Esiaba Irobi Research Articles

Interrogating Nationalist Ideologies in Nigerian Drama: A Textual Analysis of Esiaba Irobi’s <i>Hangmen Also Die</i>

There is no contesting the fact that dramatic writing and criticism in Africa have their relevance; either for the purpose of entertainment, information or conscientisation for social transformation, or drawing attention to new ideas in scholarship. Also, within this, is the notion that every writer has his/her ideological leaning(s), which serve as the springboard for contextual understanding of what the work addresses. Esiaba Irobi is one of such writers that deploy their drama texts in the signposting the aforementioned ideals. This article, through textual analysis, investigates how the play, Hangmen Also Die engages the concepts of nationalism and the call for social order. Using the Social Revolution Theory (SRT), the paper argues that Irobi’s Hangmen Also Die contributes to the comprehension of the discourses of nationalism and national development. Like other related African drama texts, the play calls for subtle social revolution especially in Nigeria’s political landscape.

Victimhood Self-construal, Irony of Tears and Melancholy amid Wealth: Critical Assessment of Select Literary and Visual Metaphors on the Niger Delta Environmental Despoilment

Studies on self-construal indicate that man is propelled by what happens around him to react in a certain manner and this reaction, we suggest is a human universal common and a representation of conscious purposive response to concomitant environmental and circumstantial realities. This purposive response encapsulates messages, which an observer articulates and interprets; hence, our study is about deepening our understanding of the factors and variables responsible for victimhood self-construal projected in select texts on the Niger Delta environmental despoilment. Drawing from the theories of eco-criticism, victimhood, and self-construal, this study utilizes an interpretive approach to discuss select instances of victimhood portrayals in the poem ‘Delta Blues’ by Tanure Ojaide, in the drama Hangmen also Die by Esiaba Irobi and in the film Blood and Oil, directed by Curtis Graham. The study examines the primary reason, which is the dispossession of livelihood by environmentally destructive oil exploitation, adduced by the Niger Delta inhabitants to understand how it generates variables that instigate victimhood self-construal. Our observation is that in the texts the inhabitants’ victimhood self-construal can be described as purposive, the propelling variable is their concomitant environmental realities and the texts as communication media have different encumbrances and advantages regarding their efficacy and utility for advocacy.

CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS OF MULTIMEDIA STAGING IN THE EDUCATIONAL THEATRE: THE UNIZIK EXAMPLE

At the turn of the century, theatre practice embraced digital technology as an aid towards the achievement of multifarious effects in the theatre. The problem of this study therefore is to examine the effectiveness of multimedia staging technique in an Educational theatre in Nigeria using the performance of Esiaba Irobi’s Colour of Rusting Gold at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University Theatre as a case study. Through the participant observation approach of the qualitative research method, the study interrogates the challenges and problems of the new media employed in multimedia staging in a Nigerian Educational Theatre. The study finds that due to the dearth of state-of-the-art digital staging equipment that the desired effects of multimedia staging is lost on the audience. It thus recommends the re-equipment of Educational Theatres for optimum positive effects of multimedia staging and concludes that the Nigerian Educational Theatre has the potentials of meeting global best practices in theatre design and technology if adequate equipment are provided for the training of theatre professionals.

Psychic and Social Paralysis of a Rising Generation: A Study of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Esiaba Irobi’s Nwokedi

This paper examines the response of youths or the rising generation, to the socio-economic and political factors that ceaselessly widen the gap between the elite and the ordinary people, especially the youth and which tend to force the youth to resort to violence as a means of making their point or calling attention to the neglected leaders of tomorrow. While Look Back in Anger represents the anger period, a notable era in English Drama, Irobi’s play in English; Nwokedi, appears to suggest that the Nigerian youth seem to grope in a more devastating condition in a post-colonial Nigeria, where poor leadership has created all manner of socio-economic and political tension. The youthful generation in both plays embodied in the characters, Jimmy and Nwokedi, respectively violently demonstrate their resentment against the ruling class ideology and the social order it promotes. Their resolve points strongly to a revolution that a positive change may only quell. The paper submits that youths should, along with their agitations for a better society, give no holiday to developing new ideas and visions on which their ambitions will thrive. Leaders on all fronts are also cautioned to realize the destructive effects of bad leadership and avert uprisings from an angry citizenry by living up to their mandates.

