Wole Soyinka Interview (page: 9 / 9) Nobel Prize for Literature	Print Interview

What has been the most exciting moment of your professional career?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Wole Soyinka: Most exciting moment? I assure you it was not the Nobel thing. Maybe people think a prize like that should count, but no, not at all. I would say, if I directed a play on stage, and I see the excited face of my company, when they really feel they've pulled off something, and I've also got the same vibrations from the audience. I think that's when I really feel very fulfilled.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

Do you regard yourself as a playwright first, rather than a poet or novelist?

Wole Soyinka: I use the expression usually that I come alive when I'm working in the theater. That's really my métier. But a bit of everything.

Did playwriting offer you an outlet for political expression not found in the other media?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Wole Soyinka: I call theater the most socialized form of literary expression, simply because it involves people all the time, and there is a kind of dynamic which exists in the theater which you do not find by reading a book or reading a poem. Different sensibilities completely. Reading a novel is almost, it's an individual exercise. You know, even when you -- unless you take it to the stage and you're doing an open reading. Poetry's even more personal, more intimate. Theater is where the community expresses itself most directly.

In your writing, do you see it as your purpose to raise social consciousness?

Wole Soyinka: I don't know that I am conscious of that kind of purpose when I write generally.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. However, when I want to raise political awareness, sensitize the people, I use the form which I call the guerilla theater. I formed a small group, a very tight group, when I returned -- after the large "1960 Masks," which dealt, if you like, with mainstream theater. I found I needed a smaller, tighter group, which could take a theme, current theme, improvise around it, and perform in the marketplace, on the lawns, in front of civil service headquarters, outside the House of Assembly -- any open space -- as well as in the theater hitting directly at unacceptable conduct, events with recognizable mimicking, acting recognizable individuals, pillorying power, government, and so on. Now that is directed, without any ambiguity, at people and direct situations. But generally a theme preoccupies me and I write a play around it.

How do you define truth?

Wole Soyinka: When I encounter that kind of question, I take refuge in the expression of Tierno Bokar, a philosopher from Mali, who was known as the sage of Bandiagara. And he used to say that there are three kinds of truth. There's your truth, and there is my truth, and there is the truth. And then I take that one stage further, and I say possibly there is a fourth, and that there is no truth.

Have you ever had doubts about your abilities? Do you worry about failure?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Wole Soyinka: I don't think I ever doubted my ability, for the simple reason that if I'm doing something, if I'm working on something and it's not working out, then I just leave it alone and can do other things. I've so many interests. And I know there are a number of other things I would have wanted to be, for instance. I'm very passionate about architecture. I would have loved to be an architect. I also consider myself a failed musician. I would love to be a musician, just to spend more time with music, and so on. So I have interests, and so I do not see them as -- anything I'm working on is just something I'm working on, and it may work, it may not work. As I said, I just do other things if it's not working.

What writers do you find inspiring today?

Wole Soyinka: I've always been rather eclectic in my reading tastes, so I cannot say that any single writer has inspired me. I have my favorites, of course. Everybody's all-time favorite, Shakespeare. I no longer read some of the novels of my childhood, like Charles Dickens, for instance, Tolstoy. I prefer the modern writers. Toni Morrison is one of my favorite writers, for instance. I was thrilled to bits, of course, when she got the Nobel Prize. That's another story! She woke me up in the middle of nowhere to tell me! I just read. I read everything. Right now, curiously, I'm reading Guy de Maupassant, the French short story writer, simply because I just caught sight of him in my library and I said, "I haven't read this one for a while." So he's my traveling companion at the moment.

What do you think will be one of the big achievements in the next quarter century?

Wole Soyinka: Something which I'll be sad to miss, unfortunately, and that is regular space travel. I'm a space nut! I follow all launches everywhere. But I'm having the nearest to it. Very soon, on July 11th, I'm going to have the zero-G experience.

Where are you going to experience that?

Wole Soyinka: In San José, California. Somebody had a spare ticket and asked me to nominate someone to give the ticket to. Some organization. So I wrote them and I said, "You want me to nominate somebody?" I said, "Do you think you can take on a 75-year-old man in above-average health who's willing to give up some self-indulgence just to be fit on the day?" And I got a note back saying, "Would that be you by any chance?" I said, "Who else? I'm nominating me!" So I'm going to have that experience. I think that's what's going to happen in the next quarter century. Space travel is going to be normal, quite normal.

Have a fantastic time! We'll be thinking of you.

Wole Soyinka: Thank you.

What advice or encouragement would you give to your grandchildren? What would you like to leave behind as a verbal footprint?

Wole Soyinka: That question comes up again and again, and I say that I don't really know.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think it's up to people to decide what they want to extract from what I've done, or left undone. But the advice I always give to my young children, or to young writers, or those who want to be activists in some way, who come to me and say, "What shall we do about this situation? How can we contribute?" I just say, "Follow your instincts." Don't feel you have to follow the paths of others, because you may not be temperamentally fitted for it. And so you'll just harm yourself and your cause and others. But just follow your instinct, and don't ever pretend to be what you're not.

This will be our last question for the day. What impact do you think President Barack Obama's election has had on world views of the U.S.?

Wole Soyinka: It is impossible to quantify, but there's no question whatsoever that people are looking at the United States, for a change, as a space of opportunity for its own self-fulfillment. See, the United States had garnered a lot of good will, international good will, and then frittered it away over the years. Frittered it away like that. So people are looking at the United States, and saying, "So this is possible within the United States. Then maybe other things are possible."

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think a kind of rigid, automatic hostility towards the United States in many parts of the world is beginning to sort of fray around the edges. People look at the United States, willing to give her a second chance. And Obama's ascension to power there is suddenly going to alter also certain policies, certain global policies. There has been reflex action against the United States. Anything that the United States does, especially in the Third World, in the Middle East, and so on, it's that, "We should take the opposite direction because there's something sinister lurking in the U.S. position." Even if people cannot analyze it, they say it's there, and so, better go a different way. Well all that, I know, is changing, quite a lot. The only continent which may find itself out on a limb -- and I keep telling my associates that -- is the continent of Africa itself. For those who feel that Barack Obama, because he has some African ancestry, therefore will make Africa his priority, for me that's foolish thinking. Why should he? He's an American, and there are certain pressing issues all over the world. I think he's intelligent enough to give to the African continent just a proportionate share of the attention which is commensurate with the condition of the world. I have a feeling that he's going to be very even-handed.

Thank you so much for talking with us today.

Wole Soyinka: You're welcome. It's been a pleasure.

Wole Soyinka Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9