biodun-jeyifo

Biodun Jeyifo, our B.J., is bracketed in popular memory as the once and future Marxist interpreter and assessor of Soyinka's hegemonic animism and of African literature and society who will not ignore the "tumult of rainstorm, thunder and lightning totally out of season" as "a passage rite preternaturally appropriate to the transition" of Duro Ladipo, the contemporary incarnation of Sango". I have argued that although not meaning to give over-weaning credence to this animist intimation…Jeyifo…"gives a clear circumstantial accommodation to the personage of the god, as a ghost in the machine of Soyinka's aesthetics". In a world of so many gods of incompleteness, we know he knows where to find what cannot yet be explained, but he has interpreted, within the paradigm that he forswears.

I want to provide a narrative of how Biodun Jeyifo affected me when we first met before I take on the task of engaging his performance as a theorist who, I shall show set out to unriddle and secularise Soyinka's animistic phases but has ended up providing a critical practice that may be best understood through the animistic tropes of Soyinka's artistic productions. Hence my title, "Biodun Jeyifo: Denizen of the Fourth Stage".

I can only narrate what I know of Biodun Jeyifo's practice in the field of African literature from a beginning that found him already a full grown man, a doctor of philosophy, striving very hard to look very ordinary on the campus of the University of Ibadan where I had just become a Post graduate student. I was an escapee from the Civil Service who had just realised, within a brief stint on the campus, that I had a preference for an intellectual life outside the institutional framework of the Ivory Tower. The paradox, which has taken me some time to resolve, is that I could not imagine myself with a sedentary life within the University but I was too painfully aware of the need to live within the philosophical norm which says that the uninterpreted life is not worth living. Therefore, I was generally drawn to those who were doing unusual things, novel and if you like sensational things with ideas that promised solutions to serious problems. The University was still a University in those days. Although all the fraying and stricturing that characterise today's Academy were already obvious, knowledge had a premium in its own right. Any serious undergraduate in the University of Ibadan in those days would not be caught ignorant of or incapable of entering a caveat drawn against the existing state of society from such writings as Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Kwame Nkrumah's Africa Must Unite, Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, C. Wright Mills The Sociological Imagination and Amilcar Cabral's The Weapon of Theory. There was a solid traditional knowledge base defended by such academic avatars as Billy Dudley in Political Science, Ojetunji Aboyade in Economics, Akin Mabogunje in Geography and Tamuno and Ikime in history. They had enough liberalism and self-assurance to stand up to the rather acerbic thrust of the new kids on the block, so to say, who were constantly interrogating them and seeking to entrench an alternative tradition.

In the social sciences, Ola Oni and Bade Onimode, superintended over the education of a class of Nigerians who even if they deviated would never be the same again. Omafume Onoge was the first of the new voices in the Social Science Faculty who broke through the disciplinary stricture that had made literary studies the preserve of the Arts Faculty. His work was a refreshingly destabilising factor against the moribund demarcations that had made the interdisciplinary work of Okwudiba Nnoli at Nsukka and Bala Usman and Mahmud Tukur at Ahmadu Bello University appear more than revolutionary. I was an excited fan of the flash of creativity which drew literary studies and the social sciences into a common conspiracy against old ways of handling knowledge. Or better to put it this way, that on a personal level, I found literature and the discussion of creative writing so much more fascinating than was allowed by the sometimes arcane lingo of the social sciences. The clear indifference of the syllabus of the social sciences to the literary arts had made my education appear like a deviation from my true nature and the seamless conception of knowledge which led me to the University in the first case. Even more, I was disappointed at the absence in English Studies of sustained engagement with those seminal if trenchant ideas that I considered the wave of the future. If social science education was incomplete without literary studies, literary studies outside the impingement of the social sciences, of political philosophy and sociology amounted, in my view, to giving a very schizoid image to the University as a knowledge factory. My disappointment would have been irredeemable but for my encounter with teachers like Richard Joseph of Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria and Sam Nolutshungu who in discourses of political parties and questions of insurgency and counter-insurgency brought in light that only literature in its immersion in the lived experiences of society could project. Even they like Omafume Onoge were too social science-centred to break the disciplinary bind. Thus, you can understand my excitement when I encountered the group of radical idealists, yes, that's what they were, who were burrowing from the fringe of the dominant ideologies in the University but were gradually chalking up territory if not taking over and shaking up the cultural climate of the campus.
Jeyifo and Soyinka

