Outsiders
, a volume of poetry.
In February, Olusegun Obasanjo wins federal presi-
dential elections and becomes civilian head of state in
xxxii
Chronology
October. Publication of
The Burden of Memory, the Muse of
Forgiveness
.
June
, meets Mumia Abu-Jamal, the prominent African
American death row activist and thinker.
September
, addresses Roundtable on Dialogue Among
Civilizations at the United Nations in New York.
August
–September
, attends conference against
racism in Durban, South Africa sponsored by the United
Nations Commission for Human Rights.
July-August, unpublished play
King Babu
premiered in
Lagos and tours a few Nigerian cities.
October
–
, International Conference on Soyinka’s
theatre at the University of Toronto, Canada.
In mid-March Soyinka and five other writers represent-
ing the International Parliament of Writers make good-
will visit to Palestine and Israel in furtherance of peace
in the Middle East.
October
, reads old and new poems in the distinguished
Readings in Contemporary Poetry of the DIA Center in
Manhattan, New York.
Abbreviations
ADO
Art, Dialogue and Outrage
, Ibadan: New Horn Press,
ADO
Art, Dialogue and Outrage
, New York: Pantheon,
CP
Collected Plays, vol.
CP
Collected Plays
,
vol.
DKH
Death and the King’s Horseman
IOP
Idanre and Other Poems
ME
Mandela’s Earth
MLAW
Myth, Literature and the African World
OA
Ogun Abibiman
SOA
Season of Anomy
TBE
The Bacchae of Euripides
TI
The Interpreters
TMD
The Man Died
xxxiii
‘Representative’ and unrepresentable modalities of the self:
the gnostic, worldly and radical humanism
of Wole Soyinka
In one sense then (there is) a traveling away from its old self towards
a cosmopolitan, modern identity while in another sense (there is)
a journeying back to regain a threatened past and selfhood. To
comprehend the dimensions of this gigantic paradox and coax from
it such unparalleled inventiveness requires . . . the archaic energy,
the perspective and temperament of creation myths and symbolism.
Chinua Achebe, “What Has Literature Got to Do With It.”
The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How
different are the words
home
,
Christ
,
ale
,
master
, on his lips and on
mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of the
spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for
me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My
voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of language.
James Joyce,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
.
Ori kan nuun ni/Iyato kan nuun ni
(That is one person/That is one difference)
From a Yoruba
Ifa
divination chant
All the book length studies, the monographs, and the innumerable essays
on Wole Soyinka’s writings and career take as their starting point his
stupendous literary productivity: some thirty-five titles since he began
writing in the late
s, and a career in the theatre, popular culture
and political activism matching his literary corpus in scope, originality
and propensity for generating controversy. Soyinka had been writing for
about five years when his first serious and mature works were published
in
and, in the words of Bernth Lindfors, “he became – instantly
and forever – one of the most important writers in the English speaking
world.”
It is significant that this observation comes from Lindfors, who,
almost alone among students of Soyinka’s writings, has been obsessed
with his literary juvenilia, hoping therein to find materials to prove that
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