|
ADO
,
)
“New Frontiers For Old” and “The Credo of Being and Nothingness”
perhaps provide the most appropriate of Soyinka’s essayistic reflections
on problems of contemporary culture and society with which to conclude
the exploration of his critical and theoretical writings. Among the essays
Wole Soyinka
of the
s and
s, the former is the most important essay on art and
the process of artistic creation while the latter is Soyinka’s most important
reflection on religion and human spirituality in the closing decades of
the twentieth century. The discussion or argumentation in each of these
essays is constructed around a central paradox, respectively of art and re-
ligious spirituality. A comparison of these respective paradoxes provides
an insight into the ambiguities and paradoxes of Soyinka’s own artistic
personality and his activist vision. Additionally, each of these paradoxes –
of artistic creation and religious creeds – builds on the same use of ex-
tended conceits that we have identified as a central feature of Soyinka’s
essayistic
oeuvre
; this time, the particular conceits are elaborated around
the terms “frontier” and “credo” in the title of each respective essay.
If allowance is made for a somewhat excessive verbal and metaphoric
play on the word “frontier” and its synonyms and analogues in “New
Frontiers for Old,” it becomes possible to appreciate the fact that the
central paradox of artistic creation argued in the essay manages to give
old or familiar ideas about art new and startlingly original reformula-
tions. The artist or writer, Soyinka urges, necessarily lives the paradox
of, on the one hand, the certainty of frontiers (which operate as effec-
tive barriers) and, on the other hand, the insistence that the frontier, the
barrier, must be crossed and exceeded. This is highly suggestive of old
debates between classical art and the anti-classical, avant-garde revolts it
always provokes or generates. In Soyinka’s reformulation of this age-old
dialectic, the artist who is happy, even exultant, to work within the aus-
tere restraints or “barriers” of classical genres and styles does so because
she knows that the power of the classics – whose conditions of produc-
tion have vanished or become attenuated – can only be “answered” by
the creation of new, vital forms. This line of reasoning provides Soyinka
in this essay with his most powerful and convincing arguments for the
appropriation of the “classics” of African art in sculpture, music, perfor-
mance arts, oral poetic and narrative idioms, and the vast repository of
ritual and mythic lore as models which spur the contemporary arts to
create new forms approaching or even exceeding the achievements of
the masterpieces of the classical traditions. This indeed is the underlying
signification of the essay’s title – “New Frontiers For Old” – and in a
vigorous presentation of the distinction between the worthy, productive
“frontiers” of the classics and the unworthy and crippling “frontiers” of
pseudo-tradition, Soyinka in this essay provides some very authoritative
and knowledgeable commentary on the state of diverse media and forms
of artistic expression in contemporary Africa, most notably on painting.
Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings
But the most telling and eloquent aspects of the essay derive not
from this reaffirmation of tradition and classicism in the arts; rather,
they derive from the energetic negative critique that Soyinka launches
against the false, sterile frontiers mounted by the determined or un-
witting adversaries of art like the “border guards” and “immigration
officers” of (African) “authenticity,” the purist defenders of supremacist
canons who mount prohibitions and anathemas against the assimilation
of content, style, genre or medium from alien traditions, the censorship
boards which repress artistic creativity through unchallengeable diktats,
and their fundamentalist counterparts who operate by divine fiats. Thus
“New Frontiers For Old” is perhaps Soyinka’s most important and pow-
erful defense of artistic freedom, and its scope in this particular regard is
truly extraordinary in its social and historical allusions. Ranging across
diverse false and constricting “frontiers” imposed on art and artists by
institutions like art galleries and museums, criticism, religious orthodoxy
and the state, Soyinka makes a passionate plea in this essay for all artists,
and especially
African
artists, to be granted the freedom to engage the
challenge of the “true” frontiers which are the very condition of artistic
creativity. Within the neo-modernist and neo-Romantic aesthetic frame-
work of this and other essays of Soyinka of the
s and
s, reality
itself is the most important and productive of these “true,” constitutive
frontiers and barriers of art:
Who, in short, is truly content with the frontiers of the empirical, against whose
constrictions the writer constructs not merely eponymous histories, but elabo-
rate assault towers? Like the scientist, is the writer not really upset, irritated,
intrigued, and challenged by the arrogant repletion of objective reality and
experience?
. . .
Indeed, paradise can be regained; again and again, the artist
does regain paradise, but only as a magical act of transformation of present
reality, not through the pasting of a coy, anachronistic fig-leaf over the pudenda
of the past in the present (
ADO
,
,
)
In “The Credo of Being and Nothingness” the paradox deployed to
structure the essay’s long, circuitous reflections on the social and politi-
cal ramifications of religious extremism in Nigeria in particular and the
contemporary world in general pertains to human spirituality itself. All
religions, in Soyinka’s view, affirm man as essentially soul or spirit, yet
tend to group that “soulfulness” or spirituality hierarchically in terms of
its difference, its lack, or its inferiority in religions other than one’s own
faith. Within the ambit of this view of religion, or, more specifically, the
organized monotheistic religions of the world based on a sacred, written
Wole Soyinka
text of revealed truth, one grasps the centre of one’s spirituality by re-
ducing the spirituality of religious Others to – nothing. On this topic,
“The Credo of Being and Nothingness” is at once a keen, well-informed
observer’s report on the state of religious extremism and fanaticism in
Nigeria and a wide-ranging reflection on the tendency toward regres-
sive, militant fundamentalism in communities dominated by competing
monopolistic monotheisms in the modern world. In this respect, the
essay implicitly but forcefully critiques the unacknowledged theologi-
cal or doctrinal predisposition toward exclusivism in all the dominant
monotheistic religions of the world, a predisposition which, in Soyinka’s
opinion, haunts these religions’ efforts at ecumenism and mutual
tolerance.
From the foregoing, it can be readily perceived that “The Credo of
Being and Nothingness” deserves attention as a vigorous restatement of
many of the radical-humanist, intercultural and internationalist themes
of Soyinka’s essays of the
s. But the essay is also noteworthy in its
articulation of ideas and tropes fundamental to the crystallization of
Soyinka’s sensibility as an artist, and of his unique personality as an
activist intellectual. Thus, though delivered as an address to a mostly
Christian group of scholars and students who, moreover, expected a
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