During the civil war in Nigeria, Soyinka appealed in an article for cease-fire. For this he was arrested in 1967, accused of conspiring with the Biafra rebels, and was held as a political prisoner for 22 months until 1969. Soyinka has published about 20 works: drama, novels and poetry. He writes in English and his literary language is marked by great scope and richness of words.
Kongi S Harvest Novel Pdf 11
Early in his career, Wole Soyinka produced two novels which distill several of the Nobel laureate's key themes. Both The Interpreters and Season of Anomy focus on the tensions and contradictions of post-colonial Nigerian society. They explore the social and political consequences of the uncomfortable coexistence of African and Western European values within a single cultural framework. Soyinka's characters try to affect various temporary (and often unsatisfying) resolutions in their lives, and to reconcile past to present, tradition to modernity, local life to global economies.
The Interpreters opens with a complex nightclub scene which sets the tone for the rest of the novel. Six friends, who represent various functions in contemporary Nigerian society (such as journalist, engineer, artist, and teacher), get drunk and discuss their lives. The dialogue, in keeping with their situation, is highly fluid, restless, and ironic. The time frame shifts from present to past, establishing resonances but also suggesting the interconnectedness of memory and action. Soyinka's narrative remains somewhat non-linear throughout the book, preferring to follow multiple threads of event and history. Various voices and perspectives interpenetrate, creating a verbal web rather than a monolithic, disciplined plot. Like his character Egbo, who cannot reconcile the demands of his native heritage with contemporary life, Soyinka tends to float between worlds, exploring the manifestations and consequences of that medial state without necessarily resolving his dilemma. The novel is often bitterly satiric, particularly through the character of Sagoe, whose pseudo-philosophy of "voidancy" (a scatology run amuck, not unlike that of Jonathan Swift) offers an ongoing misanthropic commentary on the corruption and absurdity of Nigerian society. Little escapes the novel's incisive harshness. Sekoni, the one idealist, is killed at the novel's midpoint, and the second half of the text finds no alternatives for social recovery or happiness. Symbolically, a schoolgirl whom Egbo has made pregnant offers some hope for new life, but she remains nameless and lost to Egbo himself. The Interpreters traces the dissolution and despair often brought about by post-colonial states of cultural hybridity and uncertainty.
While Season of Anomy also remains uncertain at its conclusion, it takes up the duplicitous situations of post-colonial life and attempts to suggest tentative social, political, and imaginative resolutions. The title refers both to the anarchy that comes with the violent political upheavals in the novel and to the yearly cycles of death and rebirth in nature. The narrative follows the attempts by Ofeyi, a marketing genius who works for a nameless cartel controlling the government, to subvert his employers' social and economic power by introducing a counter-philosophy he discovers at the agricultural community of Aiyéró, which is collectivist, peaceful, native, and benign. The five parts of the novel trace the slow vegetal spread of the indigenous "way of life" of Aiyéró, which leads to violence as ideologies of greed and corruption collide with grass-roots philosophy. The revolution appears to fail, although Soyinka also suggests that "spores" have been released among the people and that the possibility of betterment remains. The figure of Suberu, the prison guard who has thoughtlessly served the interests of corruption but later chooses to follow Ofeyi, represents such potential conversions. Iriyise, Ofeyi's kidnapped lover whom he sees as intimately and symbolically tied to the land and to Aiyéró, becomes sick and then lapses into a coma from which she has not emerged at the novel's close; her eventual rescue represents the possible healing of Africa in the wake of terrifying social upheavals, while her lack of consciousness suggests that all is not yet well. Soyinka's novel has been criticized for over-simplifying the political conflicts in post-colonial Nigeria, but he aims, at least, to advocate in his fiction a positive, forceful change for African society.
Wole Soyinka's plays, novels, and poetry record twentieth-century Africa's political turmoil and its struggle to reconcile tradition with modernization. With a style that combines the European dramatic form with traditional folk-drama in the Yoruba tongue, a Niger-Congo language family, Soyinka presents both satire and spectacle
Political Critiques Lead to Imprisonment Soyinka was well established as Nigeria's premier playwright when he published his first novel, The Interpreters (1965). The novel allowed Soyinka to expand on themes in his plays and to present a sweeping view of Nigerian life immediately following independence. Essentially plotless, The Interpreters is loosely structured around the informal discussions among five young Nigerian intellectuals.
The Last King of Scotland (2006), a movie directed byKevin Macdonald. Forrest Whitaker won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in this movie, which is based on the novel of the same name by Giles Foden.
SOYINKA, Wole. (Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka). Nigerian, b. 1934. Genres: Novels, Plays/Screenplays, Poetry, Literary criticism and history, Essays, Translations. Career: Royal Court Theatre, London, play reader, 1958-59; University of Ibadan, research fellow in drama, 1960-61, School of Drama, director, 1969-72; University of Ife, lecturer in English, 1962-64, research professor of drama, 1972-75, professor of comparative literature, 1975-85; University of Lagos, sr. lecturer in English, 1964-67; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, Goldwin Smith Professor of African Studies and Theatre Arts, 1988-91. Founding Director of the Orisun Theatre, and the 1960 Masks Theatre, Lagos and Ibadan. Recipient: Nobel Prize for Literature, 1986. Publications: The Lion and the Jewel, 1959; Dance of the Forests, 1960; Camwood on the Leaves, 1960; Three Plays: The Trials of Brother Jero, the Swamp Dwellers, The Strong Breed, 1963; Kongi's Harvest, 1964; Five Plays: A Dance of the Forests, The Lion and the Jewel, The Swamp Dwellers, The Trials of Brother Jero, The Strong Breed, 1964; Before the Blackout, 1964; The interpreters (novel), 1965; The Road, 1965; Idanre, and Other Poems, 1967; (trans.) D.A. Fagunwa, Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter's Saga, 1968; Madmen and Specialists, 1970; The Jero Plays, 1972; A Shuttle in the Crypt (poems), 1972; The Man Died: Prison Memoirs, 1972; (adapter) The Bacchae, 1973; (ed.) Poems of Black Africa (in US as Anthology of Black Verse), 1973; Collected Plays, 2 vols., 1973-74; Cam- wood on the Leaves, and Before the Blackout: Two Short Plays, 1974; Season of Anomy (novel), 1974; Myth, Literature, and the African World, 1976; Death and the King's Horseman, 1976; Ogun Abibiman (verse), 1976; (adapter) Opera Wonyosi, 1981; Ake: The Years of Childhood (autobiography), 1981; A Play of Giants, 1984; Six Plays, 1984; Mandela's Earth and Other Poems, 1988; Art, Dialogue and Outrage (essays), 1988; Isara: A Voyage Round Essay, 1989; The Search, 1989; From Zia with Love and A Scourge of Hyacinths (plays), 1992; (foreword and captions) Nigeria, 1993; Blackman and the Veil (lectures), 1993; Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years (memoir), 1994; The Beatification of Area Boy, 1995; Collected Plays 2, 1996; Open Sore of a Continent, 1996; Early Poems, 1998; Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness, 1998; Conversations with Wole Soyinka, 2001; Salutation to the Gut, 2002; Nigeria's Transition to Democracy, 2002. Address: P. O. Box 935, Abeokuta, Ogun, Nigeria. 2ff7e9595c
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