Postcolonial theatre and the ethics
of emancipatory becoming
Awam Amkpa
New York University
“Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of
cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority
within the modern world order..”1
How does a playwright use the corporeal structures of theatre to
interrogate history as well as engage with discursive structures that make
cultural practices pose ethical questions about citizenship and agency
in a world determined by blatant unequal relations of domination and
subordination? How do playwrights use their works and their performances
to politicize culture that hegemonies depoliticize? This essay presents an
argument about the discursive role theatre practices play in producing
ethics of becoming in societies whose histories are conjoined by colonial
and postcolonial relations. The premise of my argument is that as cultural
practices encased within varieties of traditions and institutions, drama and
performances produce a framework for understanding the cultural history
and networks that suture peoples and places together into a modern global
culture characterized by relations of domination and subordination. This
critical study will explore how drama and theatre as symbolic interpretations
of social reality and modes of communication and socialization, produce a
semiosis of socio-political values, social relations, and historical contexts.
It is within the networks of such historical contexts that the phenomena
of relations of dominance and subordination, or colonial and colonized, or
indeed –“the contest for political and social authority within the modern
world,” will be examined.
The essay will assess the kinds of authority drama offers in illustrating
quests for social equity by those whose histories are mediated by social
inequities. Drama and theatre do, however, work within symbolic orders and
regimes – which are in turn determined by state power and its hegemony.
1
Bhabha, H. The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1992
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Awam Amkpa
The two playwrights I intend to discuss work within and against symbolic
regimes to produce signifiers of emancipatory cultural politics in societies
affected by postcolonial histories. I define the “postcolonial” not simply
as historical moments after colonization, but as moments and activities
produced when colonial oppressions were understood and strategies
for resisting them were demonstrably articulated. The apprehension of
domination and processes of resistance through decolonization, anticolonial
nationalisms and resistance to neocolonial regressions provides the breadth
of historical contexts through which the term “postcolonial” is used. The
postcolonial does not only happen in former colonies but also mediate
cultural practices within former colonizing nations. The term “postcolonial”
is preferred to “post-colonial” so as to draw attention to the continuities,
collisions, and dissonances within the histories of the colonized, rather
than moments after official colonization.
I use 2 case studies drawn from different countries with a common
historical belonging within a colonial and neocolonial form of European
modernity. Colonization sutured the histories of Nigeria and Britain
together within a certain European modernity. I have argued elsewhere
that Nigeria2 was initially a colonial invention with which Britain intended
to appropriate land and other resources – natural and human, as well as
expropriate its population into fictions of fixed ethnic places. Nigeria was
assimilated into a logic of modernity that was colonial hence mapped by
a ‘colonial modernity.’ Such was the framework within which regimes of
culture and symbolic orders were formulated and contested. Anticolonial
and decolonizing aesthetics emerged to underscore the coloniality of
social and symbolic realities within such a historical context, and by 1976
when Wole Soyinka wrote his Death and the King’s Horseman, relations
between both countries were overdetermined by new global formations
that made both the loss of empire and the trauma of repetitive subjugation
the backdrop against which both Soyinka and David Edgar wrote their
plays. I have also previously argued that no one single modernity can
define and constrain the diversity of people – colonized or not. Rather,
I argue that overlapping modernities offer communities resources for
contesting colonial and neocolonial modernities (in the case of Nigeria),
or indeed the cultural mutations of a colonizing nation faced with influx
of postcolonial immigrants – in the case of Britain.
2
Amkpa, A. Theatre and Postcolonial Desires, London: Routledge, 2003
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
The two playwrights I discuss at length in this essay 3 pose ethical
questions for the discursive reaches of dramatic art and its imagining of
transcendental democracy within which ideas of equity, symbolic and
real, can be imagined as ingredients of subjectivity. Let us take a look at
them.
Wole Soyinka
Wole Soyinka’s genius in using the tragic myths of Yoruba culture to
forge a compelling language of resistance and change has drawn many
admirers and a few detractors. Few can deny his influence in shaping what
the historian Nicholas Dirks describes as “the politics of thinking about
power and resistance”4 as his dramaturgy uses social crisis and existential
chaos as ingredients for social transformation. Wole Soyinka is widely
acknowledged as Africa’s greatest, if sometimes inscrutable, dramatist.
His portrayal of themes of nationalist and transnational crises embodies
penetrating philosophical, political and metaphoric investigations of
culture and epistemologies within his home continent. Fewer African
writers mix political activism, art and philosophical analyses with as much
eloquence, energy, and intellectual rigor as does this 1986 Nobel laureate
in literature. Taking aim at the overlapping power structures of European
and indigenous African hegemonies, Soyinka’s works and political activism
assume a decolonizing ethic toward emergent and residual tyrannies and
forms of domination. They seek to create a space for radical constructions
of postcolonial subjectivity – a space that according to the playwright,
performs “the simultaneous act of eliciting from history, mythology and
literature, for the benefit of both genuine aliens and alienated Africans,
a continuing process of self-apprehension whose temporary dislocation
appears to have persuaded many of its non-existence or irrelevance in
contemporary world reality.”5
Soyinka embarked upon his unorthodox cultural mission of resurrecting
postcolonial subjectivities in an age in which intellectual orthodoxies such as
3
4
5
Most of both sections on Wole Soyinka and David Edgar are slight revisions form their
original state in
my Theatre and Postcolonial Desires, London: Routledge, 2003.
Dirks, N. [ed.] Colonialism and Culture Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992
p.10
Soyinka, W. Myth, Literature and the African World, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1976 p. x-xi
29
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Awam Amkpa
Marxism and ethnic nationalism loomed large. From the 1960s through the late
1970s, it became obvious that the 19th century colonial agenda that organized
Nigeria had shifted significantly. Anticolonial nationalism had succeeded in
developing a republic formally divorced from its imperial relationship with
Britain. Independence offered the new nation a sense of national belonging
and global engagement. Academic institutions became locations for developing
various schools of critical and creative studies largely framed by the same
anticolonial energies that made the new nation possible. Soyinka came from
such politically activist academic communities. Before long, however, ethnic
rivalries and regional conflict underscored the arbitrary colonial construction
of the geo-political entity inherited from the British. Military dictators usurped
the first civilian government in 1966, perpetuating the colonial tradition
of coercive rule as a tool of unification. New 20th century globalism and
commodity fetishism redefined the country solely as an oil-exporting machine,
and helped plunge the country into a violent civil war. The eastern part of
the country seceded from Nigeria in 1967 and proclaimed the Independent
Republic of Biafra, a situation that led to the unleashing of a three-year civil
war that culminated in reunification and savage retribution.
In the aftermath of the civil war, an oil boom gave financial reinforcement
to a new wave of state nationalism upheld by a succession of authoritarian
regimes. As the country’s tiny elite became chauvinistically nationalist, it
developed a taste for whatever it did not produce. Buoyed by windfalls
from oil revenue, Nigeria imported every consumable commodity, quickly
becoming a neocolonial satellite state clinging to the periphery of the
industrialized West. Despite its dependence on economies outside its
borders, the nation also developed an arrogant claim to African authenticity.
In the 1970s, it hosted the Festival of African Arts and Culture [FESTAC],
African Soccer championships and other events to showcase its coming
of age as a nation with the mandate to exuberantly represent Africans
inside and outside Africa. Yet, the truth was that it did not speak for all
Nigerians, much less the rest of the continent. Excluded from their share
in the nation’s oil wealth, the masses of Nigerians enjoyed little formal
voice in their government.
State nationalism coexisted with cultural practices attempting to understand
and critique the state of the nation. Cultural critiques of the official national
narrative premised upon Nigerian prosperity and the nation’s appropriation
of political and cultural leadership in Africa, abounded. Sometimes subtle,
at other times brazen, they responded to Nigeria’s neocolonial despair
and the sense of social and political alienation experienced by a majority
of Nigerians.
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
Within the universities, Marxism and residual forms of anticolonial
nationalism offered analytical frameworks for mounting critical challenges
to Nigeria’s corrupt dominant class and the unitary nationalist ideology
it deployed to buttress its regime. Sometimes contesting, at other times
complementing each other as they confronted the national government,
counter-cultural activists ranged from passionate ethnocentrists to mimics
of European political radicalism. Marxist scholarship highlighted issues of
class and the neocolonial economic structure, and presented strategies
for defining and empowering working class identities. Trade unionism
became a prominent platform for radical activism, as well as a forum for
political collaborations between middle class and working class Nigerians
committed to contradicting and limiting the excesses of the neocolonial
state. The Left not only dominated organized labor but also organized
student unionism across the country thus making universities locations for
developing counter-hegemonic attitudes. Their writings on history, culture,
and ideology depicted a nation in dire need for revolutionary change and
international alliances against global capitalism. To the extent that they
talked about collectivities, they did so in the context of forming counterhegemonic blocs, rather than in order to engage issues of the multiplicity
and hybridity of individual and group identities.
Soyinka’s revisionist notions of identity, power and agency unfolded in
the course of a versatile body of works spanning well over three decades
from the late 1950s through the rest of the 20th century to the present.
Throughout his plays and philosophical pronouncements, Soyinka has
consistently sought an adequate language of resistance and the description
of an aesthetic comprising mythology, politics and activism. In the present
chapter, I explore Soyinka’s creative use of mythic tragedy as an intermodernist site of contests over representations in a postcolonial situation.
I read his idea of “The Fourth Stage” together with his celebrated play
Death and the King’s Horseman to suggest that Soyinka’s dramatic practice
represents an inspiring and agitative archaeology of postcolonial cultures.
Grounded in the conceptualization of mythic tragedy as a site for fueling
communal consciousness of marginality and desire for change, rather
than as a bastion for consolidating tradition for its own sake, his works
challenge authoritarianism whether derived from colonial or indigenous
sources and enunciate symbolisms of resistance and agency--the birthing,
if not the destination of postcolonial desire.
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Awam Amkpa
The “Fourth Stage” was first published in an anthology of essays
dedicated to the Renaissance scholar G. Wilson Knight in 1969, and later
presented as one of a series of lectures at Churchill College, Cambridge
and subsequently published in his Myth, Literature and the African World.6
As a philosophical statement offering a decolonizing epistemology, the
essay broke controversial new ground in terms of the enunciative space
its theory presented for the study of drama in Africa. It evoked a volley
of criticism from disparate quarters, most of them located in Africa.
Anticolonial nationalists castigated the essay’s dramaturgy as too European.
Marxists lamented its alleged lack of class-based antagonism to European
colonialism and capitalism.
The frustration of Soyinka’s critics lay partly in the difficulty in
compartmentalizing the Fourth Stage within rigid genres and established
aesthetic traditions. One was apt to wonder: is the essayist a tragedian or
political satirist? Is he a socialist or anticolonial nationalist writer? What are
the instrumental values of his mythopoeic writing? Is he sufficiently African?
Yet the Fourth Stage suggests that Soyinka’s dramaturgy, although inherently
political, does not conform to prescriptive models for knowing or describing
individual and collective political identities. In the dramatist’s own words:
I have been preoccupied with the process of apprehending my own world in
its full complexity, also through its contemporary progression and distortions
... For after (or simultaneously with) an externally directed and conclusive
confrontation on the continent must come a reinstatement of the values authentic
to that society modified only by the demands of a contemporary world.7
In pursuit of his project to apprehend his own world, Soyinka in the
Fourth Stage takes us into Yoruba cosmology by describing a tripartite
structure of the world: the spaces of the unborn, the living and their
ancestors. In such a structure, the acts of being born, of living and of
dying are seen as natural processes of transition. The birth of a child is
an occasion for celebration as is the death of an old person. The world of
the living is an arena for conscious reparations through sacrifices, rituals
and mythology codifying the moralities of being and becoming. In cases
of premature birth or death, oracular wisdom is sought and appropriate
sacrifices are performed to stabilize the world, as the Yoruba know it.
Soyinka, however, complicates and subverts the ontological certainty of
this Yoruba triplicate by suggesting a “Fourth Stage” which in his opinion
is fundamentally the most fulfilling of all transitions. Defying temporal
6
7
Soyinka, W. Myth, Literature and the African World, p.146
ibid. p. ix
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
linearity, the Fourth Stage is more a desire that catalyzes perpetual action
and focuses on processes of ‘social acting,’ than a description of a life
stage or a well-defined historical destination. In other words, it is a process
that summons a consciousness for change without necessarily naming the
manner of such change beyond its immediate anticolonial directions. Such
consciousness can happen in the worlds of the living, and in the modes
of remembering the dead and the ancestors. Its goal is disalienation as a
constant process of deconstructing domination and seeking a language
of equity and justice
In a conscious act of invoking an epistemology that is indigenous to
Africa and not overdetermined by European colonizing knowledge, Soyinka
delves into a Yoruba legend describing the origin of the world to support
his concept of the Fourth Stage. According to this legend, a supreme deity
called Orisa-Nla, whose life narrated the cosmic stability of the universe,
symbolized the world. Once, while tending his garden, his servant Atunda
struck the supreme deity with a rock, shattering this symbol of cosmic unity
into a thousand and one pieces. Soyinka had celebrated this rebellious
act in an earlier poem Idanre: “All hail saint Atunda, first revolutionary/
Grand iconoclast at genesis and the rest is logic..”8 He returned to it in
the Fourth Stage, explaining that fragments of the disintegrated icon of
cosmic wholeness symbolize various godheads in the Yoruba pantheon
and are assigned different but complementary metaphysical functions in
the mythologies of Yoruba cultures. Other smaller pieces and the dusts
of cosmic disintegration are thought to form the world of human beings.
