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 also
ideological restrictions and the writings from this 'space' have shaped
themselves in particular ways. Wole Soyinka's prison poetry was an outcome of
his experiences in prison during the Nigerian civil war after his incarceration on
the charge of his writings being sympathetic to the secessionist Biafrans. The
poetry produced in this kind of a closed 'space' is traced with a consistent
awareness of being written in a restricted context. The paper shall make an
attempt to analyze how the very setting of writing shapes the act of
communication, here in the case of Wole Soyinka's prison poetry which
thematically focuses on interacting with the immediate setting to reflect upon
the present conditions. When physical removal becomes a major way to curb
expression, this kind of writing is characterized by an awareness of the
restricted space. Soyinka's poems recurrently use the strategy of the poet
encountering the most mundane in the immediate environment which triggers
thought and writing, primarily through the senses. 'Space' here becomes an
active manifestation of the real and the imagined, and the writing thus produced
carries such a critical 'spatial awareness.' There is an attempt in Soyinka's prison
poetry to use the restricted 'space' as a transgressing sphere of 'otherness' to
contest boundaries, thus also seeking to reclaim the lost cultural space. The title
of the work A Shuttle in the Crypt becomes a metaphor for enlarging this
confined present space