Wole Soyinka
As much in his prose as in his poetry and drama, Soyinka’s brilliance
as a wordsmith in language is consistently in evidence and perhaps on
display. This is a manifest and pervasive aspect of the texture of the
seven works discussed in this chapter. But while many of these works
have achieved considerable critical success and exerted significant intel-
lectual influence as prose writings, it is equally true that Soyinka’s use
of language within the medium of prose has generated both high and
equivocal praise and considerable hostility. This is largely on account of
the fact that irrespective of the matter or substance at hand in these prose
works, the use of language constantly draws attention to itself, becomes
indeed a percept on its own terms. To many critics, this facet of Soyinka’s
prose, by itself, seems a willful infringement of one of the most widely
accepted but generally unexamined regulative critical norms in African
‘Europhone’ writing in particular, and postcolonial literatures in general.
This is the tacit understanding – reflected in perhaps its most influential
articulation in the first epigraph to this chapter – that language should be
used by African writers using English (or French, Portuguese or Spanish)
as an effective medium or vehicle of expression which could, and per-
haps should, be stretched and bent to accommodate African realities and
sensibilities, but only to the extent that effectiveness of language as pri-
marily a medium of communication is not compromised, that language
usage does not draw attention to itself asenonc ́e, or to its very processes of
enunciation.Soyinka’s prose style is an affront to this norm, especially
given the fact that the visibility of his prose asenonc ́eis, with regard to
matters of style, not that of the graceful, the compact, the lucidly and
beautifully crafted (though many passages can be found in Soyinka’s
nonfiction prose writings which correspond to these styles). Thus, the
adjectives and phrases which have been applied to Soyinka’s prose style
have been vociferous in their expression of either misgivings or serious
reservations: “opaque,” “convoluted,” “harsh inscrutableness,” “linguis-
tic anomy.” Some fundamental questions raised by this highly perceptible
and demanding prose style in Soyinka’s work in this genre have not been
seriously addressed by students of his writings: is it permissible or even
necessary for the African writer in English or French to use language
not only or merely as a medium over which she or he need demonstrate
just enough competence and creativity to embody a significant vision,
but assertively and self-consciously as an idiom to stretch, bend, play
with, draw attention to, and even willfully de-form? And given the fact
that literary style in Yoruba drama and, especially, prose – one of whose
classic texts Soyinka has in fact translated into English – normatively