| Photo by S. Beth Atkin |
Wole Soyinka Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by S. Beth Atkin |
Page 5 of 7
Your work as a political activist and as an essayist and as a human rights activist took a decisive turn at a period before the Biafran war in which, in your efforts to prevent that conflict from occurring, you became a political prisoner in Nigeria for two years. You recounted that story in a book called The Man Died. Where did that title come from?
Well, the title was directly from a telegram which was sent to me. The man who died was a victim of military brutality in whose case I was particularly interested as one of the many causes which support, investigate, challenge power on behalf of human dignity. And in this case this fellow had been brutalized by the military, it was a military government, and after I was forced into exile while I was writing the book, looking for a title for the book, I sent word home asking for information about this young man and a telegram came with the title, "the man died." And it just seemed to me just apt for the book, my prison experiences, which I was writing at the time.
What did that experience of the imprisonment teach you?
The many possibilities, the unlimited possibilities of human survival. I was placed in solitary confinement for a year and ten months out of the period in which I stayed in prison, which was just over two years. Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you're deprived of it. You say to yourself when you are at liberty how desperate you are for your solitude, you love your periods of solitude, you scramble for it, you find ways of being by yourself so you can do what you want with yourself and your mind. But when you're deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you have to survive and so you devise all kinds of mental exercises and it's amazing. You walk various, and sometimes dangerous, routes that kind of exercise can lead you. It's not very, very healthy for one to feed entirely on his or her mind without any replenishment from other sources.
What was most important for you in this regard? Or were there several strategies that you employed to survive?
Being able to continue to create in some way or other, being able to recover neglected areas of knowledge. One example, I hated mathematics when I was in school. I couldn't wait to drop it the moment I left school, just like that. But left with nothing to do except my own resources, I found myself going back and recollecting those mathematical formulas, geometric and algebraic, which I'd loathed in school, and now reworking them, reinventing them, rediscovering them and finding a logic to them. Even sometimes a beauty which I did not appreciate when I was in schools. That only lasted as long as I was in prison. As soon as I came out I could not see mathematics or anything of the sort.
There is a moving moment in the book where a young woman is mistakenly placed in your cell for a brief period, and your perception is that she sees you as a guard or somebody on the side of the people running the prison.
On the side of the devils.
On the side of the devils. Please tell us what then happened, because there's a moment of recognition on her part and your part.
Yes, this is before I was formally put in prison. I was still under interrogation so I was in a cell and she was just thrown into that police cell with me. It was a holding room really. And at first she was very suspicious, she thought maybe I was just a spy, you know. And I think she just wasn't expecting to find anybody in that room, didn't know I'd just been under interrogation myself. So she was very withdrawn and very suspicious. And suddenly she looked down and saw that I was shackled, I was in chains. And so she slowly for the first time brought herself to actually look up and look at my face and recognize me. It was a very overwhelming and humbling moment because she then just took herself down at my feet and started to cry. It's reminiscent of one of those episodes of Christ, the woman washing his feet with her tears. In a way it was frightening. And then it became strengthening because I now had to console her, reassure her, and in turn I was strengthened. I became very, very strong both for her and for everybody in her situation. And so became even tougher in myself, so she did me a lot more good than she could ever have guessed on that day.
How did this experience of the imprisonment affect you as a writer once you got out?
It's very difficult. It worked in all sorts of ways.
When I first came out -- I spoke just now about this need for human company, but after I first came out, I remember that after a few days I just couldn't stand so much company. It became too much again for me and I couldn't wait until I could go away and isolate myself somewhere. Fortunately a friend of mine had a little village on a farm in the south of France and I didn't really find any peace, any creative peace, any possibility of creativity until I spent a few months by myself on that farm where I wrote a play. I wrote the play, The Bacchae of Euripides, which was commissioned at the time by the National Theater of Great Britain. And I began again to write but I found on coming out immediately I couldn't get back to writing for some time.
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