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

College Literature, Fall 2000 by Wilson, Matthew

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One of the most basic uses of personal experience as a mode of analogy was by a student who saw that one of the characters in the play, Rola/Madame Tortoise, was like his ex-girlfriend:

I can relate to the character of Madame Tortoise, simply because she says, does and reasons things as my ex-girlfriend does. Madame Tortoise as compared to Denise, my ex-girlfriend, is stubborn and as she stated, she is the master of her own fate. Denise and Madame Tortoise both restate that they have no regrets in life, so they believe. They are also similar in the way they treat men. Each will say that men are all fools, yet they have a need to be with as many men as possible.They play with men; they have to control the men just to prove that men are actually fools.

One could easily dismiss this passage, in Hesford's terms, as unearned appropriation, as easy universalizing. This student assumes that women like Madame Tortoise exist in all cultures, and in perceiving this, the writer has had an unproblematic cross-cultural experience.What he has done, of course, is to have failed to take into consideration, in Rosaldo's words, the "significant differences in tone, cultural form, and human consequences" that distinguish Soyinka's Rola/Madame Tortoise from Denise. He hasn't been able to deal productively with the fact that unlike Denise, Rola/Madame Tortoise is dual. In the present she is Rola, a notoriously promiscuous woman, but she also has an identity that abides throughout the ages, Madame Tortoise. This writer is confronting here the prime difficulty that most of the students had with A Dance of the Forests, a primary locus of the sense of dislocation in the play-the Yoruba's belief that the dead, the living, and the unborn coexist, and that, as Soyinka has written, the "deities stand in the same situation to the living as do the ancestors and the unborn, obeying the same laws, suffering the same agonies and uncertainties" (1976, 149). In the play, Rola is simultaneously herself and a transcendent self, Madame Tortoise, and in a flashback during the play she becomes one of her previous selves, the queen of Mata Kharibu, who lived some eight centuries before the main action of the play. Human identity, like that of the gods, is multiple, and the dead exist alongside the living.6

What this student is unable to grapple with (and this inability ends up being a tacit defense I would argue) is a conviction so deep as to be nearly invisible-that is of"our" American sense of a unitary identity in the face of the multiple identities possible in the play, a sense traceable to the idea of the universal Enlightenment subject. The student's inability to see outside his own frame of reference becomes even more interesting in light of another of Rosaldo's conceptual models, that of ritual "as a crossroads where distinct life processes intersect" (1989, 20). This would seem to describe perfectly what happens in A Dance of the Forests which is a ritualistic play about the intersection of the dead, the living, and the divine, but Rosaldo develops the metaphor of the crossroads even further and describes each person as such an intersection. Writing about a Japanese-American ethnographer, Rosaldo says that she is (and, by implication, we all are) "[m]ore a busy intersection through which multiple identities crisscross than a unified coherent self" (194). In having my students write about Soyinka's play, I wanted them to confront a basic assumption of our own culture that we are coherent and unified individuals. By asking them to make sense of a text which is an enactment of the threatening instability of identity and by providing them with conceptual tools which stressed provisionality and multiplicity, I created a situation in which they had been dislocated. And I would argue that is exactly what we want to happen in writing about other cultures. As Robert Burton has written: "Perhaps by encouraging students to represent in words a deepening of consciousness and openness to mystery, we can stimulate an awareness of the fragmentation and displacement of their own lives. . ." (1992, 118). In experiencing this kind of fragmentation, the students experience was analogous to culture shock, when we no longer recognize the world in ways that we have relied on throughout our lives. Translated into the terms of Fish's analysis, this kind of culture shock has nothing to do with superficial difference of custom, clothing, or what our students like to call "life style"; it has everything to do with fundamental challenges to how we conceive of the world.7