Who is Afraid to Die? Death as Communal Manifesto in Soyinka Death and the Kings Horseman Dr.

Saurav Sen Gupta Department of English Damdama College, PO Kulhati,Kamrup, Assam Death and the Kings horseman is one the most important plays from Wole Soyinka. It revolves around a real incident that happened in Nigeria some time before the work was composed. A young man who had been training in England to be a doctor returns home in Nigeria, because his father, the aged Elesin is at the crossroads of life-between life and death. Tradition asks a kings horseman to accompany his master in death, furthering the mutual trust and obligation between the two and old Elesin is all too ready to accept his fate. The complicated point in the drama is reached with the arrival of his son, who confronts Mr. and Mrs. Pilkings, both busy with trivializing the Egungun dress, a costume normally associated with the dead. Elesin, in his arguments with Mrs. Pilkins narrates his own experiences in England, which is briefly a contusion between good and the problematic. He admires the white man for their courage and conviction but finds their arrogance in describing artifacts they have gathered elsewhere as unacceptable. The real of the West is an assumed significance of its rationality, a kind of logical drive for finite conclusions based on detachment. Olundes belief and conviction in a different order of experience as opposed to knowledges undermines the apriori reductionism analogized between permissible and its dangerous other. Levi Bruhl, ethnographer, colonialist defined primitive societies in terms of binarisms. Such societies, he said located objects and images through an indeterminate mysticism:

The attitude of the mind of the primitive is very different. The nature of the milieu in which he lives presents itself to him in quire a different way. Objects and beings are all involved in a network of mystical participation and exclusions. It is these which constitute its texture and order. It is then these which immediately impose themselves on his attention and which alone retain it. (In Evans-Pritchard, 1980:80) Bruhls colonial project, carried under the head-Anthropology effectively dismisses the spiritual idea of culture as indented against Reason. Mudimbe, discussing Bruhl finds such work of negation coterminous with a vision of Europe wishing to resurrect Africa to the beginning of the history of reason (Mudimbe The Invention of Africa 149). Philosophy in the West defines the Real in terms of the being using such terms as the reality that is, anything that exists, or what is (Mudimbe Invention 151). Also, being in the West says Mudimbe is a notion transcending all determinations and opposing nothingness (Mudimbe 151). It is possible to argue that being in West is the logos or essence in structure that Derida pointed out as the absent silence determining all thought. The problematic of such operative that subsumes all experience to structures is essentially reductive and requires comment later. Mudimbe concludes that such strict operatives dilute and nullify the complex phenomenon of thought that determines all history. Hence, the operative logic of Soyinka through the symbol of Obatala, the Yoruba God later shattered through his will into other formations like Ogun(the god of will) Esu( the god of misguidance and misrecognition) etc. The important idea behind such fragmentation is the need to see all sides to an image, to defer judgment and refuse agency:

My categories do not seek to eliminate the human being, or control the fluid operations of the human mind, but rather to provide a context in which the man can be seen at work (In Person 113-114). But, in the context of Africa, Olundes decision to take the place of his father, who had opted out is fundamentally restoring. His acceptance of death when there is superficially no cause for it lodges the vivid contradiction in human selfawareness and self-definition (Soyinka The Man Died 40). can allude to the observation of Duerden: In this respect, one

In Edo society patrilineal ancestors can remain ghosts in the bush and opposed to established order if they have no children to plant them ie to ensure their complete passage through a second burial. Consequently, there is ambiguity inherent in every mans position until he has grown-up son to plant him. Until this happens, he does not know if he is on the side of order or change (Duerden 1975: 63). Elesins willing surrender of life would have given him the position of a son besides the already dead king. That way, the king could be on the side of order and stability. But, when he fails to take up the responsibility, Olunde takes over naturally. There is another idea that explains Oludes conduct-death as psychic restoration which in the event of his success as a student removed him far from home. But, Mr. and Mrs. Pilkings decry the ritual as criminal offence (Death 166). It is a mere excuse for making noise (167). But, even then, they are not sure. They are not able to categorize:

