Wole Soyinka
“Poems for Hire” shows that perhaps the terrifying advance phalanx
of the “new race (which) will supersede the present” is already here
and ensconced in the most unlikely of places – in the ranks of writers
and journalists and those who deal in the currency of language and
the word. For the “hired pens” of this poem are those who take up the
cause of murderous tyrants and dictators and proceed to distort facts
and truths and fabricate lies and falsehoods, especially against the de-
fenders of freedom and the foes of their patrons. Of these there were
many both surprising and unsurprising figures in Abacha’s Nigeria.In
the logic of this poem, the targeting of opponents of tyrannical regimes
and their symbolic assassination through words and language prepares
the way for and justifies the literal assassinations, the bloodbaths which
keep tyrants in power. More concretely, the immediate context for the
poem is the massive propaganda apparatus which the Abacha regime
set up betweenandwhich entailed an expenditure of hun-
dreds of millions of dollars to “buy” willing spokespersons at home and
abroad in this period when the regime faced almost total international
censure and opprobrium largely as a consequence of the hanging of Ken
Saro-Wiwa in November. The list is long of respected or influential
journalists, American congressmen and women, and publicists who be-
came apologists for the regime of terror in Nigeria.For good measure
this poem contains a fierce excoriation of such “hired pens,” but in the
final analysis the measure of the poem is etched not in the condemnation
of those who chose to speak flattery and blandishments to power, who
became complicit with illegitimate and dehumanizing power; rather, it
is the revelatory power of the poem that stands as its real achievement as
it startles the reader into a territory of ineffable human and social wreck-
age hidden behind the lies and equivocations concocted by the “pens for
hire”:
Some, we have come to know. They served
And were served in turn. Some believed,
And others cashed their souls in make-belief.
But both are immunised against the testament
Of eyes, and ears, the stench and guilt of power
And anomy of reddening rain, of plagues of locusts
Deaths of firstborns, seven lean years and
Yet again the eighth and sequent round –
Of death and dearth.
(–)There couldn’t be two more dissimilar poems than “Hours Lost, Hours
Stolen” and “Calling Josef Brodsky for Ken Saro-Wiwa,” the fourth and