Theorizing African Cinema: Contemporary African Cinematic Discourse and Its Discontents

Theorizing African Cinema:Contemporary African Cinematic Discourse and Its Discontents Esiaba Irobi (bio) One of the major criticisms leveled against contemporary scholarship of "African" cinema1 is that we place too much emphasis on the social, political, and economic difficulties faced by "African" filmmakers instead of engaging with theory, or, at least, establishing an indigenous theoretical framework within which we can redefine the aesthetic constructs and challenges that "African" filmmakers, film critics, and "Africanist'' teachers of "African" cinema need to grapple with in the twenty-first century. To my way of thinking, a thorough re-examination of scholarly strategies, one which conflates theoretical, discursive criticism with pragmatic, creative, intervention, is necessary if "African" cinema must outdo the present commercial mediocrity of Hollywood and make lasting contributions to world cinema and its filmic language in the same way that filmmakers from other cultures, such as China: Farewell, My Concubine (dir. Chen Kaige, 1993); Japan: Dreams (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1990); New Zealand: Once Were Warriors (dir. Lee Tamahori, 1994); and Canada: Atanarjuat / The Fast Runner (dir. Zacharias Kunuk, 2000), have done from an unapologetically non-Western semiological perspective.2 In this article I want to examine some of the major "intellectual" problems faced by African cinema scholars, both on the continent and abroad, contextualize the enormity and complexity of any attempt to theorize African cinema, redefine the expression "theory" from an African semiological and epistemic perspective, and, most importantly, interrogate what the term "to theorize" means inside and outside the Western academy today. My primary intention in this whole undertaking is to reveal the political underpinnings of the term "to theorize," even when it is used innocuously as academic parlance to encourage greater dialogue between the Western academy and African intellectuals negotiating new and complex discourses about hybrid cultural artforms, such as the cinema. [End Page 280] The African Scholar Versus the Western Academy One of the major reasons why the bulk of academic discourse on African, and, indeed, African diasporic cinematic practices, have remained largely "untheorized,"3 in a problematic sense of the word, despite a steady output of distinguished scholarship by Mbye Cham, Manthia Diawara, N. Frank Ukadike, Teshome Gabriel, Keyan Tomaselli, Clyde Taylor, among others,4 can perhaps be examined and understood in the following light: there is an absence of a coherent theoretical construct or infrastructure generated by African scholars within which African cinema can be studied, criticized, taught, or appreciated. By "theoretical infrastructure" I do not mean the superimposition or insertion of the cultural ideas and artistic philosophies of Foucault, Lyotard, Kristeva, Lacan, Derrida, and other European theorists on or into the study and analysis of African art-forms ranging from oral poetry through painting and sculpture, to the new wave of video filmmaking in the continent.5 I mean the establishment of a theorized vocabulary of experiencing and creating, of seeing and understanding, of appreciation and teaching, of exegesis and evaluation, that is "African" in origin and sensibility, yet captures within its operative dynamic the complex, hybridized, or syncretic nature of African political, historical, and cultural experience. This indigenized theoretical vocabulary need not ostracize the contributions of Western intellectuals with respect to the history of the arts, ideas, and theory; in fact, the vocabulary should incorporate these ideas and, where possible, subvert or disembowel6 them; neither does it have to get rid of the English language or French, the primary languages of communication between Africa and the rest of the Western world. What this new discourse that I am arguing for should do is to bring into the currency of international cinematic discourse, concepts, terminologies, philosophies, theories of art, and art appreciation that are indigenously and linguistically African or African-oriented. By this I mean that, we, African and "Africanist" scholars, should go forth and discover the precise vernacular vocabularies and registers in which specific African cultures have couched their theories of performance, the aesthetic concepts surrounding their artistic processes, and the creative philosophies that shape the production of their art-forms and deploy these, as full-bodied African expressions, in our academic discourse, whether we are writing in English, French, Portuguese, German, or Belgian languages.7 The reasons why we are not doing this...

