Paper 206 : Reimagining Wole Soyinka’s The Dance of the Forests through AI and Ecocritical Perspectives

Reimagining Wole Soyinka’s The Dance of the Forests through AI and Ecocritical Perspectives

Personal Information:-
Name:- Dhatri Parmar

Batch:- M.A. Sem 4 (2023-2025)

Enrollment Number:- 5108230032

E-mail Address:-dhatriparmar291@gmail.com

Roll Number:- 6

Assignment Details:-

Topic:- Reimagining Wole Soyinka’s The Dance of the Forests through AI and Ecocritical Perspectives

Paper & subject code:- Paper 206: The African Literature

Submitted to:- Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, MKBU, Bhavnagar

Abstract:

This paper explores Wole Soyinka’s The Dance of the Forests through an innovative ecocritical and artificial intelligence (AI) lens, positioning AI not merely as a digital tool but as a conceptual and epistemological force that reconfigures ecological narratives. The study emphasizes the forest in Soyinka’s play as an ontological entity, functioning as a living archive that embodies memory, justice, and resistance. Drawing from the concepts of trans-corporeality and the hyperobject, the paper argues that the forest operates similarly to AI in its capacity for pattern recognition, recursive memory, and systemic judgment. 

These qualities invite a rethinking of non-human agency and ecological time, framing the forest as a sentient witness to ancestral crimes and environmental degradation. Through this lens, AI emerges as a model of non-human cognition, resonating with Soyinka’s portrayal of ancestral memory and ecological justice. The paper advocates for a posthuman ecocritical framework where AI and ecological systems work as co-participants in envisioning future life-worlds, underscoring the vital intersection of African ritual systems, environmental justice, and computational thought. In doing so, it offers a reconceptualization of planetary ethics, focusing on AI’s role in illuminating collective ecological futures.

Key Words:

Postcolonial Ecocriticism,Posthumanism, Memory and Justice,Trans-corporeality, Planetary Ethics.

Introduction

Wole Soyinka’s The Dance of the Forests is a powerful play that explores the themes of memory, time, ecology, and justice through ritual and myth. Written in 1960 for Nigeria’s independence celebrations, the play resists simple readings of national progress. Instead, it offers a warning. The forest in the play is not just a setting. It is an active force. It remembers, judges, and brings the past into contact with the present.

This paper reads the forest as a non-human agent of ecological memory and justice. It draws on the ideas of ecocriticism and artificial intelligence (AI) to explore how non-human systems both natural and computational mirror each other in their logic and purpose. Like AI, the forest stores data (memories), detects patterns (rituals), and delivers outputs (judgment), revealing an alternate model of intelligence. Like a machine learning algorithm, it draws on accumulated inputs to generate an outcome that impacts the present a judgment that serves both ethical and communal functions.

This paper argues that AI is not only a tool but a concept that can help us read non-human consciousness in literature. By reading the forest in Soyinka’s play through the lens of AI’s epistemology—pattern recognition, recursion, and distributed memory—we gain a new understanding of how ecological narratives work. The forest, like an intelligent system, processes the past to judge the present. In this way, the forest becomes a form of posthuman intelligence. This reading helps us to imagine ecological justice beyond the limits of human experience.

Ecocriticism and the Non-Human : 

Ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the environment. It began with a focus on nature writing, but later waves have expanded to include postcolonial, indigenous, and posthuman ideas. The second and third waves of ecocriticism focus on how human and non-human systems are connected. Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality explains how bodies are porous and linked with the environment: “The human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” (Alaimo). Timothy Morton’s hyperobject describes entities like climate change or forests that are so large and complex that they are hard to grasp, but they still affect human life deeply: “Hyperobjects are viscous, nonlocal, and temporally foamy” (Morton).

In The Dance of the Forests, the forest functions as such a hyperobject. It contains the past, present, and future. It is both material and spiritual. The forest is not just a place of trees and animals. It is a living system with memory. The presence of The Dead Man, The Dead Woman, and The Unborn in the play shows how time is non-linear. The forest holds these figures in tension. It becomes a site of ecological time where human history meets environmental consequence.

As the Dead Woman says to the living characters, “You sent us back to the void with curses on your lips.” This act of summoning is not without cost the forest demands accountability. Rob Nixon’s idea of slow violence is useful here. He describes slow violence as the long-term harm to the environment and to marginalized people (Nixon). In Soyinka’s play, this violence is not shown through battles or destruction. Instead, it is shown through ritual and memory. The forest brings back the pain and mistakes of the past to confront the living. This is a form of ecological resistance.

The Forest as Ontological Force : 

Biodun Jeyifo argues that Soyinka’s plays are rooted in Yoruba metaphysics, where the spiritual and material worlds are deeply connected (Jeyifo). The forest is a sacred space that mediates between these worlds. It is not neutral. It holds knowledge and acts with purpose. It is a witness to ancestral crimes. In The Dance of the Forests, the forest calls the dead to speak. It demands that the living remember. This memory is not passive. It is active and moral. The forest brings the characters face to face with their history.

