₦airaland Forum

genabc:
I've read their works, they are great orators and a big blessing to Africa literature. However, Achebe's work is meant for the commoners, an average reader who doesn't av in-dept knowledge of literary appreciation while Prof. Soyinka work is for the elite, you have to go to a great length to decipher it, and that's the beauty of literature. Mind u, Literature comprises of poetry, drama and prose.

How many of his work have you read?

Keffi's Birthday Treat (1954)
The Invention (1957)
The Swamp Dwellers (1958)
A Quality of Violence (1959)[71]
The Lion and the Jewel (1959)
The Trials of Brother Jero
A Dance of the Forests (1960)
My Father's Burden (1960)
The Strong Breed (1964)
Before the Blackout (1964)
Kongi's Harvest (1964)
The Road (1965)
Madmen and Specialists (1970)
The Bacchae of Euripides (1973)
Camwood on the Leaves (1973)
Jero's Metamorphosis (1973)
Death and the King's Horseman (1975)
Opera Wonyosi (1977)
Requiem for a Futurologist (1983)
Sixty-Six (short piece) (1984)[72]
A Play of Giants (1984)
Childe Internationale (1987)[73][74]
From Zia with Love (1992)
The Detainee (radio play)
A Scourge of Hyacinths (radio play)
The Beatification of Area Boy (1996)
Document of Identity (radio play, 1999)
King Baabu (2001)
Etiki Revu Wetin
Alapata Apata (2011)

Novels

The Interpreters (1964)
Season of Anomy (1972)

Short stories

A Tale of Two (1958)
Egbe's Sworn Enemy (1960)
Madame Etienne's Establishment (1960)

Memoirs

The Man Died: Prison Notes (1971)
Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981)
Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years: a memoir 1946-65 (1989)
Isara: A Voyage around Essay (1990)
You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006)

Poetry collections

Telephone Conversation (1963) (appeared in Modern Poetry in Africa)
Idanre and other poems (1967)
A Big Airplane Crashed Into The Earth (original title Poems from Prison) (1969)
A Shuttle in the Crypt (1971)
Ogun Abibiman (1976)
Mandela's Earth and other poems (1988)
Early Poems (1997)
Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known (2002)

Essays

Towards a True Theater (1962)
Culture in Transition (1963)
Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Transition
A Voice That Would Not Be Silenced
Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture (1988)
From Drama and the African World View (1976)
Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976)[75]
The Blackman and the Veil (1990)[76]
The Credo of Being and Nothingness (1991)
The Burden of Memory – The Muse of Forgiveness (1999)
A Climate of Fear (the BBC Reith Lectures 2004, audio and transcripts)
New Imperialism (2009)[77]
Of Africa (2012)[78][79]

Movies

Kongi's Harvest
Culture in Transition
Blues for a Prodigal

God bless you heart! I don't know how I missed your post. Listing his works this way is so refreshing! I read the emboldened some ten years ago. I still remember the poetry collection of 'Telephone Conversation'. That anthology is a masterpiece! Studied it in my second year as an undergrad and I recall how buzzed Ajose lecture Theatre was the day we read and performed it.

I just might copy out the listed works and go in search of the ones I haven't studied/read. Thank you.

anonimi:
I have tried to keep up with your engaging contributions to this thread. I am fascinated by your mastery of the subject.
Kudos.
I just noticed your signature also:

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

Powerful message that seems to be missing for a lot of Nigerians, nay blacks.
Thanks.

Literature has always been my forte. I am flattered, to be honest. Thank you.

Gorillacrew:
For those that understand, this is always going to be a very hoy topic for centuries to come. It is an offshoot of 'John Milton vs Shakespeare' that has been an recurrent topic for debate in the English literati circle for donkey years.

The emboldened is a suicidal comparison. I read tons of John Milton's works way back as I did Shakespeares. Achebe can clearly be likened to Milton. Both focused on a genre while Shakespeare and Soyinka found a genre to be restrictive.

As good as Milton was with poetry, Shakespeare was referred to as a national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. That tells a whole lot. It is only fair to compare writers who focus solely on one genre. Example: Frank AIG-Imokhuede vs J.P. Clarke or Niyi Osundare, etc.

Achebe and Soyinka's argument is like drawing comparisons between a fixed player vs a utility player in football. They are not even close by a mile. Whatever Achebe wrote in his prose world, Soyinka translated into the same genre and extended to the other two. Even his plays I saw alongside that of Ola Rotimi way back left me dazed.

You pick Soyinka's works to study and analyze only to start wondering what he was thinking when he wrote that particular work. Achebe is an amazing writer in his own right and his novel enjoyed more popularity than Soyinka's for several reasons. Sadly, comparing saying Achebe is better as far as literature is concerned is committing a literary Seppuku.

franchasng:
If you want to find the correct answer to this question, go to a foreign dominated website or forum and ask between Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, who is a better author.

Soyinka is good no doubt, but u can't compare him to Achebe.

Soyinka's works are not as entertaining, and usually difficult to grasp by a layman.

But even an illiterate who manages to read can grasp and enjoy Achebe's works.

Do your findings, I have read almost all their works, so I know

You are Jon Snow, no doubt. You know nothing.

To every literature student, our understanding of a good work of art is one you read and don't make meaning out of at first glance. If you pick up a literary work and understand it upon closure, then it is a bad book.

Certain elements differentiate newspapers from works of literature and that is the diction, plot, style, license (poetic, in literature), mood, tone, author's viewpoint etc. I could read a section of the newspaper and comprehend what it says first hand without having to re-read. The same must not happen to any literary work of art. It must not.

We have more generation of readers in Nigeria now, more than ever, who often only try to get themselves entertained without having to pay attention to the elements the writer/author adopted in presenting his ideas.

Wordsworth defines poetry that it is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquility; the emotion is contemplated till the tranquility disappears and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced and does prove itself that it actually exists in the mind.

The above definition of poetry extends to other genres. Achebe was an amazing storyteller but it stops there. I could give you one of Soyinka's works and you won't even spend 10 minutes on it before dropping it. That in itself is the beauty of Literature. If your mind and senses are not alive before reading/studying a good work of art, then be sure it won't make sense to you.

Achebe was a novelist and wrote interesting, thought provoking books. Soyinka covered more genres than Achebe. Depth wise, Achebe wasn't close. Soyinka never really had a strength. Of the 3 genres, he covered all and did that effortlessly.

As a student of Literature, myself and the entire class had issues analyzing 'Think it Rains', a poem by Wole Soyinka. So good and confusing was it that reference materials couldn't help an entire class of undergraduates.

Soyinka's books might not appeal to non-literature students for several reasons; his choice of words, poetic license, unconscious confusion he creates in his works amongst many other things.

Sentiments aside, Achebe was the better novelist of the two when compared. But when we talk about the man who understands the very depth of Literature, then Wole Soyinka takes it.

Both were incredible in their writing days but Achebe was just a man of one field. Soyinka's works are not for every Tom, Dvck and Harry.