Read Online Climate of Fear by Wole Soyinka - Free Book Online Page B

threaten to overwhelm him, not least of which is mortality.
    In short, power is, paradoxically, the primordial marshland of fear, from which emerges the precipitate of man’s neurotic response to mortality. Therein he proceeds to attempt to match himself with the force of Nature, that agency through which the various apprehensions of God, Super Being, or whatever name— including Death—are filtered. You cannot, however, contain within yourself the elemental force of death, godhead, a thunderstorm, an earthquake, or a volcano, never mind the comparison of some energetic types to a whirlwind. Those who take such metaphors personally are subject matter for traditional psychiatry, and it is for this reason that ancient societies devised a number of ritualized scenarios for the banalization of power. As a dramatist, I have myself experimented with a number of rituals toward that end. Here is one—designed, however, only for the formal, not the shadowy counterpart of manifest power. It takes off from the French play-wright and exorcist Jean Genet.
    A glitzy brothel, most appropriately, is the setting for Jean Genet’s ritualization of the insatiable collaborator—power—in his play
The Balcony.
There, the power-obsessed come periodically to act out their fantasies. Here now is a summary of my variation on Jean Genet:
    Suppose we modernized Genet’s rather primitive stage mechanics to embrace the very latest in special effects, à la Steven Spielberg. Society would proceed to offer its ruler a chance to erupt with the earthquake, soar on flues of the thunderstorm, and become virtually one with the convulsion that attends the birth of new planets. Encased in a Virtual Reality capsule, a super Jacuzzi, the Maximum Leader would dominate the universe every day before breakfast. As a finale—and here I must acknowledge the inspiration of the innovation of that late leader Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, who soared with the sunrise and disappeared into the clouds every morning on his nation’s television—the Leader would watch the daily waste of his bodily functions morph into a celestial orb—the sun, no less—rising over the horizon, approving the beginning of a new day for his people.
    After such an immersion in the utter sublimity of galactic power, any mortal must emerge with nothing but contempt for the mere pittance of awe and terror that are the normal dues from his miserable subjects. He would leave them—us—to wallow in our now unappealing state of . . . unbroken freedom, and the absence of fear.
    I am persuaded that this is a ritualistic offering that no man-eating dictator, with the innate theatrics of that breed, could ever refuse.

Three
    Rhetoric That Binds and Blinds
    I propose to address this topic from two directions— one, the political; the other, the religious. Given the fact that, in the present day—and indeed, in a nearly unbroken continuum of history—both often prove to be merely two sides of the same coin, it should not be surprising if, from time to time, it would indeed appear that all we are engaged upon is tossing up, just like a coin, one two-sided notion. We watch it spin through the air in a blur of rapid alternations, and succumb to the law of gravity—known as coming down to earth—to reveal one side or the other, almost interchangeably. The sanctimoniousness that often characterizes one— the political—on the one hand, and the sacrosanctity that is claimed as the foundation of the other, even when it extends its constituency to the political and the mundane, make it clear that they are both claimants to the same highway of influence and control of human lives whose ultimate destination is power—the consolidation of power in itself, or the execution of policies that aspire to the total control of a polity.
    Thus, the president of a powerful nation addresses a political situation in what amounts to the language