Wole Soyinka
the metaphoric and symbolic, perhaps the most successful poem in this
section is “Ujamaa” which turns out to be only deceptively simple and
uncomplicated in its vigorous celebration of labor. Dedicated to Julius
Nyerere, the poem is a condensed poetic meditation on the Marxian
labor theory of value, its specific variation on this theme making, not
workers’ labor but “earth,” or the “land,” with its “natural” munificence,
the ultimate measure of value (“Earth replete/Seeks no homage from
the toil of earth”). This sets the stage for the poem’s frontal attack on two
historic modes of labor exploitation: the tributes extracted by feudal and
bourgeois relations of production and that extracted by the deformations
of bureaucratic, repressive socialist collectivization. There seems to be
a slight racialization of Nyerere’s “African socialism” in the sixth line
of this poem of thirteen lines, but read in the context of the poem’s
gritty humanism, “African socialism” in “Ujamaa” is continuous with
the ethical and spiritual universalism that Soyinka celebrates in this and
other poems in the volume:
Your black earth hands unchain
Hope from death messengers, from
In-bred dogmanoids that prove
Grimmer than the Grim Reaper, insatiate
Predators on humanity, their fodder
Sweet is leaven, bread, Ujamaa
Bread of the earth, by the earth
For the earth. Earth is all people ()In the general Preface toA Shuttle in the Crypt, Soyinka writes that
the section “Chimes of Silence” is “central to the entire experience” of
writing poetry under the peculiar and unique conditions of his prison
confinement. It is thus no wonder that having said this of the section in the
general Preface, Soyinka would also append a special section preface to
the cycle of poems in “Chimes of Silence.” Perhaps more than any other
prefatory gloss on his own plays, poetry and nonfictional prose works,
this preface to the central section ofA Shuttleis the most illuminating.
For not only does it provide helpful contextual notes to the allusions
to very private experiences in the poems of the cycle, it also enables
the reader to link many of these allusions to other writings of Soyinka,
most especially the writings on the Nigerian civil war. This factor has
a lot to do with the fact that the “Chimes of Silence” cycle is probably
the most successful sequence of poems in Soyinka’s five volumes of poetry.