LITR 5831
World / Multicultural Literature: Tragedy & Africa
Lecture Notes
Bacchae prsn 2
Euripides as popular and modern
mixes comedy with tragedy; Aristotle on comedy > Agamemnon
Lysistrata, scene 2
wildness
irreverence
drums and dance as in D&KH
start with prologue to remind--remind of video part of presentation
scene 1: Dionysus reveals himself, states conflict: Theban leaders doubt his divinity or legitimacy
revenge: Theban women have left their homes to engage in Dionysian rituals in the mountains and forest.
video of Soyinka, Bacchae
two groups of women
Asian women who've followed Dionysus to Thebes and hang around Thebes as chorus
Theban women who've run off to countryside
105 spirit merges
146 Whoever leads our
dancing—
that one is Bromius! [merger of identities
between mortal and divine, associated by Nietzsche with Dionysian + tragic actor
as suffering God]
148 merger of identities
160 wild ecstatic dancing, mixed
252
273 [Pentheus disrespects gods and people]
Cadmus and Tiresias warn to be respectful, then Pentheus enters disrespecting Dionysus
then acts disrespectful to old men
Oedipus at Colonus as dance, chant
antiphon, antiphony, antiphonal
mimesis: reality always exceeds art, art exceeds criticism or theory
tragedy: can't speak of it with finality (x-totalizing)
Africa: pleasure of learning, but don't expect to have it reinforced
masque 1. masquerade 2. a short
allegorical dramatic
entertainment of 16-17c, performed by masked actors
cf. ancestors and Clytaemnestra; p. 36 D&KH
compare scene 3 comedy to opening of Agamemnon, close of Oresteia
Chi-Raq (Wikipedia)
Chi-Raq (trailer)
Yoruba = language
Oyo = land
Tragic
qualities in
D&KH
Generations
Blame shared, no easy answers
Tragic flaws
Fate x-free will, destiny
Tradition, modernity
Balance of three worlds: living, dead, unborn
Spiritual / religious context
Failure to perform ritual, complete narrative
Individual and community / world
Young girl, impregnated—ambiguity, mystery
Transition x-changes per se
Knowledge x understanding
Voyeuristic human condition
Complicates change, motivation: fill my sack with dirt an
rocks, my country right or wrong
Market
+ women (Iyaloja) (Grain
of Wheat)
Drum
Dance, ball
(MH&Boys)
Carver ()
(Grain of
Wheat)
Master ()
(MH&Boys)
Community (our son )
The departed
Riddles
Colonialism: world wrenched from
true course (10); cf.
Things Fall Apart
Hybrid characters
Tragedy
Riddles (prophecies)
Honor x shame
x-curse remains behind ()
chorus 17
Elesin hesitates to sacrifice (desire, pride of life)
Generations ()
Narrative as ritual, ceremony; sacrifice ()
Learning
Crossroads ()
Fate v. free will ()
Author’s note
3 Events in Oyo 1946 > changes: detail, sequence,
characterization, + 2-3 years earlier during war
Olori Elesin
British Colonial archives > play and film
x-clash of cultures; x-equality on soil of indigenous
[rationalize as x-celebration]
>x—reductionist > threnodic
Cf. District Officer and Creon?
>metaphysical
Yoruba world of living, dead, and unborn: transition
Numinous
passage which links all (Oedipus
at Colonus)
Evocation of music
Characters: cf Pilkins and Thompsons
5 market (Grain
of Wheat); community interaction, exchange
Long-suffering home of my spirit
Cockerel
Copulation, fertility
Proverb
The other side
5 meet my father? (traditional culture)
6 Market = roost
Woman weakens
Meet forebears
World tilted from groove
Great, little wars; white slavers x-heart, mind, muscle
of race
World wrenched from true course
6-7 Not-I bird (not my turn to die)
7 Elesin’s
riddles—cf.
Things, Oedipus, prophecies
dance, drum
Death came calling
Raconteur
8 Hunter . . . rooted there
My friend Chief Tax Officer
8 Mallam? In
The Koran
Osanyin, Ifa
Kite
9 Animal fables cf. Things, Brer Rabbit
9 Iyaloja speaks
9 husband of multitudes,
master of my
fate (cf. Oedipus)
10 My great precursors
10 Yams
10 The world was mine. Our . . .
11 Calabash
Life has an end
Life is honor
It ends when honor ends
Bitterly offended
Horseman of the King
prolonging the riddle > speak now in plain words
12 [rich cloths]
You who are breath and giver of my being (woman)
x-curse remains behind
12 wrenched the world adrift (rptd 3 times, cf. chant,
chorus]
Overtake the world with one great gesture
13 navel, endless cord, great origin, roots—cf. Delphi,
Omphalos
Beloved market of my youth
Lodged among our tireless ancestors
14 Rarely uses the answer no
14 Iyaloja, who is she?
15 betrothed
The whole world is yours
Remembered by what they leave behind [sacrifice]
Memory is Master of Death
16 Pleasure palls. Our acts should have meaning
[riddle]
plantain
16 do me honor
Seeds > take root
Betrothed to your own son
16 Only the
curses of the departed are to be feared (cf.
Things,
Oresteia)
17 The very earth says No
17 ancestor + unborn wring own issue
grain > root
[sublime]
18 x-curse in seed
[ritual, ceremony]
[cf.
Birth of Tragedy:
fruit of union . . . neither of this world or next]
Part 2
Simon Pilkings, wife Jane
District Officer’s bungalow
tango [etymology: originally a dance festival of Africans or Gypsies]
a. A Spanish flamenco dance. b. A syncopated ballroom dance in 2/4 or 4/4 time introduced into Europe and N. America from Argentina, related to the Cuban Habanera but probably of African origin, characterized by a slow gliding movement broken up by pointing positions; a piece of music for this dance.
gramophone [etymology: apparently formed by inversion of phonogram]
phonogram [Gk phono voice + gram something written]
1.A written character or symbol representing a spoken sound; spec. a letter or symbol in (esp. Isaac Pitman's) shorthand.
18 tango, gramophone, fancy-dress
“Native
Administration” policeman (cf. Court Messenger in
Things)
18 disbelief and horror
19 Acting most strangely
19 Hell, hell (blasphemy)
19 Pagan / Muslim
19 Dead cult, not for human being
19 Mumbo-jumbo
19 x-touch that cloth
19 first prize
at ball (dance, cf.
MH&Boys)
19 police officer, His Majesty’s Government
19 matter of death > uniform
19 cf. gods and police
20 Egungun
20 Juju
20 When they get this way
20 [writing]
20 Elesin > commit death, criminal offence
20 Ritual
murder
21 Jane: own peculiar logic; why getting rattled?
21 Jane’s language as hybrid
21 effect of drums + question of difference
21 Jane: something to do with . . . ?
21 Joseph: Christian > outfit: no power
22 He will simply die
22 native laws and custom
22 chief’s son> med school England; fought
22 Olunde
22 Family tradition
22 Sensitive, poet
22 Eldest son? Old ram
23 eldest
son x-travel from native land > modernity; cf.
Oedipus)
23
Juju, can’t touch master
23
Trapped in horrible custom
23
Yap family secrets; give anything away?
23
Sly, devious bastards
23
[Simon talks as if Joseph is not there]
23
social anthropology
23
Jane listens to servants]
24
holy water nonsense
24
death / wedding < drum
24
missionaries
24
Christ!
25
The European club
25
Barbaric custom
25
Pilkings learns? My unchristian language (cf. Creon)
26 another letter re unchristian language
26
Prince on tour of colonies
27 woman / boss
Part 3
27 the market
27 official business
27 you white man’s eunuch
27 (low humor)
27 Cf. baton, handbell
29 Wedding?
29 Wives (plural)
29 Insult
29 our mothers
29 Jester in khaki and starch
29 No longer
knows his mother—teach
him
29 [snatch
batons, knock off hats; English accent,
play-acting]
30 cf. Jane mimesis 21, 27
30 older women encourage (audience]
30 cf. goofy gophers
30 natives, restless?
30 African time
(imitation,
mimesis)
31 [Amusa tricked, loss of face]
31 Market = home of our mothers
31 [strike palms, gestures of wonder]
31 Teach you that at school? [slave / master dialectic]
32 How they
mimicked
the white man?
