The gnostic, worldly and radical humanism of Wole Soyinka implications of the violence of that inaugurating and individuating dis-
memberment, as well as the will to gather into himself the largest stock
of that plenitude and multiplicity originally concentrated in Orisanla.
Thus, Ogun, in Soyinka’s inventive textual appropriations of the myth,
is the avatar most auspiciously placed to achieve transcendence of the
chasm between self and essence, being and non-being. And because of
Soyinka’s insistence that Ogun is an “explorer god,” side by side with
his acknowledgment of the deity’s bloodthirstiness, the deity as Muse
affords the poet and playwright visionary significations able to link the
pre-modern with the modern, and to meet the violence of modernity,
as experienced through both colonialism and neocolonialism, on a scale
commensurate with their awesome effectivity.
I have argued in another critical context that Soyinka’s appropriations
of the admittedly polysemic significations of his chosen muse, Ogun, in-
volves both an over-semiotization and an incomplete secularization of the
cultic and religious roots of this deity’s fascinating hold on the imagina-
tions of large segments of African peoples in West Africa and in diasporic
African communities in Brazil and Cuba.But it is incontestable that in
his endless improvisations on the symbolic resonance of this particular
body of mythic and ritual archetypes, Soyinka found and consolidated
a powerful, high-voltage means of persuasively insisting that his own
unique artistic individuation is inseparable from the burdens and respon-
sibilities that the negations, crises, and challenges of the postcolonial age
present to all African writers, indeed to all writers of the developing world.
In an unintendedly ironic, backhanded manner, Isidore Okpewho pays
homage to this aspect of the self-fashioning, self-mythologizing project
that led Soyinka to Ogun and his tragi-existentialist myths and legends:
No doubt that it is becoming increasingly clear to us that the tragic element
which Soyinka sees in the African character has been projected largely through
his own experience, and that in the end the tormented figure of the Yoruba god,
Ogun, which Soyinka has constantly presented to us cannot be separated from
the trouble-torn personality of our poet-dramatist.
This interpretation of Soyinka’s obsession with the myths and symbolism
of Ogun goes to the heart of the centrality of the deity and his significa-
tions for the writer’s project of self-understanding and self-constitution.
But Okpewho misrecognizes Soyinka’s intentions. For these are not so
much about rendering a generalized “African character” as they are
about fashioning surrogates, doubles and incarnations of the self as a
visionary artist and as an activist intellectual whose terrain of operation