WOLE SOYINKA: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism

“Things fall together”: Wole Soyinka in his Own Write 

of Soyinka’s critical prose embraces positions usually deemed incom-
patible or mutually self-canceling in currently fashionable theories of
postcolonial discourse and cultural studies. Some of these positions are:

Nativism: the search for origins and the call for a return to foun-

dational sources; the valorization of essences and continuities

in the construction of cultural tradition; the assertion of nor-

mative, traditional values and world-views; the recuperation of

primordial, autochthonous oral, preliterate matrices of artistic

and cultural forms as a reaction to the homogenizing cultural

effects of capitalist globalization;

Orphism: artistic expression and utterance as vehicles of prophetic

revelation, occult or paranormal experiences and mystical

intuitions;

Resistance and Oppositionality: the recourse to the insurgent carniva-

lesque counter-discourses of non-canonical, popular, unofficial,

marginal and transgressive cultural forms, styles, idioms and

practices;

Cosmopolitanism: the encouragement and celebration of hybrid, syn-

cretist, “crossover” and transcultural affinities and influences

across all kinds of boundaries – racial, national, geopolitical and

ideological.

A careful exploration of all the three phases of Soyinka’s critical thought,
such as we attempted in the second chapter of this study, would show
that in the body of his critical prose, it is only in his essays of thes
ands that Soyinka was able to inhabit simultaneously all of these
positions without seriously undermining the radical humanism of his
works and career. How remarkable then that in his imaginative writ-
ings, especially in the most ambitious and successful works of drama
and poetry, Soyinka had all along powerfully and resonantly inhabited
all of these positions. There is considerable tension in simultaneously
locating oneself in these conflicting views and positions, but Soyinka’s
fecundity and complexity as a writer-activist are powerfully enabling
means of negotiating this tension productively. Indeed, it is perhaps
best to understand the matter of inhabiting these postions and views –
nativism, orphism, resistance and oppositionality, and cosmopolitanism –
not as abstract identitarian positions, but as chronotopes and lifeworlds
of the pre-capitalist, capitalist and late-capitalist epochs. In the densely
symbolic, archetypal idiom of Soyinka’s most “difficult” and important
theoretical essays, these positions are formulated as the metaphysically