A Picture of the Big Apple

Good old New York. The same old wench of a city. Elevated racketing over you' head. Subway bellowing under you' feet.

—Claude Mckay, Home to Harlem

In the section "New York, U.S.A.," of Mandela's Earth and Other Poems, Wole Soyinka sculpts a verbal portrait of New York City and projects an image of the United States. He adopts an overtly ritualistic approach and refuses to take any definite ideological position. Maxim Gorky's representation of New York in The City of the Yellow Devil foregrounds the Marxian image of money as a universal whore that corrupts all, and is basically a critique of capitalism from solely the socialist perspective. So are Vladimir Mayakovsky's poems about the US. On the contrary, in O. Henry's New York, capitalism is conceived of as a politicoeconomic system with a human face and a guarantee of personal freedom. Brendan Behan's New York is a celebration of the "friendliest," "the greatest city on the face of God's earth," and "the wonder of the world" (13, 12). What appears contemptible and despicable to Gorky, Soyinka, and Mayakovsky about New York is perceived by O. Henry and Brendan Behan, both humorists, as the spice of life. The approach adopted by Soyinka rather suppresses the humorous.

Whatever differences do appear in the diverse portraits of the city, one thing stands out clearly: New York is great. It does not matter that some of the writers try vainly to hide the fact. The city leaves a strong impression on their minds, which is why they care to write about it. Rapturously enamored of the city, Brendan Behan's wife likens it to "a fancy fair" and considers anybody who is not impressed by its skyline either "half blind" or "simply a liar" (Brendan 13).

Broken down into five units and conceived as an initiation rite, the poem "New York, U.S.A." takes the form of a travelogue. It reads like Soyinka's covert retort to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and similar colonial texts about Africa. It is extremely difficult, if not indeed impossible, to determine what part of the picture represents the poet's direct experience in the US and what part derives from books and other sources of information about the country.

Aptly titled "Initiation," the first unit takes the poet-protagonist through airport rituals. Its first stanza introduces most of the problems discussed in the poem. The aircraft noise, the "disordered echoes" of feet of disgorged passengers walking away from the plane, the "multilingual queues," the "COLOR CODES" signs, the "tight tunnels," and duty-free shops coupled with the huge billboards initiate the poet into the menace of noise, the history of genocide, slavery, and other forms of methodical madness that continue to haunt the country, the fact of cultural multiplicity or ethnic compartmentalization, the reality of racism, rigid immigration controls, and lurid but deceptive advertising, respectively, in New York (37-38). The cryptic and highly suggestive style is greatly enhanced by the use of the second-person singular pronoun, which makes it appear as though the poet were not the initiand.

Soyinka draws an analogy between the ancient Roman Empire and the modern American society. The link is lust for economic and political power, randy pleasures, and perilous pastimes. A parody of the labyrinths of ancient Crete, the tight immigration tunnels lead the passengers out into the open, free, and permissive society where the Machine waits patiently to grind and consume them: "A lion prowls beyond to feed these Romans' lust. / Or a minotaur?" (37). The two animal images signify the industrial complex and connote that the capitalist system is cannibalistic. The minotaur metaphor portrays the city as a perplexing paradox: a strange synthesis of the savage and the civilized.

The efficient Philistines and improved savages who, possessed by power and lured by the lust for violence, want to destroy the world with...