The Many Dimensions of Wole Soyinka
Writer and Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka joins LMU as the President’s Marymount
Institute Professor in Residence. Here he talks about religion, literature, justice and
friendship in his life and work.
Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright, novelist, essayist, memoirist
and poet. He has written more than 30 books and was named the winner of
the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986. Soyinka also has been deeply
involved in his country's politics as a leader and a voice for
democracy and peace. In 1967, he was arrested and imprisoned for 26
months, spending most of them in solitary confinement. He found a way
to make ink, and he wrote on toilet paper and cigarette packages. In
the 1990s, when Nigeria was ruled by Gen. Sani Abacha, Soyinka went
into voluntary exile. After civilian rule was restored in 1999, he was
named emeritus professor at Obafemi Awolowo University. The
internationally known writer has taught at many institutions, including
Oxford, Harvard and Yale. In fall 2007, he was named the President's
Marymount Institute Professor in Residence at LMU. He was interviewed
by Theresia de Vroom, director of the Marymount Institute for Faith,
Culture and the Arts and professor of English in the Bellarmine College
of Liberal Arts.
You have a
very eclectic religious heritage, including both Christianity and the
traditional religious beliefs of the Yoruban people of West Africa. How
does the traditional view of gods and religion play a part in your work
and life?
First of all, both of my parents were Protestants, Anglican. Within the family, we have Roman Catholics, Muslims and some who practice and follow the Yoruban traditional religion.
Of course, I have to emphasize the fact that I grew up partial to
the traditional religion. For me, it's richer in many ways, it's more
democratized. Yoruban deities, called Orisha, are like a pantheon - as
with the Greek gods - made up of a chief of cabinet and cabinet
ministers who are like peers of the main one.
In my work,
there is a lot of nature imagery, which is inevitable because a lot of
the metaphors of existence in Yoruba life are derived from nature
observations. I grew up recognizing, accepting, integrating into my own
sensibilities the fact that nature is the basis of our existence as
human beings.Yet how distant we have made ourselves so that the
products we use today completely debauch nature. They derive,
ultimately, from nature.
I am very much at home in my tradition.
What sometimes does not get mentioned in your many biographies is
that you've been a teacher for a very long time and you've taught all
over the world. What does teaching mean to you?
Well, I think I have a teacher's genes in me. I love teaching. I
enjoy that kind of relationship in which eventually, effectively, both
sides learn from each other. Interestingly enough, the most revealing
experience I ever had in my teaching career was in a program of a
Japanese television show called "Superteachers." What they did was pick
people considered advanced in their fields, such as economics,
architecture, archaeology and technology. These teachers had the
opportunity to take their students where they already were working, so
that the archeologist took his students into the desert where he was
doing archaeological work. I decided I would select a school from my
own area in western Nigeria. I told the students the theme was
religion, faith and mythology. I selected this because I knew already
the deep encroachments that both Islam and Christianity had made into
traditional religion. They were astonished that somebody "educated"
like myself could actually talk about these deities as if they were on
par with European and Asian deities. One of them exclaimed to me, "But
you're talking about the devil - you're talking about the devil Eshu!"
Patiently, I had to explain that Eshu was designated as such by the
Christian missionaries who needed a figure, a thing, in Yoruba
mythology to demonize so as to create the notion of sin, Satan, etc.
There was an amazing transformation of these students at the end of
that experience. I've never forgotten that.
You are so often called the first African to win the Nobel Prize
in Literature. That is a nice way of putting it, but it is also a way
of making you less universal, more particular. Does that matter to you?
I used to be very irritated by this delimitation of categories.
It provides an easy handle for a readership to absorb. I understand it,
but at the same time, it's not very imaginative. It's too contracting.
You are first and foremost a writer, but you also are active in
politics, social justice and human rights. How do you balance your
private and creative life with your life that is public and politically
active?
I don't attempt a balance. Everything I do is controlled by my
creative urge. In other words, if I am not at peace with my outside
environment, I find it very difficult to concentrate on my creative
urge. By that I mean if I am not responding to an event, a situation, a
reality outside that I know is anomalous, that contradicts everything I
believe in. There is a sense of internal rebuke which prevents me from
being fully occupied intensely in private creative aspects.
Do you think artists and writers have a burden to be socially conscious and act justly?
I absolutely resent and contest all imposition on the writer as
having a special responsibility toward society. I think that those who
temperamentally are so unfortunate as to be inclined toward political
activism have no choice but to be where they are. Those whose created
mission is to release to the world their visions, their perspectives,
their interpretations of reality in complete and continuous isolation -
I believe that they contribute just as much to the community. So I
demand nothing of other artists, musicians and sculptors. It is only
when artists bring themselves out in opposition to what I believe in
that I'll say, "Isn't it better for you to be silent than to take the
side of what is unjust simply because you want to profit by being a
member of the establishment?" And that is where I have a clash with
other artists.
In some ways, you seem a solitary figure. But so much of what you
write about begins and ends in friendship, whether in political life or
in the theater. Even your most recent book, your memoir "You Must Set
Forth at Dawn," begins and ends in friendship.
Without these friends, in many cases, I might not even be alive today.
Because they helped save your life?
Yes. I have wonderful friendships. When one comes into public
life, it can be very turbulent, very stormy, with sometimes even
degrading things you have to wallow through to get at a modicum of
truth you are seeking. It's been this sort of honest friendship which
says, "Look, I don't know why you get yourself into all of this, but
you can always hide here." That I appreciate enormously.
In a few weeks, on March 29, a performance will take place that
is based on your poem called "Samarkand, and Other Markets I Have
Known." How did that poem come about?
"Samarkand" was basically inspired by Naguib Mahfouz. Naguib
Mahfouz is an Egyptian writer who also won the Nobel Prize in
Literature. He was a man of the people. He hardly ever left Egypt - the
very opposite of Wole Soyinka in every way. He was constantly among the
people. He writes about modern life in Egypt. He was stabbed while
sitting [in a marketplace] while sipping his coffee because he was
considered by extreme fundamentalists to be a spreader of corrupt
values, simply because he also wrote about prostitutes. Somewhere, in
some corner, somebody decided he had to be eliminated. And these young
people were programmed into stabbing him. He survived, very
fortunately. But I was horrified by that experience. The poem is
dedicated to Mahfouz.
You could take a post at almost any university in the world. Why did you choose to come to LMU?
Let me begin by saying I love small universities. I have taught
at large universities in America, but I love small universities. After
a while of teaching and traveling extensively, I can always sense the
university where I would remain longer if I had a chance. LMU struck
me, through the people who I met when I came to do a reading in
February 2007, as the "little" environment that I want. It's not
excessive. It's not too big. It seems to be just manageable. So when
the invitation came, I was quite disposed to accept it.
We are quite well-disposed and very pleased that you have chosen to come to us. Thank you.