The gnostic, worldly and radical humanism of Wole Soyinka is no apparent “refuge” for himself, not in his “Aksident Store” and, at
a first approximation, not in the confounding madness of his torrent of
words. All the same, the offer of a “sanctuary” by this awesome figure is a
credible promise and herein lies the complexity of Soyinka’s exploration
of this issue. The matter turns on the fact that Professor, like the most
memorable protagonists of the Nigerian author’s literary works, indeed
like the playwright himself, has a way with words, he impresses with his
verbal eloquence, his uncommon, dazzling use of language. Protagonists
and characters like Professor who evince an exceptional mastery of the
resources of language, and who additionally manifest a solicitude toward
other characters who are in one way or another dependent on them, per-
vade Soyinka’s writings. Such characters include Brother Jero of the two
“Jero” plays, Baroka ofThe Lion and the Jewel, Dr. Semuwe ofRequiem for
a Futurologist, the Old Man ofMadmen and Specialists, Sebe Irawe ofFrom
Zia with Love. Even the author’s father, as fictionalized in several episodes
in the life of the character of Akinyode Soditan inIsara, belongs in this
company of masters of language and its vast potential for liberating the
imagination and the human environment (Isara,,–). In all of
these characters, the gift of language and the manipulation of verbal
rhetoric is so extensive, so often brilliantly executed that these protago-
nists’ presence in their respective imaginative worlds seems predicated
on strategies and effects of language usage. And in the way in which they
inhabit, and are in turn inhabited by their “tower of words,” they seem to
embody Heidegger’s description of language as “the house of being.”
So crucial indeed is the predication of the identity and subjectivity of
these protagonists on verbal mastery, that each of them, in their respec-
tive dramas, is called upon to either literallytalktheir way out of dan-
gerous, potentially fatal circumstances, (Brother Jero, Dr. Semuwe), or
into control and manipulation of other characters in the bitter struggles
for advantage, preferment or power (Brother Jero, Baroka, Dr. Semuwe,
and Sebe Irawe), or, at their most disconcerting, into undermining the
last foundations of their auditors’ hold on a secure sense of themselves as
centered, rational subjects (Semuwe, Professor, Old Man). This general
profile of the vital connection of masterful deployment of language and
signification to the construction – and deconstruction – of identity and
subjectivity as an index of a radical, almost absolute autonomy of the
self, provides a context for an emblematic reading of Professor’s offer of
a “sanctuary,” a refuge, in his “tower of words.”
The beginning of the concluding Part Two of the play throws a focused
light on the dense suggestiveness of the dramatization of these issues in