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

College Literature, Fall 2000 by Wilson, Matthew

In responding to Soyinka's play, the students found that they could respond to blocks of A Dance of the Forests analogically, but they still felt they had no "mastery" of the play. In experiential terms, that frustration had some of its source in their previous education which hadn't equipped them to deal with radical uncertainty about meaning. But their frustration at their lack of "mastery" was also a reflection of an educational system that reaffirms

a model of interpretation in which the 'proper' interpreter is the already informed interpreter. This is the model behind most forms of literary scholarship, but it takes on a particular form when dealing with cross-cultural communication. When dealing with texts situated in another culture, we feel that what is needed is someone knowledgeable about the cultural and historical contexts of the work. (Dasenbrock 1992, 36)

In other words, since I told the students that I was not an "expert" in African literature, I was explicitly positioning myself against their expectations of how teachers embody authority. What I was trying to suggest to them, though, was that another model of interpretation was necessary, one that overturned the idea of the possession of mastery. Dasenbrock's argument on this point is that

we must break with our assumption that the only proper place from which to apprehend a work of art is the position of possession, the position of the expert. What we need is a model of reading, of interpretation, which redescribes the scene of reading not as a scene of possession, of the demonstration of knowledge already in place, or as a failure of possession, but as a scene of learning. (Dasenbrock 1992, 39)

And that model of interpretation, when it is enacted in the students' writing, is what this essay is addressing. As I tentatively moved toward that model in this class, though, I was engaging some of the students' deepest assumptions about education and writing. I suspect that they come to college for "mastery," and they tend to resist a pedagogy that wants to have them "immerse themselves in this feeling of confusion and displacement" (Burton 1992, 117) about how to make sense of postcolonial literatures.

In addition, the students' uncertainties and frustrations were increased by Rosaldo as a result of their own subject positions and life experiences. The class had very few traditional college age students, and only two students had any kind of minority perspective: a Jewish woman in her thirties and an adult student from Thailand who was still struggling with sentence-level problems. To me, fresh from teaching at a large urban multiethnic university, the rest of the students seemed somewhat provincial and largely monocultural. In another paper, I have written about using Rosaldo in a much more diverse classroom, and that classroom resembled the one that most writers about multiculturalism seem to envision-one with an array of different ethnic experiences and positions. Those experiences, in class discussion and in diverse points-of-view in student essays, enacted one of the main tenets of multiculturalism-the equal validity of very different cultural experiences. But in a monocultural classroom, the text itself necessarily becomes the sole locus of difference, and the students, with the help of Rosaldo, came to focus on personal experience as a mode of analogy, particularly because A Dance of the Forests seems to have as its organizing aesthetic principle something that the students felt was fundamentally alien.