Wole Soyinka pictured his his home in Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria | Akintunde Akinleye / Reuters
Wole Soyinka, Africa’s first Nobel
Laureate, has said that he has made good his promise to trash his US
residency document, known as Green Card, if Donald Trump won the Nov 8
elections.
In an interview with The Atlantic on Tuesday, January 17, 2017, Soyinka told the news magazine that he had rendered his Green Card ‘inoperable”.
“I don’t have strong enough fingers to
tear up a green card. As long as Trump is in charge, if I absolutely
have to visit the United States, I prefer to go in the queue for a
regular visa with others. I’m no longer part of the society, not even as
a resident,” the professor said.
“Trump’s wall is already under construction. Walls are built in the mind,” he told the US media platform.
Donald Trump ran for office a
nationalist, anti-Islamist terrorism, and anti-immigration platform. He
defeated former US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton in a keenly
contested poll, winning the Electoral College vote but losing the
popular vote by almost 3 million votes.
On November 2, 2016, he promised to
throw-away his Green Card if the billionaire real estate developer won
the poll. At the time he made this comment, most of the polls predicted
an easy win for Mrs. Clinton.
An excerpt from The Atlantic:
But Soyinka is not necessarily
urging others to follow his example and join the resistance to Trumpism.
He appears to be withdrawing from the political dysfunction he
denounces instead of trying to resolve it. He has characterized
his decision as a “personal” and “private” one, to which “[n]o one else
is invited.” (Soyinka vowed to tear up his Green Card in a question-and-answer session
with students at Oxford University, not in some showy press conference,
and he hasn’t much welcomed the media attention surrounding his move.)
0 comments:
Post a Comment