Exile and the African Intellectual in Wole Soyinka’s You Must Set Forth at Dawn
ABSTRACT
Exile has become one of the major features of the lives of public intellectuals especially where the brutality of the state as far as home is concerned becomes unpredictably dangerous. In Africa, the question of exile is more crucial to the understanding of the roles played by intellectuals who often challenge the arbitrary deployment of state power. It is common knowledge also that a great number of African intellectuals today live either permanently in exile or constantly straddle the space between home and exile. This often leads to a sense of alienation, which in turn affects the overall identity of public intellectuals. This paper, therefore, seeks to examine the question of exile as it affects public intellectuals in Africa. Using Wole Soyinka’s autobiographical text You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006) as illustration, the paper will seek to understand the way African writers and intellectuals deal with the question of exile as well as the line of departure between exile and escapism. In other words, do African intellectuals merely embark on exile as a mere alibi or do they do so in response to the dangers inherent in the constant hostilities between them and the state? As bearers of an identity defined by a kind of ‘contingency, afflicted by alienation, estrangement and exile’ (Medalie, 2004:12), do these individuals long for home? The paper seeks answers to these questions through a close reading of Wole Soyinka’s experience of exile as narrated in You Must Set Forth at Dawn. The propriety and expediency of exile is a central theme to which an entire section of the narrative is devoted. The paper will close, by attempting to point out the major impacts of the problem of exile on the field of intellection in Africa and then by reiterating ‘the need to overcome displacement’ (Anyidoho, 1997:16).
The question of exile is a very prominent one in postcolonial literature. African literature, being a major aspect of this literature, therefore, engages with the issue of exile to a very large extent. Though exile has been part of the intellectual and literary traditions of different parts of the world from time immemorial, ‘few centuries have experienced displacements of writers, artists, professors, and professionals as dramatic as those which accompanied the political upheavals of the twentieth century’ (Pavel, 1998, p.25). In like manner, the postcolonial world, and specifically Africa, continues to take the front seat as far as the ostracism of intellectuals is concerned even into the present century. It is then possible to argue that the history as well as the socio-political reality of various countries in Africa, including Wole Soyinka’s Nigeria makes an exploration of the trope of exile inevitable in the works of writers who cannot help sparing a thought for the condition of their homeland. This is even more so if one considers the fact that most of the writers themselves often fall victim to dislocation from home. It then explains, to a large extent, why exile often constitutes a major trope in autobiographical works which capture the life experiences of their authors. The internal and external frames of being implicated in the autobiography make exile a crucial component of the numerous discourses in this genre.i To be sure, the term exile cannot be said to have any monolithic meaning in literature, as it is open to a multiplicity of interpretations. As Susan Suleiman argues:
…few subjects elicit as much intellectual ambivalence – but especially of late, as much intellectual fascination – as the subject of exile. In its narrow sense a political banishment, exile in its broad sense designates every kind of estrangement or displacement from the physical and geographical to the spiritual. (1998, p.2)
In a similar vein, Sara Forsdyke in her conceptualization of exile contends that:
Exile in the broadest terms can denote any separation from a community to which an individual or group formerly belonged. Exile in the strictest sense involves a physical separation from the place where one previously lived. In the modern era, however, we know of many cases of what is called “internal exile,” in which case an individual or group is removed from the immediate surroundings but not expelled from the country altogether. (2005, p.7)
As convoluted as this understanding of exile may appear, the term taken in its broadest or strictest terms, signals the numerous possibilities of alienation which an individual or group is prone to in society.
The idea of alienation that is implied in almost every definition of exile is not limited to the physical level alone. In other words, exile, whether in the life of an individual or that of a community, occurs at different levels. These levels, which obviously may not be exhaustively listed here, can be classified into physical, creative, cultural and psychological levels. While physical exile suggests a physical movement of the individual or group, creative exile which is relevant especially to writers occurs when prevailing circumstances detract from the writer the ability to practice the vocation of creativity either for a particular period of time or even the way he would have loved to do so.
