African Novel: West African Literature: The Second Decade Part IIAuthor(s): Martin TuckerSource: Africa Today, Vol. 13, No. 6 (Jun., 1966), pp. 7-8Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4184727 .

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Many Baganda are happy to have their land mod- ernized, and most people prefer Dr. Obote to his Army. BuLt the institUtion of the Kabaka has deep roots in tradition. Kabaka Mutesa has three sons (one in the UK, one in Kenya, one in Uganda) young enough to permit a long regency. Obote is a master at compromise and could eventually permit the union of

Buganda's four districts under a new Kabaka. It is unlikely that the Baganda will attempt a new uprising, but they could withhold their cash crops and thus cripple the national economy. At this point the solu- tion to the problem, and the solution to the solution, are alike unknown. No one really desires the aliena- tion of Africans in their own Africa.

Wet African Literature: ArcnNvlIee

The Second Decade Martin Tucker English Department, Long Island Univer:sity

Soyinka's newest play, "The Road," closely parallels hi>s earliest published work, "A Dance of the Forests," and makes even more vivid the dichotomy between the forces that play out their dreams and struggles in the quasi-timeless present time of Nigeria. Perhaps this use of the same substances in changing shades of expression is Soyinka's greatest gift; certainly no sense of familiarity dlulls the reader; acquaintanceship with his material deepens with each meeting.

In "The Road" several rogues appear. The setting itself is a motor-par:k in which various "lay-abouts" (in American slang, "bums" or loiterers) visit each other. The chief rogue is The Professor, who has grown fat and rich on "The Word." He uses "The Word" the way Brother Jero used his charm to seduce and fleece his flock. The Professor dresses in Western- style clothing and undoubtedly Soyinka's "Word" is meant to convey the sophisticated, divisive teaching of Western propaganda; perhaps it also bears its overtone of the self-interest and hypocrisy of mission- ary teaching in Africa. One of the Professor's adver- saries, a young driver-trainee with little spunk, gathers up courage to declare to his friend that he doesn't believe in the Professor or his magic. When the Professor hears of this outrage-this affront to his reputation-he damns the young driver and orders him out of the park. The "Word" this time will be vengeful, not protective.

JuLst as in "A Dance of the Forests" the conflict existed between the forces of Nigeria's past and pres- ent, the forces in "The Road" range themselves in tribal and urban fashion. Particulars Joe is an ex- pedient local policeman with little regard for the spirit of the law btut muLch for its city and worldly regula- tions. He tries to arrest a "masquerade"-a spirit of Death who comes into the tent in the park in which the characters sit. In describing the ctulprit who got away, Particulars Joe significantly says of him, "Are youL suLre you know who I mean? Sort of tall but a little on the short side. Tribal marks, but beginning

to wear off. . in fact, unless you looked closely you might think he had no tribal marks at all." (Part Two).

The greatest significance for all the characters is the death that lies in wait for all of them, whichever road they take, tribal or modern. And just as in "A Dance of the Forests" the play ended with a dance- half-frenzy and half-pavanne-so this play ends in the whirl and frenzied acceptance of the irreconcilable conflicts of life. The Professor, before "Death" reaches him, yearns for a timeless situation, a time analogous to timelessness, an open space for his mind behind the closed door of a prison. He does not find it, because the mask, the masquerade of Death, is more powerful than any one of the opposing forces of life. The Professor's personal servant, ironically a mute who cannot even speak a word, merely serves his master without contributing to his welfare or his safety, and does not stop the Professor's enemy, "Say Tokyo Kid" from stabbing the Professor with all the violence *of frustration.

Say Tokyo Kid is a modern thug, a motorcycle sadist with the special characteristics of that kind of young person who finds in senseless violence his own brand of peace. Say Tokyo Kid cannot stand the rivalry of the Professor's quasi-educated talk, and he acts in the only way open to his character: violence. Thus the Professor is beaten, as all of Soyinka's educated or self-styled educated characters are beat- en, by the remnants of violence. In Say Tokyo Kid's case, this remnant can be traced to tribal primitivism.

Soyinka's "liveliness"-or at least his sense of grand grotesque, of dark flowering blood mysteries- is matched by that of another young Nigerian poet and playwright, John Pepper Clark. Clark is both more worldly and more traditional than Soyinka: his poems follow an almost classic modern British train- ing, and his often-read and -produced play, "Song of a Goat" is more familiar to Westerners than any of Soyinka's work. Clark, at least initially, treats of

