Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings such as the womb, the navel and the memory of natal security before the
pain and “exile” of birth and individuation are deployed by Soyinka as
analogues of the escapist poetic landscape of N ́egritude. Soyinka’s own
words are much sharper on this point:
Poets feed first on the self (anyway); it is the extension of “self ” into history and
mythology, into society and even into contemporary responsibility which is a
conspicuous development in the self-consciousness of most African writers,since
it does not appear to correspond to the degree of creative processing. Narcissism begins when
the writer fails to distinguish between self-exploration and self-manipulation.
The latter, overburdened with metaphors usually of thinly disguised precon-
cepts, is indeed a work of love, motivated by external responsibility. But self-love
is self-love and is far more superficial than the bereavement, the curiosity, or the
revelation. (Soyinka,,) (my emphasis)
The sustained critique of poetic solipsism in this essay perhaps achieves
its most telling expression in Soyinka’s insistence that the diverse modes
and effects of narcissism – exhibitionism, self-exoticization, passivity, im-
mobilism – are all linked to a superficial, factitious, externally imposed
intellectualism. In the caustic terms of this particular critique, the “self ”
vigorously asserted in the writings of N ́egritude and its offshoots is mostly
compounded of facile concepts and a “and magnitude of unfelt abstrac-
tions” which make of “the common backcloth” or the cultural heritage,
a mere racial label, a badge of “authenticity” hardly ever elicited from
genuine literary introspection or exploration of events and phenomena.
This critique, it ought to be noted, is fine tuned: it is not intellectual-
ism in itself that Soyinka finds fatal to the intense self-awareness of the
“literature of rediscovery”; rather, it is what he regards as the peculiarly
otiose intellectualism which breeds exoticists, self-willed primitivists and
“quaintness mongers” among African writers that Soyinka finds particu-
larly deleterious, especially since it provides ready rationalization for the
paternalism and condescension of the (re)colonizing gaze of European
promoters of the new African literature.
One particular expression of this kind of intellectualism which Soyinka
relentlessly assailed in this essay – and others as well – is the pervasive
N ́egritude cult of Africans or blacks as the world’s last true “naturals”
whose great mission is to rehumanize the species and thereby reverse
the reified over-mechanization of the human person set in motion by
the technological civilization of the West. That mature, “serious” poets
and critics could repetitively peddle and recycle this “unfelt abstrac-
tion” in the context of the increasing violence of affairs in the new post-
independence states of Africa considerably angered the Soyinka that we