Notes to pages– . :
Frank Kermode,Forms of Attention, Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press,.
William Baer (ed.),Conversations with Derek Walcott, Jackson, MI: University
Press of Mississippi,.
For essays on Soyinka by Nadine Gordimer, Wilson Harris, Femi Osofisan
and Niyi Osundare, see their respective contributions toWole Soyinka: An
Appraisal, Adewale Maja-Pearce (ed.), London: Heinemann Educational
Books,. For Achebe on Soyinka, see a brief comment in the book,
In Person: Achebe, Awoonor and Soyinka, Karen L. Morell (ed.), African Studies
Program, University of Washington, Seattle,,–; For Derek Walcott
on Soyinka, see comments onThe Roadin “What the Twilight Says: An
Overture” inDream on Monkey Mountainand Other Plays, New York: Farrar,
Strauss and Giroux,,–.
See Soyinka’s “Aesthetic Illusions: Prescription for the Suicide of Poetry”
inReading Black: Essays in the Criticism of African, Caribbean and Black American
Literature, Houston A. Baker (ed.), Ithaca: Cornell University Africana Stud-
ies and Research Center,,–.
I have explored the differences and common grounds of the two camps of
Achebe-Ngugi “realism” and Soyinka “avantgardism” in modern African
writing and their influences on younger African writers in an essay, “What
Is the Will Of Ogun: Reflections on Soyinka’s Nobel Prize and the African
Literary Tradition” inThe Literary Half-yearly, Mysore, India, vol.,no.
(July),–.
“Drama and the Idioms of Liberation,” in Soyinka,Art, Dialogue and Outrage,
–.
Nadine Gordimer, “Soyinka the Tiger,” in Maja-Pearce (ed.),Wole Soyinka:
An Appraisal,–.
Biodun Jeyifo, “Of Veils, Shrouds and Freedom: Soyinka and the Di-
alectics of Complexity and Simplicity” inPerspectives on Wole Soyinka: Free-
dom and Complexity, Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi,,
ix–xxii.
For an engaging exploration of “will” in the drama and literary career of
Soyinka, see H.L. Gates, Jr., “Being, the Will and the Semantics of Death”
inPerspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity,–.
I base this assertion on the totality of Soyinka’s artistic works, theoretical
and philosophical views and political journalism. Certainly, between such
works asAPlayofGiants,The Road,Madmen and Specialists,Season of Anomy,
The Man Died,Ibadan: the ‘Penkelemes’ Years,From Zia with LoveandThe Be-
atification of Area Boyas well as essays like “The Fourth Stage,” “And After
the Narcissist?,” “The Writer in a Modern African State” and “Cilmates
of Art,” it is possible to see strands of “Sorelian,” “Fanonist” and anarcho-
syndicalist traditions of revolutionary violence, as well as the sort of “sacred”
sacrificial violence that Girard explores sympathetically if critically in his