Literary Criticism, The Interpreters: Soyinka's Prose Style (African Writer Wole Soyinka‪)‬

A writer's first task is to make himself understood by his intended audience so that he may stimulate and motivate them into intellectual, social or political action. To do this, the writer must be committed to his subject of discourse to the extent of producing literature that is engage. Soyinka's The Interpreters fires the imagination both intellectually and politically by exposing the socio-cultural seepage, the colonial decadence and the post-colonial moral decay in modern Nigeria. His prose style reflects the growing rift between the past and present, between action and inaction, between abandonment of social responsibilities and commitment to progress and change finally between individualism and group solidarity. Chinweizu, Onwuchekwu Jemie and Ichechukwu Madubiuke criticize Soyinka for this obscurantist style, which is seemingly derived from his poetry. There is some merit to their argument if Soyinka is writing for the masses, which clearly he is not doing at all times, since vast numbers of Nigerian are illiterate. I would argue that the syntactic complexities, the difficulty in understanding some of his diction and the deliberate manipulation of English prose patterns, give Soyinka's prose that sometimes hard and sometimes brittle and pliable quality that best symbolize the economic, political and social realities of present-day Nigeria. This prose style is sustained by language that is iconographic, language that shows a society in transition and language that reveals the moral bankruptcy of leadership in Nigeria.