Thinking activity:- A Dance of the Forests

Hello Readers ,

         I am Aditi Vala and I am student of Department of English, MKBU.This blog is a part of my classroom thinking activity and this activity given by Yesha Mam. As a part of our syllabus, we have one paper on ‘African Literature’. So in this thinking activity, I am going to write a brief note on the Dystopian idea in a drama written by Wole Soyinka, ‘A Dance of the Forests’.

Wole Soyinka :

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 Dance of the Forests :

                             A Dance of the Forests Characters Last updated on December 10, 2021.First produced: 1960, for the Nigerian Independence Celebrations,

First published: 1963

Type of work: Play

Type of plot: Mythic

Time of work: 1960

Locale: Nigeria

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.

Wole Soyinka's dystopian vision in A Dance of the Forests :

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 , 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" . Likewise, according to Glenn A. Odom, what is revealed in this play of Soyinka is that the future will continue to repeat the present" , 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.

Adenebi in his prior existence, eight hundred years ago, was the Court Historian to Mata Kharibu, and he argues that "War is the only consistency that past ages afford us" , thereby facilitating the death of many soldiers in a "senseless war" that he encouraged; and at present he is the corrupt Council Orator responsible for the death of 65 passengers on a lorry he had licensed to carry passengers beyond its stipulated capacity.

Another major character is Rola/Madam Tortoise who in her previous world was a whore, and Mata Kharibu's wife responsible for the death of Dead Man and Dead Woman. She is in fact likened to Helen of Troy since it is her prostitution that caused the war, which Adenebi (Kharibu's Court Historian) described as "divine carnage" (Dance 57). And in her present world, she is still a prostitute responsible for the demise of her two lovers. Also, there is Demoke, the carver who at present killed his apprentice out of envy; and who in his former existence as Court poet to Mata Kharibu tacitly supported bloodshed by not speaking against the waging of a senseless war.To sum, we can say that ‘A Dance of the Forets’ id s a very interesting play that discusses the idea of dystopia. 

Thank you