The peculiar historical context of African literature makes it one of the major domains of exilic incidence arising from the constant tensions between the state and writers who seek to bring to the fore the failings of the state and its agents. As Chabal observes, ‘a revolutionary agenda could not but influence both the debate about the role of literature in society and the course of its development’ (1996, p.23). In Nigeria, as in other parts of the African continent, this revolutionary agenda results in reprisals against writers who subsequently relocate, especially when such reprisals become fatally threatening. Wole Soyinka details in You Must Set Forth at Dawn the difficulties of exile and the pains it brings especially to writers who feel a great sense of commitment to their homeland. This painful nature of exile is depicted by the oriental intellectual and critic, Edward Said, who argues that exile is ‘strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience’ before defining the term as ‘the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home’ (2001, p.173). Describing the experience of exile is, therefore, a laborious enterprise because of its involvement with distance, separation, displacement and detachment as realities confronting the intellectual especially in autocratic societies where the danger of rootedness becomes too daunting to be ignored. Chinua Achebe on his own part estimates an unquestionable injustice in what the exile is made to go through. For Achebe, ‘what is both unfortunate and unjust is the pain the person dispossessed is forced to bear in the act of dispossession itself and subsequently in the trauma of a diminished existence (2000, p.70). Though the kind of dispossession that Achebe invokes here is mainly cultural, the idea itself is applicable to all forms of exile and especially to that which seeks to deny the individual of his homeland and all the apparatus of home which the possession of it would have conferred on such an individual.
The experience of ‘anguish and predicament’ embedded in exile, be it voluntary, forced, secular or spiritual, tends to make it a less attractive or less-wished condition among humans. It is for this reason that Said argues further that any attempt in literature, or outside it, to imagine exile as a placid phenomenon would be unfair to those individuals, especially public intellectuals who bear the brunt of alienation. As Said questions:
Is it not true that the views of exile in literature and, moreover, in religion obscure what is truly horrendous: that exile is irredeemably secular and unbearably historical; that it is produced by human beings for other human beings; and that, like death but without death’s ultimate mercy, it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography? (2001, p.174)
The loss which the exile encounters is indeed great as Soyinka shows in his experience of exile in You Must Set Forth at Dawn. He devotes two parts out of the eight-part text to the issue of exile as it affects him as in individual as well as a member of a society held under the excruciating impact of successive dictatorships. The two sections, ‘Nation and exile’ and ‘Homecoming’ detail the kind of horrendous dangers which often motivate intellectuals like the author to opt for flight as well as how much desirous of return such intellectuals could be even in the face of potential danger. Though Soyinka has experienced exile in varying forms and at different times of his life, his latest experience of relocation during the regime of Sani Abacha engages his attention in this text. In order not to hold Abacha entirely responsible for his four-year exile, Soyinka attempts to trace the events that culminated in his escape from the country in this particular instance back to the days of the Babangida regime during which the people were deceived with political machinations they expected would lead to a democratic dispensation but which eventually resulted in an interim civilian administration. The interim government was easily pushed aside by Abacha whose assumption of power spelt greater doom for the country and made intellection a more dangerous enterprise for the country’s intellectuals, opinion leaders and leaders of civil society organizations.
The first noticeable point of exile in Soyinka’s text can be discussed from a cultural perspective. Beyond the idea of physical exile is the predicament of African writers or writers generally in the postcolony who have to conduct literary expression in a language alien to their indigenous culture. As Rowland Smith points out, there is a ‘sense of alienation which has so frequently resulted from the imposition of western codes on the formerly organic cultures’ (1976, p.ix) of such writers. Susan Suleiman also argues that the impact of the use of a foreign language cannot be wished away simply in words of ‘fine distinctions’ as ‘these words all designate a state of being “not home” (or of being “everywhere at home,” the flip side of the same coin), which means, in most cases, at a distance from one’s native tongue’ (1998, p.1).ii This alienation from tradition also extends to the question of what Smith describes as ‘exiled consciousness’ which appropriates both the linguistic dilemma as well as the qualification of the physically exiled writer to adequately represent the experiences of his people back home. In other words, beyond the issue of language the question of vision arises and the exiled writer is often called to account on his ability to partake in what Kofi Awoonor once termed ‘the festival of the senses’,iii which defines the experience of the people on the continent and what strategies may be expedient in fostering a renewal or a reversal of the negativities which obstruct the wheel of national or continental progress. Though Soyinka writes in English he compensates for the alienating implications of this linguistic choice by deviating from the stringency of western standards as far as the genre of the autobiography is concerned, thereby creating a distinct African narrative with unique aesthetic oeuvres.
