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Dramatic technique
Plot:
1.
The play is divided into 2 parts, each of 7/8 scenes, which move
fluidly on the basis of the exit or entry of characters.
Each part leads up to a climax
preceded by a series of tense clashes.
Part 1 ends with the Brother (Bero) announcing that he has practised
cannibalism, and likes it.
Part 2 ends with the old Women setting fire to the cottrage in which
the Son is holding his Father (the Old Man) captive.
The action
of the play has to do with the return of the Brother (a former
doctor who has become an Intelligence officer and a monstrous human
being) to his home-village, where his sister is helping 2 old women
(wise Earth-mother African mythology-based figures) gather medicinal
herbs. The Brother brings back the Father (Old Man), who is onstage
throughout Part 2. This man was responsible for healing injured
soldiers during the (Nigerian) Civil War then under way. During this
period, he developed new techniques of mind-control which had (and
continue to exert) a powerful dominative influence on the Son (Bero),
and former injured soldiers (the Mendicants). The Son is intent on
dominating the Father (who he says he will kill), and on forcing him
to divulge the secrets of the Philosophy of "As", a mysterious
cult-like set of ideas, rituals, mind-games, and incantations (like
a mystery cult, a new ideology, or a new but obscure philosophy)
preached and promoted by the Father (the Old Man) in his days of
power, when he taught the Son (Bero) and the Mendicants to like
cannibalism (among other monstrous practices). The play ends with
the 2 Old Women setting fire to the Cottage where the Son holds the
Father (the Old Man) imprisoned.
2. The
characters fall naturally into three groups: the mendicants
(beggars), the Bero family, the 2 old Women.
3. Soyinka
handles characterization in a manner that balances realism with
symbolism. This is most obvious in the case of the 2 old Women. The
Son (Bero) and the Father (the Old Man) show themselves as types of
the African tyrant, the cruel, dominative leadership that succeeded
colonialism in many African nations, including Nigeria (whose
history of Civil War provides the background or context for the
play), and ravaged the countryside in the pursuit of personal power.
Thus Father-Son represent modern political misrule; the Old-Women
the wisdom of traditional (also matriarchal) African societies,
which respect the earth, practise healing, and bring retribution to
the wrong-doers. They can be said to symbolize the hope nourished by
the play that African wisdom will bring about an apocalypse in which
the harm done to the nation will be stopped. The Mendicants are at
once victims and henchmen: they are seduced by the macabre plots of
the Old Man, whom they loathe yet cannot avoid being affected and
controlled by.
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Black Humour-Satire
A good part of the play is taken up by wild, frenzied behaviour
from the Mendicants, who add a touch of the zany (and the Beckettian)
to the action of the play.
Essay
Question: In a class presentation, you can
select a passage or two for close analysis, showing how the humour
relates to the theme of misrule, and the nexus between domination
and subservience?
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Why do they call themselves
"Creatures of As" (p.218)?
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What is the play
with words they create around the local dialect phrase: "Rem Acu
Tetigisti" (p.222) ("You have touched the matter with a needle",
p.223)?
Essay
Question:
Comment
on the mixture of callousness and humour with which
the Mendicants refer to their own misfortunes and physical
disfigurement. What does Soyinka accomplish by this "black humour"?
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Father and Son
The clash between Son (Bero) and father
(the Old Man) is at the centre of the action, although the Old Man
is not brought on stage until Part 2. It was he who developed the
strange philosophy/alphabetical litany of "As": "Father's
assignment was to help the wounded readjust to the pieces and
remnants of their bodies" (p.242). At the comic-macabre
level, the clash is focussed on the Son (Bero) trying to compel or
induce his Father (the Old Man) to reveal the origin, or logic, or
underlying basis for this so-called philosophy of "As", which the
Son (Bero) recognizes as the secret source of the Father's power over
him and the others. European Enlightenment philosophy sometimes
discussed the distinction between "as" and "is" in terms of how the
world "is", and "as it might be". Whether Soyinka plays a variation,
or adds a sardonic new dimension to that idealism is worth
considering for yourself.
Essay Question:
How does Soyinka use the "As" motif throughout the play, and
especially the second part? What can you describe as the details of
this "philosophy", so far as the words of the Mendicants, the Old
Man and Bero give us a basis for such a re-construction? How far
does the power and theatricality of the play depend on this "As"
remaining opaque, enigmatic and mysterious right to the end of the
play?
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"Think
not that hurt you but that Truth hurts." (p.223). Is this
utterance by Aaffa to be taken as a solemn piece of wisdom? or as
hocus-pocus meant to sound like profound wisdom?
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What
are the several ironies attached to the use of the word "specialist"
to refer to Bero and the Old Man? And what are the ironies latent
tot he title of the play?
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How does the sentence
"Madmen have such diabolical cunning" (p.237) apply to the
Father-Son pair?
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Comment on the role of
cannibalism in the play (at the literal and the symbolic levels).
How does it relate to Bero's remark: "The end of inhibitions" (p.
241)?
