"I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood"
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Soyinka punctures a comforting myth: that writing is an orderly, industrial routine, as if artistry were just attendance and a fresh sheet in the machine. The line is almost comically tactile - the “typewriter machine,” the “piece of paper” - a deliberately old-school image of discipline that he treats with bafflement. That bafflement is the point. He’s not romanticizing chaos; he’s refusing the Protestant-work-ethic fantasy that creativity is a factory shift.
As a dramatist, Soyinka writes in voices, conflicts, bodies in space. Drama isn’t born from solitary transcription as much as from listening, research, political pressure, and the slow accumulation of argument and rhythm. His subtext is that writing is not merely production; it’s consequence. In Soyinka’s career - shaped by colonial aftermath, civil war, imprisonment, and censorship - the act of making language isn’t detachable from danger, urgency, and moral choice. You don’t simply wake up and “start writing” when words can implicate you, rally others, or get you locked away.
There’s also a quiet rebuke to literary pedagogy. “Writers I learned about” hints at a canon presented as clean process and personal genius, stripped of conditions: patronage, surveillance, exile, hunger, politics. Soyinka’s refusal re-humanizes the work. He’s insisting that the writer’s day doesn’t begin at the desk; it begins in the world that presses on the desk, sometimes hard enough to break the machine.
As a dramatist, Soyinka writes in voices, conflicts, bodies in space. Drama isn’t born from solitary transcription as much as from listening, research, political pressure, and the slow accumulation of argument and rhythm. His subtext is that writing is not merely production; it’s consequence. In Soyinka’s career - shaped by colonial aftermath, civil war, imprisonment, and censorship - the act of making language isn’t detachable from danger, urgency, and moral choice. You don’t simply wake up and “start writing” when words can implicate you, rally others, or get you locked away.
There’s also a quiet rebuke to literary pedagogy. “Writers I learned about” hints at a canon presented as clean process and personal genius, stripped of conditions: patronage, surveillance, exile, hunger, politics. Soyinka’s refusal re-humanizes the work. He’s insisting that the writer’s day doesn’t begin at the desk; it begins in the world that presses on the desk, sometimes hard enough to break the machine.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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