The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  Elesin’s dilemma is both individual and collective, both social and psychic, all at once. In the same way that Faust’s hubristic transgression occurs within his consciousness—occurs, indeed, because of his deification of mind and will—so too is Elesin’s tragic dilemma enacted internally, here within his will. As he suggests ominously early in Death and the King’s Horseman, “My will has outlept the conscious act” (p. 18). His hubris is symbolized by the taking of a bride on the morning of his death in a ritual in which the thanatotic embraces the erotic; he chooses the satisfactions of the self over the exactions of the will. This is his tragic flaw. Elesin’s inevitable fall results from a convergence of forces at work within the will and without, which conspire to reinforce those subliminal fears that confront all tragic heroes.

  Not only is the Westernized Olunde’s suicide a rejection of the relief of the resolution afforded by the Western philosophical tradition; it is also the ritual slaying of the father at the crossroads. Olunde’s death leaves his father entrapped, penned outside of the rite of passage, for the fleeting moment of transition has passed, making ironic even an act as final as death. Iyaloja, perhaps the most powerful characterization of a woman in African literature, expresses the paradox: “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 leftovers of the world” (p. 68). In the face of his son’s slaying, the Elesin is poignantly “left-over.” There will be no more Elesins, for the unbroken order of this world has now been rent asunder. As Iyaloja remarks acidly, “He is gone at last into the passage but oh, how late it all is. His son will feast on the meat and throw him bones. The passage is clogged with droppings from the King’s stallion; he will arrive all stained in dung” (p. 76). To paraphrase the praise singer, the world has finally tilted from its groove (p. 10).

  The ritual passage of the Horseman had served for centuries to retrace an invisible cultural circle, thereby reaffirming the order of this Yoruba world. The ritual dress, the metaphorical language, the Praise-Singer’s elegy, the Elesin’s dance of death—these remain fundamentally unchanged as memory has recast them from generation to generation. The mixed symbols of semen and blood, implied in the hereditary relationship between succession and authority and reiterated in the deflowering of the virgin on the day of death, stand as signs of a deeper idea of transition and generation. But the role of the Horseman demands not only the acceptance of ambiguity, but also its embrace.

  Although Elesin’s is an individual dilemma and a failure of the human will, the dilemma is implicit in his role of the King’s Horseman, a communal dilemma of preservation of order in the face of change. During the play, at a crucial moment, a traditional proverb is cited which reveals that doubt and ambiguity are not emotions uncharacteristic of the Elesin: “The elder grimly approaches heaven and you ask him to bear your greeting yonder; do you think he makes the journey willingly?” (p. 64). All myth, we know, reconciles two otherwise unreconcilable forces, or tensions, through the mediation of the mythic structure itself. The Orestia is a superb example of this. This trick of “structuration,” as it were, is the most characteristic aspect of human mythology. Soyinka, in his “Director’s Notes,” in the Playbill of Death and the King’s Horseman puts the matter this way: “At the heart of the lyric and the dance of transition in Yoruba tragic art, that core of ambivalence is always implanted. This is how society, even on its own, reveals and demonstrates its capacity for change.”20

  We do not need to know, as the Yoruba historian Samuel Johnson tells us, that at one time the reluctance of an Elesin to accompany a dead Alaafin engendered such disgrace that the Horseman’s family often strangled him themselves, nor that the reluctance of the Elesins grew as contact with the British increased.21 We do not need to know these historical facts simply because the Horseman’s ambiguity over his choices is rendered apparent throughout Soyinka’s text. And from Hamlet it is that sense of “conscience” as defined in the epigraph from Hamlet’s soliloquy, implying self-consciousness and introspection, which is also the Horseman’s fatal flaw—that which colors “the native hue of resolution . . . with the pale cast of thought.”22 As Elesin Oba puts it, in a splendid confession near the end of the play, he commits “the awful treachery of relief,” and thinks “the unspeakable blasphemy of seeing the hand of the gods in this alien rupture of his world” (p. 69). This ambiguity of action, reflected in the ambiguity of figurative language and of mythic structure, allows this to remain a flexible metaphysical system. Formal and structured, it remains nonetheless fluid and malleable with a sophisticated and subtle internal logic.

