Wole Soyinka
setting where these encroachments have distinct compulsions toward
petty-bourgeois conformism about them. The resistance to these com-
pulsions pose a large ethical dilemma for the radical artist: how might
a gifted, visionary writer and intellectual remain true to his or her vi-
sion and impulses, goals and objectives, if he or she cannot create an
autonomous space which cannot, must not be breached by the often
well-intentioned but philistine, domesticating importunations of the ex-
tended family, and how might that autonomous space be created without
exerting great, emotional turmoil in the lives of individual members of
one’s family networks? What Maren tells his flabbergasted parents at
one of several confrontations with family and kin that are narrated in
the book shows the scope of the spiritual homelessness which would later
serve to accentuate and distort Maren’s prometheanism: “the university
is more secure than the throne of Isara” (). Later on, of course, Maren
would be stripped of this illusion that the university system in Nigeria
could be a free zone uncontaminated by the social contradictions of the
academic elites of the new nation-state and could be a “home,” a redoubt
against the forces of reaction and divisiveness.
This process of profound disillusionment intensifies as first Univer-
sity College, Ibadan, then the University of Ife, to be followed by the
University of Lagos, succumbed to the corrosive forces of chauvinis-
tic ethnic politics, opportunism and moral and intellectual cowardice.
One moment of Maren’s disillusionment on this point is expressed in
his ruminations after writing a letter withdrawing permission from the
Ibadan University Press to publish a collection of his plays. The letter
was written in protest against the capitulation of the university, adminis-
tration and main academic body inclusive, to the retrograde forces then
beginning to gradually entrench themselves in state and society in the
new nation. This was apparently consummated through a strategy of
wiping out opposition in the country at large by first eroding the auton-
omy of the universities and thereby eliminating the refuge available to
the campus-based radicals and dissidents. Writing this letter brought a
clarity of vision to Maren, but the relief which he felt was, ironically, an
intensification of his feelings of spiritual homelessness:
It was all over, and he was glad. He had no constituency home to go to but
one could be found, could be built up from nothing, or built around, only this
time with no expectations, no baggage of ideals to attempt to impose on such a
waystop – which was what it would ever be, no matter how much of a destination
it gave the illusion of being. He felt consoled that it had happened so early, before
he put down roots in an arbitrary choice of home. Two years had passed since