Daily Inspiration Quote by Wole Soyinka

Soyinka turns the human face into an indictment. Not a mirror of individual character, but a public ledger of what history, power, and neglect have written onto ordinary people. "Looking at faces" sounds intimate, even tender, until the line swerves: the feeling is not empathy alone, but obligation. Those faces are evidence. They register poverty, fear, fatigue, the small humiliations of daily governance. The phrase "a lot of work" is deceptively mild; it sanitizes crisis into a to-do list, the way officials talk when they want to sound responsible without naming the disaster.

As a dramatist, Soyinka understands the politics of visibility. Faces are the most legible stage prop we carry: they speak before any manifesto does. The intent here is to short-circuit abstract debate by pointing at the body as the record of policy. It's also a quiet rebuke to spectatorship. You can look, you can feel, but what matters is what you do after the looking. The sentence implies a second-person audience: if you can see it, you're implicated.

Context matters because Soyinka's career is welded to the costs of state violence and the failures of postcolonial promise, especially in Nigeria. The line reads like the moral engine behind his work: art as witness, yes, but also as a demand for repair. It's not sentimental; it's managerial in the best sense, insisting that suffering isn't a mood but a mandate.