Nobel Laureate rare conversation on writing and literature to feed your soul

“My weapon is literature" Chinua Achebe observed in his popular interview with The Paris Review. Many years after, Wole Soyinka —the first African writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature  — expressed the same view on literature as a weapon for human freedom.

Wole Soyinka is one of our era’s most beloved and prolific writers — a sage of wisdom on the craft of plays and a master of its magic; and also an activist who has been at the forefront of the pro-democracy struggle in Nigeria.

20 years after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for writing "in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones".

Soyinka in an interview with freelance journalist Simon Stanford, reflects on using literature as a weapon for human freedom and human emancipation:

"The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice. The proof of that is the ability of a dictator to snuff out the life of a writer as happened to my colleague, , the Ogoni environmental activist who was hanged after a kangaroo trial by this brutal dictator, , he and eight of his companions. When an event like that happens, and even lesser events of lesser gravity, the citizen comes to the fore, the citizen overtakes the writer because literature has proved or is proving inadequate."

Soyinka admonished against using only the pen when demonstrations and protests are needed:

"Writers throughout the ages have one weapon, which is literature, but they also have their responsibilities as a citizen when literature does not seem to suffice. I mean, they are not mutually exclusive.

One continues to write anyway but if you are called out to demonstrate, if people are being killed in the streets, it's hardly the moment to go for your pen and paper, you know, help in one way or the other."

Soyinka returns to the centerpiece of writing — the writer's block:

"I think I'm a very lazy writer and by that I mean that I do not battle, I don't struggle too hard against it. If I have difficulties in the writing, I just go and do other things. I don't feel a compulsion to write."

Like many celebrated writers, Soyinka recognizes how vital a daily routine or daily ritual is in lubricating the machinery of this painstaking process:

"It has its own creative rhythm, you know, you can't force it. At least I don't. I know there are other writers who sit down religiously every morning, they take their espresso, they put a clean sheet of paper there and they sit looking at that paper until they've finished or covered at least a number of those pages. No, I'm not like that. I have to be ready. It has to gestate it for quite a while and then it's ready to burst forth."

He also offered some uncompromisingly honest advice to aspiring writers on essence of great writing:

1. Be ready for rejection

"I always tell young writers to get ready a basket first of all, in which to collect all your rejection slips and you must continue until that basket is full or your work is accepted. "

2. Just continue writing

"You must continue writing even after all the rejections. I'm not a very good teacher of creative writing and I always warn them about that. What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that's my function, but from time to time it's possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it."

3. Don't get carried away by ideologies

"Don't get carried away by the ideologs. Don't feel that you have to tailor your literature a particular way to please any school of ideology. Many writers waste their energy and their talent because they want to be ideologically correct and of course all they produced was propaganda.

Absolute tawdry uninteresting, oh, full of excitation, yes, you know, full of ra-ra-ra but they were short changing their own talent and I used to tell them and now that they've become ideological orphans, they're now trying to recover their own true voice and have produced some very good work but they could have produced excellent work and at the same time, you know, be truthful to their ideological convictions if they hadn't allowed that ideology to take primary place and that's what I tell all writers."

This interview is a revelatory read in its entirety, full of Wole Soyinka's abiding insight into literature, writing, and politics.

Read the interview here or watch it below.

For more wisdom on the writing life read Teju Cole's eight letters to a young writer and Chinua Achebe's advice to young writers

READ: 10 interesting things you may not Know about Wole Soyinka