In his stripling boyishness, raggedy beards and very laconic life-style, one that could well be described today as marked by conspicuous under-consumption, he was a personification of the modal attributes that were believed to characterise the new radical. In those years before he moved from Ibadan to Ife, he had become among students at symposia, seminars and conferences so supremely identified with his professed ideology that it was inconceivable to see Biodun Jeyifo being referred to as someone from either a particular part of the country or with regular family relationships.

Biodun Jeyifo was a prime mover in this group which was made up, in its full dress, of himself, Kole Omotoso, Femi Osofisan, Yemi Ogunbiyi, Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie, GG Darah and from the Department of Economics, John Ohiorenuan, and into which I was assimilated. The message of the group was new. They had the temerity to display, and to normalise, in the Faculty of Arts the kind of inveterate theorising that was once associated only with the chaps in the Social Sciences. They brought ideology, politics that is, and philosophy into the reading of literary texts in ways that was becoming the norm in the global Academy but was only just scratching the lamppost beside iron gates locked against such ideas in the arts faculty. They made an open house of their commitment to Marxism whose dialectical thrust was taken as a key to praxis as the full realisation of the weapon of theory. Before they became a group they were informally brought together by, I must say, their age brackets and shared educational backgrounds. As one of them Femi Osofisan would later describe them, "most of them had been born in the years of the Second World War, had come to adolescence in the so-called years of Independence and while still at school, witnessed the gradual collapse of the first post-independence civilian governments". As compared to a preceding generation of writers, their elders, Osofisan tells us they "were saddened but not daunted, by these abortive beginnings. They had had the benefit of a much wider education and were more aware of the play of the exigencies of geopolitical forces". Besides, "their sojourn in foreign countries, at a very impressionable period of their lives, left decisive imprints on their personalities. It opened their eyes to modernity and the wonders of a modern, industrial and technological economy. It weaned them off any inferiority complex vis-à-vis the white people, with whom they had shared the classrooms. (In fact, many of them returned with white spouses)" although it must be said that except for Yemi Ogunbiyi who returned with a native, Biodun Jeyifo and Kole Omotoso and John Ohiorenuan had returned with black but non-native spouses. GG Darah and myself were homemade graduates and bachelors. Naturally, there were differences between them in temperament, skills and general intellectual and academic orientation. John Ohiorenuan was an economist. Kole Omotoso and Femi Osofisan were the artists – novelist and dramatist respectively. BJ was the critic. But he was also the practitioner of the stage whose translation and adaptation of Rererun has not stopped crying for a revival. But, and this is the point I want to emphasise, the group came to be represented largely by what Biodun Jeyifo manifested in his ways as a radical intellectual.

In his stripling boyishness, raggedy beards and very laconic life-style, one that could well be described today as marked by conspicuous under-consumption, he was a personification of the modal attributes that were believed to characterise the new radical. In those years before he moved from Ibadan to Ife, he had become among students at symposia, seminars and conferences so supremely identified with his professed ideology that it was inconceivable to see Biodun Jeyifo being referred to as someone from either a particular part of the country or with regular family relationships. It was with some feeling of grace that one discovered he came from a part of the Edo neck of the wood that simply has not be properly celebrated for producing incredible cultural philosophers, literary and art critics like Abiola Irele, Dan Izevbaye, Harry Garuba and Frank Aig-Imoukhuede. Biodun Jeyifo had the metaphoric cut of a prime-mover in his own right. He was like an itinerant principle of pure ideology whose acuity of mind and vision could be summoned only to high-minded discourses of the fate of whole populations and of the upliftment of the oppressed and repressed within it, rather than the mundane and demotic of everyday life.

