Soyinka in the Gazan Crypt

Wole Soyinka’s work gives to Palestinians something the life-world of Palestinian letters give to us: an abiding love and solidarity for the captive. 

‘Knotting poems from shards of glass, concrete, steel bars, isn’t easy. Sometimes my hands bleed. My gloves get burnt every time.’  

                                                    — Mosab Abu Toha, from Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear (2022) 

Wole Soyinka is many things: a poet, playwright, a trenchant political critic, and a giant of Nigerian letters. He is also a friend of Palestine. I am an immigrant to the life-worlds of the African literary canon, still fresh off the boat, and Soyinka was a natural first harbour. But even from this one harbour, setting off into the thicket of his works (30 plays, four novels, six memoirs, seven poetry collections, fields of essays) still has me tumbling through the leafy undergrowth of the Soyinka piedmont—his late prose, his early verse. I have yet to ascend the mountain-tops: A Dance of the Forests, A Play of Giants, Trials of Brother Jero. What then can I say as tribute to the man? How do his words connect to the present conjecture in Palestine, a holy land whose people are amputated by apartheid and war? Beyond essays like ‘Beware the Cyclops’ which he wrote in Ramallah during the Second Intifada, what else can Soyinka teach us? 

One connection is the verse of his early collection, Shuttle in the Crypt, and poems like ‘Massacre, October ‘66’, which furnish a raw, disquieting testimony of state violence and group prejudice. They provide a glimpse of how one keeps sane in a sick world. When I find myself caught in a riptide of grief over the war on Gaza, these verses serve as an anchor, an invitation to quiet the mind. As a fellow playwright, the Black American James Baldwin once told an interviewer, ‘You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.’  

In a posthumous tribute, Soyinka admits that James Baldwin’s effusive love for the human subject—his ability to see even the wounded child in the Klansman—put Soyinka ill at ease. But Soyinka’s verse admits a parallel vulnerability, one that makes it deeply personal and that connects it to Palestine. He wrote Shuttle in the Crypt during two years of solitary confinement under the Yakubu Gowon dictatorship (1966-1975), and his flirtations with prison cell insanity leave us with a deep, abiding solidarity with the political prisoner. This love for the human individual Soyinka takes up again in his later critique of decolonization, The Open Sore of a Continent (1996). Although the Soyinka mountains offer more literary ore, here is a good starting point...

This essay features in our print issue, ‘The Enduring Voice of Wole Soyinka’, and is available to read for free, courtesy of our funding partner, The Open Society Foundations.

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