Orality in writing: its cultural and political significance in Wole Soyinka's Ogun Abibiman.

In "New Trends In Modern African Poetry," Tanure Ojaide observes that poetry in Africa is [...] currently enjoying an unprecedented creative outburst and popularity (4). This popularity, according to him, seems to arise from "some aesthetic strength hitherto unrealized in written African poetry which has successfully adapted oral poetry technique into the written form" (4). Though written in English, the poetry carries the African sensibility, culture, and worldview, as well as the rhythms, structures, and techniques of oral tradition, resulting in what Wole Soyinka calls "double writing," or interweaving of various ethnic, geographic, personal, and peculiar African oral features into the European-derived written form ("Neo-Tarzanism" 319). Such oral features include ceremonial chants, tonal lyricism, poetry of the primal drum and flute, proverbs, riddles, myths, songs, folktales, the antiphonal call-and-response styles, and the rhythmic, repetitive, digressive, and formulaic modes of language use.

This use of African oral tradition is abundantly evident in the works of major African writers. To the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo, the artist's vocation is a priestly office charged with maintaining the culture of his/her society as a whole. Heavensgate, Distances, and Limits, make this claim evident. Like Okigbo, Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor is preoccupied with African folk traditions, as well as the damaging effects of the European presence in Africa. As suggested by the title of his collection Rediscovery and Other Poems, the poetry is chiefly concerned with the plight of a contemporary Africa uprooted from its traditional past by contact with an uncomprehending Europe and the poet's attempts to regain this past.

Use of traditional African oral discourse is also discernible in the poetry of Southern Africa, especially poetry against apartheid. David B. Copland's analysis of Basotho sefela (songs of the inveterate travelers) elucidates the oral content of this poetry, and it shows that sefela springs from traditional praise poems common throughout Southern Africa (qtd. in White 7). Nor is the oral emphasis restricted to Western and Southern Africa. In East Africa, the two major poets, Jared Angira and Okot p'Bitek, use oral textual features to reflect African culture. Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino, for instance, relies heavily on traditional oral literature in its use of Acoli proverbs and songs. The most obvious markers of orality in the text are the acknowledged borrowings, indented quotations, that Lawino uses to illustrate kit Acoli in many respects.

That a new literary orientation exists in contemporary African Literature cannot be doubted. Though the long list of African writers using and expanding features of oral discourse is enormous, I focus on Wole Soyinka's Ogun Abibiman because not much work on orality in Soyinka's poetry has been done. Moreover, Wole Soyinka has often been accused of relying too heavily on European models in his writing. Although he does not deny his use of such models, because he advocates literary eclecticism, he has consistently argued for the African basis of his poetry in essays such as "Neo-Tarzanism," "The Writer in a Modern African State," and "The Choice and Use of the English Language." Surrounded by controversy over its African or European sources, Soyinka's work becomes viable for a study such as this, which situates African literature within a new trend.

In discussing orality in Soyinka's Ogun Abibiman, I suggest that even Soyinka's use of neometaphysical strains, double- and triple-barreled neologisms, cadences of sprung rhythm, and complex punctuation and language, which many think are derived from European forms, have their basis in Ifa divination and African apae (appellation or praise) poetry as well. As Soyinka argues in "Neo-Tarzanism," the language of his poetry is not that of the common African oral poems, which, "being easiest to translate, have found their way into anthologies and school texts; it is not merely those lyrics which because they are favorites at festivals of the Arts haunted by ethnologists [...] supply the readiest source material for [...] academics" (313). Instead, it is the kind that, like the sculpture, dance, and music of Africa, integrates various media of expression "into the moulding of the sensibility which tries today to carve new forms out of the alien words, expressing not only the itemised experience, but reflecting the unified conceptualization of the experience" (327). Soyinka calls this strategy "selective eclecticism" (329) and argues that the "[t]raditional poetry [he uses] is [...] also to be found in the very [...] unique temper of world comprehension that permeates language for the truly immersed" (313). There was as much neometaphysical strain and "sprung rhythm" in traditional African poetry, he adds, as in the poetry of Hopkins and the others he was alleged to have copied (319).

