Wole Soyinka’s Post Mortem as an Expressive against the Horror of Death

By Saheed Sunday

POST MORTEM by Wole Soyinka
 
there are more functions to a freezing plant
than stocking bee; cold biers of mortuaries
submit their dues, harnessed-glory be!-
 
in the cold hand of death…
his mouth was cotton filled, his man-pike
shrunk to sub-soil grub
 
his head was hollowed and his brain
on scales – was this a trick to prove
fore-knowledge after death?
 
his flesh confesses what has stilled
his tongue; masked fingers think from him
to learn, how not to die.
.
let us love all things of grey; grey slabs
grey scalpel, one grey sleep and form,
grey images.

In the poem, Post Mortem, Soyinka ruptures through the societal silence about the inevitability of death, and its generic markers, by proposing a tranquil setting wherein —instead of being feared— death should be both foreseen and accepted. 

Probably because Soyinka also shares the conviction that rhymes serve as constraints to imagination, or because in this particular poem, the rhythm [in his stringing of words] is enough to denote a serene setting, he threads the poem into a free verse. Or, probably, because he means to revolve around how a free verse can be the best way to talk about the free(dom) that should come with dying.

Soyinka’s African traits is, although almost inconspicuous, ricocheted through the partitioning of each stanza of the poem. It is important to note that words can paint their own imagery. White could, for instance, paint a picture of ‘peace’. In the Yoruba milieu, the number ‘three’ has its own semanticity, an imagery it paints. Traditionally, some Yoruba occultists believe that when a person is called the first time, the second, and the third without a response, he/she is as good as dead. Thus, the Yoruba saying, ‘eketa re re oo. Bi o o ba je mi, odi ewure jelejele…’ (this is your third call, no response means that you now dine with the spirits). Little wonder Soyinka uses three-line stanzas to foreground the motif of death in the poem.

The poem’s setting is in a mortuary, as [will be] described. Soyinka uses a ‘freezing plant’ to characterize the locale (of the temperature in a mortuary), and how it doesn’t serve just the exclusive function of keeping dead bodies alone, but also ransacking their peace. The line /cold views of mortuaries submit their dues, harnessed glory-be/ reflects the payments the dead make. The due, as typified, is the loss of their bodies to hands that turn them into experiments; hands that harness them. 

In the third stanza, the other function that a mortuary serves that the poet talks about in the very first stanza is presented to be an autopsy. So, one can allude to the validity that those who the dues are being submitted to are pathologists. The /hollowed/ head and scaled /brain/ present, although lightly, the later action that comes with an the earlier passiveness of these specialists trying to examine what instigated the death after dying, after the body has heaved its final breath. The poet, Soyinka, further presents the evidence of the dead body in the line /his flesh confesses what has stilled his tongue/.

The /masked hands/ as used in the fourth stanza is a metaphor for the hands of the pathologist(s). It is through this stanza that the poet breaks into the deception of their autopsy, as not being concerned about how the dead body has become stilled after death has laid its icy hands on it, but rather, to learn from the dead body /how not to die/.

In the last stanza, the poet brings about the resolution of the inevitability of death by proposing a reception rather than a will-surely-fail precaution. He revolved around how the love for grey should be heightened: grey slabs, grey scalpel, one grey sleep and form, grey images.