Soyinka, Euripides, and the Anxiety of Empire

Abstract

��� he old Aristotelian derivation of the word t r a g e d y as a goat-song was given a graphic endorsement, at the dawn of the postcolonial African dramatic history, by the Nigerian poet-playwright John Pepper Clark. Newly graduated from University College, Ibadan—a colonial institution, w h e re the old European classics were taken quite as seriously as in their home base—Clark produced and later published his first play, Song of a G o a t, demonstrating, “in title and action, that a tragic mode might be as indigenously African as it was Greek” (Wren 42; Ferguson 5). Central to this drama, which explores the counterplay of impotence and fertility in a traditional family, is the role of a goat. The original Nigerian production of the play (1962) called for the slaughter of a goat as a communal rite. When, however, the play was produced at the Commonwealth Festival of the Arts in London in 1965, cultural diff e re n c e s dictated the replacement of the Nigerian example with a milder but not much more successful alternative. “A rather lively goat, another practical mistake,” Wole Soyinka says in his critique of this production, “tended to punctuate passages of intended solemnity with bleats from one end and something else from the other” (M y t h 45). Although Abiola Irele, in a recent discussion of the play, does not consider the theme of sexuality central to it (xlii), the liaison between the wife (Ibiere) and her bro t h e r- i n - l a w ( Tonye), which drives her impotent husband (Zifa) to suicide, clearly suggests, as I have argued elsewhere (“Understanding African Marriage”), that such subliminal drives may be even more central to the playwright’s purposes than the well advertised dictates of traditional custom. At any rate this c o n v e rgence of the sexual and the sacrificial, in a play which openly advertises its ties with the European classics, neatly pre f i g u res Wole Soyinka’s own exploration of the same themes in his adaptation of Euripides’s Dionysian p l a y. I have chosen to see Soyinka’s eff o rt as a translation of culture, not of text: since he worked from previously published translations by Murray and A rrowsmith (as he tells us in a pre f a t o ry note), he has obviously given as much of his energy to re c o n s t ructing the ethnos (no less than the ethos) of the play as to manipulating the language of it. It would there f o re make sense to see Soyinka’s eff o rt within such contexts of understanding of cultural translation as those articulated by scholars as diverse (in generational t e rms) as Reuben Brower and James Cliff o rd . In his examination of the successive fortunes of Aeschylus’s A g a m e m n o n , B rower states: “Translation forcibly reminds us of the obvious fact that when we read, we read from a particular point in space and time” (173). In more recent times, Cliff o rd has been concerned with the value of ethnographic works in terms of the claims they make about re p resenting other culture s . His point that “the maker . . . of ethnographic texts cannot avoid expre s s i v e