The dilemma of Achebe and Soyinka in terms of African sense and sensibility
African writers have an enduring propensity for social and
political commitment. Their texts mostly reflect and refract the
socio-political events in their societies. Initially, African literature was a
tool for celebrating the heroic grandeur of the African past; later it was used
for anti-colonial struggle. Presently, it is being employed as a veritable
weapon for depicting the postcolonial disillusionment in African nations.
Therefore, African literature is always chained to the experiences of the
peoples of the continent. In this paper, an attempt is made to examine the
dilemma of Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka in terms of African sense and sensibility.
To
examine the dilemma some questions are come out in front of us; Was it
literature produced in Africa or about Africa? Could African literature be on
any subject, or must it have an African theme? Should it embrace the whole
continent or south of the Sahara, or just black Africa? And then the
question of language; should it be in indigenous African languages or should it
include Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Afrikaans, and so on? The most
striking question is about “Postcolonial Literature.” Does the “Postcolonial
Literature” fulfill the expectation of the African Writers or solve the problem
of dilemma? We can examine this problem by going through the writings of Chinua
Achebe and Wole Soyinka. But firstly we should know what "Postcolonial
Literature" is.
"Postcolonial
Literature" is a hot commodity these days. On the one hand writers like
Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy are best-selling authors; and on the other
hand, no college English department worth its salt wants to be without a scholar
who can knowledgeably discourse about postcolonial theory.
Taken
literally, the term "postcolonial literature" would seem to label
literature written by people living in countries formerly colonized by other
nations. This is undoubtedly what the term originally meant, but there are many
problems with this definition.
Many
"postcolonial" authors do not share the general orientation of
postcolonial scholars toward engaging in an ongoing critique of colonialism.
Nigerian writers Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, for instance, after writing
powerful indictments of the British in their country, turned to exposing the
deeds of native-born dictators and corrupt officials within their independent
homeland. Although postcolonial scholars would explain this corruption as a
by-product of colonialism, such authors commonly have little interest in
pursuing this train of thought.
Indeed,
"postcolonial" writers often move to England or North America because
they have been exiled, or because they find a more receptive audience there, or
simply in search of a more comfortable mode of living and even sometimes like
Soyinka call upon the governments of these "neocolonialist" nations
to come to the aid of freedom movements seeking to overthrow native tyrants.
It
is notable that whenever writers from the postcolonial world like Soyinka,
Derek Walcott, or Rushdie receive wide recognition they are denounced as
unrepresentative and inferior to other, more obscure but more
"legitimate" spokespeople.
Faced
with the dilemma of wanting to make positive claims for certain ethnic groups
or nationalities while simultaneously acknowledging individualism, some critics
have put forward the concept of "strategic essentialism" in which one
can speak in rather simplified forms of group identity for the purposes of
struggle while debating within the group the finer shades of difference.
There
are two major problems with this strategy, however. First, there are always
dissenters within each group who speak out against the new corporate identity,
and they are especially likely to be taken seriously by the very audiences
targeted by strategic essentialism. Second, white conservatives have caught on
to this strategy: they routinely denounce affirmative action, for instance, by
quoting Martin Luther King, as if his only goal was "color blindness"
rather than real economic and social equality. They snipe, fairly effectively,
at any group, which puts forward corporate claims for any ethnic group by
calling them racist. Strategic essentialism envisions a world in which internal
debates among oppressed people can be sealed off from public debates with
oppressors. Such a world does not exist.
The
more it is examined, the more the postcolonial sphere crumbles. Though
Jamaican, Nigerian, and Indian writers have much to say to each other; it is
not clear that they should be lumped together.
The
conference dealt with the issue of how the legacy of colonialism
had left the African writer with a
dilemma with regard to the language choice in writing. The questions raised and
debated at the conference were:
·
What constitutes African literature?
·
Is it literature written by Africans, literature that depicts the
African experience?
·
Does African literature have to be written in African
languages?
At
the conference, several nationalist writers refused to acknowledge any
literature written in non-African languages as being
African literature. The conference is often regarded as a major milestone in
African literature, and is thought to have defined many African authors' style
of writing.
Achebe,
a Nigerian novelist, poet, and short story writer, records transition,
transformation, and tragedy in the modern history of his people. It has been
noted "his realistic treatment of Nigerian life is as valuable
anthropologically and sociologically as it is creatively. As chinua Achebe himself puts it in a lecture
delivered in 1964 to the Nigerian Literary Association:
“The
worst thing that can happen to any people is the loss of their dignity and
self-respect. The writer’s duty is to help them regain it by showing them in
human terms what happened to them, what they lost. There is a saying in Igbo
that a man who can’t tell where the rain began to beat him cannot know where he
dried his body. The writer can tell the people where the rain began to beat
them. In Africa cannot perform this task unless he has a proper sense of
history.”
