Wole Soyinka

Reviewed by: Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, Postcolonialism Esiaba Irobi Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, Postcolonialism. By Biodun Jeyifo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; pp. x + 332. $70.00 cloth. Biodun Jeyifo's book differs from earlier attempts by both African and Western scholars to explore the sophistication of Soyinka's writing in various genres such as fiction, drama, poetry, polemics, and literary criticism; Jeyifo anchors the greater part of his critical analysis in the sociohistoric and experimental imperative of the Nobel Laureate's work. Jeyifo does not just embark on an exegetic mission that perfunctorily clarifies issues of themes, technique, cultural otherness, semiology, language, and philosophy to the reader. Rather, he competently contextualizes how Soyinka's restive quest for forms, philosophies, and concepts—both African and non-African—is prompted by a need to make sense of the political and existential situation in which Africans have found themselves since the fifteenth century, when they started to battle with the rigors of a brutal modernity imposed by European intrusion into the African universe. Jeyifo's insider knowledge of Yoruba culture, from which Soyinka draws his primary metalanguages, proves invaluable in this undertaking, since the book strives to marry aesthetics to poetics and politics. Equally, Jeyifo's credentials as Soyinka's former student and colleague, ideological adversary for many years, a Marxist with a formidable wealth and depth of materialist theory as well as postcolonial and postmodernist theories, give the work an intellectual ebullience that makes for engaging if challenging reading. Jeyifo's work is divided into seven chapters, focusing on specific aspects of Soyinka's political life: his work as a public intellectual, growth as a writer, deepening metaphysics and ripening mechanics in different genres, his humanism, activism, nuisance value, and eventual emergence as a writer of universal and international significance. In this sizeable undertaking, Jeyifo benefits from the primary exegesis of Soyinka's challenging dramaturgy and theoretical writings that has been done by earlier scholars. This gives Jeyifo the critical and aesthetic distance to criticize the critics as well as to offer us new insights into texts we already know—a task he carries out with phenomenal élan. Chapter 1, "Representative and unrepresentable modalities of the self: the Gnostic, worldly and radical humanism of Wole Soyinka," charts Soyinka's beginnings as a writer in the late fifties but conflates his hydra-headed creativity in popular culture, theatre, film, music, and literature with the political history of a turbulent colonial and postcolonial Africa. We see how the implicit hybridity in Soyinka's work emerges out of an attempt at experimentation geared toward building a bridge between traditions of artistic expression indigenous to Africa and forms that he borrows from the West. This trend, Jeyifo reminds us, is what Soyinka's contemporaries all over the world were engaged in during the second half of the twentieth century. So, Soyinka's work belongs to an international avant-garde, not just an African one. In establishing this discourse, Jeyifo does not allow the sociohistorical and political backdrop that he abundantly provides to overshadow the unsparing critique he makes of Soyinka's craft in different genres. Chapter 2, "Tragic Mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse—critical and theoretical writings," is the supreme achievement of the book. Jeyifo provides an encyclopedic and powerful extrapolation of the shades and nuances of Soyinka's thinking as a cultural theorist. Most stimulating is the way Jeyifo brings to light Soyinka's position on theoretical movements as diverse as Afrocentricism, feminism, negritude, postcolonialism, Pan-Africanism, Marxism, postmodernism, globalization, etc. The archeology is truly staggering. The chapter exhumes and traces Soyinka's intellectual history [End Page 149] through his essays, interviews, and books, from the most rare and out of print to the most recent, such as The Burden of Memory. Chapter 3, "The 'drama of existence': sources and scope," develops Soyinka's aesthetic theories by looking at his area of greatest creative comfort and distinction: drama. Jeyifo brings an athletic intelligence to bear on his rereadings of all of Soyinka's published plays, a project he started with Truthful Lie: Essays in a Radical Sociology of African Drama (1985). Chapter 4, "Ritual, anti-ritual and the festival complex in Soyinka's dramatic parables

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Marxist philosophy · Poetics · Poetry · Politics · Postcolonialism (international relations · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Gender Studies · History · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies