Wole Soyinka and Autobiography as Political Unconscious*
Susan Friedman launches a useful critique of general theories of auto/ biography that postulate it as having to do solely with a growth of individualism. She is right in arguing, counter to Gusdorf and others, that the form depends on identification, interdependence and community as means of enablement. For Friedman, &dquo;individualistic paradigms of the self ignore the role of collective and relational identities in the individuation process of women and minorities&dquo;, and she shows how particularly relevant relationality is in assessing the process of women’s self-individuation.’ Though her critique is raised mainly in the context of women’s auto/biography, she offers an interesting way of considering questions of auto/biographies in general. Yet her propositions, though useful, require qualification. In my view, the site of the development of selfhood or individualism is not an interface solely of individual selves with other selves. It is important to take account also of the fact that selfhood or individualism cannot be fully understood without reference to social and other institutions with which
Anomy and Agony in a Nation in Crisis: Soyinka's Season of Anomy
Soyinka's many plays, his autobiographies, essays, direct political statements and his other novel (The Interpreters, 1965) are probably all better known than and if relative obscurity is an index of absence of admiration more highly rated than his second novel, Season of Anomy.1 The richness of this 1973 text is nevertheless in one way measurable by the fact that it is one of the few African anglophone novels brought irresistibly to mind when so disparate and wide-ranging a list of topics as bodies, identities, subcultures and repression is mentioned. It is a sustained, complex and intensely dramatic evocation of the ancient and urgent question of how violent political and social repression is to be opposed. Its crowded canvas is crammed with the presence of bodies whether vulnerably alive or in heaps as corpses with a range of disparate social and political identities, the presentation of one main subculture (Ayiero) and the overwhelmingly insistent power of ruthless repression. A common criticism of Soyinka's work (apart from irritation with his flamboyantly erudite and complex English)2 castigates what is seen as his 'substitution* of 'myth' for 'historical consciousness.'3 So, for example, Geoffrey Hunt writes:
Within and Inter-Institutional Differences Between Death Certifiers on Autopsy Conclusions
This study seeks to establish whether medico-legal practitioners differ in their autopsy conclusions within and across medico-legal institutions. Data include 459 violent deaths (homicides, suicides, and accidents) autopsy reports written by more than 20 death certifiers from four medico-legal institutions in two countries (France and the United States). Multinomial models show that compared with accidental deaths, weapon use and decedents’ characteristics both influence a homicide verdict, but not a suicide one. In addition, French practitioners are more likely than Americans to reach a conclusion of homicide or suicide compared with accident, and homicides are more likely to be certified by male practitioners.