Ironically, Nigeria’s luminary of letters, Nobelist Wole Soyinka, lost the election for the prestigious poetry chair at the University of Oxford for non-poetry reasons. His defeat by British poet Simon Armitage ranks as a stunning literary upset, considering that 80-year-old Soyinka was a clear and comfortable front runner with an impressive number of 149 nominations. Armitage had 54 nominations. The election demonstrated that “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.” Armitage, 52, polled 1221 votes, while Soyinka got 920 votes, followed by EA Stallings with 918 votes, Haldane Sean (206) and Gregson Ian (75). The Professor of Poetry is, among other things, expected to give a minimum of three lectures a year, for a stipend of £12,000, and the tenure is five years.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking reaction to the election result and Soyinka’s loss came from Andrew Franklin, who has published the laureate’s work. He reportedly described the outcome as ”collective madness,” and was quoted as saying, “Why couldn’t Oxford have voted for its first ever black professor of poetry?” Franklin added: “Simon Armitage is good but this is a collective failure of imagination. It just would have been nice to see Oxford do something different. Maybe Oxford is just full of dull old farts who only vote for the obvious. I don’t think they have anything to be proud of here.” The question is: Was Soyinka’s colour a disadvantage?
The barely disguised hint at possible racism may not be an over-reaction. While the publicised anti-Soyinka factors were his advanced age, his allegedly suspect commitment, and his failure to provide a tenure agenda, the deciding consideration may have been unstated and unspeakable. As his backers pointed out, the age argument is unsupported by the history of the over 300-year-old position, and it was not obligatory to supply a plan. On the question of his commitment, Soyinka himself said in self- defence: ”How curious that anyone would even speculate that I would allow busy and committed people – friends, colleagues and total strangers – to waste their time nominating and campaigning on my behalf for such a prestigious position if I were not serious about contesting.”
The path of reasoning by elimination leads to that dark possibility of discrimination on the basis of colour. Indeed, it would require a transparent demographic delineation of the electors to disprove or prove the suggestion of racial bias. According to the University, “Voting is by members of Convocation… Convocation consists of all former student members of the University who have been admitted to a degree (other than an honorary degree) of the University, and all members of Congregation (the ‘dons’ parliament’ of the University).” Were there racists among the voters? Or, put differently, how many of the voters were slaves of racism?
To be fair, the world has progressed to more benign forms of racial prejudice, even to the point of delusion built on the cloudy concept of post-racism. However, the reality of colour-related discrimination is still too real to be unreal. If Soyinka’s towering literary stature was rubbished by racist dwarfs, it underlines the distance between humanity and a non-racist world. And for a writer known for his passion for the promotion of human rights, it may be an eye-opener for Soyinka that the world of letters is not colour-blind, meaning that the right to skin colour has not become unchallengeable in that supposedly sublime sphere.
Was it payback time for Soyinka, the protester who registered his anti-racist punch in his marvellously and magically nuanced famous poem “Telephone Conversation”, first published in 1963? It is understandable that his supporters are puzzled. For a literator who in 1986 became the first black and African winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the world’s ultimate literary recognition and decoration, it is too bad to be true that he failed at Oxford.
It is worth recalling that the Nobel Committee painted Soyinka as a master of form and content “who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence.” There is no question that the accomplishment had the quality of a redeeming feature for the black man in a world corrupted by racism.
From a romantic perspective, a five-year period as poetry professor at Oxford, which is regarded as perhaps just short of the Nobel, would have been a befitting climax to Soyinka’s writing life. The only qualification is “that candidates be of sufficient distinction to be able to fulfil the duties of the post”. The anti-climatic development raises the question whether Soyinka has suffered a decline in distinction which the Oxford voters validated.
It is interesting that Soyinka’s rapier wit and broad imagination, as well as his capacity for thoughtful parallelism, were brilliantly communicated in his post-election statement in which he admitted to having been “truly caught up in the excitement generated by this historic union of the poetic and democratic Muses.” His punch line was delivered with practiced subtlety: “Mind you, if only they’d allowed me to import a small team of our seasoned electoral jugglers from the home front….”
The reference to Nigeria’s crisis of democratic integrity was unmistakable. It was Soyinka the poet and playwright, but also Soyinka the political activist. Undeniably, in Soyinka, there is a rare conflation of the artist and the activist at a superlative level; and it is to his credit that in the almost 30 years since he won the Nobel at age 52, he has not gone artistically cold and remains politically warm. It is noteworthy that Soyinka was Armitage’s age when he was crowned.
It remains to be seen how Armitage will champion the cause of poetry, but his statement submitted ahead of the contest indicated a useful direction. He wrote that he would take advantage of the position “to discuss the situation of poetry and poets in the 21st century, to address the obstacles and opportunities brought about by changes in education, changes in reading habits, the internet, poetry’s decreasing ‘market share’, poetry’s relationship with the civilian world and the (alleged) long, lingering death of the book”.
Armitage’s anxiety about the future of poetry in what Harold Bloom called “an age of visual overstimulation” is certainly appreciated, but Soyinka’s magnetism and lateral thinking are probably more appropriate for rescuing the genre at this juncture. It looks like the real losers are Oxford University and the art of poetry.
