Award ceremony speech

Presentation Speech by Professor Lars Gyllensten, of the Swedish Academy

Translation from the Swedish text

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Wole Soyinka, born in Nigeria in 1934, writes in English and is chiefly recognized
as a dramatist. His many-sided and vital literary works also include some important
collections of poems and novels, an interesting autobiography and a large number
of articles and essays. He has been, and is, very active as a man of the theatre and
has staged his own plays in England and Nigeria. He has himself taken part as an
actor and energetically joined in theatrical debates and theatre policies. During the
civil war in Nigeria in the middle of the 1960s he was drawn into the struggle for
liberty because of his opposition to violence and terror. He was imprisoned under
brutal and illegal forms in 1967 and was released over two years later – an
experience that drastically affected his outlook on life and literary work.

Soyinka has depicted his childhood in a little African village. His father was a
teacher, his mother a social worker – both Christian. But in the preceding
generation there were medicine men and others who believed firmly in spirits,
magic, and rites of anything but a Christian kind. We encounter a world in which
tree sprites, ghosts, sorcerer and primitive African traditions were living realities.
We also come face to face with a more complicated world of myth, which has its
roots far back in an African culture handed down by word of mouth. This account
of childhood gives a background to Soyinka’s literary works – a self-experienced,
close connection with a rich and complex African heritage.

Soyinka made an early appearance as a dramatist. It was natural for him to seek
this art form, which is closely linked with the African material and with African
forms of linguistic and mime creation. His plays make frequent and skilful use of
many elements belonging to stage art and which also have genuine roots in African
culture-dance and rites, masques and pantomime, rhythm and music, declamation,
theatre within the theatre etc. His first dramas are lighter and more playful than the
later ones – pranks, ironical and satirical scenes, pictures of everyday life with
telling and witty dialogue, often with a tragicomical or grotesque sense of life as
keynote. Among these early plays can be mentioned A Dance of the Forests – a
kind of African “Midsummer Night’s Dream”, with dryads, ghosts, spirits, and
gods or demi-gods. It is about creativeness and sacrifice, with the god or hero Ogun
as one of the performers. This Ogun is a Prometheus – like figure – the demigod
of iron and artistic skill but also of war and battle, a double figure combining both
creation and destruction in his being. Soyinka has often reverted to him.

Soyinka’s dramas are deeply rooted in an African world and culture. But he is also
a widely read, not to say learned writer and dramatist. He is familiar with western
literature, from the Greek tragedies to Beckett and Brecht. Also outside the field
of drama he is well versed in the great European literature. A writer like James
Joyce, for instance, has left traces in his novels. Soyinka is an author who writes
with great deliberation, and especially in his novels and poems he can be avant-
gardistically sophisticated.

During the war years, his time in prison and afterwards, his writing takes on a more
tragic character. The psychological, moral and social conflicts appear more and
more complex and menacing. The book-keeping of good and evil, of destructive
and constructive forces, becomes increasingly ambiguous. His dramas become
equivocal – dramas which in the shape of allegory or satire take up moral, social,
and political matters for mythical-dramatic creation. The dialogue is sharpened,
the characters become more expressive, often exaggerated to the point of
caricature, demanding denouement – the dramatic temperature is raised. The
vitality is no less than in the first works – on the contrary: the satire, the humour,
the elements of grotesquery and comedy, and the mythical fable-making come
vividly to life. The way in which Soyinka makes use of the mythical material, the
African, and the literary schooling, the European, is very independent. He says he
uses the myths as “the aesthetic matrix” for his writing. It is thus not a question of
a folkloristic reproduction, a kind of exoticism, but an independent and co-
operative work. The myths, traditions, and rites are integrated as nourishment for
his writing, not a masquerade costume. He has called his wide reading and literary
awareness a “selective eclecticism” – i.e. purposeful and sovereign choice. Among
the later dramas special mention can be made of Death and the King’s Horseman –
a genuinely, dramatically convincing work full of many ideas and meanings, of
poetry, satire, surprise, cruelty, and lust. Superficially it is about a conflict between
western morals and convention on the one hand, and African culture and tradition
on the other. The theme moves around a ritual or cultic human sacrifice. The drama
goes so deeply into human and superhuman conditions that it cannot be reduced to
something that teaches us about breaches between different civilizations. Soyinka
himself prefers to see it as a metaphysical and religious drama of fate. It is about
the conditions of the human identity and realization, the mythical pact of life and
death, and the possibilities of the unborn.

To Soyinka’s non-dramatic works belong the autobiographically inspired

accounts The Man Died, from his time in prison, and the novel The Interpreters,
from intellectual circles in Nigeria. The novel Season of Anomy is an allegory with
the Orpheus and Eurydice myth as framework, a somewhat complicated, symbolic-
expressionistic story with a background in brutal social and political conditions of
oppression and corruption. Outstanding among the poems are collections with
motifs from his time in prison, some of them written during his imprisonment as a
kind of mental exercise to help the author survive with dignity and fortitude. The
imagery in these poems is compact and rather hard to penetrate, sometimes,
however, with a laconic or ascetic concentration. It takes some time to get to know
them intimately, but they can then yield a strange emanation that gives evidence
of their background and role in a harsh, difficult period in the poet’s life – moving
testimony to courage and artistic strength.

As already mentioned, it is chiefly the dramas that stand out as Wole Soyinka’s
most significant achievement. They are of course made to be acted on the stage,
with dance, music, masques, and mime as essential components. But his plays can
also be read as important and fascinating literary works from a richly endowed
writer’s experience and imagination – and with roots in a composite culture with a
wealth of living and artistically inspiring traditions.

Dear Mr. Soyinka, In your versatile writings you have been able to synthesize a
very rich heritage from your own country, ancient myths and old traditions, with
literary legacies and traditions of European culture. There is a third component, a
most important component in what you have thus achieved – your own genuine
and impressive creativity as an artist, a master of language, and your commitment
as a dramatist and writer of poetry and prose to problems of general and deep
significance for man, modern or ancient. It is my privilege to convey to you the
warm congratulations of the Swedish Academy and to ask you to receive this
year’s Nobel Prize for Literature from the hand of His Majesty the King.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1981-1990, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co.,
Singapore, 1993

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1986/ceremony-speech/