The synthesis of violence in language and socio-political change in Esiaba Irobi’s Nwokedi by Ajumeze Henry Obi

Even before his death of cancer on the 3rd of May, 2010, Esiaba Irobi had established himself as a dramatist of immense innovative and creative stature whose dramaturgic offerings and theatre productions lent itself to currency of socio-political change against the backdrop of a decadent neo-colonial nation state. His plays include Nwokedi, Ami Too loud, Hangmen also die, Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, Why the vulture's head is naked , What songs do mosquitoes sing?, Cemetery Road and The fronded Circle.

Across his plays is a demonstration of unparalleled urgency for socio-political change of the dispossessed Nigerian youth by the political class even through the kaleidoscopic transitions from civilian and military regimes. Hangmen also Die, one of his most acclaimed plays for instance, dramatizes the crises of justice involving seven unemployed graduates in search of fulfillment who call themselves suicide squad, upon whom a death sentence is passed in the Izon State. But the hangman Yekini, suddenly aware of the aura of human preservation and ideological twist of justice, resolve not to hang the boys, abandon the job and returns to his earlier vocation in the sea as fisherman. Even when the prison doctor urged him:” Look, Yekini, you are not the law. They killed a man.They have to pay. And with their lives” .Yekini’s response was an example in defiance, and ideological response to a purgation and miscarriage of justice typical of Esiaba Irobi’s iconoclasm : “I have to know why the man I am going to hang committed the crime for which I am hurrying him into the valley of the shadow of death” Recalling the hanging of Ken Saro Wiwa in a Port Harcourt prison and the revolt by riverain women against foreign oil companies, Esiaba Irobi posited in an Interview with Nnorom Azuonye, that “Hangmen Also Die is the most prophetic of all…It is a picture of the future. Our future as a country: Area Boys. Bakassi. Armed Robbery. Anarchy! The worst is yet to come. Nigeria will break apart like a loaf of bread in water, it will capsize like a leaking canoe on the River Niger! Hangmen Also Die, as an apocalyptic, Nostradamic text belongs in the same category of intuitive and prophetic insight as A Dance of the Forests, A Man of the People and Come Thunder. It addresses Franz Fanon's injunction that "Every generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfil or betray it. "

Quest for socio-political change however is not a new phenomenon in African dramatic literature. Indeed what has been more noticeable and commonplace in the wide array of themes taking formation in post-colonial African literary landscape is the persistent interplay of the dynamics of socio-political change.It seem almost natural that African nation states emerging from a period of colonialism , post-colonialism and to what is now commonly referred to as neo-colonialism; epochs which throw up diverse experimentation of governance that in turn inspire diverse literary and dramatic responses.

For dramatists like Soyinka, the change is regenerative, communal cleansing as exemplified by plays like Death and the King’s Horseman, The Strong Breed etc.
Other dramatists, coming perhaps out of the heel of another generation and inspired by an entirely different milieu, will aspire a different variant for change. Acknowledging the true logic of purgative arrangement, Femi Osofisan, differ slightly from Soyinka on the choice of sacrifice or what is aptly called ‘messianic sensibilities’ .In an Interview with Edde M Iji, Osofisan maintains: “What I do not believe is that people should be designated or coerced into it, who have not hand in ruining the society. I think if you are going to cleanse the society, it should be of those very elements who have been responsible for dirtying society, for bringing sins, these are the people who should bear the burden of cleansing it”

Hence change is ubiquitous in the concept of African dramatic literature. However with Esiaba Irobi, is a propagation of change in all its untamed variants, though reminiscent of Soyinka’s ritual approximation, yet Esiaba Irobi’s drama demonstrates a more urgent, more pragmatic and angry Marxist temper in language and dramatic structure. Esiaba Irobi’s plays are a demonstration of defiance against establishment. However for the purpose of this examination, we will pick on Nwaokedi, one of the plays from the category Olu Oguibe called “theatre of the bloody metaphor.”.



