Wole Soyinka talks about film made from his memories: “It hurts me”

Wole Soyinka became the first black African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986 and is now one of the continent’s most revered authors. But two decades earlier, he was sent to prison without trial for speaking out about the civil war in his native Nigeria.

While in solitary confinement, he scribbled notes and poems using bones, craft paint and toilet paper. These ideas became the memoir “The Man Died,” published in 1972, which is now the basis for a film of the same name that recounts the playwright and novelist’s life at the height of the Civil War.

Now 90, at his home in Abeokuta, southwest Nigeria, Soyinka spoke to Larry Madowo of CNN about the impact his time incarcerated has had on his mind and the resilience he has developed as a result — as he looks back on his extraordinary life and looks ahead to the dreams he still has to realize.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Larry Madowo: What was it like going to prison just because you were fighting for what you thought was right?
Wole Soyinka: It was a very difficult period for me. Twenty-two months in total isolation, denied books, denied paper, my cell constantly searched, nothing to sustain my mind.

is the prisoner. The prisoner has to survive. It’s a test of survival, not a question of self-promotion.

AND [em confinamento solitário] What is the spatial-economic enterprise you could undertake? The mental enterprise, calculations, mathematics. I made my own ink from dirt; I made my own pen from the bones of my food meat, creating a complete self-sustaining mental microworld of my own. It was also a dangerous time for the mind.

I remember when I used to hallucinate, so I would jump around and try to destroy those kind of hallucinatory images that would come up. But eventually I got over that whole period, and after that, I started remembering those geometry and trigonometry formulas that I hated, and I started pulling them back out, doing calculations on the floor.

Believe it or not, I rediscovered the theory of permutations and combinations. Those things I hated in school became my livelihood.

LM: You wrote about those years in prison in a memoir that has now been made into a film, “The Man Died.” Have you seen it?

WS: No. Let me put it this way, turning anything in my life into something that other people can watch hurts me. I helped them try to locate a house that I hid out of and operated in during the civil war. They were looking for something close to what we were using during that time.

But it’s not just about me, it’s also about a particular period. I might watch it eventually, but not right away. Even this interview we’re doing, I’m not going to watch it. It always takes a while to make me watch myself.

LM: You don’t make a big deal about your birthday, but you just turned 90, which is a big deal.

WS: Well, the annoying thing is that I don’t feel 90. But I confess that I share some kind of ritualistic aspect of birthdays. So it’s not a matter of dislike, it’s just that I like to spend my birthday alone. Usually what I do on my birthday is disappear into the woods. That’s my normal way of spending birthdays.

LM: Do you remember when you became politically active?

WS: I was a big eavesdropper on my parents’ conversations, especially around my father’s colleagues. [diretor de escola e padre da igreja anglicana]. I remember sitting behind an armchair listening.

My mother would come and report what had happened. My father’s entire circle was also involved in this way, so I would say that was the beginning of my political involvement.

When the women revolted in this very city where we are now, Abeokuta, my mother was involved as a lieutenant of the [ativista dos direitos das mulheres] Mrs. Ransome Kuti, mother of [famosa musicista afrobeat] Fela Kútì. So as a child, when all the uprising was happening, I became a messenger between the various women’s camps, passing on messages.

LM: Seeing your mother involved in this political activism seems to have planted the seed for your life’s work.

WS: Correct. Being actually inside the environment, this militant struggle against an unacceptable situation that these women were facing, how their goods were being seized by the police in the markets, if they didn’t pay taxes, some of them were beaten, mistreated, and so on.

Being an integral part of this and seeing them stand their ground to go and pass more oppressive legislation, I took the side of women more naturally, and that was reflected in my writing. Without a doubt.

LM: There’s a legend about you sneaking into a radio station and switching from a political speech to something more critical. What’s the truth?

WS: Well, the first thing I have to remember is that I was tried and acquitted. Yes, it’s true, there’s no point in denying that I felt compelled to stop the transmission of false results.

I witnessed firsthand the destruction of voting booths, even the destruction of results. I was already heavily politicized at that time, but when I saw this oppressive regime about to be reinstated, and people have to remember, it was the most cynical regime, which even went on the radio saying “we don’t give a damn if you vote for us,” it just triggered my already highly honed militant sense. So it was part of an ongoing struggle on so many levels. Yes, guilty, but there was no alternative at that time.

LM: After receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, it took a long time for another African [negro] received this honor. What was it like at the time?

WS: Isolated. I was very relieved when the next African came because a lot was demanded of you. It was as if overnight your circle expanded simply because you come from the African continent. On the one hand, of course, a sense of recognition, which is very nice. It opened certain doors, but then there weren’t many doors that I was looking to enter anyway, I just liked my profession, period.

But at the same time, especially in societies like ours, it exposed you much more. I always remind people that one of the most brutal dictators we had here, Sani Abacha, would have gone to his grave a happy man if he had hanged a Nobel laureate, if he could have put that on his resume. As it is, he had to settle for hanging an activist, a writer and his eight companions. I am referring to Ken Saro-Wiwa.

So this exposed me to very great dangers because I refuse to back down in my beliefs, in my activities simply because I became a Nobel laureate. Why should I stop doing things that I was already concerned about before the Nobel?

But it was wonderful when one after the other [ganhadores africanos do Nobel] has started to arrive. Now, for some time now, I have been able to enjoy the fact that I am a Nobel laureate, instead of feeling, at times, like a rare specimen.

LM: You told some students in an exchange program that bears your name that you still hope to go to space. What is your fascination with space?

WS: It started when I was a kid, and I was fascinated by the stars and constellations. I wrote in one of my essays that I used to close my eyes and imagine a state of total nothingness, and from that, the notion of actually going into space. I remember when Armstrong stepped on the moon, I was in prison at the time, so that childhood exercise served me well too. My prison bars dissolved overnight just by imagining them on the moon. So space exploration began.

One day, in the mail, one of the human development associations I belong to had some free tickets for a zero-gravity flight simulator; at the time I was 70 years old. I went to San Jose (California) and had my space experience and it is one of the most exciting experiences of my life.

LM: Richard Branson is currently taking people into space.

WS: If Branson were to come in now and say, I’ve found space for you, I’d end this interview right now. I’m still in reasonably good shape and I think I can handle the stress of weightlessness; I’m convinced I can. I’m willing to do anything. Shoot me into space, I don’t even care if something happens there, it’s fine. So I experienced that childhood obsession.

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This content was originally published in Wole Soyinka talks about film made from his memories: “It hurts me” on the CNN Brasil website.

Source: CNN Brasil