A Dance Of The Forest

           A DANCE OF THE FOREST 

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About author 

                                      Wole Soyinka, in full Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka, (born July 13, 1934, Abeokuta, Nigeria), Nigerian playwright and political activist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He sometimes wrote of modern West Africa in a satirical style, but his serious intent and his belief in the evils inherent in the exercise of power were usually evident in his work as well.

                              A member of the Yoruba people, Soyinka attended Government College and University College in Ibadan before graduating in 1958 with a degree in English from the University of Leeds in England. Upon his return to Nigeria, he founded an acting company and wrote his first important play, A Dance of the Forests (produced 1960; published 1963), for the Nigerian independence celebrations. The play satirizes the fledgling nation by stripping it of romantic legend and by showing that the present is no more a golden age than was the past.

                               He wrote several plays in a lighter vein, making fun of pompous, Westernized schoolteachers in The Lion and the Jewel (first performed in Ibadan, 1959; published 1963) and mocking the clever preachers of upstart prayer-churches who grow fat on the credulity of their parishioners in The Trials of Brother Jero (performed 1960; published 1963) and Jero’s Metamorphosis (1973). But his more serious plays, such as The Strong Breed (1963), Kongi’s Harvest (opened the first Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, 1966; published 1967), The Road (1965), From Zia, with Love (1992), and even the parody King Baabu (performed 2001; published 2002), reveal his disregard for African authoritarian leadership and his disillusionment with Nigerian society as a whole.

                                 From 1960 to 1964 Soyinka was coeditor of Black Orpheus, an important literary journal. From 1960 onward he taught literature and drama and headed theatre groups at various Nigerian universities, including those of Ibadan, Ife, and Lagos. After winning the Nobel Prize, he also was sought after as a lecturer, and many of his lectures were published—notably the Reith Lectures of 2004, as Climate of Fear (2004).

                                A Dance of the Forests is one of the most recognized of Wole Soyinka's plays. The play "was presented at the Nigerian Independence celebrations in 1960, it ... denigrated the glorious African past and warned Nigerians and all Africans that their energies henceforth should be spent trying to avoid repeating the mistakes that have already been made." At the time of its release, it was an iconoclastic work that angered many of the elite in Soyinka's native Nigeria. Politicians were particularly incensed at his prescient portrayal of post-colonial Nigerian politics as aimless and corrupt. Despite the deluge of criticism, the play remains an influential work. In it, Soyinka espouses a unique vision for a new Africa, one that is able to forge a new identity free from the influence of European imperialism.

                                A Dance of the Forests is regarded as Soyinka's theatrical debut and has been considered the most complex and difficult to understand of his plays. In it, Soyinka unveils the rotten aspects of the society and demonstrates that the past is no better than the present when it comes to the seamy side of life. He lays bare the fabric of the Nigerian society and warns people as they are on the brink of a new stage in their history: independence.

                                The play was published in London and New York in 1963 by Oxford University Press (Three Crowns Books).

NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE OF THE PLAY 

                             A Dance of the Forests by Wole Soyinka was a controversial play in Soyinka's native Nigeria at the time it premiered. A Dance of the Forests was performed during the 1960 Nigerian independence celebration. Soyinka wrote the play as a warning to Nigeria and other African countries about the dangers. 

                                     Written and first performed in 1960 as part of the national celebrations of Nigeria’s independence from Britain, A Dance of the Forests features a unique combination of classically European dramatic elements and traditional Yoruba masquerade traditions which make the play resistant to both staging and traditional Western criticism. 

                                 Since 1960, few attempts have been made to perform the play, due to its complexity and ambiguity. A Dance of the Forests presents an allegorical criticism of the political condition of postcolonial Africa and of the recurring political patterns in Nigeria. The play, considered iconoclastic upon its debut, criticizes Nigerian history in order to satirize the political elite of the newly independent Nigerian government and resists nationalistic notions of a historical or future Golden Age in Nigerian history. The playwright, Wole Soyinka, also resisted the popular African literary and philosophical movement of Negritude, a movement he criticized for overly glorifying Africa’s pre-colonial past. 

