Echoes from the Prison Walls: A Study of Select Poems by Wole Soyinka

Abstract

Prison has been a space that has manifested not only physical but alsoideological restrictions and the writings from this 'space' have shapedthemselves in particular ways. Wole Soyinka's prison poetry was an outcome ofhis experiences in prison during the Nigerian civil war after his incarceration onthe charge of his writings being sympathetic to the secessionist Biafrans. Thepoetry produced in this kind of a closed 'space' is traced with a consistentawareness of being written in a restricted context. The paper shall make anattempt to analyze how the very setting of writing shapes the act ofcommunication, here in the case of Wole Soyinka's prison poetry whichthematically focuses on interacting with the immediate setting to reflect uponthe present conditions. When physical removal becomes a major way to curbexpression, this kind of writing is characterized by an awareness of therestricted space. Soyinka's poems recurrently use the strategy of the poetencountering the most mundane in the immediate environment which triggersthought and writing, primarily through the senses. 'Space' here becomes anactive manifestation of the real and the imagined, and the writing thus producedcarries such a critical 'spatial awareness.' There is an attempt in Soyinka's prisonpoetry to use the restricted 'space' as a transgressing sphere of 'otherness' tocontest boundaries, thus also seeking to reclaim the lost cultural space. The titleof the work A Shuttle in the Crypt becomes a metaphor for enlarging thisconfined present space