SoyinkaThe Swamp Dwellers

Patrick Colm Hogan

Harry Garuba

Biodun Jeyifo

Soyinka’s Themes -- Yehifo

1. Paradoxical union of conflicting, basic drives and impulses, in the individual as well as in culture and society, especially the opposing forces of creation and destruction: There is a creator and a destroyer in all of us and that quite often and at great cost, these conflicting drives and impulses become intertwined and inextricable. There is a terrifying mix of altruism and misanthropy, the conjoining of hatred of hypocrisy and cruelty with violent contempt for ordinary human beings.

Themes

2. Recovery or recuperation of the life-enhancing values of traditional or indigenous African culture: The master works of traditional African culture in myths and folklore, arts and artifacts, sacred and secular music and festivals contain values and energies which can be accessed for emotional anchor and spiritual revitalization in periods of individual stress of social calamity.

Themes

3. Rebirth and renewal after death and decay: Connected to his study of the rites of cleansing and purification performed in traditional African rituals: However, he merges this optimistic view focusing on voluntary sacrifice or scapegoating with the theme of malevolent scapegoating to create varied, complex and ambiguous works. Sometimes death dealt out for the wrong reasons leads only to spiritual bleakness; it is unregenerative.

Themes

4. Quest for wholeness: The search for connections between all areas of life and reality great and small, seen and unseen, familiar and foreign. Includes a search for connections between living, dead and future generations. Nature is the anchor for this search for wholeness.

5. Political theme: The relentless exposure of the manipulative abuse and misuse of power, knowledge, and insight.

Importance of Myth -- Hogan

Twins, as is well known, are revered among the Yoruba. Linked with the god Ibeji, they are elevated above children of single births. They are a special mark of fertility as well, and the mother of twins is particularly respected. If one twin dies, a small wooden doll is carved in his or her likeness and placed in the family shrine. The twin who has died has a special link with the living twin, and the family prays to the soul of the dead twin to protect the sibling who remains. Because of sanctity, and fear that the second twin might join his or her companion in death, it is taboo to say that one twin has died. Instead, the Yoruba customarily say that "he [or she] has gone to the market."

And Connection to TSD

1. Alu has twin sons. She worries that one of them has died.

2. Makuri protests that he is not dead. He has just moved to the city.

3. The myth is that one twin will call the other to follow him in death – or in this case, to the city.

4. A connection is made (p. 106-107) between the swamp and the city. Gonushi’s son left for the city, and he went the same way as Awuchiki.

IF . . .

• If he had really been dead, Alu would have said “he’s gone to the market.”

• To day that he is dead, implies a fate worse than death, a transformation more thorough than that of death, in effect, a spiritual death.

• The spiritual death of a generation, is the literal death of a tradition, a culture.

Chaos/Swamps

• According to Soyinka, all structured life rises from chaos. He writes “nothing rescues man from loss of self within this abyss but a titanic resolution of the will.” Generally, this resolution ends tragically.

• Three great deities of tragedy: Ogun, the god of Iron, Sango, the god of lightening, and Obatala, the maker of human forms.

Ogun

• The great god who bridged the chaos, who carved out a space for humans and gods to meet.

• In the end, he succumbed to chaos, murdering his own people in a drunken frenzy.

Sango and Obatala

• Sango -- God of lightening, called down the forces of chaos on himself and ended his own life. He was a great king who, perhaps because of his own pride and cruelty, was abandoned by his people, denounced by the chiefs. He fled to the country, was abandoned by his wife, left alone with one loyal slave.

• Obatala – the shaper of humans. He begs the supreme god for the opportunity to drain the marsh and make solid land to support life.

• Then he shapes life out of the muck. • Once he got drunk, fell in to the abyss of chaos and

shaped disabled men and women. He mourns throughout eternity for the suffering caused to these people for his error.

The Swamp . . .

• In the play, the swamp is an image of this chaos. It is natural disorder, always sinking beneath one’s feet, leaving one without foothold.

• The city is artificial disorder, ethical principle or structure replaced by the shifting contingencies of economy and social morality, by pride or envy or greed.

• Awuchike, far from observing his special obligation to take care of his twin, has destroyed him. He has stolen his goods and his wife, driven him to suicide.

Country/City Divide

• Alu is the good country wife – faithful, woman who conceives twins who share the color of the earth.

• Desala is the evil city wife – unfaithful. • City = evil of money, corruption, greed.• Swamp = tradition, crops, survival. However, the natural

chaos of the swamp is at work, too. The crops are destroyed by the floods.

• And, by the “oil in the swamp water.” In this line, Soyinka presciently observes the effects of the discovery of oil on the Nigerian countryside, the enormous ecological and human waste that would result from that discovery.

Also, the barber chair . . .

• Another invasion from the city: The chair knocked a hole in the bottom of the canoe and almost sunk it. (Tradition cannot survive the infringement of the modern.)