  Soyinka embodies perfectly the ambiguity of the Elesin’s action in the ambiguity of the play’s language. A play, among all the verbal arts, is most obviously an act of language. Soyinka allows the metaphorical and tonal Yoruba language to inform his use of English. Western metaphors for the nature of a metaphor, at least since I. A. Richards, are “vehicle” and “tenor,” both of which suggest an action of meaning, a transfer through semantic space. The Yoruba, centuries before Richards, defined metaphor as the “horse” of words: “If a word is lost, a metaphor or proverb is used to find it.”23 As do tenor and vehicle, the horse metaphor implies a transfer or carriage of meaning, through intention and extension. It is just this aspect of the Yoruba language on which Soyinka relies. The extended use of such densely metaphorical utterances, searching for the lost or hidden meanings of words and events, serves to suggest music, dance, and myth, all aspects of poeisis long ago fragmented in Western tragic art.

  In Soyinka’s tragedies, languages and act mesh fundamentally. A superb example of this is the Praise-Singer’s speech near the climax of the play, in which he denounces in the voice of his former King, the Elesin Oba:

  Elesin Oba! I call you by that name only this last time. Remember when I said, if you cannot come, tell my horse. What? I cannot hear you, I said, if you cannot come, whisper in the ears of my horse. Is your tongue severed from the roots Elesin? I can hear no response. I said, if there are boulders you cannot climb, mount my horse’s back; this spotless black stallion, he’ll bring you over them. Elesin Oba, once you had a path to me. My memory fails me but I think you replied: My feet have found the path, Alaafin. I said at the last, if evil hands hold you back, just tell my horse there is weight on the hem of your smock. I dare not wait too long. . . .

  . . . Oh my companion, if you had followed when you should, we would not say that the horse preceded its rider. If you had followed when it was time, he would not say the dog has raced beyond and left his master behind. If you had raised your will to cut the thread of life at the summons of the drums, we would not say your mere shadow fell across the gateway and took its owner’s place at the banquet. But the hunter, laden with a slain buffalo, stayed to root in the cricket’s hole with his toes. What now is left? If there is a dearth of bats, the pigeon must serve us for the offering. Speak the words over your shadow which must now serve in your place. (pp. 74–75)

  In this stunning speech, the language of music and the music of language are one. In one sense, the music of the play gives it its force, the reciprocal displacement of the language of music with the music of language. The antiphonal structure of Greek tragedy is also perhaps the most fundamental African aesthetic value, and is used as the play’s internal structuring mechanism. As in music, the use of repetition, such as the voudoun (“voodoo”) phrase, “Tell my horse,” serves to create a simultaneity of action. The transitional passage before which the Elesin falters is inherent in all black musical forms. Soyinka’s dances are darkly lyrical, uniting with the music of the drums and songs of the chorus to usher the audience into a self-contained, hermetic world, an effected reality. Soyinka’s greatest achievement is just this: the creation of a compelling world through language, in language, and of language. He has mastered the power of language to create a reality, and not merely to reflect reali
ty. But his mastery of spoken language is necessarily reinforced by mastery of a second language of music, and a third of the dance. “Where it is possible to capture through movements what words are saying,” he says, “then I will use the movement instead of the words.”24 To evoke these languages, and to evoke the threnodic celebration of the meanings of death and the reciprocity of passage among the past, the present, and that state of being to be, and to escape the naive myths of Africa which persist in this country, Soyinka insists upon directing his tragedies himself, as he did the production at Chicago.

