The “drama of existence”: sources and scope This ability which can be characterized as embodied, performa-
tive mimeticism, is one of the foundational bases of the suppleness of
Soyinka’s generically and stylistically eclectic dramaturgy. There are in-
numerable examples of this in his dramatic corpus. In the two “Jero
plays,” the playwright enters completely into the world of the beach
prophets of Lagos Island, with their unique pseudo-liturgical speech
habits and expressive behavior which set them apart from other occupa-
tional groups and the rest of the population. This is also true ofRequiem for
a Futurologistin which it is the brotherhood of psychics, astrologers, para-
psychologists, palm readers and the like who regale us with the elaborate
idiolects, world-view, rivalries and foibles peculiar to their world. We
may think analogously here of Ben Jonson’s memorable ventriloquizing
and parodying of the special jargon and world-views of pseudo-scientists,
pseudo-philosophers and knights inThe Alchemist, or of Caryl Churchill’s
appropriations, in the play,Serious Money, of the hermetic newspeak of
traders, bankers, stockbrokers and arbitrageurs.
Perhaps the most impressive of Soyinka’s feats of entering into, in-
habiting and then appropriating the “languages” internal to a particular
social group that is distant from his own middle-class background are to
be encountered inThe RoadandFrom Zia with Love. In both plays, there is
a complete hermeticization of the milieu of the lumpen, semi-employed
and working class characters, together with the “world” of their social
and demographic neighbors, the criminal underclass of extortion rack-
eteers, jailbird felons and petty crooks. Indeed, on the strength of these
two plays alone, not to talk of the two “Jero plays,” Soyinka must be
ranked with the late Ken Saro-Wiwa as one of the two most accom-
plished creative translators of West African pidgin English into a highly
nuanced literary language. The following scene fromThe Roadis as good
as any to illustrate this point. It entails the enactment of the bizarre, id-
iosyncratic views and attitudes of the oil-tanker driver, Sergeant Burma,
on such diverse issues as the fierce professional pride of all those who
work, live and die on the roads, the ideological formation of West African
veterans who fought in the empire’s wars as members of “subject” races,
and the savage dog-eat-dog morality of most of those compelled to live
at the lower depths of the social order. Thus, though the scene contains
a powerful distillation of a particularly cynical side of the world-view of
the composite social group to which Sergeant Burma belongs, it is also
a veritabletour de forceof mimetic ventriloquism, and its driving power
comes from the fact that since Sergeant Burma is dead, it is Samson
who reanimates the dead man by the deployment of brilliant mimicry to