Wole Soyinka
he encounters threats to his human and unique valuation. Alas, in spite of
himself from time to time, the raw urgent question beats in the blood of his
temple demanding, what is the will of Ogun? For the hammering of the Yoruba
will was done at Ogun’s forge, and any threat of disjunction is, as with the gods,
a memory code for the resurrection of the tragic myth. (ADO,)
Among other considerations, it is the idea in this passage of tragic myth
as a cultural code in a period of social stress that links the totally abstract-
universal conception of the psychic and spiritual coordinates of tragic
art in “The Fourth Stage” with the deeply historic vision of “The Writer
in a Modern African State”: between both essays a surfeit of gloom, but
also invocation of the will to action, the will to resistance from the depths
of the individual and collective psyche.
It is worth noting that class and gendered identifications are very
strong, ineluctable expressions in this phase of our author’s critical
thought, as indeed inallthe phases. The class identifications are more
indirect, more subliminal, while the imbrications of gendered identifi-
cations are by contrast so immanent in Soyinka’s critical prose as to be
ideologically and discursively constitutive. Of class, there are the vaguely
brahminical tones, the lofty pose of hauteur which haunts even the most
genuinely egalitarian and radical views and positions in these early es-
says. For occasionally, these break out into aristocratic disdain of populist
aspects of the “literature of rediscovery,” the most characteristic being
Soyinka’s view that “the average published writer” in the “literature of
rediscovery” was a mediocre literary artist. If this was a demonstrable
fact – and there is little evidence that it was – it is difficult to think of any
other writer-critic in Soyinka’s generational cohort who could have said
it in print!
On the issue of gender, let us merely remark that it says a lot about
the relentlessly male-centered nature of Soyinka’s critical thought as ex-
pressed in his theoretical and metacritical writings in all three phases,
that there is no discussion, not even a passing reference, ofanyfemale
African writer in the capacious body of these writings. In this respect
the invariable use of the male pronoun for the African writer in all of
the Nigerian author’s critical prose is more than the generic linguistic
sexism lodged at the heart of normative language usage itself; it is en-
tirely coincident with and inscribes a subliminally “national-masculine”
vision of African postcolonial writing as essentially a “men only” literary
tradition.
These direct and indirect identifications notwithstanding, Soyinka’s
early critical prose is unquestionably one of the most progressive,