Consequently Atunda’s insubordinate act led to the physical formation of
two seismically divided worlds: those of the gods and of human beings.
Alienated and impassioned by a desire for cosmic wholeness, the helplessness
of these disparate worlds was underscored by the huge gulf separating
them. Various frightening metaphors conjured by Soyinka describe not
only the enormity of the alienating gulf between these two worlds, but the
impending violence that promised to attend any act of transgressing either.
The physical gulf and the social alienation between the gods and human
beings that it symbolized became a factor of constant concern for the
gods in particular as they tried in vain to fulfill various functions bestowed
on them by Orisa-Nla’s parts. One of the more daring of their number,
characterized simultaneously by creative and destructive impulses, became
a prominent actor in his persistent quest to bridge the chasm between the
gods and the humans. That god Ogun drew magma from the core of the
8
Soyinka, W. Idanre and Other Poems, New York: Hill and Wang Publishers, 1968 p.83
33
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Awam Amkpa
earth to construct a bridge for that purpose. As Ogun walked the bridge at
the head of a brigade of other gods in search of disalienation, however, he
was thwarted by the violence of natural elements guarding the structure.
Dismembered, but not with the finality of disintegration experienced by
Orisa- Nla, Ogun as a regenerative principle, was reconstituted, and came
back to enact his walk many times more. This god’s indefatigable pursuit
of dis-alienation made him attractive enough for the dramatist to adopt
him as his ‘patron saint.’
Soyinka’s use and treatment of the legend of Ogun in the Fourth Stage
illustrate socio-political themes and aesthetic features that characterize
much of the playwright’s dramatic legacy. Several of his works similarly
highlight conditions of alienation and go on to problematize the processes
of social activism, drawing attention to issues of individual and collective
agency. From his Jero plays, Opera Wonyosi, Strong Breed, and The Road,
to Before the Blowout and the Priority Project sketches, Soyinka textualizes
his passion for social justice with artistic eloquence. It is, however, his
conception of ‘tragedy’ and the notion of agency it incorporates that has
made the Fourth Stage the subject of intense scrutiny and a significant
marker of Soyinka’s dramatic style.
For Soyinka, tragedy is a song of lamentation expressing conditions
of alienation and stimulating intense motivations for change. Defying
teleological structures, the tragic does not signify paralysis nor blind
adherence to constituted mythology; rather it is a situation setting up
ontological certainties, only to destabilize them so as to enable creativity
and the pedagogy of self-reproduction. In developing what he calls “African
Tragedy,” Soyinka proposes an aesthetic principle where the objective
of tragic art is not to provoke a catharsis that terrorizes and consigns a
community to fatalism and to a logocentric description of its world. Rather,
it hypersensitizes the community to conditions of inequity and prompts a
deliberate inventiveness that seeks to harness cultural resources to achieve
dis-alienation. As Ogun’s perseverance suggests, what makes this approach
of a constructive, socially activist tragedy unique, is its stress on repetitive,
cyclical and perpetual action as the essence of agency, anticolonial
subjectivity, and postcolonial desire. This is quite similar to Fanon’s notion
of action, which in the context of colonial domination “exposes an utterly
naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born.”9
9
Fanon, F. cited in Bhabha, H. ‘Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition’ in Williams, L. and Williams, P. [eds.] Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory,
Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993 p. 113
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
The Fourth Stage challenged the rational epistemological assumptions of
the West by depicting seamless transitions between past, present and future,
and between the worlds of gods and of humans – transitions rendered in the
English language of Nigeria’s colonizers. Yet, its epistemological challenge
to European modernity did not translate into an automatic endorsement
of the supposed purity or supremacy of indigenous mythology. Instead,
in a neocolonial context, Soyinka’s approach implies that the quest for
decolonizing social and political identities must go beyond essentializing
pristine traditions and structures conveniently remembered and kept intact
through mythology. Unlike the anticolonial nationalisms of such movements
like “Negritudism” and “Afrocentrism,” he urges the development of a
consciousness of power relations within and between internal as well as
external discourses of domination. His political attitude and cultural practice
highlight the workings of intra-modernist tensions by suggesting that the
tyrannical role of power in alienation and social inequity – whether foreign
or domestic in origin, must be represented, framed, and possibly subverted
by individuals and societies through transformative artistic processes.
Mythology, as an ideological and epistemological resource, is a site, not for
canonizing tradition and arresting social development, but for energizing
the human spirit’s desire for self and communal reproduction. As Soyinka
himself states, the purpose of the tragic paradigm as he articulates it, is to
signify human beings as socially active and ‘acting’ beings. The value of
Yoruba mythic tragedy lies in its symbolic representations of the essence
of human subjectivity and social agency, the impulse-To act, the Promethean instinct of rebellion, channels anguish into a creative
purpose which releases man from a totally destructive despair, releasing from
within him the most energetic, deeply combative inventions which, without
usurping the territory of the infernal gulf, bridges it with visionary hopes.10
Soyinka’s use of the tragic paradigm of Yoruba mythology to define
notions of subjectivity and issue calls for positive social change emerges
most distinctly in his classic play, Death and the King’s Horseman. It is
also this work that most clearly illustrates his use of “tradition” as a site for
inter-modernist and intra-modernist struggles for the sign. The following
pages present an analysis of this work as a key to Soyinka’s vision of
postcolonial dramaturgy.
10
Soyinka, W. Myth, Literature and the African World, p.146
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Awam Amkpa
Death and the King’s Horseman
The city-state of Oyo offers the setting for Soyinka’s most elaborate
illustration of his concept of tragedy. The play narrates the parable of Elesin
Oba, the chief custodian of the king’s stables and one of the most highly
regarded chiefs after the king. Oyo tradition has marked Elesin, by virtue
of his lineage and social status, to serve as a sacrament in a high ritual
after the death of the reigning king. The conventions of the land require
that the chief, like other specifically designated individuals collectively
named Abobaku,11 commit a ritual suicide at a specific time and place in
honor of the dead king and community’s sense of self. When the moment
for this supreme sacrifice arrives, however, Elesin is unable to perform his
prescribed role owing to an act of self-indulgence on his part as well as the
colonial administrator’s proscription of the ceremony. The colonial officer,
Simon Pilkings, imprisons him as the community laments the impending
demise of a familiar world they had sustained for eons, a world whose
ontological certainties appear to be slipping away. Meanwhile, Elesin’s
son Olunde, sent to Britain to train as a medical doctor, returns to attend
to his father’s funeral, only to confront his father alive. In an attempt to
restore his family’s honor and dignity, he, as his father’s heir, commits
the ritual suicide designated for his parent, thus fulfilling the dictum of
his community’s existential narrative. As though to contradict the logic of
colonial assimilation, Olunde takes his own life in order to re-orient the
community’s desire for alternative subjectivity. Upon learning of his son’s
redemptive act, Elesin, languishing in a colonial jail, also commits suicide.
The place and manner of his self-execution, thus, occurs outside the
prescriptions of the community’s codes of ritual. By the play’s end, the tragic
protagonist cursed with an identity drained of all communal significance,
rids the world of his presence by strangling himself with his chains in his
prison cell – a cavernous metaphor for colonial subjugation.
Death and the King’s Horseman presents dramatic conflict as multilayered
and complex rather than a Manichean contest between well-defined heroes
and villains. Tensions between Elesin and his community serve as the
fulcrum around which the play revolves. Embedded within this larger plot,
however, are other smaller but related conflicts over the colonial strategy of
assimilation, and the tyranny of patriarchy among the imperial and colonized
alike. The play tells a story based upon a well-known folklore that inspired
11
This means those who have to commit customary suicide after the King’s death. They are
usually buried with the King.
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
other plays by two popular Nigerian dramatists – Duro Ladipo and Baba Sala.
What makes Soyinka’s version distinctive is its political setting in Nigeria’s
twentieth-century colonial world. The historicity of the moment captured
by the play complicates its tragic paradigm in interesting ways. By 1944,
when the event it describes occurred,12 Oyo, where Elesin’s sense of being
and belonging was invented and mythologized, had undergone significant
hegemonic changes. No longer the imperial nation it once was, Oyo had
been annexed to the British Nigerian empire. Framed by the overlapping
modernities of their world, its people found in their residual mythologies,
the resources to re-invent and re-establish a community whose signifiers of
being had significantly changed. This made ‘tradition’ all the more urgent
as a site for reproducing an indigenous cultural world, and the import of
Elesin’s role all the more poignant. The community’s determined efforts
to excavate and reinstate the political importance of Elesin’s identity and
place in its traditions must be understood in this light.
The play opens amidst the seductive strains of Oyo music intended
to cement our identification with the proud and passionately committed
Elesin. The dramatist, employing a meta-theatrical device, portrays a drama
in search of an audience. Closely followed by his drummers and Praise
Singer, the protagonist struts towards the market place – a venue where he
can maximize audience identification with his performance of the ultimate
sacrifice. The Praise Singer’s enchanting invocation sets up the promise of
a ritual of death:
PRAISE SINGER: Elesin o! Elesin Oba! Howu! What tryst is this the cockerel
goes to keep with such haste that he must leave his tail
behind?
ELESIN:
[slows down a bit, laughing] A tryst where the cockerel
needs no adornment.
PRAISE SINGER: O-oh, you hear that my companions? That’s the way the
world goes.
Because the man approaches a brand new bride he
forgets the mother of his children.
ELESIN:
When the horse sniffs the stable, does he not strain at the
bridle? The market is the long suffering home of my spirit
and the women are packing up to go….You are like a
jealous wife. Stay close to me, but only on this side. My
fame, my honor are legacies to the living; stay behind and
let the world sip its honey from your lips.
12
There are conflicting dates for the actual incident – 1944, 1946 and 1947 are often cited. I
find James Gibbs’s date 1944 more reliable only because of his astute discipline on matters
of historical detail. This can be found in his Wole Soyinka, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989
37
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Awam Amkpa
PRAISE SINGER: Your name will be like the sweet berry a child places
under his tongue to sweeten the passage of food. The
world will never spit it out.13
As Elesin plunges into his self-motivating rhetoric, which equally attracts
our identification, we notice how well prepared he is for his death. As a
master rhetorician, he weaves proverb with metaphor to dispel any fear
or doubts that his prescribed mission might generate. In an Oyo world
destabilized by foreign influences, he asserts his determination to stay the
course prescribed him by tradition:
ELESIN:
The world was mine. Our joint hands
Raised housepots of trusts that withstood
The siege of envy and the termites of time.
But the twilight hour brings bats and rodentsShall I yield them cause to foul the rafters?14
As if to reassure himself and his spectators, he casts his role in terms
of the imperatives of honor:
ELESIN:
Life has an end. A life that will outlive
Fame and friendship begs another name.
What elder takes his tongue to the plate,
Licks it clean of every crumb? He will encounter
Silence when he calls on children to fulfill
The smallest errand! Life is honor.
It ends when honor ends.15
Elesin’s choice of the market place as a site to publicly reclaim the power
and honor vested in his traditional identity as a member of the Abobaku
is significant. In a colonial world where traditional sources of authority
have yielded to imperial masters, he needs the market women’s affirmation
of his exalted place in the residual patriarchy and political dispensation
of Oyo, a place about to be memorialized by his performance of ritual
suicide. The Praise Singer’s invocational opening notes that Oyo was once
whole and pure with a stable culture complete with its own corpus of myth
and rituals. In a rambunctious opening glee to a troubling opera, he even
suggests with great pride that Oyo is a place where Elesin’s impending
suicide is an illustration of its cosmic coherence. Elesin’s sacrifice signifies
a commitment to cultural persistence unsullied by the monumental changes
13
14
15
Soyinka, W. Death and the King’s Horseman in Worthen, W. [ed.] The HBJ Anthology of
Drama,
New York: Harcourt Brace Publishers, 1993 p. 822
ibid.
ibid.
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
that have swept over Oyo from within and without – changes wrought by
war, European slave traders, and British colonialists:
PRAISE SINGER: ..the great wars came and went; the white slavers came
and went, they took away the heart of our race, they bore
away the mind and muscle of our race. The city fell and
was rebuilt; the city fell and our people trudged through
mountain and forest to found a new home but- Elesin Oba
do you hear me?
…
..There is only one home to the life of a river mussel; there
is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one
shell to the soul of man: there is only one world to the
spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes
on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us
shelter?16
Tejumola Olaniyan in his sophisticated and analytically rigorous
study of Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, has rightly described
the Praise Singer’s persuasive antics as “navel gazing, the aesthetics of
the pristine and the naïve.”17 The compensatory nature of the singer’s
cajoling indicates both despair and desire. The despair of a depoliticized
residual colonial power as it gropes to recapture its moment of grandeur
and significance, and the desire for a more meaningful identity than the
museum hall curiosity it now represents. Yet the ritual suicide, vested
with the whole community’s aspirations for cultural autonomy, is not to
be. For Elesin notices a pretty woman in the market place and asserts the
lingering power of his place bestowed by tradition, by demanding her
hand in marriage, despite the fact that she is betrothed to someone else.