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themes that are part of the Western heritage. "Song of a Goat" is the story of an impotent husband, his frustrated wife, and the husband's younger, potent brother. The inevitable occurs, and tragedy results: the wife, the husband, their child, and the husband's brother all die, purging themselves by suicide or heartbreak. Judith Illsley Gleason, in "This Africa" (Evanston, Illinois, 1965), posits the theory that an indefinable humor, a kind of elusive gr and comedy, pervades the play, and that this "spirit" illuminates a work that otherwise might be imitative. Whatever this elusive quality-whether a spirit of comedy, of the grotesque, or of the breakneck speed of a young writer who stops for tragedy out of deference to his characters but who, one senses, is anxious to move on to more momentum, more of the tragicomedy of life-it is what gives "Song of a Goat" its distinctive- ness. For, surely, J. P. Clark is that most puzzling of all writers: an African with his own personality who tries to show he can do as well at English litera- ture as any other Commonweallth citizen and who suc- ceeds in displaying his indigenouis talent at the very time he is concentrating on his Western "learning." Hlis play tireats an eternal theme: woman's need for sexual ftlfillment and man's desir-e for exclusive possession of his love-object. The African motifs are present: the goat in the clutches of the leopard's claws, the serpent entwining itself into the ambience of an unsuspecting village; the calabashes and the blazing fires. In the same breath with the African symbols are the Western sounds: the marine sorrows of J. M. Synge's "Riders to the Sea," the Greek choral rhythms, and the sin-and-guilt Puritan strain of "Desire Under the Elms." These "Western" parallels, whether intentional or not, rob Clark's work of an easy identity.

Since African custom has until recently concen- trated on the custom of societal priority and multiple marriages for men, it might seem that a man's loss of his wife is not the same kind of tragedy for an Afri- can as it is for a Western audience attuned to the harmony or disharmony of a one man-one wife theme. Soyinka, in "The Lion and the Jewel," has his hero slink away when he loses his "fiancee"; the cuckolded hero is ashamed and bitter, but his anger remains comic; it can never be regar ded as tragic in sub- stance. Perhaps the tundertone of "Song of a Goat" is comic-certainly some kind of restless vitality per- vades the play. Yet the play never really establishes its tone, and the result is that a reader does not know how to respond to it.

Two of Clark's other plays (they, in addition to "Song of a Goat," have been published by Oxford University Press in "Three Plays," London, 1965) reveal his unique talent for lyrical tragedy. In "The Masquerade" and "The Raft"-one almost plotless, the other a familiar pastoral setting-Clark captures the plaintive and lyrical note without any shrillness or comic disharmony. It is doubtful if either "The Masquerade" or "The Raft" would play as well as "Song of a Goat," for they are essentially static, lyric

works, yet they are more integrated poetic verse dramas. "The Masquerade" has its share of horror. It opens with the idyllic love affair of two beautiful young people who soon marry with the blessing of the girl's family. What destroys their marriage is a rumor, apparently based on fact, that the new hus- b)and is the son of a woman who died in his child- l)irth, and that his father had "usurped" the bed of his brother and slept with the brother's wife. On hearing the rumor, the father of the bride demands the dissolution of the marriage, but the two lovers refuse. Their priority is to their personal love, not to societal strictures. The father, in a madness com- pounded of fuiry and despair, murders his daughter and son-in-law. Thus, as in "Song of a Goat," the play ends with the death of the leading characters. The play's brevity may account for its unity of tone; even the choral elements seem indivisible from the dramat- ic movement.

Clark's immersion in the demands of the individual in conflict with those of the family demonstrates itself in "The Masquerade." The conflict is an eter nal one, that of individuals who br eak their societal code. When the father learns of the shame that is now his to bear, the shame of the boy's family's history, he accuses his son-in-law of a "masquerade." The boy replies that he has been honest. He himself has learned of his father's bestiality only through the rumor. Yet innocence of the past crime does not dissuade the father from demanding a just punishment. All drama may be, in essence, the conflict between the social and the individual demand. In Clark's work the dilemma takes on added significance because of its historic associations. Though he reaches back to the village and a distant past, his theme is contemporaneous: the individuLal caught in a community that punishes him for a crime of which he is not guilty but for which he bears a responsibility. The dilemma is carried into a discuLssion of values in "The Raft," in which several men are lost on a river, searching for a home port. At the end of the play, only two are left on the raft, and because of the fog and the current they cannot stop at the city that lies on either side of them. The men float on, hopelessly, again adrift in their human predicament in an indifferently hostile community.

Gabriel Okara, another talented Nigerian writer of the second decade (his first novel, "The Voice," was published last year in London), wrote an ode for his thirty-first year of life, in which he lamented the babble of tongues and the flames within his head that were eating him Lp. He concluded his ode with a wish for silence and a stone retreat. The stone and the silence were emblems of a spiritual altitude, a height from which to accept, though not to view, the world. The stone and the silence are Okara's final signs of acceptance of, and not evasion from, the personal and social world. This pain Okara bears is the pain of all African poets, novelists, dramatists, and thinkers to- day. This pain coulld be said to symbolize their strug- gle to create an eternal and contemporary literature for their wvorld, and for the world beyond them.

8 AFRICA TODAY

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