Wole Soyinka
epistemic foundation of colonial authority. But by the same token,
Olunde is also the unhappy nemesis of his father’s fond hopes for re-
demptive action from his son against Pilkings and the oppressive social
power that he represents, as is revealed in the following exchange be-
tween Pilkings and Elesin Oba in the play’s denouement:
: Your son does not take so gloomy a view.
: Are you dreaming now, white man? Were you not present at the re-
union of shame? Did you not see when the world reversed itself and the
father fell before his son, asking forgiveness?
: That was in the heat of the moment. I spoke to him and...ifyou
want to know, he wishes he could cut out his tongue for uttering the words
he did.
: No. What he said must never be unsaid. The contempt of my own son
rescued something of my shame at your hands. You have stopped me in
my duty but I know now that I did give birth to a son. Once I mistrusted
him for seeking the companionship of those my spirit knew as enemies of
our race. Now I understand. One should seek to obtain the secrets of his
enemies. He will avenge my shame, white one. His spirit will destroy you
and yours.
()
On one level, the dramatic irony at work here is utterly devastating to the
calculations of both Pilkings and Elesin, for offstage, Olunde in his bid
to reactivate the aborted rite, is already dead by the time this exchange is
taking place onstage. But it would be too simple to see the corrosiveness
of the dramatic irony mobilized here as appertaining equally to colonizer
and colonized. As we have noted earlier in this discussion, the subversion
of the epistemic foundations of colonial authority is the most articulate
signification of Olunde’s suicide; and that undoes any interpretive move
to see an equivalence between the historic and ideological claims and
counter-claims of the colonizers and the colonized.
In one of the most insightful essays on the place of ritual idioms and
paradigms in Soyinka’s drama, an essay to which we have referred earlier
in this chapter, the late Philip Brockbank has urged a distinction between
theprimordialandliterarysources available to the contemporary dramatist
interested in exploring the possibilities inherent in the interface between
ritual and drama.Unlike most contemporary Western playwrights, ar-
gues Brockbank in this essay, Shakespeare was responsive to both of these
sources of ritual because he recognized that complex, urban civilizations
are no less subject to the primordial psychic promptings which lie at the
root of ritual than earlier stages of culture and society. If this is true of