ANTONY JOHAE

 

 

Wole Soyinka's "Gulliver":  Swift Transposed 

WOLE SOYINKA’S VOLUME of prison poetry, A Shuttle in the Crypt, to which the one-hundred-and-six-line poem “Gulliver” belongs, was published in 1972, fourteen years before the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is noteworthy, however, that neither A Shuttle in the Crypt nor Soyinka’s collection of prison notes, The Man Died (1972), were published in Nigeria, but rather from New York and London several years after the author’s release from prison and subsequent forced exile from his homeland. The poems that comprise A Shuttle in the Crypt were written during and after Soyinka’s imprisonment without trial from 1967 to 1969, “Shuttle” in the title signifying at a surface level the moving spirit of freedom within the prisoner and “Crypt” the deathly confinement of his prison cell. “Crypt” may also connote something hidden, for example, the cryptic meanings contained in the prisoner’s writings, as typically might be found in political satire, particularly of the allegorical kind, while “Shuttle” might also refer to the prisoner’s rapid mood swings from hope to despair and back again as he is psychologically worked on by the prison authorities.  

“Gulliver” is one of four poems in the section of the volume titled “Four Archetypes,” which Tanure Ojaide describes as “masks the poet wears to dramatise himself.”   The three other poems are “Joseph,” “Hamlet,” and “Ulysses,” the protagonists of which, like Gulliver, are “travelers,” who also have been at one time or another physically (Joseph and Ulysses), or mentally (Hamlet) imprisoned or trapped. As one might expect, all four poems work cross-referentially with their original counterparts: “Joseph” with the Old Testament Book of Genesis; “Hamlet” with Shakespeare’s play; “Ulysses” with both Homer’s epic and James Joyce’s novel; and “Gulliver” with Part One of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, “A Voyage to Lilliput.”  By freely reworking "A Voyage to Lilliput" Soyinka afforded himself a double disguise:  first, an allegorical mode that would cryptically announce the criticism he felt compelled to make of the military rulers of post-independence Nigeria; second, a strategy of sustained allusion to Swift's novel that would effectively put a defensive historical and cultural space between Soyinka's own writings and those whose job it was to guard him and censor what he wrote.  Technically, what we have here is a resiting of historical context:  the transposition of Swift's basic paradigm with its oblique references  to the political vices of Augustan society to post-colonial Nigeria and the moral turpitude of the governing military junta.