Robert Bly writes that “the political poem comes out of the deepest privacy” as at the same time he suggests that a poet's imaginative authority derives from an ability to speak for the people, not just to them (qtd. in Lense 18). For a good number of readers, as well as poets and critics, this philosophy borders on anathema. As Carolyn Forché notes,

We are accustomed to rather easy categories: we distinguish between ‘personal’ and ‘political’ poems—the former calling to mind lyrics of love and emotional loss, the latter indicating a public partisanship that is considered divisive, even when necessary.

(31)

This conception of art thrives when love and power, nature and politics are separated by every barrier that can be placed between them; it is tempting to believe that these created distinctions are not just good sense but natural law.

A poet such as Wole Soyinka destroys such easy distinctions. His is a poetry of such personal courage and emotion that one can hardly accuse it of being merely political, yet it is deeply concerned with protest and the reclamation of cultural ground. Soyinka reaches for a new breathing space, for a poetry that allows poets to acknowledge the power of personal resistance and at the same time confront the social and political ramifications of power, especially the abuse of power.

With the exception of a few poems, the entire collection of Soyinka's 1972 A Shuttle in the Crypt was written in solitary confinement, punishment for other writings perceived to be sympathetic to the secessionist Biafra party, and all the poems are affected by the reality of that confinement and its accompanying political world. Soyinka's poetic eye witnesses the atrocities of his prison as he attempts personally to transcend their confines and at the same time recapture a lost cultural identity; he seeks personal as well as political salvation through the shuttle, the book's dominant and controlling metaphor.

The shuttle has an elusive double meaning; it is a symbol for both a process of poetic witness and an act of cultural chronicling. In weaving, the shuttle carries the woof or weft (horizontal) threads through the warp (vertical) threads, but Soyinka's metaphor goes far beyond this simple definition. His shuttle is an instrument of personal salvation as well as social reclamation. By making additional use of the shuttle's identity as a type of African bird, Soyinka can tap into the mythology of spiritual freedom, as birds are an archetypal symbol for such freedom: their ability to leave the earth suggests liberty while their closeness to the sky equates them with angels and connects them with the spiritual. As a cultural symbol, the shuttle is both a generative act of writing, as seen in the parallel motion of the pen and the shuttle, and the act of memory which precipitates writing. The shuttle, as Soyinka says in his preface,

is a unique species of caged animal, a restless bolt of energy, a trapped weaver bird yet charged in repose with unspoken forms and designs. In motion or at rest it is a secretive seed, shrine, kernel, phallus and well of creative mysteries.

(vii-viii)

His poet-shuttle will reestablish the lost role of the tapestry weavers from traditional Yoruba society, reclaiming cultural ground from the priests who disempowered them. Tapestries were elements of storytelling in West African cultures; they were used to tell the histories of the people, their lives and deaths. The weaver women who made the tapestries “wove a spell against this hour / And kept a vigil against dearth and death,” as Soyinka says (44).

It is important to note that Soyinka is not a reactionary; he is not attempting to recreate the past. He is, however, attempting to open a new space of poetic response to the horrors of the Nigerian Civil War. The poet who takes on the identity of the shuttle will save himself in the act of writing, but he will also remake the cultural fabric, mark the horror he was witness to, and keep his own vigil over death.

For Soyinka, then, the poet becomes a new type of weaver, a storyteller who gathers the threads and blends them together to save his own sanity and to make a record of the deaths of others. “It was never a mere poetic conceit,” he says; “all events, thoughts, dreams, incidental phenomena were, in sheer self-protection perceived and absorbed into the loom-shuttle unity” (vii). The poems of A Shuttle in the Crypt are both “a map of the course trodden by the human mind” and an eventual rebirth of the mind and its culture through self-generation and the salvation of poetic memory. His prison becomes a womb, a space of understanding and creation that transcends the attempts of the “mind-butchers” to break down the individual consciousness. It is in Chimes of Silence, and especially the poem “Procession,” where Soyinka exhaustively explores the ramifications of the duality of the shuttle as the metaphor for both a cultural symbol of witness and accountancy and a personal emblem of the self-sustaining creative process:

I listened to an enactment of death in the home of death, to the pulse of the shuttle slowing to its final moment of rest, towards that complete in-gathering of being which a shuttle in repose so palpably is.