BJ was particularly vibrant. His was a Marxism of a Fanonist stripe that went beyond Fanon and made commitment to dependency theory, and an Althuserian recourse to class theory a means for the enthronement of a worker-peasant class as the basis of eventual consolidation of Africa's liberation. Almost single-handedly, it might be said, he gave the teaching of literature from a Marxist perspective its primary foundation in the University system across Nigeria. The particulars should not delay us for now but he more than any other single individual brought into strategic academic discourses the engagement with theorists of the radical stripe ranging from Herbert Marcuse, Samir Amin, George Luckacs, Louis Athussier, Jean Paul Sartre, Simon de Beavoir, Amilcar Cabral and Regis Debray into respectability as factors in the literary arts. A very catholic sampling of the literatures of the world, with African writers and the writers of the Black Diaspora given a special place, was the underside of his Marxism. Although I was never a member of any Marxist or Black Nationalist organisations or the other ones, the Black Oyinbo clubs, on the campus for existential reasons that I need not go into here, I allowed myself with a little prompting from Kole Omotoso to gravitate towards and to be coopted into the membership of the Positive Review, the organ of the the burgeoning radical tradition that BJ so conscientiously personified. Unfortunately, the journal soon suffered from the abiku syndrome of all such journals in search of answers to questions in our society. Only a few editions emerged before it collapsed. But it was such a promise of great things. I shall not pretend to be a fair narrator of what really happened to the journal because when I became Private Secretary to Obafemi Awolowo, leader-to-be of the Unity Party of Nigeria, I no longer fitted the ideological wicket of the group. It was said but not set down, as T.S. Eliot would have put it. I had moved on. As I hadn't been such a great contributor to the journal beyond a few poems, whatever agreements I had or did not have with the position-taking, if any, of the journal, was deferred to an indeterminate future.
Ogun

To those who would have thought that his highly elevated embroilment in Marxism could not be toned down from the height of his high theory, in the academic study of drama and dramaturgy, BJ literally re-jigged his image when he started writing newspaper articles under the pen name Bamako Jaji in the Daily Sketch. This would become a more full blown assaying of commitment to the popular media when he began to write for The Guardian and the weekly African Guardian. He went the extra-mile when he took to studying, and later published the book on travelling theatres, The Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria. This was very much a counter discourse, in terms of thematic intent, to the highly elevated theoretical performance in his book The Truthful Lie: Essays In A Sociology of African Drama.

In retrospect, what I recall is that BJ who was quite a moving spirit of the journal, was faithful to the modalities of the group as a collective. He was not seen as a leader. He was always the colleague and comrade who had a fervent handle on theoretical issues. He yielded to collective purposes whenever it came to the point. His was a voice to listen to because he articulated the collective position so thoroughly and rigorously well. The common stand demanded not only that knowledge should be democratised, but that Nigeria's and Africa's and the Third World's dependence on the former but still very present colonial masters should be undermined in favour of genuine independence. This went with the caveat: that our society was not free from the unresolved class struggles that afflicted more industrialised societies of the world and that more attention needed to be paid to the processes of class formation and the implied robberies that affirmed class privilege, the consequent repression and exploitation of under-privileged classes of workers and peasants and the distorted processes of policy making which offset the emergence of genuine all-round development in society. The common Marxist point was taken to heart that it was not the understanding of society that mattered but the changes that the understanding enabled organised groups to achieve. This tack, expressed in so many still very elementary but gradually maturing performances, was to provide a nucleus, one of many such that needed to be taken from various communities and fused into a mass movement capable of changing an exploitative, neo-colonial society, to give full expression to the creativity of the masses.

