Title: Celebrating D. O. Fagunwa: Aspects of African and world literary history
Edited: Adeleke Adeeko and Akin Adesokan
Reviewer: Ayo Adeduntan
Publishers: Bookcraft
Year of Publication: 2017
The success of the artist – Yoruba artist particularly – is best gauged by how he mediates culture through his art and how the instances of such mediation become artefact and are themselves set as culture. With D.O. Fagunwa, a third paradigm appears in which the artist is made into a persona in the mold of the work (or characters) he created. Let me return to this later. The canonicity of those five novels – Ogboju Ode, Igbo Olodumare, Ireke Onibudo, Irinkerindo, and Adiitu Olodumare – written by D.O. Fagunwa does not derive from their depth of constructing and deconstructing culture alone, but how these novels have coalesced into a myth that is now very popular with a public, many of whom do not know, and have not read, Fagunwa. I personally came by this possibility of the writer’s power to permeate, from a remove, the consciousness of those who have never read him during my research into a narrative performance culture among the Yoruba hunters.
In the context of the given that D.O. Fagunwa as an idea offers more tremendous critical possibilities than the attention paid to it yet, Celebrating D.O. Fagunwa: Aspects of African and Literary World History attempts a remedial task of doing, in one volume, as many as possible readings of Fagunwa’s work. A constellation of seventeen cultural exegetes from across four generations opens multiple windows to understanding Fagunwa from such areas as literature, theatre, religion, gender, visual art, translation and zoology. The diversity, according to the editors, was ensured through specifically soliciting contributions from the authors for the conference preliminary to the publication. What impelled this move was the new understanding that Fagunwa “has implications beyond the boundaries of literature and extends into philosophy, anthropology, sociology, religion, gender, and contemporary mythmaking processes” (xxix).
In the foreword, Wole Soyinka – dramatist, poet and translator of two of Fagunwa’s novels – reveals two dimensions of Fagunwa’s vision: (1) the anti-anthropocentric philosophy which undoes the hitherto advertised man-lord-of-the-earth view, and (2) disappearance of hero-villain moral cleavage, hitherto considered patent in view of Fagunwa’s preachifying narrative frills. The first dimension, of course, twins conveniently with Soyinka’s own idea that man should reconsider the arrogant ontological assumption that he is God or God’s image in view of his long history of guilt. In Fagunwa, there is an unbanishable awareness of the Other, contesting man’s claim to lordship over creation. The second dimension, arising from the first, deconstructs the definite good-versus-bad polarity through moderation of character traits: there are no heroes or villains in the very absolute sense.
Literary critic and teacher Dan Izevbaye, in the first chapter of the collection, reveals that Fagunwa’s expressive medium and strategy are at once limiting and enabling. The grim consequence of Fagunwa’s Yoruba medium is that he was occluded from non-Yoruba audience for a long time and literary critic did not pay him the attention commensurate to his art. But in sharp contrast to the postcolonial nationalist tenor of the literary production of the better part of last century, Fagunwa elected a strategic voice, appropriated from the indigenous past, tempered in the modern present, and prefiguring the future. Whereas the writings, especially of Europhone medium, of that time are characterized by cultural nationalist fervor, Fagunwa adopted persuasion. His narrative voice and strategy not only compel audiences of Christian, Moslem and traditional African backgrounds, they also factor future audience into the loop. Karin Barber enlarges the discussion on audience reach in the next chapter: “[Fagunwa] looked towards an audience that expanded in concentric tiers…, an audience that could include all Yorubas, all Africans, all black people and all of human kind, and which could encompass future generations as well as… present-day readers” (23). Specifically, she calls attention to the originality of Fagunwa’s imagination, especially in the context of an assumption that the writer is but a mere scribal legatee of “existing oral traditions” (19). Apart from the very catholic sources – indigenous and exotic – from which he draws his materials, Fagunwa’s work markedly diverges from the literary mainstream of the time in its varying placement of the scribe between the narrator and the audience, use of oratory, and multiple deployments of inserted written texts. Now what all these have guaranteed for the narrative, according to Barber, is that they create limitless interpretive possibilities.
Poet Niyi Osundare contemplates the possible motive of Fagunwa’s choice of Yoruba medium. The audacity of that choice is best appreciated in the context of the ascendancy of Western values and the fact that Fagunwa had the capacity to write equally in English, and indeed more “correctly” than Tutuola. Osundare adduces convincingly that the English language lacks the expressive capacity to bear the accurate imports of many of Fagunwa’s signs. Indeed, as noted earlier, names of characters and places evolved in his work have become contemporary usages, sometimes by people who have not read Fagunwa.