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The Ritual Context of Two Plays by Soyinka

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Derek Wright
Derek Wright
Affiliation:
Derek WrightLectures in the Department of English, University College, Darwin.
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Extract

New Year purification ceremonies are perhaps spread more widely over African fiction than African drama, ranging from the disposal of the old year's yams at the Feast of the New Yam in Achebe's Things Fall Apart to the Somalian Rendezvous of the Brooms which, in Nurridin Farah's novel Sweet and Sour Milk, the military dictatorship perverts into a political circus. More specifically, the annual rite of the carrier, who bears away the sins and misfortunes of the past year in the form of a miniature wooden boat, a bundle of twigs or a wicker effigy, is handled figuratively in the first novels of the Ghanaians Kofi Awoonor and Ayi Kwei Armah. This particular ritual practice does make some vestigial dramatic appearances, however – for example, in the symbolic dismemberment of Tufa in the cleansing floods at the end of J. P. Clark's play The Masquerade – and it receives what is probably its most complex and experimental treatment in two plays by Wole Soyinka, The Strong Breed and his adaptation of Euripides' The Bacchae.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , Spring 1987 , pp. 51 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1987

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References

Notes

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