| Photo by S. Beth Atkin |
Wole Soyinka Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by S. Beth Atkin |
Page 1 of 7
Professor Soyinka, welcome to Berkeley.
Thank you very much.
Looking back on the life of little Wole in your masterpiece, Ake: the Years of Childhood, what values did he develop that were most important for the adult Soyinka?
I strongly suspect self-confidence, and I wonder if that was such a good thing because it's got the adult Wole into so many corners. I think that feeling that if one believed absolutely in any cause, then one must have the confidence, the self-certainty, to go through with that particular course of action.
Where does the ability to master words come from?
I suspect that probably comes from a long family of word-spinners. And by that I mean the extended family, family in the sense in which ours was a large one. I was constantly surrounded, I recall, by aunts, uncles, my father's intellectual companions, all of them raconteurs of some sort or the other. They recounted episodes involving themselves, battles, conflicts. I grew up in an atmosphere where words were an integral part of culture.
And what was a contribution of your mother?
Oh, unquestionably she was ... I call her the Wild Christian. She was full of stories also, of a more religious kind, I suppose. But then she also grew up in an atmosphere of these rather gray divisions between, shall we say, the world of the living and the supernatural world. So she also had her own stories to tell.
In the book there is a facility between this world partly of your mother, and the world that the colonizer brought, the world of clerics and bishops and canons and so on. There is a remarkable sense of navigating between these worlds. What accounts for that?
Well, it's as we found it. Take for instance the Canon, the Christian prelate who presided over the bishopric, the parsonage. Now where did he live? In this beautiful, very impressive white house, which, however, backed the rock hills and some woods which were supposed to be the habitation of certain denizens of the woods. So that the forest should meet Christian urbanism was the most natural thing in the world. And I think that there were narratives in which the priest himself had to confront, shall we say, the equivalent of what you might call the goblins of the woods. And he had to bring his own Christian powers and negotiate a kind of existence with them. This was a very common phenomenon of my childhood.
What was the contribution of the Yoruba culture of your ancestors?
Well, I was thoroughly surrounded and immersed in aspects of the Yoruba culture. Even the Christians understood that they had to come to terms with what they called "pagan" cultures. For instance, to win over adherents, one grand-uncle of mine found that his best bet was to set Christian lyrics to traditional pagan tunes. That way the sense of estrangement was not very heavy, not too distanced. In addition, you had the ancestral masquerades constantly parading the streets of Abeokuta, passing in front of the church. And I asked for their significance, what was their meaning? What did they do? I was very curious. And if you recollect from Ake, I even grew to superimpose the masquerades, the masks themselves, to identify them with the figures of the saints of the stained glass window of the church. So there was this fusion, constantly, of images. And I found no contradiction between them.
The book is the memories of a child, written by an adult. But I was so taken by how the mind of a child pervades the work, the ability to associate -- for example, you mentioned the Canon. I was struck by your description of the colonial house with the cannon in front of it which you immediately associate with the cleric who is a canon and so on. Does the child remain an important part of your creativity today?
I hope so. I expect so. That kind of instant association of ideas, even if that association is provoked by the sound of words, is a facility I think which all writers and poets have to retain to some extent. Of course the Canon helped also by having a head like a cannon. That helped matters.
And the reader understands exactly what he looked like as a result of your description. The book is so filled with a pageant of rich characters, I'm reluctant to ask you this but I will anyway: does one individual stand out as a more important mentor for you as a child?
I'm not very sure, I don't think so. Perhaps if there's anybody it would be my early teacher, Mr. Lagberju. Not so much a mentor as a kind of representation of the smooth interflow of life and learning and enjoyment and strife, and debate. He was the teacher with whom I used to stay as a matter of course. If I didn't want to go home I stayed with him. And he believed very early in my ... he encouraged. It was to his class that I first went when I forced myself onto school. And it was in his house I enjoyed palmedian, which is a traditional meal. So I associate him with books, with palmedian and vegetables, with learning generally. With debate, because then he used to come and debate and have arguments with my father. So you could say, if there's anybody, he was a kind of connecting thread between the various aspects of living which make the eventual man.
I smile because I recall from the book that when you started school you literally one day decided to go to school and followed your sister and attended her classes.
That's right.
What books most influenced you as a child?
I don't know. I can only tell you what I read, and I read them simply because they were there. I remember that my father had a collection of Dickens. Charles Dickens, I remember very well. He had some anthologies of poetry. He read poets like Tennyson, I remember, some Browning I think I remember. It's very difficult from this distance but I just read what was there. So it's difficult to say what did influence me.
And another question that comes to mind is the impact of history on you, even as a child. The last part of the book is about the organization of a women's group which became an important part of the decolonization process. Would you comment on the effect of that personal experience for you?
Well, in retrospect, I think it had a strange effect of appearing at once ordinary, normal, to be expected, and yet combined with an awareness that something monumental was taking place. After all, it wasn't every day that you had such a movement of women from one corner of the town to another. It wasn't every day you had the women totally flooding the premises of Abeokuta Grammar School. It wasn't every day when the women actually made up songs deriding such a powerful potentate as the Alake of Abeokuta. And yet there was an ordinariness about it because it was taking place with my aunt, with my mother, with their womenfolk, with my formidable uncle who also treated me as a friend. So there was a whole domestic ambiance. And at the same time, there was this epochal quality about the whole thing. And perhaps that sense of proportion, that combination of ordinariness and monumentalism has stayed with me as far as history-making is concerned, an awareness that history very often is made up of the most mundane events which grow into formidable historic proportions.
An important person in the book, one that's striking, is the bookseller and the role that he played. Was that an important element in your gravitation toward writing, the window that he opened up for you?
Curiously enough, no. He was a bookseller, but you know he wasn't what I would call one of my intellectual mentors. I mean, I used to enjoy the debates, the arguments in which he participated with my father in that circle. But he as an individual -- in fact I think apart from the wife, who was like a second mother to me, there was the phenomenon of this strange daughter of theirs, who was the child of two worlds, this twilight child who used to just go into a kind of trance. And I think that aspect, that sort of contribution from their family was the most important in shaping my sense of the metaphysical world, the strange world of the living, the unborn, and the ancestral world. That's a kind of Yoruba cosmology.
Next page: Writing
© Copyright 1998, Regents of the University of California