Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds (Classical Presences)

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter

CLASSICAL PRESENCES The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds Edited by LOR NA H A R DW I C K A N D C A RO L G I L L E S P I E

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Oxford University Press 2007 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data (Data available) Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–929610–1 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Preface This volume grew out of a conference, Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds, held at the Open University in the West Midlands Centre in Harborne, Birmingham, in May 2004, organized by the Reception of Classical Texts Research Project. We thank the following organizations for providing the financial support that enabled the conference to include participants from eleven countries and all career stages: The British Academy; The Arts Faculty of the Open University; The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies; and the Open University’s Ferguson Centre for Research into African and Asian Cultures, which also collaborated in the organization of the conference. The Director of the Ferguson Centre, Dr David Richards, also took on the role of discussant. The Ferguson Centre carries the name of the family Trust of the founding Dean of the Open University Arts Faculty, Professor John Ferguson (1921–89). Before coming to the Open University, where he was Dean and Director of Studies in Arts from 1969 to 1979, John Ferguson held academic posts at the Universities of Newcastle and London (Queen Mary College) and was Professor of Classics at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria 1956–66. Throughout his life he worked for peace, conflict resolution and cross-cultural understanding and dialogue through the medium of Classics. Many of the issues that he opened up through his research and teaching continued to be addressed in the debates at the conference. The conference was a rewarding event marked by a high degree of cross-disciplinary analysis and debate, both in the formal sessions and between them. We thank all the conference participants for sharing their expertise and energy, and the contributors to this collection for their cooperation and patience during the preparation of the volume. We also owe a great deal to our Open University colleague, and editorial assistant, Jane Cawkwell, and to Hilary O’Shea of Oxford University Press for her encouragement of the project. Special thanks also to Nic Williams, the production editor; Helen Reagan, the proof reader; Jeannie Labno, the copyeditor; and to Isobel McLean who prepared the index. Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie Milton Keynes, December 2006.

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Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors

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Introduction Lorna Hardwick

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PART I: CASE STUDIES 1. Trojan Women in Yorubaland: Femi Osofisan’s Women of Owu Felix Budelmann 2. Antigone’s Boat: the Colonial and the Postcolonial in Tegonni: An African Antigone by Femi Osofisan Barbara Goff 3. Antigone and her African Sisters: West African Versions of a Greek Original James Gibbs 4. Cross-Cultural Bonds Between Ancient Greece and Africa: Implications for Contemporary Staging Practices John Djisenu 5. The Curse of the Canon: Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame Michael Simpson 6. Post-Apartheid Electra: In the City of Paradise Elke Steinmeyer 7. Sculpture at Heroes’ Acre, Harare, Zimbabwe: Classical Influences? Jessie Maritz

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PART II: ENCOUNTER AND NEW TRADITIONS 8. Perspectives on Post-Colonialism in South Africa: the Voortrekker Monument’s Classical Heritage Richard Evans

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9. Imperial Reflections: The Post-Colonial Verse-Novel as Post-Epic Katharine Burkitt 10. A Divided Child, or Derek Walcott’s Post-Colonial Philology Cashman Kerr Prince 11. Arriving Backwards: the Return of The Odyssey in the English-Speaking Caribbean Emily Greenwood 12. ‘If You are a Woman’: Theatrical Womanizing in Sophocles’ Antigone and Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona’s The Island Rush Rehm 13. Finding a Post-Colonial Voice for Antigone: Seamus Heaney’s Burial at Thebes Stephen E. Wilmer

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PART I I I : C H A L L E N G I N G T H E O RY: F R A M I N G FURTHER QUESTIONS 14. ‘The Same Kind of Smile?’ About the ‘Use and Abuse’ of Theory in Constructing the Classical Tradition Freddy Decreus 15. From the Peloponnesian War to the Iraq War: a Post-Liberal Reading of Greek Tragedy Michiel Leezenberg 16. Western Classics, Indian Classics: Postcolonial Contestations Harish Trivedi 17. Shades of Multi-Lingualism and Multi-Vocalism in Modern Performances of Greek Tragedy in Post-Colonial Contexts Lorna Hardwick

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18. The Empire Never Ended Ika Willis 19. Another Architecture David Richards

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Bibliography Index

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List of Illustrations Cover picture: Mo Sesay, Golda John and Nick Oshikanlu in Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To blame (Arcola Theatre, London, 2005). Directed by Femi Elufowoju, Jr. Photograph: Marilyn Kingwill/ArenaPAL Figs 7.1–7.4 Four panels from the monument at Heroe’s Acre, Zimbabwe. Photographs: Jessie Maritz Fig. 7.1 Oppression

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Fig. 7.2 Politicizing

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Fig. 7.3 Armed Struggle

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Fig. 7.4 Ceasefire

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Fig. 8.1 Enclosure of the Voortrekker Monument. Photograph: Richard Evans.

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List of Contributors Felix Budelmann is Lecturer in Classical Studies at the Open University, Milton Keynes. His main research interests are Greek literature and its reception, in particular tragedy and lyric. He is currently working on an edition with commentary of a selection from Greek lyric, and on a project about the Anacreontic tradition. He is also editor of the review section of the Journal of Hellenic Studies. Katharine Burkitt recently completed a PhD in the School of English, Sociology, Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Salford. Her doctoral studies explored the form of the contemporary postcolonial verse-novel and the way in which epic is revised and politicized. Her research interests include postcolonial literature and theory, contemporary poetry, black British writing, and cultural theory. Freddy Decreus is a Classical philologist, specializing in the reception of Classical Antiquity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He works at the University of Ghent, where he is responsible for courses in Latin Literature, Literary Theory, Comparative Literature, and Theatre History. His publications have addressed classical tragedy and the modern stage, mythology and modern painting, postmodernism and the rewriting of the classics, and feminism and the classics. John Djisenu is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts, University of Ghana, and the Manager of the Efua T. Sutherland Drama Studio, the main performing arts centre of the university. He lectures in theatre history, as well as technical theatre and design. He has produced, or been involved in, nearly thirty productions, and has published articles in The Journal of Modern African Studies, Legon Journal of Humanities, MATATU: Journal of African Culture and Society, and Journal of Performing Arts, Legon. Richard Evans is Lecturer in Ancient History in the School of History and Archaeology at Cardiff University, and until 2005 taught at the University of South Africa in Pretoria, RSA. His main interests are in Roman republican history and Hellenistic Sicily and he is the

