Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings list is overwhelmingly tilted toward the West African region. Nonetheless,
the readings are almost always compelling and recall and repeat the
powerful exegeses of Soyinka’s literary criticism in the early essays. The
readings of Chinua Achebe’sArrow of God, Ousmane Sembene’sGod’s
Bits of Wood, and Ayi Kwei Armah’sTwo Thousand Seasons, are particu-
larly engrossing, even if sometimes they raise more questions than they
answer. The caseismade by Soyinka in these two essays that African
writing in languages of external, colonial derivation, at its most accom-
plished, inscribes anAfricanliterary modernity, a distinctly African view
on modern experience and its challenges and perplexities.
By contrast, the first two essays ofMyth, Literature and the African World,
“Morality and Aesthetics in the Ritual Archetype” and “Drama and
the African World-view,” deal, not with works of contemporary writ-
ers, but with mostly traditional Yoruba mythic and ritual archetypes;
the only contemporary artists discussed are the late Duro Ladipo and
J.P. Clark. The strain of stretching Yoruba religious and metaphysical tra-
ditions, with all their richness and complexity, to fill the scope of a canvas
which covers the entire continent exacts much from these essays by way of
over-generalization and idealization. Moreover, much that Soyinka man-
ages to establish in these two essays as distinctively African or “racial”
paradigms and matrices come into visibility only by way of a constant
inverse cross-referencing with European traditions. This leads almost
inevitably to a reproduction of the polarity beloved of classical social
anthropology of “traditional,” “organic,” communalistic and agrarian
societies which live close to nature, versus postindustrial, highly mecha-
nized and secular societies. Indeed almost everything that Soyinka prof-
fers in these two essays as “essentially” African – non-positivist, cyclical
concepts of temporality, pantheistic spirituality, the cult of nature deities,
veneration of ancestors, the unbroken integration of all areas of collective
life including the religious, the aesthetic and the technico-economic –
can be adjudged broadly typical of most pre-capitalist, non-monotheistic
and analphabetic societies of the past and present. It is also the case that
a central epistemological theme of these essays – that there is an “as-
similative” wisdom or logic in African precolonial orders and matrices
of knowledge which selectively absorbs “foreign” inputs and accretions
while remaining true to its own self-identity – is generally simply asserted
and hardly subjected to either vigorous proof or demonstration, or for
that matter, counter-propositions. Meanwhile, it ought to be admitted
that the big qualification to the point being urged about these two open-
ing essays ofMyth, Literature and the African Worldis that Soyinkaisa poet