Genius in Theatre. Illustration by Sarah N. Kanu / THE REPUBLIC.
THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / THEATRE DEPT.
The Dramatic Procedures of Wole Soyinka
Genius in Theatre. Illustration by Sarah N. Kanu / THE REPUBLIC.
THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / THEATRE DEPT.
The Dramatic Procedures of Wole Soyinka
Wole Soyinka’s plays, though written and performed for the first time over six decades ago—the last of them, Alápatà Àpáta, was published in 2011—remain profoundly relevant in our contemporary global context. As societies worldwide probe issues of identity, power, and cultural declination in an inexorably interconnected world, Soyinka’s plays, like the mythical white hen of Ọbàtálá spreading soil to create the earth, scatter these themes across the global stage, cultivating a nuanced sphere viewed through an African lens. His masterful blend of traditional Yorùbá elements and Nigerian experience with universal human concerns speaks to our current struggles with globalization and cultural authenticity. Moreover, in an era and climate marked by political ferment and social unrest, Soyinka’s incisive critiques of authoritarianism and his calls for social and political responsibility offer as much resonance now as they did relevance to the times when they first appeared. Revisiting these plays today not only widens our initial understanding of African literature but also provides fresh insights into the complexities of our modern selves and world.
‘The primary function of literature is to capture and expand reality,’ Soyinka wrote a decade ago in his preface to an anthology of ‘new writing from Africa South of the Sahara’ titled Africa39. ‘It is futile,’ he continues, ‘therefore to attempt to circumscribe African creative territory, least of all by conformism to any literary ideology that then aspires to be the tail that wags the dog. Literature derives from, reflects and reflects upon—Life. It projects its enhanced vision of life’s potential, its possibilities, narrates its triumphs and failures.’ However, it is not only life’s potentials, possibilities, triumphs, and failures, but also the curious exuberance with which life integrates these conditions that are Soyinka’s ultimate literary conspiracy towards impeccable representation.
Notwithstanding the substantial extraliterary considerations that abound in his body of works, the fundamental territory of Soyinka’s prowess is none other than his mastery of craft, even more so in drama than in poetry, fiction, and the essay—all of which commands considerable recognition and reverence through his marked idiosyncrasy of cognition, perception, and execution. As a result of his impeccable concatenation of these qualities, his characters are not only recognizable in our immediate societies but strikingly reflective of our realities, so much so that his culturally conscious language, the vessel of his characters’ shot at lifelikeness and prominence, commands so strange an effect as though encountering a grinning Sisyphus.
TO ROLA, WITH REVERENCE
It has always been pronounced in the annals of dramatic criticism—from Aristostle’s Poetics to Harold Bloom’s Invention of the Human—that the mark of a capable playwright is the ability to create believable characters. That the mark of an impressive one is to create, with the least suspicion of cognitive coercion in their tics, personalities that convince in their singularities—not only in the particular play in which they find themselves but also across other plays in the tradition of their creator. Also, that the mark of a great playwright is the consistent ability to present these characters of convincing personalities so sufficiently marked and eloquent in their differences. In African drama, no writer has been so steadfast as well as showing great virtuosity to dazzle us with characters of this strong human-like breed and calibre as Soyinka; since the dawn of his professional career in the theatre in the mid-twentieth century till presently, in the third decade of the twenty-first.
As early as A Dance of the Forest, first performed at the Nigerian Independence Celebrations in 1960, Soyinka established that he’s not just a capable playwright—if only he could get the grace of life to write and to perform one more play of the imagination, and another after that, to prove as much. Indeed, he got this grace and well evinced it enough that the characters—major in their roles, intimidating sometimes in their gestures yet imaginatively prepossessing—that established his greatness are as marvellous on the page and stage as the ones supporting their roles toward memorability.
