A Loud Dance of Silence: The Unsaid of Wole Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests

ABSTRACT:After being a British protectorate for nearly sixty years, in 1960, Nigeria gained independence the same year A Dance of the Forests was published. The play, which expresses ambivalence toward radical changes with premonitions between its lines, has been regarded as one of the most challenging to understand. With an eye on the work's historical context, it is treated as a symptom of history that reveals its "political unconscious" based on Fredrick Jameson's ideas. Furthermore, Pierre Macherey's Theory of Gaps highlights "the ideological project" of the literary work by focusing on the "unsaid" in the text, which shapes its "speech." In conclusion, regarding the synthesis of Jameson and Macherey's ideas, which reveals and studies the correlation between ideology and narrative, the article sets out to find the central topic of the work and describe the imaginary/symbolic system put into the service of the ideological project concerning its context.