by Wole Soyinka
My dream is to see the world come together and live as one in peace and love and stop the killing.
I have learnt that you cannot categorize everyone as the same, each person has their own feelings, you need to know how to deal di ferently with each person.
If we don’t pull the “turfs” together, Kingston is not going to survive.
I believe that we as young people can make a di ference in the community.
Those were the voices of the garrison children, seeking liberation into a world of creativity and fulfillment, into which they also sought to liberate their community. At least half of them had emerged from broken homes. Most had known violence firsthand or indirectly, in one form or another. In the worst of the “war zones”—as they are actually described!—residents often slept beneath, not on, their beds, for fear of being killed before morning by stray bullets crashing through their thin walls at night. “Theater” was a strange concept to many. They had grown up learning to know their own turfs and accepting that it was dangerous to stray across certain streets or cross borderlines.
It was the politicians who created these garrisons. In order to guarantee and seal tight their political fiefdoms, they built schools in them, clinics and recreation centers of sorts, and created jobs—usually in construction—for their supporters and their dependents, some of whom doubled the job of foreman or supervisor with the more powerful position of being or serving the “dons” of the garrisons, controlling lives from infancy to death, which for many was sudden and violent. The marijuana trade sustained many; so did trafficking in harder drugs.
The garrisons, polarized in deadly destructiveness, went by exotic names: Tel Aviv, Barbican, Tivoli Gardens, Trenchtown, and the like. A full generation had been raised, gone to school, married, raised their own families, and sometimes died without stepping across the street that separated them from the next garrison. Even schooling was uneven, since sometimes the “wars” prevented pupils from emerging from their homes for long periods at a time. During our rehearsals, it was not unusual to receive frantic messages for help that had somehow been smuggled out from a youth—a stripling of upward of eighteen years—who had been locked up by his mother to prevent him from leaving home for fear of his getting killed. She would mount guard over the door and swear that he would leave home only over her dead body. Public transportation traversed these streets, moving through one garrison into the next, but you simply did not get down from the bus until you were safely in your own neighborhood.
I was pursued, I sometimes felt, by the violence from which I had sought to escape, if only for a while. I had an early taste of it one afternoon when I toured the garrisons to obtain a flavor of this Lagos live-alike, stopping in a bar from time to time for a beer and conversation. I was accompanied—a condition to which I was learning to adjust—by an assigned security officer in mufti, mostly to validate my presence in suspicious neighborhoods. Less than two hours after we left Trenchtown, a shoot-out occurred right outside the bar where we had sat. The female bartender, a buxom wit of immense vitality with whom we had passed an enjoyable half hour or so, caught a stray bullet and was killed. For some moments, I wondered, could Abacha’s roving squads have successfully tracked me down, hit the right place, but mistimed their operation? But no, it was nothing more than the daily dose of local garrison violence.
That violence constantly intruded, but violence had become part of residents’ lives. After each rehearsal, it was a quasi-military operation to ensure that these youthful enthusiasts got home safely, and there were times when the police came to rehearsals or radioed my minder to pass on a message: either we let the kids return home early on account of information of an impending gang war, or else the gang war would commence and we should keep the affected members with us for the night. Every constraint only made them more resolved to break free, and this theater activity was their personal and collective instrument.
It was thus the Orisun experience raised several levels, an intense, life-and-death Kingstonian strain. Brief, occasional theater sketches outside rehearsals for Beatification served as outlets for long-repressed experiences and emotions. Gradually, tentatively, they moved toward the creation of their own ensemble within the production company. Stringing together their sketches with songs, they designed their own very special show, all boundless energy and exuberance. For their first outing as an independent ensemble, they settled, poignantly, on the title Border Connections—most of them were crossing borders for the first time in their lives. Creative borders, obviously, but also violent, artificial borders that had been deliberately erected by the absentee political kingpins. Their obsessive theme was thus political manipulation, the exploitation and division of their communities. They decried the violence that ruled and ruined their lives and depicted the agonies of mothers constantly obliged to bury their children. The titles of the sketches reflected a touching crusading zeal: “Youth Oppressed,” “Mi Son Dead,” “Mi Hungry, Mi Angry,” “Isn’t There Another Way? Put Down de Gun!” They were apostles of change and hope.
It seemed a forlorn cry, doomed from its very utterance, but, incredibly, the “dons” who had heard of the show and watched it on television or on other neutral ground embraced it as a revelation. They negotiated “command performances” on their turfs, over which they proudly presided and played host. These were men who would end a twenty-year friendship in a burst of gun-fire for no other cause than a suspicion that one had been “dissed”— disrespected—by a lifelong friend. Rape was a way of life for most. Beneath the bravado of the warlords, however, was an infinite war-weariness, for which the message of the youths offered prospects of eventual relief and a change in social sensibilities. The proof was not long in coming: the “dons” passed the word among rival gangs that it was time for a cessation of random violence! Was flirtatious eighteen-year-old Patrine being proved right? In her mission statement, the formal declaration that each participant made of his or her assessment of the Area Youth program, as it was renamed, she declared, “The youth have displayed the power to change and the will to conquer and eradicate violence from our society.” The dons appeared to have subscribed to that. They sent out the word: Bring out the guns, or bury them.
