Wole Soyinka
ideological and ethical contestations. This seems only logical in the work
of an artist and thinker who not only writes inallthe genres but does
so cross-generically, decisively infusing the sensibilities of a gifted poet
into his dramatic works and his works of fictional and non-fictional prose
while also incorporating extensive narrative and dramatic modes into his
formal verse. To place this in a broader historical and cultural context,
for Soyinka genre and form, technique and idiom necessarily undergo
complex acts of translation and transformation when they cross real and
artificial boundaries separating the literary and cultural traditions of
Africa and the West, or of the ex-colonized and the ex-colonizers. For, as
Soyinka conceives of the matter, this is the basis ofanytruly innovative
and liberatory aesthetic practice and experience in our postcolonial age.
Thus, in organizing the contents of this study around the rubric of genre,
one works withandagainst conventional notions of genres as bounded
formal types, as fixed and distinct aesthetic and cultural codifications
of experience. This is why in this study, the chapters on drama, prose
and poetry all entail analyses and evaluations of Soyinka’s self-expression
both within the normative conventions of these genres and, more impor-
tant, his radical extensions of genre and form to negotiate the conflicting
demands of what we have identified in this chapter as the paradigms of
the representative and the unrepresentable selves. And this is as much in
his most successful works as in the few considerably flawed works in his
corpus. Before coming to chapters on drama, prose and poetry, we turn
in the following chapter to a comprehensive exploration of a particularly
combative and embattled “generic” site of Soyinka’s works, this being
his critical and theoretical writings.