We are immediately exposed to a contradiction as Elesin, that advocate for
the retrieval and sustenance of indigenous tradition, insists on conflating
a dying ritual with a marriage ceremony:
ELESIN:
16
17
you who stand before the spirit that dares
The opening of the last door of passage,
Dare to rid my going of regrets! My wish
Transcends the blotting out of thought
In one mere moment’s tremor of the senses.
Do me credit. And do me honor.
I am girded for the route beyond
Burdens of waste and longing.
ibid. p.822
See Olaniyan, T. Scars of Conquest, Masks of Resistance, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995
39
40
Awam Amkpa
Then let me travel light. Let
Seed that will not serve the stomach
On the way remain behind. Let it take root
In the earth of my choice18
Intimidated by his power, the women grant his wish. It is at that moment
that our identification with Elesin is deliberately complicated. The arrogance
he displays in cajoling and imposing iconicity on his identity in the absence
of a communal consensus on the appropriateness of his marriage sets us
up for the tyrannical contradiction in Elesin’s mission. For at that moment,
the collective subjectivity Elesin invokes and promises is jettisoned for a
solipsistic subjectivity. His patriarchal significance is underscored, not by
consensual wedlock but by the terror generated by his authority. He takes
a bride, a woman already objectified as someone else’s, in a world where
gender, class and ethnicity are signifiers of subjection. The mute bride is
the body underlining his phallocratic essence.
The wedding is held and consummated, thereby postponing the death
ritual. When at last Elesin gets ready to resume his prescribed mission of
suicide as promised at the beginning of the play, the Praise Singer sets
the stage for the transition from marriage to death in highly symbolic and
embroidered language. As Elesin dances a trance faster than the music,
avowing his resolve to die, the Praise Singer assumes the persona of the
dead king as he sings:
How shall I tell what my eyes have seen? The Horseman gallops on before
the courier, how shall I tell what my eyes have seen? He says a dog may be
confused by new scents of beings he never dreamt of, so he must precede
the dog to heaven. He says a horse may stumble on strange boulders and be
lamed, so he races on before the horse to heaven.
It is best, he says, to trust no messenger who may falter at the outer gate; oh
how shall I tell what my ears have heard?19
Just as the audience is lulled into a sense of conviction that Elesin
will die, the colonial state intervenes. Simon Pilkings, as imperial Britain’s
representative in Oyo, descends on the scene to stop the ritual’s proceedings,
and arrest and imprison Elesin. Elesin’s Oyo is under the dominion of
a Colonial District officer, who is playing host to the visiting Prince of
Wales. The imperial visit demands that the colonial officer, Pilkings, be
able to demonstrate unquestioned acceptance of his rule by the Crown’s
African subjects.
18
19
ibid. p. 826
ibid. p. 833
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
Imperial Britain practiced a strategy of indirect rule in most of what
became colonial Nigeria. Unlike their French counterparts, the British
developed institutions and moralities that re-organized and re-oriented
indigenous cultural practices, permitting the persistence of “traditional
customs” drained of political meaning. As Nicholas Dirks has observed, “much
of what has been taken to be timeless tradition is, in fact, the paradoxical
effect of colonial rule, where culture was carefully depoliticized and reified
into a specifically colonial version of civil society.”20 Pilkings’ previous
encounters with Elesin had left him in no doubt as to the horseman’s
political pretensions and potential for subverting the colonial order. What
spurred the British administrator’s proscription of Elesin’s ultimate act of
social commitment was thus the political connotation of Elesin’s impending
action, particularly its timing. The play reveals the markings of dominance
not only on subordinated bodies and spaces, but also in the conception
and practice of time. In Pilkings’ own words: “Damn! If only the Prince
hadn’t picked this time for his visit”21 or Elesin himself confirms: “ You
were waiting for dawn white man. I hear you saying to yourself: only so
many hours until dawn and then the danger is over. All I must do is keep
him alive tonight.”22
But for the Crown Prince’s visit, it would have been a relief for Pilkings
to see Elesin die in a depoliticized cultural practice, but the timing of the
horseman’s sacrifice infused it with political meaning, and hence rendered
it a challenge to colonial authority. Soyinka’s introduction of this historic
dynamic of time and the politics of cultural symbolism testifies to his
dramaturgic inventiveness. British colonial regimes in India, Nigeria, and
Ghana made significant use of symbolic manifestations of power. Through
its “durbars” and parades, the British Empire presented a spectacle of
domination at once inclusive and exclusive of the dominated natives. As
Helen Callaway has noted:
Imperial culture exercised its power not so much through physical coercion,
which was relatively minimal though always a threat, but through its cognitive
dimension: its comprehensive symbolic order which constituted permissible
thinking and action and prevented alternative worlds from emerging.23
20
21
22
23
Dirks, N. Colonialism and Culture, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996, p. 8
Soyinka, W. Death and the King’s Horseman, p. 834
ibid. p. 838
Callaway, H. Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria, UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987 p.57
41
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Awam Amkpa
Soyinka’s depiction of Pilkings offers trenchant insights into the psyche of
colonial administrators. Trained in British public schools followed by Oxford
or Cambridge, several of these officials saw local colonial power structures, in
Bradley’s words, as “the prefectorial system writ large, and mutatis mutandis,
the District Officers as masters, the Chiefs as prefects, and the tribesmen as
the boys.”24 From Pilkings’ perspective, not only was the prevention of ritual
sacrifice in keeping with imperialism’s civilizing mission, but, coinciding as
it did with the Prince of Wales’ visit, might with some luck, even earn him
a title to validate British approval of his action. His character brings to mind
Margaret Perham’s depiction of Governor General [Lord Lugard], architect
of the colonial state of Nigeria: “Lugard and his envoys seem to dash about
the country like knight errants, punishing wicked people and liberating the
oppressed, overthrowing cruel kings and elevating good ones.25
Yet in Death and the King’s Horseman, Pilkings’ pretensions to fulfill
the obligations bestowed by “the white man’s burden” a la Lugard, appears,
ironically enough, to be abetted to some degree by Elesin himself. For it
is Elesin’s moment of self-indulgence – his insistence on postponing death
for marriage – that by coinciding with the British Prince’s visit, creates
the occasion for Pilkings’ intervention. Even as Elesin desperately desires
to signify, arrest and stabilize the moving social world woven into a new
globalism--the one he and his community inhabit, he becomes solipsistic.
He prises an individualistic self from a communally derived iconicity. At
such moments we notice that while Elesin likes the honor vested by the
community in his identity, he is reluctant to fully accept the communal
obligations prescribed by tradition that flow from that honor. Iyaloja
reminds him after his arrest:
IYALOJA:
24
25
26
You have betrayed us. We fed your sweetmeats such as we
hope awaited you on the other side. But you said No, I must
eat the world’s leftovers…. We said you were the hunter
returning home in triumph, a slain buffalo pressing down
on his neck, you said wait, I first must turn up this cricket
hole with my toes..
…We said, the dew on earth’s surface was for you to wash
your feet along the slopes of honor. You said No, I shall
step in the vomit of cats and the droppings of mice; I shall
fight them for the left-overs of the world.26
Bradley, K. Once a District Officer, London: Macmillan, 1966 p.15
Perham, M. Lugard: The Years of Authority 1898-1945, London: Collins Publishers, 1960
p.52
ibid. p.840
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
It is Pilkings of all people, who exposes the real excuse for Elesin’s
hesitation: “the elder grimly approaches heaven and you ask him to
bear your greetings yonder; do you really think he makes the journey
willingly?”27 Indeed Elesin confirms his unwillingness during his confession
to his new bride: “For I confess to you, daughter, my weakness came not
merely from the abomination of the white man who came violently into
my fading presence, there was also a weight of longing on my earth-held
limbs. I would have shaken it off, already my foot had begun to lift but
then…”28
It is Elesin’s son Olunde who fulfills his father’s mandate. Olunde, in
many ways the central character in the saga, is the very embodiment of
an inter-modernist struggle for representation. Oyo’s colonial masters have
chosen this character to assume an altogether different mandate from the
one he ultimately discharges – that reserved for select members of the
colonized who are socially mobile and acculturated to British norms and
practices. Soyinka’s invention of the character of Olunde is laden with
multiple layers of meaning flowing from this dynamic. Pilkings sends
Olunde to Britain to train as a medical doctor, thus symbolically usurping
the authority of Elesin’s paternal role, and that of the local elites the African
represented. Yet Olunde proves far less malleable a subject of cultural
assimilation than Pilkings could have anticipated.
We first meet Olunde in Act Four of the Five-Act play, when he returns
to Oyo, expecting to bury his martyred father. Entering an ostensibly binary
world of imperial master and colonized subject, Olunde’s foreign education
gives him a hybrid identity carrying cultural capital that he can ill afford
to squander in a project of Oyo cultural resurrection. Soyinka’s Olunde,
loosened from the communal moorings anchoring his father, appears at
first glance to be a “sign in the making,” seeking the most appropriate
context for attaining full signification. In the end, it is his native culture
that provides that context. Far from severing his cultural affinity to Oyo
traditions, Olunde’s experience with colonial assimilation and alienation
creates in him an ever more fervent desire to redefine himself in local
terms. Fanon’s description of the colonized subject’s alienation in Black
Skin, White Masks offers an insight into Olunde’s trauma of being, or
non-being:
27
28
ibid. p.839
ibid. p.839
43
44
Awam Amkpa
I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me.
In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of
his bodily schema…I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual
deficiency, fetishism, racial defects..
I took myself far off from my own presence…What else could it be for me
but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body
with black blood?29
Like a rebellious son seeking attention from his domineering father,
Olunde arrives at Pilkings’ official residence, the seat of his hospitality to
the Prince of Wales, to proclaim his defiance of the identity the acculturated
native received from his surrogate father and colonial master. Olunde is
possessed with the simple desire to defy colonial identification. Within
such desire resides a sense of agency and identification with the native
environment from which he is alienated. Frantz Fanon again comes in handy
in describing such desire: “As soon as I desire I ask to be considered. I
am not merely here and now, sealed into thingness. I am for somewhere
else and for something else. I demand that notice be taken of my negating
activity in so far as I pursue something other than life…30
Olunde’s act of suicide – that ‘negating activity’ in the pursuit of
‘something other than life’ underscores his desire for something other than
colonial ‘life’. The betrayal of Oyo tradition by his other father (Elesin)
provides the occasion to fulfill Olunde’s quest for recognition, not just from
Pilkings and colonial discourses, but also from the Oyo community from
which he is excised. In an unequivocal recognition of Elesin’s personal
failure to uphold the honor of his family and community, Olunde declares,
“I have no father, eater of left-overs.”
As one whose body is a signifier emptied of its indigenous contents,
but whose act of self-sacrifice confers upon him a new identity within his
native context, the question that Olunde raises is, what kind of agency
does he exercise? Sympathizers of Oyo nationalism might applaud Olunde’s
action. Yet it is useful to remember that the discourses of European and Oyo
colonial regimes left Olunde and his father with little room for individuality.
Soyinka complicates our identification with either character by challenging
Negritudist investments in an allegedly binary division between European
and African traditions. Indeed, Olunde embodies overlapping cultures
defining not only Oyo, but also Nigeria, the new colonial entity into which
it is conscripted. His character belongs in a world that is simultaneously
local and global. His role introduces incoherence into colonial domination,
29
30
Fanon, F. Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press, 1967 pp. 110-112
ibid. p. 218
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
but not because Soyinka is interested in essentializing and authenticating
Oyo myth and ritual. Rather, my reading of the dramatist suggests that he
seeks to politicize his audiences into rejecting the ascendancy of colonial
logic, which describes the world in Manichean terms of good and bad,
civilized and barbaric, European and native. Tejumola Olaniyan is correct
in arguing, “Olunde’s suicide in affirmation of the indigenous culture is...a
deflation of the colonialists pretensions’ to ethical superiority.”31 The deflation
of colonial ethical superiority entails an inherent challenge to imperial
epistemologies that embraced neat polarities of the civilized European and
the savage ‘Other.’ More significantly, Olunde’s act of sacrifice, however
inconclusive and ambiguous its nature, signifies empowerment – a will to
act, especially in light of his colonized identity.
Thus, Olunde’s action must not be read as a celebration of essentialist
indigenous identities and cultural spaces. Indeed, Soyinka has assumed a
distinctly anti-essentialist stance elsewhere, most famously in his response
to Negritudism: “A tiger does not boast its tigritude.” If he appears to
deploy an essentialist paradigm in Death and the King’s Horseman, it is
to advance an anti-essentialist thesis on subjectivity. As the drama unfolds,
the mesmerizing language and structure of the ritual of death begins to
look dubious and like the Praise Singer we notice a “double speak” on
the part of the dramatist. Within the seductive foundationalist “grand recit”
of traditionalism, subtle critiques and doubts about the true meaning and
worth of Oyo rituals, strategically inserted into the drama, gradually evolve
into an anti-foundationalist attitude.