The play’s ritual drama begins with the characters being confronted by spirits from the past. The Dead Man says, “Let the air admit the dance... let the trees unburden their memory.” This poetic line reveals how nature is part of the justice process. Later, Obanezi reflects, “We called for visions of our future. We got visitations of our past.” This line encapsulates the recursive nature of the forest’s judgment.

This vision of the forest can be seen as a form of non-human agency. The forest is not just a backdrop for human action. It acts. It remembers. It judges. It is a character in its own right. This kind of agency challenges human-centered thinking. It also allows us to read the forest as a system of intelligence. It holds distributed memory, much like an AI system.

Artificial Intelligence as Cognitive Model :

Artificial Intelligence is often seen as a tool something that helps humans to solve problems. But recent studies in critical AI theory see AI as more than that. AI represents a new way of thinking about intelligence and consciousness. N. Katherine Hayles introduces the idea of the cognitive nonconscious forms of thinking that do not rely on human awareness: “Cognition is a process that interprets information within contexts that connect it to meaning” (Hayles). AI systems process data, recognize patterns, and make decisions without human control. This is similar to how the forest in Soyinka’s play works.

The forest does not follow human logic. It works through repetition and ritual. It brings the past into the present through patterns. The Masqueraders, the spirits, and the rituals all serve to expose hidden truths. This structure is recursive. It mirrors how AI systems process inputs and return outputs based on memory and rules. The forest in the play functions like an algorithm. It takes in the history of the characters and produces a moral lesson.

For example, large language models like ChatGPT or image recognition systems like DeepDream identify patterns through training datasets. The forest “trains” itself on ancestral memory. Its ritual judgments are its output, meant to improve or at least confront human behavior. Just as AI refines itself through backpropagation and error correction, the forest ritualistically revisits human errors to prompt correction.

AI also models a distributed form of intelligence. It is not located in one place or being. It is spread across a system. The forest too is not centered in one tree or spirit. It is a collective force. This kind of intelligence allows us to think beyond individual human characters. It opens space for non-human ethics.

Posthuman Ecocriticism and Ritual Drama : 

Posthuman ecocriticism explores how human and non-human systems interact and change each other. It questions the idea that humans are the center of the world. In Soyinka’s play, the spirits and Masqueraders do not serve individual storylines. They challenge the idea of national progress. They interrupt the celebration of independence with reminders of past failures.

Building on this ecological intelligence, the interruption is important. It shows that the future cannot be built without facing the past. The forest, as a system, forces this confrontation. It is recursive, like AI. It repeats patterns until learning happens. The Dead Man and Dead Woman expose the sins of the ancestors. The Unborn is a symbol of the future that has not yet been shaped. These figures are not human in the usual sense. They are posthuman. They show that memory and justice can come from outside the human world.

By placing AI and Soyinka’s forest side by side, we can see how both systems imagine new forms of ethics. These are not based on individual choice or linear time. They are collective, cyclical, and ecological. Justice in the play is not about punishment. It is about recognition and transformation. The forest, like AI, forces characters to process and confront their past.

Ecological Memory and Planetary Ethics : 

Elizabeth DeLoughrey speaks of allegories of the Anthropocene, where literature helps us to think about climate change and environmental crisis: “Narratives of climate change are acts of memory” (DeLoughrey). In The Dance of the Forests, the forest is such an allegory. It shows how the land remembers. It is not passive. It stores trauma and knowledge. The forest challenges both colonial violence and indigenous denial. It shows that independence alone cannot heal the wounds of history.

Kate Crawford, in Atlas of AI, explains that AI is built on the extraction of resources—data, energy, and human labor. She writes, “AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and human labor at every level” (Crawford). This helps us to link AI with ecological issues. Both the forest and AI are systems that rely on memory and input. But both can also become systems of justice if used with care. In Soyinka’s play, the forest is not just a symbol. It is a model of how justice can be structured through memory, ritual, and community.

Ato Quayson discusses how African texts often show a moral economy rooted in space and community. “African drama, especially ritual drama, often dramatizes social memory as a way of renewing communal ethics” (Quayson). The forest in this play functions in that way. It is a space of judgment, but also of healing. It does not destroy. It reveals. It pushes the characters to become better. This is also the potential of AI when understood as a partner in thought, not just a tool.

Conclusion

Soyinka’s The Dance of the Forests offers a powerful vision of ecological justice through ritual and myth. The forest in the play is not just a background. It is an active force that remembers and judges. When read through the lens of AI and posthuman ecocriticism, the forest emerges as a system of distributed, recursive intelligence. It mirrors how AI systems process memory and deliver ethical insights.

This paper has shown that AI is not only a digital tool but also a conceptual force. It helps us to think about non-human agency and ecological memory. Soyinka’s forest is algorithmic in its structure. It brings together the past and the future. It helps us to imagine justice beyond the human. In doing so, it opens a new path for ecocritical thinking one where ritual, memory, AI, and the environment are all entangled in the work of ethics.

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