Beyond Aesthetics: Use, Abuse, and Dissonance in African Traditions by Wole Soyinka (review)

In his most recent book, Nobel laureate, poet, essayist, and political activist Wole Soyinka offers a personal and poetic look at the politics and aesthetics of collecting. As a longtime art collector, Soyinka argues—usually passionately so—for the power of collecting as a vehicle for reclamation of Yoruba tradition and against dogmatic colonial and religious cultural cleansing. Beyond Aesthetics was developed and expanded from a three-part series of Richard D. Cohen Lectures delivered by the author at Harvard University in 2017. Of likely interest to art historians, the lectures were delivered concurrently with an exhibition at the Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art, which included objects from author's personal collection as well as the contemporary work of Nigerian artists Peju Alatise and Moyo Okedeji, among others. Following the lecture format, the book is split into three chapters: "Oga, Na Original Fake, I Swear!"; "Procreative Deities: The Orisa's Triumphal March"; and last, "From Aso-Ebi to N****wood." Like an unprintable profanity, Soyinka obscures "Nollywood," the common sobriquet identifying commercial Nigerian film and industry. The meaning of this gesture, not immediately explained, but derived eventually through the chapter's jaunty personal narrative, is representative of Soyinka's literary method of delivering meaning in Beyond Aesthetics. The discussion is achieved through highly personal narrative rather than organized chronologically, geographically, or by medium—this is not to say that Beyond Aesthetics is illogical, quite the contrary. However, much of the meaning and thematic application is discovered after reading and rereading, allowing the weaving storylines to permeate the consciousness in an organic way. Appropriately to the author's background, the text is best considered in the way one might process a well-written play—language, story, and characterization may not obviously express underlying sociopolitical ideology; rather, these elements allude to deeper insights of this nature.

In the first chapter, Soyinka explains the acquisition process of some of his favorite objects, replete with ample tangential and amusing commentary. True to his literary character, Soyinka's first object—an entire domestic Sango shrine—is not exactly an object and was never actually acquired, much to Soyinka's chagrin. The sacred objects comprising the ancestral shrine were retrieved in their entirety by a mystery curator before Soyinka was able to do so himself. In addition to the shrine, Soyinka discusses the acquisition of a bracelet from the Sungbo Eredo and a Korean Silla dynasty clay mug. The second chapter continues with a discussion of an overtly sexualized "unmatched pair" of objects from the author's collection: a male monkey and a caryatid. This much admired (or reviled, depending on the audience), nearly life-sized duo graced the entry of his home study, creating what he calls a "Field of Force," until they were stolen—never to reappear despite earnest attempts at recovery. Of the monkey-caryatid couple, Soyinka states: "My immediate purpose, of course, was to insist that we do not have to be solemn over antiquities or their substitutes, otherwise we present a distorted and prissy approach to the African art traditions" (pp. 80–81). The diversity of these objects and personal anecdotes serve to underscore two important aspects of Soyinka's deliberately tenuous definition of "aesthetics": first, that a collection and therefore the objects within are ultimately a private extension of the self; and second, that there is an inherent beauty and value in ancient objects. These aspects include a highly personal and broadly applicable definition of aesthetics, respectively, but in the context of Beyond Aesthetics, Soyinka most enthusiastically maintains that admiring, collecting, and conserving the material embodiment of Yoruba culture is a weapon of good against cultural annihilation at the hands of religious zealots: "as long as one Santeria, bembe, or candomblé remains, and is placed at the service of its adoptive community—even as a reference point, or warren of...