“Things fall together”: Wole Soyinka in his Own Write
The Will of man is placed beyond surrender. Without the know-
ing of Divinity by man, can Deity survive? Oh hesitant one,
Man’s conceiving is fathomless; his community will rise beyond
the present reaches of the mind. Orisa reveals destiny as SELF-
DESTINATION
Wole Soyinka, “The Credo of Being and Nothingness”
The very vocabulary of chaos – disintegration, fragmentation,
dislocation – implies a breaking away or a breaking apart. But the
defining thing of the Modernist mode is not so much that things fall
apartbut that they falltogether.
James McFarlane, “The Mind of Modernism”In his important book,Forms of Attention, the English scholar and critic,
Frank Kermode, has suggested that the fate of literature, the survival of
literature, depends ultimately on the degree to which it continues to be
talked about.Consistent with the title of the book, Kermode also makes
the qualification that a lot depends, not just on literature continuing to
get talked about, but also onhowit is talked about, on the “forms of
attention” that individual authors and entire literary traditions receive.
The works and career of Soyinka amply demonstrate that it is also of
significancewhotalks about literature or the corpus of a particular author
with regard to its sources, impact and legacy.
At least a decade before either of them received the Nobel prize for lit-
erature, Derek Walcott made a comment on the stature of Wole Soyinka
as a writer which gives a fair, though indirect indication of one important
“form of attention” that Soyinka has received from his own contempo-
raries. The comment was made in the context of an interview with
Walcott on the relative differences between influence by a member of
one’s own generation and influence by great authors of the past. I do
not think Walcott has ever made the kind of comment that he makes on