Wole Soyinka
of Soyinka criticism. Rather, as in any other major writer’s work, it is a
“problem” that applies to specific works of Soyinka and is differentially
distributed within the different genres of his corpus. More concretely,
it has been the purpose of this study to demonstrate that the greatest
stress point in Soyinka’s writings is paradoxically the very source of his
strengths as a writer, this being his tremendous investment in the power of
language, specifically the power of metaphor, symbol, myth, archetype
and other figures to make words and language hard to hold down to
function and referent as conceived by literal, positivist and intentionalist
usages. It is my hope to have demonstrated that where(ever) Soyinka fal-
ters aesthetically and ideationally, it is almost always the case that this is
the result of his overconfident faith in the power of language to withhold
or reveal at will. This, I have argued, is a result of a probably overcon-
fident faith in the power of his superior gifts and talents, unmindful of
readerly resistances to, and mistrust of language, especially language that
is often performatively dazzling. As a stress point, this is compounded by
the fact that the medium is English,AnglophoneEnglish which for Soyinka
and the mass of his readers in Africa and the developing world is a lan-
guage of colonial derivation: to so unapologetically and even exuberantly
inhabit, and be inhabited by this historically “compromised” medium
goes against some of the deepest though largely unspoken orthodoxies
of postcolonial critical discourse.
From the perspectives of the progressive formations of this postcolo-
nial critical discourse, perhaps the ultimate challenge of Soyinka’s works
and career lies in the fact that the metanarratives that imaginatively and
discursively legitimated the great liberation movements of the twentieth
century do not feature in his works in their conventional and famil-
iar configurations. These movements include the anti-colonial revolu-
tions which pitched colonies and “postcolonies” against empires and
metropolitan centres of global power; the class struggles of working peo-
ple and the poor for better conditions of life and work; the struggles for
gender equality in the home, in the workplace and for the control of
bodies and reproductive rights. And overarching all the struggles waged
by these movements is the struggle for self-representation as the existen-
tial and expressive roots of human freedom. It is a remarkable feature
of Soyinka’s writings that unlike what we encounter in the works of
fellow African writers like Chinua Achebe, Ousmane Sembene, Ngugi
wa Thiong’o, Ama Ata Aidoo and the late Mariama Ba, the metanar-
ratives that legitimated the struggles of these social movements – to which
Soyinka has undoubted deep ideological allegiances – appear in his