Below are two sonnets inspired by his experiences in Kaduna Prison, following the Shakespearean and Petrarchan traditions he often adapted.
1. The Pacing Mind (A Shakespearean Sonnet)
Sixteen paces by twenty-three, the line,
A narrow world within a limestone cage,
Where silence turns the water into wine,
And ink is bled from veins to fill the page.
He hears the soldiers’ boots, a heavy sound,
The scraping chains of men who walk to death,
While truths he spoke are buried in the ground,
And tyranny would steal his very breath.
But like the "Hamlet" of a broken state,
He douses passion’s flame with cold resolve,
To stand against the turning wheels of fate,
And let the riddles of the soul dissolve.
Though walls may rupture every tired seam,
They cannot touch the landscape of the dream.
2. The Cell as Crypt (A Petrarchan Sonnet)
Within the shuttle of this silent crypt,
He weaves a fabric from the dark and grey,
Where time is smoke that holds a weighty sway,
And every drop of hope is slowly stripped.
On scraps of tissue, secret lines are gripped,
To keep the haunting phantoms far at bay,
Until the amber wall of coming day
Through narrow bars of iron has softly slipped.
He is the "Ulysses" on a wine-dark sea,
Or "Gulliver" among the small and vain,
Who finds a home in fierce integrity.
No cage can kill the spirit’s ancient strain,
For truth is not a thing that can be bound,
Nor buried in the silence underground.
Wole Soyinka’s use of the sonnet and other structured forms in prison served as a "protective subterfuge," allowing him to maintain mental discipline while secretly documenting the horrors of his confinement.
In his collection A Shuttle in the Crypt, Soyinka projects his experiences through four literary and historical figures to examine his own isolation and the political state of Nigeria:
Hamlet: Used to parallel the "sick state" of Denmark with Nigeria's political decay. Soyinka adopts a modified sonnet structure to mirror the "literal and mental imprisonment" he faced.
Joseph: Based on the biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, this archetype represents the "pursuit of truths" and the rejection of a "masquerade of virtue" by a corrupt establishment.
Gulliver: An allegory for Soyinka's role in the Nigerian Civil War, where he is the "alien hulk" among "manikin cruel" leaders. Lilliput and Blefuscu serve as proxies for the warring factions of Nigeria and Biafra.
Ulysses: Employs a stream-of-consciousness style to portray the profound loneliness of the political prisoner, paralleling his 22 months of solitary confinement with Odysseus’s ten years of wandering.
The "Prisonnettes" and "Chimes of Silence"
Beyond the sonnet, Soyinka invented or adapted other forms to capture the sensory deprivation of his cell:
Prisonnettes: Five-line stanzas (cinquains) designed to capture a single, intense image with "mystical intensity," often dedicated to his jailers as a form of defiance.
Live Burial: A visceral poem describing his 16-by-23-pace cell as a tool used by the state to "drill through to his sanity".
"Amber Wall": One of the few poems of rejuvenation, focusing on the sunlight that occasionally broke the monotony of the "crypt".
Soyinka's prison notes were later expanded into the prose memoir The Man Died, which remains
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