Wole Soyinka
“Conversations at Night” ought to become a poem of conscientization
hung on the moral soul of progressive humanity; it is especially powerful
in evoking vivid and harrowing forms of atrocities and massacres visited
on “stranger populations” by their host community or by zealots of
“master race” ideologies, often with the connivance of collaborators
who are themselves powerless. Against the background of such stanzas,
the poem’s concluding lines express the same bitter and dystopian irony
as the extended conceit of “As” inMadmen and Specialists:
All was well. All was even
As it was in the beginning ()Not all the poems in this first section ofA Shuttle, “Phases of Peril,”
are of this nihilistic or bitterly ironic expression, the title of the sec-
tion notwithstanding. Indeed, the very next poem after “Conversa-
tions at Night,” “A Cobweb’s Touch in the Dark,” builds upon the
suggestion in that title that even the sheerest gossamer contact with
another object in the poet’s cell other than the cockroach of the pre-
ceding poem enables the incarcerated poet to make projections which
access the spiritual grace available in the ordinary objects and phenom-
ena of nature – wind, trees, leaves. These evoke more humane, heal-
ing times and invisible, benevolent presences. In such moods, it is too
tempting for Soyinka not to access and re-inscribe one of his favorite
tropes of metaphysical solace – the spiritual munificence of ancestral
guardians:
A skin
Whose hairs are brushed by winds that shade
Spaces where dead memories are laid
A thread
Lays its moment on the flesh, a rime
Of things gone by, a brush of time
It slips
Against the dark, radial and ebb-
line to the heart of the ancestral web.
()Other poems which build upon and expand on these rare moments
of grace and hope in a volume of poems containing Soyinka’s bleakest
poetic vision are “I Anoint My Flesh,” the last poem of the first section
of the volume, and “Seed,” the last poem of the sequence “Chimes of