Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex” discussed earlier in this study:
(more to himself): Trouble me no farther. The fooleries of
beings whom I have fashioned closer to me weary and distress me. Yet I must
persist, knowing that nothing is ever altered. My secret is my eternal burden – to
pierce the encrustations of soul-deadening habit, and bare the mirror of original
nakedness – knowing full well, it is all futility. Yet I must do this alone, and no
more, since to intervene is to be guilty of contradiction, and yet to remain alto-
gether unfelt is to make my long-rumored ineffectuality complete; hoping that
when I have tortured awareness from their souls, that perhaps, only perhaps, in
new beginnings...(CP,)
It might well be objected that Forest Head and the beings of the forest are
symbolic representations used by Soyinka to probe the complex nature
of human motivations and, in the instance of Eshuoro and Ogun’s rivalry
mirrored in the parallel relationship between Demoke and Oremole, hu-
man compulsions toward, and propensities for destructiveness. No doubt
this is part of the function of these beings in this play and this is a time-
less device, folkloric and literary. But there is no question that Soyinka
presents these representations as aspects of a living religious sensibility,
hence as an ideological substratum with all the contradictions inherent
in religious ideology. And chief of these contradictions is the antagonism
which exists between the Forest and the Town, the supernatural beings
and the humans, an antagonism which takes the form of mutual depre-
dations between Forest and Town, and in which “injury” is traded for
“injury”:
: Oh. Oh. So you can count on them can you? You have been poisoning
the minds of the ants.
: They were not difficult to win over. And they’ll be present at our
welcoming. Four hundred million of their dead will crush the humans in a
load of guilt. Four hundred million callously smoked to death. Since when
was the forest so weak that humans could smoke out the owners and sleep
after?
: No one has complained much. We have claimed our own victims –
for every tree that is felled or for every beast that is slaughtered, there is
recompense, given or forced.
(CP,)
Clearly, the ideological manifestation of the use of the forest and its
denizens in this play lies in this, that it is no less than Nature objectified,
anthropomorphized, peopled by its benefactions (Forest Head, Spirit
of the Palm, Spirit of the Sun, Chorus of the Waters), its malevolence
(Eshuoro, Spirit of Volcanoes, etc.), its capricious will (Ogun, Aroni)
and its humor and spleen (Murete, Eshuoro’s Jester). And it is necessary