A Nobel laureate who made pen from bones

The first question that popped up in my head as Wole Soyinka walked past was, what shampoo does he use? And how does his hair look when it’s wet?

Unfortunately, such questions are for some reason frowned upon in press conferences, so I never found out. Well, the Nobel laureate with the eloquent puff of cotton wool on his head and a corresponding baby puff on his chin presided over Day II of the Jaipur Literature Festival like an exotic deity, not unlike Ogun, the Yoruba tribe’s god of the road he spoke about as he read out from plays.

“These boobs are heavy, I ejaculated prematurely...” goes the “song in praise of a woman’s endowment” that the Nigerian playwright recited. Soyinka's rendering of the chant-like songs of praise were hypnotic in their power, a power it owed as much to the author’s deep, sonorous voice as to the earthy, sensuous imagery (“the earth is moist as a dog's nose”), and the “ebullient mass of humanity” that had gathered to listen to him. 

One of the more interesting stories he narrated was about how he retained his sanity when, as a political prisoner, he was put in solitary confinement.

Soyinka hated maths when in school. “When my last maths exam was over, I collected all my maths textbooks, made a bonfire of them, and did a little jig,” he recalled. But in his prison cell, where he was allowed no contact with anyone and had no books to read, how did he pass the time without going mad?

“By trying to rediscover the mathematical formulas and equations I so hated. I was so terrible in math, they would keep me occupied for days,” he said, to murmurs of sympathy from the audience. He also found a way to write — “by making ink from coffee, and a pen from bones.” His cell was next to where prisoners were executed, so bones were not difficult to find.

The session on Dalit literature, titled, Outcaste: The Search for Public Conscience was the most provocative of the festival so far, with the panel of Dalit writers, Kancha Illaiah, OP Valmiki and P Sivakami making a passionate case for why the caste system will not go unless Hinduism goes.

“The reason most Hindus don't get worked up enough about atrocities against Dalits is that their conscience is not a public conscience but a caste conscience, imbued with values derived from caste,” said P Sivakami, the Tamil novelist.

Kancha Illaiah, author of Why I am Not A Hindu, turned up the heat further, by stating, “Hinduism is spiritual fascism.”