The “drama of existence”: sources and scope adoration of, and supplication to his presumed salvational powers. These
faults are all the more surprising because this scene comes from a play
which, with all its faults, contains some of Soyinka’s most sparkling and
accomplished verse dialogue. Indeed, the very fact that this verse dia-
logue – narrated and chanted as paeans to the chiefly and ritual func-
tions of Danlola and his court – contains a heavy freight of formalism
and symbolism proves that it is not idealization or abstractionism in it-
self which proves insuperable for Soyinka’s dramatic genius; rather, it
is idealization without embodied, lived, acted-upon experience. This is
perhaps the secret source of Soyinka’s ability, almost without parallel
among contemporary playwrights, to make ritual formalism a vigorous,
vibrant theatrical expression. And this is so precisely because ritual cer-
emonialism is, for Soyinka, a lived, embodied experience. The following
passage from “Hemlock,” the prologue toKongi’s Harvest, shows Soyinka’s
deftness and discipline in giving form and body to ritual ceremonialism
as a state of being-together-in-the-world:
(As the king’s men begin a dirge of ‘ege’, Danlola sits down slowly onto a chair, drawing more
and more into himself)
: I saw a strange sight
In the market today
The day of the feast of Agemo
The sun was high
And the king’s umbrella
Beneath it.
: We lift the king’s umbrella
Higher than men
But it never pushes
The sun in the face.
: I saw a strange sight
In the market this day
The sun was high
But I saw no shadow
From the king’s umbrella.
: This is the last
That we shall dance together
This is the last the hairs
Will lift on our skin
And draw together
When the gbedu rouses
The dead in Oshugbo...
: Don’t pound the king’s yam
With a small pestle