Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex” to the occasion illustrious ancestors as symbolic presences of the greatness
and glory of the race. But the forest spirits, principally Forest Head, know
better; they know of the past crimes and evils of individuals and groups in
the community; they therefore plan to convert the euphoric supplication
of the humans to its opposite: a cathartic, purgative confrontation by
the gathered tribes with the truth of their past historical experience and
reality. Thus, not illustrious ancestors but two restless dead are sent to the
humans, accusers and gnawing spots in the buried collective conscience
of the race (the dead man’s name is “Mulieru” which literally means “He-
who-is-enslaved” – he is a ghost returned to confirm the participation
of black Africa in its darkest historical tragedy: the transatlantic slave
trade). The humans in fury and evasion drive out these unwelcome
guests; but the spirits of the forest are remorseless and they lure three
of the most important personages among the humans, Demoke, Rola
and Adenebi to an expiatory “dance” in the heart of the forest. These
three representatives of the human community have recently repeated
the cycle of moral corruption and murderous violence that they had each
perpetrated in previous incarnations in a decadent and brutal kingdom
of the past. In this ritual-judicial space in the heart of the forest, these
humans are forced to confront both the restless dead and their other
crimes and stupidities, which appear to them as objectified grotesqueries
and phantoms. Day breaks in the forest and the three humans, chastened
but still unsure and groping, return to the other humans.
This is the “conscious” storyline, the thematic surface of the play and
it entails an exemplary action, an attempt at a cathartic exorcism of
willful, defensive amnesia of collective guilt in the communal psyche of
West Africa. There is, however, alsoburied in the deep structures of the
play a “cultural unconscious” through which this “guilt” is homologously
transformed into an underlying drama of ideological alienation in which
thought, or the collective West African episteme, is tragically inadequate
to the historical problems it is called to “solve.” For this deeper structure,
we have to pay rigorous attention to Soyinka’s use of ritual idioms and
symbolism – most of which, in this play, are at their most opaque in all of
Soyinka’s drama – to complicate and even call into question the literal,
realistic plane of the dramatic action.
Critics have generally tended to further mystify the already complex
texture of this play by stating that structurally, there are several levels
of “being” represented in this play. One critic, Peter Nazareth, sees at
least five orders or levels of “being” in the play: the community of living
humans who are celebrating “the gathering of the tribes”; that of the