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author of Gaius Marius: A Political Biography (1994) and Questioning Reputations: Essays on Nine Roman Republican Politicians (2003). A monography entitled Syracuse in Antiquity: History and Topography is forthcoming (2007). James Gibbs has worked in the Ministry of Education, Khartoum, Sudan, and he taught at the universities of Ghana, Malawi, Ibadan, and Lie`ge before joining the staff of the University of the West of England. He has published extensively on African literature in English, particularly drama, and that produced in the African countries in which he has worked. He has edited journals and collections of essays, was consultant for a Channel 4 Bandung Productions programme on Wole Soyinka (1987), and has worked with publishers of African literature in a variety of capacities. His current projects include the collection and publication of essays on Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright in whose work he has taken a particular interest. Barbara Goff is Reader in Classics at the University of Reading, England. She has published extensively on Greek tragedy and its reception, and is the editor of Classics and Colonialism (London: Duckworth, 2005). Emily Greenwood is Lecturer in Greek in the School of Classics, University of St. Andrews. Her interests are in the areas of the reception of classics in the Caribbean; translation studies and Classics; classics and comparative literature. She is currently working on a book manuscript, with the provisional title: Afro-Greeks: Receiving Classics in the Caribbean (1870–1990). Lorna Hardwick teaches at the Open University, UK, where she is Professor of Classical Studies and Director of the Reception of Classical Texts Research Project. She is currently working on the relationship between the reception of classical texts and broader cultural shifts. Michiel Leezenberg teaches in the Department of Philosophy and the M.A. program Islam in the Modern World at the University of Amsterdam. In the the 1990s, he conducted extensive field research in the Middle East, especially Iraqi Kurdistan. Among his book publications

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are Contexts of Metaphor (2001), an award winning history of Islamic philosophy, and, most recently, The Curse of Oedipus: Language, Democracy and Conflict in Greek Tragedy (in Dutch). Jessie Maritz is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies, Classics and Philosophy at the University of Zimbabwe. A Fellowship from the Onassis Foundation in 2004 and a Research Fellowship from the Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge in 2006–07, have made her current research projects possible: she is currently researching representations of Africa and Africans in Europe’s classical art. Cashman Kerr Prince is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Southern California. He is trained in Classics and in Comparative Literature, holding degrees from Wesleyan and Stanford Universities, as well as the Universite´ de Paris 8. He works on early Greek poetry, including didactic, larger questions of Greek poetics, and the reception of Classical texts primarily in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Rush Rehm is Professor of Drama and Classics at Stanford University. He has written extensively on Greek tragedy, including The Play of Space: Spatial Ttransformation in Greek Tragedy (Princeton, 2002), and Radical Theatre: Greek Tragedy and the Modern World (Duckworth 2003). He has contributed essays to Fiona Macintosh et al. (ed.), Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004 (OUP, 2006) and to Marianne McDonald and Michael Walton (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre (CUP, 2007). He also directs and acts professionally, and is Artistic Director of Stanford Summer Theater. David Richards is Professor of English and Director of the Centre of Commonwealth Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland. From 2002 to 2006 he was Director of the Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies at The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. Professor Richards’ research interests are in the areas of literature, anthropology, art history and cultural theory, and the material, visual, creative, and performative dimensions of colonial and post-colonial cultures. He is currently completing a monograph on the cultural history of the archaic, which examines the role of anthropology and

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(more centrally) archaeology in modernism and post-colonialism over the period from 1875 to the present. Michael Simpson is Lecturer in English at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London, England. His research interests span Romanticism, classicism, and post-colonialism. He has published critical work across the broad field of Romantic literary culture, on drama and theatre, poetry and the novel. His interest in the Graeco-Roman Classics lies particularly in how they have been adapted within postcolonial and especially African, Afro-Caribbean, and African-American literatures and theatres. Elke Steinmeyer is Lecturer in the Classics Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. She obtained her Staatsexamen in Greek and Latin at the Freie Universita¨t Berlin, Germany. In 1995 and 1996, she worked as a Foreign Expert for Classics at the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilisations (IHAC) in Changchun, People’s Republic of China. Her main areas of research are Greek Tragedy and Reception Studies. The chapter on Mark Fleishman is part of her PhD thesis on the reception of the Electra myth after 1970. Harish Trivedi is Professor of English at the University of Delhi and has been Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and the University of London. He is the author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (Calcutta, 1993; Manchester, 1995), and has co-edited Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800–1990 (London, 2000), Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London, 1999), and Interrogating Post-colonialism: Theory, Text and Context (Shimla, 1996; reprint 2000). He has translated from Hindi Premchand: His Life and Times (Delhi, 1982; reprint 1991), and coedited a special issue with ‘Focus on Translation’ of the postcolonial journal Wasafiri (London, Winter 2003). Steve Wilmer is Associate Professor at the Deparment of Drama, Trinity College Dublin. Steve is also a playwright and his plays have been produced at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Lincoln Centre, the Body Politic in Chicago, the Roundhouse, ICA and Cockpit theatres in London, the Project Arts Centre in Dublin, and toured in various

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countries. His play Scenes from Soweto was published in Best Short Plays of 1979, and has been translated into several languages. Current projects include a monograph on the development of national theatres in emerging nations in Europe and editing collections of essays on Native American Performance and Representation, the formation and development of National Theatre Companies in Europe and the representation of women in ancient Greek drama. Has published numerous articles in journals and books and is contributing to a new history of German theatre to be published by Cambridge University Press. Ika Willis is Lecturer in Reception in the Department of Classics and Ancient History, Bristol University. She works in the field of textuality and reception, and is particularly interested in the idea of the archive, and in the impact of phonographic and photographic technologies on philosophies of writing, reading, and reception. She also writes on fan fiction (particularly slash) and the erotics of rewriting. She is currently working on a book based on her doctoral dissertation, provisionally entitled Fama in Printing House Square.

