Simple but Great Writings by Wole Soyinka

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Simple but Great Writings by Wole Soyinka

                              

             Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

The Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka is famous, notorious to some,  for conceptually and stylistically challenging works.

But some of his greatest works are both simple and exquisite. Examples of these are the poem The Seven Signposts, the play Death and the Kings Horseman and the prose autobiography Ake: The Years of Childhood.

The Seven Signposts

The Seven Signposts, though  a poem of only seven stanzas, fitting into one and a half medium sized pages, is one of Soyinka's  most important writings and a classic of African and world spirituality as a majestic,  uniquely powerful and yet readily accessible summation of the cosmology, the world view, the view of the universe developed by Yoruba thinkers.

The Seven Signposts distills the significance of each of the major deities of classical Yoruba spirituality, execept Esu,   in one  stanza- a poetic paragraph- and concludes with three stanzas summing up the cosmology, a view of the cosmos, in terms of the unity of humanity with ancestors, with Earth as mother of all, and with the total community of existence.

 The supremacy of the human will, as "destiny is realized as self destination", is also centralized in those closing stanzas, crystallizing a school of Yoruba philosophy in which " without the knowing of divinity by man, can Deity survive?", as Soyinka puts it, reworking the Yoruba expression "eniyan o si, orisa o si", " no humans, no orisa  [ deities]."

The poetry is luminously beautiful, like a transparent flame, distilling a wealth of ideational and narrative depictions of the orisa, of Yoruba  philosophical  concepts and institutions,  in a manner that can be easily appreciated even without knowing anything about the vast landscape of knowledge  the poetry so consicely and memorably  distills.

It was first published in a booklet by Spectrum as part of Soyinka's essay The Credo of Being and  Nothingness, and eventually republished  as an illustrated, stand alone book by Bookraft.

Death and the Kings Horseman 

Death and the Kings Horseman is a suprene dramatization of the imaginative force of Yoruba thought  in relation to the  aspiration to understand and shape relationships between life on Earth and life beyond death, amidst  contradictions emerging in the process.

The context is the situation undergone by the Elesin Oba, the Horseman of the King, in following the king into death through a sacred suicide, as used to be the tradition with the Alafin, the king of Oyo.

The story dramatises the tension between duty and the instincts of life in moving plot and sublime poetry, bringing alive the imagistic force and incandscent rhythms of Yoruba oral literature in unforgettable ways, its beauty and power accessible to practically everyone.

This is THE Soyinka book to read even if one reads nothing else.

Ake: The Years of Childhood 

Soyinka demonstrates mastery of general autiobiographical story telling in this work, the simple beauty of language and exciting narrative bringing alive the world of a child from the perspective of the adult he has become.

I might be able to add to this list on reading more Soyinka works.