Wole Soyinka Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by S. Beth Atkin

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Writing

When did you learn or decide that you would be a writer?

Oh, I don't think I ever decided anything of the sort. I think it just grew and grew and then I realized that maybe that's what I wanted to do more than anything else. I don't think I ever took a firm decision on it.

How do you write? Is it a long struggle for the product to emerge?

One thing I can tell you is this, that I am not a methodical writer. I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood. I can write days on end, not wanting to do anything else. And at other times gestate. I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.

What are the virtues that are prerequisite for being a writer in your view?

Allowing one's self to be overwhelmed by phenomena, by experience. In other words, the ability to submit one's ego, one's personal self-awareness, to the phenomena around one. Off-the-cuff, I would say this is one of the most profound prerequisites.

Before we talk about theater, I wanted to ask you what are the different challenges that the different literary forms that you've worked in? Or are they the same? You're a poet, you're a playwright, you're a novelist, you're an essayist.

Well, first of all I'll say that I come alive best in theater. And that means even when I enter an empty theater, physically, doing nothing. There's something about the theater which makes my fingertips tingle. Perhaps it's because I come from a society which is very rich in theatrical traditions, and I saw from my childhood the traditional forms of theater, and it became for me a logical means of expressing some of my most profoundly felt intuitions, if you like, and felt material experiences of my environment.

But there are certain experiences which are concise, which are so miniaturized in their impact, that a poem becomes a logical mode of expression for it. And of course, certain polemical demands require the essay form. The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist. If I remember my first novel, The Interpreters, this came out of frustration. Even when I'm writing plays I enjoy having company and mentally I think of that company as the company I'm writing for. And I think when I was writing The Interpreters, I was deprived of the company at the time and certain things needed to be put down. I always call The Interpreters a happening. I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.

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