Ïntertwinings of Two Histories in Tracing the Footsteps of the Master : Cognitive Autobiography and Epistemic Biography in Exploring Abiola Irele's Publication Trajectory [ Work in Progress]

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

                                                                              



                                           Intertwinings of Two Histories in Tracing the Footsteps of the Master

                                                        Cognitive Autobiography and Epistemic Biography

                                                                                                in

                                                              Exploring  Abiola Irele's Publication History


                                                                          Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju                                            

                                                                                                                              Compcros

                        

                                                       

Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

                       

                                                 

 "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

When the journey has reached a crest, it is fruitful to look back and see the roads the journey took, the identity formations evident as the road wound on. In looking into the publication history of the  great humanities scholar  Abiola Irele, he whose voyage has crested,  I am struck by the conjunction between the beginning of his publication career and the early years of my own life, years I can hardly recall.

In contrast to that period of my  biological beginnings in their accidental conjunction with the epistemic emergence  of the scholar whose work radiates ever splendid on the horizon, my unrecalled embryonic state and its conjunction with the cognitive unfolding of the thinker, a convergence that would have remained unknown to any and of little significance outside the myriad overlapping threads that constitute the great journey of being and becoming if not for the eventual intersection of those threads at a point of knowledge  as different from the unknowledge of the earlier mutual existences in both physically and epistemically distant spaces, my first encounter  with Irele's writing,  in 1986, through his essay "The Criticism of Modern African Literature", remains indelible in my memory as one of the highlights of that year.

 From that essay, a particular expression  has become part of me, "articulated resonance", his  summation of the task of the literary critic, an expression that makes me laugh in delight as I recall it right now, its marvelous ideational compression in superb syntax a demonstration of Irele's magnificent expressive style, and, in this instance, also projecting his grounding in the study of music as well as participating in its performance, "resonance" being  a term central to  the physics of sound, the Google dictionary providing this summation of the idea:

1. the quality in a sound of being deep, full, and reverberating.

   "the resonance of his voice"

   • the ability to evoke or suggest images, memories, and emotions.

     "the concepts lose their emotional resonance"
2. Physics

   the reinforcement or prolongation of sound by reflection from a surface or by the synchronous vibration of a neighboring object.
   
   

Selections from Irele's Publication Trajectory

1. "Negritude-Literature and Ideology"

Abiola Irele

The Journal of Modern African Studies

Vol. 3, No. 4 (Dec., 1965), pp. 499-526

One of Irele's earliest presentations of his engagement with Negritude as art and philosophy, foreshadowing his exploration of relationships between diverse cognitive and expressive styles, between imaginative and systematic thought and expression in African and Caribbean thought and art,  culminating in his  projection of conjunctions between the mythic frames of the Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology and Western science in "The African scholar" as possibly suggesting possible future developments in science.  The Negritude essay's ideational formulations and  style of expression indicate that, even at this early point in his career, Irele had reached a level of maturity and distinctiveness of scholarly identity that would characterize his scholarly career.

[ Note at the bottom of the first  page of the article]

"[ Abiola Irele is ] a Nigerian writer at present preparing a doctoral dissertation at the Ecole  pratique des hautes ertudes, Sorbonne, Paris. This article follows the one on "Negritude or Black Cultural Nationalism'', published in Vol.III, No. 3 of this Journal, which dealt with the historical origins and cultural aspects of the movement".

2. "Is African Music Possible?"

Abiola Irele

Transition

No. 61 (1993), pp. 56-71

A fantastic essay.Brings alive the excitement of musical creativity even for those unacquainted with the music he references or have little significant interest in music or have no knowledge of the language of music criticism, a language Irele uses with delight and illumination. Contains an arresting history of Western classical music. Discusses African music across much of the continent, with a focus on Nigeria,  with rich insight into its distinctive expressions in the language of the medium. Compares African and Western music in relation to the relationship between Western classical music as a cross-European genre  and music rooted in local European communities, exploring how African art music is facing the challenge of attracting Africans, represented by their socialization in indigenous African music,  to the foreign idiom represented by Western classical music, correlating these efforts with similar initiatives in African writing in European languages and literary genres.

 Quotes from the essay:

[ Richard Wagner]  was led to a method of composition which could no longer remain securely within the bounds of the accepted system of tonality. It is of course true that he was anticipated in this direction by Beethoven, whose late works strained so forcefully against a convention he had himself consolidated that they inaugurated a new conception of musical form and expression, so that, for instance, his late quartets can now be seen to lead straight to those of Bartok, composed more than a century later. With his opera's however, Wagner and amplified and gave sensuous life to Beethoven's austere formalism.
.....

Mussorgky's powerful opera Boris Goudenov...establishes, at the very outset, in the melodic progression and harmonies of its opening scenes, a spirit that is distinctly Russian, one that is sustained throighuit the work and is given a tragic resonance, in the interplay between the hero and the chorus, in the great final scene.   Boris Goudenov can thus be considered, on all the points that count, as the perfect exemplification of the nationalist spirit in music. In it, the musical style proceeds at once at three levels of expression: the folk tradition invigorates the equally rooted heritage of liturgical music developed within Russian Orthodoxy, which in turn confers on the folk tradition a hieratic quality, and this marvelous fusion itself is then cast into forms prescribed by the cosmopolitan language of Western art music.
...

...it is the wide appeal of our popular music that makes it the most important single source of moral sustenance for millions on our continent, faced today with the harsh realities of what Ali Mazrui has called "the African condition".

3. Editorial: The Landscape of African Music

F. Abiola Irele

Research in African Literatures

Vol. 32, No. 2, The Landscape of African Music (Summer, 2001), pp. 1

Superb exploration of why African music should be discussed in terms of the intersection between its cultural distinctiveness and related contexts across the globe.

A  quote from the essay:

" Thus, it seems inconceivable [ to ethnomusicolgy's straitjacketing of African music]   that the first movement of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 4, with its wonderful flute ritornello, could evoke the Igbo tradition of ozo and atilogwu music, yet to anyone who cares to listen, the similarities in instrumental color and rhythmic pattern can be striking. And I recall the remark made by the late Fela Sowande about how much the opening theme of the second symphony by Sibelius evinced for him a Yoruba quality that he came to feel an especially strong bond with the great Finnish composer on account of this passage."

4. Dimensions of African Discourse

Abiola Irele

College Literature

Vol. 19/20, No. 3/1, Teaching Postcolonial and Commonwealth Literatures (Oct., 1992 - Feb., 1993), pp. 45-59

An examination of the scope of themes in African imaginative and philosophical writing. Rich, but does not generally  demonstrate the musical fluidity of Irele's best prose.

Quote from the essay:

The close correspondence between the two dimensions of African discourse I have indicated [ 'imaginative literature and directly ideological terms'] becomes evident when it is observed that the themes and textual modes of the imaginative literature regularly present themselves as imagistic transpositions of explicit preoccupations at the level of the ideological;they give the indirection of form and metaphor ( in the large sense of the term) to sentiments, attitudes and ideas- to activities of consciousness-that stem from an immediate engagement with experience.
...

The plan fact is that history has not been for us a phantom play of mirrors, but rather a harrowing experience, vividly rendered in our imaginative expression and reflected in the general tenor of pour discourse.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]