This is why I am pledging my ink neither to Demoke, for instance, who has been heavily but somewhat rightly described as standing in for humanity in A Dance of the Forest. ‘The carver is central to Yoruba life and worship,’ the critical cognoscente on Soyinka, Eldred Durosimi Jones, notes in The Writing of Wole Soyinka. ‘[T]his central position is reflected in the symbolic role of Demoke the carver . . . who becomes a representative of humanity.’ Nor to Kongi, the vainglorious dictatorial president of the developing African nation of ‘Ismaland’ from Kongi’s Harvest. Ditto Dr. Bero, the cynical specialist from the absurd ambiance of Madmen and Specialists. Each and every one of these characters has been well-represented and well-interpreted in our literary and critical traditions.
However, in Jones’s comprehensive commentary, Rola—one of the four protagonists of Part 1 of A Dance of the Forest, referred to as ‘The most notorious’ of ‘the four living generations’ by Aroni, a Forest Dweller, in the prologue—becomes relegated to her appreciation of Demoke’s artistic performance, that too after calling her ‘an odd mixture,’ a keen observation that hints towards her complexity but is described with minimal context that results in a rather shallow perception of the character. ‘About all that can be said for Rola in either existence,’ the critic concludes, ‘is that she shows some appreciation of art.’ This is evidently not the case.
While I concede she does have a rather cynical view of her society as the critic also perceives, I take her loud performance of this outlook to be a result of the mocking denigration of ‘her position’ as a prostitute by the fellows in whose company she finds herself. Why stand reduced in silence by hypocrisy—that is, the amalgam of Adenebi, Demoke, and, to some minor extents, Obaneji (cynicism divined), the representatives of men and their socio-cultural privilege—when you are gifted with words and reason? The issue later escalates to the ancient question about who propagates prostitution in society: women who sell sex or the men who sustain the enterprise as hedonistic ‘investors?’ Rola understands the prejudice all too well and she defends her position as expected of a fastidious intellect, even more so when she’s accused of something as horrid as killing her transactional ‘lovers’:
ADENEBI: Men! Some of them were hardly grown up. We heard you liked them young, really young.
ROLA: I regret nothing. You men are conceited fools. Nothing was ever done on my account. Nothing. What you do is boost yourselves all the time. By every action. When that one killed the other, was it on my account? When he killed himself, could he claim that he did it for me? He was only big with himself, so leave me out of it.
ADENEBI: I suppose you didn’t really run merely because you were beset by your relations. They simply didn’t leave you room to entertain your lovers. And this could have been a profitable season. A generous season.
ROLA: Draw your filthy conclusions. I only know I am master of my fate. I have turned my training to good account. I am wealthy, and I know where my wealth came from.
ADENEBI: Oh yes, you ruined countless. Young and old. Old, peaceful ones who had never even set eyes on you; who simply did not know what their son was up to; didn’t know he was draining the home away—for you.
ROLA: Don’t go on or you’ll make me cry. Fool! What is it to me? When your business men ruin the lesser ones, do you go crying to them? I also have no pity for the one who invested foolishly. Investors, that is all they ever were—to me.
This conversation reminds one of ‘You Men’, a poem by the seventeenth-century Mexican poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in which she essentially anticipates Rola. However, the tone of this conversation is not the same tone with which Rola engages the men at the start of the play. But alert to the fellows’ disregard, among other things, of Dead Man and Dead Woman’s requests to take their ‘case’, Rola does not only seem to lose patience but also respect for each of them after she takes the case, absent excuse, absent ironical intonation. From then on, the civility, if sometimes demanded or compromised for, that permeates the air of the Forest at the beginning recedes as she claps back at them any chance she gets for their tasteless quibbles.
While Rola’s vocation is neither as socially respected nor even accepted as carving, removing the easy possibility of elevating her persona to the revered figuration of being human, with her paradoxical mix of playfulness and seriousness, she proves nonetheless these traits as redeeming of man as ‘art’—to give a nod to Obaneji’s rhetorical comment on Demoke’s impressive artistry in carving the totem. Perhaps the most thrilling discovery about the characters of Rola and Demoke is that the loud and caustic personality of the former is at a fascinating tension, but not necessarily at odds with the mild, introverted mien of the latter in which case Rola becomes just as representative of humanity as Demoke.
