Wole Soyinka
all of whose flatness and one-dimensionality derive from the extreme
idealization of their construction as central protagonists in their respec-
tive dramaturgic universes. But when idealization attaches to women
characters in Soyinka’s drama, or even to a specific male-female rela-
tionship, the result is a veritable aesthetic collapse. One of the worst
dramaturgic solecisms in Soyinka’s drama that is traceable to this prob-
lem is the scene between Daodu and Segi in the concluding section of
Part One ofKongi’s Harvestas the two lovers prepare themselves for a con-
frontation with the paranoiac, life-denying dictator, Kongi. The scene
is constructed as a prolonged movement of emotional release, the only
one such moment in the entire play for the two lovers and would-be
revolutionaries. But it is an emotional release heavily overladen with an
over-idealized symbolism in which the love between Daodu and Segi is
mythicized as the consummation of oneness between the male and female
principles and the resultant regeneration of the forces of nature. In the
central pages of the dramatic text in which this scene is enacted, dialogue
and action falter badly, progressively become inflated and mawkish; cor-
respondingly, the life-affirming values inscribed in utterance, action and
gesture in the scene take on an air of pietistic unreality:
: My eyes of rain, Queen of the Harvest night.
(slowly relenting, half ashamed): I was so afraid.
: There is nothing more to fear.
: I will never be afraid again.
: Two less for Kongi’s collection. I am glad the live one is your father.
: I feel like dancing naked. If I could again believe, I would say it was a
sign from heaven.
: Yes, if we were awaiting a sign, this would be it. It may turn me
superstitious yet.
: I want to dance on gbegbe leaves – I know I have not been forgotten
: I’ll rub your skin in camwood, you’ll be flames at the hide of night.
: Come with me, Daodu.
: Now? There is still much to do before you meet us at the gates.
: Come through the gates tonight. Now, I want you in me, my Spirit of
Harvest.
: Don’t tempt me so hard. I am swollen like a prize yam under earth,
but all harvest must await its season.
(CP,–)
The dramaturgic and aesthetic faults of this scene come to their apex
when Segi’s women break in on this romantic-symbolic exchange be-
tween the two lovers, robe Daodu in the resplendent costumes of the
Spirit of Harvest and with their leader Segi, kneel before Daodu in