Wole Soyinka's "Gulliver": Swift transposed

Comparative Literature, Winter 2001 by Johae, Antony

WOLE SOYINKA'S VOLUME of prison poetry, A Shuttle in the Crypt, to which the one-hundred-and-six-line poem "Gulliver" belongs, was published in 1972, fourteen years before the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is noteworthy, however, that neither A Shuttle in the Crypt nor Soyinka's collection of prison notes, The Man Died (1972), were published in Nigeria, but rather from New York and London several years after the author's release from prison and subsequent forced exile from his homeland. The poems that comprise A Shuttle in the Crypt were written during and after Soyinka's imprisonment without trial from 1967 to 1969, "Shuttle" in the title signifying at a surface level the moving spirit of freedom within the prisoner and "Crypt" the deathly confinement of his prison cell. "Crypt" may also connote something hidden, for example, the cryptic meanings contained in the prisoner's writings, as typically might be found in political satire, particularly of the allegorical kind, while "Shuttle" might also refer to the prisoner's rapid mood swings from hope to despair and back again as he is psychologically worked on by the prison authorities.'

"Gulliver" is one of four poems in the section of the volume titled "Four Archetypes," which Tanure Ojaide describes as "masks the poet wears to dramatise himself" (The Poetry of Wole Soyinka 74). The three other poems are "Joseph," "Hamlet," and "Ulysses," the protagonists of which, like Gulliver, are "travellers," who also have been at one time or another physically (Joseph and Ulysses), or mentally (Hamlet) imprisoned or trapped. As one might expect, all four poems work cross-referentially with their original counterparts: "Joseph" with the Old Testament Book of Genesis; "Hamlet" with Shakespeare's play; "Ulysses" with both Homer's epic and James Joyce's novel; and "Gulliver" with Part One of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, "A Voyage to Lilliput."

Before embarking on a close reading of "Gulliver" in relation to Gulliver's Travels, it is perhaps worth giving a brief account of the circumstances that gave rise to Soyinka's term in prison in order to clarify both the allegorical dimension of his resiting and reworking of Swift's material and the poem's numerous references to the author's personal experience within a Nigerian political context.

After receiving his Bachelors Degree in English Literature at the University of Leeds in England in 1957, Wole Soyinka became a play-reader at the avant-garde Royal Court Theatre in London, where three of his plays were first performed. He returned to a newly independent Nigeria in 1960, with the aim of developing indigenous African theatre arts there. He later became Director of the School of Drama at the University of Ibadan and at the same time set up his own company of touring players. The seminal cause of his involvement in the young nation's political affairs was the military coup d'etat on 15th January 1966, in which the Prime Minister, Alhaj Sir Ahubakar Tafawa-Balewa, was abducted and assassinated. In the same year, the self-imposed military leaders (most of whom came from the mainly Christian Eastern Region, Igbo) were themselves toppled by a group of officers from the Muslim North (Hausa-Fulani) led by General Yakubu Gowon, who was installed as Head of State. In order to abort a threatened secession by the Eastern Region, Gowon decreed that the four regions of Nigeria be split into twelve federal states, thus dividing the Eastern Region into three separate parts. Despite these efforts, however, on 30th May 1967 (only three days after General Gowon's decree), the leaders of the Eastern Region unilaterally declared the region an independent nation, giving it the name Biafra. A bitterly fought civil war followed, bringing immense suffering to the Igbo people. After three years of civil war the breakaway state of Biafra was forced to capitulate and allow itself to be reintegrated into the nation of Nigeria.

In the early phase of the Nigerian Civil War Soyinka became involved in an attempt to end the conflict. As a result, he was arrested and incarcerated by the military regime for just over two years, virtually all of which he spent in solitary confinement. In The Man Died Soyinka explains what led the military government to arrest him, while at the same time clearly stating his position:

My arrest . was prompted by the following activities: my denunciation of the war in the Nigerian papers; my visit to the East; my attempt to recruit the country's intellectuals within and outside the country for a pressure group which would work for a total ban on the supply of arms to all parts of Nigeria; creating a third force which would utilize the ensuing military stalemate to repudiate and end both the secession of Biafra, and the genocide-consolidated dictatorship of the Army which made both secession and war inevitable. (19)

Soyinka, it should be noted, comes neither from the North, where the military leaders originated, nor from the East, where the independent state of Biafra had been declared, but from the Yoruba Western Region of Nigeria. In other words, in trying to find a way of bringing the war to a halt he had no ethnic axe to grind, but only sought to re-establish the integrity of the newly independent nation of Nigeria and its people.