• The carrier was stuck and had to be dug out.) – Things sink you, they foster pride, envy and greed– Carrier also stands for the scapegoat who can save

the people, the person who carries out of the village the bad things that have entered it each year. This carrier, though, is bringing the evil, the modern, into the village or the country.

And then we have the Beggar

• He wants to “take a piece of ground and redeem it from the swamp” or the chaos, to “drain the filth away and make the land yield.”

• Then Kadiye enters. He is the filth that the beggar wants to remove. He is rich in a poor land, fat in a land of starvation, he eats the people’s sacrifice to the gods, deceiving them out of his own gluttony and greed.

• The tendency to corruption is universal. It comes not just from the city, but also from the country, the traditional.

So, . . . ?

• The Swamp Dwellers was produced in 1958, two years before Nigerian independence. In this context, it is a play that introduces the idea of where society might go, what the new nation might be like.

Beggar = Obatala one of the tragic deities

• He wears white, the color Obatala wears.

• He worries about his worthiness, a trait of Obatala after his “mistake.”

• He doesn’t drink. (After Obatala made the misshapen people because he was drunk, he gives up wine.)

• He wants to drain the land and make it yield.

Igwezu is another -- Sango

• Like Sango, he was abandoned by his people, his brother and his wife.

• He fled back to the country.• He has attracted a loyal slave, the beggar, who is also

Obatala.• In the legend, the slave waits while Sango wanders off

into the forest. After a while, the slave goes to find him and discovers him dead. He has hanged himself.

• The beggar’s last line in the play, “I shall be here to give account,” implies a similar ending for Igwezu.

So what hope is there?• The beggar tells the story on p. 116.• Hogan interprets it this way: This land is Africa, or Nigeria. The drought,

which kept all the people poor--so that "the land had lain barren for generations [...] the fields had yielded no grain for the lifetime of the eldest in the village"--was the period of colonial domination, which had begun a century before. The momentary hope is independence, with its expectation of universal freedom and prosperity: "This was the closest that we had ever felt to one another. This was the moment that the village became a clan, and the clan a household," the moment of national pride, the brief sense that anything is possible now that we control our own destiny. But the expectations of freedom are always quickly disappointed. The indigenous elite, moneyed collaborators (like Awuchike), the fake village heads, with their positions secured for the last 100 years by British guns, all the exploiters of the people descend on the spoils, leaving nothing for the mass of men and women: "The feast was not meant for us." The image of locusts is apt: "They [...] squatted on the land. It only took an hour or two, and the village returned to normal"

On Islands in PC lit -- Garuba

• Traditionally, we have the use of Island as Shakespeare uses it in The Tempest. The island setting is “discovered” by the colonizer and the colonizer creates a narrative to describe his experiences there. He shapes the discussion of the people, the flora, the fauna, the resources.

• Garuba reverses this common pc interpretive pattern in his reading of The Swamp Dwellers.

How?

• He claims that Soyinka focalizes the natives, rather than the “invaders.”

• He claims that in The Swamp Dwellers, the island is home, the center or point of origin, from which islanders depart, not the margin to which colonizers from an distant metropolitan center travel.

• And, home, is not the womb-warmth of the mother land that colonizers fantasize about when they’re exploring, but, instead, “home is where the hurt is.”

The play begins . . .

• By painting a vividly detailed picture of ‘home.’ (101)

• The semi-firmness of the island represents the fragility of the island economy.

• The items in the description, the hut on stilts, the walls of marsh stakes, the swivel chair, the dirty white sheet underscore the poverty of the people.

There is a general feeling of foreboding . . .

• “Can you see him? Is the first line .

• Alu and Makuri are concerned about their son’s ability to find his way home.

• She wants to go find him.

There is the recalling of a better past . . .

• Alu and Makuri recall their wedding night.• He talks of her faithfulness.• Humor is prominent, a sense of well-being

counters the uneasy foreboding of the present moment.

• The reader gets the sense that the old people are trapped or imprisoned in an untenable situation, one which they are helpless to change.

Igwezu is feels this imprisonment, too, he’s trapped by fate?

• This leads him to acts of rebellion and revolt.– He rejects traditional the religious leader– And threatens him in a “sacrilegious” outburst.

It’s important to note that

• Igwezu’s frustrations are taken out, not on the colonizing other, but on the corrupt local, Kadiye.

• Arun Mukherjee writes that “The postcolonial theorists generalizations about ‘all’ ‘postcolonial people’ suggest that Third Worldism and/or nationialism bind the peoples to these societies in conflictless brotherhood, that inequalities of caste and class do not exist in these socieites, and that their literary works are only about “resisting” or “subverting” the colonizer’s discourses.

• In this play, other local conflicts and inequalities abound that command the attention of the islanders. Its about the internal dynamics of the society and the economic and other problems the people have to contend with.