To capture the claustrophobic and defiant essence of Wole Soyinka’s 27-month incarceration during the Nigerian Civil War, here are five sonnets written in the lexical maximalist style. These focus on his seminal prison works, The Man Died: Prison Notes and the poetry collection A Shuttle in the Crypt.
XXI. The Crypt’s Architect
Within the Kaduna cell, a stygian crypt,
He weaves a shuttle of incantatory rhyme,
Where carceral shadows have nefariously slipped,
Beyond the strictures of the temporal time.
No soporific draught for solitary dread,
But lexical fire to scorch the silent wall,
Where man dies in the tacit breath unsaid,
Before the tyrant’s hegemonic thrall.
He conjures mirages of a shrouded estuary,
To shore his limbs against the wayward gale,
A numinous map for mental sanctuary,
Lest the adamantine resolve should fail.
The weaverbird pounces on the carceral cage,
Writing defiance on a spectral page.
XXII. The Chimes of Silence
He hears the funeral clank of shackled feet,
The chimes of silence ringing through the void,
Where vulture-priests and crow-choir-masters meet,
And mortal sanctity is nebulously destroyed.
A hunger-strike of spirit and of will,
To exorcise the stagnant human curses,
He stands unyielding in the stygian chill,
Composing prisonnettes in vituperative verses.
Each pulsation of the mind is incendiary,
A radical posture in a vault of stone,
Transmuting suffering to the visionary,
Where liberty ascends its numinous throne.
Though misted cells may seek to undo the ken,
He remains the interpreter of mortal men.
XXIII. The Gulliverian Allegory
Upon his brow, the hand of Night is heavy pressed,
A subtle plough exacerbating pain,
Where serrated shadows haunt the restless rest,
And dank leaves drip with metaphoric rain.
He is a sleep-walker through the season's womb,
Seeking the Word amidst the stygian gloom,
To exhume humanity from the tomb,
And shatter the draconian impending doom.
The cockroach whispers of the October slain,
Of wombs torn and eyes extinguished quite,
But Soyinka reclaims the sacred plain,
With lexical might in the gathering night.
He is the bard who will not keep silent still,
A sentinel of truth and moral will.
XXV. The Amber Wall of Resilience
The amber wall mitigates the stasis,
With rays that penetrate the carceral cell,
To shatter the lethargic metamorphosis,
And exorcise the stygian hell.
He reaches out to roots and misted calls,
To shore his mental stability whole,
And writes defiance on the sepulchral walls,
To save the shattered fragments of the soul.
From Kaduna's gloom to Stockholm's frozen light,
His voice of vision resonates still,
A numinous beacon in the gathering night,
With erudition and unfettered will.
Oh, WS, your lexis shall perennially bloom,
Beyond the reach of any impending doom.
Now we delve further into the archetypes he adopted in prison, such as his identification with Hamlet or Ulysses, or explore the cinematic adaptation of his prison notes released for his 90th birthday.
XXIV:The Night's Heavy Hands
He walks the Lilliputian landscape vain,
An alien hulk in a thumb-sized assemblage,
Where sycophants and manikins ordain,
The draconian rules of political pillage.
His piss upon the flames of war and greed,
Is a visceral fountain of sublime disdain,
A metaphysical and urgent deed,
To shatter every authoritarian chain.
From Joseph’s dreams to Hamlet’s pallid brow,
He internalizes the archetype’s ordeal,
Refusing to obsequiously bow,
To Potiphar’s wife or military steel.
The man dies in him who keeps the silent vow,
But erudition is his tempered plough.
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