Soyinka explores worlds of
words
Sporting a casual gray vest over his un-tucked shirt,
the Nobel laureate in literature could have passed for a
poet from the 1950s Bay-area Beats. But his questions had
the ring of a visionary seer.
"Have you ever encountered the sacred book of Ifa?"
Wole Soyinka asked the SRO-crowd at Kresge auditorium
Monday night.
"Have you ever listened to a recital of the
Bhagavad-Gita? Or the legend of Gilgamesh?"
For many in the United States and in Europe, Soyinka
said, those epics are so alien they could "just as
well be episodes from Star Trek."
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Noting that the humanities are under a
"heightened intensity of assault," the
dissident playwright argued that the survival of
humanistic values depends upon "opening up
restricted canons" to include diverse literary
traditions.
The fourth and final speaker in the fall quarter
Stanford Presidential Lectures and Symposia in the
Humanities and Arts, Soyinka drew on his Nigerian
heritage, Christian upbringing and Western training to
address his concerns about "Continuity and the
Humanities" today.
Elizabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, associate professor of French
and comparative literature and a native of Zaire, was one
of many faculty members, students and staff who packed
Kresge auditorium on a rainy evening to listen to the
distinguished dramatist, poet, autobiographer and
cultural critic.
"The main point of his talk, for me, was that
some kind of integration of human creativity is needed
today," Boyi said. "We non-Westerners read
Western stuff, but Westerners rarely bother to read or
learn from others, and I think he was asking how you can
talk about the humanities if half of human production is
excluded?"
Noting that universities are "central points of
knowledge conservation and knowledge dissemination,"
Boyi added that "non-Western productions should be
integrated into the curricula and not put in a ghetto, as
they are at most institutions."
"I think he suggested that very nicely," she
said of Soyinka's talk. "And I liked his balance,
which tells me a lot about the vision he has for what
literature should be. It's been a long debate, since the
time of Plato: Should literature only be aesthetic? Or
only political? Or both? And how do you put them all
together?"
Perhaps in anticipation of those questions, Soyinka
cited literary works that criss-crossed the world map in
space and time -- the Iliad, Odyssey, Bible and
Koran -- and sampled from such writers as Milton, Dante,
Le Roi Jones, Pablo Neruda, Nikki Giovanni, Kahlil
Gibran, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, a 13th-century Japanese
Zen poet, Sylvia Plath and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Diverse traditions
Born in Western Nigeria in 1934, Soyinka grew up in an
Anglican mission compound in Aké and was raised in a
colonial, English-speaking environment. But his ethnic
heritage was Yoruba, and in his talk he recalled Yoruba
oral epics, passed along from generation to generation in
"dense metaphoric language," that he heard as a
child. He also referred to the Sundiata, which
recounts the founding of the empire of Mali by the
semi-mythical leader Sundiata in the 13th century.
Soyinka said he still can hear the incantations that
drifted along the street where his mother's shop was
located, and he recalled that chants of Moslem neighbors
often competed with "lyrical cries of the fruit
hawker."
Nor could he forget his baby steps in reading at age
3, when mail-order catalogs from London introduced him to
"the postures, manners and tastes of an exotic
world." Later, he said, he graduated to the Bible
and its "wild, improbable tales whose moralities I
found most confusing."
The resulting mix of those diverse oral and written
traditions enabled him to experience "two levels of
existence at the same time." And that magical blend,
he suggested, is "what is missing from contemporary
students."
"I found myself entering or discovering exotic
worlds that lovers of literature undergo in their
enduring affairs with the written word, discovering even
the hidden worlds beneath the mundane," Soyinka
added.
Richard Roberts, professor of history and director of
the Center for African Studies, said he particularly
appreciated hearing about Soyinka's childhood and early
adulthood in England, and how he had drawn from both
Western and Yoruba traditions in his work.
"He was driving at how the humanities can be
misused for narrow ethnic and political goals, but
humanists must struggle against such distortions and
speak across borders and across cultures to the human
experience generally," Roberts said.
Educated in Nigeria and in England, Soyinka has taught
at universities in Britain and the United States. He
currently is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts
at Emory University in Atlanta.
Soyinka first came to prominence in the 1960s as a
dissident artist-activist whose plays and improvised
street theater attacked the follies and cruelties of
Africa's post-colonial leaders, according to a website
composed by William McPherson, the William Saroyan
Curator for American and British Literature at the
Stanford University Libraries.
After graduating from the elite Government College in
Ibadan, Nigeria, Soyinka completed a degree in drama at
Leeds in Britain, with the Shakespearean critic G. Wilson
Knight as his mentor. He graduated in 1957 and worked for
several years as a script-reader, actor and director at
the Royal Court Theater in London, composing his first
two plays, The Swamp Dweller and The Lion and
the Jewel.
Anna Deveare Smith, the Ann O'Day Maples Professor in
the Arts, recalled in her introduction of Soyinka that
she had auditioned for a role in The Lion and the
Jewel in the late 1970s, but had not landed the part.
"I am still enchanted by the vigor of his
language and imagery," Smith said. "Somehow I
knew that there would rarely be a chance in modern
literature to speak such a rich, committed
language."
Soyinka wrote and directed a variety of plays during
the 1960s, from comedies to politically charged
tragedies, in addition to composing satirical revues,
organizing a guerrilla theater and writing for television
and radio. He published his first novel, The
Interpreters, in 1965, and his first book of poetry, Idanre
and Other Poems, in 1967.
In 1965 Soyinka was briefly detained by Nigerian
authorities, tried and acquitted. But two years later he
was arrested and imprisoned for more than two years,
spending much of that time in solitary confinement.
Smith called Soyinka a "voice of truth" and
noted that "he was always speaking." She
recounted how he wrote necessarily short poems in his
head, so-called "prisonettes," and then
transferred them to the insides of cigarette packages at
night or during slack moments of surveillance.
Soyinka returned home to Nigeria this fall, after
being in exile since 1994, when he fled the military
regime of Samo Abacha. The former dictator died in June.
The Nobel Prize in Literature that Soyinka received in
1986 was awarded for the body of his lifework, including
a number of autobiographical works Aké: The Years
of Childhood, Ibadan, The Penkelemes Years,
A Memoir: 1946-1965, and The Man Died. His
books of essays and criticism include Myth, Literature
and the African World, Art, Dialogue & Outrage
and The Open Sore of a Continent, and two notable
tragic dramas are Madmen and Specialists and Death
and the King's Horseman.
In his closing remarks at Kresge, Soyinka suggested
that "sometimes the battle over the humanities is an
expression of the struggle for power" and that
"the supposed custodians of the humanities sometimes
prove its grave diggers."
"Lest I be charged with being a suspect believer
in the power of the humanities," Soyinka said he
wanted to clarify his position, namely, "that the
burden of the confirmation of social strategies should
never be placed on the shoulders of the humanities."
"There is relevance in the universe that will not
remain static or hermetically sealed," he said.
"Literature will always scale the boundaries that
ideologues and nationalists erect." SR
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