POETICS OF MAN’S DUALITY, EXPLOITATION AND PRESERVATION IN WOLE SOYINKA’S MADMEN AND SPECIALISTS

This paper examines Wole Soyinka’s representation of man’s duality and his perception and attitude towards the earth and his fellow man in society in Madmen and Specialists. It argues that an exploration of man’s dual nature would aid our understanding of his bizarre urge to destroy the natural environment and inflict pain on his kind at times and preserve both at other times. Through contrastive analysis, it scrutinizes Wole Soyinka’s portrayal of characters with negative and positive tendencies toward mother earth. Those with negative desires are constructed in the male-dominated destructive cult of ‘AS’ while those with positive ones are healers populated by women. This study also explores the tension between the sexes in a patriarchal society where men’s sole motivation is a depraved exploitation of human and natural resources of the earth, while women work hard at preserving and sustaining the earth and its assets. Reader-Response and Eco-Feminism are deployed as theoretical framework in this study. The study concludes that Madmen and Specialists is a satiric comment on the perennial conflict between pro-nature, earth-preserving human forces and anti-nature, earth-exploiting persons. It is also a moral condemnation of man’s irrational craving for power, domination and exploitation. It is a subtle micro construction of the universal tragedy of man’s gradual self-annihilation disguised as wanton exploitation of the earth’s resources