For your reading pleasure.
Madiba.
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THISDAY
Writer, Witch and Heretic
Lecture
By Wole Soyinka
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For as far back as we can rely on the oral history of societies, and of course
in documented history and literature, even right up to this moment - depending
on which society you had in mind - witches have always been considered a most
baneful variant of the human species. They were capable of flight - usually on
broomsticks. Certainly they levitated. They peered into the human soul, pared
away all subterfuge and dared declare what they saw. They had this strange
faculty of foresight, the capacity to peer into the future - or they were
believed to possess it which came to the same thing. Their actual claims are
not really important - what matters was what society believed them capable of.
Even if, in a curative effort, the 'witch' made use of the same herbs and
potions that others did for coughs, rheumatism or seizure, the fact that these
came from the witches imbued the same medications with supernatural powers, in
the opinion of society, and thus made them guilty of something that smacked of
the abnormal.
But hardly ever a benevolent abnormality. Witches were reputed to be in league
with powers of darkness, capable of conjuring forces from the satanic realms.
To succeed in curing what the state- approved bleeders and apothecaries had
failed to cure was in itself proof of their sinister powers. To warn the
community of the advent of floods or droughts, that is, reading with
exceptional insight the signs that nature so generously provided for the
discerning - this made them guilty of the heinous crime of diabolism. And of
course, since witchcraft laid claims to revelations, which are supposed to be
the absolute prerogative of only establishment theocratic orders, witches were
doubly doomed. Finally, in order to secure theological grounds for burning the
poor wretch at the stake or breaking her on the wheel - the witch, in many
theocratic societies, was denounEed as a Heretic.
Of course, the Bard himself, the definitive tragic poet William Shakespeare
has not helped matters. After Macbeth, it would have taken a very sturdy mind
indeed to see - witches as anything but dangerous, sinister, and fearsome,
never mind that they did in this instance - as in so many others in world
literature - pronounce nothing but the truth.
To sum up however: these creatures, at once above ordinary humanity - because
of their alleged powers over others - nonetheless occupied the bottom rung in
ethical and societal valuation. They were outcasts who lived - physically
often - on the very fringes of society. What resulted from the totality of
this picture was that some societies actually considered it a progressive act
to try suspected witches and either burn them at the stake, or drown them.
Indeed, in myriad societies - including the Europeans which try to forget this
phase of their development - the test took the form of - heads you lose, tails
we win. You were tied to a chair and dipped in the pond - if you drowned, that
was just too bad. It meant that you were vindicated, your name was cleared and
you were declared innocent. If you survived, then of course it proved indeed
that you were a witch, and then you were really drowned for good.
Other refinements of what was then called Trial by Ordeal required you to
drink a poisonous brew. If it killed you - well, the 'logic' remained the same
- you were innocent. If you survived the hemlock, you were then subjected to
the most ingenious forms of torture.
The victims of America's infamous Salem Witch Hunt, dramatized so powerfully
in Arthur Miller's The Crucible were rehabilitated two or three years ago by
(former US) President Clinton - three hundred years after their torture and
hanging. Much good may it do them but, I believe it is right that society
revisits these collective, infectious, and often terminal imbecillities. The
motivating factor for these 'revisions of history' - one positive face of
revisionism - goes beyond finally closing the account books of the past. In
fact, they are anything but 'closing' the accounts - they reopen the obscured
ledger sheets of reckoning, the pluses and minuses of social valuations, and
above all, the unfinished business of the enthronement of rationality, and the
acknowledgement of human fallibility.
This most celebrated witch-hunt of the United States took place three
centuries ago. But, is that mental conditioning really over? It would not be
too inappropriate, I propose, to make witchcraft serve us as metaphor for a
contemporary social predicament and thus confront the question: are there
sections of humanity which correspond today to the category of witches in the
perception of other sections of society? I believe so. There is a
trans-cultural tribe known as artists, writers and intellectuals, and they,
like witches, are regarded very much in this heretical light. This may be yet
another overlooked reason why ruling oligarchies, throughout history, have
tended to view writers and artists with that same superstitious awe that once
attached to witches.
Take the Japanese Kabuki performers. As they invade the boards of European and
American theatres, it must be sometimes difficult to believe that these were
once considered dangerous and/or contemptible dregs of society - but that was
Japanese culture of yonder days for you. So thoroughly disregarded was their
status in society that they were considered fair game for the wandering
samurai. A samurai who took it into his head to do some sword practice on an
unarmed, defenseless kabuki player was simply never put on trial. Today, the
same kabuki has become one of the hottest cultural exports from Japan, to be
received and treated reverentially by swooning theatre goers who may not even
understand one grunt that is hurled at them from the stage.
And then you may also wish to enquire why, whenever an articulate dissident or
perceived enemy of state is thrown in prison, the first regulation that is
imposed on his keepers is that he or she must be deprived of any reading or
writing material. From Stalinist Russia through Apartheid's Robben Island to
Arap Moi's prisons in so-called democratic Kenya, you will find that pens and
books are treated in many climes with the same awe of satanism as once applied
to the witches' broomstick and alchemical workbench.
