Between Soyinka and Clark: The Dynamics of Influence on Esiaba Irobi’s Nwokedi

Abstract

When Edde M. Iji observed persistent tendency among researchers, chroniclers, and critics of theatre and literary arts that compels them to juxtapose, compare and contrast works of earlier writers [...], with those of newer writers [...], with view to establishing dominant influences, similarities or convergences, and divergences that may exist,1 highlight is ultimately placed on literature and theatre as dialogic and discursively engaging. This phenomenon assumes seminal dimension in abiding exploration of origin of style, technique, convention, and even ideological undergirding of literary personalities. Though Joachim Fiebach has argued that since democratization of communication channels in nineteenth century, literary and artistic influence is never onesided,2 colonial contact was watershed in literary influence among firstgeneration African writers. Efua Sutherland's Edufa, J.P. Clark's Song of Goat, Soyinka's The Bacchae of Euripides, Ola Rotimi's The Gods Are Not to Blame etc. are more than one-sided demonstration of classical Greek influence on African dramatists whose adaptation of Flellenic tradition, myth, and tragic convention re-reads context that is unmistakably African.3 This comparativist impetus among critics, however, transcends older African writers and dramatists, and has become paradigm for evaluation of contemporary generation.The late Nigerian dramatist Esiaba Irobi seems to have had more than his fair share of critical comparison with Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. Earlier in his career, in 1980s, Irobi obviously started temper of this comparativist discourse with publication of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, mostly interpreted as satire on Soyinka, whom he named Ogun in play after Soyinka's patron-deity. In review of Irobi's postcolonial legacy, Isidore Diala discerned in that play Irobi's early reverence for Soyinka. While acknowledging play to be Irobi's least dramatically successful yet the most controversial, Diala intimates thatthe play ends in Professor Ogun's triumph apparently turning his experience into ordeals of visionary artist whose measures ought to be recognised as distinguished from measures of ordinary mankind. The Nobel Prize winner holds deep fascination for younger playwright for whom he apparently incarnates temper of genius.* * 4However, most astounding comparison between Irobi and Soyinka can be found in Adetokunbo Abiola's Midweek Arts Review analysis of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh. While explaining Irobi's of interest in systematized pre-occupation at dislocation of language to reveal its involvement in nonsensically and incoherence as twentieth-century Absurdists had done, Abiola argues that recourse to a patois in pidgin English is in consonance with linguistic engineering of parody that explores the satiric and ironic possibilities fixed into it with regard to Professor Wole Soyinka.5 Apparently recognizing Irobi as an iconoclastic dramatist, Abiola may have thought him likely candidate for Absurdist experimentation with language popularly referred to by Martin Esslin as incoherent babblings.6 Abiola ascribed Absurdist anti-language to lack of respect, as if Irobi, being an iconoclast, required conformity with established language conventions. Thereafter, Abiola manages most unusual comparison between language of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh and Wole Soyinka's Death and King 's Horseman:Death and King 's Horseman serves as an epitome of creation arranged by an imagination versed in manipulation of language, while Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh was written by naturing (sic) artist fast absorbing indices of knowledge and craft whose evolution might terminate in mastery of genre.Meanwhile, Irobi continued stoking comparativist temper. In an interview with Nengi Ilagha, Irobi reportedly declared: I would as writer do for this generation what Soyinka, Achebc and Okigbo have done for their generation. …