Assignment :- African Literature

 Q-1 Wole Soyinka depicts a dystopian past as well as a dystopian present and future. Explain?

Ans:-

Introduction:-

Although very few critics have ventured to analyze Wole Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests owing to its apparent difficulty, those who have attempted simply see it as a metaphorical commentary of the sociopolitical situation in Nigeria. While their observations might be valid, taking into cognizance that the play was written in 1960 as part of the celebration of Nigeria's independence, the problem with such readings is that it does not take into account the structure of the play in which Soyinka traces the past to the present to forecast a dystopian future. While a utopic past and a dystopic present are often enacted as a narrative gesture that concomitantly leads to a utopian future, the reverse is the case in this play. What Wole Soyinka depicts is a dystopian past as well as a dystopian present and future. Therefore, my proposition in this paper is that more than being a work of post-independence disillusionment, Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests links the hopeless past with the fruitless present to project a bleak future. In this way, my point of departure in this essay is that while the writing of the play has been motivated by the betrayal of the common trust and hope as it relates to the Nigerian socio-political climate, the message of the play has a universal underpinning. In this respect, Soyinka insists that the atrocities that have so often characterized human interactions generally are unavoidable. Yet, by portraying the unavoidability of these human atrocities, Soyinka invariably quests for futurity that is utopian. My conclusion, therefore, is that within the aesthetic trajectory of Soyinka, the boundary between dystopian and utopian visions is not clear-cut: they are one and the same.

Wole Soyinka:-

Wole Soyinka, in full Akinwande Olu Wole Soyinka, was born on July 13, 1934, in Abeokuta, Nigeria. A member of the Yoruba people, Soyinka attended Government College and University College in Ibadan before graduating in 1958 with a degree in English from the University of Leeds in England. Upon his return to Nigeria, he founded an acting company and wrote his first important play, A Dance of the Forests, for the Nigerian independence celebrations. The play satirizes the fledgling nation by stripping it of romantic legend and by showing that the present is no more a golden age than was the past.

He wrote several plays in a lighter vein, making fun of pompous, westernized schoolteachers in The Lion and the Jewel and mocking the clever preachers of upstart prayer-churches who grow fat on the credulity of their parishioners in The Trials of Brother Jero and Jero’s Metamorphosis. But his more serious plays, such as The Strong Breed, Kongi’s Harvest, and even the parody KingBaabu, reveal his disregard for African authoritarian leadership and his disillusionment with Nigerian society as a whole. Other notable plays include Madmen and Specialists, Death and the King’s Horseman, and The Beatification of Area Boy. In these and Soyinka’s other dramas, western elements are skillfully fused with the subject matter and dramatic techniques deeply rooted in Yoruba folklore and religion. Symbolism, flashback, and ingenious plotting contribute to a rich dramatic structure. His best works exhibit humor and fine poetic style as well as a gift for irony and satire and for accurately matching the language of his complex characters to their social position and moral qualities.

From 1960 to 1964, Soyinka was co-editor of Black Orpheus, an important literary journal. From 1960 onward, he taught literature and drama and headed theatre groups at various Nigerian universities, including those of Ibadan, Ife, and Lagos. Soyinka was the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. After winning the Nobel Prize, Soyinka also was sought after as a lecturer, and many of his lectures were published notably the Reith Lectures of 2004, as Climate of Fear. Though he considered himself primarily a playwright, Soyinka also wrote novels The Interpreters and Season of Anomy and several volumes of poetry. The latter include Idanre, and Other Poems and Poems from Prison, published together as Early Poems; Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems and Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known.

Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests is a complex play in which there is a “gathering of the tribes” in a festivity in which the living asks their gods to invite some of their illustrious ancestors. But instead of legendary ancestors, Forest Father/Head the supreme divinity in Soyinka’s fictionalized world, sends the living “two spirits of the restless dead” referred to in the play as Dead Man and Dead Woman. Owing to the apparent difficulty of the play, very few critics have ventured to analyze it. Derek Wright points to the difficulty and elusiveness of the play when he states that it is “the most uncentered of works, there is no discernible main character or plotline, and critics have been at a loss to say what kind of play it is or if it is a play at all and not a pageant, carnival or festival” . Similarly, Mathew Wilson describes the play as a “baffled incomprehension” and “a resistant text that resists assimilation”

Soyinka stretches the expressionistic mode of dramaturgy beyond its normative form in this play, most critics have avoided it in their hermeneutic exercises. A Dance of the Forests denounces different forms of pollution such as deforestation, earth erosion due to trees cut, topsoil, air and water contamination by petrol fumes and other waste Consequently, forest inhabitants are not happy; they send the living two restless dead instead of glorious ancestors for the gathering of the tribes. This situational irony poisons the feast where different nations ought to celebrate their achievements. Since the forest may stand for nature, its rebuke to humans may stand for climate change that affects both humans and non-humans.

The issue even becomes more complicated because those who have attempted to analyze it simply regard it as a metaphorical commentary of the socio-political situation in Nigeria. One such critic is James Gibbs, who is a book review of the play, opines that “Nigeria up to and during 1960  the immediate context of the play”. Also, Benedict Mobayode Ibitokun describes the play as “a clean record of and report on the country’s behavioral patterns”. Whereas he applied some concepts in existential psychoanalysis in his reading of the play, he nevertheless concentrated on what he termed “the endemic slur”  of the socio-political situation in Nigeria. In the case of Biodun Jeyifo, though he concentrates on what he terms the “ritual problematic” of the play, he still regards it as an “appropriate response to the dilemmas of post-independence, postcolonial Africa”. Similarly, in consonance with the suggestion of Eldred Jones, most critics have interpreted “the struggle of Esuhoro and Ogun for the half-child” at the end of the play as “a struggle for the life, the soul of the then newly independent nation of Nigeria” 

Whilst their interpretations of the play being one of post-independence disillusionment might be valid, taking into cognizance that the play was written in 1960 as part of the celebration of Nigeria’s independence, the problem with such readings is that it does not take into account the structure of the play in which Soyinka traces the past to the present to forecast a dystopian future. According to Simon Gikandi, creative works of the African post-independence disillusionment are not works “of how colonialism ruined Africa, but of how African leaders aborted the great hopes and expectations of indigenous rule. This was literature bristling with indignation and dripping with venom and vitriol”. Similarly, Nair Supriya appears to suggest that “the phrase ‘Great Expectations and the Mourning After’ aptly sums up the narrative trajectory of post-independence malaise”. While Soyinka’s play under consideration can then be described as a work of post-independence disillusionment since it is concerned with the configuration of things in Nigeria when it was written in 1960, it also transcends such categorization with its foundational structure which compares the present with the past to telescope the future. In other words, it is reductive to see Soyinka’s play as just a work of post-independence disillusionment because it is not just concerned with criticizing the status quo, but also concerned with the criticism of the past. In this context, Soyinka’s characters are not so many victims of the present configuration of their society as they are of their past actions.

