Impressionistic Approach to the Live Burial

1. Impressionistic
Approach: ''Live
Burial‘’ by Wole
Soyinka
• Name: Panchasara Jignesh k.
• Roll no: 8
• Enrollment No:3069206420200013
• Paper 206: The African Literature
• Batch: 2020-2022
• Email: jigneshpanchasara5758@gmail.
com
• Submitted To: S.B. Gardi Department
of English MKBU

2. Wole Soyinka
• Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde
Soyinka, known as Wole Soyinka, is
a Nigerian playwright, novelist,
poet, and essayist in the English
language. He was awarded the 1986
Nobel Prize in Literature, the first
sub-Saharan African to be honoured
in that category. Soyinka was born
into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta.

3. Soyinka's "Live
Burial"
• ‘Live Burial’, gives a visceral insight into the harrowing
experience of solitary confinement:
Sixteen paces/By twenty-three. They hold/Siege against
humanity/And Truth/Employing time to drill through to his
sanity.”[2]
Soyinka has continued to be a political activist throughout his
life, using his platform and his voice to speak out against the
injustice in the world.The small scraps of paper I saw on display
in the Treasures Gallery back in 2016 are a clear symbol of
Soyinka’s passionate fight to use his words.This passion is
exemplified through his 1986 Nobel Prize Speech ‘This Past
Must Address Its Present’, where he used his platform to openly
criticise the evils of Apartheid and the structural racism it
fostered.

4. Continue….
• His closing words in the speech are ones that not only
applied to the time but resonate today:
‘That calendar, we know, is not universal, but time is, and so
are the imperatives of the time. And of those imperatives that
challenge our being, our presence, and humane definition at
this time, none can be considered more pervasive than the end
of racism, the eradication of human inequality, and the
dismantling of all their structures. The Prize is the consequent
enthronement of its complement: universal suffrage, and
peace.’

5. "Live Burial • "Live Burial" (Soyinka, Crypt, pp.60-61) opens this
"Prisonettes" section, and the title fuctions as a summary of
what the Nigerian government tried to impose on Soyinka's
mind. Just as Kurtz can summarize his experiences in the
Congo exploration in Heart of Darkness, so too can
Soyinka -- yet the reader cannot truly comprehend Kurtz's
nebulous dying cries of "The horror!", whereas the focused
image of live burial, claustrophobic to the extreme, can
immediately summon a specific response from the depths of
human nightmares. The thought of being buried while still
living also necessarily creates the fear of premature death.

6. Impressionistic way of looking at the
First stanza
• A starting of the poem is to analyze the poet is in prison. So, we have an
idea that this poem is related to some kind of post-colonial argument of the
poet because when we analyze this poem we can get the idea that he was in
prison at the time he wrote this poem. He faced much mental torture. When
he was going to the toilet, he was writing the poem. When he was in jail
there is 16 sixteen feet of land and wheals. 23 months he was staying there.
• So, What kind of impression in my mind that writing is a big difficult task
when someone is in prison but in this condition who are able to write
through toilet paper, it makes a different impression towards to see the poet,
has some strength to analysis through the post-colonial lens.

7. "Live Burial" • The poem's tone and focus shifts abruptly in the fourth
stanza; rather than allusions and emotional
commentary, we see a simple description by,
supposedly, the prison guards. Their words reduce
Soyinka's life to "He sleeps well, eats well." "His
doctors note / No damage" could indicate the guards
have been beating their prisoner, or that Soyinka
stands up to the harsh conditions, at least physically.
Meanwhile, "plastic surgeons" repair the visible effects
of the beatings; metaphorically, these "surgeons"
rework and warp the truth, falsifying the poet's hellish
conditions, and the unfairness of his imprisonment,
for the "public image."

8. Impressionistic thinking from the above
slide
• As we know that the poet is having some mental as well as physical
torture but the Doctors and Policemen are corrupt so as some kind of
impression that politics and money are central in this.
• Example: Is the cheating shown in the private hospital sector in
the "Gabbar is Back" movie possible in the real world?
• I would say Yes, or No because sometimes it’s happened with people as
same happened with the poet, he was mentally & physically tortured but
the doctor is giving a negative report. so, it has two inside to connect with
the modern era.

9. "Live Burial''
• This falsification leads to the fifth stanza's debate about reality and to the
relationship between actuality and what the state perceives. In reality,
Soyinka "called upon Western nations to cease supplying arms to either
side" (Minna Song, "The Effects of the Biafran War on Wole Soyinka's
Works", Intermedia) during the war of secession between Biafra and
Nigeria. The dominant Nigerian government, however, twisted the truth
and accused Soyinka of supporting the rebel cause (Song, "...Bifran War.");
the state condemned and imprisoned the poet without a trial (Jonathan
Protass, "Soyinka's Battle Against Insanity", Intermedia). Soyinka
questions, ironically suggesting the syllogism that because these lies are
fiction, and fiction is art, and truth is the essence of art, the lies must be
truth.
Joel Henderson'92

10. Continue.. • In the final three stanzas, the focus of "Live Burial", which is
indicated by the word "guards" in italics, changes again. Soyinka
describes the only people -- the only life, save for glimpses -- with
which he comes in contact. Each stanza employs single images of a
guard, named in each leading line as "The lizard", "The ghoul", and
"The voyeur", to show their hippocrisy and evil. He describes a
guard as having "A concrete mixer throat," indicating perhaps a
hard, constant flow of verbal punishment; the line, in relation to
"The cola slime / Flies to blotch the walls in patterned grime" also
calls to mind someone using tobacco, mindless of the direction his
spit. The "ghoul" guard using snuff in the following stanza supports
this tobacco/drug usage reading.

11. Conclusion • Wole Soyinka’s poetry reflects the contradictions in his
heritage. His religious beliefs are tribal, specifically, the
Yoruba pantheon of gods, and Christian, and his
cultural upbringing draws from African traditions,
opposed to modernization, and Western traditions.
Although he celebrates the complexities that are Africa,
he does not romanticize his native.
• So, The whole poem criticizes western thoughts and
criticizes the mindset of the African people and
dependent on another country, who are under
colonialism.

12. Works cited • Henderson, J. (n.d.). African Post Colonial Literature. Soyinka's
"Live burial". Retrieved February 25, 2022, from
http://www.postcolonialweb.org/soyinka/burial1.html
• lauralulg, P. by, Lauralulg, V. all posts by, & says:, M. V. (P.
(2020, June 23). Poet, playwright & prisoner: Wole soyinka,
'prisonettes' manuscript. Leeds University Library Blog. Retrieved
February 25, 2022, from
https://leedsunilibrary.wordpress.com/2020/06/24/poet-
playwright-prisoner-wole-soyinka-prisonettes-manuscript/
• Thomson, J. (n.d.). Wole soyinka's poetic space - jstor. Retrieved
February 25, 2022, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/3820163

13. Thanks