Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex” The specifications for the realization of Elesin’s performance in this scene
tacitly allude to the “contraction” in contemporary Western drama that
Soyinka theorizes in the essay earlier discussed in this chapter, “The-
atre in African Traditional Cultures.” Western actors are not nowadays
typically required to speak, chant, sing and dance their lines simulta-
neously, but therewasa time in Western cultural and theatrical history
when this was not the case. It certainly is the case with the traditions of
acting in the great classical performance art of Asia like the Noh and
the Kabuki. Soyinka’s point, demonstrated both theoretically and prac-
tically, is that modern African theatre need not follow the evolutionary
path of Western drama, away from the expansive roots of the theatre in
festivals; furthermore, there is an insistence also that the modern theatre
performer, African and non-African alike, has it within his or her natu-
ral endowment of body, voice, gesture and latent rhythms and energies
to realize this simultaneous integration of skills which have come to be
normatively separated and assigned to distinct, generically bounded arts
of performance like dance, singing and acting.
The actual content of the narrative danced, sung and mimetically
acted by Elesin in this scene is an important parallel to its mode of
presentation. The central linguistic and rhetorical construct in the scene,
the “Not-I” cognomen given to the bird who comes visiting as Death’s
herald, is a term of elision from the much longer “It-is-not-I-who-saw-
that-bird-of-ill-omen (Yoruba: “Kise-emi-lo-ri-eiye-irikuri-yen”).” As the
question is put to each character named in Elesin’s narrative whether or
not they hadseenthe bird, the terrified man or woman quickly invokes
the longer phrase as a sort of mantra to ward off the “evil” of death –
and takes to his or her heels. The “Not-I” bird thus takes its name from
the universal human refusal to be reconciled to the inevitability of death.
In his vividly animated tale, Elesin not only admits to seeing the bird, he
also boasts of playing a willing and hospitable host to it, proudly asserting
that for at least a season, the call of the Not-I bird will be heard neither
by farm homesteaders or city dwellers.
This fabulous conceit of Elesin that he, and only he, is master of the
universal fear of death, with all its hyperbolic frankness, is considerably
beggared by the fanciful scale of another narrative that Elesin fashions
at the end of this first scene of the play in order to consummate a sexual
liaison with a nubile beauty on the very eve of his ritual suicide. By con-
vention, a man in his position is allowed virtually any whim, any request,
but since his wish must not be seen as that of a lecherous libertine, Elesin
casts his request in the idiom institutionally reserved for the expression