Wole Soyinka and the Logic of a Democratic Ideal in a Postcolonial State By Prof. James Tar Tsaaior

Wole Soyinka is a study in exceptionalism. His exceptionalism as Nigeria/Africa’s Nobel laureate is only equaled by a few Nigerians. Emeka Anyaoku, for instance as Commonwealth Secretary-General, the late Chinua Achebe, his fellow writer as the most read African novelist. Soyinka is also known globally for his writings and political activism. However, his literary practice has always come under intense interrogation by the critical establishment especially the formation that identifies the lack of a clear, unambiguous political dimension to his oeuvre.

In its discursive elaborations, this critical collective accuses the Nobelist of investing enormous agency and epistemological capital in the lone, individual figure who imposes on himself the exclusive preserve of galvanizing society in the kinesis of history. Inevitably, the mass of the collectivity and their communal aspirations and energies for the revolutionary transformation of the patterns of social and cultural production are subsidiarised to the will of the larger-than-life hero. Whether it is in his dramaturgy or poetic output, this critical intellection has become definitive of the attempts to come to grips with Soyinka’s writings.

The critical charge is that Soyinka is enamoured of lone, individual subjectivities who impose the communal will upon themselves and embody history without due recourse to the mass of the people who are the authentic creators of history may be somewhat compelling. However, to pronounce Soyinka guilty and to convict him of ahistoricity is to carry one’s luck too far. Allied to this assumed deficit in apprehending the networks of historical knowledge is the equally perennial accusation that Soyinka’s artistry does not pursue progressive themes that are dialectical and materialist in character. This too looks like training the arrow against a pin which is likely to be missed.

This supposed absence of a progressive centre and ideological gravitation to progressive possibilities in Soyinka’s poetics thus becomes the overriding and informing concern which drives this interpretive current. Interestingly, Nigeria’s present postcolonial contradictions issue directly from this lack of a progressive vein in her politics, economics and culture. A culture of elitist predation, oppression, exploitation and corruption has been entrenched and celebrated as national pastime since independence in October 1960.

The critical skirmish concerning Soyinka strikes at the very core of discourses which exist at the interface of the formalist and functionalist approaches to literature and art: the autonomy of art as a self-sufficient, aesthetic creation and its social/political functionality. I, however, argue that Soyinka has always been a politically active and positioned writer and that critical perspectives which negate this reality have neither been charitable nor able to transcend the concrete dynamic of his art.

Indeed, not to appear to have a clear political/ideological sympathy is itself a political rite. While it may be somewhat difficult to delineate the fine details of the political lineaments inherent in Soyinka’s creative writings, his essays constitute a more crystallizing agent in the determination of his ideological intentions which are thinly disguised in his creative sensibility. For instance, his collection of essays, The Open Sore of a Continent contextualizes and exemplifies Soyinka’s political activism as a writer.

One of the most vociferous and unsparing of the critics has been Femi Osofisan who has interrogated Soyinka’s idealization and deification of the lone, promethean individual who bears the burdens of history and takes on the forces of society to the mutual exclusivity of the collectivity. Valorizing a Marxist consciousness, Osofisan denounces Soyinka’s lack of recourse to clear ideological mooring of his aesthetics in a collectivizing partisanship that foregrounds and takes sides with the mass of the people and makes them the true agents and subjectivities of history. Osofisan is particularly disturbed by Soyinka’s deployment of animist metaphysics and the individual Promethean protagonist theorized in Aristotelian poetics.

But Osofisan is not alone. Biodun Jeyifo has also engaged in critical skirmishes with Soyinka’s oeuvre especially his dramaturgy and identified its ideological limitations in elitist aesthetics. Jeyifo has deconstructed Soyinka’s poetics based on his appropriation of cultural idioms and mythic knowledge grids without fully acknowledging the functional role of the community as veritable makers of history.  His grouse pendulates between Soyinka’s ahistoricism and lack of historical dialecticism especially concerning the latter’s creative daemon, Ogun.

Jeyifo, therefore, rails Soyinka for literary idealization and for lacking true revolutionary potential. At the interface of the two deconstructive appraisals of Soyinka’s poetics, Promethean individualism and the lack of dialectics of historicity are the animating concerns. Tejumola Olaniyan pursues the argument in the same direction of the individuation of history and its currents as hypostasised in the lone figure. Related to this also is the subsidiarisation of the female principle to patriarchal power structures in the gender politics that define the African cultural cartography where women are rendered invisible and voiceless as manifested in the thematisation of the god, Ogun.

It is ironic that Soyinka is himself on the firing range concerning the cultural politics of Negritude of which he has been a fierce critic. He is known to have famously characterised the movement (with its arch-exponents such as Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aime Cesaire and Leon Damas) as a tiger which does not need to proclaim its tigritude but act it. What Soyinka perhaps does not appreciate is that before the leopard can pounce, it must declare itself through its growls. The nativist intellection of the bolekajatriumvirate of Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike has also been at the receiving end of Soyinka’s polemics and rehearsed vitriol. Many of the critics, however, have increasingly interrogated the fidelity of Soyinka’s cultural politics to Africa, the home continent he claims to strenuously defend in his literary and critical practice. READ MORE AT STORRIED.COM

James Tar Tsaaior, PhD

Professor of Media and Cultural Communication,

School of Media and Communication,

Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos