Wole Soyinka
plunder and repression. These are the first four poems in the volume,
“Ah, Demosthenes!,” “The Children of this Land,” “Pens for Hire,” and
“Hours Lost, Hour Stolen” and the seventh and final poem of the vol-
ume, “Calling Josef Brodsky for Ken Saro-Wiwa.” In this last poem,
Soyinka celebrates the late fellow Nobel laureate, Brodsky, as an embod-
iment of something Nadine Gordimer has described as “the madness of
the brave.”By this Gordimer meant the quality of total disregard of
the perils to the self in those who oppose forms of political power which
lack any respect for human life. In Gordimer’s view, this “mad” bravery
is something at the core of the existence of such women and men which
makes them uncontainable by tyranny, no matter how extreme it is. In
this poem, Soyinka says of Brodsky that he carried this “thing” at the
core of his existence everywhere and became a symbol for his homeland,
“in and out of pro patria.” From this I would argue that even though
there are dozens of poems on Nigeria in its “seasons of anomy” and
collective peril in Soyinka’s previous volumes of poetry beforeOutsiders,
this most recent volume contains his quintessential “pro patria” poetry,
his poems ofcivitas, the classical conception of patriotism as a virtue indis-
sociable from honor, justice and service to the collective good. And this
extends even to the other two poems in the volume, “Business Lunch –
the Bag Lady” and “Exit,” both of which, ostensibly, are not on subjects
or issues pertaining to Nigeria under the Abacha dictatorship. Indeed,
these two poems are the only poems in the volume written with a light,
playful or mock-serious tone. But precisely because each of these two
poems celebrates aspects of life that the poet who penned the other five
poems in the volume wishes almost desperately to preserve, aspects he
has in fact celebrated in some of his other works as part of the lasting
human and cultural legacy of his society, these two poems partake of the
“pro patria” vintage of the other five poems of loss, dispossession and
desolation in the “homeland.” For this reason, I shall approach the five
“civitas” poems through these two poems of “home away from home.”
Before doing this, it is perhaps important to stress here that because
this volume probably shows Soyinka at his most accessible, at his most
“unobscure” and “undifficult,” those students of his poetry who have
bemoaned the mix of opacity and lyricism, of syntactical untidiness and
startling eloquence in his poetry over the last four decades will welcome
the clarity and easeful intelligibility of virtually all the poems in this
volume. But this is perhaps something of a ruse, for even when he is
this accessible and intelligible, Soyinka remains a poet of great, nearly
unparaphraseable density andgravitas.