32
[song and dance]
32
Earth and passage [transition] > grains of earth on eyelids of passage
32
Market = heart of life, hive, swarm
33 kite
33 Alafin
33 The other market
33 Semi-hypnosis
33 [dance, finality]
34 buried like seed-yam
34 Seven-way cross-roads (cf. Oedipus)
35 Mask dance (?)
35 An Elesin to die the death of death
Part 4
37 a masque [spectacle?] 1. masquerade 2. a short allegorical dramatic
entertainment of 16-17c, performed by masked actors
37 Imperial frontier
37 Local police band, white conductor
37 Entrance of Royalty
37 ritual of introductions
37 Egungun
38 “They”
38 Market women rioting?
38 Quaint grammar
38 Where would the empire be?
39 Pilkings resists vs. Resident
39 Tell him the truth?
39 Supposed to be a secure colony of His Majesty
39 sashes; color appeals to natives
39 My report
39 Superstitious nonsense
40 dead cult; dress get power of dead
40 Jane: x-count hours same way
40 [young black man, sober western suit]
41 not shocked? Why should I be.
41 desecrate an ancestral mask
41 No respect
for what not
understood
41 captain blows up ship
42 ammunition, lethal gases
42 No other way to save lives
42 Affirmative
commentary: captain’s self-sacrifice
42 somewhat
more
understanding
42 Trying to do for you . . . for your people
42 Cable, bury my father
43 Traveled with prince
43 He
has
protection
43 Honor
and veneration of his own people
43 Believe everything that appears to make sense was learnt
from you
43 Barbaric
custom,
feudal > Therapy. British style
43 You white races know how to survive; Art of survival
43 So-called civilization
43 Humility to let others survive in their own way
44 Ritual suicide? Mass suicide?
44 You people . . .
44 Disaster
beyond human
reckoning > triumph?
44 x-right to pass judgment
44 color thing?
44 x-so simple
45 [drums change rhythm]
45 Just a savage like all the rest
45 Impudent nigger
45 natives put a suit on
46 What happens to one in this place
46 the way we all react
46 Calm
acceptance, a need to
understand
46 perform rites
46 Welfare of my people
47 Terrible calamity if you’d succeeded
47 (calamity) for us, the entire people
47 You must
know by now there are things you can’t
understand—or
help
47 Where the slaves were stored
48 riot, crisis
49 covered
me in shame
49 Give back name
49 Ghost from land of nameless
49 Albino’s hand
49 My father’s voice
50 no father
Part 5
50 iron-barred gate, cell, chairs
50 Bride
50 Pilkings in police uniform
50 Moon = twin brother?
50 Quiet = peace?
50 shattered peace of world forever
50 x-save life, > destroyed it
51 my duty
51 a moment of the night
51 moon at gateway
51 sacred drums
51 turn him into something in your own image
51 push our world from its course?
51 x-great origin?
51 White skin covered our future
51 World reversed itself: father begs son for forgiveness
[modernity?]
52 Contempt, shame
52 Birth to a son
52 Obtain secrets of enemies
52 Avenge my
shame,
destroy you and yours
52 I cannot judge him
52 lost
father’s place of
honor, voice broken
52 Contradictions in wisdom of your race? [fate v. free
will?]
53 blame (distributed)
53 Weakness < abomination of white man
53 + weight of longing
53 White ghosts entered, all defiled
54 mixing with commies, anarchists
54 Stench of
shame
54 Elesin and Iyaloja: traditional gender
54 word of
honor
55 you have
my honor
already
55 report
> Papers of treachery > masters [writing, literacy]
55
I warned you . . . Who are you to make so bold? . . .
open a new life. When you dared not open the door to a new existence
55
abomination
55
Power of stranger, struggle to retrieve will
56 A maze
56 Purl: ripple, runnel, rivulet; gurgle
56 Calabash
56 Shame
56 I wish I could pity you
56 I need
understanding . . . to
understand
56 (woman as
earth; cf Mumbi,
Grain of Wheat)
