Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment seventh poems respectively in the collection and the last two poems for
review in this discussion. With the possible exception of the first poem
of the volume, the poems inOutsidersare not combative poems in the
manner in which one has come to expect much of Soyinka’s political
poems to be combative over the course of his previous four volumes of
poetry. Stated differently, the poems in this volume are remarkable in
the ways in which indignation and ridicule, or conversely, the passion
for freedom and justice are modulated by strategies and effects of an
elaborate, perhaps deliberate artfulness of rhetoric, tone and imagery.
“Hours Lost, Hours Stolen” is probably the most successful poem in this
volume in this particular respect, though “The Children of the Land”
and “Calling Josef Brodsky for Ken Saro-Wiwa” are close enough to the
consummate power of “Hours Lost, Hours Stolen.” In this particular
poem, there are extraordinarily eloquent expressions of intimate, private
dimensions of the condition of enforced exile from a homeland from
which the poet is alienated not only because of the tyrants in power but
also on account of the effects of tyrannical misrule on present and future
generations. These private, intimate moments of the desperate exigencies
of exile are not rendered in a confessional, sentimental mode; but even so,
sentiment, not sentimentality, pervades the poem. This is sentiment of an
ancient, almost religious kind and it is based on the notion of debts and
responsibilities owed to the land, the earth which “spawned” all of us. In
the scale of such values, large public matters of national community and
of belonging and “smaller” issues of private deprivations and vexations in
the condition of enforced exile assume interconnections only because the
poet has the skill of craftsmanship and precision to evoke landscapes in
which public and private, personal deprivations and collective traumas
are powerfully fused:
The jackals only seem at bay, or in retreat.
A new pack is regrouping just beyond the brush.
The cackle is familiar, no remorse. They know
The trees against whose bark their hindlegs
Were last raised – they home in on their odours.
Daylight will flush them out, not chase them home
The future they may reject, and memories deny them
But now, they kill us slowly, from shrine to township
They kill us slowly on farmstead, in ivory towers
And factories. They kill our children in their cribs.
(–)The strange and haunting mixture of rage and sobriety, of anger and
equanimity in these lines is almost unprecedented in Soyinka’s poetry up