Soyinka
The Swamp Dwellers
Patrick Colm Hogan
Harry Garuba
Biodun Jeyifo
Soyinka’s Themes -- Yehifo
1. Paradoxical union of conflicting, basic
drives and impulses, in the individual as well
as in culture and society, especially the
opposing forces of creation and destruction:
There is a creator and a destroyer in all of us
and that quite often and at great cost, these
conflicting drives and impulses become
intertwined and inextricable. There is a terrifying
mix of altruism and misanthropy, the conjoining
of hatred of hypocrisy and cruelty with violent
contempt for ordinary human beings.
Themes
2. Recovery or recuperation of the lifeenhancing values of traditional or
indigenous African culture: The master
works of traditional African culture in myths
and folklore, arts and artifacts, sacred and
secular music and festivals contain values and
energies which can be accessed for emotional
anchor and spiritual revitalization in periods of
individual stress of social calamity.
Themes
3. Rebirth and renewal after death and
decay: Connected to his study of the rites of
cleansing and purification performed in
traditional African rituals: However, he merges
this optimistic view focusing on voluntary
sacrifice or scapegoating with the theme of
malevolent scapegoating to create varied,
complex and ambiguous works. Sometimes
death dealt out for the wrong reasons leads
only to spiritual bleakness; it is unregenerative.
Themes
4. Quest for wholeness: The search for
connections between all areas of life and
reality great and small, seen and unseen,
familiar and foreign. Includes a search for
connections between living, dead and future
generations. Nature is the anchor for this
search for wholeness.
5. Political theme: The relentless exposure
of the manipulative abuse and misuse of
power, knowledge, and insight.
Importance of Myth -- Hogan
Twins, as is well known, are revered among the Yoruba.
Linked with the god Ibeji, they are elevated above
children of single births. They are a special mark of
fertility as well, and the mother of twins is particularly
respected. If one twin dies, a small wooden doll is carved
in his or her likeness and placed in the family shrine. The
twin who has died has a special link with the living twin,
and the family prays to the soul of the dead twin to
protect the sibling who remains. Because of sanctity, and
fear that the second twin might join his or her companion
in death, it is taboo to say that one twin has died.
Instead, the Yoruba customarily say that "he [or she] has
gone to the market."
And Connection to TSD
1. Alu has twin sons. She worries that one of
them has died.
2. Makuri protests that he is not dead. He has
just moved to the city.
3. The myth is that one twin will call the other to
follow him in death – or in this case, to the city.
4. A connection is made (p. 106-107) between
the swamp and the city. Gonushi’s son left for
the city, and he went the same way as
Awuchiki.
IF . . .
• If he had really been dead, Alu would
have said “he’s gone to the market.”
• To day that he is dead, implies a fate
worse than death, a transformation more
thorough than that of death, in effect, a
spiritual death.
• The spiritual death of a generation, is the
literal death of a tradition, a culture.
Chaos/Swamps
• According to Soyinka, all structured life
rises from chaos. He writes “nothing
rescues man from loss of self within this
abyss but a titanic resolution of the will.”
Generally, this resolution ends tragically.
• Three great deities of tragedy: Ogun, the
god of Iron, Sango, the god of lightening,
and Obatala, the maker of human forms.
Ogun
• The great god who bridged the chaos, who
carved out a space for humans and gods
to meet.
• In the end, he succumbed to chaos,
murdering his own people in a drunken
frenzy.
Sango and Obatala
• Sango -- God of lightening, called down the forces of
chaos on himself and ended his own life. He was a great
king who, perhaps because of his own pride and cruelty,
was abandoned by his people, denounced by the chiefs.
He fled to the country, was abandoned by his wife, left
alone with one loyal slave.
• Obatala – the shaper of humans. He begs the supreme
god for the opportunity to drain the marsh and make
solid land to support life.
• Then he shapes life out of the muck.
• Once he got drunk, fell in to the abyss of chaos and
shaped disabled men and women. He mourns
throughout eternity for the suffering caused to these
people for his error.
The Swamp . . .
• In the play, the swamp is an image of this chaos.
It is natural disorder, always sinking beneath
one’s feet, leaving one without foothold.
• The city is artificial disorder, ethical principle or
structure replaced by the shifting contingencies
of economy and social morality, by pride or envy
or greed.
• Awuchike, far from observing his special
obligation to take care of his twin, has destroyed
him. He has stolen his goods and his wife,
driven him to suicide.
Country/City Divide
• Alu is the good country wife – faithful, woman who
conceives twins who share the color of the earth.
• Desala is the evil city wife – unfaithful.
• City = evil of money, corruption, greed.
• Swamp = tradition, crops, survival. However, the natural
chaos of the swamp is at work, too. The crops are
destroyed by the floods.
• And, by the “oil in the swamp water.” In this line, Soyinka
presciently observes the effects of the discovery of oil on
the Nigerian countryside, the enormous ecological and
human waste that would result from that discovery.
Also, the barber chair . . .
• Another invasion from the city: The chair
knocked a hole in the bottom of the canoe and
almost sunk it. (Tradition cannot survive the
infringement of the modern.)