The fierce Marxist afflatus of Biodun Jeyifo's language was not simply limited to a class room stand-up performance. Although not enamoured of the popular media in the way that Kole Omotoso, the once and future practitioner of faction was, he developed quite a studious orientation towards linking the Academy to the masses through the popular media. The goal, consistent with his ideological orientation, was towards active participation in the organisation of the masses that he wrote so much about. To those who would have thought that his highly elevated embroilment in Marxism could not be toned down from the height of his high theory, in the academic study of drama and dramaturgy, BJ literally re-jigged his image when he started writing newspaper articles under the pen name Bamako Jaji in the Daily Sketch. This would become a more full blown assaying of commitment to the popular media when he began to write for The Gaurdian and the weekly African Guardian. He went the extra-mile when he took to studying, and later published the book on travelling theatres, The Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria. This was very much a counter discourse, in terms of thematic intent, to the highly elevated theoretical performance in his book The Truthful Lie: Essays In A Sociology of African Drama. These were books that were clearly inadequate representations of the larger than life image that he had acquired as a radical academic whose reputed versatility and seductive rigour preceded him into every forum. What may well be added is that the volume of BJ's performance was not to be accounted for in the publish or perish syndrome of the Academy but the influence and power of his production across not just the Nigerian University system but across the African studies programmes all over the world. His intervention in theory at this stage was concise: it was a statement of the necessity to view tragedy not as a matter of Aristotlean fixities nor the dialectics of Hegel's idealistic conception of history but one that following Karl Marx, overturned the dialectic to emboss the will of the underprivileged as self-conscious agents in history. Self-consciousness was very much the issue. But it was approached from a standpoint that made social movements coincident with bringing a socialist society or at least a close approximation of such a society into being.

Meanwhile, building organisations that would help to sustain the intellectual pursuits of the progressive kind was part of the BJ problematique. Unlike the Positive Review group which was merely a more sensational but inchoate attempt at building the means for pursuing the ideological goal, there were other less well known designs for intervention in the social arguments in the society which were supposed to grow from little acorns, as they say, into oaks. In a society where there is hardly a tradition of building civic and civil organisations for durability, the angling for the establishments of lasting movements that can embody and propel the aspirations of underprivileged groups has been a problem. Between his movement from the University of Ibadan to Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, and then his Presidency of ASUU, BJ was literally consumed by the need to confront the question of agency, a movement that could link the socialist message to the historical agency of the workers, peasants and other progressive classes in the society.
Truthful Lie

By the time BJ left for the United States, it was clear that his position was under life-threatening assaults. It bears mentioning in this regard that the decision to leave Nigeria was one that trailed and still trails a wealth of controversies. Should he or should he not have gone to the United states in the face of the emasculation that the military hierarchy was so evidently primed to mete out to the opposition especially its academic arm?

It is of significance, in this respect, that the insertion of ASUU as a factor within the workers movement in Nigeria began with his leadership. Hitherto, the average university teacher was stand-offish towards the working class movement. The graduate was an automatic member of the civil service entitled to all the visuals of the ruling class, members of the administrative class in the civil service, closeted within the ivory tower and shielded from the shuffering masses by a code of academic freedom that distinguished gown from town. That was until the military class, erupting into power, acclimatising as world-changers with immediate effect, and getting ever so touchy about being denizens of a semi-literate institution, simply could not brook the alternative source of power that universities provided. Determined to reduce the arrogance of the professors, whose students over-reached themselves too often by criticising and mounting demonstrations and protests against military authorities, the military administrations forced the academics to eat humble pie. It was dated by some maverick folklorist as beginning from the day General Yakubu Gowon took the cap from the head of Oritsejolomi Thomas fully attired in academic gown, as Vice Chancellor of the University of Ibadan and proceeded to use it as a begging bowl to collect donations at a convocation fund-raiser. Soon enough came the trauma of the Professors being ordered to clear out of their secure abodes on campus for daring to go on strike. They began to be treated worse than the civil service. Yes, the universities came under the civil service in ways that could never sit well with the old concept of academic freedom. To have to battle for their very lives was not something that the university don considered part of the business of lecturing. But the militariat induced them to see it that way. It took a Marxist to make them see that unless they organised in the manner of the trade unions, there was not a chance of their being able to stand up for themselves. Better, unless they were affiliated with the national trade union movement, their effectiveness within the system would be easily blunted. Linking the brains of the ivory tower to the brawn and muzzle of the working class movement was a novelty in Nigerian affairs that needed to be invented because it did not yet exist. The alliance, as it was, soon proved too dangerous for the powers that be.

