"The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist"
About this Quote
An “accident” is a sly way to deny the crown while keeping the authority. When Wole Soyinka says the novel arrived by mishap and insists he’s not a novelist, he’s doing more than genre housekeeping. He’s drawing a line around his real home turf: drama as a public art, built for breath, bodies, and confrontation. For a dramatist whose work has always been tangled with power - colonial residues, military rule, the moral theater of the state - the stage isn’t just a medium. It’s a worldview: conflict made visible, language tested in real time, audience implicated.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to literary branding. “Novelist” is a market category and a prestige badge, especially in the global imagination of African writing where the novel has often been treated as the primary vessel of seriousness. Soyinka’s shrug punctures that hierarchy. He refuses the idea that legitimacy comes from a particular form, or that an artist must be legible through a single label.
Context matters: Soyinka’s career spans prison, exile, and the long aftermath of post-independence disillusionment. In that landscape, the novel can feel like private architecture; drama is closer to civic argument. Calling the novel an accident suggests necessity rather than ambition - a tool picked up because the moment demanded it, not because the author sought admission to a club. It’s modesty with an edge: a reminder that the work precedes the résumé, and that art, at its most urgent, doesn’t always arrive through planned career moves.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to literary branding. “Novelist” is a market category and a prestige badge, especially in the global imagination of African writing where the novel has often been treated as the primary vessel of seriousness. Soyinka’s shrug punctures that hierarchy. He refuses the idea that legitimacy comes from a particular form, or that an artist must be legible through a single label.
Context matters: Soyinka’s career spans prison, exile, and the long aftermath of post-independence disillusionment. In that landscape, the novel can feel like private architecture; drama is closer to civic argument. Calling the novel an accident suggests necessity rather than ambition - a tool picked up because the moment demanded it, not because the author sought admission to a club. It’s modesty with an edge: a reminder that the work precedes the résumé, and that art, at its most urgent, doesn’t always arrive through planned career moves.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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