WOLE SOYINKA: KING AND LAUREATE

A CITATION

by

Prof. Michael J .C. Echeruo

Given on the occasion of the International Symposium on African Literature after the Nobel Prize in Honour of Wole Soyinka

Lagos, Nigeria 1988

    Experience is precious: personal experience, national experience; the experience of the drama of human existence. Our laureate is the king of the recording of precious experience. But experience, properly so-called, is not the accumulation of habits and rotes, such as produce the tiresome predictableness of proverbs and wisecracks. Indeed, proverbs are often an escape from confrontation with experience which ought to engage the persona with both his alter (inner) ego and his total environment such that a man may see himself and his world in the bright, burning and sometimes searing light of an apocalypse.

    Apocalypse is revelation, truth in the fabric of events, real and imagined. It was such an event when Obatala was humanized and chained; when a stumbling interpreter stammers his way to an understanding that the dead and the living are in communion, and that the bridge between them, like all bridges, leads not only from here to there, but also from there to us here.

        Death and birth are not all: there is also re-birth. We may have physical closeness with our past but maintain an intellectual distance, or cultivate an intellectual closeness without closing the physical distance with the phenomenon of other worlds and cultures.

He who must speak of these things must himself be chosen; be blessed. An Old Testament prophet asks; "Shall these bones live?" We know Jehovah's answer. Survival, even resurrection, is a conditional privilege. Nothing can be achieved by isolated acts of heroism; and yet the crassness of mass action denies the merit and the essence of election and of vision. The chosen one is an anointed one. His eyes are livid with the anger of his gods and the anguish of his apparent incapability; the pain of rolling a mouthful of acid-laced food in the mouth when a violent spitting out would be an easy termination of responsibility.

The voice of the eternal gods speak only of love, of life, not of death. Yet Ogun's example of arrogance and violence and aggression; of drunkenness and licentiousness teaches us a different and a complex lesson. Harvests and births, even spiritual rebirth, always begin with incarnation, copulation, intercourse. The hardiest sons are apparently bastard products of savage copulations. There may be merit, after all, in venery.

    Venery is wine, women and song; poetry, drama and the ribaldry of life. Beauty in wine or women or song is laced through and through with tragedy or at least with unease, if not dis-ease. We must eat apples of pleasure with the left hand of sinfulness; so that, like Brecht, though we know Hell will be our heaven, we would be consoled to know we had raised a hand or a gun to save the world: a gun at the radio announcer's head in a robbery which Justice denied; and more guns on the forehead of intellectuals and "fat bourgeois and ignorant and murderous generals and other besotted exploiters across national boundaries." A restless, sometimes a reckless, gun; but always a fecund pen to regale us with our idiocies at festival time; to raise the anthem of a people's lust to patriotic pitch; a pen to waste in torment, like Fela Kuti's, beyond the order and decency of I960 and the kinship of A Dance of the Forests. So the poet turns gunner; the poet becomes ideologue; the Nobel Laureate, a marshall in the first Division of Ogun's Road Safety Corps.

    Where is the pleasant recall of past suffering? When will Odysseus' s story be wholly told? Are we only to have the bright and burning fire of the ten-year siege of Ilium? Apparently so. Only stressed and tested beauty interests our laureate. Only such beauty, he believes, can last. The beauty that Achebe and Okigbo complete for us.

    The world of letters has crowned Wole Soyinka king. I am here only to announce him, not praise him. They say: Do not pound the king's yam in a small mortar. But this king is not President, but a son to 0gun,god of the un-tamed temper. Let the king be king. Let us hear him amid this gathering of fluting masqueraders. How right ... His dignity already embedded in his Yoruba essence has alas been sewn

    Into the lining of a three-piece suit.

    Stiff, and with the whiteness which

    Out-Europes Europe.

 

    King and laureate, Wole Soyinka, "we await the promise" of your

thrust, this morning.

 

Congratulations.