Early Soyinka (review)

The result of Bernth Lindfors' research on early Soyinka is brought together here as a tribute to the poet, and as a service to scholarship. The thirteen essays in the book are organized chronologically into five categories dealing with (1) the very early Soyinka (four essays); (2) his Rockefeller years at University College Ibadan (three essays); (3) plays published between 1963 and 1973 (two essays); (4) Soyinka's handling of borrowed materials from Euripides, Gay, and Brecht (one essay); and finally (5) essays on how others see Soyinka as theater director and as Nobel laureate (three essays).

The leading essay in group 1, "The Early Writings of Soyinka," highlights Soyinka's activities as campus wit at UCI in the early 1950s and as media activist at radio, television, theater, and newspaper houses at Ibadan in the early 1960s. There is a sure touch of style, and wit and humor, in the deployment of language in those early writings, Lindfors observes. One other essay in this group, "Alan Paton's Discovery, Soyinka's Invention," reveals an interesting connection between Paton's obscure poem "My Great Discovery" (1957), an ironic work about a South African scientist's invention of a magical elixir aimed at eradicating color differences among races, and Soyinka's early play The Invention (written in 1958). Soyinka scholars in particular will welcome the essays on Soyinka's Rockefeller years (1960-61) in the next group, as they provide an account of what actually transpired between Soyinka and the Rockefeller Foundation. Of special interest are the differing understandings of Soyinka's literary temperament on the part of two mentors, Molly Mahood of the English Department at Ibadan and Robert July of the Rockefeller Foundation's Humanities Division. Mahood saw Soyinka as "one of those who should do rather than teach" (97) and wanted him to be given the freedom to write and produce plays while carrying out his research on the development of drama in Nigeria, but July was pushing to prepare him for an academic career with the Rockefeller project. In the end Soyinka did not complete the research, but ironically, he accomplished the dream envisaged for him by both admirers in becoming famous both as creative writer and literary critic, but on his own terms.

The already well-known essay "Soyinka, When Are You Coming Home?" first published in Yale French Studies (53:1976), seems to have caught Lindfors in his most acerbic mood as Soyinka exegete. Here is one of the first serious critical interrogations of Soyinka's style, an outcry against the complexity and confusion in his writings. There are echoes of the familiar Chinweizu polemics against Soyinka in what Lindfors calls Soyinka's "inspired gibberish," his "verbal puzzles," his "mystic trances," and "delirious conundrums," referring to both the technique and language of three early plays, A Dance of the Forests, The Road, and Madmen and Specialists. Lindfors implies that writing in a more direct style and toning down his language to the level of his primary audience, his countrymen, would be for Soyinka an act of homecoming. My contention, however, is that Soyinka owes his distinction as a writer to the very source of the grievance here, his technical innovations and the charged and mythopoeic undertones of his language. The essay on Soyinka's borrowing, "Begging Questions in Opera Wonyosi," illustrates how Soyinka, in The Bacchae of Euripedes and Opera Wonyosi, was able to overcome the pitfalls of "slavish" borrowing of the European originals by stamping his own individuality on the borrowed vehicles and spicing them with native strains—an alchemy that lesser writers (witness Camara Laye of The Radiance of the King) were less able to accomplish. The leading essay in the last group, "Beating the White Man at His Own Game," evaluates the reaction of Soyinka's countrymen to his winning the Nobel Prize.

As a research source this book has great value in dispelling much of the mystery surrounding Soyinka's undergraduate and postgraduate past. We now know (in full, not just from...