Soyinka’s treatment of intra-modernist power relations, too, undermines
the binary construction of Europe and its African Other. The fields of
signification portrayed in the play do not simply represent the old Oyo
versus the new British, rather traditional Oyo is itself a product of internal
colonial structures and external colonial accommodation. The dynamic
between British colonial characters on the one hand, and a ripening
anti-colonial nationalist moment in the aftermath of World War II on the
other, suggests the presence of an archeology of overlapping colonial
powers – one residual and the other emergent. After all the patriarchal
authority bestowed upon Elesin by Oyo tradition and tolerated by colonial
authorities – as long as it did not translate into anticolonial political
behavior – enables him to tyrannize the market women into endorsing
his ill-conceived wedding.
31
Olaniyan, T. p.58
45
46
Awam Amkpa
Indeed, it is Soyinka’s depiction of the workings of patriarchy in a
variety of social and cultural contexts, both indigenous and colonial, that
does most to muddy the boundaries between the worlds of imperial master
and colonized subject, and to introduce a crisis of intra-modernism into
the story. Pilkings infantilizes his wife Jane as much as he does his servant
Joseph, his constable Amusa and all other non-Europeans. Indeed, the
character of Jane Pilkings evokes Anne Stoler’s description of the role of
colonial wives as markers of race, class and gender.32 Portrayed as one
whose body is the signifier of limits, Jane’s identity like Olunde’s is assumed
to be ‘spoken for’ by the European colonizing project. As the natives offer
Pilkings a community to be domesticated, so also it is important that his
wife serve as an exemplar of blissful domesticity. Helen Callaway’s brilliant
anthropological study of “colonial wives” stresses the marginalization of
European women in the imperial project: “The conquering soldiers and
visionary empire-builders of these vast, roadless, not yet fully mapped
territories had to be men, not boys and certainly not women…”33 The
only form of agency allowed Jane Pilkings is a total submission to her
husband’s colonial mission. Jane seems to be adhering to Emily Bradley’s
advice to colonial wives in Dearest Priscilla: Letters to the Wife of a Colonial
Civil Servant:
You must be happy to be alone, yet glad to put everything aside and be at
anyone’s disposal. You must be interested in the work, and yet a refuge from
it, knowing nothing and yet everything about it.
You may shed the light of your charming personality on the company, but
more often sink into a shadowy corner, still, anonymous and non-existent,
concerned that these creatures are fed and refreshed, with everything arranged
so that your triumphs are unnoticed and you are utterly taken for granted.34
While Jane has a speaking presence but no seriously proactive identity,
Elesin’s Oyo bride remains mute throughout the play. Her encounter with
Elesin wrests her body from any overt agency by turning it into a womb
for prolonging his iconic identity after his death. Both her significance as
the body Elesin designates to carry his future, and her silence, are eloquent
and provocative. If Jane signifies the feminine presence underscoring
32
33
34
See Stoler, A. “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power,” in Race and the Education of
Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham: Duke
University Press, 1995
Callaway, H. Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria, UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987 p. 4-5
Bradley, E. Dearest Priscilla: Letters to the Wife of a Colonial Civil Servant, London: Max
Parrish Publishers, 1950 pp. 119-120
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
Pilkings’ masculine power, the bride represents a silent body upon which
the persistent will of a receding patriarchy boldly marks itself, literally
denying her a voice.
Iyaloja, unlike Jane or Elesin’s bride, controls the market place as a
location for enunciating multiple subjectivities. Despite her authoritative
presence, however, her matriarchal privilege serves to legitimate patriarchal
feudalism. She knows the significance of Elesin’s choice of the market place
as a site for his important performance and like a prepared “stage-manager,”
she aids the Praise Singer not only in managing Elesin’s performance but
also in focusing the crowd on the task at hand. Yet, when Elesin chooses for
his bride a woman betrothed to her son, she relents. When the horseman
fails to fulfill his calling for self-sacrifice, however, it is her power as a
matriarch upon which Iyaloja draws to excoriate Elesin, closing the play
with a plea to the bride: “ Now forget the dead, forget even the living.
Turn your mind to the unborn.”
Through Iyaloja, Soyinka presents his thesis on agency in a neocolonial
setting. Elesin, Olunde, and the people of Oyo are not organized or
conscious enough to resist the overlapping forces of oppression besieging
their society. The mantle for action and change will now be the province
of the unborn alone – of those not caught between the web of domination
and subordination spun by the power structures of European colonial
and traditional African societies. Thus, the play closes on a hopeful note
expressed through Iyaloja’s vision of communal action for the future, even
as the precise nature or direction of such action is left undefined.
We are left with the question that framed this analysis of Death and
the King’s Horseman at its start. Namely, how does Soyinka use mythic
tragedy to forge a language of active resistance and change, to describe a
moment when postcolonial desire is born? Soyinka’s dynamic perspective
on mythology is built into his creation of mythic tradition as a theatre for
struggles over signification. For the Oyo community, the custom of ritual
sacrifice signified the continuity of their authentic identity in the midst
of change. For Elesin Oba, his own part in the ceremony promised the
fulfillment of his grand destiny, ordained from birth, yet one he proved
reluctant to discharge. For Pilkings, the significance of the occasion lay
in its timing – its coincidence with the visit of his royal overlord from
Britain, vested it with an attitude of political defiance to colonial mastery
that had to be crushed. Olunde, “civilized” by colonial nationalism, saw
his opportunity to redeem the family role in the performance of a ritual
sacrifice as a way to register his inter-modernist alienation from the lessons
of colonial modernity.
47
48
Awam Amkpa
But of Soyinka? What does his treatment of the significations of Oyo’s
mythic tradition and the tragedy it wrought reveal about his reading of
“the sign”? I argue that for Soyinka, the chief merit of traditional usage lies,
not in any “inherent” virtue, but rather in its role in subverting colonialist
epistemologies and in fostering consciousness for change. Soyinka’s reliance
on mythology as an epistemological resource for understanding cultural reality
and determining agency, places him at odds with those who see mythology
only as a site of assimilation, particularly into nativist symbolism. Soyinka boldly
proclaims his faith in mythology as a formidable tool for understanding and
politicizing social reality. Myth, as a social construct in the hands of dominant
cultures, fixes and barricades the fluidity of identities in any community. It
imposes a regulative order on culture’s heteroglossia. Soyinka’s thesis resists
the fixing power of mythology by destabilizing the identities it constructs
and de-centering the order within which it functions.
That seems to be the open direction of his play Death and the King’s
Horseman. Elesin, as a symbolic text is set up to be destabilized, just
as the myth of the colonized native [Olunde] is set up for contradiction.
Soyinka suggests that as a sign of knowing, myth is not only the sign of
the dominant ideology of the times, but also a site for cultural struggle
and agency. His genius lies in seducing his readers and spectators into the
narrative structure of mythology with great fluency and dramatic persuasion
before jettisoning the stable journey for a chaotic world begging for
reformation and change. The dramatist’s complexly creative action invites
varieties of accents to coincide in any of the signs in the text. Therein lies
the transformative and decolonizing potential of his works – that penchant
for reversal, substitution, contradiction, re-inscription, and intervention.
As Volosinov asserted in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language,35
the symbolic nature of language makes it a useful location of struggle for
meaning where varieties of accents coincide. As an organizing principle the
symbolisms in language enable the simultaneous performances of assimilation
and resistance. For Soyinka, mythic tragedy offers not simply a site for the
uni-accentual assimilation into a dominant ideology and its symbolisms;
rather, it provides an arena for the performance of multi-accentual energies
that can propel social change. The myth Elesin symbolizes and promises
to enact in Death and the King’s Horseman underscores Volosinov’s theory
of the radically alternative possibilities of mythology and other symbolic
signs in language:
35
Volosinov, V. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1986
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
The very same thing that makes the ideological sign vital and mutable is
however that which makes it a refracting and distorting medium. The ruling
class strives to impart a superclass, eternal character to the ideological sign,
to extinguish or drive inward the struggle between social value judgments
which occurs in it, to make the sign uniaccentual.36
Soyinka, like the Praise Singer in his play, seduces us into similar
symbolic signs through the exuberant presentation of Elesin’s character
and his impending daring act. But as Stuart Hall opines, “there’s no one,
final, absolute meaning – no ultimate signified, only the endlessly sliding
chain of signification”.37 More importantly the play simultaneously sets up
and deconstructs political subjects and any illusions that they represent the
only subjects who can speak on behalf of the world-view they represent.
No world or character or symbol is given gratuitous stability, they are
all in the throes of regeneration through a fragmentation of the familiar.
Myth as Soyinka has used it, does not guarantee organic unity. Its fixity
or certainty is ideologically spurious.
The significance of myth, in the context of Death and the King’s
Horseman, stems from its role in propelling tragedy – tragedy that fuels
agency, implicitly defined as the determined will to rejuvenate social
activism. Crucial to this formulation of agency is its complex representation
of self and community. Agency, as Soyinka’s works imply, does not connote
solipsistic action; rather the individual becomes a signifier of communal
consciousness and correction. Solipsistic self, exemplified by Elesin as
he interrupts the communal event of a sacred death ritual to satisfy his
personal desire for a young bride, exists as a tyrannical signifier that must
be subverted. Selfish individualism implies self-destruction and a breeding
ground for developing relations of domination and subordination, which
for Soyinka’s dramaturgic strategies exist mainly to be debunked. How
does Soyinka use tragedy to put forth this notion of agency? Let us first
examine the formal attributes of Soyinka’s concept of “African” or “Yoruba
Tragedy” and see how the play Death and the King’s Horseman exemplifies
such an aesthetic paradigm.
A cultural construct enabling people and communities to define themselves
as subjects of politically fluid societies is not only a necessity, but also an
urgent political strategy for developing agency in a heterogeneous continent
such as Africa. Soyinka’s concept of tragedy seems to be a response to
36
37
ibid. p. 23
Hall, S. “On Postmodernism and Articulation” in Morley, D. and Chen K. [eds.] Stuart Hall:
Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, 1996 p. 141
49
50
Awam Amkpa
the dynamics of Africa’s histories and cultures. According to him, tragedy
should simultaneously express grief over alienation and spur intense
desires for change and perpetual becoming. Such a notion of tragedy
departs significantly from its Aristotelian counterpart, which sees tragic art
as a vehicle to enable a cathartic process through which human flaws are
purged to induce conformity to an established moral and political order.
Soyinka’s play Death and the King’s Horseman, by contrast, simultaneously
depicts the Oyo community’s lamentation of turbulent change and its
eventual desire, through defiance and resistance to internal and external
tyrannies, to be the authors and subjects of such change rather than its
objects. Soyinka’s dramaturgy suggests that the kernel of agency is the
constant ability to adapt to changing circumstances without losing focus
of the transformative directions of such developments.
While the goal of Aristotelian tragedy is to produce a cathartic purgation
of transgressive behavior, that of Soyinka is to stimulate communal
consciousness of the Fourth Stage- the idea of transgressing and limiting
tyranny so as to create democratic spaces. In Death and the King’s Horseman
the absence of what he called the ‘‘Promethean spark’ is what initially led
the community to its state of tragic anguish. During the major part of the
play, the community failed to collectively grasp the Fourth Stage, leaving
it paralyzed and unable to perform proactive agency. Iyaloja’s penultimate
words of advice to the bride suggested that it was only at the end, following
the deaths of Olunde and Elesin, that the community achieved a sense
of agency akin to what Homi Bhabha describes as a “translational” state:
“where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one
nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as
it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moments of politics.”38
As a threnody, tragedy, according to Soyinka, provides the community
a moment of opportunity to overhaul its mythology and moralities of
being. From his location in the intersecting cultural spaces of Africa and
the West, of colonialism followed by neocolonialism, he resists canonizing
mythology. Rather, he considers it a resource to promote inclusiveness
and action, a resource the narrative of which does not explain the world
as much as create a space for enunciative acts, just as the god Ogun did.
In Soyinka’s own words: “ ..Man re-affirms his indebtedness to earth,
dedicates himself to the demands of continuity and invokes the energies
of productivity. Reabsorbed within the communal psyche he provokes the
resources of Nature, in turn he is replenished for the cyclic drain in his
38
Bhabha, H. The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1992 p.25
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
fragile individual potency.”39 Unlike the fatalism implied in Aristotelian
tragedy, Yoruba tragedy is described as a moment facilitating desires for
self-reproduction without necessarily prescribing a specific program for
change. Biodun Jeyifo stresses the mythic essence of Soyinka’s tragedy by
suggesting that the playwright uses his art “as a memory code in periods of
social stress or disjunction, and as an antidote to moral complacency and
spiritual stupor.”40 For Soyinka, the destination of social action is secondary
to the consciousness and courage to embark on the action itself.
