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

College Literature, Fall 2000 by Wilson, Matthew

To understand the postcolonial as this ambivalent site, I will turn first to the classroom dynamic and then to the writing of the students, a description that will imply answers to some of the problems I have posed. As I sensed their frustration with the play in the first week of discussion, I decided that they should read a text that I had found particularly helpful in the past, Renato Rosaldo's essay,"Grief and a Headhunter's Rage," the first chapter of his Culture and Truth. There, Rosaldo discusses his inability, over an extended period, to understand his informants' explanations for a crucial cultural practice-that of headhunting. He studied the Ilongots, a tribal people in the Philippines, and he writes that for "themselves, their neighbors, and their ethnographers, head-hunting stands out as the Ilongots' most salient cultural practice" (1989, 3).Yet when he asked the Ilongot men why they hunted heads, they could give him no explanation that satisfied him, that made sense to him. They said, simply, that the rage they experienced in bereavement impelled them to kill and decapitate other human beings. The essay is Rosaldo's account of how, through wrenching and dislocating personal experience, he began to understand the force of the Ilongots' explanations of this cultural practice. I thought Rosaldo's struggle with the incomprehensibility of the Ilongots explanation might serve as a useful model for the students' struggle with A Dance of the Forests, and in particular, I stressed what I saw as several useful conceptual tools.

The first conceptual tool was analogy as a mode of understanding. The ethnographer Michael Jackson has speculated, for instance, that if "there is any mode of thought common to all people, in all societies, at all periods of history, it is analogy" (1989, 171). Using Michel Foucault's analysis of the shift from a pre-scientific to a scientific discourse, Jackson argues that analogy, as a way of thinking about the world, was a dominant intellectual paradigm in Europe until the sixteenth century. Up to that time, Jackson says, following Foucault, "knowledge was principally a matter of discovering similitude in the order of things" (171)-in its most elementary form, say, that the structure of a bird's wing resembled the hand of a man. This kind of thinking also led to much that was, from our perspective, magical, where, for instance, among the Fang of Gabon, squirrel meat is forbidden for pregnant women, lest the child imitate the squirrel and refuse to come out of its burrow (173). During the sixteenth century in Europe, however, analogical thinking began to be displaced by a kind that focalized difference and that "regarded nature as an object that man dominates from a distance."This displacement also affected the ways in which Europeans "regarded primitive peoples.The separation of reason from affect, man from nature, entailed a greater emphasis on differences between educated Europeans and peoples thought to exist in a state of nature" (175). Analogical thinking, then, can create a discursive space where difference can be bridged through the discovery of similarities, and it can also provide a way to de-emphasize difference when confronting the other, particularly because difference has been taken, in our intellectual tradition, for so long to signify inferiority.