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The Burden of Memory
are male, this book contains some of the
most comprehensively comparatist reflections on world Black writing to
date. To his credit, Soyinka does not ignore peculiarities and specificities
of hemispheric, national and class differences among these writers of
the Black world; there is even an extended comparison between the
specific literary and cultural effects of French and British colonialism on
the elites of their respective colonies. But ultimately, his concept of this
“Black World” is formulated around a rubric of pure, autochthonous
anteriority which predates all waves of foreign conquest and domination
of Africa. Since, in this book, this notion is considerably amplified and
finessed beyond any of its previous incarnations in Soyinka’s critical
thought – definitely an advance on its expression in
Myth, Literature and
the African World
– it is useful to quote at some length from one of his most
extensive extemporizations on it:
By this I simply mean that, if we succeeded in leapfrogging backwards in time
over the multiple insertions of contending forces of dissension – be they of the
West or the Orient, and with all their own mutually destructive schisms and
fragmentations – if, by this process, we are able to regain a measure of anterior
self-knowledge, it may be possible to regard religio-cultural interventions as pos-
sibly no more than disruptive illusions whose ramifications hold the future in
thrall. In any case, how recent, in any effective way, were some of these in-
trusions? Of course, there is no suggestion here that the accretions of all such
interventions be abandoned on all fronts, not in the least.
. . .
Our proposition is
simply one of recollection, to go back to our commencing code, memory. The
need for the preservation of the material and spiritual properties by which mem-
ory is invested. Acceptance of both its burdens and triumphs or – better still –
its actuality, the simple fact of its anterior existence and validity for its time. To
accept that is to recognize the irrationality of mutual destructiveness on behalf
of any values, any values whatsoever, however seductive – cultural, ideological,
religious, or race-authenticated – that intervened and obscured or eroded those
multiple anteriorities
– of any kind – from which our being once took its definition.
(
TBM
,
–
) (My emphasis)
It is important to note that Soyinka talks of multiple
anteriorities
here and
that this is the very first time that he pluralizes and relativizes the term
Wole Soyinka
in his critical thought. All the same, the notion is, I would suggest, more
of a poetic conceit than an objectively verifiable historical and cultural
referent, even though Soyinka intends it to be simultaneously both! I
suggest that the term operates like other similarly elaborate conceits or
concept- metaphors in Soyinka’s aesthetic philosophy like “the fourth
stage,” “the vortex of archetypes,” “the chthonic realm” and “the dark
whirlpool of energies.” The crucial importance of these concepts for
Soyinka’s aesthetic theory makes it necessary, if daunting, for the student
of his critical and theoretical writings to attempt an ordering of relations
among the disparate, often conflicting categories of his aesthetic philos-
ophy. This is all the more necessary because, with most scholars who
have so far applied their energies to the difficult and comprehensive na-
ture of Soyinka’s aesthetic ideas, it is as if after “The Fourth Stage” and
after the essays collected in
Myth
, Soyinka stopped writing. It is perhaps
indisputable that the kernel of his aesthetic philosophy is indeed to be
found in these essays, but as I hope to have demonstrated in this chap-
ter, Soyinka’s writings of the
s and
s considerably expanded
the scope and the intricacy of both his aesthetic theory and his critical
thought.
Let us conclude by observing that the tragic mythopoesis which stands
at the centre of Soyinka’s aesthetic philosophy is embedded in a poetics of
culture rooted in a metaphysics of nature, a “natural supernaturalism,”
to press the title of M.H. Abrams’ famous monograph on European
Romanticism into service here.
Indeed, Soyinka’s deep affinities with
the Romantics, with both their revolutionary ideals and their relation-
ship to nature, has been explored by several critics.
The fundamental
factor which separates Soyinka from the Romantics is less his efforts to
ground his aesthetic ideas in African expressive and ideational matrices,
as important as these are, than his acute sense of the radical nature of
evil. It takes the form of an insistence in his theoretical writings on the
terrifying, destructive urgings and promptings which are both forces of
nature and the roots of all that is creative in mankind. Soyinka’s notion
of action and will, indeed his over-valorization of the latter, is based on
the model of nature’s awesome powers and forces, both external nature
and the “nature” within us. Indeed, in Soyinka’s ideational system, it is
ultimately unproductive if not futile, to separate “external” from “inter-
nal” nature since the same life-force, the same secret tropism animates
all of nature and gives it its unity of Being. And what is more, the roots
of tragedy, in our author’s elaborate theorizations on the subject, lie
ultimately in the fragmentation – in one individual life, in communal
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