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Introduction Lorna Hardwick

In March 2005 the Fellows of the Africa Leadership Initiative discussed Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone as rewritten by Jean Anouilh in the context of the occupation of France by the Nazis during the Second World War. Some supported Creon’s actions on the grounds that all must live within the law. Others judged that Antigone was justiWed because the law was unsound. Most found correspondences with and implications for the situation of their own countries.1 The occasion highlights many aspects of the paradoxical interaction between classical texts and post-colonial situations. Are classicists justiWed in pointing to the importance of the Sophocles’ text for debates about how rulers should think and act?2 Or should they shudder at yet another possible example of cultural imperialism with invocation of the authority of classical material in order to shape the development of independent nations? And what changes in perceptions of the ancient world, its ideologies and its writing and artefacts are created and embedded by contemporary activities that explore, interpret and translate them into other languages and cultures? Such issues were central to the conference on Classics in PostColonial Worlds held in Birmingham in 2004 and were further complicated by the ‘industry’ of post-colonial and post-colonial studies (well summarized in GoV 2005: 1–24). Post-colonial studies has provided 1 Summarized in the report ‘The Promise of Leadership’ (Africa Leadership Initiative 2005). 2 See for example Nelson Mandela’s reXections on the importance of the play in his own political development (Mandela 1994: 540–41).

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many of the concepts and theories that enable discussions to take place across disciplines and yet has also been accused of being another form of the West’s ‘will to power’ (Ahmad 1992 passim; Azim 2001: 243–47). Most conference participants were uneasy about the existing concepts and academic discourses available to them in discussing the central issues of how, why, and with what eVect writers, theatre practitioners, poets, thinkers, sculptors, and architects used, abused, rewrote, and adapted the texts and images of ancient Greece and Rome in the cultural and political contexts of a supposedly post-colonial world. One aim of the conference was to develop case studies that would bring together classicists’ scholarly traditions of working closely with texts and contexts and the perceived need for post-colonial analysis to avoid overarching generalizations and theories. Post-colonial critics themselves have pointed out how such generalizations suppress the speciWcity of particular national and cultural histories, and the distinctiveness of individual writers and artists (Boehmer 1995; Walder 1998). Yet there was also a sense that it was necessary to avoid an uncritical sense of relief that classical texts have in recent years been recognized as a source of resistance and liberation as well as, or even rather than, suppression (see Flashar 1991 for information on the popularity of performances of Antigone in Nazi Germany, and Hardwick 2000 for examples of the interventionist role of classical texts in the second half of the twentieth century). Much debate therefore centred on the paradoxical situation of classical texts, especially on the diverse ways that they have migrated and been transmitted worldwide, and the variations in how they have been received and reused. Mapping the journeys reveals how perceptions of, and attitudes to, the ancient world and its genealogies have been transformed. The process also opens up new questions about the nature and trajectories of cultural activity in post-colonial contexts. For example, a test can be banned or censored in one context and regarded as canonical in another, as was the case with Athol Fugard’s play The Island, which was considered subversive by the apartheid regime in South Africa, and too politically sensitive to receive Arts Council funding in the North of Ireland (Deane 2002: 161). Yet it subsequently achieved international canonical status. The preponderance of discussion of drama, and especially of Greek drama, is a feature and reXects the importance of this art

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form in recent cultural politics. As the Irish dramatist Frank McGuinness commented: ‘It seems to be happening through the English-speaking world, that the Greeks are emerging as the dominant international force in our theatre. . . . The strong meat is the diet they want to feed on’ (Long 2002:280). Nevertheless, a number of essays also take up the impact of Roman art and architecture and the increasing resonance of Roman ideas and imperial practices in modern geo-politics. This last is a phenomenon that echoes Virgil’s exploration of such themes in the Aeneid (Armstrong 2006). Because of the conference’s emphasis on the documentation and analysis of practices and its conviction that practice runs ahead of theory, there is no section of the book that is exclusively devoted to a discussion of the ‘great names’ of post-colonial theory and criticism. The names of Homi Bhabha, Franz Fanon, Paul Gilroy, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and others, appear in the footnotes and Bibliography, and sometimes their particular insights are directly discussed. Sometimes ancient and modern coalesce in unexpected ways; for example, Said (1978, 1993) and Virgil (the Aeneid) both make the association between imperial power and the shaping and dissemination of culture. The conference was sensitive to the nuances of the terms ‘colonial’, ‘post-colonial’, and their variants. In particular, the terms were used in their widest sense to include domination and emancipation through educational, ideological, cultural, and economic means, as well as through physical force. We were also very aware (not least because of the practices of the Roman Empire) that imperial power almost always operates with the complicity or active participation of e´lites among the colonized and that the continuing role of these e´lites after independence raises special problems. A further major issue was that transitions from colonial to post-colonial are processes not events (whether or not marked by ‘independence’ ceremonies) and that post-colonial activity—emotional, intellectual, psychological, artistic, and political— takes place when there may still be physical and material repression, and vice versa (see further Hardwick 2004a: 219–22). The debates also needed to address questions of neocolonial activity in the contexts of the geo-politics of the early twenty Wrst century (see Wilmer in this volume). Even the inscription of the words ‘post-colonialism’ carries its own problems. Some critics argue that the inclusion of the hyphen implies

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a material historicist closure to the practices, experiences, and institutions of colonialism, and that such an abrupt and all-embracing transition cannot be justiWed by the evidence (for the idea of ‘continual’ colonialism see Rehm in this volume). Theorists also like to distinguish between the material condition of post-colonialism (whether or not this is regarded as an event or a process) and the conceptual categorizations involved; for these they prefer to use the unhyphenated postcolonial. In this book we have imposed no hard and fast rule, and contributors have used the terms as they wish. The use of the hyphen can embrace both event and process; the omission of the hyphen signals conceptual use. Some authors use both within the same essay, according to context and meaning (Richards, for example). There is also a slipperiness in the use of the words ‘classics’ and ‘classical’. The word ‘classics’ focuses attention on the practices and values of scholarship, including education. The word ‘classical’ is more Xexible and, depending on context, refers to the history and culture of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the history of Sanskrit in the culture of India, or (most ambivalently of all) to the idea of the classic and the canonical status given to the Graeco-Roman or the Sanskrit (see Lianeri and Zajko 2008). The structure of the book reXects the main strands of discussion in the 2004 conference, and especially our sense that the ongoing debates have to be based on substance that is informed by case studies that document and analyse in detail the evidence from modern literary, theatrical, and artistic practice, situating it aesthetically, and also contextualizing it, in its colonial and postcolonial histories. Of course, no case study is judgmentally or ideologically neutral and authors make their own perspectives clear, either when they introduce and frame their enquiries or in the course of their discussions. Their perspectives are diverse and express a sometimes complex interaction between cultural background, academic training, professional practice and experience, ideology, and aspiration. The Welds of reference and bibliographical citations in individual essays also reXect the growth curves and scope of key works in relation to diVerent questions, areas, and time frames. The Wrst part of the book is devoted to detailed examination of a series of examples from diVerent parts of Africa, including some created in Africa and some in the African diaspora. The second