Nwokedi (1991) dramatizes the story of Nwokedi Nwa Nkokedo (Nwokedi son of Nwokedi or Nwokedi Jr ), a revolutionary individual, a defiant caught up in the hereditary web of purging society of accumulated evil, a ‘strong breed’ , an approximation of Soyinkan Emma in the Strong Breed. Therefore Nwokedi nwa Nwokedi is an agent of change. He declares to his fellow corp members, ”I am the one empowered by the land to slaughter the sacrificial animal at the shrine of the gods and renew the strength of the earth with its blood”

But the dept and consciousness of his personality set the play on the path of impending crises. When we first see Nwokedi in the play, engage in a defiant scuffle with the Regimental Sergeant-Major (AWADO) over his refusal to participate in the parade at the NYSC orientation camp, and non-conformity with the traditional Military authority’s disciplinary decision.

AWADO: Kneel down
NWOKEDI: I will rather die on my feet than live on my knees.

In the process Nwokedi fights the Military officer, strikes him on the ground and tears his shirt. Urged to run by fellow youth corp members from impending danger of obvious punishment, Nwokedi avers “…Run? Why should I run? Why?....This is our moment. Our moment. When we must gather our strength and energies into the demands of a revolution. This is the moment when what makes us young men and women must muster us to the last and supreme sacrifice .The supreme action. The greatest decision. This is the moment of revolt. We must cross the threshold now. All of us!”

Later on we gain more insight into the personality of Nwokedi from a fellow corps member Habiba who also admires Nwokedi secretly for his revolutionary zeal. “He was defying the old order. He had seen beyond the façade of anthems and pledges. He understood the foolery that inspires the annual independence circus show. That is why he defied the anthem. Nwokedi! The defiant one! Defiance! And that again is why I admire him”
In another breath she declares glowingly that “there are very few men in this wide world who can forget about themselves and think always about their society”

This is the psycho-social personality of the hero upon whom is trusted also the cultic and ritual-hereditary responsibility of regenerating society, purging it of the accumulated evil of the previous year. For, at the very beginning of the play, what is described in the stage tableaux as ‘a violence of villagers’, three members of Ekumeku eagerly awaits Nwokedi Jnr’s return from National Youth Service Corps to perform the hereditary rite of sacrificing the Ekpe festival ram that will symbolically usher in the new year while ‘sacrificing’ the old year.It is a pervading metaphor of change, inevitable in entirety, especially as can be seen in the cultic preparation and initiations through the Ekpe cultic engagements, and Nwokedi’s messianic coercion through heredity.

The play Nwokedi is replete with revolutionary atmosphere as can be seen from the above foregoings. And this leads inevitably to exploring the Marxist theoretical issues inherent in the play’s structure and content. David Forgacs (1982) in an analysis of Marxist literary theories conceptualises a radix for all the concepts relating to Marxism and literary studies and concluding that “all Marxist theories of literature have a simple premise’, insisting that “literature can only be properly understood within a larger framework of social reality”. David Forgacs categorizes five salient approaches ‘devised for linking literature to social reality” :the reflection model of George Lukacs ‘ which sees literature as reflecting a reality outside it’, the production model of Pierre Machinery which proposes specific meaning for literary ‘production’, the genetic model of Lucien Goldmann ‘ concerned with the questions of how literature, along with the other arts, came to develop out of social life and what causes literary works to assume the form they do’, the negative knowledge model of Theodor Adorno premised on placing art and reality at a distance which gives work a vantage point from which actuality can be criticized, and finally, ‘the language centred model which insists that ‘society is not separable from language’ as it is ‘the material medium in which people interact in society and they see ideology as language in form of linguistic signs’. With regard to the work of Esiaba Irobi under our examination, the reflection model of George Lukac seem quite relevant, however we shall also be looking at the impulse and force of language in Nwokedi in the mould premised by Macherey’s language-centred model as detailed by David Forgacs.

The play Nwokedi is doubtless a direct response to the socio-political situation in Nigeria, replete with massive corruption of the ruling class desperate to hold on to power at all cost, hence engaging in electioneering manipulation and rigging and human sacrifice , and the consequent revolt of the unemployed youth who clamour for change. In Nwokedi the ruling class is represented by Nwokedi Snr and the son-inlaw, Aripko. Aripko has been a senator and, as a result of persistent failure to deliver election promises, is advised by The Unemployed Youth Association not to seek a second-term of office. However upon Aripko’s persistence to run in disregard of the warnings, his house was bombed to ashes. He cries to MRS NWOKEDI:

ARIPKO: They have burnt my car and burnt my life. They have butchered me like a sacrificial animal. They have torn my flesh from limb. What you are looking at is a pillar of ashes.

