Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings This latter point Soyinka renders in an unforgettable metaphoric de-
ployment of the “abiku” phenomenon in some African traditional beliefs
concerning a warped transmigration of souls. In Soyinka’s reformula-
tion of this motif, it took the “abiku” occurrence of a militarycoup d’ ́etat
in Greece, the birthplace of Western democracy, for many in the West
to see that the barbarians may after all not be outside the gates, but
within the heart of the metropolis itself, just as it took the oneiric, ghoul-
ish visions of a Hieronymous Bosch or a Francis Bacon to reveal the
malformations and perversities lodged at the heart of an overconfident
bourgeois culture and civilization. This, Soyinka suggests, is one face
of the “abiku” phenomenon manifesting itself in so many diverse “cli-
mates” of art and politics in the modern world. Indeed one of the most
subtle rhetorical moves in this essay is enabled by his use of what he
terms the phenomenon of “identification parallels” in the reception of
works of art from diverse “climates.” It is this phenomenon which triggers
Soyinka’s recognition of an unmistakable “abiku” motif in a particular
painting by Colin Garland, an Australian artist, and more pervasively
in the paintings of Francis Bacon. As in Soyinka’s famous poem on the
“abiku” spirit-child, the motif figures as the very essence of ambiguity in
“Climates of Art” and it thus suggests itself to our author as perhaps the
most appropriate metaphor on the place of creativity in the contempo-
rary world: the spirit child who is born, dies and is born again may be an
image either of a cruel, mocking fate, or an inextinguishable spirit of hu-
man resilience, though it is the former incarnation which predominates
in Soyinka’s final cautionary peroration in the essay:
That paradoxical child,Abiku, having been successfully snuffed out in Greece,
resurfaces, gloating, in spheres as far apart as the coast of West Africa and Latin
America, wearing its mask of death and sadism. This malformed consciousness
of contemporary power expands without curb, ignored by those whose sleep is
too deep or whose roosts are too distant, they think, by its petulant snarls...No
one ever thought, before the takeover by the Greek generals, that such retrograde
event could take place in that birthland of European democracy. Today, the
same endangered species insist on believing that it is not taking place in other
countries – not even after the experience of Idi Amin. I regret to disappoint you.
We inhabit the same climate of terror – only the agents are different (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