villain of the story is the unscrupulous expert Dr. Bero, who tortures and imprisons his father the doctor.

Death and the King’s Horseman:

Wole Soyinka’s drama, Death and the King’s Horseman, is based on a true story that occurred in Nigeria during the colonial era: the colonial authorities stopped a Yoruba King’s horseman from committing ritual suicide. In addition to the colonial authorities’ intervention, Soyinka questions the horseman’s personal conviction towards suicide, providing a challenge that upsets the harmony of the society.

3) Main Themes in His Writings:

Soyinka’s Pessimism:

This pessimism is the outcome of Soyinka’s efforts to heal after 22 months in solitary confinement. Soyinka endured the experience of losing communication with society for nearly two years after being imprisoned without a specific charge being brought against him. As Soyinka highlights problems with Nigerian society, “Procession” represents this battle. In the poetry, the destructive impacts of colonialism on Nigerians are examined. Soyinka seeks to convey core thoughts about the function of an artist in society by using this pessimism for a specific goal. He feels it is his duty to bring injustice to the attention of the Nigerian people.

Soyinka believes that artists are persons who “cannot be withdrawn or isolated — he is part of his society and may have to try to change it, but never easily, never without a deep and possibly self-protective scepticism”. Soyinka succeeds in his mission to use literature as a tool for social change even though this poem has a depressing tone.

Soyinka makes the argument that colonialism began with the missionaries who imposed their views on other nations, thinking their teachings and practices were universal, in the opening section of the poem, “Procession.” They recognized how different the two cultures were when they came across the indigenous, and “glances that would sometimes conjure up a drawbridge raised but never lowered between their gathering and my sway” were described.

The Nigerians felt superior to the Europeans because they did not appreciate other cultures. As a result, they became the unintentional Chimes of Silence, the inferior race in their own nation. Soyinka disparages the missionaries’ achievements and expressly disagrees with their ostensibly warm introduction into Nigeria. His incisive poetry exhorts all of his readers to reconsider the situation in Nigeria and to understand just how they have been victimized by these “innocent” people.

A different interpretation of the shuttle might centre on Soyinka’s personal experiences with loneliness and helplessness while he was incarcerated. He attempts to generalize his personal feelings in this situation to encompass all Nigerians. This method is also used by Wordsworth and Shelley in their poetry in an effort to convey their experiences to the reader. This approach further exemplifies Soyinka’s perspective on the function of the artist. He thinks that by reliving his own experiences, the author has a duty to instruct his readers. Soyinka’s stay in solitary prison helped him understand the inequality of the current unequal situation in Nigeria when writing “Procession.” Soyinka used this poem as a means of examining the reasons behind the disparities between Nigerians and Westerners, as well as the degree to which these disparities have permeated contemporary society.

Colonialism in Soyinka:

In spite of his criticism of Negritude, Soyinka uses African stories, especially those from his own Yoruba culture, to explain Negritude in the best meaning. As a result, there seems to be a conflict between his views on Negritude and the fact that he accepts mainstream African culture in his writings. Soyinka succumbs to the prevalent ideology of Negritude—pride in African history— by discussing the origin of the universe by Yoruban deities and Orgun, monarch of the Yoruban gods, in The Pantheon and Myth, Literature, and the African World.

The events in Yorubaland in the 1940s, when European ideology ruled Nigeria, are the inspiration for Soyinka’s drama Death and the King’s Horseman, in which he contrasts European and Yoruba ideas of personal honour and self-sacrifice that he renders unconciliable.

Soyinka’s usage of African mythology in this section of his writing is “part of an active, dynamic, liberating African culture and political assertion”. According to “Wole Soyinka and the Nobel Prize for Literature”, “there is a double focus in the play, almost as if the world of British scepticism and power only superficially impinged on the real world of the Yoruba community.” As an artist, Soyinka commits himself to social awareness, seeing his African heritage as a background in which to express the Africans’ struggle with the environment of colonialism, despite the fact that he disagrees with the ideas that are prevalent in Negritude and ironically embraces it in the subject matter of many of his works.

His plays and poetry make apparent how colonialism impacted Soyinka. Due to the European desire for vast quantities of raw materials, the Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to intensified exploitation of Africa. Along with the businessmen came missionaries and educators who wanted to suffocate native African culture. Young Africans came to see their traditional poetry, especially the performances with music, dancing, and theatrical interpretations of the poem (“Changes in African Poetry,” Emily Steiner), as pagan because of the physical and spiritual dominance of colonialism. Soyinka rejects the Negritude movement in this regard since his form is “very random” and he does not write in the conventional African lyrical manner (A Shuttle in the Crypt, p.59).

In this way, it is possible to conclude that Soyinka thought that colonialism could only scrape the surface of a civilization. The theme of much of his work dealt with the black nation and topics common in the Negritude movement, in contrast to his poetry, which challenged the conventional style of writing and so bowed to the dominant ideological influences of westerners.

