Visionary mythopoesis in fictional and nonfictional prose being one of the earliest and perhaps the most powerful in a long line
of prison writings of writer-activists in postcolonial African literature
of which another great exemplar is Ngugi wa Thiong’o’sDetained: A
Writer’s Prison Diary.It is important to state this fact because there are
serious ethical, ideological and aesthetic lapses in the book and these have
tended to rather unduly condition critical commentaries on the work. Of
these commentaries, the responses of persons who have felt personally
attacked, or felt that the political communities and interests which they
represent are portrayed unfairly in the book have been, understandably,
vitriolic and lacking in balanced, dispassionate judgment, much like the
most flawed aspects of the book itself.More importantly, it is these
flaws which have conditioned the commentaries of many critics and
scholars who have not indeed failed to respond to the more positive,
the more moving and edifying aspects of the work.Of this group of
scholars, the final, summative judgment of Derek Wright on the book is
characteristic:
... the outstanding value ofThe Man Diedis as a human and personal, not
a political document. It is a brave and brilliant testament to the resilience of
the human mind in extremity, thrown back entirely upon itself and its own
inner resources in its bid to survive. It remains however, one man’s vision.
(Wright,)
These commentaries – of Soyinka’s political adversaries acting on their
sense of savage and unfair treatment inThe Man Died, and of critics
whose responses are overdetermined by the disturbing mix in the work
of idealism and mean-spirited vengefulness – highlight, more than any
work of Soyinka, the politics of location in both the creative process and
its complement, the act of interpretation. By this is meant the fact that
when confronted by a work of such fractured and “schizophrenic” ef-
fects as this prison memoir of our author, the situatedness of both the
creative and the critical acts in a particular place and time, a particular
socio-economic class, a particular irreducible existential condition, nor-
matively a “hidden” factor, becomes explicit or even obtrusive. A brief
elaboration on this issue in the way that it massively determines the use
of language inThe Man Diedwill serve to conclude our discussion of this
work.
In narrating how a change of circumstance in his status asonedetainee
among other prison inmates in Lagos to complete solitary detention
when he was moved to Kaduna was registered by bodily sensations,