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part widens the framework, using case studies and comparative analysis to review the conventional categories of time, genre, and place as elements in critical judgement. Essays also examine diVerent conceptions of colonial and post-colonial and how they are perceived and expressed. This part also introduces the perspectives and contexts of the neocolonial and their inXuence on recent and current analysis. The third part of the book includes essays that take a broader view and problematize some of the theoretical standpoints in the Weld. The aim of this Wnal part is to situate both the empirical and theoretical aspects of concepts of the classical and the post-colonial in wider and diVerent contexts, and to point towards some areas of future research. Part 1 begins with Felix Budelmann’s study of the Nigerian playwright Femi OsoWsan 2004 play Women of Owu, an adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women. The essay not only publishes new research and documentation of the world premie`re of the play and its subsequent tour, it also identiWes crucial problems and implications for the whole area of intersections between the classical and the postcolonial. Budelmann’s academic practice is based on close textual analysis of ancient and modern, and the piece exempliWes how treatment of form and tone can be integrated with that of historical and social context, especially in the overarching theme of theatrical presentation of an aggressive war, its gendered aspects, and its implications for a community. Budelmann also raises questions about how theatre audiences might react to this blend of diVerent traditions and places the discussion in the broader interdisciplinary conversation between classical and post-colonial studies, raising some issues about the problems attached to the use of critical concepts such as hybridity. This is followed by Barbara GoV ’s analysis of another important play by OsoWsan, Tegonni: An African Antigone. GoV ’s discussion relates the play to speciWc issues in postcolonial classical theatre and explores the paradoxical relationship between the conditions that created the possibility of African rewritings and those that may in turn subvert the eVects. She identiWes reasons for the popularity of Antigone in African rewritings and analyses its double-edged potential for application to African contexts and not just those of imperial subjection. GoV examines ways in which the Wgure of Antigone can

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straddle myth and history and allow metatheatrical dimensions to emerge. These are sometimes unexpected, as in OsoWsan play with its exploration of diVerent forms of colonialism and its theatrical presentation of Antigone’s arrival, not from ancient Greece via imperial Britain, but on the boat of the Yoruba water goddess. James Gibbs contributes a chapter based on his long experience of living and working in Africa. The focus of his discussion is prompted by theatre in Ghana, and the material has an additional importance outside the Weld of Classics in that it will go some way to compensate for the lack of publication of a theatrical record in Ghana. Gibbs maps the interaction between the varied and complex indigenous performance traditions of West Africa and the genres and styles imported from Europe. He discusses the impact of Caribbean and Black Atlantic cultural traYc on rewritings of Antigone, notably Kamau Brathwaite’s Odale’s Choice and also Morisseau Leroy’s Antigone in Haiti, an example of multiple translation. Gibbs challenges both ‘isolationist’ and ‘conspiracy’ theories of African encounters with Greek plays, emphasizing the varied interactions in diVerent performance traditions in West Africa. He also discusses the educational contexts, including a production of Anouilh’s Antigone, as a prompt to debate about leadership. He comments on the importance of the African diaspora in giving a political edge to rewritings and argues that African encounters with Greek drama have been liberating. John Djisenu’s essay is in dialogue with that of Gibbs. From an analysis of elements that are common, or at least comparable, in Greek and African theatre and culture, Djisenu argues that, to achieve a cross-cultural dialogue in theatre, it is necessary to recontextualize those aspects of drama that Greeks and Africans share. His emphasis is on contemporary staging practices, since it is through these that myth is made contemporary and engages audiences. Michael Simpson shifts the focus to Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame, a play that has become canonical in European and American theatre as well as African theatre. Simpson takes the ante-text, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos, as a model for how cultures work and considers how the Rotimi rewriting may be regarded as an example of canonical counter-discourse, especially in the way that it negotiates its independence from the European canon. Using the psychoanalytical model developed by Fanon, Simpson examines the variants in the

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models of destiny that underlie the play and suggests that in various postcolonial contexts the play enables a formal and cultural selfconsciousness that is not necessarily suYcient to outXank the contradictions that produce it. Elke Steinmeyer moves the discussion to South Africa. The impact of Greek drama as protest under the apartheid regime has been well documented, but Steinmeyer considers its continuing impact in the new South Africa, in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She examines the continuing importance of workshop theatre as means of individual and community transformation, and discusses the particular methodological issues raised in the reconstruction of workshop performances for scholarly analysis. She addresses the continuing Xuidity of myth in modern contexts and argues that free versions of Greek plays have potential to critique easy assumptions about the relationship between Truth and Reconciliation. In the Wnal essay in the Wrst part, Jessie Maritz moves to another African context and focuses on material culture, using both Greek and Roman analogues in her discussion of the sculpture at Heroes’ Acre in Zimbabwe. She compares the formal and thematic aspects of the continuous narrative of the Second Chimurenga (the struggle for freedom and independence from colonial rule) with those of classical public sculpture. Her analysis of technique, material, and form, draws on the Ara Pacis and Trajan’s Column but she also considers comparative examples from ancient and modern sculpture that subvert a simple ‘classical inXuence’ model. In particular, she addresses the relationship between Heroes’ Acre and the two thousand year old tradition of Korean public sculpture, as well as the monument to the People’s Heroes on Tiananmen Square in China, thus opening up further questions about patterns of migration of thematic and stylistic aYnities in public sculpture. The essays in the second part take further the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approaches raised in the case studies of the Wrst part. Richard Evans continues the examination of material culture in his study of the Voortrekker Monument in South Africa. He shows how the history of its design and creation, maps the multi-faceted history of colonialism in South Africa and considers and problematizes how the monument, and its Pretoria counterpart the Union Building, draw on Greek and Roman models, including the