Chaos in the Ivory Tower: Postcolonial Representations of the Nigerian Academic Elite in Esiaba Irobi’s Cemetery Road and Ojo Rasaki Bakare’s Once Upon a Tower

This work explores Esiaba Irobi’s Cemetery Road (2009) and Ojo Rasaki Bakare’s Once Upon a Tower (2000) with a view to examining the manner in which Irobi and Bakare represent the Nigerian academic elite in the chaos that hobbles Nigerian public universities and the country in general. Through Louis Althusser’s idea of Ideological State Apparatuses, the work analyses how the two playwrights deploy character, setting and other dramatic elements to capture ways in which the Nigerian academic elite, especially those in Nigerian public universities, promote disorder in the polity. The two plays show that some members of the Nigerian academic elite are involved in using undemocratic methods for personal gains and to create anomie in universities and in Nigerian society at large. The work reveals that the academic elite, as represented in the two plays, are not different from the corrupt Nigerian political elite because both are preoccupied with violent and corrupt acts, thereby undermining peace, stability and development in the country. It contends that the two playwrights’ representations of the Nigerian academic elite are important not only because they challenge the assumed binary opposition between the Nigerian ruling elite and the Nigerian academic elite, but also because they illuminate the complexity of the recurring chaos in Nigerian universities and the country in general. Consequently, the playwrights invite the Nigerian academic elite to engage in critical self-interrogation, genuine scholarly and community-based activities that are geared towards real national development.

THE POLEMICS OF LANGUAGE IN ESIABA IROBI’S CEMETERY ROAD

In the culture of any group of people, language, as a potent means of communication, cannot be relegated to the background. Every good play reflects the people for whom it is written. Esiaba Irobi’s Cemetery Road is not an exception. This essay, therefore, considers the employment of language as one of the major tools of revolt in Esiaba Irobi’s Cemetery Road in the dramatist’s attempt to restructure and build a new egalitarian society. The essence of this study is to reveal how Esiaba Irobi, has been able to deploy language as a revolutionary weapon in his play, Cemetery Road. The study, thus, showcases the ideological concern of the playwright in the play. The play is ideological because it takes a radical position on the issue of change in certain aspects of the Nigerian society. This essay, therefore, seeks to unveil the different aspects of language used in Cemetery Road. An examination of the text reveals that the dramatist employs macabre language or language of violence, persuasive language, wit, mockery and sarcasm, proverbial language, imagery, language of abuse and insensitivity, and language of despair.

