“Soyinka may not be accessible to everyone; but whoever writes for everyone? The mere fact that you commit thought to writing in the first place has already excluded some people. Every writing, to the best of my understanding, has its own readership.”
My interest in Soyinka’s writing is two-fold: His writing is a rich treasure of language use, a pulsating depository of culture and all that is fun in the English language. And for those who love challenges, forensic challenges, that is, Soyinka is good company – especially his plays and poetry. Soyinka is perhaps Nigeria’s best-known brand. For a country that has had so little to celebrate lately, Soyinka is, therefore, worth all the drums and cymbals that can be rolled out for him at any time; and more so at this birthday anniversary.
Let me preface my thought on his writing with a look at a few myths about Wole Soyinka’s writing: Soyinka is difficult to understand, he is opaque, inaccessible; he’s an obscurantist who writes for himself only; He writes to impress European and American critics; and He’s elitist.
My response to these strictures is that though criticism is always welcome, it can be wholly unfair sometimes. Soyinka may not be accessible to everyone; but whoever writes for everyone? The mere fact that you commit thought to writing in the first place has already excluded some people. Every writing, to the best of my understanding, has its own readership.
Soyinka communicates, and usually very intensely so, but his writing makes a demand on the reader to bring active participation to the encounter as the best way to negotiate meaning from his art. I intend to say a little bit more on this.
Once we have conceded that Soyinka is not often an open book, we need to add that some genres of his writings are more accessible than others. His essays and novels – particularly his autobiographical works (Ake, Isara, Ibadan) – yield meaning more readily than some of his plays and poetry. And Soyinka is not the only major writer “tainted” with the reputation of being difficult to understand. I believe Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nadine Gordimer, all of them Nobel Literature Laureate, equally demand full time engagement of the reader to appreciate and enjoy their writings.
Soyinka’s style is elliptical, redolent with allusions and hints, which the reader must be mindful of to unlock one of the richest mines of literary pleasure in the English language. This is well illustrated in the opening chapter of The Interpreters, one of his early writings. The novel opens onto what appears to be a street party in a shack – all too familiar in Lagos, which is the setting for the story – that is soon sacked by a sudden downpour. Soyinka typically doesn’t tell his reader this much prosaically. Rather, he drops hints of a leaking roof, the “plop” sound of rain on surfaces, rainwater diluting the beer the revellers were drinking, and dancers dashing off to escape the rain. He leaves the reader to fill in the blanks for his mosaic.
A similar elliptical design marks much of his poetry and plays. In the poem, “Massacre, October ’66,” for instance, in which Soyinka borrowed an “alien land/In brotherhood of ill” to mourn the tragedy that has befallen his people back home, he is pretty indirect in his references. He is in a lake in Tegel, Germany, where he “swam in an October flush of dying leaves,” an unmistakable reference to the October pogrom in Northern Nigeria.
Why Kongi prefers the elliptical, the cryptic to the direct way of communicating with his audience I cannot say. What I can say is that he is not alone with this style (Gordimer, Rushdie, earlier referenced, and James Joyce, particularly in Ulysses). I can only imagine that there are readers who do not want their pleasure to be watered down through too much detail and explicit revelation.
Note also that Soyinka makes profuse use of Yoruba myths, superstitions and metaphysics as well as the idioms of the Ogun deity to interact in the universe of his art. This is also implicated in the “difficulty” of his writing, particularly for the uninitiated.
As said earlier the elliptical style demands active participation of the reader. A passive passage through Soyinka’s universe would yield pretty little in understanding and appreciation.
MY HANDLE FOR SOYINKA’S WRITING
I find useful in my apprehension of Soyinka’s writing the gestalt theory of perception, which holds that the most fruitful way to sensory perception is to see issues as “organised or structured whole” rather than as “parts.” This is based on the human nature of understanding objects as an entire structure rather than as sum of the parts. So when Soyinka hints with a hand framed against a slit in the door, I see a human being. That helps to build my understanding of his art.
Marshall McLuhan’s concept of “cold” and “hot” media is also a helpful improvisation for me in understanding Soyinka. McLuhan argued in the sixties that hot media, among which he named the radio and the novel, is superabundant in details and do not demand anything of the audience to arrive at understanding. On the other hand, the cold media, among which he included the television and the movie, are spare in details and require active participation of the audience to negotiate meaning.
Soyinka’s writing for me, for the most part, is like the cold media and demands active participation of the reader to arrive at meaning, appreciation and the aesthetic pleasure that’s sometimes beyond description.
Otongaran, a Communication Consultant made these notes at An evening for Soyinka at 87 by Uyo Book Club, in Uyo on Saturday, July 31, 2021
