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The Wasteland
or
The Cantos
. Definitely, the first two of the
seven sections of the poem respectively titled “deluge” and “and after,”
are resolutely unmindful of narrative continuity, or of even clear mark-
ers or distinctions between the personae and avatars who show up in
these sections. With the rather fragmentary gloss that Soyinka himself
provides to these and other sections of the poem, with the accumulated
exegeses on the poem, and with some effort, the assiduous reader comes
to a sense of what events and which myths are being celebrated in these
two opening sections of the poem. Thus, “deluge” tells of the begin-
ning of time, of the emergence of culture – especially
agri
-culture –
and the neolithic revolution to the inception of the Iron Age, with
Ogun and Sango being the central protagonists. The second section,
“and after,” cinematically “fast forwards” to succeeding epochs and at
the same time “rewinds” again to earlier epochs. Particularly worthy
of note in this section is the poet’s considerable fixation on the para-
doxically tragic cost of the march of civilization, especially as reflected
in the carnage wrought on the roads (and highways) built to advance
progress:
And we
Have honeycombed beneath his hills, worked ores and paid
With wrecks of last year’s suppers, paved his roads
With shells, milestones of breathless bones –
Ogun is a demanding god (
IOP
,
)
Also worthy of note in these two non-mimetic, non-diegetic sections of
“Idanre” is the fact that they seem patterned on the traditional form of
the “ijuba,” the panegyric prologue of Yoruba chants, songs and theatre.
The “ijuba” typically combines a poet’s, singer’s or performer’s self-
presentation with terse, sometimes cryptic foreshadowing of the main
themes of the song, chant or performance to be presented.
It is a matter
of surprise that these two opening sections are followed by two sections,
“pilgrimage” and “the beginning” which are more or less shaped by
conventions of narrative continuity. Consequently, of all the sections of
the poem, these two contain rounded stories which can be easily appre-
hended, even by the average reader. Perhaps this is because these are
the sections that deal with the specific myths and legends of Ogun in his
Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment
more heroically creative, life-enhancing and selfless incarnations. The
third section, “pilgrimage,” the shortest section of the poem, is also per-
haps the most conventionally diegetic in the way in which, having briefly
narrated how the original godhead which contained all the deities in the
pantheon was smashed into fragments and how Ogun recombined in
himself the most diverse aspects of the shattered totality, the poem moves,
not as might be expected to exultation, but to “grieving” by Ogun and
his prot´eg´e, the poet, for that forever lost unified and totalized essence.
Section four, “the beginning,” logically moves to complete the story be-
gun in the immediately preceding section: with the advantage of being
the avatar who contains the largest and most heterogeneous stock of
attributes of the fragmented supreme godhead, Ogun succeeds where
the other deities fail in the next great task of creation and existence –
unification of the gods with mankind, or recombining of divine essence
with human existence. This Ogun achieves by forging the implements
with which to clear the immense primeval thickets which separated the
abode of the gods from mankind. This is perhaps why this particular
section contains the longest profusion of the “oriki” or praise poems of
Ogun. Except of course that the section ends with a foreshadowing of the
great lapse that is to come when the humans, against his protestations,
make Ogun their warrior-king and the god, in a subsequent moment of
inebriation, perpetrates a mass slaughter of both the enemy and his own
people.
Of the three remaining sections of the poem, section five, “the battle,”
is the longest and the most varied in stanzaic form. This is explained
perhaps by the fact the “battle” announced in the section title, though
narrated almost entirely as an external event, is not so much about a
battle between two armies as it is an account of a sustained slaughter of
his own men by Ogun, who had first wiped out the enemy forces. Since
this external shell of the story lacks a dramatic agon, Soyinka, it seems,
has to vary the stanzaic forms deployed in the section, matching this
with a scale of diction calculated to infuse drama and tragic grandeur to
a narration that essentially lacks a propulsive motion. As we have seen
in the first two sections of the poem, rhetoric, diction and cadence are
already pitched at a self-consciously grandiloquent scale. In this section,
Soyinka pushes this scale even higher and attempts to sustain this effort
for a much longer stretch than in any other section of the poem – in
fact over the course of
stanzas of no less than
lines. The strain
shows everywhere and thus the creaking, enforced assonance formed by
the conjoining and repetition of “incarnate” with “in carnage” in the
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