Wole Soyinka
to the publication of this most recent of his five volumes of poetry. I think
this is probably due to a powerful impulse: simply to register, and to bear
witness to the scale of loss and suffering and trauma in his homeland
and continent at the present time.
“Calling Josef Brodsky for Ken Saro-Wiwa” is, in its twelve stanzas
oflines, the longest poem in the volume. It is a powerfully moving
funeral dirge linking the deaths (and lives) of the Russian poet with the
Nigerian novelist and environmental activist. Much of this long poem is
constructed in the form of a bantering address to the departed Brodsky,
beseeching him to keep the hanged Nigerian activist’s restless soul
company as they both make the crossing to the great beyond. This is
of course an appropriation of a motif and an idiom of traditional African
funeral dirges which, in the ritual act of invoking a smooth transition
of the departed to the after-life is really about the life of the dead on
thisside of existence and nonexistence, together with the legacies left
for the living by the departed. This is why for most of the poem we are
treated to a skillful interweaving of the “crimes” and “sins” of both Josef
Brodsky and Saro-Wiwa against the autocratic rulers in power in their
respective homelands, one spending a large part of his adult life in al-
most permanent exile in the arid wastes of Siberia and the other in the
dungeons of a kleptocratic military regime. Common to both men is,
in the opinion of the poet, a tendency to infuriate the regimes in power
in their native lands and their judicial and administrative hirelings with
their cantankerous disrespect of power, their “refusenik” resolution not
to dignify the usurpation of legality and respectability of regimes scornful
of natural justice and respect for human life with observance of the pro-
tocols of the dutiful, obedient citizen. It would of course be misleading
to give the impression that the dominant mood or tone of this poem is
that of muted sarcasm and irony since, indeed, as the poem moves to its
overwhelming last stanza,gravitaspredominates as the tone of lines and
stanzas shaped by an acute repugnance for the violence of totalitarian
regimes of the left and the right. “I never really knew you,” Soyinka
says to the shade of Brodsky, “but I cling to yours (death) because I own
a closer death, a death that dared elude/Prophetic sight.” () Indeed,
the last four stanzas of this poem are imbued with a deep sense of the
great violence of the hanging of Saro-Wiwa and the other eight Ogoni
activists. This is why in the address of the last stanza to Brodsky, we can
hear the distinct tones of a desperate impulse to assuage the extreme
brutality of that death in the following lines in which Soyinka beseeches
Brodsky to seek out Saro-Wiwa and his other hanged compatriots and