Of course it was by no means over. The emergence of a band of evangelists does not transform any community overnight, not where there are those who feel threatened, who see their domination of society through the tactics of fractionalization being eroded by a youthful gospel of oneness. A performance of Border Connections on November 23, 2000, in one of the inner-city community centers, had to be canceled owing to what was publicly acknowledged as “war in the community,” and the waste of young Tanya Thomas at the unfulfilled age of fourteen remained a harrowing reminder of the enormity of their task. However, the Area Youths operated on a different kind of battlefront, where the conquering band remained undeterred. “What we captured,” proclaimed Theresa Whyte, one of the older members of the group, “was something we can’t let go. We’ll never let it go.”
They did not. What started out as a movement of youthful idealism became the Area Youth Foundation, touring to worldwide acclaim. I receive the occasional postcard, e-mail, even newsletter.
BEATIFICATION WAS, BY no means, an easy exercise. Undertaken as a collaboration with Sheila Graham’s quaintly named “The Company” by the University of the West Indies and Emory University, Atlanta, where I was teaching at the time, it was supposed to mark the beginning of a special relationship between the two universities. That sisterly bonding nearly foundered before it began. I was obliged to walk off the production once, agreeing to return only when the company had persuaded itself and its recruited members that it wanted a serious, professional production. The situation had become impossible! Before the show was finally over, from first casting to performance, I had rehearsed for each role, in a large cast, an average of two and a half actors—surely an unprecedented turnover rate in the history of most theater productions!
Th
e Orisun experience may prepare a director for the unexpected, but it was not in the running for an entry in the Guinness World Records in directorial self-flagellation! I let loose on the assembled cast and production team and took off, laying out conditions for my return. We did not succeed in regrouping for another two and a half weeks. By the time I returned, however, the company had succeeded, among other creative insurmountables, in filling the role of one of the two principal characters in the play. The “professionals” also appeared to have finally imbibed the dedication of the younger, rawer elements in the troupe—they were the professionals, at least in commitment!
The lighting director, however, continued his existence in his accustomed, invisible, and unique time zone. I began to wonder if he was a phantom of The Company’s creation, perhaps one of the famed West Indian zombies, from his capacity for sustained evaporation. He remained so despite the efforts of Rex Nettleford, the university rector, to trap him in the world of the living. Zombie or not, he barely escaped a truly terminal, irreversible death from a beckoning stage prop on the very day of the premiere! After disappearing throughout the crucial countdown days, Mr. Lighting Tech turned up only five hours before opening, blithely announcing that he had less than two hours to work under my direction, as he had yet another performance to light that same evening! Then, sticking to that time concession as if he had swallowed an alarm clock, he left the control booth, sauntered across the stage, and headed toward the exit, his tongue cheerfully tripping off the traditional theater greeting, “Break a leg.” I succeeded in keeping my hands off the iron rod only by retorting “Break your neck!” but he was already halfway to his next engagement—no doubt in a rummery—and I doubt if he heard or cared.
Vinnie Murphy, from Emory Theater, had arrived that morning for the premiere with a university delegation. Like most directors who worked in conditions that approximated the norm, he was accustomed to technicals that took a steady, meticulous week. They found me in an empty theater, awaiting the levitation of the lighting director. I was still waiting there till late afternoon, occupying the time in brief spurts of activity with individual actors and other crew members. They helped me to preserve my outward calm.
The opening performance was thus, as in many such productions, a technical-cum-dress rehearsal. In addition, however, it was the first complete run-through of that play ever to take place—that is, its first uninterrupted performance in the correct order of scenes—thanks to the rotating absence of the principal actors. When Murphy returned to Atlanta, he took to regaling his students with the account of how he had actually witnessed a full-length production lit in an hour and forty-five minutes, but I doubt if any of them believed that it was anything but a ploy to work them like slaves in future Emory productions.
To watch the company leaping up and down onstage like a family of long-restrained, high-spirited monkeys the moment the curtain closed to sustained applause, knowing, with their newly honed theatrical sensibilities, that they had indeed brought off a singular, nearly impossible theatrical feat despite flawed moments here and there, savoring the vindication of unaccustomed days of discipline, self-privation, and creative exploration, engulfed by bodies as I emerged from backstage and they screamed the roof down, turning somersaults, breaking into spontaneous snatches from their Border Connections, was a most affecting moment. I rescued Chicken from her self-pitying corner— she had forgotten to make a costume change in one scene—and made her join the others. I told her, Consider this: but for the Lighting Zombie, you would have had a lighting cue. Soon she was feeling less suicidal.
They basked in the adulation of the families and friends who swarmed backstage, responded to the slightly more formal felicitations and suggestions of Rex Nettleford and his colleagues from Emory, Rudolph Byrd and Vinnie Murphy, then Sheila Graham and the city worthies. What they did not know was that—again on so many levels, since theater has no parallel in this territory of largesse (and denial!)—despite frequent bouts of despondency, theirs was easily the most valued single gift that I had received throughout the four dark years of the struggle against the tyranny of General Sani Abacha.