  As a critic of silent literary texts, I was struck by the dynamic nature of the Chicago production, ever shifting, ever adapting itself toward an unspoken ideal, in a manner which in short space and time parallels what happens to a text when studied by a critic, but only over a much longer period. Soyinka, of course, knows what he wants a performance to say, and knows what combination of textures will suggest his meaning to an alien audience. Confronting an American audience’s usual unease with, or condescension toward, an African setting no doubt reinforced whatever tendencies he had to adhere to a strict rendering of the play.

  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 or the private linguistic circle of Finnegan’s Wake? Footnotes to The Waste Land, topographies to Joyce, concordances to Shakespeare: 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. As Shakespeare used Denmark, as Brecht used Chicago, Soyinka uses the Yoruba world as a setting for cosmic conflict, and never as an argument for the existence of African culture. Always in the language of his texts are ample clues for the decoding of his silent signs, since the relationship among character, setting, and language is always properly reinforcing. This is no mean achievement: it is the successful invocation of a hermetic universe.

  It is for this reason that Soyinka is often compared favorably to his direct antecedents, Euripides and Shakespeare, Yeats and Synge, Brecht and Lorca. Statements such as this sound necessarily hyperbolic, no doubt. But it is impossible not to make such comparisons when one searches for a meaningful comparison of Soyinka’s craft with Western writers. For so long, black Americans, especially, have had to claim more for our traditions than tact, restraint, and honesty might warrant, precisely to redress those claims that our traditions do not exist. But Soyinka’s texts are superbly realized, complex meditations between the European dramatic tradition and the equally splendid Yoruba dramatic tradition. This form of verbal expression, uniquely his own, he uses to address the profoundest matters of human moral order and cosmic will.

  What does remain obscure, nevertheless, is something else, a set of matters so much more subtle and profound than mere reference can ever be. And these matters involve an understanding of tragedy seemingly related to, yet fundamentally unlike, that notion of the tragedy of the individual first defined by Aristotle and, in essence, reiterated by Hegel, Nietzsche, and even Brecht. Set against the hubris, hamartia, and violent obliteration of a noble individual is Soyinka’s evocation of a tragedy of the community, a tragic sense which turns upon a dialectic between retributive and restorative justice and order. The relation which the individual will bears to this process, the always problematic relation between the order of the community and the self-sacrifice of the protagonist, whose role is defined by his own intuition and will to act, forms the center of Soyinka’s plays and of his conception of the role of the artist in society. Soyinka’s protagonists are protagonists for the community; they stand as embodiments of the communal will, invested in the protagonist of the community’s choice. Even the moment of most distinct individuation must always be a communal moment. He summarizes his own conception of this relationship in his art:

  Morality for the Yoruba is that which creates harmony in the cosmos, and reparation for disjunction within the individual psyche cannot be seen as compensation for the individual accident to that personality. Thus it is that good and evil are not measured in terms of offences against the individual or even the physical community, for . . . offences even against 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 about a constant rejuvenation of the human spirit. Nature in turn benefits by such broken taboos, just as the cosmos by the demand made upon its will by man’s cosmic affronts. Such acts of hubris compel the cosmos to delve deeper into its essence to meet the human challenge. Penance and retribution are not therefore aspects of punishment for crime but the first acts of a resumed awareness, an invocation of the principle of cosmic adjustment.25

  It is this disintegration and subsequent retrieval of the protagonist’s will which distinguishes Soyinka’s tragic vision from its Western antecedents. His understanding of tragedy at long last gives some sense to what is meant by “the functional” and “the collective” in African aesthetics, two otherwise abused and misapprehended notions. Clearly, he reveals, these are relationships effected by the prototypic agonist, the acting individual will. Rightly, we look first to Soyinka’s language to begin to understand his direct relation to Shakespeare’s mastery of language. And Soyinka’s language, always, is his own. Yet, it is this curious metaphysical structure of the tragic which most obviously remains unlike ideas of Western tragedy. Paradoxically, it is “African” certainly, but it is ultimately a Soyinka construct. Soyinka has invented a tragic form, and registered it in his own invented language, a fusion of English and Yoruba. Surely this is his greatest achievement. For, in the end, Death and the King’s Horseman itself stands as a mythic structure, as a structure of reconciliation. As he concludes about the nature of tragedy:

