A Guinean Antigone

Abstract

plutense in Madrid where he is specializing in theatre, a topic he has never aban doned as scholar, actor, or translator. Most commentators on the literature of Equatorial Guinea mention the oral quality of its prose nar rations and refer to texts recited or sung by the griots} In the rather picaresque tales by Maximiliano Nkogo found in Adja-Adjd y otros relates, for example, the author enriches the orality of the language with bits of officialese that are repeated so that everyone knows them by heart and recites them ironically. This tendency from the ancient story telling custom leads naturally into works of the theater, where the musicality of the word is joined, in some cases, by a kind of chanting and/or specified musical instruments played with a gay or somber tone, dictated by the scene. The three plays included in the anthology by M'bare N'gom and Donato Ndongo share a common theme with the Nkogo stories as well as with many other literary works?that of corruption, the struggle of the individual to survive within a system rife with bribery, favoritism, and a hellish bureaucracy to boot.2 In Pancracio Esono Mitogo Obono's play, El hombre y la costumbre, Juan, the womanizing protagonist, is sent to town to solve various problems, but his position as an offi cial gives him privilege and he is much more interested in using his status to attain objects and attract women than in solving anything. In fact, as he becomes more and more of a problem, his assistant Jesusa covers for him, creating an in teresting contrast between the independent working woman and Michaela, who becomes Juans lover and who contains her fits of jealousy because she is completely dependent on Juan. Esono uses a good deal of local vocabulary in this play, rendering it difficult to put on successfully in other Spanish