What makes a tragic character in Yoruba or African tragedy and what
kind of identification does Soyinka prescribe for its reception? The tragic
characters that Soyinka creates do not exist for themselves; rather they are
community icons whose actions facilitate change and a communal sense
of identity. They possess enormous will, pride and the desire to pursue
active citizenship. Because a creative and destructive dynamic represents
the tragic moment in Soyinka’s aesthetic, the tragic character serves as
the catalyst for regenerative action. The will and psyche of Soyinka’s
tragic character is defined by the consciousness and desire to facilitate
creativity while destroying an insufficient order. In Death and the King’s
Horseman, the tragic character exists in more than one form. Elesin Oba
and his son Olunde both have qualities of Soyinka’s tragic character if
they are looked at as a continuum. One symbolizes the local need for
regeneration and the other localizes the global reach of such needs. At
the beginning of the play Elesin Oba displays tragic will with arrogant
pride while reassuring audiences and readers that the community’s desire
for becoming is encapsulated in his person. Olunde on the other hand
displays his will with calculated understatement. But Death and the King’s
Horseman also cautions audiences that compensatory performances such
as those of Elesin or Olunde’s may indeed highlight gaps between the
aspirations of the community and those of the person acting in its behalf.
Socially determined roles, democratic or tyrannical, do not necessarily
diminish potential discrepancies between an individual’s needs and the
community’s investments in his or her identity. As the plot illustrates, the
dramatist invites identification with both characters – Elesin and Olunde
– and the dynamics of their cultural contexts. The historical and cultural
changes in Oyo turn the iconicity of Elesin’s character into a floating
signifier whose context of relevance had shifted significantly, while Olunde
39
40
See Soyinka, W. Preface to The Bacchae of Euripides, London: Methuen, 1975
Jeyifo, B. “Introduction” in Soyinka, W. Art, Dialogue and Outrage, Ibadan: New Horn
Press, 1986, p. xx
51
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Awam Amkpa
on the other hand achieves significance in the new environment. That this
happens prior to their community’s recognition of the fact, underscores the
lamentation accompanying Elesin’s failure and the apparent incoherence
of his son’s suicidal action. This strongly suggests that Soyinka demands
more attention to the social context that gives characters their discursive
depth rather than sole identification with them.
Soyinka insists that the language of a mythic tragedy be “invocational,”
“liturgical” and “myth embryonic.”41 Accordingly, from the onset, the language
of Death and the King’s Horseman invokes myth and the community’s
sense of tradition to fulfill narratives of its sense of being. Elesin’s trance
and exchange with the Praise Singer graphically illustrate the liturgical and
mythological nature of the play’s language as community members within
the play, and readers and audiences outside it, are invited to the drama of
a high ritual – one of renewal, where the old ways must forcefully give
birth to a new way of accommodating to the dynamics of history. It is the
musicality of the language as a vehicle for organizing and conveying the
emotional tone of the ritual that Soyinka emphasizes. In his own words,
the music of the play’s language:
undergoes transformation through myth into a secret (Masonic) correspondence
with the symbolism of tragedy, a symbolic medium of spiritual emotions within
the heart of a choric union. It transcends particularisation (of meaning) to tap
the tragic source whence spring the familiar weird disruptive melodies. This
Masonic union of sign and melody, the true tragic music, unearths cosmic
uncertainties which pervade human existence, reveals the magnitude and
power of creation, but above all creates a harrowing sense of omni-directional
vastness where the creative intelligence resides and prompts the soul to
futile exploration. The senses do not at such moments interpret myth in their
particular concretions: we are left only with the emotional and spiritual values,
the essential experience of cosmic reality.42
Thus, music is constitutive of the entire play’s narrative structure
and engenders identification and recognition. The playwright uses the
tonal inflections of the language and music of his play to draw attention
to “cosmic uncertainties which pervade human existence.” The play’s
tragic trajectory “prompts the soul to futile explorations.” Like his other
metaphysical plays, the language of Death and the King’s Horseman is
an intense poetic statement whose imageries animate, thereby stimulating
pathos, and offering colorful renditions of the inner thoughts and desires
of individuals.
41
42
Soyinka, W. Myth, Literature and the African World appendix
ibid. p.147-148
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
Soyinka goes as far as prescribing the most suitable structure for
experiencing the “Masonic union of sign and melody” for a Yoruba tragedy
such as Death and the King’s Horseman. He suggests such a structure
should mimic indigenous ritual plays where,
Any individual within the “audience” knows better than to add his voice
arbitrarily even to the most seductive passages of an invocatory song, or to
contribute a refrain to the familiar sequence of liturgical exchanges among
the protagonists. The moment for choric participation is well defined, but this
does not imply that until such a moment, participation ceases. The so-called
audience is itself an integral part of that arena of conflict; it contributes
spiritual strength to the protagonist through its choric reality which must
be conjured up and established, defining and investing the arena through
offerings and incantations. The drama would be non-existent except within
and against this symbolic representation of earth and cosmos, except within
this communal compact whose choric essence supplies the collective energy
for the challenger…43
This structure is implied in the narrative of Death and the King’s Horseman
and it seems that Soyinka conjures a climate of reception in which the
audience moves from spot to spot, not in passive voyeurism, but as active
participants in the music and dances integral to the presentation.
Overall, I think Death and the King’s Horseman is a deliberate engagement
with post-independence audiences particularly during moments of neocolonial
spiritual and political complacency. As the play illustrates, Soyinka’s Fourth
Stage (and its emphasis on achieving states of liminality where identities
fluctuate) refuses to privilege established modernist actors of social change
such as ‘the oppressed,’ ‘colonized,’ ‘middle class,’ and ‘working class.’
Rather than romanticizing such easily defined instruments of change, the play
describes instead, the conditions that shape a community’s consciousness
of marginalization and prompt struggles for resistance. Like Homi Bhabha’s
‘Third Space,’ Soyinka’s Fourth Stage opens up “new forms of identification
that may confuse the continuity of historical temporalities, confound ordering
of cultural symbols, traumatize tradition.”44 This fluid vision of identity is
consistent with the notion of non-formal citizenship, which I argue is most
conducive to the enunciation of postcolonial desire.
Soyinka’s insistence on the fluidity of identity formation and his refusal
to allow his creative imagination to be hedged in by prescriptive models
for interpreting social reality and history provoked a storm of criticism
in Nigeria. In the 1970s, a cohort of ethnic nationalists devoted a large
43
44
ibid. p.38-39
ibid. p. 179
53
54
Awam Amkpa
part of their book, Towards the Decolonization of African Literature45 to
defining the attributes of an authentic African writer. Led by Chinweizu,
they concluded that Soyinka did not qualify as one. The writer’s universalist
vision, they complained, contradicted local notions of ‘self.’ Moreover,
his use of English as the linguistic medium of choice elicited the charge
that he wrote for European audiences. The irony of the ethnic nationalist
critique lay in the fact that in the absence of an indigenous lingua franca,
it was the colonial language--English that opened up Soyinka’s work to
the broadest possible audience in Nigeria itself. Above all, Soyinka’s critics
across a broad ideological spectrum – from the ethnic nationalists to the
Marxists – denounced the dramatist’s symbolic allusions to oppression
and his refusal to embrace a well-defined direction for change. Soyinka’s
metaphoric language of resistance took no account of the materiality of
tyranny, they charged.
The immediacy of the social and political problems generated by
neocolonialism left most Nigerian intellectuals impatient with seemingly
symbolic solutions outside the realm of the social sciences. ‘Class struggle,’
‘authentic African,’ ‘class suicide,’ ‘high culture’ and ‘popular culture,’
‘mysticism’ and ‘materialism’- all became catch phrases for understanding
the new global dispensation defining Nigeria’s present and the local
performance of marginality. Apocalyptic pronouncements on capitalism
were made even as Nigerian society was violently reorganized by it. In
this intellectual climate, orthodoxies flourished. The decade of the 1970s
did not offer an intellectual climate hospitable to Soyinka’s conception of
culture as a site of socialization, a theater for the playing out of a dialectic
between the symbolic and the social, the individual and community.
In Soyinka defense, I would argue that identity, culture, and myth as
resources for determining being, belonging and becoming, are always
tentative and formulated in difference. Notions of homogenous groupings
like the working class, the people, and the masses, do not provoke as
much critical tension nor do they suggest the contiguity and unstable nature
of identity and culture. Soyinka’s boldness lies in presenting metaphors
of the critical tensions between the individual and community and the
resourcefulness of such tensions in bringing about social change. He uses
his drama to affirm Stuart Hall’s assertion that “what we call the self is
constituted out of and by difference, and remains contradictory, and that
cultural forms are similarly, in that way, never whole, never fully closed or
45
See Chinweizu, Jemie, O. and Madubuike, I. Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishing, 1980
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
‘sutured’.”46 Contrary to the assertions of his critics, Soyinka’s conception
of the “Fourth Stage” is a coda for engaging conditions of neo-coloniality.
The scope of neocolonialism is transnational– especially to the extent
that it implicates multinationals in the sustenance of dictatorial regimes.
In this context, the very flexibility of the Fourth Stage as a guideline to
non-formal citizenship may embody the most effective mode of resistance,
for it opens up the opportunity of coalition building across a spectrum
of identities anchored in fixities of nation, region, ethnicity and religion.
Soyinka’s vision of decolonization as a transformative, communal process
that does not necessarily follow prescribed models of social organization,
renders his work a formidable antithesis to the coloniality of power within
and outside Africa.
Wole Soyinka continues to use his theatrical skills as a form of cultural
advocacy where his dramaturgy does not simply describe his African world,
but imagine various forms of transformative subjectivities. The world he
dreams to change is intricately linked to that of Nigeria’s former colonizer
and we will see how David Edgar operates within that world.
DAVID EDGAR:
The best review I’ve ever had was when Michael Billington
said that, like Balzac, David Edgar seems to a secretary for
our times. And that defined, rather more precisely than I’d
ever defined before, what I’d like to be. I’d like to be a
secretary for the times through which I am living.47
The play begins in the dark, literally. A sonorous voiceover announces an
act of becoming. A postcolonial nation is about to happen. A people stand
on the verge of transition from colonial objectification to the achievement
of postcolonial subjectivity:
Voice:
Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the
time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly
or in full measure, but very substantially. A moment comes,
which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from
the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul
of a nation, long oppressed finds utterance. At the stroke of
the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake
to life and freedom.48
In the original broadcast, the voice belonged to India’s nationalist leader
and first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. His historic pronouncement made
46
47
48
ibid. p.145
47 David Edgar cited in Swain, E. David Edgar: Playwright and Politician, New York:
Peter Lang Publishers, 1986 p. 335
Edgar, D. Destiny, London: Methuen, 1988 p.317
55
56
Awam Amkpa
in the Indian province of Punjab in 1947 traumatized the colonizer’s psyche
and prompted a struggle to redefine Britain’s post-imperial sense of itself.
Nehru’s words furnish an unusual opening for a play concerned primarily
with a colonial culture convulsed by internal crisis and the retreat of its
imperial past. As the play proceeds to an enactment of homecoming by
British soldiers and administrators, the playwright hints at the imminence
of a postcolonial crisis of identity in England.
I find the British dramatist David Edgar’s play aptly titled Destiny
intensely provocative. Its discourse extends postcolonial theory by looking
at the impact of anticolonial agitations for subjectivity on definitions of
Britain’s national culture. Rather than simply focusing on the effects of
British colonialism in India, the playwright uses Britain’s imperialist legacy
to define the foundations of British nationalism in the 1970s. Underscoring
Gayatari Spivak’s assertion “that imperialism, understood as England’s social
mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the
British,”49 David Edgar’s Destiny proposes an ethic for social interactions in
a post-imperial British wrought by its material loss as most of its colonies
became independent.
David Edgar’s dramaturgy belongs in an aesthetic movement that is
historically counter-hegemonic and at the same time sought to engage the
dominant culture in such places as universities, and national and regional
theatres. While older writers like John Arden posed questions about socialist
alternatives to mainstream British politics, Edgar provided strategies for
inaugurating a socialist culture within it. He did this by problematizing
and connecting Britain’s imperial and colonial past to the inequities of
its post-imperial present. But changes in socialist states across the world
and internal reconfigurations within the British Left, left Edgar with a
new conundrum: what kind of cultural context and texts can generate a
society that enables the full and effective democratic operation of local
and global citizenships? His play Pentecost addressed this question in
some depth. As I show in this section, Edgar’s consciousness shifted from
the exuberance of a young, militant socialist writer, through the more
conventional sensibilities of a socialist aesthete, to the disenchantment of
a social democrat dissatisfied with the structures of European modernity,
and seeking an alternative frame of reference for understanding and
managing the world.