In Nwoke, Esiaba presents the untamed arrogance and brazen acquisition of wealth by the ruling as can be seen in the ARIKPO’s recount of the tragedy of his attack by the youths:

ARIPKO: My new house at ugep. What that house cost me is my secret. The doors were sliding doors.The floor was tiled with Italian Carrera marble.The walls were sprayed with terracotta.The roof was brittle asbestos.The ceiling made of briskets.And the palour? The palour was rugged with velvet…There were twenty-five bed rooms; it was duplex.Seven bathrooms and seven toilets.Every room was air-conditioned.Every window was was glazed with silicon. The chairs were imported from France….In-law, that splendid house, that magnificent house with all its beauty has been burn. Burnt to ashes.Burnt to cinders Burnt until there is nothing left but a heap of stones and bones.
MRS NWOKEDI:Who burnt the house?
ARIPKO:..The Unemployed Youth Association.
MRS NWOKEDI:Who are they?
ARIPKO:The devil’s own brigade! A miserable mob of jobless youngmen and women.A menace of unemployed chimpanzees.A harvest of political illiterates. Nonentities. Pieces of dirt…
MRS NWOKEDI: How did they do it?
ARIPKO:They planted a bomb in the parlour and it into pieces…

It is instructive to note that the reference to ‘bomb’ and subsequent spate of bombings during the Military regime of General Sani Abacha by civil right campaigners, the proliferation of ethnic militant groupings which took the nation of Nigeria in endless round of bomb explosions are all pointedly Nostradamic.This is why perhaps Nnorom Azuoye called Esiaba Irobi an intellectual terrorist (emphasy mine), though obviously phased from the title of Esiaba Irobi unpublished novel.The scenario is brazenly reflective of Esiaba Irobi’s view in the Interview with Nnorom Azuoye :” … the younger generation must set the music of words aside and try the machine gun, will this make a difference? Or shall we always end up defecating down our pants dangling from the hangman's noose if our feet fail, with speed to hop into exile?

There’s also another phase of change as evoked in the flashback when Nwokedi Jnr lead a mutiny against his Capone for looting gold during an operation at the Bucaneer confraternity in the University. Again, like in the Epke festival’s violence of villagers, the change is a bloody mutiny of death as Nwokedi declares “ it ain’t mutiny for me. It’s blood” , killing the Capone Mad Ahab in a combat of matchet, axe and sword.

Interwoven with scenes of protest and revolt are all the sublime language and poetry of violence
Typical of Irobi Esiaba who once defined poetry as “that inexplicable force that brought the universe into being and which will also destroy it”.

In Osisioma village, Nwokedi’s town, where Aripko has run to for refuge when his house was burnt at Ugep, Ekumeku, the Osisioma version of Ugep’s Unemployed Youth Association, change had begun its circle when, through the plot of Nwokedi Jnr, making his father lose his seat at the parliament for the second term.There is play here on the dialectics of change, the growing might of Ekumeku in religious and political hierarchy of the Osisioma community. Equally instructive is the fact that in a play-in-play, where Mrs Nwokedi dramatizes the coup that dispatches Nwokedi Snr, placing Aripko the role of the corrupt prototype. The flashback is at once true for Nwokedi Snr as for Aripko in her mimickry of Nwokedi Jnr:

MRS NWOKEDI: Standing beside me is a distinguished rogue, a political obsernity, a resourceful liar who thinks he can come here every four years and commandose us into selling our destiny to him.Before you ,Ekumeku, is a high-degree thief, a confidence trickster, a carapaced tortoise whose grey-haired generation has ruptured our future and left us foundering in the wind like yellow leaves in the harmattan.This same crook standing here, this vegetable who calls himself my father, summoned us like this four years ago….”

