Wole Soyinka
this introduction, Byrd observes that “for a writer in exile, the only home
is language and the genres of literature in which the exigencies of exile
assume significance (vii).” This is a very helpful commentary inasmuch
as we conceive of the “home” afforded the writer-in-exile by language
and the genres of literature to be conditioned by the exigencies inherent
in the uses of language and the motility of the genres and idioms of liter-
ary expression themselves. This point is in fact thematized repeatedly in
the first three of the five “pro patria” poems, “Ah, Demosthenes!,” “The
Children of this Land,” and “Pens for Hire.” In “Ah, Demosthenes!,”
Soyinka summons the example of the third-century Athenian patriot and
orator who defended the cause of democracy in his homeland against
the encroachments of tyranny and ultimately imbibed poison rather
than live under autocracy. At its surface level, the poem proffers extended
variation on a part solemn, part gleeful iteration of the vocation of all the
Demosthenes of the past and the present, the vocation to be a nettlesome
irritant to the peace and security of tyrants. But at a deeper level, there is
great bitterness in the poem, and it is directed not so much at the
tyrants and dictators as at the complacencies of the ruled and, especially,
the world. This is all the more unacceptable to the poet who dedicates
himself to the vocation of Demosthenes because the complacencies of the
world at large to the rule and proliferation of tyrants are often enacted
through and by inadequacies and infelicities of language. This “betrayal”
by and with language and words is what draws the ringing threats of
intransigence of gargantuan proportions from the poet in the following
lines:
I’ll thrust all fingers down the throat
Demosthenes
To raise a spout of bile to drown the world.
It’s petrified, Demosthenes, mere forms
Usurp the hearts we knew, mere rasps.
This stuttering does not become the world,
This tongue of millions fugitive from truth –
I’ll thrust all fingers down the throat.
()These lines of the fifth stanza of a poem of six stanzas build on the
skillful use of apostrophe and repetition in the previous stanzas both to
mobilize and to renew every means available to the poet of delivering
verbal toxins and other forms of “majele,” poison, which will be fatal to
the rule of tyrants in the poet’s own country and continent. But here,
in these particular lines, the passion is directed at the conscience of an