Prac Crit on Soyinka's "Massacre , October '66"

To begin with, the poem was written by Soyinka to express his disgust over the massacre of the Igbos by fellow Nigerians in 1966. The poem adeptly expresses the inhuman nature of this killing with extensive use of metaphors and imagery to mask out the brutality of the killings he had witnessed. The title itself is short, presented in a matter-of-fact tone and unemotionally linked to the inhuman and senseless slaughters which might have occurred to this period, and it suggests that Soyinka, as the poem, might want to distance himself emotionally from the atrocities which the Nigerians might have performed during this event.
The poem proper begins by stastying that “Shards of sunlight touch me here/Shredded in willows”, which suggests incompleteness and sharp tactility. Literally, “shards” could evoke broken glass and evisceration, which may be linked to shrapnel, and is a poignant reminder of fragmentation. This is further enhanced by the fact that he “sought to reach/A mind at silt-bed” “through stained-glass/Fragments”, which is again, very visual and tactile. The next stanza continues with the fact that the “lake stayed cold”, which could symbolise the lack of life, coupled with the “October flush of dying leaves”. October, the season of autumn, represents death and loss, as opposed to spring, the season of rebirth and renewal. The theme of death is fleshed out very significantly here, and it is reminiscent of the senseless slaughter of many of the Igbo people. Again, the description of the massacre is veiled, and not immediately apparent. To the casual onlooker, without knowledge of the context of the poem, it would be very hard to tell that Soyinka was writing about this incident, and perhaps the purpose of writing it in such a style is to avoid negative attention from the Nigerian government, who was very strict regarding the publishing of these issues. When the “gardener’s labour flew in seasoned scrolls/Lettering the wind”, we are reminded of the “dying leaves” being the victims of the massacre, and the fact that the gardener “labour[ed]” in vain, shows that trying to save these victims was a pointless task, as well as the fact that man’s labour is ultimately fruitless. The fact that they “letter[ed] the wind” could show that the deaths which occurred were openly committed, but yet from what happened in the massacre itself, no one took responsibility for these deaths. This contrast is perhaps what Soyinka wants us as the audience to realise.
Below, the massacre is also shown to be an “idyll sham”, which conveys the sense of beauty, peace and tranquillity. However, when we see that the narrator “trod on acorns”, describing “each shell’s detonation”, we see that the explosions are sharp auditory sensory input, which reminds us of explosions and bombs shattering. Again, he compares the “detonation” of the acorn shells to the “skull’s uniqueness”- how similar they are to a skull shattering. This horrific comparison evokes shock in us, because it is not what we are expecting, and we realise that beneath this “sham” of nature which the narrator has painted to us, the cover-up of the massacre, there lies something deeper which we perhaps are not aware of, which the people in power try to cover up.
With this realisation “Came sharper reckoning”. When the narrator talks about the “favoured food of hogs”, he talks about acorns, which in turn we draw back to the reference about heads, and we realise that the acorns which the narrator is referring to, “cannot number high”, as compared to the amount of heads, or lives, which the massacre has claimed. The issues of “heads sharply crop[ping] to whirlwinds/[the narrator] has briefly fled” also comes up, where the killing of the Igbo people seems to be systematic and efficient, and the intensity of the massacre is revealed, when he describes the killing as a “whirlwind”, something which he may have “briefly fled” through luck.
Again, the “oak rains a hundred more”, a hyperbole of the number of victims who were targeted during the massacre, which is a “kind of confusion to arithmetics of death”, showing that the massacre is, in fact, immeasurable, due to the countless lives it has claimed. In contrast to the “sharper reckoning” which the narrator has attained, we see that the massacre brings chaos; regardless of the fact that the destruction is systematic, it is, at the same time, total, and referred to later as “autumn the removal man/Dust[ing] down rare canvases”, almost as if it is a natural process. It is not, however; in contrast, the massacre is artificial, and man-made, and it being described akin to nature is ironic, and from the irony, we are able to note Soyinka’s distaste of the massacre itself, and at the same time, see what really happened beyond the cover-ups which the people in power initiated.
