A little bit of literature

“The sun gleamed orange through his eyelids. The reeds passed him upstream from the banks, reeds in the fingers of an eccentric healer, whispering incantations over a child in agony…a curious breed those healers. Witch-cauldroned from the womb or stressed to a tensile purity by experience, by a slow painful self-crucifying search through life, even to the lethal charge which whitens their hair overnight but fails to kill them. Hands that stretch forth and scatter healing vibrancies as lesser men in their so-called triumphal progress scatter pieces of gold. If they are not found at will then events must bring them forth, the terrible individual needs. Those secretive fingers with the sensitivity of grass, cattle and egrets, of ultimate repose—what chance do they have truthfully, against the tumoured belly of humanity with its periodic seepage of pus and bile into the living streams of earth? Ahime? Healer in magic insulation against such pervasive evil?”

Vocabulary build-up

The intransitive verb gleam means “to emit a gleam; flash or glow.” The noun gleam means “a brief beam or flash of light.”

The transitive verb scatter means “to cause to separate and go in different directions; to distribute (something) loosely; strew.”

Comments

Wole Soyinka is the first Black writer to win the Nobel Prize and one of the fiercest political activists in Africa. He was born in 1934 at Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria. He taught drama and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been professor of comparative literature. During the civil war in Nigeria, Soyinka appealed in an article for a cease-fire. For this he was arrested in 1967, accused of conspiring with the Biafra rebels, and was held as a political prisoner for 22 months until 1969. Soyinka bases his writing on the mythology of his own tribe - the Yoruba - with Ogun, the god of iron and war, at the center. Soyinka’s “Season of Anomy” is a political novel about the dangers of corruption, greed, and the desire for power. It is also an intensely religious book, both in its preoccupation with moral issues and the strong impact of its ritual undertone. One of the consequences of his increasing dedication to the cause of justice is that the world of his postwar imaginative writings is frequently dominated by visionary seekers, who can be found in “Season of Anomy”. There are two dimensions in this novel, which are interrelated. On the social level, the quest is related to what might be described as a moral alternative for a nation in a state of anomy. On the ethical level, the qualification is crucial, for it is on such a moral absolute, Soyinka implies, that a new national solidarity, which transcends ethnic and religious loyalties, could be founded. In essence, by infusing the myth of Orpheus with his signature lyricism and moral profundity, Soyinka creates a dazzling story about the clash between idealism and reality.