I take liberties of a dedicatee of literary arts to examine the content of the above work as it relates to the personality of the author. This will probably be done in more than 10 essays to make any meaning to the reader. I am mighty excited and will hold nothing back in the paintwork that should do the work that deserved credit and perhaps bring clarity to a reader of this terse and dense intellectual gift to humanity which I have done my best to understand. I may fall foul of the author’s concept of his work, but I will drink some solace that I would have tried.
I must say from the onset that only real academics who appreciate English letters will come near an understanding of the person under this analysis. Others may miss the message from impatience or paucity of the language medium written in a blend of prose and poetry of an accomplished dramatist and wordsmith.
His dedication page is quoted fully here.
To all the fallen in our common cause, and to the surviving, scars and all, clamorous and hidden.
To all my stoically resigned children.
And to my wife, Adefolake, who, during the season of a deadly dictatorship, demoted me from the designation of a Visiting Professor to that of Visiting Spouse, but was still left with only an impossible spouse as i was swallowed by my study even during visiting hours.
This piece alone tells the deep sense of guilt he bears for his neglect of his wife and children. His family should, upon reading this, forgive him unconditionally. He was born for a larger number of people and executed their unwritten and unsolicited mandate. The family featured sparingly in this great work on a noteworthy life. What seemed to matter to him in life and work was the greater good of a larger number. The joy I had reading through discharged and acquitted him with the verdict NOT GUILTY of family neglect. An Igbo proverb puts it succinctly and in parallel: “When what is more important than farmland is seen, the harvest in the barn is sold out”. After all, Shakespeare, in Julius Caesar, spoke words of wisdom through his creature: “What concerns us most shall be last served”. I have the same attitude to family and community as he. Spirit drives art into broader perspectives of the meaning of a wholesome life. Wole Soyinka lived in that broad vision in his work.
His acknowledgments is strikingly peculiar. He had contemplated to write no more after Ake: The Years of Childhood. It would have been a disaster to Nigeria’s, Africa’s and world history and literature of the quintessential quality. His Nigeria Milestones Since 1960, together with maps of evolution of the current structure, is a necessary complement to his narrative of events in which he featured prominently. Ingenious is his concept of function of memoirs. He had written also for those of us who belong to the same decade of our earthly life. We can securely anchor on his work to make our own contributions.
He devoted the first chapter titled IBA-For Those Who Went Before, in salutary evidence of his reverence for culture and tradition and the injunction to honour one’s father and mother which he extended to reverence for one’s friends and total loyalty to them at all times – in joy and grief. In that chapter, he showed his faith in his own system of values. He maintained that through his work with unshakeable conviction. His feet were planted firmly in his tradition and not even his unequalled travels in foreign lands could persuade him on received religions and their relevance. He mildly infers that he remains in connection with human spirits and other spirits that power and influence human beings here on earth.
‘Iba’ in Yoruba means ‘fever’. But I think he extended it to represent etherisation that puts him in contact with spirits in the beyond. His work sells him as an emotional bundle capable of shedding tears and grieving deeply for friends who show streaks of greatness and concern for the common good.
For Wole, he needed to connect with all those human spirits first before embarking on his mission to communicate his notches in experiencing. Part One of his work did not start until this was done. It blows the mind to even try to follow the thought processes of Wole. I hope I am right about my painting. Sometimes I wonder whether I belong to the same plane as Wole. He is a tight bundle of talent that could have been shared by 10 or more persons with amazing report from each beneficiary.