Season of Anomy

The Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka is a playwright, poet, novelist, autobiographer, essayist, flamboyant personality and a pro-democracy political activist, who has frequently been at odds with Nigeria’s series of military regimes. His book The Man Died recounts his experience of imprisonment (mostly in solitary confinement), imposed on him for his political activism.

Today I discuss his work Season of Anomy, one of the many Nigerian narratives traceable to the Biafran war in Nigeria during the late sixties, when the eastern region attempted to secede from the rest of the country and a terrible civil war ensued. The relation of the novel to these historical events is oblique and allegorical; it is a profound meditation on, as well as a terrifying account of, entrenched tyranny, attempted resistance and its defeat.

When corrupt power — economically dominant and militarily maintained — is challenged by those whose idealism is humane and principled, the ancient scare tactics of ethnic rivalry are unleashed against the would-be liberators. Their resistance is crushed when the madness of an ‘ethnic cleansing’ drive takes hold of the majority of the population.

Season of Anomy is a difficult book, primarily because of Soyinka’s characteristically erudite vocabulary, fondness for involved syntax and indirect presentation of points — as well as its immensely complex narrative structure (with many ‘unannounced’ switches in time, setting and perspective). Yet it is worth the trouble it might take a reader to disentangle it, because it is such a powerful description of the type of disaster to which news media have blunted our sensibilities.

As the title — with its reference to a condition of moral listlessness — indicates, Soyinka reads this state (i.e. anomy) as the worst and most dangerous condition into which any society could degenerate, or be driven. Faced with overwhelming odds and utter ruthlessness, bombarded with scenes of individual atrocities as well as mass killings (rendered with unprecedented vividness by this author), how is it possible to resist the loss of hope or faith in humane values; how shall the individual manage to continue to care? This is the agonising, unavoidable question the chief protagonist carries with him throughout this text.

Because we see the terrible scenes to which this man (Ofeyi) is exposed through his unfaltering and compassionate gaze, the hammering of the sensibilities is never sensational or sentimental. A profound seriousness of purpose, a humane authoritativeness, constantly striving for an understanding even of the killing frenzy, gains Ofeyi the reader’s respectful empathy. Far more successfully than in his novel The Interpreters, Soyinka has vividly depicted a mostly quite charming cast of characters. They give a personal focus to the social trauma overwhelming their society and make us think about the task of coping — intellectually, politically and morally — with the ‘unthinkably’ awful, as Ofeyi has to do.

Soyinka was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1986.

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