Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings collectivities, in the coming into being of national groups and “races” –
of nature’s infinite unity:
Man is grieved by a consciousness of the loss of the eternal essence of his
being and must indulge in symbolic transactions to recover the totality of being.
Tragedy, in Yoruba traditional drama, is the anguish of this severance, the
fragmentation of essence from self. (ADO,)
This notion of “fragmentation of essence from self ” is crucial for grasping
the revolutionary and idealistic dimensions of Soyinka’s tragic mythopoe-
sis. It also enables us to perceive the crucial fact that the relentless
emphasis on fragmentation, disjuncture and alienation, as themes and
techniques, places this mythopoesis solidly in a post-Romantic,modernist
framework. For it is in the cracks and disjunctures generated by this
“fragmentation” that Soyinka both locates the necessity and efficacy of
ritual and justifies his great investment in actions and expressions of the
Will which attempt to bridge the chasms that separate different spheres
and orders of experience and reality. One of the central constructs of
Soyinka’s aesthetic theory, “the fourth stage,” is an expression of his
attempt to connect this extremely abstract concept with apprehensible
temporal and phenomenological referents. For this “fourth stage” is the
liminal area of transition between the three spheres of life and experience
which Soyinka renders as time past, present and future, or its metaphys-
ical cognates, the “worlds” of the ancestors and the dead, the living and
the unborn. Rites – and not only passage rites – are attempts to ford the
divides which separate these tragically sundered entities of a presumed
original, primal unity of Being and nature; they work to make it possible
to pass from one sphere or domain of life to another. Thus, his investment
in ritual idioms and his insistence, in the face of powerful critiques, that
hisnotion of ritual is entirely compatible with the revolutionary currents
of culture and society, all point to the fact that “the fourth stage” acts
as a liminal space to more than the formulaic threesome of time past,
present and future; it expands suggestively to the “worlds” of the rich
and the poor, the exploiters and the exploited, woman and man, the
young and the aged, animal, vegetal and mineral life. Philip Brockbank,
in a seminal essay on Soyinka’s concept and practice of tragic ritual has
expressed this idea in an unforgettable formulation:
There were (and are) communities of the oppressors and the oppressed, of the
rich and the poor, the torturers and the tortured, the protected and the exposed,
the masters and the servants, the knaves and the fools, and the governed and the
ungoverned. They are not stable communities either – they shift about, collapse