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Parthenon Sculptures, Trajan’s Column, and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The Voortrekker Monument can variously be ‘read’ as an emblem of liberation struggle (Boers against British), as an expression of the ideology of apartheid, as a transmission of fascist symbolism, and as a statement of the new South Africa’s openness to its own histories. In comparing the two sites, Evans develops the view that the British Empire claimed to inherit the mantle of Roman Imperialism and Greek democracy by expressing them in the Union Building, while the Voortrekker Monument has a postcolonial energy in its desire for self-expression and its communication of a shaping event in the cultural memory. The next three essays examine diVerent aspects of genre with an emphasis on writers in the Caribbean and its diaspora. Katharine Burkitt takes up the relationship between history and mythology in the postcolonial verse-novel and argues that Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe represent a post-epic that sits on the cusp on the genres of poem, novel, and epic. Cashman Kerr Prince explores Walcott’s intertextuality in his use of classical literature, situating Walcott’s poetic praxis in a postcolonial context. Focusing on Walcott’s early work, Kerr Prince argues that Walcott both draws on and overcomes the fragmentation inherent in the psychic anxiety provoked by the postcolonial condition. Emily Greenwood explores readings and counter-readings of the Odyssey in the modern Caribbean. She starts with J. A. Froude’s metaphorical appropriations and then moves to discussion of C. L. R. James and Derek Walcott, arguing that mythological imagination can constitute a form of knowledge that counters that of the imperial imagination in colonial literature. She reXects on Wilson Harris’ references to the ‘epic strategems available to Caribbean man in the dilemmas of history’ and explores the counter-intuitive idea of ‘arriving in a tradition’ that reorders ethnographic movements and thus sees past traditions as unWnished and carrying into the future. In this model, the Odyssey represents a process in which there is no going back and in which Homer too has undergone a change-inducing journey. Rush Rehm’s essay discusses another postcolonial text that has in its turn become part of the western canon, Athol Fugard’s The Island. Rehm approaches the play via questions about the representation of women. He anchors his discussion in the text of Sophocles’ Antigone

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9

and in so doing he sheds light on why Sophocles is so frequently the author of choice, not only for post-colonial theatre but also for rewritings, in what Rehm argues are continually colonial contexts. He shows how in The Island Winston enters a Sophoclean world in which political resistance and theatrical womanizing are inextricably linked, and where political struggle has to engage with, and include, what seems weakest, precisely in order to test its convictions and strength. The themes of the continually colonial and the neocolonial are also prominent in Stephen Wilmer’s discussion of Seamus Heaney’s Burial at Thebes. Wilmer situates his discussion in the context of what he regards as the ‘modern McCarthyism’ involved in the suppression by the Government of the United States of the academic investigation of post-colonialism. He argues that Heaney’s language in the play relates both to the history of British colonial oppression in Ireland and to the contemporary neocolonialist actions of the USA and its allies in Iraq. Wilmer combines close textual and rhythmic analysis with discussion of the primary sources relating to the commissioning and production of Heaney’s play in 2004 to mark the centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. He suggests that the play takes up the postcolonial trope of gender politics as an analogy for geo-political developments. The third part of the book contains essays that challenge and dispute some of the current ways of conceptualizing and connecting classical and postcolonial. Freddy Decreus take a sometimes wry look at the intellectual infrastructure of concepts of the postcolonial. He locates these in the polarities between postmodernism and western humanism but shows how the history and aspirations of postcolonial approaches actually challenge both systems of thought. In particular, he investigates the impact of ancient non-western predecessors of the paradigm of tragedy (such as Gilagamesh) and modern non-western concepts and practices brought into productions of tragedy from Buddhist and Taoist traditions. Decreus suggests that postcolonial analysis is part of a general politics of resistance that challenges closure in the western mind and can enable the previously colonized ‘Other’ to turn the tables, transposing the western self into a psychoanalytically repressed ‘Other’. In an approach that both converges with, and diverges from, that of Decreus, Michiel Leezenberg’s

10

Introduction

essay presents a sometimes iconoclastic challenge to the appropriation of Greek tragedy for liberal and humanist purposes, and especially for a selfrighteous reassertion of western values. He presents a model of Greek tragedy as an art form that disengages from aYrmation of democratic principles or contexts but instead tests to the limits, questioning rather than aYrming the conventional wisdoms. Like Decreus, Harish Trivedi situates postcolonial discussion in modern critical contexts. His essay contests any assumption that there is a seamless progression from colonial to postcolonial, either in terms of historical experience or in psychological or intellectual perception. Trivedi adds a further dimension of critical distance to the debates, not only by examining the assumptions that classical texts are originary, foundational, and essential, but by doing so in the context of Indian culture and its classical (Sanskrit) tradition. He shows how India provides a contrast with other imperial uses of Greek and Roman texts and values, and probes the reasons for this, exploring how the Indian classics and Sanskrit heritage provided a counter-imperial cultural genealogy and also fed, sometimes paradoxically, into modern popular culture in India. Lorna Hardwick’s essay takes as its focus the impact of multilingual productions of Greek drama in modern theatrical contexts, including community theatre. She examines the status of English as an imperial language; as a language of cross-cultural communication that has also been the vehicle for dissent and liberation; and as a language that was historically subaltern and, in terms of its function as a language of translation for classical texts, might be said to be continually so. Hardwick uses examples of theatrical, poetic, and community practice as a check against totalizing theory. She cautions against assimilating all examples of multi-lingual productions into one kind of post-colonial ‘moment’ and suggests that examination of diVerent kinds of linguistic ‘braiding’ in translations, and in the staging of classical plays, provides an insight into the processes of engagement between and within cultures. These processes cross and reformulate social and cultural boundaries and groupings in the societies of colonizers and colonized alike. Ika Willis’ essay identiWes an area for future research. She analyses the use of the Roman Empire as a metaphor or analogy for global sovereignty and compares the ways in which imperial sovereignty

