Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex” : We are the dried leaves, impaled on one-eyed brooms.
: We are the headless bodies when the spade of progress delves.
: The ones that never looked up when the wind turned suddenly,
erupting in our heads.
: Down the axis of the world, from the whirlwind to the frozen drifts,
we are the ever legion of the world smitten, for – ‘the good to come’.
: Once my eyes were earthworms dragging in my tears.
(shouting): What is this? For what cursed future do you rise to speak?
: Then the ring of scourges was complete and my hair rose on its
tail like scorpions.
(CP,–)
This exchange between, on the one hand, the Ant Leader and his co-
horts and, on the other hand, Forest Head and Aroni, is an almost
perfect microcosm of the entire play in terms of the tension between, on
the one hand, imaginative boldness and metaphoric richness and, on the
other hand, lack of formal, technical mastery of materials threatening
always to overwhelm the reader and the audience. The central idea in
the exchange is an old, timeless theme of engaged literature: workers
as ants trodden underfoot in the march of progress. The way in which
Soyinka transforms this theme into one of the most resonant and lay-
ered tropes in the ritual masque scene is worthy of review, as are the
risks and slippages incurred in the process. First, the irruption of the ants
into the scene is shrouded in mystery and enigma, for even Forest Head
himself, the “father of secrets,” does not immediately recognize them.
Moreover, their ascension to centre stage within the scene is clothed in
a myriad of metaphors that considerably enhance their associative link
with too many forms, too many communities of exploitation, suffering
and drudgery. They are said to be a collective “hand that reaches from
the grave” (countless generations of the oppressed of past ages); they
take their “color from the fertile loam,” their “numbers from the hair
roots of the earth” (peasants who live close to the land and base their
supreme ethical values, their identity on the “soil”); they are the ones who
try “to be forgotten” by “staying low” (anonymous toilers and drudges
in their mass, “forgettable” existence); they are the ones remembered
when nations “build with tombstones” (millions of war dead memorial-
ized in the absurdity of cenotaphs erected in the name of the “unknown
soldier”); and they are “the ever legion of the world smitten for the good
to come” (the poor expropriated and disenfranchised by the promise of
a better tomorrow which has been made to the countless generations
of the ancestors of the present generation of the expropriated). The fact