What’s interesting and even enviable in the person of Soyinka the man—his polemic sharpness, to be precise—remains present and particular in Rola more than in anyone else in the play. It is evident, however, in the drastic if the natural transition of the wild temperament of Rola to the outright devilish temperament of her ancestor, Madam Tortoise, that these characters are not a result of unconscious self-representation or a conscious attempt at self-definition. Rather, they are sure demonstrations of an anthropological curiosity that seeks to analyse the present through the less informed, but equally considered lens of the past.
‘The theatre is, or should be,’ according to poet and essayist, T. S. Eliot in ‘Poetry and Drama’, ‘a means of extending our knowledge of life, and a means of enlarging our understanding of human beings.’ In the character of Rola and others like her, Soyinka has executed this job with precision, without any shortcoming reductive of their being human and peculiar.
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SOYINKA’S SATIRICAL ÉLAN VITAL
‘Satire,’ the critic James Parker once said, ‘after all, is a moral business deep down: It punctures delusions, it lays bare iniquities.’ While this is true, especially in the free, impressionistic interpretations of plays like Soyinka’s, as a formalist, I prefer another definition more applicable to our Nigerian dramatist in the voice of the English novelist-critic, Martin Amis, who, writing in ‘Jane Austen and the Dream Factory’, notes that ‘Change is the business of satire. . . It doesn’t incite you to transform society; it strengthens you to tolerate it.’ This is more applicable to Soyinka because his morality, while it ‘punctures delusions,’ and ‘lays bare iniquities,’ is rudimentarily aesthetic, which is made discernible by his considered avoidance of moralizing interventions in his plays, save A Play of Giants in which the dramatist points his introduction to the play at the real-life bad actors it features.
This commitment to aesthetics is the precise reason why the satirical resonance of The Lion and the Jewel, for instance, is so memorable. Setting them up sufficiently as the free artists of their own destinies, to adapt G. W. F. Hegel’s infamous observation on Shakespearean characters—deserved rejection in the case of Lakunle who communicates his last proposal to Sidi in a distastefully heroic overtone—Soyinka turns silence into the perfect authorial comment. With his satire, especially in harrowing plays such as Kongi’s Harvest, Madmen and Specialists, and A Play of Giants, Soyinka does seek change and transformation but also understands the insufficiency of drama—however hard it conspires to activate our most revolutionist emotions—at moving us to arms against the despotic powers and the social decay that be in our societies. Instead, the plays equip us with the knowledge of the evil of which our society is capable and, in turn, prepare us to face this evil head-on. Hence, Soyinka’s true performance of this dramatic commitment strikes more potently through the fortification of his satire with plush and exquisite dialectics.
According to the Nigerian scholar, Abiola Irele, in The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, Madmen and Specialists ‘holds a special significance within the body of Soyinka’s work, not simply as his form of commentary on the [Nigerian Civil War] itself, but also as an indication of the new dimension that his awareness has acquired.’ He adds that, ‘We have here no longer a direct preoccupation with social problems and human types, but rather a passionate and consuming obsession with the problem of evil.’ While this problem is not histrionically pronounced in the absurd actions of the play, there are nonetheless two moments that show the dialectical properties present in Soyinka’s satire. The first is the play’s climactic ending when Bero shoots his mad father, Old Man, who is just an instant away from vivisecting Cripple with a scalpel. This action essentially puts him and, by extension, the world of Madmen out of the misery that pervades its bleak atmosphere in the strange attitudes of Bero, Old Man, and the Mendicants, all of them equal victims of the war. The second moment satirizes our acute capability for cynicism through Bero’s weird conversation with Priest, Old Man’s friend, in which Soyinka elects something as terrifying as cannibalism for comic effect, at least until we know at the tragic end of the play that there is a grain of truth to Bero’s cannibalistic claim:
BERO: I give you the personal word of a scientist. Human flesh is delicious. Of course, not all parts of the body. I prefer the balls myself.
