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 especiallyAfricanartists, 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 thes ands, 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