Abstract:Wole Soyinka's recent poetry, Mandela's Earth and Other Poems (1988),' reinforces aspects of the poet already known and also exposes more the comprehensive nature of his personality. The collection in...Wole Soyinka's recent poetry, Mandela's Earth and Other Poems (1988),' reinforces aspects of the poet already known and also exposes more the comprehensive nature of his personality. The collection intensifies the poet's fight for justice, defense of the helpless and the victimized, and his condemnation of negative social and political practices at home and elsewhere. The poet exposes and condemns the vices of inhumanity, callousness, insincerity, hypocrisy, and exploitation. These vices are presented as emanating from among other sources apartheid in South Africa, dictatorship in Liberia, and the shallowness of American culture. These vices give a thematic link to the different sections of the book. They are universal phenomena but are more aggravated in some places like South Africa and Liberia than others. There is movement from place to place to expose acts of inhumanity, hypocrisy, and exploitation. As if saying that every society is relatively infected by these sociopolitical and human vices, the poet sees room for redemption in the stoic will and sacrifice of Mandela to fight the injustices of apartheid. My discussion of these new poems focuses on the voice, viewpoint, and persona of the poet, and links the new poems with Soyinka's previous poetic works, while showing where new facets of the poet's personality are revealed. In addition, the techniques which appear predominant in the new work are highlighted. Soyinka's new poems still fall within the three kinds of poetic voice articulated in his earlier poems: the critical, laudatory, and reflective. There is criticism of apartheid and its vices-tyranny, exploitation, corruption, and hypocrisy, among others. It must be noted that the critical voice seems strongest here as the poet performs his role as the conscience of society. There is also the voice of praise in the poet's admiration of Mandela's will. The poet suggests in the South African and American poems that the present falls short of the heroic past in the lives of black South Africans and black Americans. The poet seems to admire Ali's heroic past when kings were kings. Both Dragonfly at my windowpane and Cremation of a wormy caryatid carry the neutral voice of meditation. Thus displaying a unified sensibility, capable of criticism, praise, and reflection, the poet in Mandela's Earth is like his mentor-god, Ogun, orphans' shield. His own experience of arbitrary detention during the Nigerian civil war makes him a credible spokesman for victims, especially Mandela, whose earth is infected with injustice, hypocrisy, and exploitation. This collection, however, while carrying forward and intensifying earlier poetic traits, has added significantly to Soyinka's thematic exploration and technical maturity. While Ogun Abibiman2 deals with the general southern African situation of the midRead More
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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