The Ideological Content of Soyinka's War Writings

Extract

Wole Soyinka's controversial stature as an African writer and intellectual derives from certain contradictions inherent in both his stance on important socio-political questions as well as in his artistic mediation of contemporary African experience. At the level of social action and thought, Soyinka could conveniently be regarded as a progressive idealist in the sense that his involvements in and utterances on specific social problems indicate a fervent preoccupation with social justice and an aversion to oppressive institutions. As a literary artist, however, much of his significant writing displays an unrelenting obsession with myth and its complex reenactments through ritual. Consequently, while his consciousness is ultimately historical, his imagination and idiom of creative expression derive from a fundamentally mythic source and a religious sentiment Says Stanley Macebuh (1976:79):

Soyinka is, first and foremost, a mythopoeist; his imagination is, in a quite fundamental sense, a mythic imagination.

Biodun Jeyifo (1984:4) puts the matter even more devastatingly: “Soyinka has a deep, abiding penchant for mythology, metaphysics and mysticism.” Soyinka has complicated this ambiguity in his reputation by striving, in his earlier works at least, to proffer mythic “explanations” and resolutions for social problems which ordinarily belong in the realm of historical reality and empirical human experience. An important evidence of this feature of his art is the tendency to create human characters whose actions are circumscribed by the cosmic attributes of specific Yoruba deities.