49
Spivak, G. ‘Three Women’s Text and a Critique of Imperialism’ in Critical Inquiry 12 [1]
1985, p.243
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
The origins of Edgar’s dramatic practice lay in a politically left wing
dramaturgical movement known as “agitprop theatre” that emerged in
England in the late 1960s. The label stood for “Agitation and Propaganda,”
and applied to artists and groups who believed that all art is tendentious
and ideologically loaded. Its adherents sought, through their art, not only
to explicate the ideology of the dominant culture but also to propose
strategies to contest and limit it. The movement boasted members such
as the group known as ‘Blue Blouse,’ as well as the dramatists Erwin
Piscator and Bertolt Brecht. David Edgar’s socialist aesthetics, grounded
in the traditions of agitprop, aimed to produce a counter hegemonic
culture both within the institutions of the establishment as well as on
its fringes. Edgar did not belong to the avant-garde theatre movement,
but rather, described his early politics as “a combination of the New Left
and counter-culture.”50 Edgar’s coming of age as a writer coincided with
the Conservative government’s electoral success in 1970. His early plays
include A Truer Shade of Blue, Still Life: Man in Bed, Two kinds of Angel,
Acid and Bloody Rosa. By 1971, in collaboration with an agit-prop group
called The General Will, he had written The National Interest, which was
an unsparing indictment of Conservative rule. As his relationship with the
leftist theatre group deepened, he produced several other works including
The Rupert Show, State of Emergency, Rent, Or Caught in the Act and The
Dunkirk Spirit.
These works responded to working class disenchantment not only
with the Tory government, but also with the Labor Party’s drift toward a
conservatism that seemed to make it unelectable. Unlike the preceding
decade, the 1970s dawned in a spirit of gloom and cynicism. The socialist
optimism that had spurred such dramatists as John Arden was in a state of
decline. The left wing writer David Hare lamented that era by proclaiming:
“We have looked. We have seen. We have known. And we have not
changed.”51 These adverse circumstances galvanized the resurgence of
working class consciousness and labor militancy during the four years of
Conservative ascendancy from 1970 to 1974. As Edgar observed, “suddenly
after thirty years the working class movement awoke with such speed and
strode back onto the stage of history, like a broom sweeping people in
its path…”52 Socialist theatre workers in England shared in the sense of
urgency to resurrect the vision of a socialist revolution. As Edgar explained,
50
51
52
Cited in Peacock, D. K. Thatcher’s Theatre, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999 p.2
Cited in Peacock, D. K. Thatcher’s Theatre, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999 p.2
Itzin, C. p. 146
57
58
Awam Amkpa
he and other like-minded writers responded to the heightened radicalism
of the early 1970s “by rejecting the social realism of writers like Arnold
Wesker that had dominated radical theatre for fifteen years.” They joined
artists like Brecht in proclaiming realism “inadequate” for a militant age.
In addition, they felt that the rise of “mass populist culture,” especially
television, had sharpened the limitations of the realist strategy.53 Agitprop
emerged as the artistic approach of the hour.
True to the conventions of agitprop, Edgar’s early plays were overtly
didactic and politically topical.54 They were performed in spaces appropriate
to the economic and political identity of their audiences – streets, union
conferences, church halls, pubs and fringe venues. These plays interpreted
the state of British society through the prism of Marxist economic theory,
offering searing critiques of the “crisis of capitalism,” and prescribing working
class strategies to resolve it.55 Edgar insisted that psychologism, depth of
character and linearity of plot were irrelevant to the drama of socialist
agitation – indeed, that they undermined the didactic function of agitprop
plays. Using cartoon strip methods to present grotesque and contradictory
imageries, the plays matched Marxist analyses of social reality with music
hall and ‘Stand Up’ comedy performances. They aimed to package their
political message in an entertaining garb. According to Edgar, the plays
“worked best with what the jargon calls ‘advanced workers’ – at things
like TASS weekend schools, shop stewards, Labor Party and IS socials.”
They made little impression on “apolitical workers.”56
British agitprop drew encouragement from the spread of parallel
genres in other parts of the world such as China, the former USSR and
East Germany. Artists such as The Blue Blouse, Erwin Piscator and Bertolt
Brecht produced agitprop in countries where socialist states supported
and promoted their endeavors. Agitprop practitioners in Britain sought to
implant their aesthetics upon the imagination of a social class [the working
class] they hoped would help redefine Britiish national culture. While the
governments of socialist countries sought to use agitprop to assimilate
their citizens into the state, British agitprop became an aesthetic describing
the marginalization of the working class that hoped to pave the way to
socialism in Britain.
53
54
55
56
Edgar, D. “Ten Years of Political Theatre” in Theatre Quarterly 32 (Winter 1979): 25:33
p.27
Edgar in Itzin, C. Stages in the Revolution, p. 140
Itzin, C. p. 140-141
ibid p.143
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
In the early 1970s, David Edgar mounted scathing challenges to
conservative government policies through a series of agitprop works. The
National Interest dramatized the Industrial Relations Act introduced by the
Tories to emasculate the working class and their unions. Rent… explained
the implications and contradictions of the Housing Finance Act designed
ostensibly for the welfare of the less privileged. State of Emergency chronicled
events culminating in the miners’ and dockers’ industrial disputes during the
year 1972. Death Story, which was an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet, was a political allegory of Britain’s colonial domination
of Northern Ireland. Tederella adapted the fable of ‘Cinderella’ to parody
former Prime Minister Ted Heath’s predicament with the European Common
Market. The Case of the Workers’ Plane produced in 1973, explored the
aerospace factory labor disputes.
By 1974, however, Edgar had parted company with The General Will
over disputes that reflected the general fragmentation of the Left. One bone
of contention between the playwright and the theater group concerned
the issue of performer /audience relationship. Edgar explained his version
of the conflict thus:
My feeling was that we should remain very slick and almost arrogant in our
relationship with the audience. The group’s feeling was that there should be
much more room for a relationship with the audience in the sense of popular
culture. Which I disagreed with because I was fearful that it will become vague
and unspecific and imprecise.57
Moreover, with a gentrified Labor party back in power between 1974
and 1979, Edgar felt that it was time to shift the focus of his practice from
exclusively working class and dissident middle class audiences to a broader
population representing a variety of political and social backgrounds.
The discourse of socialist revolution in which agitprop was embedded,
was in decline. The internecine bickering on the role of trade unions in
Parliamentary politics had weakened and compromised the effectiveness
and reliability of the Labor Party as the home for radical politics. At the
end of the decade, the election of a Conservative Government loomed
imminently on the political horizon. It seemed necessary for any artist who,
like Edgar, wished to enlarge the scope of his impact, to insinuate himself
into the institutions of mainstream culture. Thus the political and cultural
dynamic from the late 1970s through the end of the 1980s, led Edgar in
a new direction. His craftsmanship and political activism moved from the
57
In Itzin, C. p.143
59
60
Awam Amkpa
fringe aesthetics of agitprop to the center of the political spectrum and
into the dominant culture.
Returning to a context and audience he once excoriated, Edgar started
working in state subsidized establishment theatres and television in
addition to fringe and community theatres. By the 1980s he had, in the
words of John Bull, “declared War on All Fronts”58 – for those were years
dominated by Britain’s popular and demagogic Prime Minister – the arch
conservative Margaret Thatcher. The machismo of government never saw
a better performer than Margaret Thatcher. Not only did she cultivate
an overbearing patriarchal persona, she instituted an ideology equating
conservative values with ‘common sense’ and socialism with ‘loony
thoughts.’ “Thatcherism” blossomed as an ideology based on competitive
and solipsistic individualism, and an economy that boldly and arrogantly
placed the interests of property ownership and wealth accumulation above
social welfare and concern for the less privileged. Her government set out
to limit the moral and material gains of working class culture and modes
of representation by a systematic process of economic strangulation.
Thatcherism also redefined subjectivity for the popular masses by destroying
trade unions and limiting their effectiveness with jingoistic nationalism. In
her own words, the Prime Minister was determined to set up a government
and dominant culture that:
decisively broke with a debilitating consensus of a paternalistic Government
and a dependent people; which rejected the notion that the State is all powerful
and the citizen is merely its beneficiary; which shattered the illusion that
Government could somehow substitute for individual performance.59
Thatcherism blossomed in a politico-cultural soil fertilized by a profound
postcolonial identity crisis anchored in economic distress and large-scale
immigration from Britain’s former colonies. For centuries, Britain’s national
self- assurance was shaped by its power to determine the cartographic
boundaries and cultural destinies of people within and outside its little
island. Britain’s command over the vast resources and wealth of far away
Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the lower Pacific islands gave it an exalted
place in the career of European modernity. By the 19th century, the riches
of the British Empire far outshone the fabled bounty of Britain’s imperial
forbears-- Spain and Portugal. By the middle of the twentieth century,
58
59
Bull, J. New British Political Dramatists, London and Basingtoke: Macmillan, 1984 pp.
151-194
Margaret Thatcher cited in Kavanagh, D. Thatcherism and British Politics: The End of Consensus? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 p. 247
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
however, British colonialism was in retreat. Anticolonial nationalisms across
the Afro-Asian world provided a global impetus for counter-modernist cultural
conflicts which began to destabilize the British sense of national identity
both in the context of empire and within the nation. Decolonization was
accompanied by the influx of waves of immigrants from Britain’s former
colonies in the Caribbean, Asia and Africa to rebuild cities devastated by
German bombs during the Second World War as well as to meet the nation’s
dire need for menial labor. Britain’s immigrant population grew when
the exclusionary fury of African racial nationalism in Kenya and Uganda
thrust large numbers of Africans of Asian descent out of east Africa onto
Britain’s shores. By the 1970s, debates over what constituted “Britishness”
convulsed British society. Economic hard times accentuated what came to
be constructed as an essentially cultural debate over national identity, and
added fuel to the exclusionary fire of Conservative politics.
It was in this context that Thatcher effectively limited socialism’s
political appeal as an effective mode of agency among the working
class by fashioning a new nationalism that was imperialistic, culturally
chauvinistic and racist. The political and cultural landscape forged by
Thatcherism confirmed Edgar’s sense that progressive theater must broaden
its appeal to include the “radically inclined middle class people.”60 By
the early 1980s, he had jettisoned his past political activism in favor of a
more rhetorical aestheticism. It became important to develop a multivocal
aesthetics challenging the univocal nationalism shared by the dominant
culture and subordinated working class. Edgar expanded the range of his
concerns beyond the working class to include women’s rights, and the
struggles against racism and homophobia, skillfully navigating a spectrum of
political and aesthetic borders in an attempt to reach the broadest possible
audience. He moved from fringe to mainstream theatre, and television
to journalism, in a project to create what he called a “theater of public
life,”61 viewing the search for subjectivity by each constituency within that
“public” a potential source of a counter-hegemonic culture.
It was, however, Destiny, written during the transitional period of Edgar’s
theatrical practice in 1976, that most directly engaged the broad range of
issues – of race and nation, of class and citizenship, of colonialism and
postcoloniality – that had begun to reshape the former agitprop artist’s
thinking. Deliberately mixing historical reality with fiction into a genre Edgar
called ‘FacTion,’ the play presented a masterful illustration of the process by
60
61
Cited in Itzin, C. p.146
Itzin, C. p.144-145
61
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Awam Amkpa
which nationality is invented and signified. As the historian Nicholas Dirks
has observed, “Claims about nationality necessitated notions of culture that
marked groups off from one another in essential ways, uniting language,
race, geography, and history in a single concept. Colonialism encouraged
and facilitated new claims of this kind, re-creating Europe and its others
through its histories of conquest and rule.”62 David Edgar emerged as one
of his nation’s most trenchant commentators on Britain’s imperial legacy
and its postcolonial identity. The following section analyzes Destiny as a
tract for the cultural conflicts of its time, as an exposé of the violence of
chauvinistic nationalism.
Destiny
Destiny is set in the British Midlands in the 1970s. That this play about
postcolonial beginnings dawns in darkness is highly symbolic. For darkness
in this context is laden with multiple layers of meaning. On one level, it
connotes a moment of renewal, both for the postcolonial nation and for
its former colonizer. On another, darkness serves as a metaphor for the
precarious foundation of that confident myth of imperialist ideology that
asserted that the sun would never set over the British Empire.63 Darkness
also signifies a postcolonial moment akin to what Jacques Derrida calls
‘brisure’64 – a simultaneous act of ‘join’ and ‘break’. In this case, the ‘join’
forged Indians into a commonwealth of the formerly colonized loosely
united by a shared, informal allegiance to Britain – what I call colonial
nationalism. The “break” entailed a moment of anticolonial disidentification.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s call to his people to reawaken, and savor the moment
when “the soul of a nation, long oppressed, finds utterance,” with which
Edgar opens Destiny, opens a space for enunciating the limits of colonial
order and announcing a postcolonial desire. It signals the emergence of
what Homi Bhabha terms ‘a third space,’65 a moment of in-betweeness
denunciating and fragmenting colonial order while projecting desires for
postcolonial subjectivity.
62
63
64
65
Dirks, N. [ed.] Colonialism and Culture, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992
p. 3
Edgar, D. Destiny p.327
In Derrida, J. Writing and Difference [trans. Bass, A.] London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1978
See Bhabha, H. Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1992
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
Following Nehru’s opening salvo to new beginnings, the lights fade onto
the British Sergeant Turner and the Indian servant-soldier Khera as they
pack up artifacts of the British colonial presence in India. Major Rolfe and
Colonel Chandler join them. The beginning of the end of the British Empire,
which for Indians has opened up new vistas of freedom and opportunity,
imbues the returning colonists with a sense of rootlessness. Will the Britain
they call “home” live up to the expectations of their carefully preserved
nostalgia? Or will it turn out to be an unrecognizable land, far, in fact,
from the figments of their romantic imaginations? By opening the play in
such a fluid setting in far away India, the playwright gives notice that all
that is solid will crumble to dust, and all that is distant will unequivocally
be brought closer to local struggles. In other words, Edgar schools his
audience in the notion that the local is always global and vice-versa.
