Wole Soyinka
perhaps even more significant than direct commentary or praise. This is
the incidence of perceptible echoes of Soyinka’s writings, or of Soyinka
as a literary figure, in the works of other living authors. Perhaps the most
obvious examples of this pattern in contemporary writing are to be found
in Francis Imbuga’sBetrayal in the Cityand Gloria Naylor’sLinden Hills,
each respectively from the canons of contemporary Anglophone African
and African American literatures. In the Kenyan dramatist’splay,
the youthful rebels of a burgeoning social movement dedicated to ending
the neocolonial tyranny and corruption in their country name and in-
voke the example of Soyinka and his works as one of the intellectual and
spiritual sources of their inspiration. In an almost identical pattern in
Gloria Naylor’snovel, Willie, a fledgling poet, the more conscien-
tious and sensitive of the two protagonists of the novel, invokes Soyinka
as one of a body of living and dead poets who are his mentors in a list
which includes names like Keats, Whitman and Baraka. Soyinka himself
has written about the indirect, “ghostly” influence that writers exercise
on one another across generations, cultures and literary traditions.It
is a safe guess that in time, patient, careful scholarship will uncover the
significant direct and indirect influence that Soyinka has exercised on
writers of his own emergent postcolonial African writing and on writers
elsewhere in world literature in the English language of the last quar-
ter of the twentieth century and beyond. Meanwhile, one can venture
a tentative but secure opinion on some of the most likely candidates:
Femi Osofisan, Bode Sowande, Niyi Osundare, Ben Okri and the late
Dambudzo Marechera.
And yet in spite of this “writerly” dimension of Soyinka’s influence and
appeal – or rather because of it, because he takes all levels and forms
of writing seriously – there is an “Everyman’s” Soyinka that has wide,
popular appeal but nonetheless entails as much wit and sophistication
as can be found in his most ambitious and complex works. For if it is
the case that two particular poems of Soyinka, “Abiku” and “Telephone
Conversation,” are perhaps the two most widely and consistently an-
thologized and popular poems in modern African poetry, it is also true
that these are poems crafted with considerable skill and eloquence of
expression. This point is equally true of the dramatic sketches in the
famous “Before the Blackout” series which Soyinka himself designated
“shotgun” pieces. By this he meant that they were topical, extemporized
pieces devised to meet specific demands of protest and social criticism
and nothing more. From all accounts, these were as memorable and effec-
tive as artistic expressions as they were wildly and wickedly funny barbs