PILKINGS. [] They always find excuse for making noise(Thoughtfully) Evenso

According to Frantz Fanon, the ultimate virtue of revolution, the goal of historical action, is not the conquest of power, but the resurrection of repressed questions and the disclosures of unexpressed values(A Dying Colonialism 109). In his approving depictions of such transformations, such as renewal of openness to untried possibilities, maybe discerned what he meant by true decolonization. For, Soyinka too, it seems the issue of decolonization is not synonymous with anticolonialism. It is not a matter of moral litigation, restitution and distributive justice, between them and us. It is instead in its moment of decolonization or rather post apartheid, first and foremost, a resumption of interrupted history. This resumption should not be likened to going back to some lost purity and essences before the fall, but the interrupted dramas, above all a resumption of our dialogue with one another and with us. At this moment, decolonization reaches beyond any puerile ambitions of engaging itself with the questions of white supremacy, in a word with the white man. The important idea is also to look within. When the British left Africa, they had already created stooges who took over the functioning of the system (Wauthier The Literature and Thought of Modern Africa 276). Every reactionary dictator adopted the poses of liberalism, radicalism and Marxism (Art Dialogue and Outrage 158). Armah in his novel Beautiful Ones disowns all concocted and meaningless sloganeering in a mock pseudo lampoon:

WHO BORN FOOLS SOCIALISM CHOP MAKE I CHOP CONTREY BROKE (Beautiful Ones 106).

The novel ends with a protest against the unjust rule of Nkrumah and the escape of the protagonist through the latrine hole of the Mans house. But, this escape is only a temporary relief. A new regime, new manifesto and new way of blackmailing people are generally the canon. The continuance of political oppression requires manufacturing of norms of a particular class as universal code and art, in its political act must decipher the manner of mystification-unsettling conundrumsprofessional wrestling, cinema stereotypes, and soap operas, powders, detergents and Greta Garbo as seductive misrepresentations. One way of realizing this is through a constant shift between the mundane, commercial world of Capital against the esoteric, which for Quayson constitutes an aspect of defamiliarization. The narrative is like a tissue of interruptions, with no promise of return to the precise moments in either realm when the interruption took place. In addition, the setting is itself defamiliarized in terms of what the physicists describe as the anamorphic space.

Elesin, is like so many political masters of newly liberated countries, a victim of his own making. To an extent, his imbecilities are also the effect of an unsound hierarchy-belief in the chosen one as outside normal handicaps of the flesh. The argument is that a leader of man cannot be narrowed within the logos of determinism or probability and is best left open to situations to prove his mettle. And this should explain why Elesin feels unsafe with the notion of honor

The world I know is good The world I know is bounty Of hives after bees have swarmed No goodness teems with such open hands

Even in the dream of deities (Death 156).

The perceptive failure of institutions, societies and also public at large in checking misrule is evident when the horseman gets the lady he wants even after she is conjoined to someone else. Soyinka turns tradition against itself when he questions this assumption of ritual co-inhabitation as profitable to societies. Elesin may deliver his seeds to posterity. But, there is certainly no guarantee in its strength or value. In Elesins case, the probability of a fissure between his declared communal and ritualistic concerns and his unconscious with its subterranean conundrums is not lost. The Praise Singer hints at this divide when she speaks of the wickedness of men (Death 183) carrying a weight on the loose ends of his sash (Death 183). The Singer also plants the image of the tamer of the forest (Death 183) to indicate Elesins ravenous, destructive maneuvers. But, she ignores Elesins preemptive restlessness, his rational syllogisms as counter-producing the will to revolutionize. When the Chorus gloss over surface variables/invariables present in such cultural metaphors of the dog and the elephant -associated with memory and reliability, it is in fact negating its own discovery. And it is this that Elesin the so called risk taker has been consumed by the relativist tendencies of individualism or that he really stands apart from frames that had to consume him in the first place. PRAISE SINGER: How shall I tell what my eyes have seen? []. He says that a dog may be confused by new sense of beings, [] so he must precede the dog []. It is best, he says, to trust no messenger who may falter at the outer gate [] (Death 184).

