Wole Soyinka
Let the dandy’s wardrobe
Be as lavish as the shop
Of the dealer in brocades
It cannot match an elder’s rags
(almost to himself): This dance is the last
Our feet shall dance together
The royal python may be good
At hissing, but it seems
The scorpion’s tail is fire
: The king’s umbrella gives no more shade
But we summon no dirge-master
The tunnel passes through
The hill’s belly
But we cry no defilement
A new-dug path may lead
To the secret heart of being
Ogun is still a god
Even without his navel (CP,–)The linked but disjointed chain of metaphoric signifiers in this pas-
sage have their source in the extremely elliptical, gnostic lore of tra-
ditional Yoruba divination poetry that Soyinka has on occasion held up
as a model of poetic practice against what he deems the literalism and
simple-mindedness of the poetics adumbrated by some of his African
neo-traditionalist critics.The metaphors all relate to a deep conscious-
ness of the decline of an indigenous monarchical civilization precipi-
tated by, on the one hand, the creeping authoritarianism of the modern
nation-state in Africa and, on the other hand, the imbrication of this po-
litical process in the larger framework of the dislocations of the capitalist
technological-industrial civilization in Africa and the developing world.
In other words, these metaphors compositely and astutely link the travails
of Oba Danlola and his courtiers to the clash of modes of production
and their associated political-administrative forms and lifeworlds. But
nowhere in the entire passage is this historic transition from one mode of
governance to another directly and unambiguously referenced; rather,
Soyinka relies adroitly on dance, cultic music and chant, and cryptic
metaphors to give inscriptional depth to this epochal shift. And he is
able to do this because of his ability to completely inhabit the world of
the Oshugbo cult and of Ifa divinatory lore, the world of ritual dirges
and gnostic orality, in the process cannibalizing their hermetic idioms
and ventriloquizing these in the concluding section of the “Hemlock”
overture toKongi’s Harvest.