Soyinka and Pasolini—Beyond Negritude

1.

Fanon, in the vein of his critical stance towards Negritude (and its concomitant Orphism, even as it paradoxically denies any non-African influence) famously criticised the adaptation of Greek mythology and its ‘Mediterranean values’ to (post)colonial contexts. He says in The Wretched of the Earth (1965):

Now it so happens that during the struggle for liberation[…]all the Mediterranean values—the triumph of the human individual, of clarity, and of beauty—become lifeless, colorless knickknacks. …those values which seemed to uplift the soul are revealed as worthless, simply because they have nothing to do with the concrete conflict in which the people are engaged. (37-38)

His negativity is understandable. The usage of ‘Greco-Latin’ myth seems to come out a sense of insecurity on the part of the colonised intellectual (like Soyinka), and a sense of superiority on the part of the colonialist bourgeoisie (like Pasolini), which lauds the perceived purity and universality of the so-called classics above all else. The assumption that the essence of these classics can be so easily transposed does disservice to the classics themselves, which are profound in their original context, but which become ‘lifeless, colourless knickknacks’ when they are forced to speak to third world experience with which they do not have necessarily anything to do.

While Fanon’s arguments are provoking, he betrays a lack of faith in the transcendent capacity of mythology (of all cultures) to speak to all mankind and to bear timelessly resonant implications; Wole Soyinka and Pier Paolo Pasolini on the other hand evince a belief in this. Soyinka’s Bacchae of Euripides (1973), and Pasolini’s Appunti per un’Orestiade africana (‘Notes for an African Orestaia’) (1970) are hybrid dramatic adaptations which may be interpreted in light of their ambition of making Greek drama relevant to a modern African context. Their hybridity comes out of a reconciliatory impulse which recognises natural parallels between the Hellenic and the African, and a politically informed ambition of illuminating modern African societies in flux by drawing comparisons between them and points in Greek history, especially as they pertain to the false dichotomy between reason and unreason.

I argue that in Pasolini there is a confused romanticism and nostalgic tendency which makes him unable to see Africa as it really is; perennially complex, multivalent. This unwitting reductionism ultimately dooms his project to a certain primitivist superficiality and lends credence to Fanon’s grouse. Conversely, Soyinka’s adaptation, illuminated by his lifelong critique of the essentialist myths of negritude (even while accepting to some degree the necessity thereof), as well as his frank understanding of African society and his usage of a specific and profound point of reference in his comparison of the Ogun myth to that of Dionysus, provides a more authentic and more serious, universally relevant syncretic vision.

2.

To refresh on Negritude momentarily. The term is notoriously ambivalent, but it broadly describes a mainly Francophone response to colonialism and how it affected Africa and Africans, especially as espoused by Leopold Senghor, as Irele (1990:67) summarises. Negritude constituted a reactionary valorisation of blackness and of Africa: ‘a passionate exaltation of the black race, associated ‘with a romantic myth of Africa’, whose essential project was the ‘rehabilitation of Africa’(ibid:69). The ideology ultimately relies upon the idea that there is something exclusively essential to blackness and to Africa. Senghor held that this essentiality comes down to the relative corporal, rhythmic sensuousness of Africans, as opposed to the rationality of the Occidental. Soyinka’s relevant satirical summary of this idea was: ‘Reason is Greek; emotion African’(1993:176).

Needless to say, this reductive essentialism is problematic (and false), but perhaps we can understand the historical necessity of reactionarily rescuing the tarnished image of Africa and doing some salutary work to the black ego, as well as fostering the recognition of commonalities between black people globally. Above all, despite its foundational claims, Negritude is a synthesist vision, which at ts best encourages the black person to reconcile with the realities of the modern, post-slavery, post-colonial world, while never losing view of their ancestral history, and thus achieving a kind of authentic subjectivity.

