Playing God: The Triadic Course of Soyinka’s Nationalism in Literature
Authenticity is an escape from what society, the school, the state, what history, has tried to make of us (Anthony Appiah 1994: 100).
I. Introduction: The Project of Cultural Representation
The very expansive body of critical literature on Wole Soyinka and his works is quite unanimous about his cultural project as a creative artist; his use of literature for what he himself described as the recording of ‘the mores and experiences of his society and the voice of vision in his own time’ (‘The Writer in a Modern African State’ 21). For Soyinka, like many of his contemporaries, the writer in him could not afford the luxury of literature for just its own sake, a literature that does not serve his Nigerian, African, and indeed, the human race, any utilitarian socio-cultural value. Therefore, his works (and indeed himself) have been very unequivocal in the commitment to great social enterprises in the face of an unjust and sometimes daunting human history. This much has been established in the large body of critical writings on Soyinka and his creative and critical works. What needs to be done, then, I want to argue, is a shift from the object of his literature, to what Tejumola Olaniyan describes as ‘the modalities’ of Soyinka’s literary activism (349). Olaniyan in other words solicits a new critical approach that emphasizes the literary ‘moves’ initiated by Soyinka as a writer, scholar, and philosopher in reinventing Africa at a critical juncture in the world’s cultural history when Africa counted as nothing within the global cultural imagination. In this paper, therefore, I am concerned to demonstrate the cultural framework deployed by Soyinka as a literary activist and what achievements have attended those cultural ‘moves’.
My concern with Soyinka’s strategies as a writer is made the more imperative when considering a play that stands at the threshold of African literary history such as Death and the King’s Horseman (hereafter referred to as DKH). For DKH crystallized into a canonical text not so much because of the enormous aesthetic suavity that it enfolds and exudes, but by the very fact that it was conceived and deployed as a thesis-play to enunciate Soyinka’s own conception of Yoruba (African) tragedy at a tense moment of almost incurable doubts about the existence and validity of African literature in western literary circles. The play thus offers a unique opportunity not only to reflect upon the capacious potentials of literature to narrate nationhood—people (their social, cultural and political tensions and struggles), mentalities, sensibilities, visions and collective social pursuits, but also to deconstruct and gauge Soyinka’s literary moves as writer and inventor of Africa’s existence in literature. And to undertake the pursuit I set for myself in this essay, I fear only the play-text under study will not suffice. For as Mpalive-Hanson argues: ‘one will have to take into account the totality of his [Soyinka’s] immediate ideological context in order to preserve the distinctiveness of his cultural project’ (78). In this paper, then, I shall engage in a bit of historisization, comparative analysis, and textual interpretation, as I tease out my central concern, which is what Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman narrates, symbolizes, and what it achieved as an African cultural text. I will begin by revisiting the exact context of the field of global cultural production in which the play was written.
II. Contextualizing Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman
In his introduction to Pierre Boudieu’s The Field of Cultural Production, Randal Johnson observes that Boudieu was primarily concerned with the unraveling of ‘the role of culture in the reproduction of social structures, or the way in which unequal power relations, unrecognized as such and thus accepted as legitimate, are embedded in systems of classification used to describe and discuss everyday life—as well as cultural practices’ (2). For Boudieu, the field of cultural production is integrated and deeply enmeshed in other larger social processes. Chinua Achebe, Africa’s foremost novelist, hints at this power of culture in the context of Africa when he made copious references to the works of western writers about Africa like Joseph Conrad and his contemporaries as not being innocent.i So art, especially literature, within the field of cultural production, embodies and is embodied by human tensions and hence cannot be divorced from other social realities. There is thus an inextricable link between the field of culture and the field of power, and precisely so because as Boudieu notes, ‘cultural producers, who occupy the economically dominated and symbolically dominant position within the field of cultural production, tend to feel solidarity with occupants of the economically and culturally dominated positions within the field of class relations’ (44).
