Religious Metaphors and Faith Crises in Wole Soyinka’s Poetry

Abstract

Major critical inquiries, in search of the social relevance of Wole Soyinka’s works across genres, have always engaged with the cultural influences which pervade his artistry. Unarguably, this approach has yielded some merits but only in assessments that focus on his plays. This paper engages Soyinka’s poetry with an objective to harness the peculiar influence, apart from the cultural, which is central to his compositions in verse. The essay has used Idanre in Idanre and Other Poems (1967), Ogun Abibman (1976), “Joseph”, one of the “Four Archetypes” poems, in A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972), “Mandela’s Earth Poems” in Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1989) and selected poems under the sections “The Sign of the Zealot” and “Elegies” in Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known (2002) to argue for the centrality of religious mythologies and metaphors in Soyinka’s poetry. The discussion dissects Soyinka’s passion for faith issues into slants which include his use of faith metaphors to mediate on diverse traumas, within and outside his homeland, and as intervening tool to interrogate the crises of faith which has become one of the dystopias in his postcolonial space. While identifying the ambivalent tendencies of religion in Soyinka’s hybridized milieus and raising questions on his prognosis on the crises of faith, the paper concludes that the search for peace, within the confines of religion, may become a reality if humanity focuses on those positive inclinations of respective faiths identified by the poet. Major critical inquiries, in search of the social relevance of Wole Soyinka’s works across genres, have always engaged with the cultural influences which pervade his artistry. Unarguably, this approach has yielded some merits but only in assessments that focus on his plays. This paper engages Soyinka’s poetry with an objective to harness the peculiar influence, apart from the cultural, which is central to his compositions in verse. The essay has used Idanre in Idanre and Other Poems (1967), Ogun Abibman (1976), “Joseph”, one of the “Four Archetypes” poems, in A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972), “Mandela’s Earth Poems” in Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1989) and selected poems under the sections “The Sign of the Zealot” and “Elegies” in Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known (2002) to argue for the centrality of religious mythologies and metaphors in Soyinka’s poetry. The discussion dissects Soyinka’s passion for faith issues into slants which include his use of faith metaphors to mediate on diverse traumas, within and outside his homeland, and as intervening tool to interrogate the crises of faith which has become one of the dystopias in his postcolonial space. While identifying the ambivalent tendencies of religion in Soyinka’s hybridized milieus and raising questions on his prognosis on the crises of faith, the paper concludes that the search for peace, within the confines of religion, may become a reality if humanity focuses on those positive inclinations of respective faiths identified by the poet.