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The Burden of Memory and the
Muse of Forgiveness
.
If no other single book of postcolonial African literary-critical dis-
course has generated as much discussion as
Myth, Literature and the African
World
, with the possible exception perhaps of Ngugi being Thiong’o’s
Decolonizing the Mind
, the explanation for this lies as much in the man-
ner in which Soyinka frames the argument as in the subject matter of
the book. For it is almost impossible not to respond to the many memo-
rable rhetorical and metaphoric flourishes of its argumentation. Two of
these are worthy of mention, especially as they pertain to the important
issue of the ideological and aesthetic distance that, beginning with the
writings of this second phase of his critical thought, Soyinka begins to
urge between his ideas and constructs of poetics and literary epistemol-
ogy and Western modernist and avantgarde ideas and practices. First,
there is the extended conceit of modern European literary and cultural
history as a steam-engine locomotive lurching from station to station of
soon-to-be-discarded movements – naturalism, symbolism, surrealism,
cubism, expressionism etc. – each of which is however, in successive revi-
sionisms proclaimed as ultimate verities of Experience or Truth (
MLAW
,
–
) Second, there is the wildly satirical fantasy with which Soyinka
ends the last essay in the book in which the ghost of Ren´e Descartes,
foraging in the African bush of “prelogical mentality” for confirmation
of his ratiocinated existence, is bearded by an African “innocent” who
overwhelms the Cartesian cogito with “native” wit and logic (
–
). The
critical assault on Western humanist and modernist or avantgarde values
Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings
and practices indicated in these two examples assume considerably more
extended expression in two of the most eloquently polemical essays of
this second phase of Soyinka’s critical prose, “Drama and the Idioms
of Liberation: Proletarian Illusions” and “Between Self and System: the
Artist in Search of Liberation.” It is not fortuitous that both essays have
the word “liberation” in their titles since, in different ways and addressed
to different contexts, each of these two essays vigorously challenges the
revolutionary credentials of the contemporary Euro-American avant-
garde in theatre and literature, detailing the faddishness, preciosity and,
above all, the lack of rooted, organic links to either cohering communal
values or authentic social movements which, in our author’s opinion,
had drained the Western avantgarde of its revolutionary energies and
authentically emancipatory traditions.
The significance of Soyinka’s deployment of highly inventive rhetorical
“riffs” and conceits noted above in
Myth, Literature and the African World
for
negotiating the inescapable dilemma of the project begun in the book –
“race retrieval” – is incalculable. This dilemma, simply stated, is the
dilemma of
pure anteriority
, a dilemma which involves the near impossibil-
ity of eliciting the constitutive elements of an “African world” with its own
internal cohering reference points absolutely without recourse to any
external sources. Which culture or tradition in the history of human cul-
tural evolution can meet this rigorously
autochthonous
requirement? How
far back do you go to “recover” the absolutely pristine values and ma-
trices of the African “racial” heritage in culture? Islam provides Soyinka
with his toughest challenge, that is to say, Islamized Africa whose totally
absorbed syncretist “integrity” is a basis for an unquestionably positive
identity for some of the African writers and intellectuals that Soyinka not
only apparently admires but with whom he feels some cultural kinship. Of
these, Amadou Hampate Ba and Cheikh Hamidou Kane are particularly
formidable. On Kane in particular Soyinka expends some of the most
admiring, luminously exegetical prose in the whole book, but without in
any way abjuring or qualifying his insistence that “race retrieval” has to
go back to autochthonous sources before the syncretist fusion of cultures
that is Islamized Africa. This insistence on an absolute point of aboriginal
anteriority inevitably often pushes Soyinka toward a purism of cultural
essences which he everywhere in the book disavows. One particularly
troubled expression of this is Soyinka’s apparent quandary that
The intelligentsia of the black world are in ideological disagreement over the
question whether enforced exocentricity, as a retarding factor in the authentic
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