Wole Soyinka’s dystopian/utopian vision in A Dance of the Forests:-

The structure of a play is an important ingredient in the determination of the artistic vision of a playwright. But the structure to which I refer in this paper is not the conventional dramatic structure of exposition, complication, climax, anti-climax, and denouement that is the paraphernalia of plays in general; but the plot structure that is distinctive to individual plays or artistic visions. Booker identifies this distinctive plot structure, especially as it pertains to dystopian/utopian artistic vision when he avers that “Utopia and dystopia are very much part of the same project in that both describe the other world, spatially and/or temporally removed from that of the author and/or intended readership”. Therefore, using faraway imagined places is a feature of utopic and dystopic imagination. The only difference perhaps is that whereas in a dystopian landscape the faraway imagined place is in the past, in a utopian poetic space it is in the past as well as in the future. Michelle Erica Green describes Butler’s works as “dystopian because she insists on confronting problems that have occurred so often in human communities”. Those dystopian works confronting “problems that have occurred so often in human communities” imply that it is a work that is not just concerned with human atrocities in the present but also in the past. It is this that figures in Soyinka’s play under consideration. The play takes its readers to “another world” that is far removed and unfamiliar. Arguably, among Soyinka’s plays, it is A Dance of the Forests that takes its readers/or audience to a distant past to the Court of Mata Kharibu about eight centuries earlier. While Biodun Jeyifo sees the structure of the play as being “formalistically extravagant” and as not being controlled as well as polished, the point to be noted is the geographical elusiveness of Soyinka’s setting of a distant past in this play hints at its vision of utopianism or dystopian.

However, while a utopian past and dystopian present are often enacted as a narrative gesture that concomitantly leads to futurity that is utopian, the reverse is the case in this play. What Wole Soyinka depicts is a dystopian past as well as a dystopian present and future. In this way, Soyinka rejects négritude’s glorification and idealization of the African past. Based on this negative reconstruction of the African past, which is antithetical to its glorification in the works of négritude writers, Soyinka insists, to borrow the words of Wendy Brown, that there is no “lost way of life and a lost course of pursuits”. That Soyinka rejects négritude’s idealization of the African past is significant within the aesthetics of utopianism. This is so because in a work that quest for a utopian future, the past must be reconstructed in such a way that the living seeks to recapture the past in the future. But as Anyokwu observes “Soyinka” in this play “dramatizes man’s proclivity to selectively ‘edit’ his past, turn a blind eye to warts and welts of his ignoble past and choose to highlight the halcyon days instead”.

Likewise, according to Glenn A. Odom, what is revealed in this play of Soyinka is that the future will continue to repeat the present”, and one might add “and the past.” So while the “Jews thirsted for the lost kingdom of Isreal; the English, for the Saxon Golden Age; and the Chinese, for the Taoist Age of Perfect Virtue”, what Soyinka posits with his poetic ruminations is that there is nothing glorious in the African past, and nothing euphoric about the present. For instance, the atrocities committed by the actors in the Court of Mata Kharibu eight centuries earlier are repeated by their reincarnated selves under different circumstances in the present world.

Adenebi in his prior existence, eight hundred years ago, was the Court Historian to Mata Kharibu, and he argues that “War is the only consistency that past ages afford us”, thereby facilitating the death of many soldiers in a “senseless war” that he encouraged; and at present, he is the corrupt Council Orator responsible for the death of 65 passengers on a lorry he had licensed to carry passengers beyond its stipulated capacity. Another major character is Rola/Madam Tortoise who in her previous world was a whore, and Mata Kharibu’s wife responsible for the death of Dead Man and Dead Woman. She is in fact likened to Helen of Troy since it is her prostitution that caused the war, which Adenebi described as “divine carnage”. And in her present world, she is still a prostitute responsible for the demise of her two lovers. Also, there is Demoke, the carver who at present killed his apprentice out of envy; and who in his former existence as Court poet to Mata Kharibu tacitly supported bloodshed by not speaking against the waging of a senseless war.

Likewise, Wiegman sees the apocalyptic or dystopic work “which writes the present as the failure of the future”. This is what obtains in A Dance of the Forests in which Soyinka stretches Wiegman’s an explanation/or observation by writing the past and the present as the failure of the future. This is evident, as already noted, from the past and present violent actions of Soyinka’s major characters. This is a play therefore in which the past and the present conflate in a metonymic reenactment of violence and bloodshed. Soyinka traces the history of a hopeless past and compares it with a defective present to forecast a bleak future. It is exactly as noted by Jane Wilkinson that the play invites its audience “to face past and future without any romantic illusions”. In this regard, my argument in this paper is that more than being a work of post-independence disillusionment, Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests enacts a dystopian vision of humanity in general and the African continent in particular. Sunday O. Anozie says as much when he observes that as much as the play is African, “it is also universal in its application”

The dystopian landscape of the play is further made definite and unambiguous by the storyline in which there is a “gathering of the tribes” in a festivity in which the living asks their gods to invite some of their illustrious ancestors. These illustrious ancestors are supposed to be reminders of a magnificent past, which concomitantly is a telescoping of a glorious future. But instead of legendary ancestors, Forest Father Head the supreme divinity in Soyinka’s fictionalized world, sends the living “two spirits of the restless dead” referred to in the play as Dead Man and Dead Woman. As an all-knowing god in Soyinka’s aesthetic universe, it is significant that Forest Father chooses to send lackeys instead of great forebears. A logical interpretation then is that there are no great ancestors of this community of humans. As hinted in the play, the supposed glory of the empires of Mali, Songhai, Lisa, and Zimbabwe is all a mirage. For instance, the historical Mata Kharibu who Obi Maduakor describes as a “great African warlord”  is anything but great as portrayed in this play.

By creating a situation in which Demoke strikes down his apprentice out of spite and jealousy, Soyinka parodies the festivity of this human community. The supposed symbol of unity of this human community is in fact a symbol of conflict and rancor. Moreover, although the totem was meant to reach the sky, Demoke diminishes its height. This is nothing, but dystopian. That the symbol of this community that is supposed to reach the sky is diminished is a metaphorical manifestation that this community of humans cannot grow beyond their imperfection, nor can they escape it.

It is also significant that the Dead Man and Dead Woman have come not to celebrate with the living, but to judge them. Their repeated imploration “Will you take my case?”, which is also the opening statement of the play is an indication that they have come to right the wrong against them in their previous existence, eight centuries ago. Accordingly, instead of the festivity being characterized by social harmony, what is witnessed is acrimony between citizens, between the living and the dead, and between the divinities of the tribe. For instance, the Dead Man and the Dead Woman have come in judgment against the living, whilst the living tries to get rid of them. In this respect, Soyinka insists that the atrocities that have so often characterized human interactions are unavoidable. Yet, the depiction of the unavoidability of these human atrocities is implicitly a desire for a better world. In other words, the dystopian images in Soyinka’s play are strongly tied to his utopian vision. Jeyifo says as much with his observation that Soyinka’s most ambitious plays, among which is A Dance of the Forests are “appropriate responses to the human and social crises and dilemmas of post-independence, postcolonial Africa and beyond these, the crises and malaise of the modern world”. This appropriate dramatic response takes the form of a corrective through condemnation in Soyinka’s artistic vision.

According to him, “Butler does not offer a full-blown utopian ‘blueprint’ in her work, but rather a post-apocalyptic hoping informed by the lessons of the past”. It is within this frame of reference that Soyinka’s dystopian setting of the past, present, and future is concomitantly a desire for a utopian future. G. G. Darah notes that “the satirist discerns beneath the world of vice, wickedness, and failure, a kind of ideal world attainable only if people heed the satirist’s prescription for uprightness implied in his condemnation of individuals”. Similarly, James T. Presley sees utopias as works “which satirize the manners, customs, pursuits, and follies of the age or nation in which the writer lives” . Even though Soyinka’s work is not categorically a satire, yet it condemns the past and present follies of his characters. Giving this context, the Dead Woman’s observation that “A hundred generations have made no difference” is in itself a wish or desire for a better future. Also, the play’s criticism of Adenebi, the corrupt Council Orator responsible for the death of 65 passengers on a lorry he had licensed to carry passengers beyond its stipulated capacity can be read as a warning that such should not repeat itself in the future. In effect, Soyinka uses his play to warn his readers about the essence of learning from the lessons of the past.

As Miller rightly observes, “dystopias motivated out of a utopian pessimism in that they force us to confront the dystopian elements so that we can work through them and begin again”. In this sense, Dead Woman’s observation that nothing has changed after eight centuries is in itself a call for a new beginning that would guarantee a promising future. The past is gone, the present is here, but the future is yet to come. By painting a dystopian past and present, and forecasting a gloomy future, Soyinka warns that the mistakes of the past and the present should be avoided for a better future. It is perhaps in this vein that Sunday O. Anozie remarks that “A Dance of the Forests gave warning of disaster in 1960”. Soyinka’s wish, therefore, is not so much that the disaster or doom he predicts would come to pass, but that it should be avoided.

In an essay entitled “Feminism’s Apocalyptic Futures” in which Robyn Wiegman interrogates the question “Is There Life After Identity Politics?”, she seems to suggest that the import of the question lies not in its predictive element, but in its warning about the need for social transformation in the field of feminist studies, Therefore, the anxiety implicated in the question is not so much that the future of feministic studies is doomed, but the need to revive and re-engineer it. In this wise, artistic predictions are uttered not so much for them to be fulfilled as to avert their fulfillment. This is pointedly the case with Soyinka’s play. Abiola Irele concurs with this argument when he states that “For all the gloom that traverses work, and which is a reflection of our objective condition is in its primary nature a call to an active process of regeneration”. The interpretative burden of Anozie’s and Irele’s remarks as well as Wiegman’s argument is that Soyinka’s play is more of a warning rather than a prophecy.

Despite the dystopian images that populate Soyinka’s play, he still hints at the regeneration of the human world. For instance, the plot which is in itself dystopian still has a utopian element implicated in it. As already stated, the plot of this play is one in which there is a “gathering of the tribes” in a festivity in which the living ask their gods to invite some of their illustrious ancestors. These illustrious ancestors are supposed to be reminders of a magnificent past. But instead of legendary ancestors, Forest Father/Head, the supreme divinity of the play sends the living “two spirits of the restless dead”. It is this action of Forest Father that sets in motion the conflict of the play between the dead and the living, and between humans and the gods. But beyond these conflicts is the new world envisaged by Soyinka: a world in which, to borrow the words of Miller, all that is presently separated are united.

In his comment on Butler’s fictitious world in which humans and aliens inhabit the same space, Miller states that what is explored is “the possibilities for alternative and non-hierarchical definitions of gender and identity within which the difference of aliens and others can be accommodated rather than repressed”. He then adds that “any form of literature that seeks to help us see things anew is driven by a utopian impulse even if the work in question is dystopian”. Similarly, Ulrich Bach in his “Sacher-Masoch’s Utopian Peripheries” maintains that work with a utopian vision must “transcend the status quo”. Also, Karl Mannheim remarks that utopias “evoke images transcending those of the present reality”. This is exactly what obtains in Soyinka’s poetic universe, despite its dystopic and apocalyptic elements. By creating an aesthetic universe in which the living and the dead, and humans and divinities interact freely with one another, Soyinka transcends the status quo and helps his audience to see things anew.

Soyinka’s play under consideration is not an enactment of “what is” but “what could be.” It is not the way the world is, but his perception of how the world should be configured. It is noteworthy that this play is entitled A Dance of the Forests and not Forest. Taking into cognizance the major characters of this play, it can be extrapolated that there are three forests in the play: the forest of the gods, the forest of the dead, and that of the living; and as portrayed in the play, the three forests are in close proximity to one another. The Dirge-Man in this play, for instance, tells the living to “Leave the dead some room to dance”. It then means that in this play Soyinka breaks down the boundaries between life and death, and between humans and the divinities as a way of enacting a new world that is different from the present world. Thus, in contrast to Odom’s argument that the ending envisaged by Soyinka in this play “remains obscure”, it can be seen that he envisages a future utopian world in which all stratificational privileges, divisions, and boundaries would be eradicated.

But what difference does it make if divisions and boundaries are eradicated and there are still conflicts as depicted in Soyinka’s imaginative universe? It is worthy to note that a utopian world is not a perfect world. It is as Green rightly maintains that “a utopia does not have to be a ‘perfect’ society”. And commenting on this, Miller argues that “if this is the case, then utopian fiction has more to do with social/cultural/economic critique than with imagining perfection”. The argument of Green and Miller is that in a dystopian/utopian work; the socioeconomic, sociopolitical, and socio-cultural dynamics are critiqued not so much with the aim of achieving a perfect society, as that of achieving a better community. What is, therefore, significant in a utopian vision is not so much a perfect world as it is a better world or new beginnings in which there is a change in the status quo: what Jim Miller describes as “a post-apocalyptic hoping informed by the lessons of the past”.

This is what Soyinka expects of his readers/audience. More than participating in the making of meaning, he wants his readers/audience, in the same dramatic strategy of Bertolt Brecht in the Good Woman of Setzuan, to write the end to Forest Father’s statement. In the epilogue to Brecht’s play, the playwright acknowledges that the ending is not satisfactory, and he implores the readers/audience to write their own ending. However, in contrast to Brecht’s dramatic strategy of alienation or distancing effect, which impresses on the audience that what they are watching on stage is not real life, Soyinka’s ellipsis forces his readers to be engaged in the consequences of their action based on the play’s warning. Therefore, the end Soyinka’s audience is going to write would be predicated on whether they have heeded his artistic warning or not. Accordingly, despite the acknowledgment of his ineffectuality in the affairs of the human community, Forest Father still hints at a “post-apocalyptic hoping” that is informed by the lessons of the past. As he himself suggests, his fundamental reason for wanting to torture awareness from the souls of the living is that, perhaps, in new beginnings, they are going to have a change of heart, which obviously will lead to a better community.

Thus, while Darko Suvin sees Utopian fiction as “the verbal construction of a particular quasi-human community where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community”, what Soyinka enacts is a reversal of such “quasi-human community” in which the inhabitants have reached perfection.

Conclusion:-

In effect, Soyinka’s imaginative intervention/or contribution to the anthology of Utopian literary genre is that a writer does not necessarily have to create an imaginary future setting in which the inhabitants have attained perfection as in Thomas More’s Utopia and Chancellor Bacon’s New Atlantis as a demonstration of his/her utopian vision. Utopia does not necessarily have to be about a place. Sargisson says as much in her explanation that utopia is “the good place which is no place”. It can, therefore, be about an idea or a change in the status quo. In this respect, Soyinka rearticulates the critical yardstick for measuring and identifying utopian vision in imaginative works.

Furthermore, it can be argued within the framework of this essay that Soyinka’s artistic rumination within the ambit of utopian literary genre is that the past must not be constructed in such a way that it is idealized and romanticized as a projection of a blissful future. For him, the past and the present must be criticized for the future to be hopeful. As can already be deciphered, he critiques the past and the present and forecasts a dystopian future as a means to orient action that would avert its fulfillment. Therefore, Soyinka’s dystopian landscape is strongly tied with his utopian vision. He condemns and criticizes the past and the present actions of his major characters, and predicts a bleak future so that humans in general and Africans, in particular, would avoid the mistakes of the past and the present in the future. It is in this sense that his dystopian vision is concomitantly a desire for a utopian future.

Work Cited:-

(1)  Azumurana, Solomon Omatsola. "Wole Soyinka's Dystopian/Utopian Vision In A Dance Of The Forests". Scielo.Org.Za, 2014, http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0041-476X2014000200006. Accessed 18 Mar 2022.

(2) Wole Soyinka – Facts. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2022. Thu. 17 Mar 2022. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1986/soyinka/facts/>

(3) Soyinka, Wole. "A Dance Of The Forests: Soyinka, Wole, 1934-: Free Download, Borrow, And Streaming: Internet Archive". Internet Archive, 1963, https://archive.org/details/danceofforests00soyi/mode/2up. Accessed 17 Mar 2022.