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In his very life Clark exemplifies this uneasy fusion of the standard and the trendy. In introducing his quantity of poems A REED IN THE TIDE he considers himself as:
…….. that trendy cultural phenomenon they name ‘mulatto’ – not in flesh however in thoughts! Coming of an historic a number of inventory within the Niger Delta space of Nigeria from which I’ve by no means fairly felt myself severed, and going by means of the same old instructional mill with the common grind of English college at its finish, I generally marvel what in my make-up is ‘conventional’ and ‘native’ and what ‘derived’ and ‘fashionable’.
J.P. Clark embodies in his work a variety of influences from historic and fashionable western sources to the myths and legends of his Ijaw individuals. Though he writes in English so as to attain the widest potential viewers, African photographs, themes, settings and speech patterns are on the heart of his work.
Born in 1935 in Nigeria, Clark together with Wole Soyinka is one among Nigeria’s foremost dramatists and poets. His curiosity in poetry began whereas he was finding out at college School in Ibadan. There he additionally co-edited THE HORN, an undergraduate journal publishing poems, evaluations and articles by younger African writers. In 1964 he revealed his scurrilous work on American society AMERICA THEIR AMERICA based mostly on his experiences while finding out at Princeton College. He labored briefly on the Day by day Specific and co-edited BLACK ORPHEUS with Abiola Irele. He has written a number of volumes of poems and performs and produced two documentary movies The OZIDI OF ALONZI and The GHOST TOWN. He has since 1968 been instructing African Literature and English on the College of Lagos and is the director of the Repertory Theatre there.
The standard and the trendy are nearly all the time blended in Clark’s performs in themes, attitudes and strategies as they’re in a few of Soyinka’s early performs. His first two performs SONG OF a GOAT [performed in 1961] and The MASQUERADE [performed in 1965] comprise components of classical Greek and Shakespearean drama, the poetic performs of T. S. Elliot and the people literature of the Ijaw individuals which Clark says has a lot in widespread with classical drama. In SONG OF A GOAT a barren lady consults with a masseur and conceives a toddler by her husband’s brother. Unable to just accept this case, each the husband and his brother commit suicide. The kid, grown to manhood and unaware of the circumstances of his beginning, is the tragic hero of THE MASQUERADE. He travels away from his native village and engages a ravishing, strong-willed woman. When the younger man’s background is revealed the woman’s father forbids her from marrying him, however she refuses to abide by his determination. Within the violent denouement all of them die. Each performs are written in verse and share a relentless aura of doom, with neighbours functioning as refrain commenting on the tragic happenings.
A SONG OF A GOAT demonstrates effectively how the 2 components – the trendy and the standard – coalesce or battle. However the entire social scenario of the play is actually conventional. . The angle of the characters subsequently preserve strictly in step with the social ethos of the world created throughout the play. These are ethos and traditions sanctioned by the gods themselves. Those that pit themselves in opposition to it are seen as rebelling in opposition to the customs sanctioned by the society and the gods themselves. Due to this fact on account of resisting these customs. Zifa has an ill-fated battle to overturn the curse inflicted on him.
The play additionally exhibits the excessive premium the society locations on the reproductive act. It’s to them essentially the most sacred responsibility of life. Anybody who fails to replenish his home with youngsters is deemed as being responsible of a really severe omission, which may portend hazard because the masseur explains right here:
An empty home, my daughter, is a factor Of hazard. If males won’t dwell in it Bats or grass will, and that’s sufficient Sign for worse issues to return in.
So essential is that this act of fecundity that every thing else turns into subordinated and practical to it. For because the Masseur states:
You purchase your spouse the truest Madras, beat for her the very best gold and Anybody can see she may be very effectively fed However we fatten our maidens to organize for fruition, To not thwart them.
Considerably, the masseur hints that to not facilitate it’s to impede it. For custom holds that those that haven’t produced are nearly as good as useless. Due to this fact:
…customized dictates those that die childless Be solid out of the corporate of the fruitful whose Particular grace is interment within the township.
Zifa who has been cursed with infertility due to the sins of his father, refuses to stick to the standard curstom of giving his spouse over to somebody virile sufficient to make her bear fruits and by so doing verify her existence. She thus pits herself in opposition to a powerful conventional drive which could possibly be nearly not possible to battle in opposition to. The ill-advised nature of his quarrel in opposition to custom embodied within the oracular masseur – is proven in his rash assertion: ‘I’m sturdy and /Alive and dare you open your filthy/mouth to counsel I pawn my land?’ His very phrases repudiate the age-old perception that to not create is to not dwell and exposes the ill-fatedness of his battle. The approaching doom is underlined by the masseur’s reply:
You’re eaten up with anger however though You crush me, a cripple, between your sturdy Arms it won’t remedy your drawback.
And what he suggests, the masseur goes on, has been of a long-standing custom, our father didn’t forbid even in days/of outdated.’