Introduction

11

was conceptualized in Latin literature with modern global formulations. She discusses how modes of historicization of the Roman Empire have made it synonymous with history itself and develops an analogy with the trans-temporal force of modern telecommunications technology, against which all resistance might be equally impossible. The concluding essay to the volume is contributed by David Richards. He examines issues of ‘beginnings’ in the narrative foundations of the physical environment and probes its incompatibility with postcolonial intellectual architecture. He uses this as a basis for his discussion of temporal uncoupling, which enables present models to be situated in the past, and vice versa. Richards uses Christopher Okigbo’s labyrinth as a metaphor for the productive incongruity of the openness to new experience, which is the deWning feature of the encounter between the classical and the post-colonial, and argues that this encounter enables classical and post-colonial to jointly challenge the conventional architecture of historical progress. Richard’s argument thus generalizes out from the impact of the detailed case studies of the Wrst section and then returns to key examples which are scrutinized through new lenses that are sensitive to the themes of temporal and genre disjunction that emerged in the second part. Taken as a whole, the essays in this book are part of an extended conversation. They show how the engagement between classical and post-colonial texts and contexts is a crucial part of the dynamic of modern creative practice. They show how creative practices remake and sometimes transform conceptions of the ancient texts. They also mark the signiWcant impact that has been made on the concepts of post-colonial and post-colonial by their encounter with classical texts and material culture. There is much research still to be done on the role of classical texts in modern cultural shifts. We hope that this book demonstrates how the intersection between classical and post-colonial is part of that wider picture. Lorna Hardwick, Milton Keynes, December 2006.

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Part I Case Studies

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1 Trojan Women in Yorubaland: Femi OsoWsan Women of Owu1 Felix Budelmann

This chapter is devoted to Women of Owu, a new adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women by the Nigerian playwright Femi OsoWsan, in a production by the US-Nigerian director Chuck Mike. The play premie`red in Chipping Norton in rural Oxfordshire in February 2004, and then toured across England and Scotland, including London’s Oval House Theatre.2 Since then, OsoWsan himself appears to have produced and directed it in a poorly funded semi-staged student performance in Ibadan.3 Women of Owu is the latest of a 1 I am grateful to Pantelis Michelakis, the editors, and the anonymous readers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 2 I saw the play twice, on 4 February in Chipping Norton and on 6 March at the Oval House Theatre. A video recording of one of the Oval House performances is deposited in the Theatre Museum in London. On the history of the commission see n. 21 below. At the time of writing this chapter, OsoWsan was still in the process of preparing the text for publication. I am grateful to him for showing me a working script and letting me quote from it, and to the good services of Sola Adeyemi in this. There may therefore be discrepancies from the eventually published text. In the absence of verse and page numbers, I quote by scene numbers (I–V). In addition, I draw on the programme notes, as well as an email response from Femi OsoWsan (7 July 2004) and notes from a conversation with Chuck Mike (London, 13 May 2004). I would like to record my thanks to both of them for being generous with their time. [Since preparing this chapter for publication, University Press, Ibadan, has published the play in 2006. The volume is currently available from Amazon.] 3 According to a review in the Nigerian Daily Sun of 23 March 2005, at http://www. sunnewsonline.com/webpages/features/arts/2005/Mar/23/arts-23–03–2005–003.htm (last accessed December 2005). I have not been able to Wnd further information on this production.

16

Case Studies

number of West African plays using material from Greek tragedy or, in the context of this volume, the latest Greek tragedy-inspired play by a playwright from a postcolonial state. Such plays have become the subject of increased interest especially among classicists, but also within drama and postcolonial studies. Kevin J. Wetmore’s The Athenian Sun in an African Sky (2002) and Black Dionysus (2003) are book-length accounts of Greek tragedy in Africa and in the African-American theatre. Greek tragedy in African drama is also the focus of several pieces in this volume, of a monograph (2007) by Barbara GoV and Michael Simpson (2007), and of an earlier article of mine (Budelmann 2004). Greek tragedy-related work by Irish dramatists (a rather diVerent sort of postcolonial situation), has recently been the theme of an edited volume by Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton (2002), and elsewhere in this volume, Steve Wilmer discusses Seamus Heaney’s recent Antigone version, The Burial at Thebes, Wrst performed in Dublin in 2004.4 Most wide-ranging, perhaps, Lorna Hardwick’s article (2004a) on ‘decolonizing Classics’ traces the complex interaction between Greek drama and anti-colonialism in various regions. This is a selection of just a few recent publications, none of them earlier than 2002, but probably enough to give an impression of the surge in work on this topic. Femi OsoWsan, born in 1946, is probably the best-known Nigerian playwright of the generation after Ola Rotimi and Wole Soyinka.5 He has written over Wfty plays, about ten of them adaptations, but also poetry, a novel, a host of academic studies and newspaper essays. His 1994 play Tegonni,6 using material from Sophocles’ Antigone, is discussed by Barbara GoV in this volume. Chuck Mike was born in New York but has lived in Nigeria for much of the time since 1976. His troupe in this production, Collective Artistes, was made up almost entirely of actors with strong Nigerian aYliation, half of them having lived in Nigeria for considerable periods. OsoWsan and Mike have worked together repeatedly, including on a 2002 production of Tegonni in New York. Their collaboration 4 Several essays in Dillon and Wilmer (2005) are also devoted to Irish versions of Greek tragedies, as is Taplin (2004). 5 On OsoWsan work in general see especially Dunton (1992: 67–94), Awodiya (1995, 1996), Richards (1996), and Adeyemi (2006). 6 Published text OsoWsan (1999a).