56 Alien hand pollutes force of will, stranger force of
violence
57 Ancestral mask
57 riddle
57 Did I ask you for a meaning?
57 [crosses line, whistles]
59 Women chanting
59 Invasion
59 prevent death, make other deaths? (irony)
59 Wisdom of white race
60 [cylindrical bolt]
60 mine are no words for anyone’s ears
60 My father, my first-born
61 Alafin
Simon Gikandi, introduction
vii-viii both within and gainst traditions of modern and African drama
viii Yoruba + cosmopolitan & avant garde
viii Beckett, Brecht, O'Neill
viii rehabilitate colonial image of Africa
viii x-didactic
viii self-apprehension of African subjects
ix critic of ideologies of African identitie e.g. African image and negritude (Cesaire)
ix x-romanticism, naivete, and idealization
ix x-political and ideological
x tension between African worlds, experiences and colonial models, languages
x African past before and after colonialism
x precolonial forms of African drama [cf. ritual in Things]
x-xi every day world, market women, center of cosmos
xi colonial and Yoruba cultures
xi Christianity . . . early life and education
xi Westernized family + Yoruba grandparents
xi elite corps of Africans
xi islands of European culture, sea of barbarism
xii + police and military
xii writing clubs and dramatic societies
xii Ibadan, University College
xii rethinkg relationship to both
xii University of Leeds
xiii returns to Nigeria 1969 year of country's independence
xiii compare WS's disavowal but politics, history
xiii topical and prophetic
xiv politically active
xiv Kenya political prisoners [Grain of Wheat]
xiv Civil War mid-60s [> Chinua Achebe; Yoruba > Igbo]
xiv Third force
xiv not apolitical but
xiv reception . . . duality
xv unique stage experience
xv challenged Western rules of performance
xv established conventions
xv space of transition between life and death
xv music, masking rituals, proverbial language
xv formal features x direct dialogue and dramatic conflict
xv conflict between Western and African values
xv metaphysical confrontation
xv colonial factor "catalyst"
xvi Nigeria and Benin civilizations (Menil Collection)
xvi cultural influence in New World
xvi distinct regional groups and kingdoms
xvii shared uniform body of religious beliefs and cosmology
xvii living and unborn
xvii limitatings of African writing after decolonization
xviii historical event part of popular culture and consciousness
scholar of African drama and theater
xxi nature of tragedy and ritual
xxii role of women
xxiii Iyaloja, mediator of metaphysical conflict
"The Yoruba World," pp. 67-73.
"[Death
and the King's Horseman in the Classroom]," pp. 115-120.
"Being, the Will, & the Semantics of Death," 155-64.
155 Nietzsche's sage, Silenus (BT, ch 3, p. 22)
http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/xcritsource/TextGuides/NietzscheBT.htm
155 patraon God Ogun, god of creativity and the Yoruba proto-agonist . . . primal enactment of individual will [cf. Satan / Adam / Eve, Prometheus]
155 densely figurative language, peculiar music + action
155 . . . if the play's structure was classically Greek, the adaptation of a historical actionat a royal court was compellingly Shakespearean. . . . a great tragedy.
156 event = sign, sign adumbrates something other than itself by contiguity as well as by semblance
156 text mediates distance between art and life
156 concern with what a protagonist will probably or necessarily do; cf. Poetics 15a the poet should always aim either at the necessary or the probable
156 philosophical import of human and black experience
156 death = rite of passage
156 ritualistic union of life with death
157 son assumes this hereditary title only to become his surrogate in death to complete the cosmic restoration of order (cf. tragic narrative)
157 no mere drama of individual vacillation. Communal order and communal will . . . reflect but amplify his own failure of will. . . . suggests Greek tragedy much more readily than Elizabethan tragedy
cf. Synge, Brecht, Lorca's Blood Wedding
157 a classical tragedyy in which structure and metaphysics are inextricably intertwined
157 structurally, five acts . . . 24 hours (unities)
157 richly metaphorical poetry + music and dance and mime
157 cosmos comprised at once of nature, of human society, and of the divine
157 The protagonist's bewildernment and vacillation, his courage and inevitable defeat, signify a crisis, confrontation, and transformation of values, transfixed in a time that oscillates perpetually in an antiphonal moment.
157 "situation" and "recognition" Poetics 6d [T]he most powerful elements of emotional interest in tragedy—peripeteia or reversal of the situation, and recognition scenes—are parts of the plot.
157 hamartia
157 nine-member chorus
158 character determined . . . [by] the plot itself, as in the formal dramatic elements of any tragedy
158 [plot and ritual]
158 Elesin's dilemma both individual and collective, social and psychic
158 hubris, taking of bride on morning of his death in a ritual in which the thanatotic embraces the erotic; chooses satisfaction of self over exactions of will. This is his tragic flaw.