There was already such a ferment in the Nigerian University system that can still be imagined today: Think of the class of academics: Billy Dudley, Ojetunji Aboyade, Wole Soyinka, Ayodele Awojobi, MJC Echeruo, Bala Usman, Ola Oni, Bade Onimode, Akin Mabogunje, Emmanuel Obiechina, Chinua Achebe, Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie, the Professors Awe, and so many others whom we must now see as avatars of the Academy. They formed the backbone of an academic and intellectual tradition that once seemed capable of lasting forever. With the student population pumped up with a knowledge of their civic efficacy, and making demands that were increasingly anathematised by military dictatorship, there was clearly a basis for worrying about the power that the masses would pool if the working class was organised to stand with the Academy. The minders of the system were frightened of young people who could ask questions. But they were more frightened of an alliance between them and those who had experiences to weigh against the system. The dictatorships would rather that the students were turned into heady mischief makers and spoilers of unionism and enemies of the sense of solidarity that comes from seeing the country as a common property. This was the season when University people began to be sacked for teaching what they were not paid to. The future of the Nigerian University and of not just radical but liberal politics in Nigeria was slated for muzzling. It took place in the context of the death of the Lagos Plan of Action, as the government, riddled by debt peonage, was being induced, among other African states in the grip of structural adjustment programmes, to reduce sponsorship of Nigerian Universities. It was indeed the ruination of the intellectual class whose exodus to foreign havens began in the first trickles that soon became a flood. It was openly presented, by government spin doctors, as a favour done to the political economy. By the time BJ left for the United States, it was clear that his position was under life-threatening assaults. It bears mentioning in this regard that the decision to leave Nigeria was one that trailed and still trails a wealth of controversies. Should he or should he not have gone to the United states in the face of the emasculation that the military hierarchy was so evidently primed to mete out to the opposition especially its academic arm? I shall leave the answer to the very end of this intervention. What cannot be denied is that, given the traduced nature of the Nigerian University system and the systematic dismantling of the structures that sustained qualitative academic production, he would certainly have had to abandon so much of what goes today as his intellectual work if he had remained. That work indeed needs to be assessed in its own right.

Denizen of the Fourth Stage

Surely, a Marxist who situates himself as a reader of animistic phases, a historical materialist who must operate in a world where the elimination of history from centrality has become both a national pastime and a world-class phenomenon valorised in the age of post-modernism and globalisation, is a rare breed. As a farmer of alternative consciousness, he is either moving against the tide or enacting self-denial as a means of coping with fate. Thus, challenged to celebrate the interpreter, I find myself in the unenviable position of those pai de santos, the Babalawo of the new world orishas in Brazil, knowers of what is here, below and above our side of the metaphysical divide, who were asked to determine the patron god of Umberto Eco, the Italian semiotician, and now, best-selling novelist. As no one needs to be told, the semiotician comes from the country that is the domicile of the Roman Catholic Pontiff. He is the product of a very rationalist enlightenment conundrum that covers Thomas Aquinas and Galileo, Hegel and Marx and Nietzche and Kierkegard, Betrand Russell and all the other doubters of faiths and questioners of paradigms. So to say, he is supposed to belong to another world, one that does not recognise or mis-recognises the ontological status and validity of the orishas. For Umberto Eco, as readers of his Essays in Hyper-reality can attest, it was a matter of epistemological or disquisitional sport. He just wanted to know his own orisha. He was only too aware that pai de santos, the Babalawo, whether in Oshogbo, Urhonigbe, Ketu, Havana or Brasilia belong to a highly over-otherised alternative world view, an animistic bastion that bridged phenomena and epiphenomena, past present and future from a common umbilicus. He was expecting to wrong-foot the heirarchy of animists by taking the same question from one Babalawo to another. But all of them gave him the same answer: he belonged to Oxala, or what the average Yoruba animist would call Obatala in the manner that either a Soyinka or my father, the motor mechanic and game hunter, would claim the patronage of Ogun. Umberto Eco would not know what to make of his Obatala provenance. But he was sufficiently overcome by the animistic coda of the orishas to have found a place for Afro-Latin deities in his novelistic fabulations.

