What is it about storytelling that turns the storyteller into a threatening figure for those who hold power? That is the case for Wole Soyinka, playwright, novelist, poet and Nobel laureate, who spent most of a 27 month prison term in solitary confinement. That was in 1967 at the beginning of the Nigerian civil war when Soyinka was accused of helping to buy jet fighters for Biafra. He was never formally charged. That was not the first time he had been imprisoned by Nigerian authorities.
Did the storytelling impulse turn Soyinka to political activism? Did the activism impulse turn Soyinka to storytelling? Was there some prior impulse—a genetic predisposition, say, or a bolt of lightning—which motivated both the storytelling and the activism? Or did the two feed one another in a kind of carbon cycle of the soul?
If we say that storytelling can turn storytellers into activists, then it’s easy to see why a government might feel threatened by a storyteller. But what about the act of storytelling itself? Is there something intrinsic to storytelling that renders it subversive?
Climate of Fear
This is a question which occurred to me as I read Soyinka’s Climate of Fear (while I was waiting to be screened by security at an American airport). It is a collection of five lectures which he delivered in 2004 for the Reith Lectures, the BBC’s equivalent of our Massey Lecture Series. Soyinka himself never poses this question, but it seems an obvious query to put to a man for whom such intellectual discursive analytical stuff is about as far as one can get from the writing for which he is best known.
I have a theory and wish to test it here: storytellers—at least those at the top of their form—are threatening figures precisely because they refuse to be intellectual, discursive, analytical.
The Monologue
Climate of Fear offers an exegesis of power relationships within the political sphere. One feature of power which Soyinka observes is the monologue—the one-way rhetoric of domination that sounds from both the left (with the Marxist chant “Property is theft” ringing above the Paris student riots of 1968) and the right (with George W. Bush’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction” whipping an entire nation into a blood lust that bore no connection to the events of 9/11) and culminating today in the phrase “There are no innocents” which is invoked to justify the slaughter of children as collateral damage to military action. Power, he observes, exists on an axis with dignity, and while we might tend to regard dignity as a lesser value than, say, life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness, nevertheless, Soyinka draws dignity to the centre of the conversation. Power invariably comes at the expense of dignity. The monologue itself is an exercise of power and so becomes an affront to human dignity.
Persuasion
I think this is where my theory intersects with Soyinka’s account. The intellectual, the discursive, the analytical are strategies aimed at persuasion. Implicit in the act of persuasion is the notion that “I am right; you are wrong.” Interesting that we speak of a person’s intellectual or analytical powers. Persuasion can be a violent act. While we in Western countries pride ourselves on the spaces we have created for “civil discourse,” there are times when the discourse of our Parliamentarians, for example, is anything but civil. Sometimes our discourse devolves into unabashed attempts to strip those who oppose us of their dignity. Then, we deal in humiliation.
Storytelling subverts power when it eschews persuasion. A story that embraces ambiguity, that acknowledges complexity and admits multivalent readings is a story which confers dignity on the reader. It grants to the reader the freedom to discover for herself what meanings may lie within this narrative space the author has birthed. An intrusive author reveals insecurity in his artistic powers.
Religious Persuasion
In an early chapter, Soyinka asks why, during the Vietnam War, nobody tried to draw the whole world into the conflict by, say flying airplanes into buildings in New York City or by blowing up trains in Spain. He tacitly answers this question in the final chapter, titled “I am right; you are dead,” by observing that the Vietnam War concerned a secular ideology. There is a qualitative difference between communist fanatics and religious fanatics. Secular ideologies are grounded in reason, and so will come up against facts that cannot be refuted. The collapse of the Soviet Union is one such fact. But religious ideologies are grounded in an all-knowing, all-seeing, invisible being whose existence is impossible to refute. As a consequence, there is no reason to suppose that such an ideology’s monologue won’t go on forever, no matter how vile.
There is an analogous distinction between the secular persuasion of the academic, which claims an objective and therefore universal point of view and seeks to allow truth to reveal itself on its own terms, and the religious persuasion of the cleric, which claims a subjective (god being the subject) although equally universal point of view and seeks to convert the listener to the truth already embedded in that point of view. In both instances of persuasion, there is the danger that that act of persuasion will be used to assert dominance in a power relationship (but that is easier to counter in the case of an academic).
Storytelling can serve to inoculate us against the poisonous impulse to dominate by offering alternatives to the monologues of persuasion and conversion. Stories can erase power from the author/reader (teller/listener) relationship when they speak to us with compassion and empathy, humour and insight, humility and longing, and with respect for that most elusive of qualities: our innate love of beauty.