his extended and penetrating engagement with classical tragedy may be understood? One possible answer comes through comparison with two curiously close contemporaries: Soyinka’s fellow Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott (b.1930), and Tony Harrison (b.1937); both, like Soyinka himself (b.1934), verse-dramatists and poets for whom classical literature are artistically central. The accent, in all senses, is in each case distinct – Soyinka trading in Euripidean tragedy, Walcott in Homeric epic, and Harrison in Catullan and other lyrics –but all deploy their knowledges both fiercely and in strongly regionalised tones. So great are the differences that the three may often seem incomparable, but in a political sense I have come to think their approaches far closer than they seem, and oddly like a central strategy of the EU –the paired, nation-dismantling tactics of federalisation and subsidiarity. The latter corresponds to Soyinka’s deployment of Yoruban language and myth, Walcott’s of creolised English, and Harrison’s of Yorkshire demotic, regional voices that draw power from local comprehensibility. The former corresponds to the trio’s deployment of the classics, a supranational inheritance reaching over and behind the selfaggrandizing claims of British imperial power to trump the Augustan inheritance. And the purpose, of course, in every case, is precisely to counter on behalf of a subject people the legacies of the overweening and culturally destructive imposition of an imperial and/or post-colonial state. This analogy, I believe, has some genuine explanatory power, but like many such propositions raises at least as many questions as it answers. For all the sufferings of which Walcott and Harrison have sung (including, for Walcott, the grotesque horrors of the Middle Passage), neither is remotely a tragedian, for both celebrate their peoples’ achievements as much as they regret the oppressions that must be overcome, and both have lived largely in times of peace. But for Soyinka, constantly devoured by a self-mutilating Nigerian polity that has seen at least eight attempted (five successful) military coups since independence, as well as the extraordinary brutalities of the Biafran War, the necessity for his many sacrifices to be real generates an overwhelming desire for their efficacy. As You Must Set Forth at Dawn makes abundantly clear, he has operated politically both within Nigeria and in exile at a far higher political level than most artists can hope to attain, but the consequence is a visceral understanding of himself –and all living things –as “reservoirs of blood”, rightly emptied at need and as the orisas demand; not the gaze of Creon at Antigone, nor of Clytemnestra at Agamemnon, but of Agamemnon at Iphigenaia and his stranded fleet, wondering how long he dare wait for the wind to change and blow the epic forwards to a divine destiny.

John Lennard is Professor of British and American Literature at the University of the West Indies at Mona.

MY EX

A demon was drawn in that woman’s face and her beauty cut into my organs and limbs; whenever she spoke, my hair stood up straight – as the intricate links of my heart wore thin.

She shut the gates of affection and peace – opened the door to strife and we fought; she set her dwelling on a hill of complaint, pitching her tent, and stretching it taut.

She weighed on my heart like the sands of the sea, and as though she were cooking – boiled my belly.

Yosef Ibn Zabara (c.1140-late twelfth century) trans. Peter Cole

‘SNAKEINTHEGRASS’ COMMENTARY

INYOKA ETSHANINI(June 2007), pp.56-57. Robert Fokkens (1975-) For quarter-tone alto flute, violin and cello. Like much of my recent music, Inyoka Etshanini, a Zulu phrase, attempts to engage with a number of issues raised by post-colonial critical thinking. Central to my response is a concern with the construction of identity in the context of my experience of cultural hybridity as a South African. On one level, this can be heard in the choices I have made in developing my musical self: it is technically rooted in South African (particularly Xhosa) bow music, but one can also hear traces that range from the work of Cage and Feldman to jazz to fiddle music to electronica. On another level, the enactment of an interaction – here in a quiet, understated confrontation – between two radically different materials reflects my interest in how the meeting of these voices gives rise to new entities. The title is thus more conceptual than programmatic, though perhaps the distinction is rather vague in music – it stems from a comment made recently by a friend in response to another new piece that “there is always a snake in the grass”. Inyoka Etshanini is scored for quarter-tone alto flute – an alto flute designed to play accurate quarter-tones chromatically across its range – violin and cello. It was written for Carla Rees and her ensemble rarescale, who specialize in performing music which includes quarter-tone alto and bass flutes, and was premiered on 13th June in London. Robert Fokkens www.robertfokkens.co.uk