The anecdotal instances of skepticism about the existence of African literature in Europe and North America, especially in the so-called Ivy-League institutions in the early 1970s are important here. In 1973, while a visiting professor at the department of English at Sheffield University, a series of lectures on ‘Literature and Society’ were being held, but when it came to the theme of ‘literature and society in Africa’, the seminar was moved to the department of social Anthropology, instead of English. On casual probing, Soyinka discerned that the ‘Department of English (or perhaps some key individuals) did not believe in any such mythical beast as African literature’ (Myth, Literature and the African World, vii). Similarly, Chinua Achebe has narrated such encounters of cynicism about the existence of African literature while at Amherst, Massachusetts in the early 1970s.ii The experiences from these kinds of encounters, Soyinka notes, ‘provided an unintended (and mildly comic) pertinence to the themes of his lectures’ collected in his book of essays, Myth, Literature and the African World, and I must also add, his famous play, Death and the King’s Horseman.
What did the doubts recounted by these two very important writers of African literature about the existence of African literature in Europe and North America mean or engender within and outside western academes? In his essay, “An Image of Africa,” Chinua Achebe provides an amazing answer. According to Achebe, ‘The west seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparing it with Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity, it could say with faith and feeling: There go I but for the grace of God. Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Grey—a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate’ (Achebe 17). To refuse Africa the existence of its literature then was to ‘have gone far as to deny the existence of African world’ (Myth viii)—its history, civilization, culture, its people; its humanity. If, as Boudieu avers, the ‘literary or artistic field is a field of forces’ (30), then the entry of DKH into that contested field of global cultural production became a symbolic struggle for the recuperation of a suffocating or vanishing cultural entity (Africa) struggling to emerge from the dominating and asphyxiating cultural forces of the West. So when Soyinka, in his preface to DHK prescribes a downward play of the ‘colonial factor in the text, he puts his entire literary project in harm’s way. According to Radhamani, ‘the colonial factor raises its head, demanding attention. In all its poignancy, the metaphysical question is projected against the background of historical reality’ (44). It is the ‘colonial factor’ that gives birth to the play in the first place, and is also central in the play’s overall dramatization of its ‘threnodic essence’. So although Soyinka tells us that the ‘colonial factor’ in the play is merely ‘catalytic,’ we cannot ignore its continued protruding influences. I will now return to my previous concern with ‘strategies’ by showing how the western tragic paradigm became central to Soyinka’s cultural project in Death and the King’s Horseman.
III. The Tragic Paradigm: Nietzsche and Soyinka
The tragic genre is very central to the Western literary tradition; it embodies the very nitty-gritty and perhaps dignity of Western civilization and history. Western myths, lore and folkways are constantly transmitted, amongst many other cultural routes, through the tragic genre. This means that to share in the Western tragic vision is to share in a ‘dignified civilization’—it is to have a respected history, a legitimate human existence—one that had been consistently denied African literature in the field of global cultural production up until the 1970s.iii And though Aristotle had rigorously theorized the character of good tragedy, it was Fredrick Nietzsche, the German philosopher of the mid- Nineteenth century who tracked the very roots of European tragedy in that seminal essay, “The Birth of Tragedy.” It was the Nietzschean logic, very central to the ‘existence’ of western literary culture, which Soyinka mobilized in articulating the tragic vision in Yoruba [African] tragedy. I will sketch very briefly Nietzsche’s thesis and proceed to show how Soyinka sipped from that vision in enunciating the logic of Yoruba tragedy.
According to Nietzsche, the very fountain of European tragedy is to be traced to the “Appolonian-Dyonysiac duality” (820). It is by apprehending the influences of the two gods as art-sponsoring deities that we are brought face-to-face with the origins of Greek (European) tragedy. The two represent, according to Nietzsche, the separate realms of ‘dream and intoxication’ (821). Apollo is the god of creativity- ‘the god of all plastic powers and soothsaying.’ In other words, he is the inner light of man’s ‘world of fantasy.’ As a god of beauty, his aesthetic requirement demanded ‘self-control’ from all. His dictum was ‘man know thyself’ and ‘nothing too much’ (Nietzsche 822). The excess of anything was [un]Appolonian. So, for example, the excess wisdom of Oedipus, the inordinate determinism of Antigone, the inordinate selflessness of Agamemnon, are all qualities of the Dionysian spirit. They all lead to human disaster in the clear literary formation that we call tragedy.
