New Directions
“I think Tara’s at a stage where she agonizes over what she wants to write,” Soyinka explains. “She agonizes whether it makes sense. She likes to use the expression: ‘It’s messy, it’s all over the place.’ What does she think writing is about? When you write, you’re all over the place to start with! Rare, rare, rare is the writer who doesn’t start that way – I’ve met only one or two. I work, write and prune afterwards. I prune and prune, and that’s the way it is. So part of my task is letting Tara know that creating messily is inevitable because writing is a messy procedure.”
More gentle a mentor than Wole Soyinka would be difficult to find. “It’s not an intensive relationship in the sense that he’s looking at me labouring over my work,” Winch says, describing him as an heroic, almost god-like “presence” – a god, she points out, who communicates to her directly, with a call or email, or indirectly – most days a search on Google News brings fresh words of Soyinka’s, as the media report his many actions and speeches. "I'm walking a path and now Wole's walking with me," she says.
This presence has inspired Tara June Winch, leading her in new directions. She is now exploring an interest in drama, her mentor’s principal idiom of literary and artistic interest. The result is an embryonic play script. “The play is about vision, but also about the topic of vision, how we see, how we become blind,” the protégée says. She is also writing her second novel. “It’s a novel interwoven with an epic narrative. It’s about language and culture, and holding onto what is most important to us. What makes us who we are?” Towards the end of the mentoring year, she ventured into essay writing with a style that is highly personal and political as well. The subject, the controversy over an international oil company’s operations in Nigeria, allowed her to engage not only with a political issue but to demonstrate her empathy with the people of Nigeria following the time she spent there.
But for Winch, her writing of the past 12 months is less important than the experience of getting to know Soyinka and being guided by him. “I have been able to build my confidence, to make the most of this great, unmatched opportunity. It has been a year of self-growth, almost more importantly than production.” Her mind has been opened, and she now sees parallels between Sophocles, the Bible, the fate of modern-day Nigerians and the mythology of Australian Aborigines – insights that will enrich her writing.
This was Wole Soyinka’s objective for his year of tutelage, to help Winch write in a way so that any reader can relate to the universal truths in the story. “I wanted somebody from a minority culture,” he said after choosing her as his protégée. “I am very much fascinated with what happens to literature when it finds itself in a ghetto situation. At the same time, the writer must create universalities, convincing universalities, in the outcome.”
Extracted from an article written by Biodun Jeyifo for Mentor & Protégé, a magazine documenting the 2008/2009 cycle of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.
Biodun Jeyifo is Professor of African and African American Studies and of Literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He has written extensively on Anglophone African literatures and critical theory, and is a weekly columnist for the Sunday Guardian of Nigeria.