In Act 1 Scene I Edgar makes colonial India the setting for what will
turn out to be a British contest in England. Sergeant Turner, Major Rolfe
and Colonel Chandler all show a spectrum of emotions about the present
state of the motherland they had long served, and appear to harbor different
expectations about the reception they will be accorded upon their return
home. The variety of their social backgrounds inserts them into different
spaces in Britain’s class hierarchy. The self-assured Chandler, born to
wealth and educated at public schools, exudes confidence that he will be
well rewarded for his loyal service to his nation. Far more insecure than
Chandler about their hard won middle-class status, Rolfe and Turner, by
contrast, worry that their sacrifices will be undervalued and their gains
eroded by the invasion of their pristine motherland by savage hordes of the
colonized “Other.” The parallel, yet different paths the three men traverse on
their return to Britain will determine the nature and scope of the political
and cultural conflicts in the play. The end of the scene is a particularly
poignant lesson in British colonial history. As his imperial masters leave the
stage, Khera, left alone to complete the packing of their colonial trophies,
mockingly toasts a mural representing the colonial army’s suppression of
an anticolonial mutiny, declaring “Civis Britannicus Sum.”
Why did Khera toast this mural? The mutiny represented in the mural
is of great significance to any postcolonial enquirer. Jubilant cheers that
serve as the backdrop for Khera’s gesture of deference to the mural
accentuate the painting’s importance in announcing the imminent birth
of a postcolonial nation. Displayed again in the next scene, this icon of
anticolonial nationalism and colonial repression depicts the legendary
Indian Sepoy mutiny of 1857 – a year that marked the centennial of
British rule in India. On that memorable day, Indian troops belonging to
63
64
Awam Amkpa
the British colonial army enacted their insubordination to British rule in a
rebellion that started in Meerut near Delhi and lasted a full year before it
was brutally squashed by the British Army. The mutiny started when the
circulation of a rumor that the British had introduced new bullets greased
with fat derived from pigs and cows fueled the disaffection of Muslim
and Hindu soldiers irate at the alleged desecration of their faith. A British
dispatch published in the December 1857 edition of The Atlantic Monthly
summed up the event thus:
The overt ground of the general mutiny was offence to caste feelings, given
by the introduction into the army of certain cartridges said to have been
prepared with hog’s lard and cow’s fat. The men must bite off the ends of
these cartridges; so the Mahometans are defiled by the unclean animal, and
the Hindoos by the contact of the dead cow. Of course the cartridges are
not prepared as stated, and they form the mere handle for designing men to
work with. They are, I believe, innocent of lard and fat; but that a general
dread of being Christianized has by some means or other been created is
without doubt….66
The rebellious troops moved to Delhi where they aligned themselves
with the Mughal emperor, the titular head of a realm under the de facto
suzerainty of the British. They attacked, maimed and killed several British
families, burnt down homes and colonial monuments. After a yearlong
struggle to crush the rebellion, the British brutally brought the revolt to
an end on July 20th 1858. The mutiny of 1857 had a far-reaching impact
on the organization of British India. The Parliament in London dismantled
the authority of the East India Company which had hitherto exercised
formal control, exiled the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah to Burma [now
Myanmar], and imposed direct colonial rule by vesting overall governing
authority in a newly appointed Vice-Roy. India became Britain’s richest
and largest possession from 1858 to 1947. The rebellion, however, exposed
the fragility of colonial authority, while its repression became a symbol of
Britain’s military might. By raising a toast to the mural, Khera appears to
acknowledge, indeed celebrate, anticolonial resistance by Sepoys like himself.
Edgar’s placement of such a significant gesture at the beginning of the play
highlights the playwright’s intent to demystify British nationalism.
The second scene shifts the locus of action to a Tory social gathering
in England, which turns out to be a funeral for Colonel Chandler. The
character makes a last dramatic entrance at his memorial service to offer
a biographical sketch of himself before departing forever:
66
See Hazewell, C.C. “The Indian Revolt” in The Atlantic Monthly, December 1857. Also
online at http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/1857dec.revolt.htm
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
In ’47. Came on home.
Colonel Chandler. Monochrome
Another England,
Rough and raw,
Not gentle, sentimental as before
Became a politician, not to master but to serve
To keep a careful finger on the grassroots Tory nerve;
Like any born to riches, not to plunder but to give:
Always a little liberal, a great Conservative.
But as his seat grows marginal, his powers less secure,
His responsive elder statements sound increasingly unsure;
Colonel Chandler, oyster eyed,
One fine summer morning, died.67
Chandler’s death creates a vacancy in Parliament, which his cousin Peter
Crosby is invited by Party members to fill. Unlike the Colonel, Crosby is a
new kind of Conservative less obsessed with imperial nationalism than with
global finance. Sleek, compassionate and more tolerant than his forbears,
Peter’s persona is both repulsive and attractive to a propertied class clinging
to mythologies of Britain’s grander days. Peter accepts his anointment as
Chandler’s successor with enthusiasm and launches a political campaign
to secure his dead relative’s parliamentary seat.
Edgar uses the Second Scene to set up the ambiguous identity of the
Conservative Party as it positions itself to narrate the destiny of the nation.
The scene suggests that neither the Conservative nor Labor Party constitutes
a coherent, consistent entity; rather, the identity of each is ridden with
tensions and conflicts. Platt, the factory work manager, trade unionist and
local chairman of the Conservative Party, disagrees with Frank Kershaw,
owner of Baron’s Casing Factory that Platt manages, over workers’ wages.
Such differences become even more glaring when Kershaw meets the
retired Major Rolfe and Sergeant Turner later on in the play.
The Third Scene of the First Act shifts attention to the other political
party involved in the conflict over narrating the nation. Edgar introduces
the audience to Paul, Clifton and Sandy at a meeting in a Labor club.
Clifton, an aspiring Labor Party parliamentarian, is very dependent on Paul,
a militant socialist with intricate knowledge of the Party’s constituencies
and internal politics. As in the previous scene, Edgar shows the presence
of racial nationalism among Labor partisans. Paul informs Clifton and his
wife Sandy that the Labor politician Mr. Smalley whose parliamentary seat
Clifton is seeking, has burnt his bridges with his largely Asian constituency
67
Edgar, D. Destiny p.324
65
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Awam Amkpa
by declaring, “Whatever one’s sympathies- and I have many- with these
unfortunate people, one must accept that the indigenous population will
not for ever stay silent, faced with what appears to be the thin end of a
very thick black wedge.”68
In subsequent scenes the playwright underscores the readiness with
which fascism sprouts roots not only within the dominant political party,
but also among those marginalized by it, and even within its opposition.
Scene Four exposes the dangerous logic of retired Major Rolfe’s racial
nationalism. Edgar showcases him thus:
In ’47. Came on home.
Major Rolfe. A face of stone.
Another England, seedy drab,
Locked in the dreams of glories she once had.
The Major looks at England and bemoans her tragic fate
Condemns the mindless comforts of a flaccid, spongers state,
Despairs of trendy idiocies repeated as rote,
While the knot of old school tiredness is still tight
Round England’s throat.
Sees leaders fat with falsehood as they lick up every lie,
The people’s blood grown sickly with their driving will to die.
Major Rolfe, sees the light,
Calls for a counter from the Right:
Major Rolfe, starboard seer,
Loses, for they will not hear.69
Major Rolfe has not come to terms with the imminence of the British
Empire’s end. Despite the minor issue of the loss of India, the empire is
well and alive, its mandate to “civilize” intact: “its not true that we’ve lost
an Empire. Haven’t found a role. We have a role.”70 Rolfe sees his own
ascent from his working class roots to upper middle class respectability
as the prize for his sacrifices to the national cause. As suspicious of the
highborn as he is of groups he deems unfit for social mobility, the Major
defines Britain’s national identity in much the same terms, as does Enoch
Powell. His experience in the colonial army has left Rolfe convinced that
the boundaries of glorious Britishness is boldly delineated by the colonial
‘Other’. Long years of policing and reorganizing the colonial order have
helped him construct an exclusive idea of Britishness to which few outsiders
can lay claim. The working classes and the poor whose dependency on
68
69
70
Edgar, D. Destiny p. 330
Edgar, D. Destiny p. 331
ibid p. 345
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
the state he deplores, represent a potent threat to the purity of Britishness,
as do the moderates within his own party who preach racial tolerance.
As far as he is concerned “the flag they wave omits the red and blue.”71
The theatricality of his personality makes him memorable in the drama
of nationalism.
Sergeant Turner’s path to racial nationalism is paved with ambiguity
born of disillusionment with the values of the contemporary Conservative
Party. As someone who invests a great deal in the symbolic wealth of
Britain – especially the glory of its imperial vision and achievements – the
Sergeant is disenchanted with the modern conservatives’ crass materialism.
The party to which he has long owed allegiance has mortgaged the
country’s future to selfish economic interests. The England defined by the
traditional values of “thrift” and “prudence” which Turner had devoted his
life to defending has all but passed. Edgar’s sketch of Turner portrayed as
a man out of sync with his time:
In ‘47. Came on home.
Sergeant Turner, to a Midland town.
Another England, brash and bold.
A new world, brave and bright and cold.
The Sergeant looks at England, and it’s changed before his eyes;
Old virtues, thrift and prudence, are increasingly despised;
Old values are devalued as the currency inflates.
Old certainties are scoffed at by the new sophisticates:
And big capital and labor wield and ever bigger clout,
And it’s him that’s in the middle and it’s him that’s losing outSergeant Turner, NCO:
Where’s he going? Doesn’t know.72
Caught in limbo between “big capital” and militant labor, Turner
eventually walks into the arms of the rabidly racist National Forward
Party, although haltingly. His defection from the Conservative Party is
triggered by the devastating news that Metropolitan Investments, owned
by Frank Kershaw, is about to buy him out of the building housing his
antique store. The carrier of these unhappy tidings is a Jewish character
named Monty. This rubs Turner the wrong way. The messenger of his
doom, after all, belongs to a “race” historically stigmatized as the ‘Other’
– one whose decimation established the racial foundations of European
modernity. Yet Monty’s message is not one of his own making. Caught in
a wave of anger and disappointment when he realizes that his betrayer
71
72
ibid p. 333
Edgar, D. Destiny p. 336
67
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Awam Amkpa
is a man from his own party, Turner establishes a fringe party known as
the Taddley Patriotic League, which, by the play’s end, merges with the
extremist National Forward Party (NFP).
The last scene of the Act dramatizes the mentality of fascistic racial
nationalism and its complicated relationship with empire by depicting
the NFP’s celebration of Hitler’s birthday. The participants represent a
motley crew – from working class men to a rich older Canadian – who
share a nostalgia for Britain’s imperial glories and disdain for the alleged
offscourings of its former Empire, now in their midst to steal their jobs and
adulterate their “culture.” The Canadian Drumont recounts the anguish of
an Enoch Powell constituent: “if I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in
this country…In this country in fifteen or twenty years time the black man
will have the whip-hand over the white man.”73 The paranoid imagination
of racial nationalism has thus transformed England the great colonizer into
the colonized, the lofty civilizer of savage lands into a land under siege
by savages. The power of this imagination overwhelms distinctions of
class among white men. As Edgar shows, Marxist theory notwithstanding,
colonialism leaves its formidable imprint upon the nationalist consciousness
of even those described by Ernest Renan as lacking “the social capital
upon which one bases a national idea.”74 Conflating demands for protective
wages and collective bargaining with imperialist tropes, the disenfranchised
join the status quo in narrating an imagined nation premised upon racial
purity and masculinity. The play’s white male protagonists, no matter
what their precise location on the political spectrum, proclaim their stake
in participating in the racialized, masculinized discourse of nationalism,
obscuring deep social cleavages among them in the process. As Benedict
Anderson asserted, “Regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that
may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal
comradeship.”75
Into this racialized national narrative steps Khera at the end of the scene.
Khera has immigrated to England as a formerly colonized subject who
had rendered loyal service to his former masters. He makes no apologies,
despite the fact that he understands that race and national origin disqualify
him from narrating the British nation:
73
74
75
Edgar, D. Destiny p.344
Renan, E. ‘What is a Nation?’ trans. Thom, M. in Bhabha, H. [ed] Nation and Narration,
London: Routledge, 1990 p.19
Anderson, B. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
New York: Verso Press, 1991 p. 6-7
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
Gurjeet Singh Khera. To a Midlands town.
Another England, another nation,
Not the England of imagination.
The labor market forces have an international will,
So the peasants of the Punjab people factory and mill,
The sacred kess and kanga, kachka, kara and kirpan
The Sikh rejects so he can be a proper Britishman;
Keep faith in human virtue, while attempting to condone
The mother country’s horror at her children coming home.
