“Things fall together”: Wole Soyinka in his Own Write writings as fragments, and almost always in ironic de-formations. The
best examples of this structure in Soyinka’s works areA Dance of the Forests,
Kongi’s Harvests,The Road,Madmen and Specialists,The InterpretersandFrom
Zia with Love. Indeed, where Soyinka, like most of these other African
writers, has tried to write positively and unambiguously about narratives
of emancipation and disalienation – as inSeason of Anomyand parts of
The Man Died,Ibadan: the ‘Penkelemes’ YearsandOgun Abibiman– the results,
as we have shown in this study, have usually been the worst aesthetic
flaws and ideological solecisms in Soyinka’s corpus. One cause of this,
it was suggested, is the distorting, simplifying over-intrusion of heroic
doubles and surrogates of the self in these works, but the main reason
is unquestionably the paradoxical fact that for all his passionate pursuit
of progressive, democratic causes, Soyinka writes best about the need
for radical transformative changes in Africa and the global order when
he writes with ferocious, searing irony. In this matter, Soyinka is in the
company of a younger generational cohort of postcolonial writers like
Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee and the late Dambudzo Marechera,
writers who consistently submit the metanarratives of the emancipa-
tion of colonized societies and subaltern groups to a severe and skeptical
inspection which is sometimes ludic and funny but also often grimly
sardonic and even nihilistic. What separates Soyinka from writers like
Rushdie, Coetzee and Marechera is his unshaken retention, into the
beginning of the fifth decade of his literary career, of the idealistic and
romantic rebelliousness of his youth.
This last point, which is crucial for an appreciation of the inextrica-
ble mix of ambiguity and “freedom” in Soyinka’s writings, is superbly
illustrated by a parable which is chanted in the first scene ofDeath and
the King’s Horseman. This pertains to the Praise-Singer’s chanted ode to
Elesin Oba’s munificence on the day that the god of wealth came on a
visit to his homestead dressed in the rags of poverty. With intuition, with
insight and with grace Elesin Oba welcomes and fetes the disguised deity
and thereby becomes a beneficiary of the largess of the god, a largess
that in the course of the dramatic action of the play he dissipates – with
tragic consequences. This parable is remarkably analogous to the aes-
thetics and poetics of Soyinka’s transmutation of his passionate political
activism into the superbly ironic inscriptions of his major literary works
in the fact that it is nearly always in the figure of thepharmakon–the
disease which is also the harbinger of health, the poison which is also
the cure – that the striving for freedom finds expression in Soyinka’s
writings. Extending the ramifications of this parable further, it could be