Madmen and Specialists
Soyinka’s immediate audience, the urban Nigerian audience, have often complained about his seemingly obscurantist aesthetic even while acclaiming his genius. The feeling is that he is made too much good use of his syncretic education and multilingual lexicon to craft texts which are so inscrutable and elliptical as to be rendered practically useless. Critics like Abiola Irele and Biodun Jeyifo and Henry Louis Gates (one his fellow-traveller and the others his former students) have argued his right to ‘opaqueness’ (to borrow Eduoard Glissant’s concept), comparing his complexity to the complexity of the Yoruba mythopoetic art traditions, for example, as well as to the vaunted complexity of global (especially European) modernists. With Soyinka we have a Serious Writer. But we also have with him a committed, occasionally agitprop, writer, who--despite having paid the price of activism by facing threats to his life and freedom, in solitary confinement and exile—who is criticized, especially by those of a more hardline Marxian bent, for not being more baldly didactic, for betraying his vision and message by not making his art more accessible to the ‘masses’. A critic like Lindfors has put it like this:
‘He has got what it takes to move men and set them thinking…Soyinka, in attempting to brave the harsher elements of his society, may have blow his own fuse, for there is increasing evidence of a tragic misapplication of power, a near total blackout of illumination. More and more frequently the artist simply fails to communicate his message to the world.’
Is this not a criticism of the whole avant-garde trend of the 20th century, as well as the drama that concerns us specifically. What does it matter if Beckett and Soyinka and Jarry and Brecht did their thing? What has it actually changed for people outside of the privileged few who have access to their plays? And yet…
Reporting about a young first-time voter who was disillusioned by the delay in the opening of the polling units and left without casting his vote, Al Jazeera quotes him saying:
“I’ve been here since 9am (8:00 GMT) and there’s still no sign of them. I can’t keep waiting for Godot,” he said in reference to a play by Samuel Beckett about a man who never arrives.”
Most Nigerians have not read or watched Madmen and Specialists, but the author and the title are so popular that the words often for newspaper headlines. Apt because it describes a country which has not diminished in chaos since the years of the civil war, and sometimes it’s so apt it is almost absurd. Take for example, words from a campaign speech in which the unlikely ‘Third Force’ Labour Party candidate and ex Anambra governor Peter Obi, businessman and Philosophy BA, very seriously says about how he managed to stop crime in an area of Anambra State: ‘I got the advice from a madman’. And the audience responds with pensive collective nods and ‘Hmmm’…which is not unlike what we do when we try to understand Beckett and his ilk, after all.
In a way, despite claims of obscurantism, Soyinka is depicting more clearly than anyone else the absurdity of his postcolonial milieu. The characters are stock characters, which you can take a stroll down the streets of Lagos or Ibadan and still encounter. In Ibadan, for example, there is still the colony of mendicants located on Jemibewon Road (Je mi be won=‘help me beg them’). And there are stories about the various ‘specialists’, technocrats, doctors, lawyers, data analysts, computer programmers and so on… the postcolonial bourgeois elite who have not hesitated to use their skills and education to assist in the oppression of their own people. What we are left with is a dismal dog eat dog or man eat man situation.
Anyway, Soyinka’s play is not about the particular postbellum social circumstances so much as it is about the problem of evil in general and the ever-lurking possibility of human perversion. It is pessimism reified; what Abiola Irele calls ‘a global Manicheism underscored by a profound cynicism’, a warning of what could happen if the evil encouraged by the civil war is not kept at bay; it demands to be experienced as an allegory.
Much like Beckett and Brecht, whose Vladmir and Estragon and Pirate Jenny could very well fit in with these characters, Soyinka frustrates our need for escapism by perplexing us, forcing us to think, much like he had to brood during his time in solitary confinement in which the aim after all was to warp his mind, to drive him mad.