The next stanza details beautifully the crux of the whole poem. To him, to let a “loud resolve of passion/Fly to a squirrel”, is as if the squirrel, nature, and representative of a human life, is being annihilated by this “loud resolve of passion”, or the fury and madness in which the massacre was committed in, in a explosion of “burnished light and copper fur”. Again, “burnished…copper” provides a very artificial, piercing sensation, and reminds us that the massacre is artificial, and destructive to man, because man here is represented by objects of nature, such as the acorns as described previously above. When the narrator sees this, he has a “distant stance without the lake’s churchwindows”, a line which hints that he wants to look at the incident transparently, through all the cover-ups the people responsible have initiated, from an onlooker’s point of view, hence the term “without”. Once he feels he has attained this, gained his “sharper reckoning”, he realises that, for the victims of the massacre, “for a stranger”, he cannot help but feel love, as a Nigerian to a Nigerian and a human to a human. Through this stanza, he is able to effectively evoke our sympathy for the victims of the massacre, as well as call us to look at the issue in a clear frame of mind.
The rest of the poem falls into place once this is established, that the “host of acorns [falling]” are simply men who fall once they have been shot, as they “are silenced all, whose laughter/Rose from such indifferent paths”, detailing the narrator’s slow revelation of how senseless the killing is. There is a double meaning in the word indifferent, meaning “neither good or bad”, and at the same time, also meaning “being neutral in alignment”, showing how everyone who was an Igbo, was slaughtered, no matter how important they were, and whether they were passionate revolutionaries or simply passive people. To him, this epiphany is moving, and even shocking, when he realises that “oh God/They are not strangers all”. Again, the massacre is referred to as a “desecration”, which “mocks the word/Of peace- salaam aleikum- not strangers any”, meaning that the “idyll sham”, as referred to above, was such a blatant pretence at covering up, that it was mocking, and even derogatory, not only to the people involved in the massacre, but also to him and his countrymen, and his religion, and everything that they have stood for. “Salaam aleikum” here means “peace be with you”, which is a common greeting for Muslims, but here it is realised that this greeting is part of the idyll sham which was created, and it loses, even tarnishes its significance in its part of Igbo culture. Again, the “Brain of thousands pressed asleep to pig fodder” is indubitably referring to the fact that many people have actually believed the audacious “idyll sham” which was constructed, and Soyinka here is expressing frustration, and even disbelief, that people are too blind to see what he perceives as the real truth of the massacre, and coming to terms with one’s self. To him, “Shun pork the unholy”, is just another excuse propagated by the people in power, for them to live their lifestyle of power, and be able to get off scot-free for initiating the massacre, and the “priest” here reveals that the people in power might even be using religion as a justification for their actions, albeit styling themselves as in control of the religion itself; their words seem to form a sort of cult-religion in itself, whose illusion Soyinka wishes to banish. Therefore, in a mocking tone, Soyinka wishes us to see that the only real “desecration” is the one that he has mentioned- that of secretly condoning the massacre or being in denial of its existence.
In conclusion, he “borrow[s] seasons of an alien land”, again, searching for meaning in the chaos of the “whirlwind” and “confusion… [in the] arithmetics of death”, only to realise that he finds it “In brotherhood of ill, pride of race around [him]/Strewn in sunlit shards”, that fact that he and his countrymen stand united in the aftermath of chaos and death, but for the wrong reasons. It is interesting to note that the Igbo war ignited was a civil war, and the underlying message of the poem was that during the massacre, Soyinka was not able to trust even his fellow countryman, due to the very nature of the war. The impermanence and ephemeral nature of Man and his relationships is also touched upon in this poem, hinted at his borrowing of “alien lands/To stay the season of a mind”. We realise, after reading the poem, that Nigeria is not united as a country, but as a confederacy of people, and that people are only united by visualising the “mockery of waves” in the “idyll sham”, as if it was a painting, and no one could look beneath the surface except him, to visualise the incident through clear “churchwindows”. To him, the “brotherhood of ill” is what he wishes to destroy, the fact that we are all united for the wrong reasons, and what he wants us to unite under, is under the banner of acceptance, of the realisation and acceptance that the atrocity did occur under Nigerian hands, and that people should all look through this “idyll sham” and look at this clearly.
The poem itself is deceptive in its stanzas with four lines each, seemingly regular, but in free verse. Again, this deception is vital in showing that a deeper message lies within the poem, as in the massacre itself, and how it was portrayed by the people in power. Pastoral symbolic references are also used to “cover up” the horror of the massacre in a seemingly innocent way, and are also representative of the way that the massacre was covered up. The tone is carefully neutral, and the mood, sombre, carefully disguising what Soyinka really feels, and we realise that this passion and anger is all the more intensified, due to it being veiled. Writing on the theme of death, transience of human life, and generally on the massacre itself, Soyinka is able to convey his feelings over effectively through such techniques, making “Massacre, October ‘66” a text which may evoke ambivalent feelings in us.