The problem of a group psychology has been commented upon by Mabika Kalanda in respect to Bantu cultures that he studied:

The Bantu global milieu can be characterized as disintegrating and depressing for the individual. Its philosophy posits as sacred law dependency, submission, effacement, the mental and therefore physical degeneracy of the Bantu. Such a milieu is predisposing to slavery . . . The individual or group mental impotency perceived intuitively or even observed in the objective realities leads people unconsciously to aggressivity towards strangers who are more advanced than we are. (Kalanda, 1967:163) Olundes death shuffles between a sense of history as given and with one that can be reinterpreted at a personal level. He keeps the basic tenets of loyalty in order but interrogates its summative closure-that a horseman can only accompany a dead king. His is the autonomy of thought, one that metaphorically breaks inside from within while retaining its outward contours. This is also the Lacanian field of splitsubjectivity that dismisses a unified field of subjectivity in the I and posits a distinction between the source of action(Belsey Critical Practice 71) and the source of action(Belsey Critical Practice 71).

So, who is responsible for communal failures or success- the society or the hero or else regimes of power? The beginning of this question inaugurates the space of invention and cultural critique necessitating inconsistency. It is important to point here that for Soyinka, the crisis of history requires a double entendre-the community and the hero as the risk taker. This position then situates the programme of revolution in a theory of imitation that is removed from Eurocentric casualties. W. Benston sees this quality as a movement from mimesis to methexis:

Spiritually and technically, this movement is one from mimesis, or representation of an action, to methexis, or communal helping-out" of the action by all assembled. It is a process that could be described alternatively as a shift from dramathe spectacle observedto ritualthe event which dissolves traditional divisions between actor and spectator, between self and other. Through this process, the Black beholder is theoretically transformed from a detached individual whose private consciousness the playwright sought to reform, to a participatory member of tribal or, in this case, national ceremony which affirms a shared vision (Facing Tradition 94-109).

It may be mentioned that the ancient farming communes of Africa organized most of their theatrical performances. They raised money for the costumes and awarded capable actors cash as well as kind. In the Lord of the Misrule Festival the actors would sit with the spectators and the latter would enter into role play with the former. The interaction amongst the audience and the performers made it difficult to find out who was in role and who was a member of the village hierarchy (Etherton Theater in Africa 30). In the process, the author as a meditating voice moves away from the center of the text. He remains a medium through which the larger models speak. In literary theory, this has been the project since the advent of structuralism. The notion of decentring goes back as far as Freud who thinks it extremely probable that myths are distorted vestiges of the wish-fulfillment of whole nations-the age long dreams of young humanity (Okpehwo,Myth in Africa 10).But, mythological literature, as an inflection of dissent creates the fundamental,

and taxing question of agency within the sphere of decentring and dominant, residual and emergent narratives. As Okpehwo says, the premium placed on the unconscious by Freud and Jung removes myth-making from the sphere of creative awareness and skill (Myth in Africa 13). Death and the Kings Horseman proves that a negotiation of counter offensive must go beyond a nationalism of mourning (Brenan, Salman Rusdie 3). Hence, the need to detour plays from textuality to performance- art as narrativizing events to detect the lie of language (Spivak Preface to Grammatology X). A related effort is to locate them beyond the stage, in the streets where actors, spectators, casual onlookers, humorous commentators etc break free of a given script. At this moment, African drama captures the simultaneity of expressive mode with its Western counterparts and hence dismantles the Eurocentric discourse of the other as effectively a variation on the same. This is a political position and argues against the colonialist idea of the nation as exotica or given. Senghor's famous (or even Alain Locke's less famous) racialization of thoughtemotion is African as reason is Greek revealed the constructedness of the sovereignty of the Western subject. But, in the end, Senghor could only define his position viz. a viz. the Western episteme and ran the risk of being consumed by it. This point of departure is, in Foucault's terms, a subversive recodification of power relations which has the capacity to detach the power of truth from the forms of hegemony in which it operates (Foucault The Archeology of Knowledge 133). In contrast, Soyinkas differed perspective surreptitiously alludes to the need for relocation and reassessment according to particular situations in history. A brief summary of his style as in Death may suffice.

