Wole Soyinka
writer’s corpus of poetry, to encounter many poems which read nothing
like the Soyinka we have come to expect from the accumulated critical
commentary of more than three decades.
In the light of this critical orthodoxy on Soyinka’s poetry, taking a
measure of his merits and stature as a poet often depends on which
side the critic or interpreter stands in a critical line which has been
drawn in the sand on the question of the alleged forbidding obscurity,
complexity or inaccessibility of much of the long and short pieces in his
five volumes of poetry. Behind the formalism of this strong divide in
the critical reception of Soyinka’s poetry is the apparent consensus on
the presumed burden of the modern African poet to both her African
roots and her audience. For the underlying premise of this consensus is
the view that “complexity” or “obscurity” constitutes a form of cultural
deracination, a divorce from the nourishing wellsprings of traditional
oral poetry and from the often asserted public vocation of poetry in
Africa and the developing world.It is perhaps on account of this factor
that though he has not particularly cared to refute the charge of the
“obscurity” or “complexity” of his poetry, a spirited disavowal of the
charge of divorce from oral, communal roots and from a public vocation
is a theme that recurs in nearly all of the three or four essays of Soyinka
dealing exclusively or substantially with poetry and the search for a vital
poetics in modern African writing.We find this refutation in a forceful
articulation in Soyinka’s careful delineation of the features and qualities
of traditional African poetry in the following passage from his essay,
“Neo-Tarzanism: the Poetics of Pseudo-Tradition”:
Traditional African poetry is not merely those verses which, being easiest to
translate, have found their way into anthologies and school texts; it is not merely
those lyrics, which, because they are favorites at Festivals of the Arts haunted
by ethnologists with tape recorders, supply the readiest source-material for up-
rooted academics; nor is it restricted solely to the praise of yams and gods,
invocations of blessings and evocations of the pristine. Traditional poetry is all
of this; it is however also to be found in the very technique of riddles, in the phar-
macology of healers, in the utterance of the possessed medium, in the enigmas
of diviners, in the liturgy of divine and cultic mysteries...in the unique tem-
per of world comprehension that permeates language for the truly immersed –
from the Ifa priest to the haggler in the market, inspired perhaps by economic
frustration! (ADO,)
The ringing assertion in this apologia that poetry transcends the
generic boundaries of versification, that it finds habitation and expres-
sion in diverse specialized and non-specialized media and contexts was