Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka endured 22 months in solitary confinement during Nigeria’s civil war, landing in prison on trumped-up charges of treason for brokering peace. Tyrannical captors from the repressive regime deprived Soyinka not only of human contact, but also of books or any means of writing. Aware of the intention to destroy his mind, the writer understood that retaining his sanity required some stripe of creativity and mental exercise, so he disciplined himself to solve mathematical problems he worked in his head.
And he never regretted what he had written or said to denounce the reign of terror.
“No regret, I guarantee,” Soyinka said in a telephone interview, the timbre of his voice as rich and deep as the body of fiction and nonfiction, plays, poems and memoirs he has penned. “My main emotion was anger that the people who put me there could find the power to do so,” he said.
Exiled after his release, Soyinka abandoned numbers and returned to words, unleashing a prolific swath that added to his
oeuvre “The Man Died,” his account of incarceration.
Soyinka won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature and now – along with Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o – the 2007 Aspen Prize for Literature. The two headline the 31st Annual Aspen Summer Words Literary Festival, June 24-28. Under the theme, “Africa: The Origin of Stories,” this year’s event also welcomes other African literary luminaries: Leila Aboulela, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alexandra Fuller, Habib Koité and Binyavanga Wainaina.
Another guest of Aspen Summer Words, Henry Louis Gates Jr., put Soyinka in context: “Wole Soyinka is one of the few people who also could have won the Nobel Peace Prize, as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature,” said Gates, who chairs Harvard University’s African and African American Studies departments and serves on the board of the Aspen Institute.
Gates said, “Wole Soyinka is the African continent’s single most strident and articulate proponent of democracy – one person, one vote – as well as economic justice. He has unflinchingly criticized corruption in Nigeria. Soyinka has a favorite line, which is ‘Criticism, like charity, begins at home.’He’s a freedom fighter, and he knows that injustice is injustice in whatever language or locale.”
Sentenced to die
The persecution of Soyinka included more than one jail term, as well as a death sentence. Soyinka has been quoted as saying he harbors no illusion that his Nobel Prize renders him bulletproof, yet he unswervingly displays the courage of his convictions, seemingly fearless.
He quickly qualified that assessment: “No human is completely fearless,” Soyinka said. “The point is, one refuses to be a prisoner. I don’t know any other way to live but to wake up every day armed with my convictions, not yielding them to the threat of danger and to the power and force of people who might despise me.”
Realist at heart
Photographs of Soyinka depict cumulous clouds of white hair on his head and chin. He laces his work with comedy, myth and theater of the absurd, yet both of the writer’s feet seem firmly planted on pragmatic ground. The word “hope,” for example, is not in his copious vocabulary.
“I don’t use expressions like ‘hope.’ I can tell you what I want to happen, but I am not at all sentimental about Nigeria,” he said. “I defend not a vague concept, but a real piece of earth to which I happen to belong. One has a responsibility to clean up one’s space and make it livable as far as one’s own resources go. That includes not only material resources, but psychological resources, the commitment of time and a portion of your mind to something when you’d rather be doing something else.”
The something else Soyinka would rather be doing is writing poems or directing plays.
“I write whenever I can create that mental space, and that includes time on planes, in between lectures,” he said, “but it’s a question of encroachment on one’s primary occupation.”
Soyinka granted that the Nobel Prize garnered him enough cash to build a house for the first time – and enough cachet enough to advance his personal aspirations, such as founding a writer’s retreat. But the prestigious honor comes with fetters.
“The Nobel Prize is many types of hell,” he said, “especially when you’re from the so-called Third World. Your constituency balloons out of proportion, and there’s so much demand on you. People feel that they are entitled to a portion of you. I constantly feel I’m being nibbled alive. And every time I say ‘yes,’ it sets off a chain reaction: One thing hooks on to the next.”
Soyinka, however, continues to say yes, aware that his engagements figure into what he calls gestation, the time when he’s not actually writing but gathering creative energy. He said, “You have to clear up mentally and psychologically and go through a cleansing process to be able to feel at ease in creating.”
Which is why Soyinka, again a Nigerian resident, lends his voice to the current outrage against the nation’s May election beset with violence and evident fraud.
“It was not an election at all, and I just testified to that fact before a congressional hearing,” said Soyinka. “It was disastrous, and its meaning is very, very sinister. I feel diminished as a human being when votes are taken and treated with contempt.”
Words, film and music
Soyinka eagerly anticipates his involvement with Summer Words, applauding not only the focus on Africa, but the multimedia nature of the literary event that also features film and music.
“It’s always a relief to do something cultural,” said Soyinka. “An excessive amount of my time is taken with political involvement. It’s unavoidable, that’s my temperament.”
Gates, himself an author and a literary critic, singled out “Death and the King’s Horseman” as his favorite Soyinka work.
“A thousand years from now, people will still be reading it. It’s a play of the stature of Hamlet.”
Aspen Summer Words also includes a writing retreat that draws editors, and literary agents, as well as writers not necessarily tied to Africa. Soyinka’s only advice for would-be Nobel laureates in literature is this: “To write, write and write, and prepare to collect and treasure the rejection slips.”
Connection beyond life
In his writing, Soyinka examines his Yoruba tribe’s belief that connects dead ancestors, the living and the unborn. At age 73, Soyinka is well beyond the average life expectancy for an African man. He has purchased his burial plot in his Nigerian birthplace.
“I figured that’s the least I could do for myself since, once I’m gone, I’ll have no say in other matters,” he said. “One knows one must go. That’s part and parcel of existence, and you can find calm and indifference once you accept that existence, as one knows it to be, vanishes and terminates.”
Asked what he considers his greatest accomplishment, Soyinka answered, “I never think in those terms.”
In his speech at the Nobel Prize banquet, the writer championed the endeavor of “snaring for all time that elusive bird – peace – on our planet Earth.” Twenty-one years later, when questioned whether that rara avis perches any closer to the snare, Soyinka said, in a crestfallen tone, “It remains elusive.”
The details
For more information on the
Aspen Summer Words Literary Festival, visit or call 970-925-3122.
