Telephone Conversation

“Telephone Conversation” is a lyric poem written by Nigerian poet/dramatist/novelist/activist Wole Soyinka. It was published in Modern Poetry in Africa in 1963. At this time, Soyinka had written and produced a multitude of plays, but this was one of his first published poems. It predominantly features dialogue and strong characterizations of the two people speaking, bringing to light themes of racism and power dynamics. Soyinka wrote the poem after Nigerian independence from England and his time studying in Leeds but before the Nigerian civil war, a transitional period in which he was engaging politically and expressing his views in various written genres.

Poet Biography

Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka was born in 1934 in Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria to a minister/headmaster father and mother from a prominent political family. In grammar school, Soyinka won awards for his writing and was later accepted to the prestigious secondary school Government College. When at the University College Ibadan, he studied English literature and Western history,  composed a radio play for Nigerian Broadcasting Service, and founded the first social justice student group Pyrates Confraternity. He moved to London where he finished his B.A. in English literature at the University of Leeds. Here, he edited The Eagle, a satirical magazine about university life.

In England while he began an M.A. program, he started to write plays that combined his Yoruba heritage with Western theater, including his first major play The Swamp Dwellers in 1956, which was produced in Ibadan, Nigeria. His love of theater brought him to the Royal Court Theatre in London where he worked as a play reader and eventually produced his own plays, including The Invention in 1957. At this time, he was also a published poet, having works printed in Black Orpheus, a Nigerian magazine. A Rockefeller Research Fellowship brought Soyinka back to University College in Nigeria, where he also became co-editor of Black Orpheus. He married British writer Barbara Dixon in 1958, with whom he had two children.

In 1960, Soyinka developed Nineteen-Sixty Masks, an amateur acting troupe, and wrote the first full-length play My Father’s Burden to be produced on Nigerian television. Three years later, his first movie Culture in Transition premiered, and he married his second wife, a Nigerian librarian, with whom he had four children.

His writing and teaching at Obafemi Awolowo University had him speaking out and satirizing issues he saw in his homeland, including government corruption. In 1965, he faced his first arrest for an act of protest against election fraud but was soon released because of outcries from global writers. He was arrested again several years later after attending a secret meeting with a military governor following a coup that eventually led to the outbreak of the Nigerian civil war.

While in prison, Soyinka wrote poems in criticism of the Nigerian government using scraps of toilet paper since he was not allowed paper and writing utensils. He said of this time, “Writing became a therapy. I was reconstructing my own existence. It was also an act of defiance.” Soyinka was freed in 1969 when the civil war ended. He continued to write prolifically, including poetry, essays, novels, original plays, memoirs, and adaptations of other plays, including Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, through which he continued to voice his political dissents.

In 1986, he became the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he devoted his speech to Nelson Mandela and the horrors of apartheid in South Africa. Later in 1989, he married his third wife, with whom he had three children. The mid-1990s found him unable to remain in Nigeria, and he was subsequently charged for treason in 1997. In spite of his arrests and political activism, his plays continued to be produced in Nigeria, including King Baabu in 2001.

As recently as 2021, he published a well-reviewed novel criticizing power in Nigeria called Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, and in 2022, he saw his famously anthologized 1975 play Death and the King’s Horseman made into a film with financial support from Netflix.

Poem Text

Soyinka, Wole. “Telephone Conversation.” 2000. Kansas State University.

Summary

In this one-stanza, first-person poem, the speaker “I” recounts a potential apartment he calls a landlady to inquire about. During the phone call, the speaker feels the need to confess that he is African once he establishes the price and location are as he wants them. He imagines the landlady’s “good breeding” (Line 7) at the other end of the phone. However, when she eventually breaks the silence, her words are much less inviting. She asks, “How dark?” (Line 10). The speaker lingers with the question, noting his surroundings at the British pay phone and the “ill-mannered silence” (Line 15). The landlady asks again whether he is dark or light, varying her tone. He asks if she means “like plain or milk chocolate” (Line 19). Her impersonal voice gives consent. He tries another tactic with “West African sepia” (Line 22), which confuses the landlady, who seems to use the silence to conjure up the plethora of possible colors. She then questions what sepia is in a harsher tone. The speaker responds that it’s like “brunette” (Line 26), and she assumes that is rather dark. He clarifies that externally he is brunette, but the undersides of his hands and feet are “blond” (Line 30). He further jokes that his bottom has turned black because of having to sit down. He then senses that she is about to slam down the receiver. As a result, he quickly asks if she would be willing to see his color in person.