Expanding the Vision of Humanity: Soyinka the Artist

The crowd at Cody's, Berkeley's legendary bookshop, is multicolored in every way – skin, clothing, headgear. On this Saturday night, over 100 people have filled the upstairs space to see and hear Wole Soyinka read from his new memoir: "You Must Set Forth At Dawn." The chairs are all taken. People stand at the back, pressed up against display tables and bookshelves.

When Soyinka enters the room, his trademark shock of white hair moves like a beacon to the podium. At 70 years old, he has been through gruelling physical trials, including 22 months in solitary confinement under the Abacha regime. He's on a book tour so jam-packed with interviews, readings, signings, speaking engagements, it would exhaust a 25-year old. And even more tiring, one would imagine, is the recurrence of the same questions, over and over, at every appearance:

What do you think about the conflict over oil in Nigeria?
Is there hope for democracy in Nigeria? In Africa?
What are the responsibilities of The African Writer?
What Can We Do About Darfur?

Also recurrent in every audience: the self-important windbags who don't even have a question. Who simply want to trumpet their nanosecond of African Experience:

"I was in Ghana in the Peace Corps in 1972..."

"I visited your country in 1981 and I was told it was a very dangerous place for Americans…"

Yet, he fields them all. With grace, humor, energy, presence, attention. Stays awake. Stays engaged. Stays responsive.

Tonight, he reads an excerpt that describes his departure from Nigeria, 10 years ago, by "shall we say, an unorthodox route". A 10-hour journey by pillion on the back of a motorbike, through bush and forest via smugglers' routes, across the border. He describes the very real physical dangers and hardships: branches slashing his face in pitch darkness, risk of capture; then renders them surreal with an equally vivid evocation of the two fantasies clung to throughout the journey: a long, cold shower, followed by a long, cold beer.

His firm resonant actor's voice reminds us of his decades in theatre. It has an unhurried, hypnotic quality that redeems his frequently-rambling, verbose sentences that can seem clunky and tedious on the page. He draws out syllables, "agonized in-ten-si-ty"; aerates the prose with pauses, visibly savours the memories his words conjure up for him. "I'll sing the praises of whatever brings me solace."

So a terrifying flight into exile also becomes an ode to beer, an adventure story. The passage could be a metaphor for Soyinka's own life and work, marked by his capacity to hymn the tiny comforts of life, the minutiae of human longings, as a defiant counterpoint to the larger oppressive forces of history.

Questions about his work as an artist bring out the different strands of thought that have made up his opus.

Q: African literature in past decades has focused overwhelmingly on the encounter between African and European culture. What are African writers most concerned with today?

A: We've moved into a stage of internal probing. An inquiry into the internal states of contradiction that have prompted the state of affairs on the continent. Issues of power, and the alienation from power, of the people being governed. We're really probing into the social interstices of our being, the philosophical givens. We've become far more inward looking over the last few decades.

Q: Africa is frequently discussed generically, as a single continent, ignoring the multiple nations and cultures.

A: This is not just a mistake the West makes. Even some African intellectuals do it as an act of choice – a sensibility that denotes unity – "don't split up Africa – we're one." It's a nice sentiment, but it lacks a basis of reality.

Q: You write in English, but what is your relationship to your mother tongue?

A: Colonial language was forced upon us. Just as colonial boundaries were enforced to serve administrative and economic needs of the colonial power. After independence, these new nations required, for the same administrative, economic, legislative purposes, a national language. Which was usually the colonial language – English, or French, or Portuguese.

So my generation grew up bilingual. We had our mother tongue, and then we had English – the language of exchange, mobilization, commerce, courts. From a political aspect, it was also the language of unity.

Q: Is Heinemann's African Writers Series broad enough to cover West Africa literature adequately?

A: The series is very uneven. While it did pioneering work, it also tended to do away with standards. That was why I originally refused to be published by it. But it was also a marvelous instrument for giving new voices an avenue for publication.

Q. What are the roles and responsibilities of the African writer who lives abroad?

A: The same as the role of the writer in any part of the world. Which is no different from the role of the bricklayer, or mason, or carpenter – that is, the role of a citizen. A human being, a community member.

The writer has one advantage: the tool of instant communication. As a citizen, the writer's role is to inform, sometimes to entertain. When I seek something to read, I don't reach for a political tract, I reach for a poem, a beautiful poem. But the very act of entering another's experience enlarges and strengthens me to return to the cauldron of political engagement.

So as a writer, you must find a way to enlarge your vision of humanity.

* * * *

Many might say that with the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Soyinka reached the apogee of achievement as an artist. He could afford to rest on his laurels. But he continues to delight in new adventures, to bring undiminished zest to his face-to-face encounters with audiences around the world. Perhaps this appetite for dialogue, this sustained creative energy, are the finest testaments to his work. They are living proof that art can, and does, revitalize, rejuvenate, reinvent, in the face of all challenges.

I want whatever he's on. And I want to still be on it when I'm seventy.

* Shailja Patel is Kenyan poet, writer, and spoken word theater artist. Visit her at

* Please send comments to [email protected]