PRIEST [vehemently.]: I don’t believe you.
BERO: You don’t? Well, then, why don’t you stay to dinner?
PRIEST: Dinner? [Cheering up.] Of course. I see all you want is an argument like your old man. Delighted, of course. Only too delighted to oblige . . . [He is stricken by a sudden doubt.] Er… dinner . . . did you say dinner?
BERO: Dinner. I came well-laden with supplies.
Here, the juxtaposition of the horrific with humour, if only momentarily, represents a stark dialectical contrast. This dialectical contrast is also employed to great effect in such moments as the ending of Kongi’s Harvest, where Segi’s presentation of the head instead of the festival yam gives way to an anarchic climax out of which the possibility of a peaceful future emerges; and in Death and the King’s Horseman, where colonial officer, Pilkings’s self-satisfied disruption of Ọyọ’s tradition allows a graver tragedy to occur in which case Olunde, who, in order to ‘preserve the honour of his people,’ as the synopsis of the 1987 edition of the play has it, volunteers himself for the ritual in place of Elesin, his father. In Swift and Satire, the scholar, James A. W. Rembert figures we need, ‘a theory of the dialectical basis of satire,’ but in Soyinka the basis is premised in form and easily proven.
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OTHER CONDITIONS OF GENIUS
‘A man’s language is his culture,’ Willfried F. Feuser, the German comparative scholar, remarks in ‘Wole Soyinka: The Problem of Authenticity’, affirming the playwright as ‘a master of language.’ Soyinka’s career in drama, fiction, poetry, and nonfiction verifies this affirmation to be true, especially in his stringent incorporation of his Yorùbá cultural elements, ranging from dance, riddles, festivals, rituals, deities, to proverbs, the last of which holds an important place, into his plays.
In Yorùbá social settings, for instance, ‘Òwe l’ẹṣin ọ̀rọ̀’: ‘The proverb is the horse of conversation’, which is analogous to the Igbo proverb that Chinua Achebe gives us in Things Fall Apart, that: ‘Proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.’ According to this proverbial self-reverence, there is perhaps nothing linguistically grander and more indicative of class, age group, and locus of authority in our culture than the seamless infusion of proverbs in serious as well as casual conversations, even more so now that people are less educated in that cultural mannerism. Critically indicative of our verbal creativity, proverbs and their mastery are significant to any claim to the proper literary representation of Nigerianness. However, it is not only Soyinka’s omnicompetent activation of the smooth appearance of proverbs in his plays—which results, among other fascinating effects, in dialogic depth—but also his deft and studious translation of those proverbs, steeped in Yorùbá cultural psyche, into English idioms, that is one of the evidence of his formal merits.
What’s more rewarding to the comprehension of Yorùbá ways of life, especially regarding our non-negotiable subscription to respect, is to notice how many speakers of the proverbs in the plays are socially important and older people, and how they elect proverbs to voice caution and other observations of equal significance. In Death and the King’s Horseman, for example, Iyalode shows her serious scepticism to Elesin’s incessant claim of commitment to tradition through a proverb that suggests the enactment of honour is easier said than done: ‘Eating the awusa nut is not so difficult as drinking water afterwards.’ Elesin’s response to that is equally proverbial and serious: ‘The waters of the bitter stream are honey to a man / Whose tongue has savoured all.’ Sometimes, proverbs are also conscripted to humorous effect, as in Part One of The Road when Samson tells Salubi how useful his stinking breath would be against the police and, ‘their riot squad with tear-gas and all that nonsense’: ‘A compost heap has its own uses, as long as the wind is blowing in the other direction.’
