Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment short scene from Part Two ofMadmenis as good as any from these plays
in illustrating this point:
Old Man (His voice has risen to a frenzy.)
Practise, Practise, Practise...on the cyst in the system...
(Bero is checked in his stride by the voice. He now hesitates between the
distractions.)
...you cyst, you cyst, you splint in the arrow of arrogance, the dog in dogma,
tick of a heretic, the tick in politics, the mock of democracy the mar of marxism,
a tic of the fanatic, the boo in buddhism, the ham in Mohammed, the dash in the
criss-cross of Christ, a dot on the I of ego, An ass in the mass, the ash in ashram,
a boot in kibbutz, the pee of priesthood, the peepee of perfect priesthood, oh
how dare you raise your hindquarters you dog of dogma and cast the scent
of your existence on the lamppost of Destiny you HOLE IN THE ZERO of
NOTHING! (CP,)
In this passage, the “divine frenzy” of the Old Man achieves a powerful
imaginative intelligibility in the manner in which a deconstructive assault
on the ideational bases of an “ecumenical” social cannibalism through
which humanity preys upon itself is achieved by taking concepts, words,
and slogans from a bewildering array of cultures, religions, secular creeds
and spiritual dispositions apart to reveal the complicity of language in this
social cannibalism. The scene, physical action and linguistic articulation
combined, is paralleled in post-Second World War world drama only by
Samuel Beckett and a few of the Absurdists in its assault on all ethical,
religious, rationalist and discursive foundations of liberal humanism. At
work here is Soyinka’s reliance in his dramas on poetic inspiration and
utterance to seemingly effortlessly achieve the sort of hermetic total-
ization of widely divergent areas of life, history and experience that is
rather rare in his poetry precisely because of generic constraints.
Idanre and Other Poems– together withOutsiders, Soyinka’s fifth volume
of poetry – is distinguished by the fact that, unlikeA Shuttle in the Crypt,
and perhaps evenOgun AbibimanandMandela’s Earth, it places at the
core of its organizing central vision a distinction between hurt, pain,
terror and alienation which are unabating, senseless and without relief
or redemption, and those which, being tragic or ironic consequences
of social and cosmic checks and balances between contradictory reali-
ties and forces, are either preventable or capable of remediation. This
dualistic vision on the whole finds adequate, often startling expression
in Soyinka’s lyric poetry, give or take the occasional quirks of willfully
opaque and confounding poetic diction and syntactical aporias which
do not seem to derive from any perceptible deconstructive logic, as in