[.ca] The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (ISBN 0195134281)

From Amazon.com:
When a book begins with a statement such as "In the 1992 presidential elections, it would appear that the United States stood a reasonable chance of acquiring a new president in the person of a certain Mr. David Duke," a reader must wonder if the author is being deliberately alarmist or has simply lost contact with reality. (After all, Duke had little national credibility, and even his campaigns in his home state of Louisiana could best be described as highly problematic.) On matters concerning his native Nigeria, and on the rest of the African nations, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka is perhaps more reliable, albeit still somewhat longwinded. The Burden of Memory is based on a set of lectures Soyinka gave at the W.E.B. Dubois Institute and faithfully preserves their highly academic orality, whether he is advocating massive reparations for the people of Africa for the historical injustices to which they have been subject, or using literary criticism to explore the ways in which Africans have been willing to "forgive" Westerners in the hopes of assimilating into the culture that formerly treated them as vassals.

What has the world come to?:
After learning that Soyinka received a Nobel Prize in Literature while perusing the back cover of this book at the bookstore, I was immediately interested. Unfortunately after reading this book, I was surprised that Soyinka could read a book let alone write one. Obviously there must be some sort of affirmative action on the Nobel Prize board, since this is second-rate writing from a third-rate mind. A waste of money, and more importantly, time.

Soyinka is more than "The Burden of Memory...":
Wole Soyinka's mastery of the English language, as I have had occasion to say on another forum, borders on the supernatural. And perhaps therein lies the man's flaw--but that is a matter I will get to in a minute. "The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness," you must understand, is "in the obligatory \oSoyinka\c fashion," a compilation of oral lectures the learned professor gave at Harvard. You must understand too, that the writing is basically academic, and suited more to an oral lecture. And because we speak of Soyinka, the writing is characteristically difficult. So then, his lectures-turn-books (including, of course, "The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness") are not the best of works with which to appraise Soyinka's genius. For a true appreciation of Soyinka's literary prowess, you must read his plays and novels. The flaw, of which I spoke earlier, is captured in the question a friend once posed to me (not Soyinka): "Is not the purpose of language to communicate?" Without a full-fledged dictionary, and the will to re-read whole paragraphs, one would struggle to keep up with Soyinka's writing. In all, whether one likes it or not, the man is a literary giant, period!

Mildly interesting at best:
There is no doubt that Wole Soyinka is a good writer - his Nobel prize was justly deserved and not a case of affirmative action as another reviewer insultingly suggested. However, someone encountering Soyinka for the first time in this book would not be tempted to try reading his more famous writings: this book is, to be frank, not well written. Based on three lectures Soyinka gave at Harvard University in 1997, Soyinka touches upon the very topical reparations controversy in the first essay, praises the Senegalese writer Leopold Senghor in the second and spends the last examining African poets' attempts to deal with the legacies of colonialism and racism. Through all three lectures Soyinka employs a very dense style, one that might have worked well when speaking for an academic audience at Harvard but one that does not translate well onto the written page. Phrases like 'slaves into the twentieth-first century, mouthing the mangy mandates of mendacity, ineptitude, corruption and sadism' sound impressive but are merely a means for Soyinka to play around with words when he could be spending his time seriously addressing very important issues like reparations. When he does get down to business, he writes that 'reparations would involve the acceptance by Western nations of a moral obligation to repatriate the post-colonial loot salted away in their vaults, in real estate and business holdings' but never goes into detail exactly what this would involve. What is more disturbing is his frequent references to the U.S., which reveal his real ignorance about American life: examples include his belief that David Duke could have been elected President in 1992 and that the Ku Klux Klan held or holds a 'tentacular hold over power structures across the United States.' If he knows so little about the country where he is giving his lectures (and also holds a job as a Professor at Emory University), should we trust him to do a good job at addressing the international debate on reparations? I didn't give this book one star for the fact that Soyinka's second and third lectures are reasonably coherent and do a good job of tracing the literary history behind Negritude. (For instance, he discusses the reasons why American black writers were in closer contact with Francophone blacks rather than their Anglophone brothers.) Yet even here he does not attempt to present any kind of thesis, but is merely contented with quoting various poems and doing some quick literary analysis. Readers with an interest in discovering why Soyinka won the Nobel Prize should thus turn elsewhere.

In defense of a great author:
Let me start by acknowledging that I haven't read this particular work. I'm merely expressing my ire at an ignoramus of a reviewer from Philadelphia, who suggested that Soyinka's nobel prize was not well deserved. While I'd be the first to acknowledge that Soyinka's writing can be difficult, I would suggest that this cretin start off with Soyinka's autobiographical corpus of "Ake: the years of childhood", "Isara" and "Ibadan: the pemkelemes years" then, maybe such powerful (if acerbic and polemical) works as "The Man Died," before attempting the more difficult critical works like "Myth, Literature and the African World" and by all accounts, the work under review. I do not believe that such a powerful mind as Soyinka's, could write a lightweight tome and so while I haven't read "The Burden of Memory," I'm willing to stick my neck out and give it three stars if only because while Soyinka's mastery of language is beyond doubt, his quest for precision, sometimes, rather ironically, renders his writing a tad dense; which can be the only explanation for the bulk of complaints, levelled at this work, on this occassion.

Excellent:
I was extremely impressed with Professor Soyinka's argument for reparations not only for Africa, but for all victims of enslavement, colonialism, and oppression. His style may be difficult, but for the able reader it is an excellent introduction to the conditions, both past and present, contributing to the current state of affairs throughout the African continent. It provides much food for thought on the question of just what is justice. Bob Marley's song "War" was constantly in my mind. It would be an honor to shake Professor Soyinka's hand.