African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space

Reviewed by: African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space ed. by Cajetan Iheka and Jack Taylor Sule Emmanuel Egya African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space EDS. CAJETAN IHEKA AND JACK TAYLOR U of Rochester P, 2018. vii + 310 pp. ISBN 9781580469340 cloth. Migration, one of the disturbing transnational realities of the twenty-first century, is increasingly receiving inter/multidisciplinary attention from scholars across the world. One of the latest efforts in this regard is African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space, edited by Cajetan Iheka and Jack Taylor. The focus of this volume is on Africa, a continent in contradictions: a place endowed with natural and human resources, but mismanaged to such a pitiable extent that its inhabitants seek survival in the West or elsewhere. The editors begin the introduction with anecdotes that emphasize the critical condition of the continent, ending with something that sounds like a plea "to nudge humanity toward justice—to encourage the reader to welcome in advance the ones who have yet to come" (14). In the editors' view, this is a call to democratize global resources, but it may have unwittingly lent credence to the notion that migration is the only way out of economic miseries for people in Africa. The volume, however, contains essays not as patronizing as the introduction sounds. Some of the essays interrogate the very acts of migration, foregrounding its consequences on not just the individual lives of the migrants, but also on the diasporic communities they have built in their hostland. One significance of this volume is the prioritization of representation as a cultural act. Migration, that is, is seen as mediated by artistic and cultural imaginations—imaginations as diverse as their aesthetic locations. The volume is therefore an offering of migrant arts and [End Page 211] writings from Nigeria, Algeria, Peru, Burkina Faso, Angola, and other locations in Africa and South America. There are fifteen essays, grouped into four parts, each with a headline that captures mainly the genre or the location. For instance, part one is titled "African Migration on the Screen: Films of Migration," the emphasis being on the genre of film studies. Part two is "Forgotten Diasporas: Lusophone and Indian Diasporas," the essays emphasizing the location markers "Lusophone" and "Indian." The essays are studies of recent works in film, literature (fiction and nonfiction), and visual art, in nuanced ways that match craft with sociological and historical issues. Valérie K. Orlando's "Harragas, Global Subjects, and Failed Deterritorializations: The Tragedies of Illegal Mediterranean Crossings in Maghrebi Cinema" is a study of two movies, Merzak Allouache's Harragas [The Burners] and Mostefa Djadam's Frontières. In explaining the word "harragas," Orlando gives sociolinguistic insight regarding its semanticization as "burning" to capture the desperation and waste attendant to migration in northern Africa. Her analysis of the two films points to the eventualities of the Western capitalist, exploitative system that consumes the hopes of migrants. Other films studied in this volume are Sylvester Amoussou's Africa Paradis, Chineze Anyaene's Ije: The Journey, and four Nollywood comedies on the related issue of visas: Osuofia in London, American Visa, 30 Days in Atlanta, and Visa Lottery. In a similar vein, Isidore Diala's chapter, "Esiaba Irobi: Poetry at the Margins," follows the saga of the Nigerian poet Esiaba Irobi, an embattled migrant yearning for home, in the real and symbolic sense, until his death in Germany. Reading some of Irobi's autobiographical poems, Diala blends reality and the imaginary by casting Irobi as an intellectual exile in the sense Edward Said propounds it. Other writers discussed in different essays are Nadine Gordimer, Noo Saro-Wiwa, Teju Cole, Jose Agualusa, Mia Cauto, and Germano Almeida, among others. The world of artwork and material culture is powerfully represented, among others, by Gilbert Shang Ndi's chapter, "Reimaging Blackness in a Hybridized and Racialized Space: The Visual Landscapes of the Peruvian District of El Carmen, Chincha." Ndi studies how Peruvian Africans, specifically of the El Carmen community, project their unique music and gastronomy through artworks. Images in the forms of photographs, paintings, billboards, posters, and handwritten slates are embedded with unique folkways and histories, the import of which this chapter unveils...

Transnationalism and the Creative Imagination: A Comparative Study of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, African literature has witnessed a significant shift from its attention from peculiar national cultures, discrete experiences and traditional practices to more global paradigms. The global or transnational approach to literary studies weakens the writers’ roles as committed vanguards of their indigenous cultures and reconfigures their works to accommodate exponential global issues and postmodern characters. Due to the newness of this transnational turn in African literary enterprise, scholars still grapple with its tenets and application. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to engage archetypal, borderless or transnational plays in the demonstration of the methods some postcolonial writers have applied in the demolition of geographical and historical boundaries especially via appropriations. Its significance lies in its ability to open up new perspectives to the study of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Irobi’s Sycorax which will aid the understanding of the features of globalization in African literature. The paper is qualitative in approach and is based on Homi Bhabha’s strand of the postcolonial theory. Seen in the light of the above, the paper concludes that African literature is advancing speedily, like its European counterpart, in the exploration of the peculiarities of (a) global capital. Keywords: Transnationalism, African literature, global character, postcolonial theory, The Tempest , Syorax , DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/65-05 Publication date: February 29 th 2020

Divided We Stand: Bewailing Alien-nation in Esiaba Irobi’s Why I Don’t Like Philip Larkin