Trojan Women in Yorubaland

17

is close enough for Mike to be able to change the play-text in the course of the rehearsals. As with many new plays, it is impossible, therefore, to separate play and Wrst performance completely, and I will draw on both. Future performances and the eventual publication of a text will inevitably change perspectives. The play is set outside the burning city, not of Troy, but of Owu in Yorubaland, part of what is now Nigeria. The wider historical backdrop is the Wghting between rival groups in Yorubaland in the Wrst half of the nineteenth century, in the course of which large groups of people were displaced and enslaved. Owu was destroyed in the 1820s after a siege of many years (on the Owu war see Mabogunje and Cooper (1971); and Law (1997)). Each of OsoWsan characters corresponds to one of Euripides’ characters, and his play follows the plot structure of Trojan Women closely, with just a few signiWcant deviations.7 Owu has been destroyed. The men have been killed or enslaved. The women, including the former queen, are camping near the burning ruins. The play focuses on the group of women lamenting what has happened to them. As in Euripides’ play, there is relatively little action. The emotional highpoint is reached when one of the soldiers of the victorious army takes away the child of one of the women to kill it. In the end, the women go into slavery, each to a diVerent master. It is immediately clear, then, that OsoWsan sets up a three way relationship: ancient Greece, nineteenth century Yorubaland, and any present day war relevant to the spectators, whether in the UK, in Africa, or elsewhere. This relationship, which OsoWsan had exploited in a diVerent way already in Tegonni, is at the heart of this chapter. I will Wrst discuss four notable features of the play, all related to the blend of Greek, nineteenth century Yoruba, and contemporary European/American and, indeed, African elements: its presentation 7 In my view, the three most substantial deviations in structure are: (1) OsoWsan moves the discussion between the two gods from the beginning to after the Wrst interaction between chorus and queen. Instead, Women of Owu opens with a dialogue between the despondent women of the chorus and just one of the two gods, the city’s protecting deity Anlugbua. (2) Women of Owu ends with the queen and chorus performing a ‘ritual valediction to the dead’, eventually bringing Anlugbua back on stage. (3) The choral songs are not all in the same places as in Euripides. They are in Yoruba rather than English, and their text does not closely follow the themes of Euripides’ songs. (I discuss both the gods and the chorus—though not the detail of the songs—later in the chapter.)

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Case Studies

of an aggressive war and its consequences; its emphasis on communality rather than individuality; its treatment of gender; and its form and tone. On the basis of this discussion, I will then think more generally about the way diVerent audiences might respond to this blend of diVerent traditions, characteristic of Women of Owu as indeed of many other postcolonial plays. Finally, I will Wnish oV with a section on the more abstract audiences constituted by diVerent scholarly disciplines, and place this chapter in the interdisciplinary discourse of Classics and postcolonial studies.

WAR, SLAVERY, AND RESPONSIBILITY Women of Owu is a play about the suVerings imposed by war. Its main mode is empathy and pity for the victims of war, especially the women. Owu is in ruins. Its former inhabitants are constantly threatened by rape, displacement, slavery, degradation, and death. Even the victors are aVected as war changes their behaviour: Okunade, the Maye´ or war leader of the aggressors, corresponding to Menelaus in Euripides, was once a peaceful artist but has turned into a ruthless killer. Gesinde, a herald of the attackers and based on Euripides’ Talthybius, has worked out that only opportunism will bring survival. Repeatedly, he stresses that he only executes orders, against his will. In Mike’s production, the perversion of normal human relations is epitomized by the scene in which the baby boy of the Andromache character, Adumaadan, is taken away to be killed: although he is about to smash the child’s head against a tree, Gesinde handles him with great care. Despite the nineteenth century setting, moreover, OsoWsan and Mike give the war present-day resonances, as two examples will show. First, the slavery theme that runs through Euripides’ play is made even more prominent in Women of Owu. An aim, or at least an inevitable by-product, of the war seems to be the enslavement of the female population of Owu. Throughout, the women voice their fear of slavery, aware of their imminent departure for their new fates. In the Wnal speech of the play, the Poseidon-character Anlugbua, the ancestral and now deiWed founder of Owu, says:

Trojan Women in Yorubaland

19

Owu will rise again! Not here, / Not as a single city again, but in little communities / Within other cities of Yorubaland. Those now going / Into slavery, shall form new kingdoms in those places. (V)

This and other statements about slavery open out perspectives, well beyond Yorubaland, onto the black diaspora across the centuries. Secondly, the play quite obviously alludes to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in which the US, along with some other nations, including the UK, deposed ruler Saddam Hussein. The besieging army is called the ‘Allied Forces’ (of Ijebu and Ife), as was the US-led coalition. It claims to have come to liberate Owu rather than to act out of any material greed, but the women repeatedly pour scorn over this assertion, evoking intense and prolonged debates over the complex motivations for invading Iraq, for example: They do not want our market at all—/ They are not interested in such petty things / As proWt—Only in such lofty ideas as freedom,

divided between three speakers (II). At one point, in Mike’s production,8 they even turn to face the audience and shout something like: ‘you say you came to liberate us’. The programme note mentions Iraq in the Wrst sentence, and also refers to Kuwait, Bosnia, Rwanda, Algeria, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Although set in a colonial context, Women of Owu has clear postcolonial and neocolonial overtones. It is about the consequences of military aggression any time, anywhere: in nineteenth and twentieth century Africa, in the Middle East, and wherever spectators care to make connections. Against the backdrop of this stark account and indictment of the brutality and lies of war, one of the most interesting aspects of the play is its subtlety in treating responsibility and causation. The immediate cause of the women’s misery is the sack of their city, but why was the city sacked? Partly no doubt because of greed, as the women suggest, but that is not all. First, as in Euripides, there is also the complex issue of the Helen-character, called here Iyunloye. She caused her husband to take up arms as the leader of the Allied Forces as she left him, voluntarily or otherwise, to live with the youngest prince of Owu (V). 8 Based on my performance notes (n. 2); not in the draft play text.

20

Case Studies

In addition, OsoWsan introduces a further element, drawing on both Euripides’ gods and the history of the Owu war. The goddess Lawumi, grandmother of Anlugbua and based on Euripides’ Athena, wants the Owus punished because they enslaved other Yoruba in the past, and behaved arrogantly against Ife Ife, the most renowned Yoruba oracle (III). OsoWsan likes using gods, calling them in an interview: ‘metaphors of some of the enduring qualities of society’, but presents them (like other aspects of society) rarely as beyond criticism (Awodiya 1993: 48, similarly 80). In this play, he develops Euripides’ gods in such a way that it becomes even more diYcult to disentangle individual shares of responsibility. Anlugbua comes too late to save his city and is angrily scolded for this by the women (I); Lawumi does not just seek the destruction of Owu but also talks Anlugbua into unleashing a storm on the attackers on the way home to make them pay for their religious impropriety, yet appears anything other than digniWed as she makes her, rather personal, case against both the warring parties (III). Scenes I and III show that the gods have a role in the human suVering, yet in the end (V), Anlugbua puts the blame squarely on humans, leaving it to the spectators to draw their own conclusions: You human beings, always thirsty for blood, / Always eager to devour one another! I hope / History will teach you.

