Soyinka's Animystic Poetics

Extract

Since his long experience in prison (1967-69), a mystical strain has crept into the writings of the Nigerian poet, playwright, and novelist Wole Soyinka. The long exclusion of his mind from external space has turned his imagination inwards. The works conceived or partly written in prison– Madmen and Specialists (1971), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972a), and Season of Anomy (1973)–are introspective, visionary, and metaphysical. They are remarkable for their avoidance of sunlight, of open spaces, and the actions of Promethean deities such as Ogun and Shango. Here one looks in vain for the mountains and clouds of the epic poem Idanre (1967) and the grand gestures of its protagonists, the “Skymen of Void's regenerate Wastes.” The landscape of the works of Soyinka's dark phase is, instead, the mind's dark interior or its external correlatives such as caverns, the abyss, vaults, catacombs, and crypts. What prevails is a mood that is Orphic and metaphysical. Madmen and Specialists is a drama of essence rather than of action. The philosophy of As provides the play with its basic metaphysical concept. The actors in the drama are physical and spiritual cripples, beggars, and blindmen. The setting is subterranean in the second part. The prison poems, A Shuttle in the Crypt, visualize Soyinka's prison landscape as an immense universe of void–the crypt–and the poet's mind, the only living essence within the abyss, is evoked as a shuttle. The novel Season of Anomy owes its mythic background to the legend of Orpheus and Euridyce. The leading characters in the novel, Ofeyi and Iriyise, are modern counterparts of Orpheus and Euridyce. Ofeyi's quest for Iriyise takes him through grottoes, caverns, and mortuaries. Ofeyi, the mythic voyager, is frequently lost in the throes of visionary reminiscences. If there is one word that best characterizes the mood behind these works, it is the term “animystic,” that is, quasi-mystical.