Writing the postcolonial: The example of Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests

College Literature, Fall 2000 by Wilson, Matthew

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Although I am committed, through personal experience and conviction, to diversity and multiculturalism in the classroom, I have become increasingly concerned with how these concepts get translated into practice, particularly in the pedagogy of writing classes. I fear that postcolonial texts are frequently being used as litde more than a kind of multiculturalist mass tourism, what Stanley Fish has termed "boutique multiculturalism" (Fish 1997, 378).2 The student is taken on tours of other cultures-one class on a Chinese story, another on an Ugandan-tours which, like the network evening news, tame otherness and difference. And this taming dominates multicultural readers, where experience is interpreted in universalist terms, thus making us all, underneath, the same, except for some exotic surface differences.3 Exposed only to fragments of other cultures, the students' unconscious assumption of cultural superiority remains unchallenged, and their experience of multiculturalism becomes a confirmation of what they believe they already know. Like tourists on a twelve-day tour of ten countries, they may recognize quaint tourist sites, but they will have little sense of how life is lived in those "other" places, because we do not allow the central belief systems of these "other" cultures to confront our own. As Julie Drew has written: "Despite the good intentions of those who produce them, multicultural readers ... often promote a kind of `cultural tourism' that constructs students as free to travel, to observe, to remain removed from and unaffected" (1997, 298) by what they read of these other cultures. The stance toward other cultures encoded in multiculturalist readers, she continues, "does not compel students to negotiate or dialogue" (301) nor does it "require students to think through their own positions because theirs [is] . . 'natural' . . . [and] invisible" (301-02). These readers assume that "our" experience is the template against which all other cultures are measured, and another of the central governing assumptions of these textbooks is toleration-that all cultural differences must be tolerated because difference is merely a feature of the surface of things. These books, in Stanley Fish's terms, share the assumptions of a boutique multiculturalist who does

not and cannot take seriously the core values of the cultures he tolerates. The reason that he cannot is that he does not see those values as truly "core" but as overlays on a substratum of essential humanity ... We may dress differently, speak differently, woo differently, worship or not worship differently, but underneath (so the argument goes) there is something we all share (or that shares us) and that something constitutes the core of our identities. (Fish 1997, 379)

What I will try to argue for in this essay is a pedagogy that asks students to 11 take seriously the core values" of other cultures by using culturally resistant texts to make students confront their own Enlightenment assumptions about how experience can be universally construed.

In critiquing this kind of boutique multiculturalism in writing courses, I am speaking in part from personal experience-from having lived for extended periods in Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, and Poland-and I bring that experience to our current debates over multiculturalism. My working hypothesis is that unless students are unsettled, that unless they begin to examine fundamental cultural issues, then multiculturalism, as a project, will fail, for as Thomas West has argued, we need a multicritical pedagogy, one "that realizes the transformative potential of the otherness of the other, of that which is neither always understandable or assimilable." (1998, 87). I realize that translating this agenda into pedagogy is quite challenging, especially because it relies on finding texts that are culturally resistant, ones which cannot be easily read in terms of the students' pre-existing cultural or aesthetic categories. Texts like these, which resist assimilation, will produce in the students (and in the teacher) a good deal of frustration, and I read the frustration of dealing with a sense of unhomeliness in writing as the challenge to a multiculturalist pedagogy.4 In the rest of this essay I want to focus on what happened when I stumbled across one such resistant text-Wole Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests.

Before going on to discuss that class, though, I need to pause to emphasize that this was not a literature class; it was a writing class. For me that meant that I wasn't particularly interested if the students "got it right" in a literary sense. In a writing course, I find notions of the students"mastery" of the text largely irrelevant. In my teaching experience, I have seen too many students tyrannized by (and silenced by) what I've come to call "the pedagogy of the right answer," the impression that they're given by many of their teachers that there is only one right interpretive answer and that you must be an "expert" or at least consult an expert's opinion before you have anything to say that could be remotely interesting.5 I wanted to structure a class in which the students had to struggle without either being given interpretations or guided to them. I wanted to immerse the students in a foreign world and then have them struggle, in an almost classic way, with the difficulties inherent in making meaning of the radically alien, difficulties that are all too often, I suspect, evaded in multicultural writing classes.