Wole Soyinka
is an entire continent. Thus, in placing the weight of Soyinka’s adoption
of this deity on the “trouble-torn” personality of the writer Okpewho
makes a useful point, but he nevertheless elides the question of the
social and historic context of this literary mythologization. For even
at a cursory level of interpretation, it is not difficult to perceive that
the “tormented figure” of the god seems appropriate not only to the
“trouble-torn” personality of the writer, it is eminently apposite to a
trouble-wracked, post-independence Africa. Beyond this sort of direct
correlation of archetype and referent is the far more complicated matter
of ambiguity and contradictoriness in Soyinka’s Ogun, who turns out
to be not merely “tormented,” as Okpewho says, but is also, among
so many others of his attributes, patron god of song and lyric poetry,
liberal imbiber of wine, comrade in battle and play, guardian of sacred
oaths and therefore bedrock of moral integrity, protector of orphans, the
weak and the destitute. However, Okpewho could have more properly
charged Soyinka for an ideological male-centeredness that considerably
constrains the “representativeness” of his mobilization of the myths and
legends of Ogun for the construction of a paradigmatic figure of the
modern African artist. For Soyinka has on many occasions spoken of
the complex, multifaceted nature ofhisOgun; one area in which he has
stolidly withheld ambiguity and uncertainty from his Muse – his self-
reflecting muse, we may add – is that of gender. For no metaphoric or
cultural androgyny, the mixing of the “female” and “male” principles
and values in the life of a society, remotely obtrudes into the “virility”
that Soyinka celebrates in Ogun.
This last point brings us to the other arc, or cluster, of textual in-
scriptions of the self in Soyinka’s works which we have designated the
paradigm of the “unrepresentable” self, of an “unfinalizable” subjectiv-
ity. In explicating this dimension of Soyinka’s self-fashioning project we
turn to one of his most complex and ambitious plays,The Road, for an
emblematic reading of a crucial episode in the play.
“I offer you sanctuary in my tower of words.” This solicitude, expressed
almost like a sacrament, is directed by Professor, the protagonist ofThe
Road, to his retinue of underclass hangers-on at one of their daily evening
carousals. Both the solicitude and the context suggest some of the tropes
of the Ogun archetype that we have highlighted: liberal enjoyment of
wine, protection of the weak and the dispossessed, patron and guardian
of those who work in iron. But coming from Professor, this solicitude,
though obviously sincerely meant, is dubious, perhaps even absurd. This
is because Professor is nothing if not a “lost,” mad visionary and there