Visionary mythopoesis in fictional and nonfictional prose the unusual writing tablets provided by the few books that did somehow
manage to reach him. “Books and all forms of writing have always been
objects of terror to those who suppress the truth,” he writes in this prefa-
tory note. And of the writing which he managed to do, against all the
obstacles erected by his vigilant captors, Soyinka makes the following
assertions which throw a useful light on the genesis of bothThe Man Died
itself and quite possiblySeason of Anomy:
Between the lines of Paul Radin’sPrimitive Religionand my ownIdanreare scrib-
bled fragments of plays, poems, a novel and portions of the prison notes which
make up this book. Six other volumes have been similarly defaced with my
writing. For fear of providing a clue which would lead to a reconstruction of
the circumstances and the certain persecution of probably innocent officers, I
cannot even provide titles of these books, much less indicate at which periods
of my imprisonment they were smuggled in to me one by one. After the inde-
scribably exquisite pleasure of reading, I proceeded to cover spaces between the
lines with my own writing. (TMD,)
Beyond giving the bare but crucial information regarding the genesis,
in prison, of not onlyThe Man Dieditself, but also nearly all the writings
which later collectively became Soyinka’s civil war tetralogy, this passage
provides vital interpretive clues to the special place of his civil war writ-
ings in Soyinka’s literary corpus, and quite possibly in the trajectory of
his entire post-incarceration output. For in a way far more portentous
than its literal connotation in this passage, Soyinka’s civil war writing
constitutes writing “between the lines” of his previous and future works.
Bearing in mind what this phrase literally and metaphorically connotes,
it is not fanciful to suggest that it is precisely with these texts on, and
generated by, the civil war that Soyinka as author begins a mediated but
extensive intrusion into his own works. In other words, it is with these
texts written “between the lines” of his pre-incarceration writings and
the works which come after his civil war tetralogy that the literary and
ideological construction of a persona, in all its guises and articulations,
begins to occur in nearly all of our author’s post-war writings, some sub-
liminally, others quite obtrusively.The Man DiedandSeason of Anomyare
the first harvests of this development in Soyinka’s writing and between
them they show the extremes of the artistic and ideological effects and
consequences of this pattern.
The particular dimension which the first person narrative voice and
point of view takes inThe Man Diedis probably without any comparison
in modern African literature in its completely unselfconscious and unem-
barrassed assertion of the indissociable identity of the author/narrator