Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings acute social disjuncture. A good illustration of this is perhaps his reading,
in the essay “And After the Narcissist?” of Senghor’s treatment of the
protagonist of his long dramatic poem,Chaka. For Soyinka, the splitting
in this poem of Chaka the poet from Chaka the politician, together
with the celebration of the former, aestheticizes politics in a manner
that is symbolic of the excessively naive cultural politics of N ́egritude in
particular and the dominant temper of the “literature of rediscovery” in
general:
Senghor’sChakasuggests that the poet’s answer to antihumanism lies solely in
sublime or aesthetic conceptions. The implication is that poetry in itself is not
a force for violence or an occasional instrument of terror. That it combats fear
by the revelation of beauty is undoubtedly one of poetry’s functions; hence the
social responsibility of the artist – his “politics”, as Chaka would have it – are
not in themselves a contradiction of the poet. A true Ogun sensibility that is
African, or should be, recognizes this at once and does not seek the negativity
of escapism which blasphemes against the very existence of the poet...Every
creative act breeds and destroys fear, contains within itself both the salvation
and damnation. And Senghor has impossibly imposed on his Chaka a poetic
stratification that is not compatible with the creative stress of a poet in Ogun
possession. (Soyinka,,–)
Given the qualities and attributes associated with his cult, Ogun
would seem to be the appropriately powerful, nuanced, countervail-
ing metaphoric construct for what Soyinka perceives to be the escapist
flight of the (typical) “narcissistic” writer of the “rediscovery” movement
from the gathering violence of post-independence Africa, an Africa in
which the pattern of coups and countercoups, rampant corruption and
arrogant, dictatorial abuse of power that has since become banal in the
politics of the continent was then just beginning to crystallize. The phrase
“the poet in Ogun possession” suggests that the writer should register
this creeping, miasmic violence of the period, but not as pure, mind-
less, gratuitous force. Rather, Ogun’s creative-destructive axis operates
like Derrida’s notion of thepharmakon: artistic signification conceived in
the pharmacological metaphor of the poison which could be the saving
prophylactic, or the disease inseparable from its cure.
The vital question of violence which is first broached in Soyinka’s early
critical essays in “And After the Narcissist?” dominates “The Writer in a
Modern African State” and “The Fourth Stage,” but in quite divergent
ways. “What we are observing in our own time,” Soyinka observes in
“The Writer in a Modern African State,” “is the total collapse of ideals,
the collapse of humanity itself. Action therefore becomes meaningless,