Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings critics of African literary texts as a rather privileged and overextended
discourse in the debates on the strategies necessary for building demo-
cratic polities in Africa. On all of these issues and discourses, Soyinka’s
critical prose, beginning in the mid-s, has made characteristically
idiosyncratic interventions. The following caustic remarks on the subject
of critics and writers, from the essay “The Critic and Society,” is typical:
We are familiar, probably even excruciatingly bored with the question, “For
whom does the writer write?” Very rarely is the same degree of social angst
encountered in the case of the critic. Indeed the question is very rarely posed:
For whom does the critic write? For Mr. Dele Bus-Stop of Idi-Oro? Or for the
Appointments and Promotions Committee and the Learned Journals Interna-
tional Syndicate of Berne, Harvard, Nairobi, Oxford or Prague? Unquestion-
ably there is an intellectual cop-out in the career of any critic who covers reams
of paper with unceasing lament on the failure of this or that writer to write for
the masses of the people, when he himself assiduously engages, with a remorse-
less exclusivity, only the incestuous productivity of his own academic – that is
bourgeois-situated literature. (ADO,)
Within this new emphasis on the institutions, contexts and class basis
of critical discourse, it is easy to see that Soyinka’sracialdiscourse in
these essays is not in a “protest mode”; the intention is far less to blame
the Western “Other” than to point out the discursive, representational
traps which awaits any African response to a Eurocentrism that bases
itself on the terms initially proposed by Western discourses of, and on
Africans. Thus, because unlike “classical” N ́egritude it is constructed
not as a counterdiscourse to Eurocentrism, it is necessary to carefully
apprehend the cultural politics of this neo-N ́egritudist turn in Soyinka’s
critical prose.
Notions of an “African world” of spirit, imagination and creativity are
not exclusively to be encountered in Soyinka’s “middle period” essays.
Even in the earliest critical writings, he had expressed the view that much
of the imaginative and expressive resources available to modern African
art and literature derive from precolonial traditions of creativity and re-
flection which preceded and survived colonialism and are therefore not
to be comprehendedonlyas reactions to, or the products of colonization.
What is different in the articulation of this view in Soyinka’s critical and
theoretical writings both inMyth, Literature and the African Worldand other
critical writings of thes is that whereas he had urged in his earlier
essays an unfussy, “indifferent self-acceptance” in reclaiming the cultural
legacies of the past, the subsequent body of essays loudly and assertively
enunciate, defend and celebrate the original, pre-contact, cultural