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 accused of relying too heavily on European models in his writing. Although he does not deny his use of such models, because he advocates literary eclecticism, he has consistently argued for the African basis of his poetry in essays such as "Neo-Tarzanism," "The Writer in a Modern African State," and "The Choice and Use of the English Language." Surrounded by controversy over its African or European sources, Soyinka's work becomes viable for a study such as this, which situates African literature within a new trend.

In discussing orality in Soyinka's Ogun Abibiman, I suggest that even Soyinka's use of neometaphysical strains, double- and triple-barreled neologisms, cadences of sprung rhythm, and complex punctuation and language, which many think are derived from European forms, have their basis in Ifa divination and African apae (appellation or praise) poetry as well. As Soyinka argues in "Neo-Tarzanism," the language of his poetry is not that of the common African oral poems, which, "being easiest to translate, have found their way into anthologies and school texts; it is not merely those lyrics which because they are favorites at festivals...