The Nigerian Wole Soyinkawho in 1986 became the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, believes that the combination of religion and extreme ambition for power are ruining the world and would have preferred not to have to combine literature and politics, an “inevitable” mix. . Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka (1934), known as Wole Soyinka, is a writer and teacher; For almost four decades, he has been part of the select club of Nobel Prize winners in Literature and has actively participated in Nigerian political life, a cause that cost him two years in prison and a death sentence.
With African and European training and more than fifty publications, Soyinka has starred in the premiere of the 20th edition of the Granada International Poetry Festival (FIP), a city to which he came for the first time so long ago that he does not even remember it and in which it captures cultural and literary energy. In an interview, Soyinka points out that he would have preferred not to have had to combine his political career with his literary career and acknowledges a certain resentment at having to mix them, because one has always affected the other.
“The issue is not so much what it has cost me, but rather the inevitability of the two aspects being intertwined, that one is always in conflict with the other,” explains the Nobel Prize winner. The Nigerian defends that this combination of dimensions is marked by where, when and under what circumstances he was born, by the education he has received and by his way of facing specific problems in history, and he wonders why he did not choose to be a musician, also committed but more safeguarded than a writer.
A frustrated architect despite the fact that he built his own house, Soyinka assures that he decided not to let it affect him that he was the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature despite the fact that it is a recognition that “weighs on me.” “I am aware that I am more requested by the public, which translates into having less time, but I have expanded my radius of influence,” adds the author of The lion and the jewelwho knows that other winners have returned to “living their lives.”
TO Gabriel Garcia Marquezwho received the Nobel Prize four years earlier, acknowledged when collecting the award that the recognition was a “nuisance” that would pass with the following year’s winner, but the author of One hundred years of solitude He already told her then that “this never ends. Objectively, now I know that it is so.” Soyinka, who temporarily teaches at the International University of Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates), participates in a program that promotes tolerance of all religious and political backgrounds while maintaining the Islamic creed.
“For me, the fact that this experiment is being carried out shows that in this world there are people who think that religion intervenes as a conflict, it shows that there are societies that think that religion should not be a factor that divides,” he adds. . “The combination of religion with extreme lust for power, those two things together, is what is really ruining the world.. Both separately are negative enough, but together they are an explosive cocktail,” he reflects after a turbulent weekend in the East.
The Nobel Prize winner does not believe that there is literature for whites or blacks, although he does defend that all forms of artistic expression have their roots in the context in which one is born, in the “random circumstances” in which one has to live. “What makes the difference is when one begins to be aware of all that, of the roots,” adds the writer, who believes that one can write aware of one’s origins, adapted to the culture in which one lives, or already aware of the time critical of the context.
It defends the influence that African culture has left in European countries such as Spain and Portugal and in many Latin American countries such as Brazil, and applauds the “syncretism” of cultures and the search for origins in Africa. “Even some white people look to Africa when they search for their origins because, in some cases, they are more in tune with this culture than their own,” he explains. Although with new interests that bring him closer to agriculture and nature and a latest novel published in 2021, the Nobel Prize winner continues writing: “Unfortunately, one cannot stop writing, it is still an addiction.”
Source: EFE
