With the Off-Broadway debut of his play “Marshlanders” in 1958, the Nigerian Nobel laureate looks back at the writer he was at the beginning of his career.
We all live in a grueling world, and Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka is not immune. You won’t become as deeply involved in art and politics as he has been in his long life unless you care deeply about the path we are charting as a species.
“I'm a fundamentalist of human freedom,” he said one morning last week in Brooklyn. “It's so basic.”
In the late 1960s, during Nigeria’s civil war, he spent two years as a political prisoner while campaigning against the conflict. Three decades later, he was charged in absentia with treason, which carried the death penalty, but remained abroad until the dictator who had persecuted him died and was replaced by a leader promising reform. Meanwhile, cementing Soyinka’s status as a global intellectual, he won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, with the Academy praising his “vibrant, often harrowing” writing and its “evocative, poetically heightened language.”
But last summer, when he turned 90, he decided to give himself an unusual gift – in response to what he called the “double whammy of Ukraine and Gaza” that had left him so pessimistic that he wanted to withdraw completely.
“I remember for months saying to myself, ‘I don’t want to read the papers, I don’t want to watch the news on TV, I just want to go out and be outside and enjoy the experience,’” he said, sitting in the artist’s lobby of the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, where Theatre for a New Audience is presenting his 1958 play “Marshlanders” in its Off-Broadway premiere.
