The Ills of The World: On Wole Soyinka

          
Now forget the dead, forget even the living. Turn

your mind only to the unborn.

Thus ends Wole Soyinka’s landmark play, Death and The King’s Horseman, first published in 1975, with the words spoken by the matriarch Iyaloja after the culmination of the tragedy, two generations of nobility dead on the stage, both father and son, only the potential unborn child of the disgraced Elesin, the eponymous King’s Horseman, left to bear the lineage into the future. It is a proclamation of hope, as much as it is of despair.

And it is a grandiose statement to make, with all of the Shakespearean foreboding that follows such a dramatic turn of peripeteia, where all fortunes are brutally resolved, even the language itself heavy and prophetic. Not like the jingoistic mannerisms of the British characters of the play, nor the broken dialect of the local policemen in their service. Soyinka produces an innately different lexicon of dramatic speech, one that is not opposed to European influences, so much as it adopts them into a loop of irony. Like all great dramatists, Soyinka holds that much-mentioned mirror to the world. The result is not ugly, but vast, inextricable and horrific.

With a Nobel Prize to his name, Soyinka is a writer often identified with the political upheaval in his native Nigeria and its environs, a region frequently venerated by Western readers for its literary output, but rarely for its tapestried pre-colonial cultural tradition, particularly that of performance, which, in the manner of its ritualistic nature, also served certain societal, spiritual and political purposes. Soyinka should not be misidentified as no more than the spokesperson of a tumultuous time, when the very nature of his culture-making is one of social importance by definition of what he has inherited.

But, as has been spoken and cannot be undone, it is not the dead or the living that define Soyinka’s work, but the unborn. The possible futures of Soyinka’s worlds are ones of rebirth and reinvention, including that of his Bacchae of Euripedes, published two years prior to Death and The King’s Horseman, in 1973. Taking the most shaky cornerstone of the classics of antiquity, Euripedes’s play of revels, of anarchy, where the social world becomes one of violent and sensual ecstasies fired on illusion, Soyinka moves between the uncertain foundations of Western civilisation, and the imposed framework of imperial rule.

Somewhere within, is the question of what unborn will come of the living and the dead.

‘What did you do with the blood?’

She stopped, they looked at each other. Father frowned a little and reached

forward to place his hand on my forehead. I shook my head anxiously, ignoring

the throb of pain this provoked.

‘Have you washed it away?’ I persisted.

Again they looked at each other. Mother seemed about to speak but fell silent as

my father raised his hand and sat on the bed, close to my head. Keeping his

eyes on me he drew out a long, ‘No-o-o-o-o.’

This scene, from Aké: The Years of Childhood, depicts the young Soyinka recovering from an injury received during a spat with a childhood friend, part of his memoir of the youth he spent in Nigeria. As children do, he believes that the blood lost from the wound to his head must be replaced, his father assuring him it has already been done.

My father nodded agreement, smiling. ‘How did you know that was the right thing

to do?’

I looked at him in some surprise, ‘But everybody knows.’

Then he wagged his finger at me, ‘Ah-ha, but what you don’t know is that we

have already done it. It’s all back in there, while you were asleep. I used Dipo’s

feeding-bottle to pour it back.’

I was satisfied. ‘I’ll be ready for school tomorrow’ I announced.

This putting-of-things-right is a current in Soyinka’s writing, the proverbial blood-lost put back into the head. ‘Man can only grasp his authentic being through confrontation with the vicissitudes of life,’ he famously stated. And these vicissitudes are the trials the future is defined by, the future being the course of any one individual’s existence, each individual a symbol for the potential universal. The hope in Soyinka’s writing is that any one person has the great possibility of containing the hope of the future, beyond the griefs and joys of the past. Or, in other words:

Now forget the dead, forget even the living. Turn

your mind only to the unborn.

This is Soyinka’s imperative, one equally of despair and of hope.