Modern Mind

lies in his telling of ordinary stories (of a family trying to survive, in
Pather
; of an affair between a woman and her husband’s young cousin, in
Charulata
; of a businessman expected to provide a client with a woman in
The Middleman)
in extraordinary detail, lovingly observed. His biographer has pointed out that there are few, if any, villains in Ray’s world because he sees everyone’s point of view. Ray was just as aware of India’s failings as the other writers, but he seems to have been more comfortable with the contradictions. 41
    The award of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature to the Nigerian writer and dramatist Wole Soyinka, and then to the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, in 1991, the same year that Ben Okri, another Nigerian, won the Booker Prize, shows that African writing has at last been recognised by what we may call the Western literary ‘establishment.’ At the same time, contemporary African literature has nothing like the same following, worldwide, as does Indian or South American literature. In his
Myth, Literature and the African World
(1976), Soyinka, who had studied in Britain and read plays for the Royal Court Theatre, did his best to make many fellow writers more visible in a Western context. 42
    Soyinka was trying to do for literature what Basil Davidson had done for African archaeology, not just in the book referred to but in his own poetry and plays. In fact, it was Soyinka’s choice of literature – in particular theatre – that finally won the Nobel Prize for him, rather than for Chinua Achebe. (Achebe’s novel
Anthills of the Savannah
was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987.) Soyinka was part of the generation of brilliant writers who studied at Ibadan University College in the period before independence, together with Cyprian Ekwensi, Christopher Okigbo, and John Pepper Clark, some of whose works he covered in
Myth, Literature and the African World.
In that book, his secondary aim, after rendering these writers visible to an international audience, was to do two things: first, to show black African literature as its own thing, having themes in common with other great literatures, and just as rich, complex and intelligent. At the same time, Soyinka, in discussing such entities as Duro Ladipo’s Yoruba plays, or Obotunde Ijimere’s
Imprisonment of Obatala,
or Ousmane Sembene’s
God’s Bits of Wood,
stressed the particular strengths of African literature, the ways in which it differs from its Western counterparts. 43 Here, he stresses the
collective
experience of ritual, the way the individualism of the West is alien to African experience. In the African social contract, community life comes first, and Soyinka explains the impact of ritual by analogy at one point, in order to bring home how vivid it is: ‘Let us say he [the protagonist in a story] is a tragic character: at the first sign of a check in the momentum of a tragic declamation, his audience becomes nervous for him, wondering – has he forgotten his line? Has he blacked out? Characters undertake acts on behalf of the community, and the welfare of the protagonist is inseparable from that of the total community.’ 44 Soyinka’s point is that whatever story is set out in African literature, the
experience
is different.
    Soyinka is both a creative writer and a critic. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, literary and cultural criticism has been both exceptionally fertile and exceptionally controversial. This is particularly true of three areas, all related: postcolonial criticism, postmodern criticism, and the development of the discipline known as cultural studies.
    In postcolonial criticism two figures stand out: Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. Across several works, but especially in
Orientalism
(1978),
Covering Islam
(1981), and ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, (1986), Said, writing as a Palestinian academic on the faculty of Columbia University in New York, explored the way the Orient’ has been conceived in the West, especially since the beginning of ‘Oriental studies’ early in the nineteenth century. 45 He examined the writings of scholars, politicians, novelists, and even painters, from Silvestre de Sacy, whose
Chrestomathie arabe
was published in 1806, through Gustave Flaubert, Arthur James Balfour, and T. E. Lawrence, right up to academic books published in the 1960s and 1970s. The jacket of his title shows a young boy, naked except for a large snake wrapped around him, standing on a