Notes to pages–
of life can find a central image of the contemporary world.” () While the
observations made here about Hubert Ogunde andhiscompany are gen-
erally accurate, the generalization of these observations into an “essence”
of the travelling theatre in general is highly debatable. And with regard to
Soyinka and his “circle,” we have, as I hope to have shown, a far more
complex, more dialogical pattern than the profiles drawn by Barber and
Etherton.
Remarkably, Soyinka has pointedly left out “Telephone Conversation,” his
most widely anthologized poem, from all of the five volumes of his published
poetry.
I have discussed this issue extensively in my Introduction toPerspectives on
Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity, Biodun Jeyifo (ed.), Jackson, Mississippi:
University Press of Mississippi,.
For a powerful defense of Soyinka against the charges of “difficulty” and
“obscurity” see Stanley Macebuh, “Poetics and the Mythic Imagination,”
in James Gibbs (ed.),Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka,–.
This is exactly the form in which Bernth Lindfors allegedly phrased his
objections to the radical, experimental form of Soyinka’s drama at a confer-
ence, as recounted by Annemarie Heywood in her “The Fox’s Dance: the
Staging of Soyinka’s Plays.”Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka,–.Fora
full-blown expression of Lindfors’ scathing critique of Soyinka on this issue,
see his article, “Wole Soyinka, When Are You Coming Home?,”Yale French
Studies(),–.
Needless to say, I am far less interested in self-fashioning as a mode of
astheticization of the self than in the tensions between textual, psychoanalytic
and materialist theories of subject-formation. See notebelow.
In Introduction to Gibbs,Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka,.
Abiola Irele, “The Season of a Mind: Wole Soyinka and the Nigerian Crisis,”
in his book of essays,The African Experience in Literature and Ideology,” London:
HEB,; Eldred Jones,The Writings of Wole Soyinka, London: Heinemann,
; Gerald Moore,Wole Soyinka, London: Evans,.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o,Decolonizing the Mind: the Politics of Language in African
Literature, London: James Currey,.
I have explored these contradictions and their impact on the study of African
literatures in “The Order of Things: Arrested Decolonization and Critical
Theory,”Research in African Literatures,().
Aristotle, “The Poetics,” in Bernard F. Dukore (ed.),Dramatic Theory and
Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,,
–.
Pierre Macherey,A Theory of Literary Production(translated by Geoffrey Wall),
London, Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul,.
As reported and quoted in theNew York Times, October,.
Frantz Fanon,The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press,,
especially the chapter “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,”–;
Amilcar Cabral,Unity and Struggle, London: Heinemann Educational Books,
.