Mourning Remains: Femi Osofisan’s Women of Owu

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

in the theatre on the Pnyx, the spectator discovers through catharsis that he is a mortal first, a citizen second- Nicole LorauxIf I'd known, I'd not have come to the world I'd have stayed peacefully in heaven instead.- Femi Osofisan, Women of OwuIn this closing chapter, I focus on through an examination of Femi Osofisan's Women of (2006), an adaptation of Euripides' Trojan Women (415 BC).1 My focus on follows on logically in some respects from the previous chapter. If the narration of traumatic events allows them to enter into memory, as Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer suggest, the stories of Electra's and Clytemnestra's South African refigurations not only express their suffering but also constitute the processes of they undergo.2 The TRC hearings were intended to facilitate those processes on both a personal and national level. I have analysed their complex workings as theatres of mourning, providing a forum for, while at the same time mediating, individual accounts. Their complexity results from the dual demands to which responds: the practice is directed both towards the past, in that it commemorates loss, and to the future, in that it defines what follows this loss. As the site where past and future compete, has crucial relevance at moments of political transition.My emphasis on follows not only from Farber's and Fleishman's adaptations of the Oresteia, however, but also from the other adaptations I have discussed. As I will endeavour to demonstrate, is central to the stories of Antigone and her African revolutionary refigurations, as discussed in Chapter 1, and to the ritual sacrifice in Soyinka's Nigerian reworking of the Bacchae, as discussed in Chapter 2. For that reason, I devote part of this chapter to revisiting the plays considered so far to delineate what is at stake, politically and historically, in mourning. For this purpose, I take my cue from Nicole Loraux's concept of the mourning voice. I then return to Femi Osofisan's Women of to investigate the implications of in detail. Lastly, I address the performative potential that may hold and move to its broader relevance.The voiceOn the title page, Women of Owu is followed by (An African Re-reading of Euripides' The Trojan Women first commissioned by the Chipping Norton Theatre, UK) (iii). Unlike the procedure he adopts in Tegonni: an African Antigone, Osofisan does not cite the pre-text within his title, instead bracketing ing his forerunner. The Euripedean tragedy is primarily implicated as a piece of additional information. Distancing pre-text from adaptation, the politics of adaptation at play here are less an appropriation of ?the' canonical text than a citing of it as ?an' available source. This gesture acquires increased relevance in relation to the second half of Osofisan's bracketed reference, the play's British commissioning theatre, where Women of was first staged in 2004. The enduring cultural dominance of Britain, once the imperial centre that mobilized Greek tragedy as part of its civilizing mission and a continuing force in the production and circulation of anglophone African cultural texts, is countered by casting Euripides' tragedy as only one of many sources available to African playwrights today.Trojan Women was the third tragedy in a trilogy dealing with the Trojan War, waged by the Greeks against the Trojans after the Trojan prince Paris had taken Helen from her husband, King Menelaus of Sparta. The Trojan War is among the most important events in Greek mythology and the topic of many ancient Greek texts, most famously Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. In Trojan Women, Euripides follows the fates of the women of Troy after their city has been sacked and their husbands have been killed. In Women of Owu, Osofisan transposes the action to the city of in nineteenth-century Yorubaland, prior to the colonization of what is now known as Nigeria. …