father our neighbour's quarrels
perhaps when they come 45 with their cameras and straw hats: sacred pink tourists from the frozen Nawth
we should get down to those
white beaches
where if we don't wear breeches
50 it becomes an island dance
Some people doin' well
while others are catchin' hell
o the boss gave our Johnny the sack though we beg him please 55 please to take 'im back
so the boy now nigratin' overseas . . .
1967
WOLE SOYINKA
b. 1934 Wole Soyinka was born in Abeokuta, near Ibadan, in western Nigeria, and educated at Government College and University College, in Ibadan. In 1954 he began his studies at the University of Leeds. After six years in England he returned to Nigeria, where he founded a national theater in 1960 and, at the cost of repeated imprisonment, intervened in tumultuous political struggles. He has taught at universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, as well as at North American universities. In 1986 he became the first black African writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognized for plays, such as Death and the King's Horseman (1975), that inventively hybridize Yoruba oral traditions with European literary paradigms, fuse African rhetoric, myth, and ritual with the verbal extravagance of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. He has also written poems, including 'Telephone Conversation,' a mini verse drama of sorts in which two characters, a racist English landlady and an African trying to rent an apartment, are wittily pitted against one another.
Telephone Conversation
The price seemed reasonable, location
Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived
Off premises. Nothing remained
But self-confession. 'Madam', I warned,
5 'I hate a wasted journey?I am African.'
.
2530 25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
Silence. Silenced transmission of Pressurised good-breeding. Voice, whe n it came, Lip-stick coated, long gold-rolled Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was, foully.
10 'HOW DARK?' ... I had not misheard . . . 'ARE YOU LIGHT 'OR VERY DARK?' Button B. Button A.1 Stench Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak. Red booth. Red pilIar-box.c Red double-tiered mailbox Omnibus0 squelching tar. It was real! Shamed double-decker bus
15 By ill-mannered silence, surrender Pushed dumbfoundment to beg simplification. Considerate she was, varying the emphasis?
'ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?' Revelation came. 'You mean?like plain or milk chocolate?'
20 Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted, I chose. 'West African sepia'??and as afterthought, reddish brown 'Down in my passport.' Silence for spectroscopic2 Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent
25 Hard on the mouthpiece. 'WHAT'S THAT?' conceding 'DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS.' 'Like brunette.'
'THAT'S DARK, ISN'T IT?' 'Not altogether. 'Facially, I am brunette, but madam, you should see 'The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet
30 'Are a peroxide blonde. Friction, caused ? 'Foolishly madam?b y sitting down, has turned 'My bottom raven black?One moment madam'?sensing Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap About my ears?'Madam', I pleaded, 'Wouldn't you rather
35 'See for yourself ?'
1960, 1962
1. Buttons on old British telephones. 2. Related to study of the spectrum. TONY HARRISON
b. 1937 Tony Harrison was born in Leeds, where his father was a baker, and where he learned a regional Yorkshire dialect from his mother. At the age of eleven, a scholarship to the prestigious Leeds Grammar School dislocated him from his working-class background: he was told he would have to learn to speak 'properly' and forbidden, because of his accent, to read his poetry aloud in the classroom. He later studied classics at Leeds University. While a lecturer in English at Ahmadu Bello University in northern Nigeria, he translated (with fellow poet James Simmons) Aristophanes' Lysistrata into the pidgin English of the Hausa people; at the same time he wrote poems in the voices of working-class British expatriates. He has been resident dramatist at the
.
HARRISON: NATIONAL TRUST / 2531
National Theatre in London, has undertaken commissions for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and has published verse translations of classical Greek and French plays.
As a poet Harrison has been faithful to his modest origins. His poems give speech to the speechless, to the
