The gnostic, worldly and radical humanism of Wole Soyinka a unique, “unrepresentable” self which locates its replete identity in the
endless chain of signification and the polysemy of language, especially as
these are teased and played out in our author’s writings between figures
and idioms of both high and low literariness in the Yoruba and English
languages. This particular paradigm, in my reading, provides the base
for any possibility of an adequate, sophisticated grasp of Soyinka’s more
daunting, more elliptical and, on many occasions, esoteric use of lan-
guage, metaphor and image; it also provides a base for apprehending our
author’s intimate but profoundly ambivalent relationship to important
formations of European modernism and the avant-garde. The juxtaposi-
tion of these two paradigms allows Soyinka to achieve several important
artistic moves or “swerves” simultaneously. These include the construc-
tion of powerful strategies to confront the violence and negations of the
social conditions and realities of the most oppressed and marginalized
groups in neocolonial Africa; the creation of distance from, and a per-
spective on his deep immersion in his social and cultural milieu; the
invention and finessing of an idealized “self” that tries to combine the
full self-presence of classical mimeticism with the putative decentered,
contingently predicated subjectivity of poststructuralism; a more or less
successful negotiation of the dangers of that extremely narcissistic form
of self-absorption which seems to afflict great writers and intellectuals,
and has produced bizarre distortions in the careers of many important
literary artists of the twentieth century like Ezra Pound, Yukio Mishima
and V.S. Naipaul.
First then, we turn to the paradigm of the representative self in
Soyinka’s writings and activities, paying attention to the complex modes
of its construction through recourse to and reinvention of the auto-
chthonous myths and rituals of Yoruba culture.
“Ogun, comrade, bear witness how your metal is travestied!” This
silent cry of rage which invokes the wrath of Ogun, the Yoruba god
of war, creativity and metallurgy, is from Soyinka’s prison memoir,The
Man Died. It comes from the incarcerated author upon his being shackled
at the feet after an ingratiating, deceptively “friendly” interrogator had
departed from Soyinka’s cell. This is only one of the numerous instances
in his writings in which Ogun and many other alter egos, surrogates and
“doubles” of the self are invoked to give metaphoric or spiritual depth
to the conception of the self. For instance, in other parts of this same
text, we encounter other personae and incarnations assumed by the
imprisoned author such as “Shuttle,” “Fox,” “Lawgiver” and “Pluto.”
This pattern of self-textualization in Soyinka’s writings through doubles