The Nobel clarion rings in Northern air,
A pan-Africanist threnody of grace;
He strips the Eurocentric ego bare,
And reinstates the sovereignty of race.
Not as a suppliant at the Western gate,
But as a custodian of the cosmic wheel,
He decries the hegemony of the state,
With oratorical and tempered steel.
His Nobel Lecture—"This Past Must Address Its Present"—
Is a monumental and searing plea,
To end the vassalage of the peasant,
And set the ontological captive free.
From Sartre to the Yoruba worldview,
He crafts a synthesis both old and new.
Sonnet XI: The Civil War’s Cinder
Across the Benue and the Niger’s flow,
The secessionist fire began to bloom;
A conflagration fed by ancient woe,
That turned the hinterland into a tomb.
Soyinka, the itinerant of peace,
Sought to obviate the coming slaughter;
But found only the draconian police,
And blood like effervescent wine on water.
He became the pariah of the "ZOO,"
An inconvenient voice in seasons of anomy,
Where the viscera of the nation grew,
Into a grotesque and dark anatomy.
In the "Shuttle in the Crypt," the verses moan,
For a republic built on broken bone.
Sonnet XII: The Satire of Area Boys
In Lagos’ heat, where "Area Boys" reside,
Amidst the cacophony of the bus-stop’s roar;
The Lumpenproletariat cannot hide,
The putrefaction of the civil war.
The "Beatification" of the street-wise king,
In a picaresque and urban-jungle play,
Shows how the dispossessed begin to sing,
While the kleptocrat steals the light of day.
It is a verisimilitude of grit,
A microcosm of the nation’s fevered dream,
Where indomitable and caustic wit,
Flows like a subterranean and dark stream.
He finds the numinous in the city’s dross,
Calculating the national and human loss.
Nobel Lecture: Delivered in 1986, dedicated to Nelson Mandela, it remains a seminal text on racial justice.
The Shuttle in the Crypt: A collection of poems composed while he was imprisoned during the Nigerian Civil War.
The Beatification of Area Boy: A play set in Lagos exploring the lives of the urban poor and the impact of military dictatorship.
Now we proceed to explore his "Aesthetic of Resistance" against the Abacha regime or his theological deconstruction of the Abrahamic faiths.
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