Detailed Review of the poem: Elegy for a Nation by Wole Soyinka (part 1)

Review © Ohikhuare Isuku (author of Grandpa’s Clothes)
First published in October 2016 by English Writing House.
All rights reserved.
For use of this work, contact English Writing House (englishwritinghouse@gmail.com)

Wole Soyinka

     Elegy for a Nation is a long elaborative poem written by one of Africa’s finest poets – Wole Soyinka – who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, becoming the first African to be so honoured. Addressed to another literary icon – Chinua Achebe – to mark the 70^th birthday of the later, the poem (just as the title implies) mourns the fall of his home country – Nigeria – to his fellow compatriot, Chinua Achebe.
     The poem is in two parts and it is one of the darkest and saddest poems of the Nobel Laureate. As often characterized by his satirical works, there is no humour in this one. Bitterness surges through every line as he reports the failure of the nation to Achebe in distant land.
     In the first part of the poem, Soyinka concentrates on the moribund structures in our system as well as the visionless leaders who have foiled the struggles of the nation’s founding fathers. He also criticizes scantily in this first part, the invasion of traditional religious practices by their foreign brethren.
    But Soyinka expresses faint hope as he writes in the opening stanza:

                         Ah, Chinua, are you gravepine wired?
                         It sings: our nation is not dead, not clinically
                         Yet. Now this may come as a surprise to you,
                         It was to me, I thought the form I spied
                         Beneath the frosted glass of a fifty-carat catafalque
                         Was the face of our own dear land – ‘own’,’dear’

    In this first stanza, Soyinka inquires from his addressee – Achebe – if he is still concerned about the nation of his own, which has undergone a lot of turbulent political histories in the recent past. He expresses hope (but it shocks him) that the nation is not entirely dead, although he shows fear that the country has already been put in casket by gruesome circumstances emanating from disgusting leadership. Well, the nation would have been dead long ago if not aids from international organizations and foreign countries which have kept the countries from meandering off like vapour into eternity. Soyinka is quick to note that these organizations and countries rendering aids, don’t do these because they love Nigeria; rather, they do what they do to keep the country balance, pending on when she will be able to pay her debts to them. Here, Soyinka writes:

                        Doctors IMF, World Bank and UNO refuses, it seems,
                        To issue a certificate of death – if debtors die,
                        May creditor’s collect? We shall turn Parsees yet,
                        Lay this hulk in state upon the Tower of Silence,
                        Let vultures prove what we have seen but fear to say.
                        For if Leviathan is dead, we are the maggots
                        Probing still her monstrous womb.

    The above stanza further stylishly bares the fact of Nigeria’s heavy indebtedness to foreign monetary organizations. Soyinka then warns Achebe that it is right to be mute about the poor situation of the country, until poverty and social vices finally betrays the hidden truth of Nigeria’s hideousness – what they have seen but fear to say.
    Soyinka, like his other works, makes fluent use of literary devices to embellish this work; for instance, while using symbolism, he calls Nigeria Leviathan, and then uses strong metaphor when he writes: We are the maggots (i.e we are the people).

     In the remaining stanzas left in this first part of this poem, Soyinka refreshes our mind on histories which have spanned over a century (even before the amalgamation of the southern and northern protectorates in 1914): he writes about Overamwen’s resistance of the British empire which led to the Benin invasion of 1897; the Aba women riot, where, in 1929, Aba women ( from Eastern Nigeria) protested against colonial tax billed on women. Soyinka also speaks about the civil war with dark emotional tonality: how compatriots laid their lives down for the oneness of the country – a country whose sap is being sucked now by scarecrows in government.
    He speaks also of traditional deities and their prowess: Sango’s axe, Orisa-Oko, Ogun, of his Yoruba race. He shows deep veneration for their genuineness, although, foreign gods have trampled upon then more or less.
    Yet Soyinka (in his autumn years or old age) notes the stagnation the country witnesses, when he writes:

                       In our now autumn days, behold our leaden feet,
                       Fast welded to the starting block.

       Soyinka goes on and on to document the agricultural boom of our recent past: Heads of Millet, Flakes of Cotton, Green of the Cornfields of Oyo and Ochre of Groundnut Pyramids of Kano. He also talks about the beauty of the nation’s art and craft, long abandoned: Indigo in the ancient dye-pot of Abeokuta, Bronze in Benin-city, etc.
     In the next stanza, the poet becomes bitterer as he notes that these agricultural and art achievements have been expunged completely and nothing is left to invest in.
     In Soyinka’s bitter voice:
    
                       Alas for lost idylls. Like Levi jeans on youth and age,
                       The dreams are folded, potholed at joints and even
                       Milder points of stress. Ghosts are sole inheritors.
                       Silos fake rotundity – these are kwashiorkor blights
                       Upon the landscape, depleted at source.
                       Even,
                       The harvest seeds were long devoured.
                       Empty hands scrape the millennia soil of planting.

     It must be noted that throughout this elaborate work, Soyinka – armed with the power of rhetorical questions – unmasks the struggles of yester years especially the Nigerian-Biafran civil war, which silenced Okigbo and other griots in infancy. Then weighing the struggles of the time past and the current denizens of zoo which pride themselves as leaders, desecrating public offices, Soyinka cries out to Achebe:

                        Whose feet are these upon the storehouse loft?
                        Shod in studded boots or jewelled sandals,
                        Khaki crisp or silk embroidered – who are these?

    In the above lines, Soyinka, with sad spasm, demands from his addressee, who the people are that loot the country’s treasury dry. He symbolizes Military regime as ‘studded boots’ and ‘khaki crisp’, while civilian regime, he calls: ‘jewelled sandals’ and ‘silk embroidered’.
    In the stanza which follows, Soyinka explains that the coming to power of these regimes have brought nothing but famine to the land. The dark lines read:
                
                         Their advent is the hour of locusts – behold
                         Cheeks in cornucopia from the silos’ depletion
                         While the eyes of youth sink deeper in despair.
                         Death bestrides the street, rage rides the sun
                         And hope is a sometime word that generations
                         Never learnt to spell.

       Soyinka, in this long work, proves himself again to be a master of the English language. He flaunts his dexterity to intimidate those who have not mastered the language. In these lines noted below, instead of wishing Chinua that long life was theirs, he writes instead:
                                    
                          Chinua, I think with you I dare
                          Be indelicate – we scrape our feet upon
                          The threshold of mortal proof, denying
                          The ancestors yet a while our companionship –
                          May that day learn patience from afar!