Like Umberto Eco, an interpreter, Biodun Jeyifo has been such a consummate interpreter of our literature and our society that it is not so much what he says he wishes to do that excites but how he has affected all of us in the process. A difference does exist between the two. As for me, I want to say that I have come to view him from standpoints that I have only managed to work out after years of groping for a handle with which to react to the many ideological fashions that have mauled our spaces.

Jeyifo
I want to engage my celebration of Biodun Jeyifo by insisting that like Umberto Eco, he has a place in the thought system that he would not, on firm ideological grounds, claim as his forte. Like Umberto Eco, an interpreter, Biodun Jeyifo has been such a consummate interpreter of our literature and our society that it is not so much what he says he wishes to do that excites but how he has affected all of us in the process. A difference does exist between the two. As for me, I want to say that I have come to view him from standpoints that I have only managed to work out after years of groping for a handle with which to react to the many ideological fashions that have mauled our spaces. BJ happens to be one unflinching interpreter of our literature whose central production has been to engage WS, the most challenging writer that African literature produced in the twentieth into the twenty first century. He has operated from a standpoint that on the surface was an alternative angle to the reality that Soyinka himself mythologised. In one of his pieces, he actually talked about having Soyinka demythologised. To do this he had himself to enter the real Dance of the Forest. The jury is still out as to whether Biodun Jeyifo came out intact from the process. The tendency is that when you enter the forest it takes you over. In the process of pursuing Soyinka, BJ, I believe, has been completely taken over by the Dance of the Forest. So much so that it is unfair to assess BJ without reference to it. It is impossible to understand the work that BJ has done so far, whether on Soyinka's works or the other skirmishes that have yielded his most seminal work, unless you are prepared to situate him within the ambit of that hermeneutic frame that begins with accepting that animism is not just a religious conundrum, not a mere alternative to either a Christian or Muslim approach to metaphysics but a distinct approach to interpretation and management science. I have argued this in my piece In Search of Ogun: Soyinka Inspite of Nietzche. Here I will merely present a sketch for the purpose of revealing the implacable seduction that Biodun Jeyifo has had to contend with in the process of seeking to interprete the poet of Ogun and his animistic tropes.

In order to get into the mindset, yes it is a mindset that makes it possible to appreciate the transition from your regular sense of trope to the animistic, I would suggest that you do not need to do anything extraordinary. It begins with acknowledging that the business of interpretation starts with accepting it as an entrenched human right to ask questions in order to acquire knowledge. That was why the old philosophers talked about the pursuit of knowledge in terms of a presupposition-less enquiry. For it to make sense, it had to assume a generous presumption of inter-subjective appreciation of reality. It deferred faith on the basis of pooling of knowledge from wherever possible. For it to work, as interpretation, we are obliged to take on and to secularise the terms of Soyinka's four archetypes. They are to be seen from the standpoint of the pursuit of synthesis, that is the recreation of the original oneness that was lost when that mythical slave Atunda smashed the head of the First One, Orisanla and created splinters, each of which became a god, fracturing wisdom and making the task of knowledge-acquisition a matter of patching together so many disparate fretworks of the same godhead. Of course, every god you can think of according to this narrative is an incomplete being with ambitions to approximate the original godhead. Soyinka asserts the larger flint of the godhead for his own patron god, Ogun. We do not have to dispute it to accept that with so many incomplete gods around, the problem of knowledge, wisdom, centers on painstaking matching of phenomena and epiphenomena. If Ogun, the master of will, the pathbreaker is the most approximate, we have the other who sets the rules of engagement or seeks to discover the laws, the bureaucratic ethos that enable the survival of structures which help us to practice memory. Beyond the rule-governed framework is the necessity to solve problems, the very purpose for which knowledge in human society gains so much centrality. As Amos Tutuola's The Palmwine Drinkard reminds us, human beings tend to lose the power to solve problems when they lose the power of self-enjoyment, call it narcissism, love of music or the libidinal quest. What counts is that the gods that match each of these ways of dealing with the world are merely alter egos for practices of interpretation and management which ultimately bring together the past the present and the future in ways that attempt to create a region in which division, arising from the splintering of the original oneness, is resolved. Soyinka, following one of his two most determinate masters, Nietzche, the other being DO Fagunwa, calls it the chthonic realm or the Fourth Stage. The resolution that his chthonic realm constitutes is neither in the past or in a determinate present or future. But it is the ambition of all knowledge to arrive there. Why not the interpreter seeks to take us there, to have a synthesis amidst disparate orders and phenomena.
He is too conscious of it to disavow in wholesale fashion, critical areas outside the reach of his Marxist hermeneutics.

