The Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka has told students that if
Donald Trump is elected president of the United States next week, he will
leave the country.
“If in the unlikely event he does win, the first thing he’ll do is to say
[that] all green-card holders must reapply to come back into the US. Well,
I’m not waiting for that,” said Soyinka, who is scholar-in-residence at
New York University’s Institute of African American Affairs this autumn.
“The moment they announce his victory, I will cut my green card myself and
start packing up.”
The Nigerian playwright and poet, who was imprisoned in Nigeria during its
civil war, later fleeing the country and receiving a death sentence in
absentia, urged young people to stand up against oppression.
Giving a seminar to students at Oxford University, he also laid into
Brexit, saying it was a “ridiculous decision”, and part of an
international rise in what he called “ultranationalism”.
“What is happening in Europe shouldn’t surprise any of us … It has
happened before,” he said. “We were here when Enoch Powell was leading his
thugs out to drive blacks from here … it’s a constant fight to try to get
a nation to recognise its own noble persuasions, its own persuasions of
the loftiness of human possibility. It’s for young people like you to say
no to them whenever that happens.”
Soyinka was Africa’s first Nobel laureate in literature, winning in 1986
for writing that “in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones
fashions the drama of existence”.
He told the students that African literature today was “robust, without a
question, especially with the younger generation… I think we of the older
are getting a little bit tired, and I think our production gets thinner
and thinner. But fortunately, it doesn’t worry any of us, as far as I
know, because the body of literature that is coming out [is] varied and
liberated,” he said.
“African literature suffered from some kind of ideological spasm in which
the younger generation was bombarded by a sense of ideological duty, in
other words it was bombarded with a very simplistic notion by leftist
radical writers, very reformative revolutionary thinkers, that all
literature is ideological and therefore writers must ensure that their
writing illustrates progressive ideologies.”
This, he said, had “inhibited a number of very talented writers, crippled
their sense of liberal creativity, forced them to try and narrow
themselves into a very tight prism of viewing phenomena, humour,
relationships, even politics.” But “fortunately this next generation has
been freeing itself and the result is really marvellous, very varied – the
women in particular”.
Asked about Bob Dylan’s unexpected crowning as winner of this year’s Nobel
laureate, Soyinka was reluctant to be drawn, though he did say: “Since
I’ve written quite a number of songs for my plays, I would like to be
nominated for a Grammy”.
TheGuardian.com