PART VI
Bernard Shaw Was Right!
How the News Came to Me
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW IS REPUTED TO HAVE SAID, “I FIND IT EASY TO FORgive the man who invented a devilish instrument like dynamite, but how can one ever forgive the diabolical mind that invented the Nobel Prize in Literature?”
Yes, the Nobel was born of dynamite, but did that mean that it must transmit the shock waves of dynamite, and for so long afterward? It is not my business to account for how it came to take such a hold on the imagination of the world, to the extent that when I find myself in a number of countries, in Asia especially, the first question asked me is nearly always “What must we do to bring the Nobel Prize to this country?” It is a question that never ceases to astonish, even shock me—why should people worry their heads over a prize whose mode of selection they can in no way influence? Indeed, why should one strain for a prize? If it comes, fine; if it doesn’t, what was one before the prize? Why should one notice the existence of a prize for anything?
Acknowledged competitions, I understand. At least one knows what the rules are. In my youth, I sent in my poems and short stories to the arts festivals in colonial Nigeria, won a bronze medal or two—it was always a bronze medal, for some reason—and was highly elated. My competitiveness was restricted to such adventures. It retained its keenness, perhaps, until I returned home from my studies in the United Kingdom and created my theater company. From then on I became increasingly indifferent to the very notion of competition, which can only mean that, somewhere deep down, I was persuaded that competitions in the world of creativity are meant for the young or the early adult, not for the mature, self-cognizant being. Contradicted though I am by the existence of numerous prizes of great prestige, much sought after and undoubtedly enhancements of one creative enterprise or another, I have experienced no urge to revise my visceral conviction.
The third-hardest part of the Nobel is to be found in the expectations of others—in the main. As a laureate, one is expected to be different from whatever one was before. So confident and self-fulfilling is that expectation that in some cases a difference is noticed—with marked approval or resentment— even by those who encounter a Nobelist for the first time! Others simply demand, even wordlessly, that one act differently, eat differently, talk differently, dress differently, walk differently, abandon former haunts, former preoccupations, former idiosyncrasies, and former likes and dislikes, and don, overnight, a totally fictitious persona that corresponds to their fantasies. Certain chores become too commonplace for the Nobelist, and the poor sod is faced—thank goodness!—with desertion if he fails to deliver on their expectations.
Second place, nearly in dead heat with the first, goes to the loss of the final shred of anonymity, especially hard for those who carry around with them a landmark of luxuriant moss that passes for a head of hair. This, however, can be ameliorated by a good stock of hats. Such disguises are not perfect, but at least they give one a running start. The prime place, however, belongs to one’s overnight transformation—in the conception of most in one’s own community— into the drinking buddy of Bill Gates.
There are compensations, however, and mine came right at the beginning. Not too many of the laureates, I am certain, could have relished coming into knowledge of their award the way it occurred in my case. Let me recall, first of all, the previous year, 1985, in which all kinds of speculators had been deservedly chastised for their premature celebrations, the Nigerian media most especially. It is a pity that no one can get a comprehensive copyright on one’s own being, so that public speculations about any individual’s prospects in any field become actionable infringement on one’s privacy. How the rumors began, only the gods can tell, but there they were, and I at the distasteful center of it all. Confronted by confident predictions plastered all over the pages of the Nigerian newspaper
s, pursued by journalists in the weeks leading up to the announcement in October 1985, then pursued after the deflation of their prophetic presumptions, just to be asked what I felt, my answer oscillated among “Let that be a lesson to you all,” “Serves you all right,” “No comment,” “Now can I get on with my writing?” and the like.
However, the media had learned its lesson, so in 1986 all was silent. Indeed, I did not even recall that the time of the Nobel was at hand as I took leave of Cornell University, where I was then teaching, boarded a plane, and headed for Paris to chair the executive meeting of the International Theatre Institute (ITI). I was to stay with my cousin Yemi Lijadu north of Paris, where he had an apartment. I arrived early in the morning. I hated those flights from the East Coast of America to Europe. They are what I call the overnight neither-nors— not long enough to permit a decent sleep and too long to prevent one from dozing off. My routine after such flights is to crawl into bed, close all the blinds, put on my eyeshade, and sleep for between two and three hours. As I was getting into Paris at an early hour, Yemi would normally have left the keys with a neighbor or in an agreed-upon hiding place and taken himself off to work.
This time, he was home. I found him in a state of barely suppressed excitement, his slight goatee bobbing up and down, his dark cheeks dancing with the well-being of French wines and lunches, not to mention the results of his own kitchen prowess. Before I could set down my bags, he had commenced his “dramatizer routine,” one that had become second nature. If Yemi had exciting news to deliver, he would never do it straight—the more exciting, the greater the garnishing. This time he surpassed himself with so many peripherals, incidentals, and parentheses that I finally had to interrupt.