Soyinka vows to rip green card up if Trump wins

Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka announced in a seminar to students at the University of Oxford that should Donald Trump emerge the President of the United States of America next week, he’ll rip up his green card. He said “If in the unlikely event he does win, the first thing he’ll do is to say [that] all green-card holders must reapply to come back into the US. Well, I’m not waiting for that. The moment they announce his victory, I will cut my green card myself and start packing up.” Professor Soyinka is scholar-in-residence at New York University’s Institute of African American Affairs this autumn.

He also said Brexit was a “ridiculous decision” and part of an international wave of “ultranationalism”. “What is happening in Europe shouldn’t surprise any of us … It has happened before. We were here when Enoch Powell was leading his thugs out to drive blacks from here … it’s a constant fight to try to get a nation to recognise its own noble persuasions, its own persuasions of the loftiness of human possibility. It’s for young people like you to say no to them whenever that happens.”

He also gave his thoughts on;

The current scene of African Literature

“robust, without a question, especially with the younger generation… I think we of the older are getting a little bit tired, and I think our production gets thinner and thinner. But fortunately, it doesn’t worry any of us, as far as I know, because the body of literature that is coming out [is] varied and liberated.”

“African literature suffered from some kind of ideological spasm in which the younger generation was bombarded by a sense of ideological duty, in other words it was bombarded with a very simplistic notion by leftist radical writers, very reformative revolutionary thinkers, that all literature is ideological and therefore writers must ensure that their writing illustrates progressive ideologies.”

He described this as having “inhibited a number of very talented writers, crippled their sense of liberal creativity, forced them to try and narrow themselves into a very tight prism of viewing phenomena, humour, relationships, even politics.”

He also suggested women were at the current forefront of this. “Fortunately this next generation has been freeing itself and the result is really marvellous, very varied – the women in particular”.

On Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature

“Since I’ve written quite a number of songs for my plays, I would like to be nominated for a Grammy”.

via Guardian