The Lone Ranger

Little did the Nobel Laureate know at the time,that mathematics would save him from losing his mind,during his imprisonment in 1997. “When I was imprisoned,I was thrown into solitary confinement. I had been placed under trial but it was a barren existence. I invented games in my head. I began doing mathematics again. I’d scratch on the floor of the cell with a stone,working out permutations and combinations,using different formulae. Hours would pass but it nearly drove me crazy too,” says Soyinka,who later managed to befriend the jailor and smuggle in a book to read. He later began to make ink out of smuggled in coffee and wrote on scraps of paper. “I had to create an interior life to survive,” says the 75-year-old.

At the ongoing festival—in the midst of authors famous and obscure—Soyinka walks tall. Easily spotted thanks to his white Afro beard,he is known to be taciturn. But on the dias,while reading scenes from his plays,The Road and Death and the King’s Horsemen,Soyinka is a natural performer; his deep baritone dips and swells as he recreates the dark,grim atmosphere of the road and a long journey of both plays.

“As a writer,I wanted to illustrate my relationship with the road,it opened up a world to me. In Africa,the road signals transition and is understood in its capacity as a diety as well as its capacity to kill,for there is much carnage on the road,” says Soyinka,who feels at home on Indian roads.

As the first African to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986,Soyinka has travelled far and wide. Yet,his works such as The Lion and the Jewel and A Dance of the Forests ,have always revealed an umbilical relationship with his country,a clear evidence that his sense of identity and roots have not been contaminated by any external agents of place or time. “I believe that controlled contamination is a positive thing. I’m both a tactile as well as a sensual person. I use,exploit and enjoy the texture and tongues of other places and seek co-relations with my own land,” says Soyinka.

After the festival at Jaipur,Soyinka will head back to Nigeria where he runs a busy schedule teaching at the University of Ife and is trying to get his political party registered (they were refused registration during the previous elections). “I’m also organising a cultural festival in Lagos this summer and you’re all invited,” smiles Soyinka.