The Poetry of Wole Soyinka (review)

The Poetry of Wole Soyinka, by Tanure Ojaide. Lagos: Malthouse, 1994. 140 pp. ISBN 978-023-006-8. Distributed by African Books Collective Ltd., 27 Park End Street. Oxford OX1 1HU, England.

Although it is commonly acknowledged that it is Wole Soyinka's exceptionally heightened use of language that animates all of his works in the various genres (drama, prose fiction, and translation as well as criticism), all too often Soyinka's poetry is relegated to the obscure and impenetrable without any sustained effort applied by the reader or critic. Tanure Ojaide begins this study by noting the inadequate attention critics have paid to Soyinka's poetry relative to his work in the other genres; however, he attributes the neglect (mistakenly, in my view) to what he claims to be the overall lowly status that he believes poetry occupies in African literature. (Quite to the contrary, the singular accolade given such successful poetry volumes as the late Christopher Okigbo's Labyrinths [London: Heinemann, 1971] and Gabriel Okara's The Fisherman's Invocation [London: Heinemann, 1978]—to say nothing of the jubilation that has attended Niyi Osundare's recent successes—should be sufficient enough both to disprove any claim that critics of African literature generally despise poetry and to provide a clear indication of, sad to say, the real problem: the fact that Africa has just not produced too many good poets worthy of any painstaking critical attention.)

Ojaide argues more to the point when he remarks that the few exegetical essays devoted to Soyinka's poetry have all been so repetitive—to the point of being boring—in stressing his alleged obscurity. As he proposes, the objective of his study is not only to "explicate the poems," but to "do so with some unifying critical methods," saying that he will "discuss the voice and viewpoint of the poet in Soyinka's poems with a view to establishing the poet's persona" (3).

Though he acknowledges that a "writer's poems create a personality for him, which may not necessarily be his personality in real life," Ojaide places tremendous faith in the approach to poetic analysis conducted via the figure of the speaker, the poet's presumed fictive self, because, for him,

[c]ritics who work on selected images or on selected themes deal with only the tip of the iceberg. But the critic who focuses upon the poet's persona can provide a more comprehensive treatment of the poems. The persona unites all the poems the poet writes.

The speakers of the poems express different aspects of the poet. Besides, psychologically, the many speakers emanate from the ego states of the poet. And he chooses his images according to the voice and viewpoint he wishes to project, for the poem is a literary arena in which he is a performer and his readers, his audience, listening to his voice and watching his gestures. Soyinka is a gifted writer who holds opinions that should be heard. He may be regarded as a maverick highbrow poet who is difficult and obscure. When examined from the standpoints of voice and viewpoint, however, I believe that his poetry is quite accessible. (3)

Regrettably, what Ojaide takes in his book to be a distinctly clear and accessible image or idea held by the persona of Soyinka's poetry is not always made so obvious to the reader. Since the lack of clarity arises mainly from the tendency toward pedestrian explication, awkward phrasing, and at times just plain vagueness, the reader may not have the patience to follow the work to discover the striking case made in the better parts of the study.

These expository problems are in evidence right from the introductory chapter. For example, the main point pursued here appears to be that Soyinka draws from both his Yoruba background and his European exposure (while the subsidiary argument—equally sound—is that the devices of poetic composition borrowed from Yoruba ijala and oriki traditions, which account for...