(vii-viii)

Through his poems Soyinka becomes both bird and loom, capable of both reclaiming the freedom denied him and recording the deaths of others, fighting everything the “mind-butchers” would hope to accomplish by putting him in prison.

In the confines of his cell, Soyinka is given almost nothing to work with mentally:

My crypt they turned into a cauldron, an inverted bell of faiths whose sonorities are gathered, stirred, skimmed, sieved in the warp and weft of sooty mildew on the walls, of green velvet fungus woven by the rain's cunning fingers.

(33)

He is denied contact with others and must create his world whole cloth out of the fabric of his own mind. In “Live Burial,” he defines this world: “Sixteen paces / by seventy-three. They hold / Siege against humanity” (60). The first line break suggests a pacing prisoner, who has counted again and again the confines of his cell and, as Chikwenye Ogunyemi suggests, “the harm that is indicated is not just on himself but on the whole of humanity. Soyinka would agree … that a well-balanced society does not need prisons; the operation of a prison is a comment on the society that finds it indispensable” (80). Soyinka's personal besiegement merges with a cultural assault. The whole social group suffers when men (or women) are jailed, caged like animals, and led helplessly to their deaths. Executions cheapen life and allow killing easy access to our psyches. Soyinka, as both prisoner and poet, would put himself in front of this destruction by recording it.

His crypt restricts him in everything but hearing, so unsurprisingly his poems are filled with images of sound—hammering and birdsong, the wails of women, and the echo of disembodied laughter. Through sound, he differentiates between the walls of his prison in “Bearings,” the poem that opens Chimes of Silence. To the north is the Wailing Wall, so named because

it overlooks the yard where a voice cried out in agony all of one night and died at dawn, unattended. It is the yard where hymns and prayers rise with a constancy matched only by vigil of crows and vultures.

(32)

To the west is the “Wall of mists, wall of echoes” and to the south is the “Wall of flagellation,” named Purgatory by the poet. It is a wall of beating and torture, where “Strokes of justice slice a festive air— / It is a day of reckoning” (38). Only the Amber Wall, where above and beyond the prison a young boy reenacts the fall from the Garden of Eden, is defined by sight.

At the center is his cell—“Vault Center”—surprisingly filled with birds:

Corpse of Vault Center and the lone
Wood-pigeons breast my ghostly thoughts
On swelling prows of down, plunge
To grass-roots, soar to fountains of the sun.

(39-40)

For Soyinka, his cell, “This still center of our compass points” (40), is a space filled with birds, symbolic of spirituality and freedom. As the day closes and a “choir of egrets, severs at the day's / recessional, on aisles fading to the infinite,” Soyinka is left alone: “a shawl of grey repose / fine moves of air / gathers dusks in me / an oriel window” (40-41). He takes on characteristics of the birds that fill his cell. His vowels and consonants are feather-soft and restful—“The day's sift filters down” (41). He is a bird fluffed up and waiting out the political night which engulfs him.

Yet the next poem, “Procession,” moves directly away from the image of birds; it is a meditation on the hanging day of five men. These men are bound for the earth and bound to the earth. The imminence of their deaths connects them to the grave and its associations with the earth:

Hanging day. A hollow earth
Echoes footsteps of the grave procession
Walls in sunspots
Lean to shadows of the shortening morn

(41)

Note Soyinka's morbid puns: “hollow” for “hallowed” and “grave” meaning both “serious” and “the burial plot.” The death of these men will in no way be a holy rite; instead it is a false ceremony that approaches rapidly, as the sundial-like wall suggests.

There is a distance between the poet and the men for several reasons. First, and most obvious, is the distance between the worlds of the living and the dead; the poet will be in the former while the prisoners are soon to occupy the latter. The poet is the recorder of death, as he has already noted in the Preface, and must live on to tell the stories of these men:

Tread. Drop. Dread. Drop. Dead
What may I tell you? What reveal?
I who before them peered unseen
Who stood one legged on the untrodden
Verge—lest I should not return.

(42)

Soyinka here puts on a mask of naive authority, pretending that he might have nothing to say about the deaths of these men; this is the nature of the pair of rhetorical questions that abruptly follow the executions, questions directed as much to his captors as to a larger audience. This false naivete is a possible hiding place should the jailer find the poems in his cell, but it is also, as I shall examine in a moment, a segue into the large function of these poems as a restorative for the cultural damage the civil war has done. It is a false naivete, though, because he follows the questions with the assertion that he was there and heard the five die. He was on the very verge of death, thus is the only one qualified to tell their story even as he questions the possibility of poetic witness.

