Civilian and Soldier ~Wole Soyinka

The basic theme of ‘Civilian and Soldier’ is war. The poem itself captures a crucial moment in war when a civilian is brutally shot by a soldier. It explores the dilemma of a soldier trying to shoot a civilian. The civilian, who is the narrator, imagines the soldier’s brutality–his willingness or unwillingness to carry out the order of his superiors and kill the civilian. 

-lines 1-6

In this first stanza the confrontation between the civilian and the soldier is established. The civilian went on to imagine the instructions the soldier must have gotten, his confusion as to his function as a soldier. This hesitation to shoot can be liberally (and rightly) predicated upon the fact that the soldier may also have civilian relatives. At the point where the soldier ‘brought the gun to bear’ on the civilian, the civilian reiterates the central dilemma of war–the pointlessness of the senseless killings.

-lines 19-27

Here the civilian states a strange thing: he says that if given the same opportunity as the soldier, he would make his life better (‘But I will shoot you clean and fair’), by feeding him and giving him many other good things. War is a strange business: sometimes civilians helps soldiers, feed them, nurse the wounded ones back to health while the war rages; later on, the same soldiers whom the civilians fed may be the very ones to shoot them in the battlefield. Now shouldn’t you ask yourself: what is war really about? For Soyinka, the man dies all who refuse to protest in the face of tyranny.