Orality in Writing: Its Cultural and Political Significance in Wole Soyinka's Ogun Abibiman
In “New Trends In Modern African Poetry,” Tanure Ojaide observes that “poetry in Africa is [. . .] currently enjoying an unprecedented creative outburst and popularity” (4). This popularity, according to him, seems to arise from “some aesthetic strength hitherto unrealized in written African poetry which has successfully adapted oral poetry technique into the written form” (4). Though written in English, the poetry carries the African sensibility, culture, and worldview, as well as the rhythms, structures, and techniques of oral tradition, resulting in what Wole Soyinka calls “double writing,” or interweaving of various ethnic, geographic, personal, and peculiar African oral features into the European-derived written form (“Neo-Tarzanism” 319). Such oral features include ceremonial chants, tonal lyricism, poetry of the primal drum and flute, proverbs, riddles, myths, songs, folktales, the antiphonal call-and-response styles, and the rhythmic, repetitive, digressive, and formulaic modes of language use. This use of African oral tradition is abundantly evident in the works of major African writers. To the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo, the artist’s vocation is a priestly office charged with maintaining the culture of his/her society as a whole. Heavensgate, Distances, and Limits, make this claim evident. Like Okigbo, Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor is preoccupied with African folk traditions, as well as the damaging effects of the European presence in Africa. As suggested by the title of his collection Rediscovery and Other Poems, the poetry is chiefly concerned with the plight of a contemporary Africa uprooted from its traditional past by contact with an uncomprehending Europe and the poet’s attempts to regain this past. Use of traditional African oral discourse is also discernible in the poetry of Southern Africa, especially poetry against apartheid. David B. Copland’s analysis of Basotho sefela (songs of the inveterate travelers) elucidates the oral content of this poetry, and it shows that sefela springs from traditional praise poems common throughout Southern Africa (qtd. in White 7). Nor is the oral emphasis restricted to Western and Southern Africa. In East Africa, the two major poets, Jared Angira and Okot p’Bitek, use oral textual features to reflect African culture. Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino, for instance, relies heavily on traditional oral literature in its use of Acoli proverbs and songs. The most obvious markers of orality in the text are the acknowledged borrowings, indented quotations, that Lawino uses to illustrate kit Acoli in many respects. That a new literary orientation exists in contemporary African Literature cannot be doubted. Though the long list of African writers using and expanding features of oral discourse is enormous, I focus on Wole Soyinka’s Ogun Abibiman because not much work on orality in Soyinka’s poetry has been done. Moreover, Wole Soyinka has often been
Art, Dialogue and Outrage
At one level a collection like this is a genuflection before fame. In this regard it matches Chinua Achebe's Morning Yet on Creation Day. The international distinction of the writer, and in this case the Nobel prize, means that any prior publication is elevated by the prestige adhering to subsequent reputation. This view is reinforced by the direct replication of original essays written over a period of 25 years, from the first publication of "Towards a True Theatre" in 1962. There has been little editing except between competing versions, no updating, no revision, simply a reprinting of what were often originally quite ephemeral journal articles. This method at least prevents any temptation to tidy things from the security of hindsight. That hardly sounds exciting but for all such instinctive doubts, this is the work of Wole Soyinka and the man is quite simply a genius and nothing he writes can be considered negligible, either in itself or for the reflection it shines upon the corpus of his work. The opportunity to possess and review his passionate and provoking essays—many long hidden in journals available only in the most specialized collections, and several, such as "Climates of Art," and "How to Marximise Mediocrity," never previously printed— has an enormous value. They still bear a careful and exact reading. Soyinka has preached so many essential truths through the years, expressing common sense with explosive vigor and a rich sense of metaphor. Soyinka was closely consulted about the selection and the title is typically his own. For unexplained reasons he withheld such a familiar work as "And After the Narcissist," so the collection is not comprehensive and we are promised a second volume. Some of these articles have become dated but in so doing have become icons of their age, recording crucial confrontations within the intellectual history of African literature. Some in fact are literally retorts provoked by some exasperating critical controversy. If an essay such as "From a Common Backcloth" seems to reflect a distant time, it is precisely because Soyinka's argument was sufficiently persuasive that it changed the direction of writers' creativity and quelled the necessity of further debate. Jeyifo's introduction, which reviews both the intellectual achievement of these works and the context of their publication, asserts that a more calculated ideological sequence exists within these isolated essays than could have been intended originally. Yet he is right to see that there is a continuity of ideas to which Soyinka remains consistently committed—nothing less than "the vitality and direction of the literary enterprise in contemporary Africa." Africa is crucial because for all its international acceptance, Soyinka's writing has been uncompromising in its attachment to African cultural values, particularly the Yoruba cosmology of his birth. It is his total respect, even reverence, for this inheritance that provides him the
Kant's 'Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason'
Preface 1. Context 2. Overview of Themes 3. Reading the Text Prefaces to the First and Second Editions Part I of the Religion Part II of the Religion Part III of the Religion Part IV of the Religion 4. Reception and Influence 5. Guide for Further Reading Bibliography Index