Wole Soyinka’s Elegies and the Context of Performance
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Date
2012
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The Performer: Ilorin Journal of The Performing Arts
Abstract
To an extent, readers and critics are familiar with Wole Soyinka's style of carving titles for his poetry. For instance, though we have Ogun Abibiman (1976) which is a single title of a long poem and A shuttle in the Crypt (1972) where the demarcations into titles clarify the poet's obsession with other themes, a common trend runs through his works like Idanre and other poems (1967), Mandela's Earth and other poems (1989) and Samarkand and other Markets I have Known (2002). Critics have always found it convenient to use the major poems in each title to navigate the terrain of the poet's ingenuity. This has some credibility in its own right but to the negligence of the salient points made by the poets in his "Other Poems". In the "Other Poems" of Soyinka, we have the "exit Poems" which, on the surface are compositions for persons who have transited from the earth. This paper traces the origins of poetry for the dead to the pre-literate African culture where all entertainment forms are predicated on performance. Beyond emphasizing the context within which such poems are rendered, the paper also distils the implications of such transitions for the dead and the living. The researcher concludes that Soyinka's attempt at reviving an aspect of performance poetry asserts core values bequeathed on the living and the dead.
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Keywords
Wole Soyinka, Elegy, Performance
Citation
Afolayan, K.N. (2012). Wole Soyinka’s Elegies and the Context of Performance. The Performer: Ilorin Journal of The Performing Arts. 14; 244- 256, Published by The Department of The Performing Arts, University of Ilorin.