WEST AFRICA REVIEW ISSN: 1525-4488 Issue 9 (2006)

Uzoma Esonwanne

Over several decades, Biodun Jeyifo (BJ) has framed his scholarly career around Wole Soyinka. Whether celebrating Soyinka as a “titan” of modern African drama and theatre, taking him to task for dehistoricizing the “historical confrontation” on which Death and the King’s Horseman is based, mapping his distance from and proximity to postmodernism, or casting him as simultaneously mythopoeist and mythoclast, Jeyifo has construed his subject as a contradictory and complex intellectual who, as he puts it in his “Introduction” to Conversations with Wole Soyinka, “simultaneously speaks from a separate earth and to our common Earth” (xix). What has made Soyinka so compelling a figure for Jeyifo? What might his portrait of the writer disclose of himself as a critic? Why should we remind ourselves, on Jeyifo’s 60th birthday, of the nature and significance of this relationship between two of Africa’s most prominent intellectuals?

Who is Jeyifo’s Soyinka? Is he a globetrotting postmodernist or a faithful devotee of Ogun and Orisanla? And what of his writings? Are his explorations of Africa’s past nativist, as Said claims (82), or are the wellspring of “archetypes and matrices” from which he has drawn the resources “for exploring individual and collective experience” in Nigeria and Africa, as other critics suggest (Conversations xix)? As painted by Jeyifo, Soyinka’s portrait is that of a dynamic and versatile playwright, poet, novelist, and literary theorist and critic. But above all, he is an intellectual whose often complex literary responses to the age have been contradictory and, sometimes, even paradoxical. In some works he is the exponent of literary realism, but in others of literary modernism; some of his plays, seemingly abiding by what Northrop Frye calls “the tendency of comedy,” throw their doors open to the world (The Lion and the Jewel) (165), while others employ a medley of mystical states, mythical figures, and poetic discourse so dense as to create a creditable facsimile of the “abyss of transition.” In short, Jeyifo’s Soyinka is a highly provocative thinker and public intellectual; like Brecht, he appears convinced that “Contradictions are our only hope.”

As a critic, Jeyifo seems equally convinced of the virtues of contradiction. Once one of Soyinka’s most vocal critics, now he readily admits that he had been inattentive to “the subjective dimensions of artistic creativity” that Soyinka insisted upon (Wole Soyinka xv). To Soyinka’s cosmopolitan imagination Jeyifo now brings a critical rigor modulated by intellectual flexibility. In this critic and writer, now friends and now foe, seem shadows of each other; in this, too, they seem to shadow each other. Not the “death of the author” or the belatedness of the critic, but the reincarnation of each as the other’s doppelganger; might this not be the import of Jeyifo’s relationship with Soyinka? Thinking of this possibility allows us to perceive how African literary criticism and critics of African literature are, like their objects, being transformed.

Citation Format:

Uzoma Esonwanne. “‘Contradiction is our only hope’: Soyinka and BJ,” West Africa Review: Issue 9, 2006.

Copyright © 2006 Africa Resource Center, Inc.