It is clear what Pasolini’s affinity with Negritude would have been: he says in his African travel diaries ‘Negritude…will be the way’(Siciliano, 1982:265). But, besides his genuine concern for the ‘Third World’ his ‘panmeridional’ (i.e the Global South) consciousness (see Trento, 2010) and a desire to see Africa progress past the morass of colonialism and post-colonial wars, he is in many ways the prime candidate for the pitfalls of reductionism. He is unable to see past the myth of Africa and actually realise the progressive potential of Negritude, which is the self-actualisation of Africans through debunking myths of African inferiority and the artistic and political deployment of African ideas in the face of postcolonial modernism. Trento (2012), for instance, has argued that despite his affinity for the global proletariat, Pasolini’s descriptions of Italian-colonised Africa were not different from the likes of the exoticist, imperialist Marinetti and the ‘colonial construction of ‘Mediterranean Africa’ (ibid:292). The cloying odour of romanticism and primitivism degrades Pasolini’s revolutionary vision, even as he tries to move past an aestheticization of poverty and atavism. Let us see how this manifests in his attempt to create an African Orestaia.

We see Pasolini’s translucent reflection in a shop window in Africa. The impression is that behind every shot in this film, there is the implied individual gaze of the European auteur, with all the neocolonial implications of this. His aim:

I have come to film. But to film what? Not a documentary or a film. I have come to film notes for a film. This film would be the Orestaia of Aeschylus, filmed in the Africa of today, in modern Africa. [1:00-2:00]

Pasolini finds parallels between this hybrid, transitional modern Africa and the Argos in which Aeschylus’s Orestaia begins. His voice speaks over moving-portraits of autochthonous Africans, reminiscent of the apotheotic ethnographic portraits of Pierre Verger, as he chooses potential cast members and settings, as he suggests an American jazz singing scene (he is silent, though, when he uses real war footage): we imagine the film without really seeing it. He recounts: following his matricide of Clytemnestra to avenge his father, Orestes is hounded by the Erinyes, ‘the goddesses of ancestral terror”. He is protected from them by Apollo, who brings him to Athena, “goddess of democracy and reason” and patron of Athens. She establishes the first human law court to absolve Orestes (here Pasolini shows images of African students at the university of Rome – evidently the new, rational arbiters). The conclusion is that “the Furies (i.e Africans) are transformed by the goddess Athena (i.e. Europe) from goddesses of ancestral terror into goddesses of the irrational – which endure alongside the rational democracy of the new state (i.e ‘Modern African)’”--parenthetical inserts mine.

Interestingly self-critical, Pasolini interviews the African students at the University of Rome whom he considers to be fulfilling the role of Orestes, bringing civilization to their homelands, and suggests to them that this period of democratic transformation is the basis of his identification of Africa with Ancient Greece. Their response takes the form of collective bemusement, if not outright scorn. Pasolini is first of all reminded that “Africa is not one thing” – it is vast continent with diverse realities and histories (including, as we must be reminded, diverse political systems historically, from imperialism to democracy). This is the general form the criticism takes, which I would largely agree with. Pasolini is chastised rightly for indulging in essentialist myths about African and its perceived homogeneity and archaism, and for the idea of democracy as being brought through colonialism as an ideal model for Africa (if it indeed exists), even though a few profess to some tenuous belief that his adaptation could work. One tells him bluntly, however, that despite fulfilling the role of an Orestes who travels for education, “We haven’t come to discover a better world. We are discovering a new world.”[56:01]

In the end, Pasolini speaks to the political relevance of his film:

it must refer to the African ideology of those [independence] years, which probably had its symbol in Senghor, the president of Senegal. This is the idea that the new Africa.. must be a synthesis of modern, independent, free Africa, and of ancient Africa. [1:01:53]

This is revealingly ambivalent: Pasolini intuits the need for a syncretic vision of Africa, which reconciles its past with its present; but in saying this he also affirms the view of Africa as a primitive monolith, which has in all areas a consistent past, and one consistent present and fails to understand that the continent, with its historically complex and diverse nationalities and politics, like every other entity, is constantly in flux. Additionally, by his phrasing, he implies that ancient Africa, whatever he means by that, was not ‘free’ or ‘independent’. His valorisation of Senghor is telling. While he may believe that he is truly on the side of the lumpenproletariat, and paradoxically at the same time thinking that he is moving past his attraction to primitivism, he fails to realise that he is actually supporting a privileged, western-university-educated mode of being, which is of little relevance to actual lived experience of the proletariat; much like Fanon warns against. Soyinka relevantly has this to say about the Negritude’s bourgeois trappings:

even in a country like Senegal where Negritude is the official ideology the regime, it remains a curiosity for the bulk of the population and an increasingly shopworn and dissociated expression even among the younger intellectuals and literateurs. (1976:135)

