Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment indifferent world, a world of “millions fugitive from truth,” a world where
“mere forms usurp the hearts” of otherwise decent people, turning their
feeble protests against tyranny “out there” in Africa “mere rasps.” That
Soyinka can in this and other poems in this volume turn the towering
anger of his despair at the human cost of the brutal misrule of tyrants
in Africa on the world of “outsiders” (the title of the volume) is both be-
cause our world is so interconnected now that “outsiders” and “insiders”
are co-implicated in the state of things everywhere in the world, and
equally important, because Soyinka is totally unsparing on the culpa-
bility, the responsibility of the “insiders” of his homeland and continent
for the desolation caused by the long, seemingly interminable misrule of
the tyrants.
“The Children of this Land” and “Pens for Hire” are nearly un-
bearable for the power of their evocation of this desolation in Abacha’s
Nigeria and much of contemporary Africa. In the introduction to the
volume, Rudolph Byrd writes of “majesties of language” in this volume;
perhaps nowhere else in the volume are these more evident than in these
two poems. “The Children of this Land” attempts a reckoning of the
scope of loss and dispossession that are the bequest of the young of a
country whose great historical misfortune it is to fall prey to marauding
rulers who come in an unending succession of one brutal and mediocre
tyrant after another. Part elegy for loss on this monumental scale and part
righteous excoriation for those whose complacencies and lack of acuity
have made ruination and desolation of such proportions possible, “The
Children of this Land” is ultimately a cautionary, prophetic national al-
legory. This particular dimension of the poem assumes its most graphic
and chastening expression in the fourth of the five stanzas of the poem:
These are the offspring of the dispossessed,
The hope and land deprived. Contempt replaces
Filial bonds. The children of this land
Are always in holed crafts, all tortoise skin
And scales – the callous of their afterbirth.
Their hands are clawed for rooting, their tongues
Propagate new social codes, and laws.
A new race will supersede the present –
Where love is banished stranger, lonely
Wanderer in forests prowled by lust
On feral pads of power,
Where love is a hidden, ancient ruin, crushed
By memory, in this present
Robbed of presence (–)