Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex” It is within this treatment of forest-nature, this validation of nature’s
integrity (earth, sea, wind, mountains, stone, trees and metals) against
man’s historic assault that Soyinka provides the specificity of the oth-
erwise generalized canvas of the play. It is the validation of the animist
wisdom of the mythic and ritual epistemologies of “tribal” West Africa
against its historical experience: a precarious undertaking.The humans
depredate the forest-nature but the forest takes its toll, makes exactions.
Moreover, Forest Head is supreme, meaning: the earth is old, nature
subsists. To find, parallels to this absolute certainty of its own correctness
by the pure, unsullied animist wisdom, one would have to move beyond
the nineteenth-century Western romantic glorification of nature to the
present profound doubts of the ecological movement of the West in the
recognition that we will never subdue nature but will always remain part
of it.Still, this validation in the play proves illusory and precarious.
Soyinka may be upholding Nature against History when Murete says:
I am not much concerned. But it seems to me that limb for limb, the forest has
always proved victor ().
But it is an affirmation which Soyinka achieves mostly by linguistic
devices only, by rich imagery and poetic brilliance, and not by the use
of antagonisms in the plot of the play. One instance of this can be seen
when the “Chorus of Waters” warn:
Chorus of the Waters:
Let no man lave his feet
In any stream, in any lake
In rapids or in cataracts
Let no woman think to bake
Her cornmeal wrapped in leaves
With water gathered of the rain
He’ll think his eye deceives
Who treads the ripples where I run
In shallows. These stones shall seem
As kernels, his the presser’s feet
Standing in the rich, and red, and the
cloying stream...
Spirit of the Rivers:
Then shall men say that I the Mother Have joined veins with the
Palm my Brother.
Chorus of the Waters:
Let the camel mend his leaking hump
Let the squirrel guard the hollows in the stump.
(CP,)