Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism (review)

Biodun Jeyifo's Wole Soyinka is the ninth study (and eleventh volume) in the Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature series. Under the general editorship of Abiola Irele at Ohio State University, this series is committed to detailed studies of the entire corpus of major literary figures from the African and Caribbean regions (including to date Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Édouard Glissant, V.S. Naipaul, Aimé Césaire, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, J.M. Coetzee, and Jean Rhys). Jeyifo follows the Cambridge protocol, linking literary analysis of Soyinka's extensive writings (35 titles, beginning in the 1950s) both to Soyinka's own radical political activism and to a broad range of postcolonial discourses. Given the extent of Soyinka's writing and the controversies that his sometimes irreverent activism has generated, this volume is ambitious. Building on his own edited anthology (Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity, University Press of Mississippi, 2001), Jeyifo has overall made a valuable contribution to the already extensive bibliography of secondary studies on Soyinka's work.

As a Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian writer with a tendency to satirize what he simultaneously portrays as deadly serious, and as a writer of essays as well as plays and fiction, Soyinka has himself polished the critical lenses through which scholars inevitably view his work. Frequently compared to authors and modes ranging from the high tragic poesis of Aeschylus to the alienating intelligence of Brecht, Soyinka foregrounds the irony of his role as a Yoruba author and playwright who ultimately writes in English. Living and studying in England or the U.S., periodically in a state of semi-exile from Nigeria, Soyinka's main source of identity derives from his African roots. Because of his own cosmopolitan experience, this sense of what constitutes the essence of Africanness is both intensely specific and yet utterly nonparochial. He gets to the universal through the local.

Jeyifo captures the essence of this process within the apparently conventional framework of a critical survey that tackles Soyinka's writings genre by genre, chapter by chapter. He tracks and evaluates what he calls "Soyinka's self-expression" within conventional genres, even as he defines the "radical extensions of genre" that characterize "the paradigms of the representative and the unrepre-sentable selves" (40).

Whether dealing with "tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourses" in Soyinka's critical writing (chapter two) or what he calls the "visionary mythopoesis" of both the fictional and nonfictional prose (chapter five), Jeyifo finds the essence of the larger vision within the Africanness of the individual work. This study, thus, has a holistic perspective lacking not only in, for instance, Derek Wright's earlier 42-page monograph Wole Soyinka: Life, Work, and Criticism (York Press, 1996) but also in impressive recent studies such as Onookome Okome's Ogun's Children: The Literature and Politics of Wole Soyinka since the Nobel (Africa World Press, 2003). Taking into account the useful chronology of Soyinka's life, running through 2002, this volume is one of the best as well as most comprehensive surveys of the Soyinka canon to date.

Reading this book, one can easily understand why this most African of writers has generated critical volumes written in Portuguese, German, French, and Chinese. Jeyifo places Soyinka on the world stage, within the frame of Graeco-European playwrights and authors whose works have defined what we sometimes call the Western "classical" tradition, without losing sight of his seminal role in the broader African sphere. He argues, for example, that Soyinka "insists on the enormous impact of the ethnocentric epistemology of European discourses on race and culture" on Africans as well as on Europeans, even as he is "at pains [...] to recuperate an 'African world' whose self-constitution precedes and survives the Eurocentric epistemological onslaught" (61).

Despite this considerable achievement, however, Jeyifo's book finally disappoints as well as rewards its readers. The necessity to summarize and make a central point about virtually every piece of Soyinka's writing, which gives...