Gurjeet Singh Khera,
Once a slave,
Returns to haunt the Empire’s grave.76
Sectarian unrest in the land of his birth – itself an invention, in part,
of colonialism – has complicated the notion of a “home” for Khera. For
him, the existential sites for being, belonging and becoming must be
multiple, and he has come to England to assert such a pluralistic notion
of identity. Khera’s reference to his reception in England (“The mother
country’s horror at her children coming home”) aptly captures the irony
of imperialism’s legacy. One the one hand, the paternalism inherent in the
imperial mandate of the “white man’s burden” facilitates Khera’s British
“homecoming,” establishes his claim to England as one of her “children.”
On the other hand, he is an unwelcome stepchild, as it were, from whom
the motherland recoils in horror. Khera’s assertive presence and those of
other postcolonial subjects contradict the univocal and singular narrative
of British nationalism and provoke the vituperation of xenophobes like
Enoch Powell. Edgar’s crafty insertion of Khera’s character at the end of
the first act throws into sharp relief the dramatist’s plea for an inclusive
politics of humanism.
Edgar does not, however, romanticize Khera. Departing from agitprop
traditions, Edgar problematizes the Indian character as much as he does
the British protagonists of Destiny. Shunning his Sikh identity to become
a Britishman, Khera is an ambiguous neocolonial character. Khera seeks
subjectivity through assimilation. Yet his aspiration to assimilate also
implicates him in the project to write a national narrative premised upon
uniformity – of custom and culture, if not race. For “pukka” (a colonial
coinage meaning “pure”) British nationalists, he poses a particular problem.
His postcolonial identity is one they prefer to forget. Yet he also represents
the “Other” against which they define their identity and describe their
history.
76
Edgar, D. Destiny p. 346
69
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Awam Amkpa
In the Second Act, the discourse of nationalism plays out on the floor
of a factory – that familiar arena for conflict and consensus over race and
class. The First Scene pits Khera and another Indian immigrant Patel, against
the manager Platt and a white worker Attwood. Khera and Patel protest
the racialization of class by drawing attention to the low wages and lack
of opportunity for promotions from which Asian workers suffer. Attwood
responds with the familiar charge that Asians jeopardize the economic
security of whites. Edgar develops the theme of intra-class racial conflict
in the Second Scene by depicting the merger of two disgruntled splinter
parties – Turner’s Taddley Patriotic League and Nation Forward. Both
groups seek to dissolve the schisms of class in a sea of white supremacy.
As the National Forward spokesman Maxwell declares, “much more unites
us than divides us. It’s an old saying, but you can change your class and
your creed. But you can’t change the blood in your veins.”77 He goes on
to promise that National Forward will restore Britain’s brilliance by rooting
out the darkness that stains the body politic: “I hope with all sincerity,
that you will wish to join this party, join with us, and make our country
great again.”78 Turner is persuaded to amalgamate his group with the
racial nationalists with the hope that he will secure the combined party’s
nomination to run for Chandler’s seat in Parliament. This moment of
joining in racist fraternity is sealed by a new member Tony’s rendition of
Kipling’s ‘The Beginning’:
It was not part of their blood
It came to them very late
With long arrears to make good
When the British began to hate
It was not preached to the crowd
It was not taught by the state
No man spoke it aloud
When the British began to hate79
Subsequent Scenes trace Turner’s growing popularity. Both mainstream
parties – Labor and Conservative envy the appeal of his populism, but are
squeamish about his politics of racial essentialism. Meanwhile, schisms
rack the ranks of Labor, as Khera and Patel denounce the racism of trade
unions. Clifton, contesting Turner and Peter for Chandler’s seat, walks
a political tightrope between the concerns of the trade unions and the
77
78
79
Edgar, D. Destiny p.354
ibid p. 355
ibid p.356
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
aspirations of their dissident immigrant members. Labor’s predicament,
as Edgar presents it, reflected the identity crisis the Party experienced in
the period when Destiny was written. In the late 1970s, the Conservative
Party gained ground among Labor’s traditional constituencies such as
trade unions. Labor’s ambivalence towards racialized class conflicts – as
signified by Clifton’s attitude toward the grievances of his working class
Asian allies – marked its willingness to move to the right in a strategic
move to arrest its own marginalization.
An impending strike by lowly paid and largely Sikh workers at Baron
Casings, acts of intimidation against immigrants followed by a race riot,
and confusion among politically moderate members of the electorate
combine to propel Edgar’s plot to an uncertain climax. The riot provides
the occasion for two white members of the working class to weigh the
claims of racial nationalism against that of class solidarity. As these men,
Tony and Paul, await police interrogation in the aftermath of the riot, they
reveal the deep cleavage that the competing claims of race and class have
wrought in the ideas of nationhood and citizenship:
Paul: All history’s the struggle of the classes.
Tony: No. All history’s the struggle of the races.
Paul: The workers of all races must unite.
Tony: The workers of all classes must unite.80
Meanwhile, Edgar highlights the anxieties among the mainstream
parties generated by Nation Forward’s racialized populism. The dramatist
appears to be saying that the Conservative and Labor parties, by their
opportunistic manipulation of racial divisions, have unleashed a monster
that is now rapidly spinning out of their control. Peter Crosby, the Tory,
is bewildered by the Nation Forward Party’s lack of civility and its failure
to pursue a decorous electoral process. As he confides in Platt:
Crosby (to Platt): And it was very strange, when talking to these people;
thought, oh, no, these can’t be with their grisly xenophobia, they can’t or
are they, our creation, Demons. Alter-ego. Somehow. (Platt smiles) And I
remembered, being small, the coronation, and the climbing Mount Everest,
a kind of homely patriotism, sort of harmless, slightly precious self-content.
A dainty, water-color world, you know. (Platt looks embarrassed.) And then,
their monstrous chauvinism. Dark, desire, for something… Kind of, something
dark and nasty in the soul.81
80
81
Edgar, D. Destiny, p.391
Edgar, D. Destiny, pp. 366-367
71
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Awam Amkpa
Crosby pays an unexpected visit to Clifton and Sandy to urge that racial
politics be taken out of the electoral process so as to keep the Nation
Forward Party in check. Clifton then reminds Crosby that the Labor and
Conservative Parties have created the problem in the first place and that
both parties must take a more principled position on the subject: “Your
deal, in ’62. Then ours, a higher bid, the Kenyan Asians Bill, restricting
entry purely on grounds of color. So, not to be outdone, the stakes go
higher, back to you in ’71, ‘Keep Race out of Politics, Keep Blacks out
of England’. Thus, once again, Edgar implicates the mainstream political
parties whose conflicting narrations of nationalism use race and class as
markers of effective citizenship.
The racial moderation championed by Crosby and Clifton marks a
moment of recognition and regret at the excesses of racial and imperial
nationalism. Several scenes toward the end of the play tend in the same
direction. A case in point is a scene at the end of the Second act, when
Edgar invokes audience sympathy for an unexpected casualty of nationalism.
Major Rolfe, that icon of imperialism, reappears, this time to mourn the
loss of a soldier-son, killed in Belfast where he had been dispatched to
defend the claims of colonial nationalism. As he laments his child’s death,
Rolfe achieves a surprising state of political consciousness. Edgar uses this
unusual character to map and reject the coloniality of British nationalism
within and outside its borders. Contradicting his earlier assertion, Rolfe
states that after all, “The sun has set. And we should remember. We should
not look back, but should, instead, think only of the morning.”82 At the
moment when the younger Rolfe laid down his life to sustain the nation’s
imperial narrative, his father said, enough. The time has come to draw
the curtain on that narrative, and to launch new beginnings untainted by
its legacy.
As Rolfe bids Britain’s imperial destiny goodbye, so too, by the play’s
end, most of the remaining protagonists have come to realize the futility
of rabid nationalism. The wedge issue of race has failed to buttress the
electoral fortunes of the National Forward Party, and has undermined the
integrity and electability of Labor. The Tory Party remains entrenched in
power. The play ends like it began, with a voiceover. Lights fade out on
Turner and Cleaver as their rhetoric wears out. And as darkness encroaches,
a gentle voice rings out. It is Adolf Hitler at Nuremberg in 1933. In a brilliant
stroke of irony, Edgar presents a fascist offering his advice on how to tame
and resist fascism: “Only one thing could have stopped our Movement: if
82
Edgar, D. Destiny, p. 378
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
our adversaries had understood its principle, and had smashed, with the
utmost brutality, the nucleus of our new Movement.”83 Like its beginning,
the ending of the play promises the closing of old chapters and the dawn
of new ones. Edgar admonishes partisans on the right as well as the left
not to allow the fervor of nationalism to obscure the dangers of fascism.
He invites them to close the chapter on the notion of a singular British
identity that excludes more people than it admits, and to open a fresh one
inscribed with the inclusive spirit of a multiethnic England.
Framed by a modified agitprop structure, Destiny tells a compelling story
whose strength lies in its cast of tentative rather than emotive characters.
As icons with deep discursive resonance, these characters act as ideograms
seeking a common place where they can conjugate their identities. Edgar
eschewed linearity of plot in favor of an emphasis on the play’s political
message. As he explained, “What I wanted the audience to do was actually
view the play in terms of its theme, in terms of the social forces involved,
not necessarily to be bothered with strict chronology.”84
As a postcolonial subject, I read Edgar’s text as interrogating mainstream
and countercultural narratives of national identity at a time when Britain was
trying to re-negotiate its place within a fragmenting European modernity.
In the 1970s, the European Common Market and its cultural politics
fractured uniform philosophies within and between political parties and
labor unions in England. Great power rivalries among Europeans moved
from colonial battlefields to the arena of global capitalism. England found
itself caught between nostalgia for its imperial grandeur on the one hand,
and a recession within its economy on the other. The result was a titanic
struggle to redefine the national destiny, to draw and redraw the contours
of nation and race. It is this moment of renewed cultural invention that
Edgar captures in Destiny.
Since the age of European expansion in the sixteenth-century, colonial
encounters between the British and their Others had shaped Britain’s
sense of self. The racialized construction of the British Empire translated
into an exclusionary definition of Britishness when, in the latter half of
the twentieth-century, masses of the formerly colonized immigrant Others
flocked to England to complicate the meaning of nationalism. Mapping an
archeology of colonial and anticolonial nationalism, Edgar’s play portrays
the racialization of class antagonism in times of social crisis. More than
83
84
ibid p. 404
Edgar, D. ‘Towards a Theatre of Dynamic Ambiguities’, Theatre Quarterly, Vol.9 No. 33,
Spring 1979, p.15
73
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Awam Amkpa
describing such an archeology, however, I believe that Edgar goes on to
prise out fissures within which a socially democratic subjectivity is possible.
The character of Khera, for instance, opens up the promise of such
subjectivity. The indexical resonance of Destiny lies in its representation
of the crisis of Euro-modernity by fragmenting solid discourses of national
belonging. The play promises a more global means of restructuring the
terms of becoming. If Edgar sees himself as a “Secretary of the times,”
recording the contradictions of nationalism, I see him as a theologian of
nationalism, not merely documenting its overt manifestations as much
as probing and explaining to the world its deepest meaning. For Edgar,
socialism still furnishes the path to that meaning, a thesis for a theology
he has so energetically textualized in his plays, television drama, films,
journalistic articles and essays. In recent times Edgar’s dramaturgy reflects
the aspirations of a social democrat seeking to use his art to provoke an
ethic of emancipatory subjectivity.
Conclusions
Two playwrights separated by the Atlantic ocean over 3100 miles show
us how drama and theatre are not simple reflections or representations of
the world but frameworks for using the conventions of the symbolic order
to imagine a transcendent subjectivity. They did not only work within
historically given institutions and conventions, but also devised their own
conventions to provoke an imaginary of democracy in societies of desperate
social inequities. I partly chose both playwrights and their contexts to
show the colonial and neocolonial relations binding both countries though
slight different from when Britain declared Nigeria a formal colony in
1914. These playwrights are famous for devising the best dramaturgy that
would underscore an ‘aesthetics of fragmentation’ whereby known ideas of
identities are set up to be fragmented for an uncertain but democratically
projected re-assemblage. In their own ways, they tampered with existing
conventions of drama and performance to promote a style of becoming
that stresses culture is always being re-made to address issues of equity
and democratic participation.
Their aesthetics negate metaphors of hegemonic wholeness and
completeness by deliberately inducing chaos that produce social fragmentations
in search of meaningful coalitions and re-assemblage. For them, tribulations
do not induce penance but are actually resources for developing a
productive platform for imagining equity. Stressing repetitive action as
Postcolonial theatre and the ethics of emancipatory becoming
important to subjectivity, both playwrights illustrate how the coloniality
of culture can and should be perpetually subverted in order to imagine
new utopias for a dystopic world. Their politics is their art and vice versa
and the ethical position they articulate for us is to constantly imagine a
universe in a perpetual state of becoming and theatre in a constant state
of polysemiosis.
I have combined literary appreciation with historical readings of discourses
of power and its coloniality to make a post-structuralist argument that the
world, in which we live, is a framework for enabling perpetual re-invention
thematized by social justice and spaces for imagining subjectivity.
75