Chapter 1 - ‘Representative’ and unrepresentable modalities of the self: the gnostic, worldly and radical humanism of Wole Soyinka

Summary

In one sense then (there is) a traveling away from its old self towards a cosmopolitan, modern identity while in another sense (there is) a journeying back to regain a threatened past and selfhood. To comprehend the dimensions of this gigantic paradox and coax from it such unparalleled inventiveness requires … the archaic energy, the perspective and temperament of creation myths and symbolism.

Chinua Achebe, “What Has Literature Got to Do With It.”

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of the spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of language.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Ori kan nuun ni/Iyato kan nuun ni

(That is one person/That is one difference)

From a Yoruba Ifa divination chant

All the book length studies, the monographs, and the innumerable essays on Wole Soyinka's writings and career take as their starting point his stupendous literary productivity: some thirty-five titles since he began writing in the late 1950s, and a career in the theatre, popular culture and political activism matching his literary corpus in scope, originality and propensity for generating controversy.