Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment the poet chooses to celebrate the dead sibling’s memory by investing the
“precision” of her demise on the first anniversary of her birth – “almost
to the hour” – with a preternaturally superior will for one so young.
The complexly formulated homage allows the poet to shift startlingly in
the last two lines of the poem from the third-person voice narrating the
experience of the poem to the persona of the dead sibling, boastful of
her superior will, calling Time itself, the great confounder and thief of
will, to bear witness to her “victory”:
She was not one more veil, dark across
The Secret; Folashade ran bridal to the Spouse
Wise to fore-planning – bear witness, Time
To my young will, in this last breath of mockery.
(IOP,)The cynical pose implied in the “mockery” of the last line is compromised
by a cluster of associated images subtly hinting at a deep sentiment of
residual grief – the resonance between “veil” of the first line and “bridal”
in the second line as a form of elegiac parody of conventional associations
of the bridal veil; this, in conjunction with the substitution of Death for
the “Spouse” the dead sibling was never to have suggests the collapse of
the poet’s own composure as the narrating persona of the poem. This
compromised taunting pose of the poet’s departed sibling becomes in
“Abiku” a savagely mocking boastfulness that is tinged with a sadistic,
gleeful malevolence at work in the cosmic order. “Abiku” is thus the
more powerful, haunting poem because whereas the lyric mode in “A
First Deathday” shifts to the dramatic mode only in the last two lines of
that poem, the two modes interpenetrate throughout the whole of the
powerful mythopoem that is “Abiku” in the same manner in which we
encounter the fusion of these two modes – the lyric and the dramatic –
in the most powerful passages of Soyinka’s dramatic verse in plays likeA
Dance of the ForestsandDeath and the King’s Horseman. The specific appro-
priation and deployment of the dramatic mode in “Abiku” is that of the
interior monologue, albeit shouted across the footlights of the monster
child’s imaginings to a faceless, generalized audience of bereaved, forlorn
motherhood in the darkened theatre of human existence:
Night, and abiku sucks the oil
From lamps. Mothers! I’ll be the
Suppliant snake coiled on the doorstep.
Yours the killing cry.
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