With the recent surprise of 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature for the african gurnah, we remember the first author of that continent to win the most prestigious recognition of letters, Wole soyinka. A playwright with a vocation but a novelist also due to that natural synergy that invites us to narrate without thinking about other tables than those that real life offers, much more exposed to unforeseen turns and unexpected scene changes.
Having in this blog a greater love for fiction, we will always gravitate towards the novel or the story without conditions of a more scripted structure, more restricted by the imagery and the rhythms of the poetic, or completely removed from fiction. I say this because Soyinka's work moves through theater but also towards essays or poetry. Here we are going to review those plots not designed to interpret, but rather to imagine each reader inhabiting the soul of the characters.
Realism and even chronic many times, yes, but inviting us to enter even the kitchen of the most transcendent events in Nigeria and many other places in Africa and the world. Because it may seem that the excessive ambition of certain African dictatorships is something exclusive to those parts, until we see how everything splashes to very different locations around the world.
We find ethnic stories, political criticism and great humanistic vision. But also, Soyinka shows an Africa that is necessary for our world. Because, as strange as it may seem, in the current inertia of the West there are sins not yet committed in that third world that is not so third world in its conception of life. In fact, some of the stories that Soyinka tells us have that point of transformative biography, of a time and space where human beings have so little that they can end up being happier in the absence of imposed needs...
Top 3 recommended novels of Wole Soyinka
Chronicles from the country of the happiest people on Earth
Satire requires an ingenuity that Soyinka wastes like a spring in this story that starts from fiction but brings us closer to raw realities with that narrative trilerism of someone who knows how to present a fiction to offer us the prestige, that final trick of every magician, of the lyrics in this case, that leaves us speechless and shocked ...
A funny and bitter political satire on corruption in mystery novel form. In an imaginary Nigeria, but very similar to the real one, a group of rogues, preachers, entrepreneurs and politicians find themselves immersed in a plot about trafficking in human limbs stolen from a hospital.
The doctor who unveils this shady business tells his close friend, the fashionable man in the country, who is about to join an important position in the United Nations. But someone seems willing to defend the secret and it soon becomes clear that the enemy is powerful, and can be anywhere.
At once a narrative feast, a story of intrigue and a scathing denunciation of corruption, this novel, Soyinka's first in nearly fifty years, is also a poignant call to mobilize against the abuse of power.
Aké: The childhood years
Everything is forged in childhood. We are childhood laden with years, circumstances, beliefs and other foods for the soul, sweet or sour. To appreciate the difference in how the soul of a human being is forged in a space very different from ours, nothing better than traveling to his childhood. If it can be of a brilliant type like Soyinka, we will discover more of that essential food.
Aké. The childhood years is the first-person account of Soyinka's childhood in a Nigerian village called Aké, in the years around World War II. There little Wole, a boy of infinite curiosity, a lover of books and prone to getting into trouble and adventure, grows up with the double influence of the western airs and the ancient spiritual traditions of youruba. This colorful evocation of the landscapes, sounds and scents that shaped the world of Soyinka takes on a beautiful, lyrical form, but also loaded with humor and the candor and insight of a childlike gaze.
Season of chaos
one of the most relevant literary works in Africa. It focuses on the problem of war, ethnic and regional politics, as well as the corrupt military conspiracies that unfold in that troubled country, hypothetically Nigeria. His argument goes beyond simple testimony and leads to the possibility of social regeneration.
The novel is a definitive vision of the militarization of the state in Africa. What could be the elements to achieve a social reconstruction in a context suffocated by a predatory state? The issue is evidenced in this work in the tension between violence and non-violence, on the one hand, and collective activism versus individual heroism, on the other. ??
Season of anomie ?? it is the story of an individual who sells us a utopian world in which to spread his ideas. In this endeavor, there are many who die senselessly and many others who suffer just because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is a violent and destructive book, yet it contains some of the most beautiful passages I have ever read. Soyinka possesses a sublime knowledge of man and his role in the world.
