Nobel Laureates Honor Wole Soyinka at IOP

Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, and Toni Morrison joined hundreds of audience members last night at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum for an evening of readings in celebration of the 70th birthday of fellow Nobel prize-winner Wole Soyinka, who became the first African to receive the prize in 1986.

Gordimer, Walcott and Morrison, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, 1992, and 1993 respectively, all spoke of the profound influence that Soyinka has had on their own work as well as English literature more broadly.

Soyinka, who is a prolific playwright, poet, and novelist, has also been a prominent political activist since he was imprisoned in 1967 after appealing in an article for a ceasefire in the Nigerian civil war.

Speakers throughout the evening honored Soyinka’s ongoing human rights work as inseparable from his artistic achievements.

“He is the conscience of Nigeria,” said W.E.B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. in his welcome speech, “If democracy in…the world’s most populous black nation has a voice and a face, they belong to Wole Soyinka.”

Gates, who hosted the event, added that he could imagine no celebration of Soyinka’s life more appropriate than “a feast of words—words created by some of his favorite writers, who also happen to be Nobel Laureates.”

Gordimer, Walcott, and Morrison each offered his or her own words of homage before reading selections from their own work.

Gordimer was introduced by Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Margaret Marshall, who is a childhood friend of Gordimer’s from South Africa.

Gordimer spoke of Soyinka as “something absolutely indispensable to the African continent.” She then read from her story, “The Ultimate Safari,” an account of flight from the Mozambique Civil War, narrated by an eleven-year-old. The title, Gordimer noted, was taken from a European travel advertisement—which, she mused, most likely had “a different kind of Safari” in mind.

Walcott as well presented a revision of a received European theme: the Cyclops episode from an adaptation of the Odyssey he wrote for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Walcott was introduced by Jamaica Kincaid, Visiting Lecturer on African American Studies and on English and American Literature and Language, who spoke of the impact Walcott has had on her own work as a writer.

“As it is true that law cannot make a poet but a poet can make laws, so it is true that people cannot make a poet but a poet can make a people,” Kincaid remarked. “Derek Walcott made a people. He made us.”

Rothenberg Professor of English Homi K. Bhaba introduced Morrison, speaking of what he refers to as her “spirit of rememory.”

“She excavates genius,” Bhaba remarked, “she does not just express it…She has mined the hard stone of unthinking habit and unforgiving circumstance to reveal the finer mettle of the American character.”

Morrison read an excerpt from her most recent novel, Love, published in 2003.

After an introduction by Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton K. Anthony Appiah, Soyinka himself took the podium. Soyinka read “A Digression on the Purpose of Accident,” an excerpt from a memoir-in-progress he expects to publish next year.

The evening concluded with a brief question-and-answer session and a few closing remarks by Professor Gates.

The event was co-sponsored by the W.E.B DuBois Institute for African and African American Research, the Department of African and African American Studies, the Institute of Politics and the John F. Kennedy School of Government.