Mimic Men:

A reference to unsettling colonial subjects that upset the apple cart is “Mimic Men” or “Mimicry.” Because they express those disruptions of cultural, racial, and historical difference that threaten the narcissistic need of colonial authority through the repeating of partial presence, which is the foundation of imitation. It is a desire that, as Foucault puts it, liberates marginal elements and fractures the unity of man’s existence through which he extends his sovereignty, reversing the colonial appropriation “in part” through the production of a partial view of the presence of the colonizer.

Wole Soyinka and the Archetype of Ulysses: Soyinka uses a first-person monologue in “Ulysses” to represent the poet’s own voice. By doing this, Soyinka departs from the dramatic monologue style popularized by Modernist (and occasionally Victorian) poets, which frequently results in a narrator who cannot be trusted to convey the poet’s message in his own words. Soyinka’s “Ulysses” features a first-person streamof-consciousness monologue in addition to a plethora of sensations that are interconnected without a clear argumentative framework. Soyinka gives the reader a verse that is both poetic and ambiguous by fusing unconventional syntax with pictures that are firmly based in human experience.

Soyinka arranges the images in such a way that the reader is unable to draw an immediate or logical connection between them. As a result, the reader must, in part, extrapolate his own meaning from the poem by letting subconscious association take precedence over conscious thought. Nevertheless, Soyinka did not write “Ulysses” as a test of wholly personal interpretation. Instead, Soyinka makes sure that the reader (or at least the well-read reader) has a framework of symbolism in which to read by making references to Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses.

Soyinka establishes solitude as a central motif of the poem with these allusions to the archetype of Ulysses. Two separate variations on the concept of isolation are presented, the first of which addresses the immediately obvious subject of Soyinka’s detention by the Nigerian government. Soyinka spent several years imprisoned, fighting amidst a metaphorical “swell of dancing seas and pygmy fountains” not to “lose the landmarks of my being,” much like Odysseus, who became physically cut off from his old life and wandered aimlessly for 10 years following the destruction of Troy. However, the poem continues on to make a connection with Joyce’s Leopold Bloom beyond the parallel with Odysseus, as suggested by the full title of the poem: “Ulysses—Notes from here to my Joyce class”. The allusion to Bloom broadens the analogy to include the isolation felt by all members of society, in contrast to the allusion to Odysseus, which seems to function better as a connection to the specific isolation Soyinka experienced while incarcerated.

In fact, Soyinka’s imagery, which is incredibly private, reflects this solitude in a similar way to how James Joyce does in Ulysses with his use of stream-of-consciousness. Soyinka compares his particular experience of confinement with the more universal sensation of isolation brought on by each person’s unique mind by making references to Homer and Joyce.

4) His Relevance in Our Times:

Wole Soyinka is no stranger to the spotlight as the first African and person of colour to win the Nobel Prize. However, the focus hasn’t always been favourable or impartial. He has been punished with exile, two years in solitary incarceration, and a death sentence for his scathing criticism of the Nigerian government. His work and thoughts are influenced by this connection to his country, which also gives him an unmatched dignity that is moving and strong.

His writing is an intriguing blend of his desire to see his native land less shackled and more alive, the stories of his Yoruba tribe, and the breath of his favourite deity, Ogun (a spirit of metal work), all of which permeate his words. Wole Soyinka is an atheist who finds it impossible to believe in a deity who allows crimes to be committed in his name. And yet, Ogun exists. His work also exhibits this dichotomy, a conflict between the present and the past. The need to. create art and the need to be an activist can sometimes go hand in hand. Some of us – poets – are not actually poets, in his own words. We occasionally exist “beyond the word.”

Even wilful, almost idiotic pride admits to submissiveness and the need to fit in. What a fantastic capture. Such insights into the human psyche shine through in Wole Soyinka’s work. His tone is abrasive. He says, “What may I tell you of the five/ Bell-ringers on the ropes to chimes. of silence? What tell you of rigours of the law?” in Procession I-Hanging Day. “From towers on dumbfounded walls. What whisper to their football thunders/Raised to withstand a siege of gloom. fading into sunlight’s shrouds? Let not man talk of justice, blame, or the tens of thousands of hands that were cursed and smeared with blood. But here, alone, the lone act/These wretches to the pit triumph”. A few little gestures with a powerful message highlight the audience’ collective impotence and even apathy.

He shares Pablo Neruda’s poetry’s soulfulness in that regard. Wole Soyinka writes, “O it must rain/These closures on the mind, blinding us/In strange despairs, teaching/Purity of sadness,” in his poem I guess it rains. “And how it beats/Skeined transparencies on wings/Of our desires, searing dark longings/In cruel baptisms. “. The poet refers to romance as “the sweetening of the soul/With fragrance offered by the stricken heart” in The Lion and the Jewel. Perhaps we pick poetry for this reason. We fall in love with poetry, and poetry helps us fall in love with love, or at the very least, respect it. But we do so unconsciously. It instructs, but discreetly. This gentle instruction would be appreciated by the teacher in Wole Soyinka