A Walk Through Wole Soyinka’s ‘Àbíkú’

An anthropological attempt at unravelling Wole Soyinka’s rewardingly obscure poem, ‘Àbíkú’.

Some eve or unholy hour in the early 1960s, as I like to imagine it, perhaps in London, a broad-nosed, impecunious, bilingual, frostbit and homesick young African felt the unmistakable pang of inspiration and produced these beguiling lines: 

In vain your bangles cast 

Charmed circles at my feet 

I am Àbíkú, calling for the first 

And the repeated time. 

Let us try to make sense of it all. 

 This is hauntingly beautiful surrealistic poetry, if, at first glance, elliptical. There is a sense of the mystical, with ‘charmed circles’ and the quasi-religious imagery of bangles above the feet, around the ankles. The ‘first and the repeated time’ evokes an idea of cyclicality—perhaps even of rhythm, which is underscored by the alliteration and the limping metre. This also heightens the mystery of the passage. There is at least, for some identification, a name or title of some kind: Àbíkú. Thus, the idea of a voice, not entirely disembodied; there are those ‘feet’. But each observation leaves questions begging: whose feet, whose faceless voice, and who is being addressed (the mysterious ‘your’), and to what end? Is it a male or a female voice; is gender important at all? 

Moreover, why, in the rest of the poem, which has an additional seven quatrains, are there shifts in the narrative voice, with Àbíkú (is this even a name?) referring to themselves variously in the first and in the third person: ‘Yams do not sprout in amulets to earth Àbíkú’s rings’; or in the final lines: 

Where I crept, the warmth was cloying. 

In the silence of webs, Àbíkú moans, shaping 

Mounds from the yolk.  

And where is this poem set, in what parcel of time? We are unsure whether to read for verisimilitude, or to look for religious or psychological symbolism; a Freudian or maybe a Jungian reading of the images of eggs and birth, bangles and rings, would perhaps be indicative. We could deconstruct; we could merely focus on syntax. Certainly, it would be possible to hinge on one kind of reading, parse and then extrapolate; the poem is ‘open’ in that sense, but the very possibility of a multiplicity of readings renders each one inconclusive. Ultimately the question of what the poem is ‘about’, if a poem can really be ‘about’ anything is left unsatisfied. I have merely tried to demonstrate here the questions that any attempt at reading without context raises. The point is that without a key, without an understanding of the axis upon which the poem turns, it is impossible to appreciate what exactly it does, and what it communicates. Perhaps in this sense, the over-curious reader is guilty of a lack of negative capability, but it is surely useful to delve into some background information to see if this may provide some illumination...

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