WOLE SOYINKA: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism

(Romina) #1

 Notes to pages–


Frisch), all in Soyinka,Art, Dialogue and Outrage, Ibadan, Nigeria: New Horn
Press,.
 In “Climates of Art,” in Soyinka,Art, Dialogue and Outrage.
“Drama and the African World-view” ( J.P. Clark and Duro Ladipo) and
“Ideology and the Social Vision: the Religious Factor” (Achebe), both in
Myth, Literature and the African World, Cambridge University Press,;“The
External Encounter: Ambivalence in African Arts and Literature” (Osofisan)
in Soyinka,Art, Dialogue and Outrage.
Philip Brockbank, “Blood and Wine: Tragic Ritual from Aeschylus to
Soyinka.”
Oyin Ogunba, “Traditional African Festival Drama,” in Oyin Ogunba and
Abiola Irele (eds.),Theatre in Africa, Ibadan, Nigeria: University of Ibadan
Press,.
 Peter Brook, “Introduction,” Peter Weiss,Marat-Sade, New York: Atheneum,
.
 Press Release, Swedish Academy, inBlack American Literature Forum,vol.,
no.(Fall).
 Chinua Achebe,Things Fall Apart, (Expanded Edition with Notes), London:
Heinemann,(),.
 Peter Nazareth,Literature and Society in Modern Africa, Nairobi, Kenya: East
African Literature Bureau,,–.
 The point has to be made that the original N ́egritudists, because of the
profound ideological perplexity caused by their peculiar situation, were
uncritically extrapolating animist sentiments and tenets in their raptures
over an intuitive oneness of black Africans with the rhythm of the cos-
mos, the dead and the earth. Some, like Cesaire wrote great poetry,ani-
mistpoetry because the animist universe is a hall of mirrors throwing back
reduplications of the image of the one essential unity. Let the metaphor
stand: the reduplicated images are however, mere reflections, mere shad-
ows and our willed animists compounded theirpsychologicalalienation as
uprooted intellectuals blanched in the lyc ́ees and academies of Europe
with theideologicalalienation of erecting animism as a vehicle of racial
politics.
Here is a contemporary philosophical statement of this point: “Carried
far enough, the symbolic design of the factory as the basic framework of
understanding our world and our actions within it leads us back, partly,
to the recovery of the symbolic design of nature – that which “resists”
being transformed to our specifications. We are in the process of shifting
the symbolic designs of our civilization from the basic framework of the
factory a little closer to the basic framework of nature. In this sense, and in
this sense only, am I willing to accept the notion of “post-industrial society.”
Vytautas Kavolis, “Notes on Post-Industrial Culture,”Arts in Society,vol.,
no.(Fall-Winter),.
 Wondrous tales are here remembered from my own childhood of forest
ghommids, imps, etc., who flee and retreat from the laying of railroad tracks
and highways through the forests, though not before allegedly making costly
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