A good summing up of the work of significant African writers and dramatists who have enriched literature with their own sensibility and ethos
Very little is known about Africa and its literature, art and drama despite many Nobel laureates hailing from the continent. The book under review is a clear indicator that African literature and drama have travelled a long way to be very successfully engaging with the current literary and artistic concerns of the world.
Literature and theatre -- other than western -- has been ignored in countries like Pakistan and this is also a conscious attempt at bringing into focus African literature and theatre. This is a developed and completed PhD from the University of Northampton which includes a large number of names of the dramatists. It is, thus, a good encyclopedic summing up of the significant writers and dramatists of the African continent who have expressed themselves in a large number of languages including European languages -- the legacy of their colonial past. It also brings in their very own sensibility and ethos despite the limitations of these languages.
Many of the African languages were actually spoken languages with no scripts of their own. So it was easier for colonial languages like English, French and Portuguese to move in with less resistance than they encountered in other parts of the world that had very developed languages in their written forms as well. But, all this did not start with the European colonisation. Before that, Arabic too had left a decisive influence, especially in the northern part of the continent -- by providing the underpinning of script besides enrichment of the spoken languages.
The function of drama has been troubling playwrights and critics since ancient times. What its role is or what its role should be has been the focus of attention of critics and philosophers like Aristotle since his Poetics written in the ancient world.
His theories have since been challenged over millennia and the counter-function or role has been posited by others all these centuries as well. The all-absorbing action on stage that carries the audiences with it had to be a totally submerging experience for the catharsis to take place. If the spectators stayed outside the action of the play and the tragic fall of the hero, the function of the play had been met inadequately. It was essential for the action and the spectators to be totally in-sync with each other for the feelings of pity and fear to grip and rinse the audiences with the overwhelming experience.
But many other playwrights like Brecht have advanced the function of theatre differently as they decry the total identification of the action on stage and the spectators. Instead, Brecht calls for a distancing between the two. The audience had to be wary of getting sucked into the suffering of the hero, rather be critically aware of it all. The audience were to leave the theatre not purged of emotions and drained out but in a sharpened critical state of mind on what happened to the hero and why. And thus, to carry outside the theatre the same critically ignited awareness -- for the resolution of issues in the bigger, wider world.
This book is also a conscious attempt at bringing into focus African literature and theatre and how metatheatrical elements that create illusion could be used in achieving a balanced state with respect to the audiences’ reception -- by affecting them on both the cognitive and emotional levels. It investigates American social psychologist, Thomas. J Scheff’s theories on the creation of such scenes and situations in drama which need to first touch upon the repressed emotions shared by most members of the audience and at the same time allows them sufficient freedom not to be overwhelmed by these. "Aesthetic distancing" is then successfully achieved by the creation of space where the audience socially relates to the happenings on stage while maintaining an aesthetic absorption and critical outlook -- through optimising "the under and over distanced situations".
This phenomenon of distancing interchangeability is used because it all tends to distance actors/performers and audience /readers from an emotionally affective theatrical environment.
The current study demonstrates how critical empathy could be aimed for and achieved through the employment of illusion-breaking devices which produce and modulate the degrees of dramatic distancing in plays. These include creation of the micro world, balancing the ideal and the common, open-ended denouements, play within a play, role switching, role playing within the play, textual frames as historical palimpsests, changing perceptions through changing foci.
The playwrights analysed are Wole Soyinka in the plays Death and the King’s Horseman and King Baabu, Ola Rotomi in Kurunmi and Hopes of the Living Dead, Femi Osofisan in The Chattering, The Song and The Women of Owu, Esiaba Irobi in Hangmen Also Die and Stella Dia Oyedepo in A Play that was Never to Be.
Nigerian drama can be classified as pre-independence, post-independence and the third generation military. It also implies the thematic and stylistic preoccupation of a group of writers responding to a distinct circumstance; gravitating towards a unifying body of discourse. Though the caveat is that a specific literary period could not be restricted to a single theme and style because of modern African literature’s association with extra-literary context. Since distancing devices depends on cultural belief systems and the degree of the audiences’ allegiance to a particular idea or value, the main aim is not to compare and contrast the two models mentioned but to understand distance topoi with respect to metatheatrical references in Nigerian plays.