The Dramatist: Wole Soyinka

by Cate Weeks

It’s 11:25 a.m. I’m standing outside a small office on the sixth floor of the Flora Dungan Humanities Building. The brown plastic sign by the door reads: Mr. Wole Soyinka. A student (I presume) with a book bag slung on his shoulder joins my wait.

We stare at the study-abroad posters on the bulletin board. We’re both early for our respective appointments – we’re not meeting the kind of man you keep waiting. A deep voice with a distinct diction echoes through the hallway maze; it’s finishing a conversation started on the elevator, politely turning down an invitation to a book festival only because the speaker will be out of town.

“That’s him,” the student says. “His voice stands out, doesn’t it?”

Indeed, Soyinka stood out in that hallway. He stood out to UNLV President Carol C. Harter and English professor Richard Wiley, who recruited Soyinka in 2000 to hold the first Elias Ghanem Chair of Creative Writing, a position funded by donor Glenn Schaeffer. He stood out to the Nigerian military dictatorships that placed him in solitary confinement for 22 months in the 1960s and forced him into exile in the 1990s. He stood out to the Swedish Academy, which in 1986 awarded him the Nobel Prize in literature, the first given to an African writer.

And he stood out to graduate theatre student Jonathan Shultz, who now speaks to Soyinka in a decidedly deferential manner as the playwright invites us into his office. The office’s bookshelves wrap around the walls, sagging under the weight of the poetry, novels, plays, and essays they hold. Soyinka grabs a paperback – his own play King Baabu – signs it, and hands it to Shultz. “I wanted you to have this from me.”

“That has to be one of the coolest things anyone has ever given to me – ever will give to me,” Shultz says later. The actor traveled to Greece last year with fellow UNLV students and faculty to perform Oedipus at Colonus, a play written and directed by Soyinka. “I mean, he gave me incredible opportunities and experiences and here he is giving me his just-published work. I traveled out of the country for the first time because of him, and my resume will always have on it that I worked with him on the world premiere of his play – that carries a lot of weight when you walk into an audition.”

As Soyinka turns to my interview questions, I’m suddenly grateful for my tape recorder as his word choice tests my note-taking skills. Here are his views on teaching, books, and politics.

On today’s literature: It’s the nature of the mind to constantly make comparisons and look backwards. The classes (I taught) yesterday were on the American novel. We discussed how many great writers all matured in the early part of the 20th century – Steinbeck, Faulkner. When you have a cluster of creativity, people tend to see successive periods as lacking in the weight and profundity of the period. I don’t believe that. Literature moves on a continuum. All ideas build on one another. One of the joys of literature is it doesn’t stand in isolation.

On teaching and directing: I think my father passed the teaching genes down to me. It keeps my mind very, very active - students are so intellectually curious. Directing, too, is a teaching process. The most fascinating part is to watch human beings in the exercise of self-transformation. Their minds develop as they take on the new consciousness of their characters and they go so far beyond that which was such agony in the beginning.

[Here, Schultz can offer some insight: Oedipus at Colonus “was so different than any play I’ve ever worked with before. The language is so dense, and I didn’t know where to go with it or how to work with (Soyinka). I really struggled. Somewhere along the way I realized how far ahead of everyone he was, and I just had to trust him and catch up. Once I did, it was such a joy, such an incredible experience.”]

On receiving the Nobel Prize in literature: It was a mixed bag, actually. It played havoc with my creative life. For somebody like me, coming from a certain society, that world’s demands were constant, even dangerous. Nigeria’s dictator would have considered it his crowning glory to hang a Nobel laureate.

On politics: I’ve developed through some mysterious means a very conscious sense of justice. I have never been able to accept the absoluteness of a pacifist approach when dealing with state terrorism, when facing the insanity of fundamentalist persecution. I have enormous admiration for Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, Aung Suu Chi. Martin Luther King was also an unquestionably great fighter for social justice. He was able to combine that with absolute faith in nonviolent means. These men are among the saints.

On imprisonment: People try to suggest my writing got darker. My politics certainly became hardened. What I did in the first place to become imprisoned became more strident. As all writers, I bring my experiences into my writing, but my experiences don’t change me as a writer.

On his vigorous travel schedule: My actions may suggest I’m restless – peripatetic, perhaps – but there’s nothing I wallow in more deeply than the isolation of my home – and trampling through the bush when in Nigeria. My politics, I’m afraid, have turned me into a nomad.

[In the two weeks prior to the interview, Soyinka was in Cape Town, South Africa, where he was staging King Baabu, and in Italy for La Biannale di Venizia, an arts festival. After teaching courses at UNLV, he was on to Egypt for the opening of the Alexandria Library, followed by Paris for a conference on the plight of exiled writers.]

On selecting a book to read: Some writing is meant for entertainment, escapism. You read and don’t remember it - your mind just goes away. There’s so much literature in the world that my advice is to find that which is both enriching and pleasurable to you.
There’s a world-famous writer – I’m not going to name names, of course. I know, academically, that she is a good writer, but somehow her work has never gripped me. I picked up her latest book thinking I’d try again. I set it aside after the second chapter. I think we should be enriched by what we read, but there’s no reason to be solemn about it.

On the writing process: I find it very, very difficult actually. I really don’t know why I write when I do. ... I don’t think you can force it. I’ve known writers who sit at a typewriter and demand of themselves that they produce a certain number of pages every day. To me, if it doesn’t come, there are equally important things in life, like going to the nearest bar for a glass of wine.

Advice for young writers: Get ready to receive your rejection slips, treasure them and transcend them. It’s a very, very rare writer who doesn’t receive them. Await yours and then carry on.