After Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, [Wole] Soyinka took a pair of shears to his green card, determined to no longer "be even a partial member of this society." Now, he says, he looks at the United States and sees "MAGA land."
"It's one of the saddest developing phenomena that I know of," Soyinka said. "I just feel very, very sad that what's happening in the States should be happening in such a potentially progressive country."
Given the current political atmosphere in which foreign governments — including Britain, Germany and Canada — have warned their citizens about traveling to the United States, I asked if he felt safe visiting.
"Oh, I've lived in a constant state of nonsafety," he said, with a small laugh. "So I'm used to that. If I'm walking through the street and they pick me up, I have no problem whatsoever. You know, my laptop is where it is. It's up in the clouds."
Time and experience have shaped the hopeful young man who wrote "The Swamp Dwellers" into a worldly old man with a dented sense of possibility. But if he regards humans as being entrenched in perpetual conflict, with "power on the one side, freedom on the other," he has not abandoned the battlefield.
"I've lost that sense of achievable idealism," he said. "But it's always there. One never loses a picture, a projection of what you think your society can be. That's what hurts."
- Laura Collins-Hughes, 04-08-2025
READ MORE:
At 90, Wole Soyinka Revisits His Younger, More Optimistic Self
With the Off Broadway debut of his 1958 play "The Swamp Dwellers," the Nigerian Nobel laureate looks back on the writer he was when he was starting out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/theater/wole-soyinka-swamp-dwellers-nyc.html
-- "It's one of the saddest developing phenomena that I know of," Soyinka said. "I just feel very, very sad that what's happening in the States should be happening in such a potentially progressive country."
Given the current political atmosphere in which foreign governments — including Britain, Germany and Canada — have warned their citizens about traveling to the United States, I asked if he felt safe visiting.
"Oh, I've lived in a constant state of nonsafety," he said, with a small laugh. "So I'm used to that. If I'm walking through the street and they pick me up, I have no problem whatsoever. You know, my laptop is where it is. It's up in the clouds."
Time and experience have shaped the hopeful young man who wrote "The Swamp Dwellers" into a worldly old man with a dented sense of possibility. But if he regards humans as being entrenched in perpetual conflict, with "power on the one side, freedom on the other," he has not abandoned the battlefield.
"I've lost that sense of achievable idealism," he said. "But it's always there. One never loses a picture, a projection of what you think your society can be. That's what hurts."
- Laura Collins-Hughes, 04-08-2025
READ MORE:
At 90, Wole Soyinka Revisits His Younger, More Optimistic Self
With the Off Broadway debut of his 1958 play "The Swamp Dwellers," the Nigerian Nobel laureate looks back on the writer he was when he was starting out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/theater/wole-soyinka-swamp-dwellers-nyc.html
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