Zifa’s battle in opposition to custom is principally by means of questioning the legitimacy of the curse positioned on him by cosmic forces. Right here he’s in direct fight with the gods whom he regards as thwarting his efforts to satisfy his marital tasks.. Even by means of his father who had angered the gods had died and had been buried within the evil grove, as customs dictates, and he has finished his duties as a son by making sacrifices, the curse remains to be prolonged to him when ‘they dared not spit at his father when he was alive.’ In a match of despair, he asks: ‘And am I in charge/If all was fish that come to his web? However the masseur quietly hints that maybe his fault was in bringing him again house amongst his individuals a bit too early for one who died of the white taint. However Zifa is to not be persuaded. He sees it as an unjust punishment which he describes as selecting his flesh ‘To the bones like fish a floating corpse’.
Sarcastically, Tonye, Zifa’s brother and Zifa’s spouse, Ebiere, of their effort to impact the procreative act Zifa has did not carry out additionally put themselves in the best way of custom. They’re thus threatened with doom. Their destiny comes from their omission – not searching for the sanction of custom and thus inviting the cleavages climaxing the play. Considerably within the warmth of the act – with Ebiere and Tonye interlocked – cock crows ominously and this instantly rouses the all-seeing Orukorere. The unnaturalness of the act and their unacceptance of custom is proven in her phrases:
I’ve seen a sight this nightfall to make The eagle blind. I heard the cock crow As I wakened from sleep. That was signal Of omen sufficient however little did I do know It was this nice betrayal of our race.
The futility of the battle in opposition to custom, and its self-destructive outcomes was being hinted at from the very begin of the play. The primary comes from the masseur who has been a prophetic voice of perception within the play. He warns:
….you your self noticed even now how the hen All however blew down the home with the flutter Of her wings. With the cock himself, the partitions Could effectively give in and I’m too outdated To begin elevating inexperienced thatch for my gray hair.
Although Orukorere, one other prophet-like determine, has been hinting at hazard from the play’s very begin, it is just in direction of the tip that his message turns into clear. Then she pronounces
There’ll by no means be mild once more on this Home, youngster, that is the night time of our race, The autumn of all that ever reared up head Or crest.
This fall appears as that of Adam and Eve of cosmic dimension affecting the destiny of all males. She concludes: ‘Recognition subsequently’s grow to be a factor/for houseflies and bats, has it? The destruction of Zifa, Tonye and Ebiere exhibits the destiny awaiting those that insurgent in opposition to custom and defy the gods.
The curse positioned on Tonye and Ebiere extends to the product of their incestuous act, Tufa, within the subsequent play THE MASQUERADE. Tufa himself recounts:
I’m that unmentionable beast Born of lady to brother and for whom brother Drove brother to horrible loss of life. That is not All. My mom who they are saying engendered The seed, on expulsion of it, withered Within the act, and it was left an outdated lady With out wit to select me up and take Into one other nation [ p86 THREE PLAYS]
Evidently then such a curse has doomed his love for Titi because it has his life… Right here, Titi defies custom to woo a person who’s cursed. She defies her father’s supply to dissolve the wedding with ‘a haphazard alternative’ in favour of the choicest man in all of the creeks and the virgin paths on land and sea. She scoffed that she would not ‘be put/On a platter for hawking’.
Nevertheless, the battle isn’t that straightforward, for the wedding had already been sure and blessed by Titi’s father, Diribi. He thus transforms himself into an confederate within the sacrilegious act although unwittingly. The dissolution of the wedding can’t then come just by proclamation from solely father and mom. For that they had solely then found the person’s ugly previous. It’s thus a conglomeration of ironies that of their battle in opposition to custom, each TitI and Tufa resort to custom – the wedding having been tied and blessed to justify their stance. The daddy, in flip, in a bid to uphold custom and battle in opposition to a curse that would come over his household, battles in opposition to custom itself, and brings himself a curse of wider ramifications. Sarcastically sufficient it’s the present that Tufa introduced Diribi on the event of his marriage that grew to become the instrument of his undoing and his spouse’s loss of life. In consequence, that complete drive face sure doom as with Umoko who misplaced her wits.
Admittedly, such a pervasive conventional setting brings in modernistic attitudes or forces which contest with the forces of custom in each performs. A SONG OF A GOAT and THE MASQUERADE reveal free-wheeling girls in quest for feminine independence in Ebierre and Titi. In her battle of phrases with Tonye she provides the looks of 1 who would omit nothing in her battle to show that her intercourse can’t be a cause for being put within the flawed on a regular basis. She says:
In fact, it’s the lady who’s within the flawed At all times I who’ve suffered neglect and Gathered mould like a factor of sacrifice Disregarded in solar and rain on the cross-roads You speak to me of my quick mood; what Brief mood have I, when it’s pulled and Tugged at each day like a hook-line?
Titi, however isn’t solely a girl however a younger woman striving to claim to the older people her proper to decide on the person she needs to be married to and to not be ‘placed on sale/like fish or fowl rejected by the meanest/Family’.
