Travellers
In both the life and work Wole Soyinka, travel is a constant. He travels tirelessly, for his writing of course but also answering calls to lend his voice or speak on numerous issues, from the environment to the state of politics and government across his native continent.
But in Soyinka’s life, travel has two faces. Travel can be pleasurable, enlightening, often undertaken out of altruism. It has, however, also meant exile, which he endured when forced to leave his native Nigeria on account of his political beliefs, and even danger, as when he travelled, against the wishes of the national military government, to Biafra, during the Nigerian civil war. Soyinka wanted to persuade the Biafrans to rethink their options and work for peace. For this journey, he was incarcerated for the entire period of the war – mid-1967 to early 1970 – most of the time in solitary confinement.
Much of his early poetry is pervaded by this theme of risky travel and, indeed, Soyinka’s most recent publication, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, takes its title from one of his early poems about journeys taken early in the morning when few travellers are on the roads and highways.
In kilometres, the travels of Tara June Winch cannot compare with those of Soyinka. But the young life of this writer of Aboriginal, Afghan and English descent already holds the promise that she will become as seasoned a traveller as him. She began early, and, like Soyinka, with a measure of courage, some might even say recklessness. Leaving school at 16, she took to the road, hiking across the vastness of Australia, penniless, alone but unafraid, writing poems and long letters home along the way. “I felt this need to know my country,” Winch says. “And because being away forces you to reflect, I started writing as a way of understanding my childhood and my world. Travellers I met gave me books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which helped me to look at things differently. I put everything down on paper.”
Her notes inspired her first novel, a semi-autobiographical story, in which a young Aboriginal girl of mixed racial parentage travels across the continent in search of her roots. The novel, Swallow the Air, is remarkable less for the places the protagonist passes through than for the people she meets as the narrator gives unexpected, memorable twists to clichés and stereotypes of poverty, alcohol, spousal abuse and despair among indigenous Australians. In everything she writes, Winch displays an eye for detail matching that of her Aboriginal ancestors.