Wole Soyinka
conveyed by the following observations pervade the essay: “A very long
time ago, the discerning African rejected the anthropological novel.
Perhaps during the next twenty years his foreign counterpart will do
the same.” (ADO,) Or: “Those who consider the modern imagery of
Amos Tutuola a sign of impurity represent the diminishing minority of
African primevalists.” (ADO,)
Given these sentiments, it should hardly be surprising that Soyinka’s
most severe critical censure in this essay is directed not at the vanishing
breed of foreign Africanist “primevalists,” but at African writers who
seem to invite, and indeed thrive on, foreign critical condescension, and
who collude with the concepts of the African as a true, unspoilt innocent.
Particularly savaged by Soyinka in this regard are the fiction writers of
the so-called “anthropological novel” and those of the related “culture
conflict” school, both of which, in Soyinka’s view, are varieties of a super-
ficial, self-exoticizing traditionalism or nativism. Against this, the essay
identifies a number of African writers, chiefly Alex La Guma, Mongo
Beti, Chinua Achebe and Amos Tutuola, who are praised for forging
their own unique, exciting and complex “backcloths.” We can thus see
a sort of proleptic structure to the argument of this essay in which there
is a movement from the “imposed” and “wishful” “backcloths” to the
unique, individual idioms being fashioned by the most powerful talents
through self-confident and complex appropriations from both African
oral sources and Western written models, from contiguously local mate-
rials as well as materials appropriated from other cultures and traditions.
The sense of this proleptic movement dominates “And After the Nar-
cissist?,” “The Writer in a Modern African State” and “The Fourth
Stage,” but only in a very complex mediation which, moreover, is deeply
inflected with pessimism. It is as if in Soyinka’s despairing but outraged
view, the very cultural and historical contexts of cultural “rediscovery”
conspire to entrench in African writing the “imposed” and “wishful”
backcloths so reviled by him, so that instead of the self-confident and
complex individual talent and vision required, only self-exoticizing nar-
cissists are bred by the dynamics of the self-absorption of a “rediscovered
self.”
“And After the Narcissist?” considerably refined this critique, proffer-
ing in the process some permanently valid and illuminating commen-
tary on exhibitionist cultural narcissism as the inevitable, even enabling
ground on which a dangerously racialized poetics takes root. The essay
appropriately focuses on poetry, and more specifically on the excessively
aestheticized persona of the N ́egritudist poet. Psychobiographical topoi