                                      Soyinka was the first sub-Saharan African author to be awarded a Nobel Prize (1986) and is recognized today as one of the most respected Nigerian authors. In addition to his work as a playwright, Soyinka has been active in Nigerian politics for several decades, including advocating for Nigeria’s independence, and he was imprisoned in solitary confinement for two years during the Nigerian civil war (1967-70), after a military coup following increased political tensions as the federal government took control of indigenous Yoruba land. After his release, Soyinka continued to publish poetry, drama and political criticism prolifically and today remains an outspoken political activist.

                                     A Dead Man and a Dead Woman are summoned to a tribal gathering by the deity Aroni. Instead of inviting more illustrious ancestors to the festival, Aroni chooses the dead couple because they  were wronged by the previous incarnations of several of the play’s living human characters. These characters—Demoke, Rola, Adenebi, and Agboreko—meet and reject the dead couple and argue about political corruption before being led off into the forest by Obaneji, who is really the chief Orisha (or god), the Forest Head, in disguise as a human.

                                     Meanwhile, strife brews between the gods Eshuoro and Ogun. Ogun is Demoke the carver’s patron god, and Eshuoro is angry that Demoke carved Oro’s (another Orisha) sacred tree into an idol for the festival, and because Demoke killed his assistant Oremole, who was also a devotee of Eshuoro. The Orisha and the dead plan to gather with the living in the forest to redress the wrongs of the past.

                               In Part 2 of the play, The Forest Head turns back time eight centuries, shifting the setting to the Court of Mata Kharibu, when the dead couple lived. Mata Kharibu wishes to wage war for a frivolous cause. The Dead Man, known as “the Warrior” in the past, refuses to lead his soldiers into battle for such a cause. For his defiance, the Warrior is castrated and enslaved and his pregnant wife, who is the Dead Woman from Part 1, dies soon after. Demoke, Rola, Adenebi, and Agboreko’s ancestors (the Court Poet, Madame Tortoise, the Court Historian, and the Soothsayer, respectively) all play a part in the fate of the Warrior and his wife.

                                 In the present, deep in the forest, the humans are put on trial for their previous lives in a masquerade presided over by the Forest Head, Aroni, and the other forest spirits. The pregnant Dead Woman is finally able to give birth to her baby, who is called the Half-Child. Eshuoro interferes with the ceremony, attempting to kidnap the Half-Child; he is thwarted, and Demoke rescues the Half-Child, giving him back to his mother. The Forest Head laments to himself that he doubts that the intended lesson has sunk in, and fears that the humans are doomed to repeat the sins of the past. The Orisha, the dead, and the forest spirits disperse.

                            Eshuoro forces Demoke to climb the village idol as an unwilling sacrifice. Eshuoro sets fire to the idol and Demoke falls but is rescued by Ogun. When he regains consciousness, Demoke is confronted by his father and Agboreko. When they ask Demoke what happened to him and what he learned of the future, Demoke is unable to give a sufficient answer.

                             Although very few critics have ventured to analyze Wole Soyinka's A Donce of the Forests owing to its apparent difficulty, yet those who have attempted simply see it as a metaphorical commentary of the sociopolitical situation in Nigeria. While their observations might be valid, taking into cognizance that the play was written in 1960 as part of the celebration of Nigeria's independence, the problem with such readings is that it does not take into account the structure of the play in which Soyinka traces the past to the present to forecast a dystopian future. While a utopic past and a dystopic present is often enacted as a narrative gesture that concomitantly leads to a utopian future, the reverse is the case in this play. What Wole Soyinka depicts is a dystopian past as well as a dystopian present and future. 

