‘Representative’ and unrepresentable modalities of the self:
the gnostic, worldly and radical humanism
of Wole Soyinka
In one sense then (there is) a traveling away from its old self towards
a cosmopolitan, modern identity while in another sense (there is)
a journeying back to regain a threatened past and selfhood. To
comprehend the dimensions of this gigantic paradox and coax from
it such unparalleled inventiveness requires...thearchaicenergy,
the perspective and temperament of creation myths and symbolism.
Chinua Achebe, “What Has Literature Got to Do With It.”
The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How
different are the wordshome,Christ,ale,master, on his lips and on
mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of the
spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for
me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My
voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of language.
James Joyce,A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Ori kan nuun ni/Iyato kan nuun ni
(That is one person/That is one difference)
From a YorubaIfadivination chant
All the book length studies, the monographs, and the innumerable essays
on Wole Soyinka’s writings and career take as their starting point his
stupendous literary productivity: some thirty-five titles since he began
writing in the lates, and a career in the theatre, popular culture
and political activism matching his literary corpus in scope, originality
and propensity for generating controversy. Soyinka had been writing for
about five years when his first serious and mature works were published
inand, in the words of Bernth Lindfors, “he became – instantly
and forever – one of the most important writers in the English speaking
world.”It is significant that this observation comes from Lindfors, who,
almost alone among students of Soyinka’s writings, has been obsessed
with his literary juvenilia, hoping therein to find materials to prove that