Pasolini is unable to make positive use of the flawed Negritude vision of an ideal ancient Africa; instead denigrating it as irrational, and using the Occidental as a paradigm instead; his amounts to a kind of whitewashed Negritude; Negritude without Africa.. Siciliano rightly criticizes the development of this viewpoint: ‘One might say that in him an old cultural dream—exoticism—donned progressive clothes’(1982:265).

Shockingly, these problems have not struck a critic like Usher (2014:114) who insists ‘None of this, however, is sentimental; nor does it romanticise African “primitivism.’, while making no mention of the criticism of the African students’ criticisms. Indicatively, he approves of Pasolini’s usage of real footage from the Biafran war to illustrate the Trojan War. I personally find Pasolini’s appropriation of these images of people’s real suffering as illustrations for his adaptation repulsive, regardless of whatever arguments about parallels he claims to be making. This, to me, shockingly insensitive attitude encapsulates the problem of the primitivist impulse, again a confirmation of Fanon’s argument. Despite all good intentions, it results in an absolute inability to view the so-called primitive directly; they are merely illustrations and not people with real lives and destinies; their past is a fiction of the appropriator’s imagination. What is the alternative?

3.

Soyinka has criticized Negritude as: ‘infantile regression’, the work of ‘Neo-tarzanists’ (1993:p.175), who delight in Senghor’s insipid Uncle-Tomist dictum of valorised black emotivity which encourage such extrapolations as Pasolini’s Athenian reason versus African unreason. But this is the same Soyinka who has delimited an ‘African world-view’, which he holds as distinct from the European. The necessity of this African world-view is for the self-actualisation of the African on African terms to protect from neocolonialist impulses both well- and ill-intentioned:

We black Africans have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of colonization – this time by a universal-humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social neuroses and their value systems. It is time, clearly, to respond to this new threat, each in his own field. (1976:135)

So with this neo-colonialism, comes the need for a neo-, refined Negritude, with fewer of the essentialist pitfalls of the first epoch, while recognising the primary potentialities. Jeyifo (2004) has described Soyinka as going from out-and-out anti-Negritude to a ‘complex neo-Negritudinist temper’. How does Soyinka evince this nuanced Negritude in his Bacchae of Euripides?

To summarise: It concerns Dionysus’s revenge upon the people of Thebes, especially King Pentheus and his mother Agave, who have denied his divine legitimacy and slandered his mother Sebele. Disguised as a mortal, he causes havoc, inducing the women of Thebes to run mad in the hills and engage in orgiastic bacchanals in his honour; Pentheus intrudes on this ritual and is dismembered, his head mounted on a pike by his wine-maddened mother. Ultimately, Dionysus is feared in all his glory as a vengeful god. Composed by Euripides in his years of exile (and there are clear parallels here with Soyinka, who also endured exile from his homeland at various points), it is interpretable under various schema, but Soyinka has chosen to emphasise its revolutionary significance, which is borne through its ritual, metaphysical centre and carried through by the artist-avatar, arguing that:

Dionysos [forms]a universal paradigm for the artist – the dramatic artist that is, as illusionist, conjurer, agent of release and control, a medium of primordial chaos, yet midwife of beginnings (1993:.45-46)

(Notably, and similarly to Pasolini, Soyinka likens Euripedes transitional Greek context to postcolonial Africa in flux (Jeyifo, 2004: 162).