                                   Therefore, my proposition in this paper is that more than being a work of post-independence disillusionment, Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests l inks the hopeless past with the fruitless present to project a bleak future. In this way, my point of departure in this essay is that while the writing of the play has been motivated by the betrayal of the common trust and hope as it relates to the Nigerian socio-political climate, the message of the play has a universal underpinning. In this respect, Soyinka insists that the atrocities that have so often characterized human interactions generally are unavoidable. Yet, by portraying the unavoidability of these human atrocities, Soyinka invariably quests for a futurity that is utopian. My conclusion, therefore, is that within the aesthetic trajectory of Soyinka, the boundary between dystopian and utopian visions is not clear-cut: they are one and the same.

                                 Wole Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests is a complex play in which there is a "gathering of the tribes" in a festivity in which the living asks their gods to invite some of their illustrious ancestors. But instead of legendary ancestors, Forest Father/Head-the supreme divinity in Soyinka's fictionalized world, sends the living "two spirits of the restless dead" referred to in the play as Dead Man and Dead Woman. Owing to the apparent difficulty of the play, very few critics have ventured to analyze it. Derek Wright points to the difficulty and elusiveness of the play when he states that it is "the most uncentered of works, there is no discernible main character or plot line, and critics have been at a loss to say what kind of play it is or if it is a play at all and not a pageant, carnival or festival" (81). Similarly, Mathew Wilson describes the play as a "baffled incomprehension" and "a resistant text that resists assimilation" (3). 

                                    In his own statement of the play's general reception, Harry Garuba observes that "One common denominator of reviews and critical commentaries on this play (Soyinka's Dance) is the uniform insistence that it is complex, difficult, and overladen" (qtd in Christopher Anyokwu's "Ode to Chaos and Amnesia" 122). Because Soyinka stretches the expressionistic mode of dramaturgy beyond its normative form in this play, most critics have avoided it in their hermeneutic exercises.

                                      Adebisi Ademakinwa hints at this phenomenon when he observes that the play "has enjoyed more neglect since it was written than any other of his (Soyinka's) plays. The so-called 'complexity' of the play has been primarily responsible, thus, since it was performed for the Independence Celebration in 1960, only feeble attempts have been made to perform it..." (81). While Ademakinwa's focus is on the neglect the play has experienced in terms of its presentation on stage, the fact remains that the play has not only been feebly performed on stage, it has also received very little critical reviews relatively to other plays of Soyinka.

                                            The issue even becomes more complicated because those who have attempted to analyze it simply regard it as a metaphorical commentary of the socio-political situation in Nigeria. One such critic is James Gibbs, who in a book review of the play, opines that "Nigeria up to and during 1960 (is) the immediate context of the play" (155). Also, Benedict Mobayode Ibitokun describes the play as "a clean record of and report on the country's (Nigeria's) behavioural patterns" . 

                                      Whereas he applied some concepts in existential psychoanalysis in his reading of the play, he nevertheless concentrated on what he termed "the endemic slur" of the socio-political situation in Nigeria. In the case of Biodun Jeyifo, though he concentrates on what he terms the "ritual problematic" of the play, he still regards it as an "appropriate response to the [...] dilemmas of post-independence, postcolonial Africa" (127). Similarly, in consonance with the suggestion of Eldred Jones, most critics have interpreted "the struggle of Esuhoro and Ogun for the half-child" at the end of the play as "a struggle for the life, the soul of the then newly independent nation of Nigeria" (Jeyifo 141).

                                        The structure of a play is an important ingredient in the determination of the artistic vision of a playwright. But the structure to which I refer in this paper is not the conventional dramatic structure of exposition, complication, climax, anti-climax, and denouement that is the paraphernalia of plays in general; but the plot structure that is distinctive to individual plays or artistic visions. Booker identifies this distinctive plot structure, especially as it pertains to dystopian/utopian artistic vision, when he avers that "Utopia and dystopia are very much part of the same project in that both describe an other world, spatially and/or temporally removed from that of the author and/or intended readership" (qtd in Richard Phillips 190). Therefore, using faraway imagined places is a feature of utopic and dystopic imagination. The only difference perhaps is that whereas in a dystopian landscape the faraway imagined place is in the past, in a utopian poetic space it is in the past as well as in the future. Michella Erica Green describes Butler's works as "dystopian because she (Butler) insists on confronting problems that have occurred so often in human communities" (qtd in Jim Miller 339). 