Therefore in Osisioma, Ekumeku has seized political power through the defeat of Nwokedi Snr at the Parliament masterminded by Nwokedi Jnr’s oratory and age-grade vanguard, which also constitute administration of the Ekpe festival, a festival which marks the end of one farming year and the beginning of another year, in a larger metaphoric sense, it is also a festival in which Ekumeku purges the land of decadent and social vices perpetrated by corrupt and inept ruling class.This sympolic cleasing is done traditionally with a ram. And it is the responsibility of Nwokedi Jnr, which he inherited from his father, to slit the head of the ram with a stroke of the matchet and spill the blood on the shrine.At the beginning of the play, Nwokedi Jnr has performed this task for six consecutive years.However for this year Nwokedi Jnr thinks a human blood will suffice, preferably the blood of a politician. In an exchange with Aripko, Nwoke jnr declares, “My generation gave you the future to hold in trust for us.You turned it into a handkerchief, used it to wipe the mucus of greed dripping from your wretched nostrils.After that you rumpled it, crumpled our future and sqeezed it into your pocket.But your pocket is full of holes.So our future fell out to the ground.And with your leprous feet, you quarried it into dust.Aripko, that is why this matchet must spill your blood today” In another breath, Nwokedi declares that "it is the sacrifice the future demands" Even when the politicians closest to him are his father and inlaw, Nwokedi does not shudder to sacrifice either of them.As the ultimate moment of the ritual approaches, Nwokedi is presented with Aripko tied hands, feet and neck and placed on the sacrificial log.In the process of slitting Aripko’s head his father rushes to intervene, the matchet of incensed Nwokedi descends on first Nwokedi snr and next, Arikpo.Hence it is doubtless that Nwokedi is a portraiture of a violent revolutionary change even as the last line of the chorus:|” …and blood is the rain that falls upon the land”


Within the structure of this revolutionary portraiture is perhaps one of the best collage of mellifluous poetry and violent language from a writer whose language Ola Rotimi once likened to listening to music. Esiaba Irobi strings words and poetry to reflect his revolutionary ideology. We have already gleaned Senator Aripko describe the Nwokedi generation and the Ekumeku, who represent the people, as "a disco-going, hemp-smoking, beer-guzzling generation [...] Touts loitering the streets like lost souls in search of financial salvation” And the morbid metaphor of sacrilege when Nwokedi slaughters his faither and inlaw is expressed by the Ufo-bearer in a traditional poetry and proverb characteristic of Igbo ritual and myth “A man never sees the lightning that strikes him down. The eye never sees what flies into it.The axe man has felled the tree we climbed to touch the sun”, he concludes “…fiery-bloodied panthers, desperate in pounce and paw have torn to pieces, the carcass of the tiger”

Replete in the play is a substantive dose of ‘bloody metaphor’, as when Nwokedi Jnr charges at his mother “, echoing the conversation between Nwoke and Aripko:

NWOKEDI: You look like a ram to me
ARIPKO:A ram?
NWOKEDI: A sacrificial ram.
ARIPKO: Who do you mean?
NWOKEDI: I mean a constipated destiny is staring you in the face.
{…} Soon, your skull will bounce on the surface of this earth like a cocoanut blown down by the wind…and your cunning brains will gush out on the ground like a congealed milk….

Indeed as the Epke festival celebrates the passage and death of the old year and the ushering of the new year, Esiaba Irobi constructs a metaphoric miscegeny of death and life, a circle of life which underlines the structure of the play as also typified in Nwokedi’s altercation with his father “Father, if the butterfly must fly, the caterpillar must die”


In summary therefore, Nwokedi is a dramatization of change in all its socio-political variants in the mould of Marxist-socialist temper, a change in which the praxis is focused in the purgation of socio-political decadence of the old corrupt order by the peasants most often represented by the youths; a change predicated on a revolutionary and bloodthirsty variant which makes it exclusively and uniquiely Esiabian.This view is not exclusive to Nwokedi, but a metaphor that runs through other plays of Esiaba Irobi aptly described by Olu Oguibe as theatre of bloody metaphor.However in subsequent essays I shall expand the scope of this research into a more comparative study to review divergences and divergences of this discourse as it relates to the works of Africa’s arguably most engaging dramatist of the post-Soyinka generation.


WORKS CITED:

Azuonye, Nnorom. "My E-conversation with Esiaba Irobi." Sunday Vanguard 21 Sept. 2003.

Edde M Iji: Femi Osofisan’s Philisophy of Drama and Theatre,Baaj,2001

Forgacs, David “Marxist literary theories” .Modern Literary Theory, A comparative introduction. Ed. Ann Jefferson and David Robey.London. BT Batsford Ltd,1989

--. Nwohedi. Enugu: Abic, 1991.
--. Hangmen Also Die. Enugu: Abic, 1989.
Olu Oguibe:"Esiaba Irobi: The Tragedy of Exile", Marble Tree Literay Supplement, Issue #7 Aug 2010.