Concentrating on Ogun Abibiman, its theme of Black nationalism, of Africa's liberation struggles, and its relations to traditional African war poetics, I argue that Soyinka uses Ogun Abibiman to highlight his position, taken in Myth, Literature and the African World, that African literature can be expressed through traditional African categories. He demonstrates, as Stuart Sim points out, "that `the self-apprehension' of the African world in terms of concepts and categories can be embodied in properly African cultural forms, forms which can be considered to have artistic merit" (376). In view of this remark, the fact that critics have not paid much attention to African cultural forms in Soyinka's Ogun Abibiman comes as a surprise. To date, criticism on the poem, such as W. B. Last's "Ogun Abibiman" and Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie's "A Comment on Ogun Abibiman," has thematized the poem's contemporary links with Africa's liberation struggles in Southern Africa. Very little or no attention has been paid to the poem's relations to oral African war poetry; yet it is to such poetry that the postcolonial Soyinka returns, rewriting it for a sociopolitical purpose.

African war poetics comprise the unique discursive practices that operated as war strategies in precolonial Africa, especially in Zulu izibongo (Finnegan, World Treasury 120-34);Yoruba oriki and war poetry (Beier 38-41, 120; Finnegan 152-54); Galla gheraera from Ethiopia (Trask 113); gabay war songs from Somalia (Finnegan 101); Dinka war/hunting poetry (Deng 202); imigubo and imihubo war poetry of the Ngoni of Malawi (Finnegan, Oral Poetry 201); Ashanti war poetry from Ghana (Nketia, Drumming 107-12, 147); Shona detembo rehondo from Zimbabwe (Hodza and Fortune 32, 339-44); Swahili tenzi, the long religious poems dealing with the heroic deeds of Muslim heroes; the Lianja Epic, the long prose narrative of the Nkundo of Zaire; and the Sunjata Epic of Somalia and Senegambia, which narrates the exploits of the hero Sunjata.

This precolonial African war poetics characteristically included making reference to the presence of, and the human dependence on, gods, spirits, supernatural forces, and ancestors in times of war or national emergencies; using an engaged poetic voice to stir up public sentiments against an imminent danger to the community; stressing the virtues of group strength, heroism, and patriotism; resorting to particular oral generic modes, like the victory ritual of song and celebration, drum poetry, dancing, and chanting, which together give the discourse a public, sociopolitical character; and using special technical features, like detailed descriptions of war objects and a dramatization of war situations. These descriptions, usually couched in short verse form (to fit the urgency of a war situation) and punctuated with emphatic repetition, puns, proverbs, parallelism, appellations, alliteration, and animal and plant imagery, represented compressed ways of expressing imminent victory. These traditional devices, repressed for decades in anglophone African poetry as a consequence of colonialism, are the discursive strategies that Soyinka redeploys in Ogun Abibiman. They are used as countercolonial discourse against the imposed European knowledges, values, disciplines, and institutions that were part of the imperial state apparatus during the colonial period.

The title words "Ogun" (Yoruba god) and "Abibiman," an Akan word Soyinka defines as "the Black [Abibi] Nation [man]; the land of the Black Peoples; the Black World; that which pertains to, the matter, the affair of, Black peoples" (Ogun Abibiman 23), were initially oral signifiers limited to particular ethnic groups, the Yorubas of Nigeria and Akans of Ghana, respectively. But in carrying forward these references through a written form, Soyinka broadens their conceptual reference to give the text a more pan-African character. Ogun, the god of iron, war, lightning, creation, and transition, thematizes traditional African war poetics; he embodies action, primal energy, and destruction, on one hand, and passivity, regeneration, and resolution of conflicts, on the other. Soyinka succinctly alludes to this multiple nature of the god in his essay "And After the Narcissist?":

 
   Ogun is the antithesis of cowardice and Philistinism, yet within him is 
   contained also the complement of the creative essence, a bloodthirsty 
   destructiveness. Mixed up with the gestative inhibition of his nature [is] 
   the destructive explosion of an…