Genuine euphoria, which accompanied the birth of multi-ethnic Nigeria nation-state in 1960, has been regrettably deflated and more than offset by the onrush of political tension that has ravaged its polity in recent times. Hence, the deforming pressure of inequity in contemporary Nigeria logically stands out as a corollary of political tyranny. From the standpoint of inequity, political marginality ostensibly poses a contentious decoding as it often raises poignant questions in the philosophy of meanings embedded in Esiaba Irobi’s Why I Don’t Like Philip Larkin. In connection to this, the historical referencing of the amalgamation of northern and southern Nigeria in the poetry collection provides a test-case for the thematic quest for Biafra republic’s self-determination. Agonized by a perceived marginality, retreat to nationalism offers Irobi a convenient platform to affirm the predatory and ruthless suppression of the Igbo ethnic group during and after the Nigerian civil war (between 1967 and 1970). This paper asserts that Irobi takes power imbalance for his subject matter in order to build on these contrariety and contradictions. This build-up facilitates the exploration of tension between public duty and personal affections. Remarkably, the paper concludes that Irobi’s poetic thrust of marginality in the collection espouses a fury which verges on resentment at the lopsided Nigeria nation-state.

Re-engaging master narratives: Re-encountering Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax

Just like Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête, Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax is a parallel narrative of Prospero’s encounter with characters of other skin colour and gender. Both plays, like many others, represent successful efforts in countering the hitherto master narrative, Shakespeare’s The Tempest. They speak back to and destabilize it through different versions that, at once, query and mitigate Shakespeare’s. Using the idea of counter-narrative and writing back, Sycorax is interrogated here through textual analysis and selective close reading with a view to examining its exhumation and foregrounding of the silences, elisions, and under- or misrepresentations of The Tempest. With a highly provocative diction — Irobi’s language is sexually explicit, violent, abusive, and unsettling — and experimental, somewhat postmodernist, dramatic structure, Sycorax intertextually dramatizes the issues of race, enslavement, colonial domination, migration, and gender as well as sexuality. Its relocation of action from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean; resurrection of Sycorax; Caliban’s able-bodiedness, revolutionary zeal, vociferousness and change of name to Caribbean; Ariel’s piebald sexuality as a bisexual hermaphrodite with the liberty to jump from Prospero’s bed to Sycorax’s; and the questioning of Shakespeare himself to answer for his (mis)representations; all exemplify Irobi’s redirection of action and the emergence of new protagonists out of the characters of The Tempest. This article sees Sycorax as part of the work of formerly-colonized writers and artists now engaged in the process of redefining their people, identity, and cultural realities in the face of the preponderant assault of more powerful cultures and narratives that often garble them. Irobi’s politically incorrect, troubling, and highly charged play thus expresses the angst of finding oneself vilified simply on the basis of race, body, or sexuality.

Reinventing The Primordial: Human Blood Ritual and the Lure of Power in Esiaba Irobi’s Nwokedi

ABSTRACTMany critics of Esiaba Irobi’s Nwokedi have contended that the play portrays an atmosphere of terror and irrationality, which reflects Irobi’s fascination with an ‘invitation to orgy’ (Eagleton) as the panacea to the oppressive political leadership in his postcolonial Nigeria. Beyond this observation, however, the position that in his obsession with power, Nwokedi, the protagonist snowballs into an object of terror himself has not been fully examined. Seeking to further this point of reflection, this paper engages the Hegelian theory of freedom in relation to the Dionysian myth of irrationality as a paradigm for examining the ironical attitude of power in Nwokedi. It interrogates the lure of power and the attempt to reinvent primordial human blood ritual in the play. Nwokedi’s positive riot of perversity, set against a politician’s economics of exploitation results in the death-drive that commands its beholder to relish human annihilation at that point where the opposition between law and personal desire is ‘most dramatically dismantled’ (Eagleton). The paper concludes that if the enchanted ritual revolutionist becomes at once deity and rebel, judge and outlaw, autocrat and anarchist, he equally plunges headlong into that solitude which is both self-willed and tragic.