Throughout the modern theater movement-including Strindberg, Meherhold, and Brecht and of course Artaud- one finds a general tendency to subvert, or even eliminate constitutional elements of theater. Eurocentric discourse figures the emergence of theater to the invention of the phonetic alphabet, and as such it functioned as an amplifier of the cognitive, emotional and sensory effects of alphabetization, ensuring that all members of the Athenian society, either literate or otherwise would acquire and internalize these effects. Kerckhove summarized these effects (a) visuality in theater as purely one-dimensional, removed from the blend of other sensations (b) theatre that dislocates senses from the contents of knowledge and forms of memory. Within this fold, Greek theater teaches its audience to divide the mind from the body (c) this is to be contradistinguished from oral culture that makes no discrimination between subject and object, locating perception in the middle of reality itself. Hence, Bakhtin points to the sensation of verbal activity (The Word 62- 64) and rejects dialogue as a compositional form of speech (The Word 92). In doing so Bakhtin moves away from traditional dramatic enactment where an actor has his individual perception to things different from others. Bakhtin however believes that an actor is always under the influence of his environment bonded inseparably with the response, the motivated repartee (The Word 94):

The repartee is formed within the context of the entire dialogue that exists; it is formed and assigned meaning to by ones own (speakers) and the (others) utterances. Self and the other cannot separate repartee from this mixed context of utterances without losing its meaning and tone. It is an organic component of undifferentiated whole (The Word 97).

This is the example when Iyaloja, the market woman speaks to the police men gathered around the town. Her repartee is a combination of humor and irony in an English accent. She speaks of the formality or conventionality of invitation cards (Death 177), irrelevances like may I take your hat (Death 177) which slides into more meaningless glossy rituals like if you insist. May I take yours (Death 177). But, the important word that subverts assumptions is tractable which the white man uses to define the unpredictability of the Africans. The English Resident assumes the matter to be a legal problem and advices Pilkings to keep a cool head and not allow things to get out of hand (Death 188). But, trapped within the circularity of his structured logicality that must detect a linear relationship between events and their meaning he fails to transcode (Levi Strausss term for a perpetual rhetorical activity conscious of its own operations). This fact has been commented before. Derrida similarly follows Neitzsches critique of the delusions engendered by moving metaphorically from image to concept without subjecting the same movement to a full rhetorical scrutiny (Christopher Norris Deconstruction 80). Derrida also points out to the intrinsic formality of the Western Episteme as constructed (Speech and Phenomenon 5). Soyinkas use of the market place and street institutionalizes change into shared relevance. Hence his theatrical space combines vision and sound shouts, moaning, songs, and programming counterinsurgencies into fossilized pedagogic rationalities. If, he uses dances in his play, it is for the purpose of negotiating cultural presences. Elesins half taunting dance in Scene I, contradicts his regal bearings. In Scene 4, when Olunde confronts his father, stage directions indicate an uneasy calm lethal in its ramifications. The stage direction has it all:

Olunde stares above his head into the distanceJane (Mrs. Pilkings) screams (Death 202).

There is calm when Elesin is arrested and his recent bride has her eyes perpetually bent on the grounds. The wordless gestures between them spell their disastrous entrapment. Pilkings now in a police officers uniform enters noiselessly observes them for a while. Then he coughs ostentatiously [] (Death 302).

Elesin finally ends his life. But, the women who sing their dirge at the death of Olunde continue unmoved by the sudden event. Elesins act now becomes a personal choice. Olundes is a communal enterprise. Elesins death is as unexpected as it is sudden. It moves no one. The play ends with a complete blackout on the stage. It would be time before new things can happen.

Who is Afraid to Die? Death as Communal Manifesto in Soyinka Death and the Kings Horseman

Abstract: Nigeria, like other parts of Africa was affected by Colonialism. This socio-political crisis was articulated through a reaching back to an essential Negritude, imagined as uncorrupted cultural space. But, an aversion towards the present only managed to lock narratives in terms of diachronic hierarchies Self vs. Other, an underdeveloped Africa against a technologically superior Europe. This novice, reductionist simplification of lived experience was revised in the plays of Soyinka who docketed the Western Episteme as a construct driven by structural analogies. The process called up a summation of African theatrical maneuvers as community driven, emphasizing the spoken word in interplay of proverbs, riddles and orature to dismantle straitjacket conformity. Soyinkas performative space though African draws parallel with theatrical practices worldwide- Bakhtins market place theatre as also Artauds poetic anachronism. Death and the Kings Horseman justifies to a mode of narration that breaks open traditional myths as a closed, self-sufficient moral universe to instigate cleavages with present history as a series of shifting configurative patterns. Dance, songs and lights employed in the play negotiate between concepts of history as given to an idea of Africa as immutable to change, where cultural practices are borrowed. The important design is to ensnare an extra-terrestrial dimension not included in either.

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