Questioning whether one has the qualifications to write what he has seen is a common thread among poets attempting to write the poetry of witness. As Carolyn Forché notes, speaking of Ariel Dorfman but in a passage that might be easily applied to Soyinka:

The poet claims he cannot find the words to tell the story of people who have been tortured, raped, and murdered. Nevertheless, it is vitally important that the story be told. Who shall tell it?

(37)

Soyinka echoes this reticence again and again:

What may I tell you of the five
Bell-ringers on the ropes to chimes
of silence?

(42)

And:

That I received them?

(42)

And:

Let no man speak of justice, guilt.
Far away, blood-stained in their
Tens of thousands, hands that damned
These wretches to the pit of triumph
But here alone the solitary deed.

(42)

The poet as the shuttle—for he completely becomes his image in this section: “… I / Wheeled above and flew beneath them” (42)—must find a new way to tell this story, and he does so by developing a personal mythology, framing the poem with a mantle of poetic witness that will replace the standard of the tapestry weavers and cultural gatekeepers.

The second section of “Procession” attempts to develop just such a mythology. “Passage,” the section opens, suggesting both a movement through space and time, but also the drawing of the shuttle through the loom—Soyinka is beginning his weaving. The first passage is through the land of death, “rich in the rottenness of things” (43). This death is the putrid decomposition of living things, of the body, yet it is “festive” with rebirth, “velvety with mead and maggots.” Death gives rise to new life, because it is the natural process of reclamation, but Soyinka's imperative says, “Shade your sight from glare / Of leavings on the mound. The feast is done” (43). Why? I would suggest that for Soyinka this is too easy an answer. If the body is only meat, then the death of the men had no meaning beyond politics. This avenue is pointless for Soyinka. There must be more:

A coil of cigarette ribbon recreates
A violet question on the refuse heap
A headless serpent arched in fire
In vibrancy of tinsel light, winding
To futile light, barren knowledge.

(43)

Death asks the most serious of questions and to answer with the simple idea of the organic cycle of rebirth, as the Orobrian serpent in flames represents, leads only to futility. It may be true, it is after all “knowledge,” but alone it cannot be enough.

“Passage” again. The moment after death when from “a bean cake hive” ants swarm and break down the world of the dead—“do not these / Hold a vital motion of the earth?” asks Soyinka (43). They are the necessary parasites, but other foragers come after the dead as well—priests. The priests are more insect-like than the insects: they prey on those who live on after burying the dead:

                    … how well we know them—
Inheritors of the stricken hearth.
Their hands are closed on emptiness
And opening, shall give nothing out.

(43)

These priests have nothing to offer. Like the ants, they come in the wake of death, but instead of “a vital motion of the earth,” they contribute nothing.

From the priests, Soyinka moves to those whom the priests had dispossessed in the Yoruba culture—the old women of the loom. It is the weaver women who made the tapestries and kept track of the community's individuals. “Through intertwine / Of owlish fingers on the loom, they gave / and wove a spell against this hour / and kept a vigil upon death and dearth” (44). The women's function as cultural protectors was to watch over the people and record their lives and deaths, so that they would not be forgotten and the proper forms of ancestor worship could occur. With the arrival of the priests, the worship of ancestors was displaced with Christian prayer and the community became divided; the priests drew the focus away from the community because Jesus Christ saves only the individual soul. Thus when the deaths of men are not memorialized, the community suffers. A piece of history is lost.

Into this gap steps Soyinka. He claims a position as the new weaver by assuming his new identity as the shuttle, an identity that is both witness to the cultural and personal destruction of the prisons, but also an antidote against it, just as the old women of the looms “wove a spell against [their] hour / And kept a vigil upon death and dearth.” With the final “Passage,” Soyinka moves through

                    … a doorless barrier of light
This is the last we shall revisit
Passageways of childhood, through rows
Of broadlooms weaving emerald tapestries
To wind the effigy of chanting seasons.

(44)

After reliving, in the poem, the world of the weavers, this world of his childhood, he is ready to take over their position. There is a deep need for a new storyteller because the violence and destruction of the Nigerian Civil War has cast a “leathern dark of bats” that “froze the sunlight in the flight / of weaver's hands” (45). The reign of terror and its easy abuse of power has stopped the weaving, stilled the hands of the carriers of cultural wisdom.

