Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment “Exit,” the shortest poem inOutsiders, is dedicated to the late French
President, Fran ̧cois Mitterand. This is not, however, an ordinary dedi-
cation since the poem is in fact about Mitterand’s last few hours of life,
about the deeply moving way in which, realizing that the end was near,
he made his peace with this world, joked about dying – “I do not mind
the face of death, but find/Not being around distasteful” – and came to
a “negotiated settlement” with his physician which enabled the regimen
of “time-delaying pills” keeping him alive to be stopped so that he could
die – “quit” as the poem expresses it – with dignity. We are not too far
in this poem, it seems, from the spiritual universe of the values cele-
brated in the parable of the “Not-I Bird” in the first scene ofDeath and the
King’s Horseman. And more appropriate to the “pro patria” context of the
“civitas” poems inOutsiders, there is the point that the world, our world,
does contain powerful rulers who not only know when to “quit,” but
more importantly how to “quit” so that life is renewed and reaffirmed
even by their exit.
The dedication in “Business Lunch – the Bag Lady” is to the late
Femi Johnson, a close personal friend of the poet whose passion for
life, especially his unalloyed sybaritic delight in the best food and wine
in the company of friends with whom to enjoy them is captured in
parts ofIbadan – the ‘Penkelemes’ Years. In this poem, the “bag lady” of the
title of the poem who looks and acts every bit the human and social
archetype of the confirmed vagrant, wanders into a high-class restau-
rant where upper echelon business executives dine only with others of
their kind. She then proceeds to order choice dishes which she con-
sumes with meticulous and rather noisy zeal, totally oblivious of the
incongruity of her person in that space. The poet who narrates this
startling encounter with total rapture is equally responsive to the two
effects which the hedonistic “bag lady” produces on all who are present
at the “happening”: the tacit but eloquent deflation of class pretensions
in the “bag lady’s” total lack of self-consciousness in a place where all
eyes and ears wished her anywhere else but there; the exemplary, almost
sacramental quality of this vagrant woman’s enjoyment of her repast.
On one level, this poem celebrates social “border-crossing” in the most
unexpected of places, but ultimately, it is a lyrically funny celebration of a
rare moment when the joy of life triumphs over the constrictions of social
distinctions.
Outsidershas a very insightful introduction written by Rudolph P. Byrd,
a professor of English at Emory University where Soyinka held one of the
prestigious Woodruff professorships when this volume was published. In