—Tomiwo Owolade, “Black Kids Should Study Larkin”
I taught a class in “multicultural literature” for four years. You can watch the complete lectures here for the Fall 2020 semester to see in depth how I approached the subject. I share Owolade’s skepticism of encouraging reductive identifications among literature students and his contempt for those who reject the aesthetic out of hand. I also agree that there is a continuum to literature, so you can’t neglect foundational works because they were produced in inegalitarian conditions. As I wrote in my last Tablet column, dropping the classics from the curriculum is not an option even when there is a legitimate ethical case to be made against them.
I believe if you want “diversity” in your modern and contemporary literary curriculum, however, there needn’t necessarily be a problem; there’s enough talent to go around if you believe, as I obdurately do, in literary merit. No quality will go missing if you teach Wole Soyinka over Philip Larkin.
Granted that I’ve only read the most famous works, the anthology pieces, of these two writers and haven’t gone into depth on either, I think I would rather read Soyinka than Larkin myself. Ironically, Larkin strikes me as the “identity” writer of the two, a local and national poet you might have to be English to really understand; while Soyinka, interleaving modern social drama, Greek tragedy, and Yoruba cosmology, seems a figure of larger, more universal stature. But that’s a literary judgment, not a political one, which is the point.
The political judgment, that Soyinka should be read because he “help[s] us to understand structural racism,” is, as Owolade rightly says, patronizing and finally dehumanizing. It’s also slightly false to Soyinka, who, at least in the texts that I read, scourged the Marxist premises underlying the present discourse. The Norton Critical Edition of Death and the King’s Horseman includes Soyinka’s reply to a Marxist critic who faulted the play for criticizing colonialism but not authority (or metaphysics) per se:
Nobody, I hope, will tell us that the fear of—or at the very least, the resentment of, sense of unpleasantness about, etc.—Death is simply due to the failure of the individual or society to as yet exist within an egalitarian environment. My suspicion is that this need to communally contain Death will always be there. Whether indeed the desperation with which this primary (human) hostility to death is sublimated under historico-materialist incantations is not in itself a superstitious device for evading the end of the material self is a question that can only be resolved by a deep probing of the critic’s deeper sub-conscious. Certainly it leads easily to a tendency towards ‘vulgar Marxist criticism’ or, in this context, superstitious Marxism.
In other words, to quote what the writer wants to tell the activist in Joyce’s great postcolonial story “The Dead,” literature is above politics.
Speaking of politics in Ireland—how fast the revolution devours its own! They are removing Seamus Heaney from the curriculum to “decolonize” it. Owolade doesn’t fail to point out the irony. Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize during its determined diversification streak, not accidentally in the company of Soyinka himself, and Mahfouz, Gordimer, Walcott, Morrison, etc.; Heaney, who wrote all those poems about the suppressed violence in the Irish earth; Heaney, the veritable bard of the postcolonial. Bog Queen for a day, as it turns out. Is there any better evidence that the politics vanishes, while only the poetry remains?