A dance on contrasting platforms: African tradition and revolutionary aesthetics in Esiaba Irobi’s plays

Igbo African tradition, characterised mainly by rituals and myths, has often been regarded as too codified and therefore a dead end of sorts, as M.J.C. Echeruo observes in his article “The dramatic limits of Igbo ritual” (1981). But Esiaba Irobi, in his plays of revolutionary aesthetics, decodes this and has practically given it limbs, sinews and all, breathing into it a Marxist revolutionary life. The result of this miscegenation of forms is a dramaturgy that is rich both in the African tradition and culture of songs, dirges, anecdotes, and the age grade system-propelled communal festivals of ritual sacrifice, on one hand, and the Marxist Brechtian revolutionary aesthetics, characterised by a dramatisation of what Frantz Fanon (1963: 255) sees as “the blood-thirsty tension fed by classes”, dialectics, and the alienation techniques on the other. In Esiaba Irobi’s Hangmen Also Die (1989) and Nwokedi (1991), we see this “blood thirsty tension” fully and boisterously, if psychoanalytically, dramatised. For what he presents in these plays is a psycho-dramatic portraiture of characters, especially disenchanted characters, bitterly going against their oppressors. These model “victims of the system”, as Francois Maspero (1980: viii) would say, have been driven to the fringes of reason by vicious and blindfolding oppression and they fight back sporadically and blindly at whoever they stumble on especially in Hangmen. But in Nwokedi they have matured into a visionary vanguard force, having realized the collective nature of the struggle to dislodge their oppressors. In the end, Irobi has literarily responded to Fanon’s (1963: 255) clarion call that “we must invent”, that “we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man”, while recognizing (and creatively appropriating) “the sometimes prodigious thesis which Europe has put forward.”

Contextualizing the contours of subjugation: dramatizing conflicted image of the military in Wole Soyinka's The Beatification of Area Boy and Esiaba Irobi's Cemetery Road

This article examines the ways in which two prominent Nigerian playwrights, Wole Soyinka and Esiaba Irobi, re-envision common perceptions of the Nigerian armed forces as portrayed in literature. Despite nearly two decades of often-tumultuous democratic rule, Nigeria is yet to attain full membership of the league of democratic nations. In The Beatification of Area Boy and Cemetery Road, Soyinka and Irobi respectively look at the ways in which authoritarian regimes have sought to repress and subjugate hapless indigenous populations. The country increasingly finds itself between two psychological dispositions: the traumatized psyche occasioned by the military in the past, and the democratic dispensation which represents the present. Soyinka’s artistic commitment is ostensibly demonstrated in constant questioning and an accusatory historicization of the role of the military in the tragedy of Nigeria’s decadence in his play, The Beatification of Area Boy, while Irobi dramatizes the weaving together of the historical massacre of the peasants of Bakolori by the army in Northern Nigeria. The important question raised by this article is: How does the Nigerian nation-state atone for the evils of brutality, torture, forceful evacuation and displacement perpetrated by the military on its citizens, especially the Ilaje ‘Maroko evacuees’ and the Fulani victims of the ‘Bakolori massacre’? The article concludes that Soyinka’s and Irobi’s deft appropriations of historiography have been utilized to explore the inherent complexity of the interplay of Nigeria’s political anomie for the interrogation of military dehumanization of defenceless Nigerians in The Beatification of Area Boy and Cemetery Road.

Diala, Isidore: Esiaba Irobi’s Drama and the Postcolony. Theory and Practice of Postcolonial Performance

Diala, Isidore: Esiaba Irobi’s Drama and the Postcolony. Theory and Practice of Postcolonial Performance

