“Things fall together”: Wole Soyinka in his Own Write Soyinka about any other living or dead contemporary writer – except
perhaps Borges and St. John Perse – in the following quote from the
interview:
(): What about Soyinka as a master?
(): I’m not saying that there aren’t emerging black writers who could not be
great, that there are not masterpieces among the emerging literature. I
considerThe Roada masterpiece. But the man is a contemporary of mine;
we have gone through the same evolution in terms of writing in countries
where, previously, there had not been a large body of recorded literature. So
this masterpiece, any masterpiece created by a contemporary is his. There
is no one among my contemporaries who I wish to apprentice myself to.
At its most apparent level, the disavowal by Walcott in this quote of
any influence by Soyinka and more generally any “intra-generational”
influences from his own contemporaries is unremarkable, for it is a very
rare occurrence in literary history for writers of the same generation
to admit to tutelage within and among cohorts. What makes Walcott’s
observations in the quote remarkable is the fact that a writer of his stature
found it necessary to disavow tutelage to Soyinka, much as he admired
the Nigerian author’s writings. This, I would argue, indirectly reveals
an aspect of Soyinka’s impact on his own society and his own times
that is often overlooked by most students of his writings. This is the fact
that among postcolonial African writers, Soyinka is probably the closest
approximation there is to what could be described as “the writers’ writer,”
the writer in whose corpus “writing” stands out clearly in its own right, as
a percept, a value which exercises tremendous, if heterodox fascination
for other writers. This dimension of the impact of Soyinka’s writings
reveals the significance, of how andby whomhis works have been talked
about by his contemporaries. For among all groups of commentators
on Soyinka’s writings, it is among other writers that there has been
the most enthusiastic praise for Soyinka’s writings aswritingand thus
the weakest link in the chain of resistance to the alleged “complexity”
and “difficulty” of his works. Among the many major contemporary
African and non-African writers who, with due caveats and the usual
qualifications, have given eloquent testimony to the power of Soyinka’s
writings are Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Wilson Harris, Walcott
himself in another context entirely different from the quote above, John
Arden, Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare and Caryl Philips.
There is an aspect of this “writerly” form of attention on the writ-
ings of Soyinka which is more indirect, more subliminal and therefore