Nigeria’s Larger-Than-Life Nobel Laureate Chronicles A Fascinating Life

More Nigerians are prouder of Wole Soyinka than have read his large body of work — plays, essays, poems, fiction. He is known to be difficult, because of his love of the Latinate, and his non-linear, digressive, even symphonic, narrative style. In his language, formerly imprisoned people are not “free,” they are “at liberty.” His sentence choices echo not only certain mainstays of his generation of educated Africans — the King James Bible, Shakespeare — but also his personality. He is a man who bristles and chafes at restraint. As does his language, with its maximalist exuberance. But his reputation for being difficult is exaggerated.

Sometimes his style — the mechanical density of his sentences — seem intended to form a protective shield, to keep emotion at a remove, not only for the reader but for Soyinka’s own interiority. Lamenting his incarceration, in The Man Died, he writes, “I must dig into my being and understand why at this moment you have the power to affect me. Why, even when I have rationally rejected the tragic snare, I am still overcome by depressive fumes in my capsule of individualist totality.”

But, often, he cracks open. About an Igbo woman who was mistakenly brought into his cell after the Biafran secession, part of the stream of those unfairly arrested in Lagos, he writes:

“She came forward, her hand patting the table as if to engage some reassurance of concrete things. I watched her silently. She needed no further comforting from me; the sight of my chains had done more than words could have done for her, calmed her.” The woman recognises him and bursts into tears, just as guards come into the prison.

“They led the woman away, calmer, stronger. She turned around at the door, looked at me in a way to ensure that I saw it, that I knew she was no longer cowed, that nothing ever again would terrorise her. I acknowledged the gesture. I wondered if she knew what strength I drew from the encounter.”

He gestures to such emotions, grapples with them, but a direct engagement—an open admission such as this — is rare. His is a particularly taciturn manifestation of masculinity. He writes with affection about his male friends — the poet Christopher Okigbo consistently visits him in prison — but of other parts of his personal life, little is said. There is a fleeting mention of his wife, and only because half her wardrobe is given up to his Igbo friends who dressed as women to escape Western Nigeria.

Soyinka is a food and wine enthusiast, but he also sinks easily into a kind of ascetic mode and fasts regularly. He is irreligious in the conventional sense, but his world teems with beliefs. On the day his mother dies, he is at an airport check-in counter when he is overcome with an intense feeling that something is about to happen. He cancels his trip, returns home, shuts all his windows and waits. Soon, someone comes with the news that his mother is gone. The scene is written with a matter-of-fact restraint that lends it great power.

There are other delights in Soyinka’s memoirs: his sharp impatience for platitudes, his generosity, his acute sense of the absurd, perhaps most baldly-drawn in Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years and his (often-disguised) collectivist yearning. In the early 1960s he drives through Nigeria, nurturing a spiritual connection to the road, and learning about his newly-independent country.

“Another trajectory took me through Oyo, city of the fiery god Sango, leathercraft and decorated gourds; Oshogbo, watched by her river goddess, Osun, Ilorin, Bida of glass beads and hennaed women, then Minna, scattering hordes of monkeys and apes; plump mouth watering guinea fowl all the way to Kaduna, Kano and Maiduguri of dry dust, turbaned horsemen and minarets … the confluence of the great rivers, Gboko and Abakaliki – pounded yam and roadside venison, Awka of furnaces and roadside Smithies, Calabar of fiery ogogoro (illicit gin) and light-skinned pulchritude, the sweep of the Niger through Port Harcourt, gathering towards its assignation with the sea.”

To read this lovely passage, especially in today’s terrorism-scarred Nigeria, is to imagine what could have been, and what still could be. The romance of Soyinka’s adventure becomes, also, a symbol of Nigerian possibility.

In You Must Set Forth At Dawn, his friend Femi Johnson visits him in detention, a day before the verdict of his trial. His friend stares in astonishment at Soyinka, who seems unperturbed.

“Tomorrow is the day isn’t it?”

“You mean, the verdict?” Soyinka replies.

“What else is there tomorrow?” His friend, exasperated, then adds, “Wole, eda ni e.”

Soyinka translates this as “You are not normal.” “Not normal” might as well also mean “remarkable.”

•Adichie is a renowned Nigerian writer.