“The Purest Mode of Looking”: (Post)Colonial Trauma in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman

The starting point of this essay is Wole Soyinka’s (in)famous claim concerning his Death and the King’s Horseman that the “Colonial Factor is … a catalytic incident merely.” Since that assertion appears to be at odds with the central movement of the play, almost to the point of missing a truth that simply cannot be missed, the essay aims to address a question first posed by Anthony Appiah, “why [does] Soyinka feel the need to conceal his purposes?” The focal point of the answer will be Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit (“deferred action”), especially as revised through Cathy Caruth’s seminal work on trauma theory. Through an extended rhetorical analysis of the play, the essay details how the subject of colonization can be understood as the subject of trauma precisely to the extent that the experience of colonization entails an originary missing of the event itself. The essay’s final section explores how such a missing yet offers an ethical opportunity, the bearing witness to what it means not to see.