Esiaba Irobi's Legacy: Theory and Practice of Postcolonial Performance

By the death of Esiaba Irobi (1960–2010) on 3 May 2010, contemporary African theater lost a distinguished playwright, stage director, actor, literary theorist, and scholar. Educated at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and at the University of Sheffield and the University of Leeds, both in England, Irobi’s specialization was drama, film and theater studies. Theater practitioner and scholar Irobi at various times taught at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka; the University of Leeds and the Liverpool J. Moores University in England; New York University, Townson University, and Ohio University (Athens, Ohio), all in the United States of America. He was on a fellowship at the Freie Universitat, Berlin, Germany, at the time of his death. However, if Irobi’s life was a restless search for new horizons, his deep anchorage in the oral tradition of his Igbo ethnic group, its rituals of self-renewal, myths and legends of enigmatic and daring deity-heroes, its lore of the mysteries of life and transcendence of the human spirit, its rousing chants, masquerades, and dramaturgy remained the indispensable source of creative imagination and critical thinking. In a tribute read at Irobi’s graveside at Amapu Igbengwo Umuakpara Osisioma Ngwa in Abia State, Nigeria, on 16 July 2010, his friend and colleague, the veteran stage director Eni-Jones Umuko, highlighted Irobi’s talents as actor, stage director and playwright. Umoko described in fascinating details Irobi’s role as Elesin in a production of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman that Umoko had directed, and as Styles in Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi Is Dead in a production of the play directed by the renowned theater scholar J. A. S Amankulor (whose extensive and engaging work on traditional Igbo performances was to have an enduring influence on Irobi). Deeply moving and explicitly panegyric as most graveside tributes generically strive to be, nonetheless Umoko’s oration in describing Irobi’s acting generally as “trance-like” and his role as Elesin specifically as having a “hypnotic” effect on the spectators offers a sober and critically insightful assessment consistent with Irobi’s own account of his interpretation of that role. For Irobi himself was certain that the role of Elesin, which he played first as a final-year student at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1983 and then several times more between 1985 and 1989, was clearly the most “satisfying role” he played

A Theatre for Cannibals: Images of Europe in Indigenous African Theatre of the Colonial Period

Europe’s colonial presence on the African continent from 1885 to the 1960s produced complex discourses about race and its representation. Whereas the Europeans constructed their putative images of Africans as inferior beings through radio, television, film, and print, for a predominantly literate sector, Africans deployed a more complex and mixed set of literacies. As well as conventional forms of literature, Africans used iconographic, kinaesthetic, proxemic, sonic, linguistic, tactile, calligraphic and sartorial literacies in their indigenous festivals and ritual theatres to resist, historicize, and domesticate colonial whiteness from the nineteenth century to the present day. In this article, Esiaba Irobi offers a detailed response to Bell Hooks’s observation (in Black Looks: Race and Representation, 1992) that in the work of postcolonial critics ‘there is a continued fascination with the way white minds, particularly the colonial imperialist traveller, perceive blackness, and very little expressed interest in representations of whiteness in the black imagination’. Esiaba Irobi is an Associate Professor of International Theatre at Ohio University, Athens. Born in the Republic of Biafra, he has lived in exile in Nigeria, Britain, and the USA. His African Festival and Ritual Theatre: Resisting Globalization on the Continent and Diaspora since 1492 is due for publication by Palgrave Macmillan in 2007.

Violent Obsessions: Esiaba Irobi's Drama and the Discourse of Terrorism

Violent Obsessions: Esiaba Irobi's Drama and the Discourse of Terrorism

Letters to a Young Actor: A Universal Guide to Performance (review)

