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

College Literature, Fall 2000 by Wilson, Matthew

Before going on, I want to stress that these essays were second drafts and were written after an extended discussion of the play. When I saw how difficult the play was for the class, I dropped one of the texts we were going to discuss in order to concentrate on A Dance of the Forests, and although the student I just discussed had not been able to come to a satisfactory interpretation of the play, he was able to articulate why he could not interpret, and this meta-critical move is a substantial achievement in itself These first two examples would seem to lead to one conclusion about cross-cultural interpretation. If we are going to use culturally resistant texts, ones that create a sense of dislocation, then we have to allow our students to fail. Ordinarily, in a writing course, we would expect, even from an exploratory essay, internal coherence: positions taken, argued, modified and/or rejected. But in writing about other cultures, students have to be allowed to grapple with cultural difficulty, and they must be allowed to fail to make sense of that difficulty. I would argue that the failure is an enactment of the largest problem of crosscultural understanding, but that failure is also courting the possibility that the student will conclude that such understanding is utterly impossible. In other words, students, in their writing, have to be allowed to come to a basic conclusion that contradicts the very premise of writing about other cultures. What that means for the quality of their essays is that they are not going to be polished and traditionally unified; they are going to be rough-hewn, troubled, but reflective.

If as I said earlier, the writing assignment is framed so that students cannot reject other cultures out of hand, they must also be granted the opportunity to articulate why they cannot understand. In so doing, they are creating a kind of meta-discourse in which they are writing about the process of and the conditions for cross-cultural interpretation. Of course, this is setting the bar quite high, and we need to ask within this pedagogy, how much can we legitimately demand that students accomplish? If we are to believe that there is a kind of built-in myopia which allows us, in Rosaldo's terms, to conceive of ourselves as "transparent cultural selves" (1989, 208), how can we create situations in writing which will allow students to become culturally visible to themselves? The difficulty of achieving this might even be increased in institutions like mine where most of the students are first-generation college students who have attended community colleges for the first two years of their education. Perhaps they have, because of their class background, a greater investment in their own cultural transparency, an investment that's seemingly unshakable because it is so perilously achieved.

I am going to suggest some tentative answers to these questions through the example of another student who wrote an essay which used personal experience as analogy and which created a meta-discourse. This essay was written by a graduate student who used Rosaldo to abandon "the precarious perch of pretended objectivity" in order to focus on "the force of emotion." She used this "force," specifically her experience in her own life of grief and rage, as a set of analogies to approach the experience of the Ilongots and the Yoruba. As she writes in the middle of her paper: