Ode to Chaos and Amnesia: Fractured Narrative and Heteroglossia as Postcolonial Othering in Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests

Abstract

In the light of the increasing globalisation of culture and the increasingly amorphous character of the contemporary world, literature has sought to refract and reinscribe this indeterminate or fractured nature of human society and civilisation. What is more, the postmodern climate of the global world also captures the very collapse of social and intellectual categories of modern literature, a fractured or fragmented “mirror” which in turn signposts the malaise, the psychic morass and the moral-cum-spiritual chaos of history and human experience. In the postcolonial ‘peripheral’ experience, this crisis of consciousness is doubly spectral, what with its loss of ontologic wholeness and epistemic integrity as a result of its contact with the imperialist West. Part of the fall-out and after-effects of this historic encounter is the systematic and methodical denigration and bastardization of an autochthonous African way of life and the corresponding adoption and adaptation of the Western way of life.

Nigerian artists and writers, having received their education in Western-styled schools, naturally write in foreign languages, particularly English. Hence, in this paper we examine Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests to analyse how his “Yoruba Thought, English Words” or the (un)holy marriage of Western ideas and Yoruba (African) belief-systems iconises the fractured character of postcolonial narrativity.