Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment discreetmelaninizationof the presumed “whiteness” of the achievements
of modern civilization in commerce, science and space exploration.
In this manner, the racial confrontations specific to apartheid are in
these lines absorbed into the abstract non-racialism of some postmodern
discourses of race and identity. This abstract non-racialism entails a pu-
tative sublation of the crude “master race” discourses of the nineteenth-
century “prehistory” of modern racism: from the discourses of racial
hierarchies and “manifest destinies” to the discourse of a world without
“races,” even as entire peoples continue to be viewed and treated as
inferior, incommensurable and threatening others.For in the manner
of all sublations, what is “crude” or, in the present case, what is embod-
ied as a literal, epidermal datum, is not totally expelled or even tran-
scended, it is merely transformed into an idealized, aestheticized version
of the “lower” term. Thus, even as the Tempters in these lines pressure
Mandela in his prison cell with an offer “even/Christ, second-come,
could not refuse,” they let out that the “star planet” at the end of their
intergalactic probe is “code-named” – “Bantustan.” The superbly mod-
ulated irony of these metaphors and images around the exemplary figure
of Mandela mark the remarkable ideological distance between the ren-
dering of racial identity in relation to global peace and justice inMandela’s
Earthand the masculinist essentialism of the collective will to emancipa-
tion of Black people that we uncovered in our reading ofOgun Abibiman.
Outsiders, the fifth and most recently published volume of Soyinka’s
poetry is, in many respects, compositely a worthy sequel to the best
of the poems inMandela’s Earth. Though the volume was published in
January, all the seven poems in it appear to have been written be-
tweenand, the years of Soyinka’s most recent encounter with
involuntary exile during the inglorious reign of the dictator, Sani Abacha.
As we have observed in the first chapter of this study, those years saw
Soyinka in a commanding role in the external opposition to the Abacha
regime; as a consequence of this, Soyinka and eleven other leaders
of that external opposition were charged with treason in March.
Previous to this farcical attempt to make dedication to freedom and
justice treasonous, the Abacha regime had in Novemberhanged
Ken Saro-Wiwa, the world-famous writer and environmental activist,
together with eight other Ogoni activists. Five of the seven poems in
Outsidershave these events as their informing background, seen in the
broader context of the human factor in a homeland under a tyranny
so brutal, so corrupt and mediocre that it seemed like an occupying
foreign power without any program for its subject population beyond