Soyinka’s translation is broadly similar to his reference texts (as Sotto, 1985:32-36) has detailed,) but there are instances in which one can sense the post-colonial implications simmering beneath the surface. For instance, in his opening lines, Soyinka goes directly to Dionysus’ rage, saying:

Thebes taints me with bastardy. I am turned into an alien, some foreign outgrowth of her habitual tyranny. (1974:1)

This introduction has shades of that infamous righteous fury of Caliban, surely not by accident. It is perhaps possible to suggest here that Soyinka is willfully invoking a postcolonial cadence to show the anger of the hybrid who is reduced to ‘bastardy’, ‘an alien’, some ‘foreign outgrowth’; the ‘habitual tyranny’ being that of course of the colonial centers. The narrative arc of the play, the revelation of the outcast as the superior and his divine retribution against bigotry, achieved through para-theatrical means, offer possible identifications with Caliban. And yet, it would seem that Soyinka is too nuanced of a thinker, to limit the play to this kind of reactionary interpretation. It serves to look at Soyinka’s other main points of departure from the original.

For example, where in the original Euripides has homogeneously Asian Bacchante chorus, Soyinka has them as being of mixed origin. This is relevant for a creolized, diasporic view of the world, certainly, but with any mention slavery, of specific historical resonance. There is also the opportunity to meld different performance techniques (reminiscent of Pasolini’s proposed use of jazz). He calls for a compelling inclusion of ‘Negroid’ lead slave, the result being particularly Fanon-esque. “In the play, the “hollering” of the mostly male slaves blends well and effectively with the women’s keening, ululuating cries of anguish and faith. The suggestion is that the terrifying powers of the god Dionysus—which derive from, and express elemental forces of nature—can merge with the cause of all oppressed people-- women, slaves, workers.”(Jeyifo, idem: 163). In short, the wretched of the earth. This is truly Panmeridiomal consciousness.

Perhaps more significantly, Soyinka blends praise-songs of Dionysus with Yoruba oriki praise poems to the Yoruba god of transition, Ogun ( uncannily similar in fact to Dionysus, both simultaneously embodying rationality and irrationality, as well as the ideas of transition and hybridity). This is a way to introduce the compelling final scene in which Soyinka’s Dionysus turns the blood from the head of decapitated Pentheus into wine, an act of expiatory mercy as opposed to Euripedes’ all-out punishment. This is appropriated from Ogun rituals. That is, Soyinka’s syncretised version is a more creative, less destructively vengeful Dionysus, in fact a fusion of the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. Jeyifo:

“The effect of this is to give the ritual sacrifice at the heart of the play, as extremely gruesome as it is, a more credible necessitation than its dim, symbolic outlines in the text of the Euripides original. This is perhaps why this play marks the most convincing dramatisation of Soyinka’s theorization of ritual as a performative matrix for change and renewal.”

The syncretism (which also has unmistakable Christian reference points) detailed in Soyinka’s famously elliptical metaphysical essay the fourth stage as well as in his preface to the Bacche,mimics the resistance syncretism of African slave religions in the Caribbean and Latin America and underscores the revolutionary (in every sense) achievement of the play.

Soyinka’s subtly complex adaptation of the Bacchae, I would argue, is fundamental to an understanding of his vision as an artist, especially as one who may be considered a socially engaged mythopoet and conscious, consistent syncretist. The achievement is such that ironically, despite his critique of negritude; ‘it can be said that there is no better fulfilment of the idea of negritude in modern literature than in the work of Soyinka himself’. (Irele,idem: 112)

4.

It would be fruitful to compare deeper both of these authors’ works as pertaining to mythopoesis, panmeridionalism and the politics of creative adaptation (including into different artistic media); as well as to bring them in dialogue with other artists who have contravened Fanon and used Greco-Latin myth for postcolonial ends. However it must suffice here to summarise. While Pasolini’s attempt may ultimately be a dialectical basis for further thought (and thus not entirely flawed; in fact amounting to productive self-mockery, as Syrimis (2013) suggests), Soyinka provides an excellent model for the postcolonial who must overcome double-consciousness. For Soyinka the arena for the dialogue between reason and unreason; for the affinities between Africa and the Greek world, is not Africa as symbol or set; rather it is within the reified image of the gods Ogun and Dionysus. Through them he draws out similarities and builds his mature neo-Negritudinist synthesis which is dialectically and aesthetically revolutionary. This is opposed to Pasolini’s superficially hybrid, conflicted idealisation, which while well-intentioned looks like lightweight tokenistic allegory in comparison, even as it is inspiringly self-critical.