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Comment on: "As was the
Beginning, As is, Now, As Ever shall be..." (p.241). In what sense
was it "the first step to power" (p.241)? What is meant by
"As is everywhere" (p.243)? And by "Where the cycle is complete
there will As be found" (p.244)? And "I am I, thus sayeth As"
(p.247).
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Comment on the
chant/recitation of the alphabetical list that begins: "A. As is
acceptance, Adjustment. Adjustment of Ego to the Acceptance of
As..." (p.246).
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Note how the alphabetical catechism
develops: B=Blindness, C=crippled, D=Destiny, Divinity... G=Godhead"
(pp. 246-7); H=Humanity (the ultimate sacrifice) (p.255), etc..
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What is the significance of
Bero's statement to his Father: "In this case I raise my idea of
your need to coincide with your want" (p.251)? What is the relation
of Need to Want in the play as a whole?
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When the Son forces the
Father to accept a cigarette instead of getting to smoke the pie he
wanted to, why do you think the Old man says: "an old idea riddled
with the pellets of incidence" (p.252)?
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Why does the Son keep
asking/demanding: "Why As?" (p.253)? And what is the significance of
the Old Man's reply: "A code. A word". (p.253)? "What is As, Old
Man?" (p.263)?
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What does the Old Man mean
when he calls his Son an Octopus: "Plenty of reach but nothing to
seize on" (p.262)?
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In what sense does the Old
Man claim that "A part of me identifies with every human being"
(p.264)?
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Analyse the long speech by
the Old Man at the end of the play (p.271), where he gives an
account of what he means by "we are together in As".
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Brother-Sister
Part of the action in the play is concerned with the Si Bero
(the Sister). Her cottage is the home to which her Brother (Bero)
and her Father (the Old Man) come back. It is also the place where
she is collecting and storing herbs, which the 2 Old Women help her
with. It is also where the Mendicants have been sent by Bero, as his
spies, to offer to help Si Bero, but secretly to find out what she
is doing with the Old Women (who, as we find out, are opposed to
Bero and the Old Man). Si Bero is torn between loyalty to her
Brother (Bero), or to an idea of what he was like before he went on
war service (which changed him into a Monster, created by the Old
Man, but fighting against the Old Man for power), and loyalty to the
wisdom of the 2 Old Women, who form a kind of magical Sisterhood, to
which they initiate her. This brings up an antithesis between Male
and Female principles.
Essay
Question: Do you
find Soyinka's dramatization of the Male-Female opposition
convincing in its attempt to balance the mythic element with the
element of political satire?
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What
does Bero mean when he says to his sister: "We've wetted your good
earth with something more potent than that"? (p.234)
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Comment on the
following remark from Bero: "Control, sister, control. Power comes
from bending Nature to your will". (p.237)
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The Mendicants
The play begins on a note of zany and macabre comedy. The
Mendicants (Beggars) are crippled (by war). Yet they are also
animated by a strange energy that seems unmindful of their own
handicaps, or makes fun of them, in a manner that is both funny and
savage. The effect of the disconcerting and the disturbing is thus
part of Soyinka's characterization.
Essay
Question: How
effective do you find the dialogue and actions given them by Soyinka?
How do the Mendicants serve at once to show the brutality of civil
war (the damage it does to people) and the savagery and slavishness
it incites among the ordinary masses who get dragged into it (as
manipulated by masterful individuals like the Old Man and Bero)?
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How
would you explain Aafaa saying: "In the name of As of the
beginning..."? (p.229)
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Why does the
Cripple say in Part 2, "I is what makes me continue to obey the
specialist" (p.248)? Does he refer to the Father (the Old Man) or
the Son (Bero)?
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Why do the
Mendicants address the Old Man as if he were God (p.249)?
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Comment on the
logic of the Old Man's remark to Goyi: "You have lost the gift of
self-disgust", and "Disgust is cheap. I asked for self-disgust"
(p.257).
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Comment on the
Cripple's use of the word "gushpillating" (p.258).
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The Old Women
Soyinka gives to the old Women the role of Earth-mothers: they
are symbolic of maternal strength and endurance, of patience and
optimism, of healing and recovery, also of retribution and
cleansing: "WE move as the Earth moves, nothing more. We age as
Earth ages" (p.259).
Essay
Question: Is Soyinka
able to make their role in the action a convincing mixture of the
dramatic and the symbolic?
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Iya
Agba: "Burn out the soil where they find it [poisonous plants]
growing, just to kill the seeds. Foolishness. Poison has its uses
too. (p. 225). How would you explain the "logic" of the last
sentence? Likewise, in the following:
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Iya Mate:
"You don't learn good things unless you learn evil' (p.225).
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Why
does Iya Agba say of Father & Son: "There is too much binds them
down here. They will take root with their spirit, not with their
bodies on some unblessed soil" (p.226)?
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How would you
explain: "Two long lives spent pecking at secret grain by grain"
(p.235)?
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What is meant
when Iya Agba says to Bero: "Your mind has run farther than the
truth" (p.259)?
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Comment on: "We
put back what we take, in one form or another. Or more than we take.
It's the only law. What laws do you obey?" (p.260).
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Comment on Iya
Agba's words: "We pay our dues to earth in time, I also take back
what is mine" (p.268).
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