|
Wole Soyinka
life that he so extensively appropriates.
Madmen and Specialists
and from
Zia with Love
are particularly illustrative of this point. For in each of these
plays, the protagonist functions, unlike the protagonists of plays like
Death
and the King’s Horseman
,
Dance of the Forests
and
Kongi’s Harvest
, as a sort of
embodiment of that figure of medieval European folk festivals, Lord of
Misrule. Thus, where
Death and the King’s Horseman
more or less success-
fully fuses and harmonizes ritual with drama by integrating the words,
actions and gestures of Elesin Oba as the communicant of the communal
rite and as existential hero of the private drama of his vacillating, sub-
liminally divided will, Professor in
The Road
, the Old Man in
Madmen and
Specialists
, Sebe Irawe in
From Zia with Love
, and Sanda in
The Beatification of
Area Boy
all set in motion and orchestrate wild disruptions and inversions
of the protocols and practices of “polite” and official languages and id-
ioms of power, privilege or tradition. Moreover, within themselves, these
four plays differ so markedly that an element common to all the plays – a
sort of plebeian, Bakhtinian “grotesque realism” involving extensive car-
nivalesque jokes and conceits on bodily appetites and desires – connects
differently with other elements like music, dance and spectacle, ritual
and ceremonial performative idioms, and propulsive, plot-driven dra-
mas of individual destiny. And it is precisely on account of this extensive
internal differentiation in idiom and style, technique and performative
mode in Soyinka’s drama that in our concluding section of this chapter,
we now move to analyses of two particular plays from the “early” and
“late” periods of Soyinka’s career. These are respectively
The Lion and the
Jewel
and
From Zia with Love
.
The Lion and the Jewel
occupies a unique place in Soyinka’s dramas. It
is perhaps the only play by him that is written entirely in a comic spirit
uncomplicated by a dark, brooding humor or satire. True, it is a satirical
comedy, but the satire is of a gentle, good-natured kind. Most of the
satirical barbs are directed at Lakunle, the eccentric schoolteacher, and
people like him who propose a superficial, naive, and pretentious view of
progress, modernity and Westernization as a counter to what they con-
sider the unmodern backwardness of African village life. Thus, though
Lakunle finds his village compatriots insufferably ridiculous in their “un-
sophisticated” rural ways, the laugh is on him: we laugh
at
, and not with
him; we laugh at the incongruity between his inflated self-importance
and the half-digested, pedantic nature of the “knowledge” he espouses,
and between his affectation of superiority and the utter condescension
with which everyone in the village, including even his own pupils, re-
gards his ineptitude and eccentricity. But compared with the dictators,
The “drama of existence”: sources and scope
tyrants, charlatans and hypocrites of Soyinka’s more ferocious satires,
Lakunle seems to come from another dramatic imagination. Moreover,
The Lion and the Jewel
is the only one of Soyinka’s plays to end with an
unambiguously happy resolution. The very last stage direction in the
play informs us that having been outmaneuvered by the wily Baroka,
the “lion” of the title of the play, in the competition for Sidi the “jewel”
of the village, Lakunle is seen rallying to the irrepressible impulses of
youth and sexuality as he dances after one of the young maidens in Sidi’s
bridal party.
The plot of the play involves a deliberate inversion of one of the most
constant motifs of romantic comedy: a love triangle in which the romance
of a pair of young lovers is for a while thwarted and frustrated by an older,
often wealthier suitor; but the younger suitor ultimately prevails and the
young lovers marry. In this play, it is the older suitor, Baroka, whose suit
prevails and who shows far greater vitality and resourcefulness than his
young, hapless competitor. This inversion, in which age prevails over
youth, entails other important details as well: the “illiterate” protagonist
proves more astute and enterprising than his bookish antagonist; the
“backward” villager proves more cultured, more enlightened than the
citified, would-be sophisticate.
Soyinka has given an account of the origins of this play that shows
how his direct observation of life and its surprises provided a basis for
the play’s inversion of conventional comic motifs:
I wrote the first draft of
The Lion and the Jewel
towards the end of my student days in
England. It was actually inspired by an item which said: “Charlie Chaplin
. . .
a
man of nearly sixty has taken to wife Oona O’Neil,” who was then about
seventeen, something like that. Now no one reading
The Lion and the Jewel
would
ever have imagined that this is the authentic genesis of the play from Charlie
Chaplin, and again thinking of the old men I knew in my society who at
-
plus,
, would still take some new young wives – and always seemed perfectly
capable of coping with the onerous tasks which such activity demanded of them!
I just sat down and that’s how Baroka came into existence. I knew that some of
these old men had actually won these new wives against the stiff competition
of some younger men, some of them schoolteachers who came to the villages.
“This girl has got to be impressed by my canvas shoes.” Mind you, the younger
men didn’t speak the language that those girls understood and they were beaten
by the old men. That’s how
The Lion and the Jewel
came to be written.
The mental leap in this account from Britain to Nigeria, from Charlie
Chaplin to randy octogenarians in his own country, underscores the
universal quality of Soyinka’s dramatization in this play of sexual rivalry
Wole Soyinka
between different generations and between men and women. What gives
a trenchant, and often uproarious edge to the dramatization of these mo-
tifs of age and gender in
The Lion and the Jewel
is the way Soyinka has
conjoined them, inverted the usual pattern of their treatment in con-
ventional romantic comedy, and extended their imaginative resonance
by making the conflict of generations one between “grandfathers” and
“granddaughters” not, as is usual, between “fathers” and “sons.”
These important revisions and extensions of conventional motifs of
romantic comedy are made even more enthralling by the way Soyinka
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