To establish his identity as one who exists in communion with the shuttle as a bird, Soyinka must first establish the manner in which a potent bird such as the shuttle could be captured. Thus, he restates the superstition that one can capture a bird's soul by stepping on its shadow as it flies above:

If you pass under, trap a sky-soul bird
Your foot upon its shadow as it flies.

(45)

In the second section, this is the first use of a direct address to the reader using the second-person pronoun and it reflects back to Soyinka's rhetorical questions of the first section. The referent of the pronoun is both general readers, those who might now know the superstition, and his captors, those who know. Soyinka is about to turn superstition to his own creative use. It is this creative rebirth that follows directly. He says:

In the passage of looms, to a hum
Of water rising in dark wells
There to play at trap-the-shuttle
To step on the flight of its shadow soul
And hold it captive in a home
Of air and threadwaves, a lamp
Of dye-fuels hissing in the sun
Elusive as the thread's design.

(45)

He taunts his captors, suggesting they can only “play” at trap-the-shuttle. His jail is a “home / Of air and threadwaves,” not a cell; the duality of his bird-loom shuttle thrives in this place. He is held but not controlled. They may stop his immediate flight but his captivity will spark a new germination, a rebirth of both the lost cultural heritage and personal poetic creativity:

By footfall on the shade of wings
On earth, a bird may drop as rain.
Ghost fires, loom whisper, indigo lines
On the broad palm of the loom.

(45)

“Indigo lines” and “loom whispers” are obvious references to the poetic process that occurs in prison, hidden and quiet at night. They are a result of, and at the same time are, the bird that drops as rain.

For the poet who will assume the role of shuttle, with its manifestations of both witness and rejuvenation, it is in no way a completely triumphant vision. The reality of prison, obviously, is never far from Soyinka's mind as he writes these poems:

Mine the bedraggled wings
Raising a wind's lament to every step
Floating on lakes to cries of drowning
Where pebbles bask in twilights of departing
Mellowed by the sun's last whispers.

(46)

These are poems of pain, dirges and laments, cries of the heart, but they are poems written nonetheless from within Vault Center, written with his sky-soul shadow trapped under the heavy jackboot of his oppressor. The poet has assumed the place of the weavers by keeping a “vigil over dearth and death.” He is

Waiting for the sound that never comes
To footfalls long receded, echoing
In craters of newly opened space
Listening to a falter of feet
Upon the dark threshold.

(46)

The shuttle waits for the end of the dark times, when the songs and stories of heroism and despair can fill the newly opened space; the shuttle waits to tell what it has heard. Until the footfalls recede, until that free space is newly opened, he will have to listen to the footsteps of men on the dark threshold of their hanging deaths.

The act of remembering and recording the deaths is the vital necessity of the shuttle. In this, Soyinka is like Anna Akhmatova, who in “The Memory of a Poet” (Poems) writes:

In the awful years of the Yezhovian horror, I spent seventeen months standing in line in front of various prisons in Leningrad. One day someone ‘recognized me’. Then a woman with blue lips … whispered in my ear (everyone there spoke only in whispers):

—Can you describe this?

And I said:

—I can.

Then something like a fleeting smile passed over what had been her face.

(82)

The act of memory becomes vital to the survivors and for the survival of hope, because when people's deaths are lost, their lives are lost. The reality of Soyinka's condition is no more hopeful after he has written; he is still imprisoned, but he has claimed a piece of cultural space where he is capable of memory.

Soyinka writes from the deepest of privacies, a political hell of solitary confinement. As he does, he reaches out to the people, offering what he has witnessed as a testament, both of what he endured and of what others suffered beyond endurance. Soyinka's private self becomes the salvation of a public group; he speaks for the people, not to them. He becomes the shuttle and weaves the story of those things that are too often hidden behind the steel shutter and the tall stone wall.

Works Cited

Akhamatova, Anna. Poems. Selected and trans. by Lyn Coffin. New York: Norton, 1983.

Forché, Carolyn. Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. New York: Norton, 1993.

Lense, Edward. “A Voice for the Wild Man: Robert Bly and the Rhetoric of Public Poetry.” AWP Chronicle 26.2 (1993): 17-20.

Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo. “The Song of the Caged Bird: Contemporary African Prison Poetry.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 13.4 (1982): 65-84.

Soyinka, Wole. A Shuttle in the Crypt. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.