Wole Soyinka
either contingent or normative, universal poles of ethical investments
and ideological commitments. It is thus a mark of the suppleness of
Soyinka’s project of self-invention that it seems completely untroubled
by this tension. However, what is truly remarkable but very daunting
for his critics is the fact that the Nigerian writer-activist can vibrantly
appropriate the burden(s) of ethical and political obligations inherent
in the Ogun archetype, and at the same time celebrate the principle of
the ultimate impossibility of codifying selfhood and experience into an
ordered, fixed and stable identity, as the following “mantra” from that
tapestry of the Yoruba creation myths in Kola’s painting inThe Interpreters
demonstrates:
Of the eternal word of the first procedure with the long sickle head of chance,
eternally mocking the pretension of the bowl of plan, mocking lines of order in
the ring of chaos (TI,)
This study takes its interpretive and analytical point of departure from
the dialectical interplay of the two paradigms we have outlined in this
chapter. In essence this pertains to the centrality of a project of self-
fashioning as an African, postcolonial writer in Soyinka’s writings and
career. To restate them, these are, respectively, the arc or paradigm of
a subliminally “representative” self, a self that our author anchors sym-
bolically in the mythic traditions of the god, Ogun; and the arc of an
“unrepresentable,” unanchored, “ludic” self born of an excess of signifi-
cation and the unfinalizeability of “meaning.” Although basically unan-
chored, this latter paradigm, I would suggest, strongly resonates with
the ritual and mythic traditions of the Yoruba trickster god of chance,
mischief and indeterminacy, Eshu, a deity whom, remarkably, Soyinka
has largely left out of his extensive appropriations of mythic and ritual
materials from Yoruba cultural, expressive matrices. This line of inter-
pretation is all the more compelling given the fact of Soyinka’s great
predilection for satire and parody, those specific expressive and perfor-
mative idioms which, within the Yoruba tradition, have been assigned
to the patronage of Eshu.Thus, it would seem that with extensive,
some would say decisive, use of parodic and satiric modes and idioms
in Soyinka’s dramatic and non-dramatic writings, Eshu ought now to
take his rightful place beside Ogun as the poet-dramatist’s composite
or double-headed muse. This is indeed a central premise of this study
in its reading of Soyinka’s literary use of mythic and ritual material.
Moreover, it is a hermeneutic strategy that receives support from the
fact that Eshu, not Ogun, as shown in the impressive work of scholarship