Wole Soyinka
The gratuitous but also willful, deliberate evil suggested in snuffing light
from the enveloping darkness of night before the serpentine strike is, in
another context, appropriated by Soyinka to represent the “abiku” motif
as essence of willful, gratuitous sadism and terror.Thus, in “Abiku” we
are far from the elegeiac, self-divided “mockery” of the long departed
sibling in “A First Deathday.” The two poems are nonetheless linked by
the “mytheme” of passage rites which, though they “go wrong” by taking
the form of “unnatural” aberrations, are still part of the great metaphys-
ical cycle of birth and death, creation and destruction, transience and
eternity. This way of interpreting isolated but tropologically linked poems
of Soyinka is bolstered by the remarkable fact that these same mythemes
are given far more technically polished and thematically powerful poetic
expressions in the dramatic action ofThe Road. If we remember that this
play was written and first staged at about the same time that many of
the poems inIdanrewere written, it does matter for our consideration
of Soyinka as a poet to read the poetry inThe Roadintertextually with
the formal verse inIdanre. Certainly, one of the most compelling poetic
sequences in the play in this regard is Professor’s harrowing, mocking
prose-poem at the moment just before his death, a peroration which
constitutes the last, eschatologically bleak words of the play:
Be even like the road itself. Flatten your bellies with the hunger of an unpro-
pitious day, power your hands with the knowledge of death. In the heat of the
afternoon when the sheen raises false forests and a watered haven, let the event
first unravel before your eyes. Or in the dust, when ghost lorries pass you by and
your shouts your tears fall on deaf panels and the dust swallows them. Dip in
the same basin as the man that makes his last journey and stir with one finger,
wobbling reflections of two hands, two hands, but one face only. Breathe like
the road. Be the road. Coil your self in dreams, lay flat in treachery and deceit
and at the moment of a trusting step, rear your head and strike the traveler in
his confidence, swallow him whole or break him on the earth. Spread a broad
sheet for death with the length and the time of the sun between you until the
one face multiplies and the one shadow is cast by all the doomed. Breathe like
the road, be even like the road itself...(CP,–)
The imperative, apodictic tone through which this passage commands
acceptance of, or identification with Professor’s vision of the road’s,
or life’s, barren destructiveness tremendously amplifies the mocking,
supercilious malevolence of “A First Deathday” and “Abiku.” But here, in
the context of the denouement of a play which both ritualizes and mourns
the fear and terror of death with exuberance, wit and humor, Professor’s
“abiku” pose is far more suggestively ambiguous, far more open to