We can make a global tour of such examples throughout history, nudging the
American memory with its own prolonged phase of the communist witchhunt - an
expression that was most aptly used at the time, and still is - where the
principal targets were writers, theatre artists, musicians, film actors and
producers. Americans like to reassure themselves that this was a singular
aberration but, we do know enough of the social instinct that pounces on
convenient scapegoats to recognize that this simply is not true. The
life-and-death predicament of the former Black Panther, Mumia Abu Jamal still
on death- row in the state of Pennsylvania may appear to Americans to be a
simple matter of crime and punishment but, my conviction is that the maHer
goes deeper.
Abu Jamal has utilized his time in prison to assault the inhumanity of the
American prison system, indeed to assault the very foundations of American
justice. At one stage, he ran a radio show and contributed a regular column to
a newspaper. It is difficult to completely dismiss the nagging suspicion that
the refusal to grant him a new trial' or the refusal of his state govemor to
exercise his prerogative of mercy over this individual, is rooted in the fact
that this prisoner was one who refused to sheathe his pen, one whose writings
succeeded in calling attention to the proven fallibility of the American
judicial system, its statistically proven racial context and most especially
the criminality of crucial sectors of its crime detection agencies.
And yet, like the witches of yore, has he not been proved right? Have
comparative racial statistics not vindicated his claims? Even beyond race, has
the criminality of the crime-preventers, state witnesses not been exposed,
time and time again, as capable of railroading innocent men to their deaths?
The hearings of Amnesty International held in 1998 in Chicago, and its
findings, surely ought to have shattered the complacency of most Americans,
just as revelations regarding the "crime-busting" tradition of America's
finest - the LAPD.
The development of DNA testing has resulted in the release of several
condemned men from the Death-Row, some of whom have been awaiting execution
for nearly fifteen years. We acknowledge that the very system that produced
these monstrosities also exercises the virtue that makes possible the exposure
of the malpractice that cumulatively discredit the system. What remains
puzzling, illogical and inhuman to us, outside observers, is that those
elected individuals who hold the lives of Mumia Abu Jamal and others of his
predicament in their hands remain incapable of adjusting their homicidal
inclinations to these glaring contradictions.
Further afield however, the horrors that are currently unleashed by religious
extremists - with or without state support - Egypt, Afghanistan, and Algeria,
India, Indonesia - in the name of the purity of religious cultures - should
remind us that whenever the virus of intolerance strikes, the first-line
scapegoats are the makers of culture. The battlecry is familiar - our culture
has been contaminated, it is time for purification. Out go the alleged
impurities - foreign music, foreign art, foreign literature, foreign thought,
foreign clothing, satellite dishes etc. - but, in reality, and most profoundly
- the heretical arts, that is - even the internal arts that challenge the
status quo.
Remember Hastings Banda, Life-President of Malawi? He installed a pemmanent
censorship board that was kept busy all round the year. Chinua Achebe was one
of the victims of his everlengthening Index, so was 1. My contribution was a
modest one - The Trials of Brother Jero.
Hastings Banda's worst excesses pale, however, in comparison with the horror
that has overtaken the world through the cultural purification route in
Algeria. As always, it is the actual products of culture that lead the way,
but the makers of culture follow swiftly after. With the decimation of the
ranks of producers, or their increasing inaccessibility through govemmental
protective cordons, or exile, the suppliers - more tendentiously named
traffickers - of these cultural products become the next target, then the
suspected consumers, then the allegedly contaminated which routinely
translates as - anyone, any group, any family or village that is not seen to
participate in the self-righteous orgy of cultural cleansing. 'Witches' are
sighted and proliferate in every corner of the land till nothing will assuage
the thirst for a fictitious pristine existence but that the land be bathed in
the blood of innocents. Naguib Mafouz, the Nobel Laureate from Egypt was
stabbed in the neck by religious zealots for no other reason than that his
writing was considered guilty of polluting Islamic thought. More than the
nebulous prize of the soul is at stake - it is the very real prize of power, a
territory of domination that can only be guaranteed by outward confommity.
Thus we find that there are in the end, only two broad categories of culture -
the culture that fawns upon and sustains power, and the 'heretical'culture
that critiques and challenges it.
Cuba as a nation, knows what it is - even till today to be regarded as a
nation herself bewitched by what today passes for ideological non-conformism,
a condition that more powerful nations consider a threat and a destabilizing
presence in relation to their way of life, their values and global ambitions.
Each visit that I make to Cuba reveals a nation that is constantly renewing,
indeed re-inventing herself.
You could accurately describe Cuba, I think, not just as the maverick, but as
the heretic of the Western Hemisphere. If therefore, Cuba has a lesson to
impart to the world, it is to ensure that on her own soil, she recognizes the
nature of the witch in the writer, in the artist in general, a being possessed
by uncomfortable, even sometimes socially disruptive visions, internally
ravaged by seemingly heretical insights.
Literary and artistic prizes exist to honor the marriage of such original,
non-complacent imagination with industry and artistry. It is this that makes
our profession bearable, even sometimes honorable. It is the social acceptance
of this mission as our raison d'etre that justifies the global network of
witches' covens of which Casa de las Americas is a vital part. It is this,
above all other considerations, that validates our celebration of human
creativity.
The text of a lecture delivered by Prof. Wole Soyinka at the Casa de Las
Americas Literature Prize, Havana, Cuba.
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