2 - SatiricalRevelations

Summary

Satire is one of the two principal ways by which Soyinka, as it were, pounces on the various issues with which he engages. His work easily divides into comedy and tragedy, with the latter including texts which are serious in mood, but which do not wholly conform to any conventional meaning of the term. Bernth Lindfors’ use of the term ‘range’ in his description of Soyinka's work is suggestive of the idea of a continuum which, in my view, best describes the distribution of the satiric and the tragic within the writer's work, attesting to his desire to operate within received generic categories whilst simultaneously making them bear the distinctive multi-faceted character of his dual inhabitation of African and Western traditions. Thus, in Soyinka's creative practice, generic identity is subjected to the same logic of transformation as that evident in his representation of subjectidentity, as it is brought to the moment where the law of order itself is exposed to the modifying force of disorder – what Niyi Osundare so aptly refers to as Soyinka's ‘near-Messianic passion to re-create, to remake’ things,’ (Maja-Pearce 86) with a view to revealing what the writer himself in Opera Wonyosi describes as ‘the maggot-infested underside of the compost heap’ (SSP 300) of post-colonial power.

Opera Wonyosi, first produced in the late seventies, was very much the culmination of a distinctive satirical style that had evolved over a long writing career. It is visible in Soyinka's Ibadan undergraduate days, most spectacularly in the performance he and his fellow members of the Pyrates Confraternity put on during their public outing, which included colourful dress as well as singing in a style presumed typical of real pirates. This strain of hyperbole finds its early written expression in Soyinka's 1950s mini-travelogues about Europe. In a 1955 letter to the editor of the University of Ibadan student magazine, The Eagle, Soyinka's piratical bravado of old is very much in evidence, as indicated by the following excerpt:

I'msure you must be hoping that I'mdead… You ought to know I'm pretty hard to kill …Why, only yesterday a car bumped into me and had to be taken to the scrap iron-dealer, while I walked home with no worse damage than some engine-oil on my trousers. (Gibbs 38)