From past to present and future: the regenerative spirit of the Abiku

Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, Annual, 2004 by Mounira Soliman

   In vain your bangles cast
   Charmed circles at my feet; (28)

No sooner is this traditional atmosphere established--which, like Clark-Bekederemo's poem, recreates the ile ideology with its emphasis on history, origin, tradition, and heritage--than it is shattered with the introduction of an opposite ideology that advocates principles of individualism and self-definition rather than communal definition:

   I am Abiku, calling for the first
   And the repeated time. (28)

It becomes obvious fight from the first stanza then that Soyinka--who was born to an ethnic Yoruba background and brought up in urban communities like Ibadan and Abeokuta--is negotiating a personal as well as a national conflict between an old and a modern way of life, which became especially clear during the politically turbulent era preceding the independence of Nigeria from British colonialism, which is also about the time when the poem was composed (see Soyinka's Nobel lecture "This Past Must Address Its Present"). In Infinite Riches, Ben Okri talks about this same conflict when he describes a group of people at a dinner:

   They argued about divisions of power, tribal rivalries,
   territorial control. They quarreled about their loyalties, their
   achievements, their interpretations of the new African
   way, age-old disagreements surfacing. The air resounded
   with the clash of their myths and ideologies. (225)

Throughout the eight stanzas of Soyinka's poem, there is this ongoing conflict between the abiku, who represents the individual, and the community which has tried in vain to sever the child's connection with the spirit world but has failed. In fact, the abiku ridicules all their efforts, taunting them instead:

   Must I weep for goats and cowries
   For palm oil and the sprinkled ash?
   Yams do not sprout in amulets
   To earth Abiku's limbs. (29)

And as if that is not enough, in a typically arrogant manner, the abiku offers advice and suggests ways that might help in recognizing him/her when reborn:

   So when the snail is burnt in his shell,
   Whet the heated fragment, brand me
   Deeply on the breast--you must know him
   When Abiku calls again. (29)

It is easy to argue at this point that there is nothing unusual in Soyinka's portrayal of the relationship between the abiku and its parents and community. It is in accordance with the traditionally recognized behavior of both. And, in fact, this is true to a great extent. There is always a conflict of interest between the abiku who never wants to be born in the first place and who does his/her utmost to return to the spirit world as soon as it is feasible and, on the other hand the interest of the parents in retaining their child by trying to sever its relationship with its kindred spirits. What is exceptional though in Soyinka's interpretation of the abiku phenomenon is the self-assertive attitude of the abiku, the sense of individualism and self-adulation:

   I am the squirrel teeth, cracked
   The riddle of the palm; remember
   This, and dig me deeper still into
   The god's swollen foot. (29)