Reviewed by: Letters to a Young Actor: A Universal Guide to Performance Esiaba Irobi Letters to a Young Actor: A Universal Guide to Performance. By Robert Brustein. New York: Basic Books, 2005; pp. x + 240. $22.50 paper, $32.00 cloth. Robert Brustein's new book is a gem. Unlike his earlier works, such as The Theatre of Revolt, Seasons of Discontent, The Third Theatre, Cultural Calisthenics, and Revolution as Theatre, which are immense and sometimes unwieldy, Letters to a Young Actor is concise, heartfelt, and beautifully written. Richly studded with anecdotes from the theatre world, Brustein's new offering has the potential to galvanize the thousands of unemployed young actors who wait tables and walk the streets into never giving up on their dreams to have successful careers in the theatre. The book will serve as an invaluable tonic for the members of a beleaguered profession. In fact, by the time you get to the end of the book, Brustein reminds the perceptive reader of an aged, armored tank clearing the battlefield so that the young troops can pour in and finish the battle. Brustein draws from his extensive professional experience and offers a battle plan for survival—something sorely needed for an embattled profession whose cultural relevance is daily assailed by television, cinema, sports, football, the Internet, and even pornography. Letters is divided into four sections: "Starting Out," "Getting There," "Being There," and "Working There." It features extremely short chapters (as brief as three pages) on subjects such as "The Pleasures of Imitation," "Looking for Work," and "Ephemeris, Ephemeris." Brustein manages to expertly conflate exciting scandals, gossip, and scenes from the history of Western professional theatre with incisive advice on how young actors can wing their way through this maze of a profession. Indeed, Letters is invaluable to the current generation of young actors who, driven by what Frederic Jameson calls the ontology of the present, desire to become superstars overnight. Brustein cautions that the American theatre needs educated actors; the more the actor can buttress his performing activities with humanistic knowledge, the more fulfilling his life will be. "You'll probably want to major in theatre if your college or university offers such a concentration," Brunstein suggests, "but, that's not essential" (28). Brustein goes on to argue that exposure to great Western dramatic literature helps put the actor in a position to grasp the subtleties of newly-encountered roles. Significantly, the author stresses that "you will need some background in literature, philosophy, economics, history, politics, the natural sciences, and the social sciences, the basic foundation of a liberal arts education" (28). In the rest of the book, particularly in the fourth section, "Working There," Brustein gives the actor first-hand initiatory advice on how the theatre industry works and how the actor can successfully navigate her way through management, audiences, directors, playwrights, coaches, and the indefatigable critics who can maim or mangle your career with a single devastating stroke of the pen. Overall, the strength of Letters stems from Brustein's entrancing theatre anecdotes, his knowledge of Western theatre history, and his devastating critiques of the industry. For example, sizing up Method Acting, he argues that as long as Method actors are playing characters close to themselves—generally working-class Americans with explosive personalities—they can impress us with their power and believability. But the moment they step into the shoes of heroic characters, especially those from other epochs, they are likely to stumble and fall. Commenting on his disagreements with the late August Wilson on the issues of race and representation in American theatre, Brustein states that Wilson had proclaimed that black actors should perform only in plays written by black playwrights. Wilson rejected "color-blind" or "nontraditional casting" as "the same kind of assimilation that black Americans have been rejecting for the past 380 years" (28). Brustein argues that this was a melancholy thing to hear at a time when black actors in American resident theatre were getting the chance to play not only Othello and Aaron the Moor, but also Mark Antony and Hamlet. This new separatist movement, Brustein concludes, is unacceptable. But after this political insight, Brustein's arguments on theatre scholarship...

Ritual and Mythological Recuperation in the Drama of Esiaba Irobi

M. J. C. Echeruo's sober appraisal ofthe dramatic limits of Igbo ritual in 1971 had generated quite some spirited critical debate on the nature of Igbo/African theater. Pointing to the distinctive Eurocentrism ofthe Greek model privileged by Echeruo as the viable universal paradigm for the evolution of ritual into drama, several other Igbo scholars had sternly rebuked him for an alleged fail? ure to recognize cultural distinctions in the dramatic form and consequently for the failure to advocate a culture-authenticating notion of drama. Esiaba Irobi's drama since the 1900s has re-opened this debate and, moreover, virtually constitutes a demonstration piece of Echeruo's postulations. Advancing insights deriving from Soyinka's formulation rooted in Yoruba theater, Irobi makes the theatrical basis of his truly challenging corpus the dramaturgy of demonstrable Igbo ritual performances. In his iconoclastic recuperation of Igbo myths and expansion of ritual to facilitate secular projects in a contem? porary postcolonial society, Irobi constantly sets in relief a specifically Igbo theater/tragedy as well as foregrounds his audacious innovativeness.