Of course, in that rarified zone – full of gods and epiphanies – we know in whose company we shall always find our comrade, breaking down barriers and luxuriating in the knowledge that human beings tend to lose the power to solve problems when they lose the power of self-enjoyment. Biodun Jeyifo always had that power. It was what he was fighting so hard not to lose when he did the exit-taking that found him in the United States at a time when there was so much to do at home to bring up a new generation of activists and fighters for a just and better society.

I want to argue that this will to synthesise, to enact laws or discover rules that govern things, is a problem-solving propensity that drives the knowledge curve, comes to its apogee in a pleasure principle, a narcissistic, self-luxuriating order. It is the ultimate somatic drive of Being when it abnegates pain for self and others and seduces activity accordingly. I do not make the claim that all interpreters are seduced by these archetypal performances in the same measure. But I would say the more an interpreter or analyst engages existence or aspects of it with consciousness of the archetypes, the less cornered he or she will be by the venting of sheer mysticism or what the sarcastic would call mumbo jumbo. To the rationalist, the animistic trope is a fount of mumbo jumbo. This is the way that BJ ought to be required to view it from his Marxist perspective. But not so fast. Biodun Jeyifo, our B.J., is bracketed in popular memory as the once and future Marxist interpreter and assessor of Soyinka's hegemonic animism and of African literature and society who will not ignore the "tumult of rainstorm, thunder and lightning totally out of season" as "a passage rite preternaturally appropriate to the transition" of Duro Ladipo, the contemporary incarnation of Sango". I have argued that although not meaning to give over-weaning credence to this animist intimation…Jeyifo…"gives a clear circumstantial accommodation to the personage of the god, as a ghost in the machine of Soyinka's aesthetics". In a world of so many gods of incompleteness, we know he knows where to find what cannot yet be explained, but he has interpreted, within the paradigm that he forswears. He is too conscious of it to disavow in wholesale fashion, critical areas outside the reach of his Marxist hermeneutics. Of course, in that rarified zone – full of gods and epiphanies – we know in whose company we shall always find our comrade, breaking down barriers and luxuriating in the knowledge that human beings tend to lose the power to solve problems when they lose the power of self-enjoyment. Biodun Jeyifo always had that power. It was what he was fighting so hard not to lose when he did the exit-taking that found him in the United States at a time when there was so much to do at home to bring up a new generation of activists and fighters for a just and better society. It was an exit taking, that in reality was also a homecoming to being always in the same place with his society. The work he has done away from the homeland, and the work he is doing, attests to it. So why not! Let's celebrate.

Odia Ofeimun, a poet, Essayist, political and cultural historian, writes from Lagos. He is author of the acclaimed The Poet Lied, several other collections of poetry, dance dramas, and the book of essays Taking Nigeria Seriously, among others.