Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka (review)

Identity is a topic of central concern to a wide range of writers and activists involved with cultural production and reception in former European colonies. Mpalive-Hangson Msiska takes up several aspects of this topic. In his introduction, he sets out some of the main issues and defends Soyinka against critics such as Chinweizu. The first chapter considers the interrelations between myth and history. Chapter two turns to the opposition between tradition and modernity. In this chapter, Msiska presents the main contention of the book, summarized already on the opening pages of his introduction, that Soyinka's "particular mode of cognition is animated by a commitment to the historicisation of the postcolonial contemporary and a relocation of its problematic within a symbolic order grounded in an indigenous mythopoesis, but one that is equally engaged dialectically with Western culture and knowledge" (xv). As this suggests, Msiska believes Soyinka's work accords well with the ideas of post-structuralist theorists, prominently Homi Bhabha. The third and fourth chapters turn to Soyinka's representation of power in postcolonial societies. The final chapter considers what positive possibilities there are for such societies. In the course of this study, Msiska discusses thirteen plays, three works of poetry, and a novel in some detail, taking up other works more briefly.

Msiska's book is an exemplary case of what is referred to as "theoretically informed criticism," the mainstream of postcolonial literary interpretation today. For this reason, I suspect that many readers will find the work highly rewarding. To my mind, however, the book shows the narrowing effects of mainstream "theoretical" ideas. Soyinka's works explore political and ethical concerns along a wide range of axes. He employs myth, fiction, history, autobiography in complex literal and metaphorical, explicit and implicit ways. But prominent ideas in "postcolonial theory" simply do not allow us to see this. Consider, for example, The Swamp Dwellers. The play draws deeply, but implicitly, on stories of Obatala as conceptual models for thinking through ethical and social issues. It uses farming allegorically to extend the treatment of ethical issues to the national level. At points, Msiska gives hints of the complexity and human insight in Soyinka's plays. But constrained as he is by the current discourse of postcolonialism, Msiska interprets the play simply in terms of tradition, modernity, and hybridity. Given that he finds neither pure tradition nor pure modernity, his "theoretical" framework forces him to conclude that the work is hybrid. But in fact, the play is dealing with much more various and complicated issues. For example, even in terms of tradition itself, there are many different strains of Yoruba, Muslim, and Euro-Christian tradition; there are different attitudes toward tradition; there are different ways in which different traditions may be modernized and yet retain their ethical force or social implications. All this is occluded by such simple—and, in my view, nontheoretical—ideas as "hybridity."