Modern Scheming Giants: Satire and The Trickster in Wole Soyinka's Drama

Abstract

Wole Soyinka's creative energy transforms many questions about human life into satirical drama of intellectual significance and sheer theatrical delight. Whether he is dealing with African or non-African themes in his drama, he reduces all cultural idiosyncrasies and ideological differences to their common denominator: human problems. In his drama, the age-old intoxication of power, greed, love, hate, death, and survival are as particular as they are universal. He artistically transforms each one of these themes into vast arena of intellectual quest for the reader or the theatregoer. And this is the case with his satirical delineation of the We shall examine the trickster motif, one of the basic narrative elements of the African past, in the light of Soyinka's own ethical, dramatic, and esthetic considerations-particularly his views on the artistic reproduction of the African past. In Myth, Literature and the African World, collection of his theories and views on literature, he postulates, I have long been preoccupied with the process of apprehending my own world in its full complexity, also through its contemporary progression and distortions (ix). Despite his high regard for traditional African culture, Soyinka has always been prudent in basing the themes of his plays on an idea from the traditional culture. His nostalgia is devoid of sentimentality. He praises and chastises when need be and once dismissed hypernegritude by saying that a tiger does not sing its tigritude. Similarly, the mythological and folkloristic foundations on which Soyinka built the satirical plays, be they plays that mirror modern political crises or those that take their themes from the essence of history, they whet our curiosity for debate. In this study, we shall examine how the trickster, contrary to its conventional image, is an object of ridicule in the plays of Soyinka; this contention seems contrary to the high regard often accorded the trickster in traditional African narratives in which he is the powerless who, through resourcefulness and determination, ultimately triumphs over powerful adversaries. Before an extended comparison is made between the trickster in Soyinka's plays and the trickster in traditional African culture, let us define the word trickster.