Things Fall Apart is primarily a realist novel, period. Therefore, it
is hardly likely to romanticize, sentimentalize or falsify either the
pre-colonial experience, or critical, but not single, moment of colonial
encounter when Achebe’s represented and reinvented tribes first severally
experienced and sustained the shock of the impact, on their total way of life
which had been sediment and sustained over centuries, of an advanced and
modernised Europe culture.
This
impact is felt and experienced in three main spheres of social-cultural
activity- religion, trade and legal system, this last backed by police and
military. Achebe assimilates and absorbs into his narrative a general history
of the colonial impact directly, concretely, empirically and existentially,
through his depiction of how it changed and scarred local lives in separate but
also representative places like, for example, Umoufia, Mbanta, and Abame.
Things Fall Apart turns out to present the whole tragic drama of a
society, vividly and concretely enacted in the tragic destiny of a
representative individual. This use of an individual character as a symbolic
receptacle, the living theatre, of a social dilemma, is what gives Achebe's
novels their real measure of strength—it explains what for me is the weakness
of his second novel: No Longer at Ease, and the achievement of his third
novel, Arrow of God.
Like
Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka also has been suffering from the dilemma of
African’s sense and sensibility. He was born to Yoruba parents in 1934. His
works are really artistic hybrids of mixed Yoruba and European parentage,
blending African themes, imagery and performances idioms with Western
techniques and stylistic influences. Though he has spoken of the Yoruba in
which he grew up as “one seamless existence” of Christian and Yoruba elements-
Bible stories and indigenous folklore- the impression left by his account of
his parsonage-based childhood in Ake is that, in his upbringing as in his
schooling, Christianity was a primary and Yoruba religion a secondary
influence, and that he came late to the latter, perhaps with some of the
fanaticism of the convert as well as the sharpened objectivity of the outsider.
It was not until his mid twenties, and after a Western academic education, that
Soyinka undertook any firsthand study of indigenous ritual, religious, and
dramatic forms. Nevertheless, the Yoruba heritage has been famous throughout
its diasporic history for its quiet resilience and capacity for survival in
foreign languages and cultures, not to mention artistic forms and theories, and
the remarkable ease with which Soyinka “gave up Christianity” when the “first
opportunity” arose evinces a deep and abiding substratum of Yoruba but a
Yoruba-based eclecticism. The celebrative festivals that are so crucial to
farming peoples and punctuate the Yoruba agricultural year supply his early
plays with their atmospherics, moral symbolism and structural design. Though
the tonality of Yoruba- a musical language chanted rather than spoken- does not
translate into English, its wealth of images, proverbs, and folkloric motifs
survives the transplantation to foreign forms in Soyinka’s works. According to
Martin Tucker;
“Soyinka’s
plays, on one level, are about the conflict between past and present, between
tribal beliefs and modern expediency. He was both critical and appreciative of
both ways of life. What he was most attached to were those universal features
of character that distinguish a man no matter when he was born.”
Generally,
the plays of Wole Soyinka, like those of Bernard Shaw, are triggered off by a
real-life incident. The Lion and the Jewel was triggered by
Soyinka’s reading about Charlie Chaplin’s marriage at the age of nearly sixty
to the teenaged Oona O’nell, daughter of the American playwright Eugene O’Nell.
Like The Swamp Dwellers, The Lion and the Jewel deals with traditional
village life experimenting with mime and dance elements as an integral part of
the comedy. It is rollicking comic satire of the clash between the self-indulgent,
crafty but shrewd tribal chieftainship and superficially Westernised at the
primary school-master lever.
In
The Lion and the Jewel there is ample use of dance, song and mime. The
play is very simple in its structure and is a musical. It shows deep familiarity
of Soyinka with the various aspects of African tradition and also the
influences of the modern world on the African mind.
In 2011, under the aegis of African
Heritage Research Library and Cultural Centre, a writers' enclave has been
built in honor of Professor Wole Soyinka. The location is Adeyipo Village,
Lagelu Local Government Area, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. The main objectives
of the Enclave, amongst others, are:
·
To promote African and World
Literatures.
·
To provide a conducive
atmosphere for the improvement of writers' craft.
·
To increase world-wide
knowledge and appreciation of African literatures.
·
To raise the standard of
African literature toward ensuring its active participation in cultural and
national development.
·
To initiate an
endowment for a prestigious African Writers' Prize.
It is hoped that their works will impact
positively on the lives of all categories of literary audience; youth, adult
and the general public, throughout Africa and the entire world.
References:
1. ‘Date-Line on Soyinka; New Theatre Magazine.
2. Asiatic, Volume-3, Number-1, June-2009
3. Wole Soyinka; Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism by
Biodun Jeyifo, Cornell University.
4. Black Africa Literature in English, 1982-1986
5. www.wikipedia.org
6. www.sparknotes.com
7. www.enotes.com
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