158 cf. Oedipus, ritual slaying of father at crossroads
158 Iyaloja, perhaps the most powerful characterization of a woman in African literature
158 unbroken order of world now rent asunder
159 ritual passage of Horseman served for centuries to retrace an invisible cultural circle, thereby reaffirming the order of the Yoruba world . . . ritual dress, metaphorical language
159 mixed symbols of semen and blood . . . transition and generation
159 All myth . . . reconciles two otherwise unreconcilable forces, or tensions, though the mediation of the mythic structure itself. The Oresteia is a superb example of this.
159 how society . . . reveals and dmonstrates its capacity for change
159 reluctance of the Elesins grew as contact with the British increased
160 flexible metaphysical system. Formal and structured, it remains nonetheless fluid and malleable with a sophisticated and subtle internal logic.
160 meatphor as the "horse" of words
161 The antiphonal structure of Greek tragedy is also perhaps the most fundamental African aesthetic value . . .
161 The transitional passage before which the Elesin falters is inherent in all black musical forms.
Baptist,
Edward E. The
Half has never been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.
NY: Basic, 2014.
165 . . . in musical and social rituals that played out
as rings surrounding a changing cast of innovators, enslaved people chose to act
in ways that reinforced a sense of individual independence through the reality
of mutual interdependence.
161 the power of language to create a reality, and not merely to reflect reality.
162 But is Soyinka's Yoruba world so very obscure? Is it any more obscure than the tribal world of the ancient Greeks, than Joyce's voices in Ulysses . . . we presume a familiarity with these texts which is made possible only by the academic industry of annotation. The fact of Soyinka's Africanness only makes visible an estranged relation which always stands between any text and its audience.
162 ample cluse for the decoding of his silent signs, since the relationship among character, setting, and language is always properly reinforcing . . . a hermetic universe
162 Soyinka's texts . . . meditations / mdiations b/w the European dramatic tradition and the equally splendid Yoruba dramatic tradition.
162 What does remain obscure . . . tragedy of the individual first defined by Aristotle and, in essence, reiterated by Hegel, Nietzsche, and even Brecht. . . .
162 Soyinka's evocation of a trage4dy of the community
162 dialectic between retributive and restorative justic and order
162 problematic relation between the order of the community and the self-sacrifice of the protagonist . . .
163 [cf. Nietzsche on incest] offences against even nature may in fact be part of the exaction by deeper nature from humanity of acts which alone can open up the deeper springs of man and bring ab out a constant rejuvenation of the human spirit.
163 disintegration and subsequent retrieval of protagonist's will which distinguishes Soyinka's tragic vision from its Western antecedents
163 Soyinka: Great tragedy is a cleansing process for the health of the community . . . a literal development of ritual.
Biodun Jeyifo, "Ideology
and Tragedy," 164-71.
164 transforming experience into metaphysical, transhistorical, mythic dimensiosn
164 segments of play . . . entirely fabricated
165 Schiller: tragic imitation . . . different from historical imitation
167 1955 Richard Wright visits Ghana (Gold Coast): no power on earth can rebuiild the mental habits and restore that former vision of live . . . take pride in themselves, that capacity to make decisions, that organic view of existence . . .
168 referential representativeness of his tragic hero . . . the collective psyche and spirit of a whole continent
168 That a tragedy and a tragic hero can express, symbolically, the basic myths and the psychic experience of a culture, has been simply demonstrated by great examples in Western literature.
168 protagonist hero assumes an essentiality of symbolic reverberations carried by his goals and aspirations
169 redemptive nature of Elesin Oba's intended ritual suicide.
169 The play never really dramatizes either the force of E O's personality or the inevitability of his actions. We are simply presented these matters as given realities and the playwright compels our acceptance of them by the lyrical brilliance of his dramatic language.
170 polarizes the conflict between a traditional African organic vision of life and an alien system of discrete laws and social polity, with tragic results for the indigenous system.
170 categorical super-structures wrested from for their economic and social foundations.
170 E O's honour--and the honor of the 'race'
the notion of honor (and integrity and dignity) for which Soyinka in the play provides a metaphysical rationalization rests on the patriarchal, feudalist code of the ancient Oye kingdom.
171 to symbolize pre-colonial African civilizations and NOT other more egalitarian African cosmogonic and metaphysical systems, the erosion of which ideological and political progressives can, with greater reason, regret.
Elesin Oba
& the Critics," 172-77.