  Great tragedy is a cleansing process for the health of the community. Tragic theatre is a literal development of ritual. It is necessary for balancing the aesthetic sensibilities of the community. Tragedy is a community event. It is the acting out of the neuroses, the recoveries, within a community. It does not just involve a single individual.26

  NOTES

  1.Penelope Gilliatt, “A Nigerian Original,” Observer, 19 Sept. 1965, p. 25.

  2.Personal interview with Wole Soyinka by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 7 Oct. 1979.

  3.John Mortimer, “Nigeria—Land of Law and Disorder,” Sunday Times, London, 28 Nov. 1965, p. 5.

  4.John Povey, “West African Drama in English,” Comparative Drama, I, No. 2 (1967), 110.

  5.Wole Soyinka, “The Writer in a Modern African State,” in The Writer in Modern Africa, ed. Per Wasberg (New York: Africana Publishing, 1969), p. 15.

  6.Wole Soyinka, “Live Burial,” in his A Shuttle in the Crypt (London: Rex Collings/Eyre Methuen, 1972), p. 60.

  7.Wole Soyinka, The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (London: Rex Collings, 1972), p. 13.

  8.Soyinka, The Man Died, p. 1.

  9.Angus Calder, rev. of The Man Died, New Statesman, 8 Dec. 1972, p. 866.

  10.Soyinka, The Man Died, p. 13.

  11.Wole Soyinka, Madmen and Specialists (London: Eyre Methuen, 1971).

  12.Mel Gussow, “Psychological Play from Nigeria,” New York Times, 3 Aug. 1979, p. 38.

  13.Wole Soyinka, “The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy,” in Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976).

  14.Soyinka, “The Fourth Stage,” p. 150.

  15.Soyinka, “The Fourth Stage,” p. 150.

  16.Soyinka, The Man Died, p. 88.

  17.Soyinka, “The Fourth Stage,” p. 158.

  18.Duro Ladipo, Oba Waja in Three Nigerian Plays, ed. and trans. Ulli Beier (London: Longmans, 1967). Beier’s translation captures almost nothing of the lyricism of the Yoruba.

  19.Soyinka, “The Fourth Stage,” p. 142.

  20.Chicago, Goodman Theatre, 1979.


  21.Samuel Johnson, A History of the Yorubas: From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate, ed. O. Johnson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969).

  22.William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene I.

  23.The Traditional Yoruba reads, “Owe l’esin oro, bi oro ba sonu owe ni a fi n wa a.”

  24.Personal interview with Wole Soyinka by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 5 Oct. 1979.

  25.Wole Soyinka, “Drama and the Revolutionary Ideal,” in In Person: Achebe, Awoonor, and Soyinka, ed. Karen L. Morell (Seattle: Institute for Comparative and Foreign Area Studies, 1975), pp. 68–69.

  26.Personal interview with Wole Soyinka by Nancy Marder, July 1979.

  SOURCE: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Being, the Will, and the Semantics of Death.” In Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity, edited by Biodun Jeyifo (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), pp. 62–76.

  INTRODUCTION, WRITING “RACE” AND THE DIFFERENCE IT MAKES

  The truth is that, with the fading of the Renaissance ideal through progressive stages of specialism, leading to intellectual emptiness, we are left with a potentially suicidal movement among “leaders of the profession,” while, at the same time, the profession sprawls, without its old center, in helpless disarray. One quickly cited example is the professional organization, the Modern Language Association. . . . A glance at its thick program for its last meeting shows a massive increase and fragmentation into more than 500 categories! I cite a few examples:. . . “The Trickster Figure in Chicano and Black Literature” . . . Naturally, the progressive trivialization of topics has made these meetings a laughingstock in the national press.