Tragic mythopoesis as radical postcolonial discourse:
critical and theoretical writings
There are only two ways to go about forming racial concepts: either
one causes certain subjective characteristics to become objective, or
else one tries to interiorize objectively revealed manners of conduct.
Thus, the black man who asserts his negritude by means of a rev-
olutionary movement immediatelyplaces himself in the position of
having to meditate, either becausehe wishes to recognize in himself
certain objectively establishedtraits of the African civilization or be-
cause he hopes to discover the Essence of blackness in the well of
his heart. Thus, subjectivity reappears, the relation of the self with
the self, the source of all poetry...
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orph ́ee Noir”
Esu sleeps in the house/But the house is too small for him/Esu sleeps
on the front yard/But the yard is too constricting for him/Esu sleeps
in the palm-nut shell/Now he has room enough to stretch at large.
From a Praise-poem to Esu, the Yoruba god of fate, chance
and contingencyConsidering the fact that there are only three volumes of the published
critical and theoretical essays of Soyinka –Myth, Literature and the African
Wo rl d,Art, Dialogue and Outrage,The Burden of Memory and the Muse of
Forgiveness– Derek Wright’s estimate that in this group of our author’s
writings we have “the substance of over,pages of critical prose”
may seem an exaggeration.But Wright speaks of “substance” and this
seems quite valid if, to the three volumes of collected, published essays, we
add the large quantity of uncollected but published materials like essays,
prefaces by Soyinka to his own plays, innumerable pieces of political and
cultural journalism, and, especially, interviews.These published but un-
collected pieces, together with the collected volumes, properly constitute
the complement of Soyinka’s critical prose. Thus, it is necessary to em-
phasize that there is much else besides the three titles that are of crucial
import in taking a full measure of Soyinka as a theorist and critic. To give