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

College Literature, Fall 2000 by Wilson, Matthew

I grew up, as many of us did, on the fare of European literature. Even in school we didn't have too much problem understanding the world of ... Shakespeare_ . Shaw, Galsworthy, Moliere [sic], and Ibsen, and, frankly, I'm irritated when people from outside my world say they find it difficult to enter my world. It's laziness, it's intellectual laziness . . . especially today when communication is a matter of course.... I find no difficulty at all in entering into Chinese literature, Japanese literature, Russian literature, and this has always been so. I think the barrier is self-induced. "This is a world of the exotic, we can not enter it, " The barrier is self-created. By now it has to be a two-way traffic. There can be no concessions at all; the effort simply has to be made. (Soyinka 1988, 779-80)

As Ngugi wa Thiong'o has pointed out in Decolonising the Mind, students in Africa were taught European literatures as "the great humanist tradition," but the location of that tradition was "necessarily Europe and its history and culture." As a result, "the rest of the universe was seen from that center" (1986, 18), and European writers "were often taught as if their only concern was with the universal themes of love, fear, birth and death" (91). Soyinka, though, doesn't seem to be thinking of these non-African literatures in terms of the great humanist tradition. He isn't claiming that European writers are "universal" while non-European writers are parochial. Rather he seems to be saying that just as he could "enter" the cultural specificity of the texts of these writers, he expects non-Africans to be able and willing to "enter" the cultural specificity of his world. He seems to be claiming that the nature of reading itself (whether it be fiction, autobiography, or drama) lends itself to "entering" another cultural universe, and that if Western readers have difficulty doing that with African texts, their own preconceptions of"exoticism" get in the way of the act of reading and interpretation.

I reproduced this passage from the interview with Soyinka and used it in class to frame the students' struggle with A Dance of the Forests; I told them I saw their writing as an explicit answer to Soyinka's challenge. Is there a symmetry between the student in a former colony reading Ibsen, and a classroom of American students trying to make sense of a play by Soyinka, a contemporary Nigerian? In other words, is it as easy for us to "enter," in Soyinka's words, the world of the Yoruba as it was for Soyinka to enter into the worlds of Eastern and Western cultures? This challenge of Soyinka's also points to an important, and often ignored, part of the dynamic in post-colonial writing. As the writers of The Empire Writes Back have argued, post-colonial literatures 11 present us with writers and readers far more 'absent' from each other than they would be if located in the same culture; they present a situation which in some cases . . . provides a totally ambivalent site for communication" (Ashcroft 1989, 186). One might argue that this kind of ambivalence has been increased by the asymmetrical positions of American and African students. In Africa, Western culture is going to be much more present than African culture is present here where-if the students know anything about Africa-such knowledge is usually about military coups or about inter-ethnic violence. My focus in this essay, then, is going to be on the postcolonial as such an ambivalent site, and on what happens to students entangled in that ambivalence as they try to write about a culturally resistant text.