Each performs have been largely effectively acquired and their beneficial analysis is principally for his or her principally first charge artistry and class. For Anthon Astrachan, ‘At his weakest, he’s extra competent than many dramatists extra extensively identified exterior Africa; at his strongest, he’s magnificent. His THREE PLAYS can compete as equals on the stage of world literature with out dropping a cowries value of their African qualities.’ He goes on to check each performs of this primary charge dramatist to Sophocles’ Oedipus performs, as does one other critic, John Fergusson. ‘The language and feeling of each are so wealthy in motion that the reader is compelled to stage them within the theatre of his inside imaginative and prescient, and never having seen them grow to be much less of a handicap’. Going on to analyzing the language of SONG OF A GOAT he states thus:
The language evokes the pity and terror that are the prime goals of tragedy, and the dramatic building has an aura of doom….. Orukorere evokes the phobia of the offence that’s nonetheless to return. In her half-crazed nightmare:
I need to discover her, the leopard That can devour my goat, I need to Discover him.
John Ferguson describing it as a robust play additionally joins Astrachan in acknowledging how massively indebted Clark is to Greek drama with out being imitative or by-product. It recollects the curse of Laius or Atreus and their figuring out in OEDIPUS and AGAMENNON. The masseur is the equivalence of the divine determine that usually begins or ends Greek performs. The neighbours kind the refrain, although Clark doesn’t hyperlink his actions with music and dance sequences. The actions are taut, and the characters economical in quantity and conception. Like Greek drama the play is spiritual in tone. A number of the gadgets and approaches of Greek drama .are used with nice talent. The idea of the Messenger’s speech is superbly tailored to explain Zifa’s self-immolation within the sea. Probably the most shifting components of Aristotelian tragedy – peripeteia and anagnorisis – are all evident on this play.
Astrachan additionally notes that many traces such because the final one quoted are wealthy in fable. This final speech unveils a tragedy of revelation that’s the keynote and the automobile of motion in OEDIPUS TYRANNOS. However no such growth nor suspence could possibly be skilled in SONG OF A GOAT. No change, progress or degeneration happens in Tonye and Ebriere that convey them on to sin. The premise of the tragedy isn’t clearly established. Zifa’s tragedy thus is with out trigger.
African-American poet, Amiri Baraka’s appreciation of the distinctive African lyricism of Clark’s language can be value noting. He initially describes it as ‘so stunning a piece’. He expresses his issue in inserting Clark’s language, which to him, is English, however it’s not. The tone and the references are drawn from a clearly African expertise. ‘The English is pushed previous the stainless boredom of the latest Victorians to Non-European high quality of expertise, although it’s the European tongue which appears to form it, externally. However Clark appears to him after a particular emotional texture that’s unusual to European literature or life:
Masseur
your womb
Is open and heat as a room
It must accommodate many
Ebiere
Nicely, it appears to love staying empty
Masseur
An empty home, my daughter is a factor
Of hazard, if males won’t flip in it
Bats or grass will, and that’s sufficient
Sign for worse issues to return in
The writing of this play a couple of conventional Nigerian household break up and destroyed by adultery, strikes simply by means of the mythic coronary heart of African life, constructing a form of ritual drama that relies upon a lot on the author’s inside for its exactness and energy because it does on the narrating of formal ritualistic acts. The language is mild and lyrical more often than not, however Clark’s photographs and metaphors are strikingly and indigenously vivid as evident right here:
1st Neighbour
It must be simple to see a leopard
If he have been right here. His eyes must be
Blazing forth at midnight.
third Neighbour
So I hear I’ve heard them likened
To the sunshine home out on the bar
2nd Neighbour
And its movement is silent as that large home
We have to be cautious
These are African traces in tone and reference, securing for us readers a way of place.
Although in depth similarity has been established between this play and Greek tragedy, it’s not Greek tragedy. It could stand by itself two ft as Ijaw tragedy. Fergusson thus endorses it as ‘in some ways essentially the most exceptional play to emerge from Nigeria.’
The MASQERADE isn’t solely a sequel to SONG OF A GOAT however a tragedy with out hubris. John Ferguson although calling it as ‘not an unworthy companion to SONG OF A GOAT claims it has a far much less highly effective impression. Right here, the verse writing is extra sure however much less memorable. There’s much less climax and fewer anticlimax. The best writing is within the love speak of the primary act between Tufa and Titi with it is extremely, mellifluous passages. Its lightness contrasts effectively with the somber gravity and grim destruction of the ultimate scene. The dealing with of plot is untidier, much less taut and fewer managed. Although suspense and extra dramatic growth has been detected, the revelation doesn’t come originally – the characters react extra strongly when it does come.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Astrarchan, Anthony., ‘Like GOATS TO Slaughter THREE PLAYS by John Pepper Clark’ in BLACK ORPHEUS, No 18, October 1964, pp. 21-4
Clark, J. P. A REED IN THE TIDE
Clark, J.P. THREE PLAYS: SONG OF A GOAT, THE MASQUERADE and THE RAFT
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Source by Arthur Smith