The Writer as a Mentor

        My anger spumes… and I reel to and fro, a drunk.

        I am really reeling with spuming anger!

    My face is set hard as a piece of steel at the great man with an eternal youthful looks and attributes. I am mad with Wole Soyinka, that relentless partridge always in celerity of motion. He is more than the common human race that we all are. He simply outpaces that human level of existence, as he would wont to do, with those his long strides. As a scholar, a writer, an activist and a constant conscience of nation and the world, he has set the standards of scholarship and conscience to despairing heights for the creature called the human kind.

          I should suspect it coming the year I met him in the pages of newspapers in my formative years in Imade College, Owo. It was the year Kalakuta Republic came into the national news, when it was invaded by soldiers and sacked. Soyinka was around to make one railing or the other against the military government. It was also the year of sudden surge in the price of cocoa world wide. My parents , cocoa farmers, made an even break and I had more than the usual pocket money. So I sneaked out of the boarding house to the best-stocked bookshop in town.

Wole Soyinka – the name grabbed my attention immediately as I looked across the bookshelves. It was also appealing. So I bought two of his tittles along with several others including Chukwuemeka Ike, Alex Laguma, Sonela Dipoko, Lenrie Peters and several others of the Heineman’s African Writers’ Series. Soyinka’s The Interpreters was published by Fontana Books as also was Chukwuemeka’s The Naked Gods and Toad for Supper. The other title of Soyinka was The Man Died but this one was published by Pengiune.

           Niran Olowofela, my friend and classmate, wanted, when I arrived with my load of books to the school, and had The Interpreters. Bode Abulatan, and Benson Aruna and several other  friends, including the notorious Popusco, Samuel Oluwole Oritsa came around to pick their own choices. In those days, exchanging of books among young friends was the real life like the modern generation’s exchanging of video films and other digital devices.

           Niran O'Fela quickly returned to me the second day with the one he borrowed with a dejected look, commenting, I cannot understand a single line and he [the author] seems to be abusing God here.  And he returned the novel, pointing out in the first line, of Egbo’s statement.

 I read the line: “I don’t need his pity. Someone tell God not to weep in my beer.” I had no comment on that. So my friend dropped the novel and picked another. It was the lot of Ristian Kunle Olakunori, another classmate and friend - he died as a lecturer at Nnamdi Azikwe Universwity, Awka - to pick this novel and stay with it until he finished it. He came back to argue that the writer was deliberately hard in the first few pages of the book; and that was vantage Ristian. He was a great critic of works of literature and no writer, however great, escaped his criticisms. Well, I still had nothing to say yet.  

            When Miss Mary Stansfield became our teacher in English in Literature, she started with Soyinka’s Telephone Conversation. It was a complete departure from those poems we had read and mastered. It was fierce, defiant and unconventional. The rhythm ran riot and had no discernible rhyme scheme. These constituted the training we had: rhyme scheme, division of stanzas, regular rhythm – like the beating of the heart, you know – theme, tune and mood. God, were we hard put to it to fit the poem into these and many more! We could not even determine the mood. It was jagged and grating.

The price seemed reasonable, location/ Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived//. . .  Silence. Silenced transmission of/ Pressurised good-breeding. Voice, when it came,/ …What was the need of repeating the same words, even when nuanced: Silence. Why that period after just a word?  Could a word of just three syllables, SILENCE, make a complete sense or statement? Then again, SILENCED TRANSMISSIN OF,/. . .

The teacher pointed out to us that the poet was a dramatist and a playwright; this explained the conversational mode of the satirical poem. That introductory beginning put us into a better state of mind not to run away from Literature in English.

            “You see,” explained Miss Stansfield, ” Soyinka is a very wise man. He is compressing so many thoughts in a single compound-word.” Now, I was a science student and was on the way to becoming a scientist, or an engineer or a medical doctor. But this re-orientation was insidiously settling on me and coalescing. Who would not want to be like this great man of amazing cerebral excellence?  “You see, Soyinka is a very wise man…l” In no time, I was imitating his cerebrated writing of using monosyllable to stand for “compressed thoughts.” Miss Stansfield who also doubled as my English was horrified and warned me to desist forthwith if I did not want to fail English Language. I was flummoxed. How possible? If I wrote like this man of great depth of thought, how come WAEC would not recognize the worth of me and give me distinction! However, I followed the advice of my friend-teacher towards the end of my studies and barely escaped scoring a bad failure in WASCE. I was to know later in life that  WAEC with all its glory was not as bright as Soyinka; in fact it could not decipher some of his "complex thoughts" which is why I am unhappy with him: my hankering after him swayed my destiny which was to be a scientist or medical doctor. And now, of all my efforts, I have not come any where near him. I am mad with Soyinka. If anybody sees him, tell him that I am angry with him for his pricing everything too high for other mortals.

           I was too much in love with Soyinka; too much in love with the literary world because of him. I thought one could only become a universal scholar like him if he did literature. As a matter of fact, I collected the form of the University Joint Matriculation of Great Britain. My choice was the University of Leeds where the man himself schooled. I simply wanted to trail him around. But then, that university could not take me as I did not have so much money to offer for my education. What a pity!

            That was a long time ago, close to four decades now.

 Let me pick the story of my reading the works of Soyinka where I left off. Our life as secondary students in those days was interspersed with hard class works and reading for pleasure. One of those days, I picked my copy of The Interpreters  and flipped open the first page and read, “Metal on concrete jars my drink lobes.” This was Sagoe grumbling as he stuck fingers in his ears against the mad screech of iron tables. In just a chapter the novelist has shown us the dramatic personae of Sagoe, Egbo, Kola, Sekoni and Bandele, all intellectuals which the writer shows to be interpreting the society, our nation. The complexity of the book makes it the more appealing to me. Soyinka’s books and essays are just the works I could be caught reading over and over and again. In 1996, I used these characters in my collection of stories. But that is for another day.

           I read and savoured the grace of the “intellectual and modern” novel. It appealed, I now know, to my sinful intellectual pride.

 I got to the second chapter and read:  They left the club towards morning. Two years later, while waiting to get a job before I would succeed in travelling to Leeds I started writing my own novel.  I wrote in the opening line: They returned in the early hours… in fact the title of the novel was The Searchers. It was cute to be intellectually sound and modern like this prodigy of a man, a man of letters.

          Of course, my convergence with one of the greatest minds to traverse the planet earth, the man called Soyinka, is not in all things though he has helped sharpened my adolescent age in a very dramatic  way. I still want to possess the ability to bring out thoughts in lucidly flowing  and flowery language like him and have always striven to solve all my personal and national and other-world-view problems and difficulties by, like him, the applications of my intellect. I am a very simple man who always wants to be up and running around for justice like the indefatigable man. I am still working on the "complexity" of my mind so as to be able to appeal to the depths of the sound-minded young ones.

        The convergence ends here. I am what he will think suffers from “bornagainism.” Yes, I am a Christian who is in full worship of my elder brother Jesus as he, he once said in an interview, his elder brother, Ogun.

                May God bless this great one who has traversed our earth and our hearts, blazing forth like lightening. May Nigeria have him around for a long time to come and may he be blessed with the face of Yaweh