Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment Spells,” the target is Yakubu Gowon, head of the civil-war military regime
in power in Lagos during Soyinka’s incarceration; in “Future Plans” the
event (or phenomenon) referred to is the bizarre pattern of international
alliances formed either in support of, or against secession during the
civil war. In general then, the “Prisonnettes” poems show Soyinka using
his tried and tested weapons of protest and resistance – satire, parody,
invective – without the mediation of his complex mythopoesis, but with
a discreet technical formalism which skillfully exploits the confinement
imposed by his detention. The last two stanzas of “Future Plans” are
particularly illustrative of the resulting nuanced protest of this poetic
pastiche:
Projects in view:
Mao Tse Tung in league
With Chiang Kai. Nkrumah
Makes a secret
Pact with Verwood, sworn by Hastings Banda
Proven: Arafat
In flagrante cum
Golda Meier. Castro drunk
With Richard Nixon
Contraceptions stacked beneath the papal bunk...
and more to come()The complement of proselytizing, left-identified poems gathered in the
section “Poems of Bread and Earth” is the most uneven of the five sections
ofA Shuttle. Nearly all of the poems exploit the dialectical tension between
the literal and symbolic connotations of the two keywords of the section’s
title, “bread” and “earth.” In addition to these two key tropes, some of the
poems in the section, like “Ever-Ready Bank Accounts” and “Apres La
Guerre” exploit replacement metaphors for “bread” and “earth,” often
in the form of an extended wordplay. In the former poem, this doesn’t
work quite effectively because much of the metaphoric wordplay used
to express the pathos of poverty and exploitation seems strained and
precious. Conversely, the same technique works trenchantly in “Relief,”
Soyinka first deftly building up a contrast between life-sustaining and
life-negating dependence on bread as an all-embracing trope for physical
sustenance, and then going on to deploy this contrast in an uproarious
send-up of the notoriety of the extravagance of the banqueting at Yakubu
Gowon’s wedding during the dark days of the Nigerian civil war. From
this perspective of exploiting the tension between the literal or factual and