Charting the Footsteps of a Navigator and Creator of Thought: Mapping the Omnivorous Writings of Toyin Falola through Genre and Style
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Charting the Footsteps
of a Navigator and Creator of Thought
Mapping the Omnivorous Writings of Toyin Falola through Genre and Style
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
''A long and worthy acknowledgment must await another opportunity. I am too famished to speak, too dehydrated to move, too exhausted to write. With the little breadth that is left, let me mumble just a few words before I faint''.
Toyin Falola, ''Acknowledgements'', Cultural Modernity in a Colonized World: The Writings of Chief Isaac Oluwole Delano, 2020, ix.
At the centre of the universe is a tree and at its foot a little old man. The tree is his mind, the branches his thoughts, their leaves his words.
How may one map the branches of this tree, large as houses, spreading in various directions, their leaves innumerable?
An image of the human being as thinker and expresser of thought, his consciousness the standpoint from which he perceives the cosmos, therefore in a sense, the centre of the cosmos, since cosmic vastness and its individualities only exists for him to the degree that he perceives it.
An image adapted from Wande Abimbola’s An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus.
How may one map the omnivorous writings of one particularly dramatic demonstration of the human being as thinker and expresser of thought, Toyin Falola’s penetration into broad zones of exploration and creation in African thought, a journey of which perhaps no complete public account exists?
The following admittedly incomplete approaches may be adopted.
Genres
Poetry, interviews, letters, essays, books.
Poetry
Yoruba poetry
English poetry
Celebratory poetry
Elegiac poetry
Unified celebratory and elegiac poetry
Others in the book Etches of Fresh Waters which I have not categorized.
Interviews
Interviews of himself by others
Interviews of others by himself
Letters
Private correspondence demonstrating striking insights or expressions, or both
Essays
Reviews
Project announcements
Celebrations
Celebratory elegies
Expository and analytical essays
Expository, analytical and narrative essays
Books
Poetry
Scholarly
Poetry and scholarship
Autobiographical
Sole authored
Co-authored
Sole edited
Co-edited
Focused on individuals
Focused on cities
Focused on countries
Focused on peoples
Focused on other subjects
Religion
Philosophy
Religion and Philosophy
Art
History
Literature
Politics
Education
Economics
Multidisciplinary and multi-subject
Styles
Expository and analytical
Vatic
Expository, analytical and vatic