Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings implicitly denies the suggestion of a resultant radical divide in his critical
thought:
If I do not exercise great caution, I know that I may end up with no persua-
sive defense against some kind of declaration by a nettled European critic or
artist that, “in the early Seventies, a certain notorious African playwright un-
derwent a crisis of racism”. Certainly, I am aware that my pronouncements on
Euramerican society and culture have become more abrasive, less compromis-
ing, while recourse to the contrast provided by mine has tended, even by the
very fact of comparison, to magnify its virtues. I hope I may yet withdraw from
the brink – close to which I of course deny ever being (ADO,)
This momentous annunciation raises many questions: what explains this
seeming shift in Soyinka’s critical discourse on race and ideology, and
on race and cultural politics, especially as inscribed in his critical and
theoretical writings? And if this shift does not amount to a radical break,
how are we to read those writings that belong in the anti-N ́egritudist
phase in relation to the dominant neo-N ́egritudism of the essays of the
mid-s to the earlys? How might we read the shifts and turns in
the entirety of Soyinka’s critical and theoretical writings in the light of his
early prognostications on the future of postcolonial writing, a “future”
which his own subsequent creative and critical writings in part helped to
produce? And finally: how does the very practice of critique, of critical
intelligence operating as an emancipatory epistemic activity in these
early essays, compare with Soyinka’s considerable antipathy towards
critics and criticism in his mature critical and theoretical prose?
These questions are crucial in the light of the fact that the early essays of
Soyinka also established some of the idiosyncratic features through which
he would, in his latter, more mature essays, elaborate what is perhaps the
central element of his entire critical-theoretical project: the elaboration of
a distinctively African literary modernity through a poetics of culture and
a revolutionary tragic mythopoesis which is also neo-modernist. Some
of these constant features of Soyinka’s critical prose are the primacy of
metaphoric, figural or poetic iteration over expostulatory analysis in his
critical and theoretical writings; the pervasiveness of a sort of negative
critique by which the positive contents and rubrics of this African liter-
ary modernity are established and highlighted primarily by vigorously
polemical, deconstructive assaults on diverse local Nigerian and foreign
interlocutors and adversaries; and the prevalence of what might be de-
scribed as self-quotation throughout his critical and theoretical writings
as Soyinka repeatedly redeploys and refurbishes motifs, clusters of ideas