Ritual and Revolution: Wole Soyinka’s Bacchae, a Yoruba Tragedy

Abstract

What has to be sacrificed is the grandeur of a Hellas that refused AfroAsiatic syncretism. The Afro-Asian god must retrieve place in the ancient Greek city-state so that [...] a true sense of history, a history that has been heinously homogenized and expunged, may prevail.- Chantai ZabusWhen the present is intolerable,the unknown harbours no risks.- Wole Soyinka's BacchaeIn the previous chapter, I discussed two dramatic texts that explore Antigone's political relevance in contemporary African contexts. I analysed how these texts challenge Antigone's conventional status as a Western canonical figure and how they extend her political legacy, confronting the conception of tragedy as an apolitical genre. I identified, in other words, a ?politics of adaptation' through which Greek tragedy's discursive context and definition are challenged. In this chapter, I further explore this politics in another adaptation of Greek tragedy: The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (first performed in 1972, published in 1973) by the Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka.1 The title of Soyinka's play explicitly points to the ambiguity of its double status as both a revision of an antecedent text and a unique work of art. While the main title, The Bacchae of Euripides, emphasizes the Greek tragedy, the subtitle A Communion Rite flags Soyinka's departure from this pre-text, marking its modification into a different cultural context where it acquires new relevance as a communion rite.Euripides' Bacchae (405 BC) dramatizes the confrontation between Dionysus, who returns to native Thebes, and cousin King Pentheus, who denies Dionysus' divinity and refuses to worship him. As punishment for this blasphemy, Dionysus causes the women of Thebes to be possessed by spirit and to tear Pentheus to shreds. The tragedy concludes with chaos and destruction. In adaptation, Soyinka roughly follows Euripides' plot, but he also makes significant changes. Most importantly, he gives play colonial and postcolonial relevance, transforming Thebes into a slave society, Pentheus into an oppressive tyrant, and Dionysus into a revolutionary leader. In Soyinka's Yoruba-inspired Bacchae, the emphasis falls on Dionysus as a force of liberation.My focus in this chapter is twofold. In the first sections, I analyse the ways in which, in adaptation of Euripides, Soyinka draws on mythology and cosmology to emphasize the revolutionary potential of ritual sacrifice. I begin by exploring how Soyinka sets the stage for the communion rite that concludes Bacchae through rendition of Thebes. I then consider Soyinka's ritualist aesthetic as revealed in refiguration of Dionysus and in dramatization of the sacrifice of Pentheus. In the final section, I shift focus to Soyinka's theorization of Yoruba tragedy. Here, I am especially interested in the cultural politics that theory performs, through the ambiguous relation they establish between African and Greek contexts. These politics, I argue, can also be discerned in Soyinka's refiguration of Dionysus as a god who resembles Greek counterpart, but not quite. In the first chapter, I suggested that adaptation is by definition characterized by such a double gesture of establishing similarity and difference, familiarity and foreignness. Soyinka seems particularly aware of the political potential that this ambiguity offers and, as I hope to demonstrate, puts it to strategic use. His choice of title is a good indication of this: in referencing Euripides, Soyinka embeds him in text, literally making the Bacchae own. At the same time, however, as Mark Pizzato points out, his play is obviously not The Bacchae of Euripides.2Before commencing my analysis, let me note that Soyinka's decision to rework a Greek tragedy reflects conviction that artists should feel free to draw on other traditions, as long as they take their reference points from within their culture. …