One of the hardest things about being Wole Soyinka is that you never get to stop being Wole Soyinka. Nigeria's most famous playwright and poet is flown around the world for literary festivals, invited to address humanitarian crises. He has visited many halls of government. But so thoroughly has the man become his voice—and it is a powerful voice for democracy and conscience—that even when he writes of himself, Soyinka disappears.
His latest memoir, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, will be an interesting test of this rule. In dense and sometimes lyrical prose, the book chronicles Soyinka's last four decades of political involvement, from his first stirrings of awareness as a student in England in the '50s to his winning of the Nobel Prize in 1986 to his final trip home after his second, self-imposed exile.
During this time, Soyinka has been sentenced to death and thrown into prison for two years, which he described in his classic book The Man Died: Prison Notes. In contrast to that memoir, You Must Set Forth at Dawn is a very busy, political story—a public life.
Was there any one event in Nigeria that made you decide to put down the pen and become an activist?
I think it's a consequence of accumulated slights. I watched many things [in the early '60s]. I am talking about direct brutality on people. I am talking about impoverishment. Then there was the passing of spurious laws or regulations. Let's say you build a house, and then a lawman comes around and says, We are planning to build a road where your house now stands. We'll discuss compensation. But of course that day never comes along. The road is never built. And these things just bring you down to your knees.
Is it well-known that the British interfered in the 1959 elections in Nigeria? And did that change history.
Yes, yes, and yes it did. The legacy is still there. Once a departing colonial master is impatient with a certain section of the country that by power or means they should rule, it becomes difficult to abandon it. They impose rules that are for their benefit.
Rant: Lazy Insults |
Why can't any out-of-town writer trash Vegas with a better adjective than "tacky"? As they universally discover with disdain that slot machines are mind-numbing, they one and all become far more so. The latest entry comes from Dan Kiernan's The Idler Book of Crap Vacations: 50 Tales of Hell on Earth (HarperCollins, $11.95) in which Las Vegas ranks 10th worst place to vacation, because, yawn, "you can see tacky reproductions of some of the world's most breathtaking landmarks converted into tasteless hotels." Biting wit! "Sharp suits, sunshine and Sinatra." Alliteration! The editors redeem themselves only slightly in describing the sixth worst vacation spot, Orlando, Florida: "Picture the pointless blight that is Las Vegas, subtract the vice, add lots of humidity and flies and then place the whole mess in a Wal-Mart parking lot ..." Better, but still not infused with the rich, tangy vitriol we're dying to read from a good anti-Vegas blurb.
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Did this make you believe that violence was necessary for change?
I had reached an acceptance about violence long before then—with lots of Third World countries used a surrogates for the ideological battles going on between superpowers, violence was a way of life. Having also been weaned not only on pre-colonial history but on the history of other societies, it is difficult to escape the understanding that there will always come those moments when there is no other response but violence.
You describe frequently leaving the political chaos of Nigeria to go on the lecture circuit or teach. It sounds like these organizations were lifesavers.
It's why I became so committed to the International Parliament of Writers. It went a step further than merely being a refuge of like-minded intellectuals. It recognized the fact that literature sustains societies.
How did they do that?
They set up a network of cities and residences which can actually harbor and sustain writers for a period of a year, two years, sometimes more—so they can recover their creative space. Sometimes individually, sometimes with their families.
Now we have residences in Mexico, Italy, in Portugal, in Spain, in France, entire regions. And that's why I was in Las Vegas recently. I was trying to extend the network. It was University of Nevada that pioneered it. But there are others. Half a dozen others.
Does writing in exile—and traveling—change what you write?
No, for the simple reason that I've had one exile in my life—the self-exile after I came out of prison after the civil war when I found myself dissociated from the tribalist view which pervaded Nigeria. The very atmosphere made it impossible to work. So I decided I must take a break.
It's very different from this last exile, into which I went with a mission—to globalize international awareness. I never at any time accepted the fact that I was in exile. It was a continuation of what I was doing on the inside, but which had to be undertaken on the outside in order to be effective.