The gnostic, worldly and radical humanism of Wole Soyinka wa Thiong’o and Bessie Head, some of these writers themselves having
for years been known to be hot favorites for the Nobel literature prize.
But behind the statement is also the more crucial notion of a repre-
sentative self whoseraison d’etreis the authority to speak on behalf of a
whole collective tradition threatened not only by acts of repression and
silencing of non-Western texts and traditions, but also by the acute cul-
tural contradictions of the postcolonial alienation brilliantly analyzed by,
among others, Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral.The great tension
between the uniqueness implied in the notion of an autonomous artistic
selfhood and the notion of representativeness appertaining to a whole
tradition has indeed been extensively explored in Soyinka’s writings and
is at the heart of his project of self-fashioning. At the heart of this tension
in Soyinka’s writings is the implied recognition that for the postcolonial
writer, the claims of unique, autonomous artistic individuation and those
of representativeness and solicitude for a threatened culture or tradition
are both vigorously contested. For as Ashis Nandy has cogently and pow-
erfully argued in his monograph,The Intimate Enemy: the Loss and Recovery
of the Self Under Colonialism, in the matter of precolonial, indigenous tradi-
tions, there are not one but diverse, conflicting paradigms and matrices
for a representative, resisting selfhood available to the writers and intel-
lectuals who, like Soyinka and indeed most writers of the first generation
of postcolonial Anglophone literatures, take up the cultural-nationalist
project of fashioning individual selves and collective identities against the
negations of colonial subject formation.Similarly, in the matter of the
chosen, non-indigenous “world language” of expression and its received
modes of literariness – in Soyinka’s case English – there are equally di-
verse, multiple and even conflicting paradigms to choose from. This in
effect means that in any critical account of the identity of a postcolonial
author and the tradition she claims to speak out of or represent, there is
a crucial need to be attentive to what is selected and what is omitted in
choosing from the range of available paradigms and matrices, both in
indigenous traditions and in foreign, metropolitan sources.
These complicated issues lose their abstract and somewhat factitious
character once we move into the concrete, embodied expressions that
self-fashioning assume in Soyinka’s writings. In both his imaginative
works and his essays, the reified, anomic, “fallen” world of the African
postcolony in particular and modern life in general obtrudes massively
and manifoldly on sensitive individuals, on protagonist figures part of
whose moral burden is to register – and in some cases resist – the “fallen”
state of the world. Indeed, if it is true that in these works we are not exactly