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Myth, Liter-
ature and the African World
. If the neo-N´egritudism of this phase is no less
assertively and combatively articulated as the anti-N´egritudism of the
first phase, it remains true that Soyinka is
defensively
combative in this
second phase in a manner that he was not, and could not have been,
in the first phase. This is because it is an embattled theorist, critic and
Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings
polemicist that we encounter in this phase. And in this connection, not
the least of his objects of attack here are precisely the Western modernist
and avant-garde cultural and literary currents that Soyinka had more or
less embraced in the first phase. Moreover, race being a central subject
of the discourse in this phase, the historic experiences of slavery, colo-
nialism and epistemic racism enter into Soyinka’s critical discourse in
this phase and not in the first phase.
If the third phase – corresponding to the essays and writings of the late
s and
s – return us to the cosmopolitanism of the first phase,
it is a neo-cosmopolitanism quite unlike the unexamined and rather
abstractly pessimistic universalism of the first phase. Taking our cue from
the title of one of the most significant essays in this third phase, “Climates
of Art,” the “climates” of culture and the arts in diverse regions of the
contemporary world are the main objects of analysis and speculation
in the discourses of this phase. Even the thematics of “race” and of the
elaboration of a “Black world” which includes both the continent and
the Diasporas, both of which are dominant topics in the writings of the
second phase, are redefined in this third phase in more intellectually
rigorous and more ideologically nuanced ways.
Before moving to an elaboration of the anti-N´egritudist cosmopoli-
tanism of the first phase of Soyinka’s critical prose, a word of clarification
is perhaps necessary on the usefulness of dividing his theoretical writings
into phases, especially into a quasi-Hegelian triadic movement of “be-
coming.” Famously, Fanon divided the writings of all colonized societies
seeking to end their colonization and move into another, more liberated
epoch of history into this same triadic movement, this in his greatest
theoretical work,
The Wretched of the Earth
.
The three phases in Fanon’s
schema – which have been widely and most uncritically applied to the
writings of virtually all formerly colonized groups and societies – are: a
first phase of a derivative, imitative literature based on barely assimilated
models and influences from the colonizers; a second phase of more or less
extreme nativist reaction to, and in many cases rejection of, all models
and influences from the colonizers; and a final phase of what Fanon calls a
“fighting” literature, a people’s literature, a revolutionary literature. It is
instructive that while in terms of the movement of modern, postcolonial
African literatures the works of Soyinka and his generation collectively
straddle Fanon’s second and third phases, Soyinka’s own critical thought,
as the outline given above indicates, defies any direct and uncomplicated
assimilation into the schema of Fanon’s three phases. Indeed, it would
seem that the motive force of the very first phase of the Nigerian author’s
Wole Soyinka
own critical thought, as we will presently demonstrate, is an obsessive
concern that, with few notable exceptions, the writings of his generation,
the so-called “literature of rediscovery” – together with the writings of
the generation of Senghor and the whole N´egritude movement – was
bogged down permanently in Fanon’s second phase, the phase of a na-
tivist counterdiscourse to Western paradigms and discourses. This point
provides a useful bridgehead to our exploration of this first phase of
Soyinka’s critical and theoretical writings.
By the time Soyinka launched his career as a critic and theorist, the
N´egritude writers and the critical pundits of the “rediscovery” phase of
contemporary African literature, of whom L.S. Senghor and Alioune
Diop are major figures, had established what they deemed appropriate,
empowering responses to the binarisms of “indigenous” and “foreign,”
African and Western, “traditional” and “modern” and other questions
of the challenge of capitalist modernity to Africa.
In the main, and with
few but significant exceptions, these responses rested on the thesis of a
fundamental clash of world-views, an incommensurable antithesis be-
tween African and European cultural traditions, an antithesis thought
resolvable only through abstract syntheses of the best attributes and val-
ues of both traditions.
The critique single-mindedly sustained through
virtually all of Soyinka’s early critical essays challenged these claims
and questioned the validity of their aesthetic ramifications. The essays in
question are “Towards a True Theatre,” “From a Common Back cloth,”
“And After the Narcissist?,” “The Writer in Modern African State” and
“The Fourth Stage.” Each of these five essays addressed a specific, dif-
ferent subject, or group of issues or writers, but they all converged upon
a sustained and penetrating questioning of the ideas, premises and atti-
tudes which sought to celebrate and legitimate the so-called postcolonial
“literature of rediscovery.” It should, of course, be emphasized that these
essays are in the main in basic agreement with the implied “renaissance”
or “cultural reawakening” inherent in the notion of a “rediscovery” af-
ter the long night of colonial cultural subjugation; what these essays
vigorously contested were the superficialities and the paradoxes of self-
negation in apparent self-assertion in the postures, attitudes and ideas of
the standard bearers and pundits of “rediscovery.”
“Towards a True Theatre” is the most programmatic of these early
essays, as the title implies. The “falsehood” negatively suggested in this
title is wittily spelt out in Soyinka’s dryly sarcastic delineation of the atmo-
sphere of “preciosity” and “sterility” which the author sees as gradually
pervading the new “National Theatre” and “Arts Theatre” movements of
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