Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings and practices indicated in these two examples assume considerably more
extended expression in two of the most eloquently polemical essays of
this second phase of Soyinka’s critical prose, “Drama and the Idioms
of Liberation: Proletarian Illusions” and “Between Self and System: the
Artist in Search of Liberation.” It is not fortuitous that both essays have
the word “liberation” in their titles since, in different ways and addressed
to different contexts, each of these two essays vigorously challenges the
revolutionary credentials of the contemporary Euro-American avant-
garde in theatre and literature, detailing the faddishness, preciosity and,
above all, the lack of rooted, organic links to either cohering communal
values or authentic social movements which, in our author’s opinion,
had drained the Western avantgarde of its revolutionary energies and
authentically emancipatory traditions.
The significance of Soyinka’s deployment of highly inventive rhetorical
“riffs” and conceits noted above inMyth, Literature and the African Worldfor
negotiating the inescapable dilemma of the project begun in the book –
“race retrieval” – is incalculable. This dilemma, simply stated, is the
dilemma ofpure anteriority, a dilemma which involves the near impossibil-
ity of eliciting the constitutive elements of an “African world” with its own
internal cohering reference points absolutely without recourse to any
external sources. Which culture or tradition in the history of human cul-
tural evolution can meet this rigorouslyautochthonousrequirement? How
far back do you go to “recover” the absolutely pristine values and ma-
trices of the African “racial” heritage in culture? Islam provides Soyinka
with his toughest challenge, that is to say, Islamized Africa whose totally
absorbed syncretist “integrity” is a basis for an unquestionably positive
identity for some of the African writers and intellectuals that Soyinka not
only apparently admires but with whom he feels some cultural kinship. Of
these, Amadou Hampate Ba and Cheikh Hamidou Kane are particularly
formidable. On Kane in particular Soyinka expends some of the most
admiring, luminously exegetical prose in the whole book, but without in
any way abjuring or qualifying his insistence that “race retrieval” has to
go back to autochthonous sources before the syncretist fusion of cultures
that is Islamized Africa. This insistence on an absolute point of aboriginal
anteriority inevitably often pushes Soyinka toward a purism of cultural
essences which he everywhere in the book disavows. One particularly
troubled expression of this is Soyinka’s apparent quandary that
The intelligentsia of the black world are in ideological disagreement over the
question whether enforced exocentricity, as a retarding factor in the authentic