Making sense of Wole Soyinka’s difficult and brilliant new novel
THIS year, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka published his first novel in 48 years, Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth. His previous novels were The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy (1973).
Fiction is not Soyinka’s most favoured medium. He is a dramatist first, as well as being a poet, essayist and memoirist in a career whose creative energies have never waned.
But the fact that it has taken him half a century to return to the novel, specifically, creates an irresistible opportunity: in the context of a single (and a singular) oeuvre, to compare two literary and historical moments.
Of course, this is what critics do: we look for opportunities, the coins scattered from the purses of the people with genuinely creative talent.
The novel, however, gives nothing away for free. The reviews are mixed, not because of any perceived slackening of Soyinka’s ferociously challenging writing, but because, apparently, the book is too long, dilatory, and difficult. There is no admission from those who strike this note that the fault might lie with them. It is surely our task as reviewers and critics to take the work on its own terms?
If there is a question of scale, then we should take the measure of that too. Why does Soyinka’s subject need such expansive treatment?
Soyinka’s early fiction sought to anchor the day-to-day lives of his characters in the cultural matrix of what he called “the African world”.
As his essays show, that matrix was defined mainly in terms of Yoruba mythology, but the emphasis was not exclusive; in fact, he was just as likely to draw on Shakespeare and classical European sources as the adventures of the Yoruba deities.
The existential and psychic drama being played out, whether on the page or on the stage, had to be grounded in an underlying matrix that gives meaning to experience, one in which the living, the dead and the unborn are thrown together in time and space.
This helps to explain the curious title of the first novel, The Interpreters. It is not about a class of clerical functionaries who mediate communication among people speaking different languages. It is about a group of young Nigerian professionals, “beento’s” in the language of the 1960s, who have returned from studies in Europe to establish themselves in their newly independent country.
Season of Anomy is a different novel, but the point of departure is similar. One way of reading it would be to see it as a transitional novel, in which Soyinka is in search of a mythic structure that is capable of addressing the political and moral failures that emerged in the Biafran War.
Soyinka has always been a satirist. Chronicles’ scale is commensurate with the task: to diagnose and bring to light of day an unimaginable spiritual corruption. In anglophone African writing, Chronicles is the work closest to the despair of a Jonathan Swift, who in A Modest Proposal suggested that a solution to Irish poverty would be for Irish babies to be served upon English dinner tables.
What explains the paradoxical shift from a strong account of the importance of the mythological and the spiritual to a scathing attack on religion?
The answer is that into Soyinka’s “metaphysical void” have stepped the fake evangelists and Pentecostalist preachers of the prosperity cults who have learnt to manipulate and finetune the very animist sensibility that Garuba describes.
Their accomplices are the politicians who milk the state for every penny and a class of wealthy collaborators whose appetite for material goods knows no bounds. It is the god of Mammon that is venerated, otherwise known as consumer capitalism.
In one sense, the novel is all about perspective since the title refers to an actual 2011 Gallup Poll that placed Nigeria top in its annual happiness index. As was the case with Mbeki’s African Renaissance, Soyinka took up the provocation.
By the end of the novel, the hazards of professional life in Nigeria leave three of the characters damaged and one dead. One rises to the top because he is more capable than the others of keeping on the right side of power and playing a venal game.
Just how venal the game is, becomes apparent in the closing chapters. Menka, the surgeon, endures a mysterious but menacing attempt to recruit him into a secret organisation with connections to the national leadership. It turns out, in implications gradually revealed, that this organisation is Human Resources, which is running a lively trade in human body parts to be used in traditional medicine.
While loosely based on an actual episode at the Okija Shrine in Anambra State in 2004, where dozens of bodies were discovered in a condition that implied that they had been used for medicinal purposes, and where senior politicians were found to have taken oaths, the trade in Chronicles is used as a satirical device which, in its scale, is as disturbing and implausible as Swift’s recommendation of cannibalism as a solution to the Irish problem. As the novel approaches its conclusion, it uses plot devices more familiar in the political thriller than satire, but the effect is no less shocking.
Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is satire, political thriller, and finally, in its darkest register, tragedy.
It is the work of a great writer who is entitled to a deep sense of fulfilment, rootedness, and belonging; instead, in the words of Milan Kundera, he must feel as if his testament has been betrayed.