During the six years spent in England, he was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London In , he was awarded a Rockefeller bursary and returned to Nigeria to study African drama.
At the same time, he taught drama and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since , he has been professor of comparative literature. He has periodically been visiting professor at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Yale. During the civil war in Nigeria, Soyinka appealed in an article for cease-fire. For this he was arrested in , accused of conspiring with the Biafra rebels, and was held as a political prisoner for 22 months until Soyinka has published about 20 works: drama, novels and poetry.
The critic Michael LaPointe calls Sorokin's output "one of the most transfixing bodies of work in world literature". Day of the Oprichnik is set in in a dystopian Russia, which is extremely violent and strongly redolent of Anthony Burgess's book A Clockwork Orange Like Clockwork, the former's nasty ironies are not subtle: Russia is now ruled by a tsar again, and the book follows one of his henchmen, a strapping specimen of Russian masculinity, as he murders, rapes, and tortures his way through a day.
This thug at one point daydreams about the "state cauldrons boiling" and rendering human fat, which drips into the snow and "swirls like frozen mother of pearl… Splendid. Sorokin's writing is hallucinatory, laced with grim humour, but never really funny ha-ha. Mullan makes the point, and so does Jonathan Coe in a brilliant article about political satire in the London Review of Books, that actual laughter and satire might even be seen as opposed: one forces us to look at an ugly situation by amplifying it, while the other defuses the situation by trivialising it and potentially putting us at our ease.
Coe's article is actually about Boris Johnson's capacity to play the fool, to "laugh at himself", which Coe views as a sly strategy to evade criticism.
The article was published long before Johnson became prime minister, and his brand of tomfoolery became emblematic of an era. Since mere laughter at a situation may be co-opted, the smile may need to be wiped off people's faces before it can fully form.
There is plenty of infernal, sardonic irony in the Chinese writer Yan Lianke's books, which send up life in communist China. Yan born , who continues to live in China, is often tipped for a Nobel Prize; he has made a long career out of trying to avoid censorship by finding oblique ways to criticise Chinese politics and society, though he seldom succeeds.
Currently most of his work is subject to an official ban. His style is experimental and absurdist; he has said , "The reality of China is so outrageous that it defies belief and renders realism inert. Dream of Ding Village satirises the "plasma economy" the government-managed trade in blood in Henan province in the early s, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of people contracting HIV. In a moving dispatch to the New York Times in , Yan wrote: "People live like dogs in this society.
I dream of being able to bark out loud in my books, and of turning my barking into exquisite music. In the age-old wrestling match between satirists and political vice, who wins?
Mullan suggests that satire is a way of laughing at something we're powerless to change — which would seem to be saying that satire has no social traction. When asked if he had hope for Nigeria's future, Soyinka replied , "Oh, hope. Again that's another word that I don't use. All these writers are taking on much bigger opponents — and yet they continue to write. Love books? His run-ins with successive governments ensured that Soyinka led a peripatetic life.
He is currently based in Nigeria. There are also plans for an international release early next year. Click here to join our channel indianexpress and stay updated with the latest headlines. Paromita Chakrabarti Coronavirus Explained.
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