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The gnostic, worldly and radical humanism of Wole Soyinka
wa Thiong’o and Bessie Head, some of these writers themselves having
for years been known to be hot favorites for the Nobel literature prize.
But behind the statement is also the more crucial notion of a repre-
sentative self whose
raison d’etre
is the authority to speak on behalf of a
whole collective tradition threatened not only by acts of repression and
silencing of non-Western texts and traditions, but also by the acute cul-
tural contradictions of the postcolonial alienation brilliantly analyzed by,
among others, Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral.
The great tension
between the uniqueness implied in the notion of an autonomous artistic
selfhood and the notion of representativeness appertaining to a whole
tradition has indeed been extensively explored in Soyinka’s writings and
is at the heart of his project of self-fashioning. At the heart of this tension
in Soyinka’s writings is the implied recognition that for the postcolonial
writer, the claims of unique, autonomous artistic individuation and those
of representativeness and solicitude for a threatened culture or tradition
are both vigorously contested. For as Ashis Nandy has cogently and pow-
erfully argued in his monograph,
The Intimate Enemy: the Loss and Recovery
of the Self Under Colonialism
, in the matter of precolonial, indigenous tradi-
tions, there are not one but diverse, conflicting paradigms and matrices
for a representative, resisting selfhood available to the writers and intel-
lectuals who, like Soyinka and indeed most writers of the first generation
of postcolonial Anglophone literatures, take up the cultural-nationalist
project of fashioning individual selves and collective identities against the
negations of colonial subject formation.
Similarly, in the matter of the
chosen, non-indigenous “world language” of expression and its received
modes of literariness – in Soyinka’s case English – there are equally di-
verse, multiple and even conflicting paradigms to choose from. This in
effect means that in any critical account of the identity of a postcolonial
author and the tradition she claims to speak out of or represent, there is
a crucial need to be attentive to what is selected and what is omitted in
choosing from the range of available paradigms and matrices, both in
indigenous traditions and in foreign, metropolitan sources.
These complicated issues lose their abstract and somewhat factitious
character once we move into the concrete, embodied expressions that
self-fashioning assume in Soyinka’s writings. In both his imaginative
works and his essays, the reified, anomic, “fallen” world of the African
postcolony in particular and modern life in general obtrudes massively
and manifoldly on sensitive individuals, on protagonist figures part of
whose moral burden is to register – and in some cases resist – the “fallen”
state of the world. Indeed, if it is true that in these works we are not exactly
Wole Soyinka
in the world of Kafka’s totally hapless, lost souls, or the world of the
robotized workers of Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” it is nonetheless true
that the search for a coherent, stable selfhood, a selfhood harmoniously
integrated into the human and natural environment, is more applicable
to “lesser” works like
The Strong Breed
and
The Swamp Dwellers
than to
the great dramatic parables like
The Road
and
Madmen and Specialists
.
More tellingly, in the autobiographical memoir,
Ibadan
, it is in spite of the
collapse, not the redoubtable support, of all the institutions and sources
of “home” and “homecoming” that the protagonist struggles heroically
with a small band of collaborators against the festering and destructive
“penkelemes” of the Nigerian postcolony.
It is part of Soyinka’s significance as a postcolonial writer that in his
works he has explored these problems of self-writing or self-constitution
with a tacit but pervasive understanding that the issues are not beyond
commensurable and productive syntheses, that the postcolonial writer
can plot her way through the maze of the conflicting claims of the local
and the foreign, the autochthonous and the modern, the familiar and
the totally unprecedented and unanticipated precisely by the choices
and selections of paradigms and matrices from the African and Western
traditions, as well as other literary traditions of the world.
In the following concluding half of the present chapter, and on the
basis of the critical and theoretical issues outlined above, I subject the
textual production of Soyinka’s personality to the sort of careful scrutiny
it has hardly received in critical commentary on his works, his life and
career. In other words, I place the authorial “self” of Soyinka’s works and
the “self-presentation” immanent in his radical activism under scrutiny,
seeking to elucidate its constitution as a process that dialogically moves
back and forth between its inscriptions in literary texts and its embod-
ied incarnations in the extraordinary writer-intellectual that the world
knows as Wole Soyinka and that his band of acolytes and admirers in
Nigeria knows as “Kongi.”
Concretely, I explore two distinct but com-
plementary paradigms by which Soyinka in his fictional and nonfictional
works has sought to negotiate the great tension between the two sides of
the problem. The first of these is the paradigm, or arc, of a complexly
and subliminally “representative” self whose authority and originality
receive their greatest validation from access to the repressed recesses of
collective memory, as codified in myths, rituals and other cultural matri-
ces. This paradigm, I would argue, provides the textual and ideological
base for Soyinka’s great solicitude for the vitality of a collective African
cultural and literary modernity. The second paradigm, or arc, is that of
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