“Things fall together”: Wole Soyinka in his Own Write directed at corrupt, demagogic politicians of thes in Nigeria. And
going farther afield in the Soyinka corpus, plays likeThe Trials of Brother
Jero,Jero’s Metamorphosis,The Lion and the JewelandThe Swamp Dwellers
which have all become favorite dramas of amateur theatre groups on the
African continent, all evince considerable dramaturgic skill. The con-
clusion is thus inescapable that Soyinka’s observance of the demands of
craft and technique in writing is so consistent that he probably could not
write down to the popular masses even if he tried to do so. Indeed, in
the essay “Drama and the Idioms of Liberation,” there is an extensive
and cogently argued theorization of the pitfalls of condescension toward
the popular masses in much of the work of middle class writers who
consciously and overzealously set out to write for and to the masses.
In an essay on Soyinka that raises some of these issues, Nadine
Gordimer has made a point similar to this same cautionary observation
of Soyinka, but more generally with regard to the relationship between
modern African writers and their relatively newly constituted teeming
readerships on the continent:
Soyinka is a sophisticate whose making free use of the tricks and techniques of
European literatures are seen by some as a contradiction. I have heard him criti-
cized by black writers for being too difficult to be read by ordinary black people;
you must understand, there is an uneasy conflict among us, in Africa, between
the genuine and determined desire to extend the mind-opening pleasures of
literature to millions who have had to regard these as the privilege of an elite,
and the sure knowledge that you stunt and stultify that literature, to the millions’
eventual deprivation, if you ask writers to limit complexity of thought, reduce
vocabulary, trim codes of reference to some accessible common denominator
of comprehension.
In another context, I have demonstrated that the racialization of the
problem by Gordimer in this quote is only one side of the story.Fo r i t
is also the case, as I hope to have shown in parts of this study, that quite
a number of Euro-American scholars and critics have also expressed
impatience and frustration with Soyinka’s complexity as a writer, either
because, consciously or unconsciously, they have come to expect only
“simplicity” from an African writer, or because on the basis of a rearguard
hostility to modernist and postmodernist avant-gardism, they simply
expect and demand “simplicity” and “coherence” fromanywriter, Euro-
American, African or Asian.
It is my hope in this study to have demonstrated that the issue of “com-
plexity” and “obscurity” in Soyinka’s writings is not the overdetermining
or regulative problem that it has been made out to be in four decades