But the central importance of proverbs to Yorùbá wisdom is exemplified in Death and the King’s Horseman when Pilkings, after imprisoning Elesin to avert his ritualistic death, asks him ‘to search the quiet of your heart and tell me—do you not find great contradictions in the wisdom of your own race?’ When Elesin tells him to make himself clear, Pilkings tags proverb to do his bidding:
I have lived among you long enough to learn a saying or two. One came to my mind tonight when I stepped into the market and saw what was going on. You were surrounded by those who egged you on with song and praises. I thought are these not the same people who say: the elder grimly approaches heaven and you ask him to bear greetings yonder; do you really think he makes the journey willingly? After that, I did not hesitate.
(A pause. ELESIN sighs. Before he can speak a sound of running feet is heard.)
That nothing is offered as a response to this, however accidental of circumstance the reason might be, intimates that it is the strongest argument against the kind of social institution that needs someone like Elesin to give his life for the preservation of the honour of his society.
It is often said that an aspect of Soyinka’s dramatic genius can be ascribed to his poetic language. But if ‘to transfuse emotion—not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader’s sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer—is the peculiar function of poetry,’ as the English poet, A. E. Housman, has it in The Name and Nature of Poetry, Soyinka is not an early accomplisher of this poetic feat—at least not as early as A Dance of the Forest, whose soliloquies at best are undeniable beau ideal of transmission of thought. However, by the publication of Death and the King’s Horseman in 1975, Soyinka has graduated, for instance, from the long, frustrating soliloquies of Eshuoro to a more effortless poetic language in which he now charges even the most ordinary words with sedimented meaning. Here, for example, is Eshuoro threatening Demoke for the violation of his home, the ‘araba’ tree:
Demoke, son and son again to pious carvers,
Have you lost fear? Demoke, renegade, beware
The slanted eye of night. Beware The anger of the silent wind that rustles
Not a leaf. I’ll be revenged. Eshuoro, I,
I’ll be revenged, I’ll be revenged. . .
Now, compare this austere language to Elesin’s fluid dramatization of his commitment to the ‘women’ who question if nothing will hold him back from fulfilling his duty:
Nothing. What! Has no one told you yet?
I go to keep my friend and master company.
Who says the mouth does not believe in
‘No, I have chewed all that before?’ I say I have.
The world is not a constant honey-pot.
Where I found little I made do with little.
Where there was plenty I gorged myself.
My master’s hands and mine have always
Dipped together and, home or sacred feast,
The bowl was beaten bronze, the meats
So succulent our teeth accused us of neglect.
We shared the choicest of the season’s
Harvest of yams. How my friend would read
Desire in my eyes before I knew the cause—
However rare, however precious, it was mine.
If this effusing dithyramb to reciprocity and honour also seems facile in its claim to poetics, the defence lies more succinctly with Eliot when he asserts that in drama, ‘The verse, the poetry, must never be so far removed from ordinary speech as to destroy the illusion of the theatre.’ Although the lineation of the opening speeches of the play contrasts the prosaic form of the later dialogues, the beginning is neither strictly committed to the formal essences nor the pregnant linguistic aspiration of poetry. Here, the relaxed subscription to verse and refrainment from artificiality is handled with breeze. Here, Soyinka’s ‘poetry’ is ‘ruthlessly subordinated to [his] dramatic needs.’
Range, variety and verisimilitude—one could make a case that these command our sustained admiration for Soyinka’s plays, most especially because of his articulation of our potentials, possibilities, triumphs, and failures through his characters and their conditions. Meanwhile, we also flex the feeling that we all are recognized and included, if not in situations that might be remote to outside experiencers of the cultural landscape of the plays, then in language that excites the mind no matter the origin of the ingredients of its forge. Definitive as one of the few writers to make use of Nigeria’s historical and cultural materials to a productive as well as impressive degree, Soyinka’s legacy as a dramatist is also a testament to what a proper cultural education, clear ambition, and strict commitment to craft is capable of producing: a body of work resistant to the terror of literary overpopulation, the phantasmagoria of taste, and the fleetingness of literary fashion⎈
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