Wole Soyinka
Yambo Ouloguem’sBound to Violencewill find parallels inSeason of Anomy.
But unlike the former where the narrator successfully adopts, or affects,
a completely amoral indifference to the monstrously evil acts narrated or
described, the narrator ofSeason of Anomyidentifies closely and intimately
with Ofeyi as he wanders through the landscapes of human carnage and
moral nullity in search of his Iriyise. The problem is not so much the
sheer fact of the total identification of narrator with protagonist in the
novel, although this nearly always proves problematic, as the fact that in
proposing Ofeyi as a protagonist who is not a mere wandering witness to
the “season of anomy” in his homeland, but a promethean revolutionary
seeking to mobilize all the dormant regenerative energies of society, there
is very little in information about character and events supplied by the
narrator to lend plausibility to the unfolding narrative as it increasingly
casts Ofeyi in a superlative promethean stature.
It is difficult to tell which artistic solecism is more costly to the narrative
ofSeason of Anomy, the hollowness and implausibility of Ofeyi and Iriyise
as symbols of revolutionary renewal in the revisionary version of the
Orphic myth deployed in this novel, or its corollary, the great strain
between symbol and referent in the depiction of the Cartel’s bosses, Zaki
Amuri, Batoki and Chief Biga as symbols of incarnate evil. This latter
point applies as well to the depiction of “Cross-River” – the physical
terrain and the people – as a natural habitat of the monstrous evils which
Ofeyi, the Dentist and the new herald men of Aiyero must defeat if the
land is to be regenerated. It might help to clarify the argument being
advanced here if we look more closely at, on the one hand, Ofeyi and
Iriyise as symbols of regenerative will and revolutionary consciousness
and on the other hand, Zaki Amuri, Batoki and the Cross-River terrain
as symbols of an incarnate, unregenerate evil.
Ofeyi and Iriyise work in the sales promotions division of a corpo-
ration which has a monopoly of cocoa products, he as songwriter and
creative publicist and she as singer, dancer and performer of the songs and
skits that Ofeyi creates. They are in reality underground revolutionaries
working against the corporation’s monopolistic greed and exploitative-
ness, their subversiveness indeed extending to the internal workings of
the Cartel, the shadowy ruling oligarchic alliance in the country which
controls the cocoa corporation, Ofeyi and Iriysie’s employers. On the
evidence given by the narrator, their “subversiveness,” like that of Daodu
and Segi inKongi’s Harvest, is almost puerile and certainly unconvincing.
This evidence comes mostly in the form of samples of Ofeyi’s “subver-
sive” lyrics (SOA,,,), none of which remotely comes close to