                                 That dystopian works confronts "problems that have occurred so often in human communities" implies that it is a work that is not just concerned with human atrocities in the present but also in the past. It is this that figures in Soyinka's play under consideration. The play takes its readers to "an other world" that is far removed and unfamiliar. Arguably, among Soyinka's plays, it is A Dance of the Forests that takes its readers/or audience to a distant past to the Court of Mata Kharibu about eight centuries earlier (Dance 51). While Biodun Jeyifo sees the structure of the play as being "formalistically extravagant" and as not being controlled as well as polished (122), the point to be noted is that the geographical elusiveness of Soyinka's setting of a distant past in this play hints at its vision of utopianism or dystopianism.

                                           However, while a utopian past and dystopian present is often enacted as a narrative gesture that concomitantly leads to a futurity that is utopian (Paul F. Starrs and John B. Wright 98), the reverse is the case in this play. What Wole Soyinka depicts is a dystopian past as well as a dystopian present and future. In this way, Soyinka rejects négritude's glorification and idealization of the African past. Based on this negative reconstruction of the African past, which is antithetical to its glorification in the works of négritude writers, Soyinka insists, to borrow the words of Wendy Brown, that there is no "lost way of life and a lost course of pursuits" (qtd. in Robyn Wiegman 806). 

                                                      That Soyinka rejects négritude's idealization of the African past is significant within the aesthetics of utopianism. This is so because in a work that quest for a utopian future, the past must be reconstructed in such a way that the living seek to recapture the past in the future. But as Anyokwu observes "Soyinka" in this play "dramatizes man's proclivity to selectively 'edit' his past, turn a blind eye to the warts and welts of his ignoble past and choose to highlight the halcyon days instead" (121). Likewise, according to Glenn A. Odom, what is revealed in this play of Soyinka is that the future will continue to repeat the present" (207), and one might add "and the past." So while the "Jews thirsted for the lost kingdom of Isreal; the English, for the Saxon Golden Age; and the Chinese, for the Taoist Age of Perfect Virtue" (Starrs and Wright 98), what Soyinka posits with his poetic ruminations is that there is nothing glorious in the African past, and nothing euphoric about the present. For instance, the atrocities committed by the actors in the Court of Mata Kharibu eight centuries earlier are repeated by their reincarnated self under different circumstances in the present world.

                                    In effect, Soyinka's imaginative intervention/or contribution to the anthology of Utopian literary genre is that a writer does not necessarily have to create an imaginary future setting in which the inhabitants have attained perfection as in Thomas More's Utopia and Chancellor Bacon's New Atlantis as a demonstration of his/her utopian vision. Utopia does not necessarily have to be about a place. Sargisson says as much in her explanation that utopia is "the good place which is no place" (1). It can, therefore, be about an idea or a change in status quo. In this respect, Soyinka rearticulates the critical yardstick for measuring and identifying utopian vision in imaginative works.

                                     Furthermore, it can be argued within the framework of this essay that Soyinka's artistic rumination within the ambit of utopian literary genre is that the past must not be (re)constructed in such a way that it is idealized and romanticized as a projection of a blissful future. For him (Soyinka), the past and the present must be criticized for the future to be hopeful. As can already be deciphered, he critiques the past and the present, and forecasts a dystopian future as a means to orient action that would avert its fulfillment. Therefore, Soyinka's dystopian landscape is strongly tied with his utopian vision. He condemns and criticizes the past and the present actions of his major characters, and predicts a bleak future so that humans in general and Africans in particular would avoid the mistakes of the past and the present in the future. It is in this sense that his dystopian vision is concomitantly a desire for a utopian future.