Shattering the Foundations of Thought: Wole Soyinka at 80 (II)

I spare the details here. The crudity of his language, which earned him the critic’s charge of going over the precipice on personalities; the screaming hysteria in his tone and the dircetness of the language of someone who is renowned for his mastery over the English language, is deliberately aimed at arresting the attention of […]

I spare the details here. The crudity of his language, which earned him the critic’s charge of going over the precipice on personalities; the screaming hysteria in his tone and the dircetness of the language of someone who is renowned for his mastery over the English language, is deliberately aimed at arresting the attention of an insensitive, disbelieving world. Arthur Koestler’ssimilarly screamed in his report of the Nazi’s venal anti- Semitism which ended in the pogrom against Jewry. Hear Koestler: “I scream for help but nobody hears me. \the crowds walk past laughing and chatting… At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing by hot steam, mass electrocution and life burial of total Jewish population of Europe…yet being daily disbelieved”.
Soynka’s uncouth language here is also due to the nature of his awareness that ‘squalor, sordidness and ugliness’ exit side by side with the most ‘transcendental phases of human subjectivity’. Hence the juxtaposition of beautiful passages and lyrical eloquence with a language of sheer brutality as a ‘deliberate tool’ or as a style that carries little or no artistic  illusion, The author defines this latter language as a ‘hammer, hand grenade which you detonate under a stagnant way of looking at the world’. An in an unabashed manner, Soyinka forsees the adoption of the language of The Man Died as a language of future literature as the society wallows in unrelieved obscenity. As he says; “I would like to suggest that in another five to ten years with the reality of African politics, as the sensibility of those who actually participate in the process of creating change in society grow, this sort of style, which I insist is deliberate, will become commonplace”.  Herbert Marcuse also holds that “illusory art remains alien to the revolutionary by virtue of the artist’s commitment to form…art must no longer be illusory because its relation has changed in a revolutionary world”. This is in fact a prediction come true in the simplicity of the linguistic strategy of the generations that follows Soyinka, and indeed the bare-facedness of the language of the most successful of the literarture of the present generation—sensuous, erotic and unpretentious.
Soyinka’s bitterness, aggravated  by his imprisonment, accentuated his resolution and dedication to militancy and non-compromise in his commitment to revolutionary change. He resolves to  ‘dig into my being’ and through creative imagination, and make an ultimate affirmation of a final action for personal andd social regeneration and sustenance from earth—the ‘sacred core’ which emerges in the poem ‘O Roots’ in a Shuttle in the Crypt:
Pathfinder to the underworld, lead
My feet to core, to kernel seed
Draw me still to crucibles of earth’s
Alchemistry, to rock and metal births
The prison therefore becomes a microcosm of the society, filled with all sorts of sacrilege and affronts to human integrity—as we witness in the cannibalistic practices of the lepers in Temoko prison in Season of Anomy, the novel in which we shall find some of the writer’s responses.It is this non-compromising resolution to effect social reconstruction; to search for catharsis and illumination that I find account for The Man Died’s artistic validity and endurance.
Having repudiated the regime that incarcerated him as a dictatorial establishment in The Man Died, Wole Soyinka’s resolution is to help establish a concrete alternative; a programme for creating an ideal social order which will provide the new humanity of his aim. This is the core creative efforrt that manifests in Season of Anomy.This novel recreates the whole Nigerian experience to interprete the present as a way of comprehending the future. My argument is that in this novel, Soyinka, in his quest for a reformed society, concedes the necessity of political violence, not as the ultimate weapon of revolutionary change, but only as an expedient response to a violence-torn dictatorial establishment. The Dentist spells out the to confront violence with counter-violence:
Whoever first invites the other to death has his cake and eats it.
 For the recipient to pretend non-recognition of the invitation is to accept his own demise.
One observes a certain affinity between Albert Camus’s view on the issue of violence as a feasible means of achieveing revolutionary ends with Soyinka’s here. Camus’ position is that ‘the most morally respectable route is to kill only only in the most extreme circumstances, to resort to this ultimate form of violence as sparingly as possible in the quest for a more nearly just order’
The essence of pragmatic violence dominates the dialogue between Ofeyi and Demakin, that ‘self-effacing priest of violence’. Ofeyi concedes ‘necessary and this accounts for the fact that it is Demakin who is the ‘Costudian of the Grain’ when life begins to ‘stir’in Aiyero, Soyinka’s utopian commune. We can best apprehend Aiyero as a metaphor for a world that has come to stabilize as different from stagnancy. Imagine Victor Turner’s ‘communitas’ synonymity with Aiyero, a community of ‘neophytes’ which ‘tend to develop an intense comradeship and egalitarianism’. Aiyero is a riverine village, a ‘quaint anomaly’ in an anomic world. The village is the ‘unique beneficiary of a three quarter century of accidental isolation’ . It is Soyinka’s prime exemplification of ‘unscientific socialism’ whose commune always returns, because the ‘umbilical cord’ never snaps from the greatest stretch. The essence of fidelity to identity and commonality of anscestry is being envisoned anew by Soyinka from the sybolism of Aiyero for contemporary society.
Now Ofeyi is the revolutionary quester. He is the modern day prometheus, the icon of Soyinka’s revolutionary protaganist—lone quester and martyr. He is Ogun’s re-incarnation, drawn from the classical Western, Hellenic  parrallel of the ‘Dionysian, Apollonian and Promethean’ principle.The difference between Ofeyi and other such Soyinka’s figures like Eman of The Strong Breed or even Olunde of Death and the King’s Horseman, is that he does not try to save society alone but ‘seeks with Aiyero’s descendants’ to ‘destroy the existing human condition’, the cartel, a corporation of cocoa magnates who symbolize the capitalist/ monopolist hegemony in Nigeria. He seeks, with the commune, to ‘end man’s alienation through the re-creation of a radically new order’. Ofeyi’s aspiration is the restoration of a permanent, equitable value into society by sowing seeds of regeneration. This manifests in the biological metaphors of the novel (which did not quite form in The Man Died). We find these metahphors in the Season of Anomy’s sub-titles—Buds, which develop Tentacles that are Ripening for Harvest and reproducing itself, Spores. This metaphoric pattern is double-edged. Nigeria of the war-time had planted a seed of degeneration and had thus reaped it in violence and destruction—as the Cartel iconizes; ‘sow the wind and thus must ‘reap the whirlwind’, which is the Civil War. But the destruction from the war makes radical transformation a biological necessity, since ‘liberation presupposes change…(a) reaction of the body as well as the mind’.