Wole Soyinka
Soyinka remarkably privileges language and words as is shown in the
following passage:
I recognize, and welcome the beginning of a withdrawal process, an accentuation
of the imposed isolation by an instinctive self-isolation. I find first of all that my
body rejects all objects, a process which did not take place during my four
months in Lagos. My body adjusted to its surrounding, picked up a rhythm of
the prison, accepted its pulse, sounds, the touch and feel of food. It reacted only
against things which would normally disgust me: filth and bad smells, treachery
between prisoners, callousness among the warders. I slipped into prison life as
one dives into a stream, an unnatural element but one to which the body does
adjust. The reverse has happened here. I reject everything, make no contact.
One object after another is rejected by my skin. Lying down, even this involves
no contact. Walking, I do not feel I touch the ground. The process accelerates
towards total completion. Reality is killed and buried with memories of the past.
Words play a part of it, hypnotizing the mind and de-sensitizing the body. For
instance, as the last gate was opened I found I had set up an aimless cycle of
words. Over and over it repeated itself, over and over until my conscious mind at
long last took note of this incantation. A quotation from a long-forgotten book?
Or simply the creative mind’s originality-at-all-costs variant of that familiar
theme: Abandon hope all who enter here? No matter, it goes thus and in an
accent of bell chimes: In time of evil come I to this place of evil brought by evil
hands and who knows but I may come to evil in this evil place...Thenitbegins
over again. (TMD,–)
The way that language operates in the experience narrated in this pas-
sage to hone the psychic reserves of the author-detainee is emblematic of
the over-investment in this book in the fundamentally constitutive role of
language in all areas of experience. In this particular example, words and
language encode and supplement subliminal and presumably precogni-
tive bodily processes, consolidating at deep psychic levels the author-
protagonist’s survival in “that time and place of evil.” At one level, this
all-encompassing investment in the efficacy of words and language in
The Man Diedis the product of the cynical and deliberate deprivation of
the author-detainee of books and materials with which to write. Indeed,
Soyinka’s battle to contest this deprivation and to fashion quite ingenious
stratagems to overcome the effects apparently desired by his captors is a
major theme of the second part of thebook. I would, however, suggest
that the all-encompassing investment in language in the book cuts deeper
than this and affects the construction of the underlying moral-ideological
scheme of the narrative – the very source of some of the text’s most serious
lapses. In other words, at this level we encounter a dialectical structure
of affirmation and negation, of high-minded idealism and extraordinary