Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings violence and negations of modernity which run through the three phases
of his critical writings:
religions do exist such as on this continent, that can boast of never having
launched a war, any form of jihad or crusade, for the furtherance of their beliefs.
Yet those beliefs have proved themselves bedrocks of endurance and survival,
informing communities as far away as the Caribbean and the Americas.
Is there, or is there not a lesson for our universe in this? Is there no lesson
here for those dogmatic, over-scriptured and over-annotated monumentalities
whose rhetoric and secular appropriations far exceeded the ascertainable, inner
verities of their spiritual claims? (ADO,)
It is a large subject matter that Soyinka engages in the three long essays
which make up the contents ofThe Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgive-
ness. This subject is nothing short of the perennially perplexing problem
of what transpires when the historic supports and institutional bases of
extreme domination and servitude imposed by one group on another
crumble and master and slave, exploiter and the exploited are forced to
settle accounts, morally, spiritually and materially, on issues of atonement,
recompense and restitution. This problem is of course of cardinal impor-
tance to Africa’s experience of modernity, given the centuries-old ravages
of slavery, colonialism, apartheid and racism, together with waves and
cycles of state criminality imposed on their own kind by internal rulers,
tyrants and oligarchs. On the atrocities and traumas experienced by
African peoples in this long chain of oppression, there are few writers to
match the graphic, moving eloquence of Soyinka’s prose. He is equally
moving in his account of the always fraught, often terrifying attempts
of the violated and the dehumanized on the African continent to exact
justice from their erstwhile violators and dehumanizers. What is more,
Soyinka’s witness-bearing in this book embraces virtually all attempts at
recompense and reconciliation between former oppressors and their vic-
tims in the contemporary world, from South Africa to Argentina, from
Chile to Rwanda, and from Cambodia to Ethiopia. In this particular
dimension of the book,The Burden of Memorycontains some of Soyinka’s
most lucid and forcefully eloquent prose writing.
But the Nigerian author’s purpose in this book is not only to bear
witness; it is also to try to understand, to anticipate and to move readers
to action. In these goals, the great classical prose virtues of simplicity and
directness elude Soyinka. Or, more appropriately, they are not his forte,
not his usual rhetorical and discursive weapons of choice. His strengths in
these aspects of prose writing lie in the extensive use of elaborate conceits,