• The carrier was stuck and had to be dug out.)
– Things sink you, they foster pride, envy and greed
– Carrier also stands for the scapegoat who can save
the people, the person who carries out of the village
the bad things that have entered it each year. This
carrier, though, is bringing the evil, the modern, into
the village or the country.
And then we have the Beggar
• He wants to “take a piece of ground and redeem
it from the swamp” or the chaos, to “drain the
filth away and make the land yield.”
• Then Kadiye enters. He is the filth that the
beggar wants to remove. He is rich in a poor
land, fat in a land of starvation, he eats the
people’s sacrifice to the gods, deceiving them
out of his own gluttony and greed.
• The tendency to corruption is universal. It
comes not just from the city, but also from the
country, the traditional.
So, . . . ?
• The Swamp Dwellers was produced in
1958, two years before Nigerian
independence. In this context, it is a play
that introduces the idea of where society
might go, what the new nation might be
like.
Beggar = Obatala one of the tragic
deities
• He wears white, the color Obatala wears.
• He worries about his worthiness, a trait of
Obatala after his “mistake.”
• He doesn’t drink. (After Obatala made the
misshapen people because he was drunk,
he gives up wine.)
• He wants to drain the land and make it
yield.
Igwezu is another -- Sango
• Like Sango, he was abandoned by his people, his
brother and his wife.
• He fled back to the country.
• He has attracted a loyal slave, the beggar, who is also
Obatala.
• In the legend, the slave waits while Sango wanders off
into the forest. After a while, the slave goes to find him
and discovers him dead. He has hanged himself.
• The beggar’s last line in the play, “I shall be here to give
account,” implies a similar ending for Igwezu.
So what hope is there?
•
•
The beggar tells the story on p. 116.
Hogan interprets it this way: This land is Africa, or Nigeria. The drought,
which kept all the people poor--so that "the land had lain barren for
generations [...] the fields had yielded no grain for the lifetime of the eldest
in the village"--was the period of colonial domination, which had begun a
century before. The momentary hope is independence, with its expectation
of universal freedom and prosperity: "This was the closest that we had ever
felt to one another. This was the moment that the village became a clan,
and the clan a household," the moment of national pride, the brief sense
that anything is possible now that we control our own destiny. But the
expectations of freedom are always quickly disappointed. The indigenous
elite, moneyed collaborators (like Awuchike), the fake village heads, with
their positions secured for the last 100 years by British guns, all the
exploiters of the people descend on the spoils, leaving nothing for the mass
of men and women: "The feast was not meant for us." The image of locusts
is apt: "They [...] squatted on the land. It only took an hour or two, and the
village returned to normal"
On Islands in PC lit -- Garuba
• Traditionally, we have the use of Island as
Shakespeare uses it in The Tempest. The island
setting is “discovered” by the colonizer and the
colonizer creates a narrative to describe his
experiences there. He shapes the discussion of
the people, the flora, the fauna, the resources.
• Garuba reverses this common pc interpretive
pattern in his reading of The Swamp Dwellers.
How?
• He claims that Soyinka focalizes the natives,
rather than the “invaders.”
• He claims that in The Swamp Dwellers, the
island is home, the center or point of origin, from
which islanders depart, not the margin to which
colonizers from an distant metropolitan center
travel.
• And, home, is not the womb-warmth of the
mother land that colonizers fantasize about
when they’re exploring, but, instead, “home is
where the hurt is.”
The play begins . . .
• By painting a vividly detailed picture of
‘home.’ (101)
• The semi-firmness of the island represents
the fragility of the island economy.
• The items in the description, the hut on
stilts, the walls of marsh stakes, the swivel
chair, the dirty white sheet underscore the
poverty of the people.
There is a general feeling of
foreboding . . .
• “Can you see him? Is the first line .
• Alu and Makuri are concerned about their
son’s ability to find his way home.
• She wants to go find him.
There is the recalling of a better
past . . .
• Alu and Makuri recall their wedding night.
• He talks of her faithfulness.
• Humor is prominent, a sense of well-being
counters the uneasy foreboding of the
present moment.
• The reader gets the sense that the old
people are trapped or imprisoned in an
untenable situation, one which they are
helpless to change.
Igwezu is feels this imprisonment,
too, he’s trapped by fate?
• This leads him to acts of rebellion and
revolt.
– He rejects traditional the religious leader
– And threatens him in a “sacrilegious” outburst.
It’s important to note that
• Igwezu’s frustrations are taken out, not on the colonizing
other, but on the corrupt local, Kadiye.
• Arun Mukherjee writes that “The postcolonial theorists
generalizations about ‘all’ ‘postcolonial people’ suggest
that Third Worldism and/or nationialism bind the peoples
to these societies in conflictless brotherhood, that
inequalities of caste and class do not exist in these
socieites, and that their literary works are only about
“resisting” or “subverting” the colonizer’s discourses.
• In this play, other local conflicts and inequalities abound
that command the attention of the islanders. Its about the
internal dynamics of the society and the economic and
other problems the people have to contend with.