OsoWsan gods, like Euripides’, are inXuential and moral, yet pettish, elusive, and the target of human attacks. Finally, in this complex web of responsibilities, the role of the European colonizers is handled subtly, too. The whites are there: they have provided Wrearms and they are slave traders, but they are in the background. They do not appear on stage, they did not take part in the siege, they are not the only slave traders, and they are not the only brutal oppressors. OsoWsan has repeatedly attacked the notion that all postcolonial drama focuses on protest against the ‘centre’ (much as such protest matters to him), and has stressed the importance of engagement also with the challenges of present-day Africa in his work.9 The open-endedness of his treatment of responsibility should 9 In particular: OsoWsan (2001) 153–73. On OsoWsan general concern with presentday Africa, see also below pp. 29–35.

Trojan Women in Yorubaland

21

probably be seen in this context. Nobody is innocent in this play, and nobody is the sole guilty party.

COMMUNALITY Perhaps more than any Greek tragedy, Trojan Women dramatizes the story of a group; the chorus and the individual women all face similar struggles. What Mike and OsoWsan have done is to increase further the emphasis on communal suVering that is already present in Euripides. As one would expect, the chorus dance dances and sing songs. But there is more. Throughout the performance, diVerent combinations of two or three actors form mini-choruses chanting together. In some scenes the chorus provide a vocal audience to the interaction of other characters, whether with words or just exclamations. Moreover, Mike stresses the emphasis on ensemble work and the avoidance of star cult in his rehearsal work. He calls the rehearsal process a ‘sociology’. Actors were allocated their roles only a good week into the rehearsal process; and many of the clearest expressions of communality were the result of improvization in rehearsals rather than original scripting. As a result of all this, the production achieves an unusually powerful solution to the notorious problems posed by Greek choruses. As in Wfth century bce Athens, the chorus here is not an embarrassing interruption of a good plot, but central to the play and, as in Athens, participation in the chorus is conceived as a social act. However, and I think this is important, the play does not portray the women’s enforced community as bliss, or choral song and dance as a panacea for all woes. The women quarrel; most of the dances seem to be cut short as members of the army arrive on the scene; a soldier even urinates during one of the dances; and (again as in Greek tragedy) there is the concept of the perverse song: the deranged seer Orisaye (Cassandra in Euripides) keeps asking for a song to celebrate her imminent forced marriage with one of the victors, but the chorus refuse this kind of song (IV). OsoWsan and Mike force spectators to reXect upon what they see at the same time as submitting to its power.

22

Case Studies

Moreover, there are lines of demarcation between communality on stage and in the auditorium. The choral songs are in Yoruba, a language few members of the, mostly white, Chipping Norton audience are likely to have understood. Moreover, Chipping Norton theatre—with a raised stage and a proscenium arch—sets obvious limits to the degree the audience will feel part of any dances on stage. Unsurprisingly, audience reaction was more vocal in London’s Oval House, a more informal and integrated performance space, with a predominantly Afro-Caribbean audience, including people with Nigerian connections. Communality set in nineteenth century Yorubaland can extend into twenty-Wrst century Britain, but only to a degree.

GENDER It hardly needs pointing out that Women of Owu is, among other things, a play about relations between men and women: women suVer at the hands of men. As OsoWsan puts it10: . . . women, and children, are the ones who suVer most from the eVects of war—brutalized, raped, disWgured—and are then left alive to face the consequences. . . . In a way therefore it is easier for the men, they are gone from the scene and so beyond pain. But think of the widows and orphans, the mutilated women left with their wounds and memories. . . . Euripides must have chosen to concentrate on these victims in order to further highlight the horror and brutality of war. A message which is particularly pertinent today, with Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, etc.

But, as in Euripides, the women’s suVering and powerlessness is poised against their resilience and resistance. The male characters are not just a minority, they are also rather weak. Especially, the Maye´ is brutal and uncaring, altogether lacking the women’s stature. The women tend to have the better of the arguments, repeatedly exposing the senselessness and cowardliness of the war propaganda, and maintain their dignity throughout. In performance terms, their actions as a group create a sense of organized resistance. The women sing together, they dance together, they curse together; 10 By email (n.2)

Trojan Women in Yorubaland

23

at one point in Mike’s production they all bare their breasts as a weapon of last resort, an ill-omened act in many African cultures. Interestingly, this dramatization of the women’s powerlessness and resistance is juxtaposed with a rather diVerent treatment of gender in Women of Owu’s version of Euripides’ Helen scene (V). The Maye´ comes to punish his wife Iyunloye, undecided whether to take her back home or have her die straightaway. A scene of debate ensues between Iyunloye and the Hecuba-character Erelu. Iyunloye portrays herself as a victim of circumstances, always missing her husband, while Erelu tries to persuade the Maye´ to kill her for lightly abandoning him for her rich and handsome youngest son. OsoWsan and Mike’s scene resembles Euripides’ in many ways, but deviates in a vital point: it increases the erotic charge that is already present in Euripides. Quite explicitly, Iyunloye tries to seduce the Maye´. Threatened with execution, Iyunloye, dressed in bright red with long plaited hair and set oV against the other women in sombre blue and with shaved heads, pulls all the stops to make herself desirable to him, both physically and rhetorically. The scene ends without Wnal decision but, as we hear later from Gesinde, Iyunloye eventually succeeds. The Maye´ succumbs to her allure. It is not easy to say what messages to take away here about gender. Iyunloye is perhaps the conceptually most daring and problematic character in the play. Even more than Gesinde or the Maye´, she shows how extreme situations can force people into certain roles. She makes herself a sexual object and succeeds. Powerlessness or power? Legitimization of patriarchal authority or female subversion? The ambivalence increases further if we bring in statements characters make about male–female relationships. ‘I know as a woman how it feels / To be chosen as the favourite of such a man’ (V), Erelu says to Iyunloye, referring to the physical attraction and status of her son. And Adumaadan, having learned that she has been selected to live with a particularly loathed member of the victorious army, worries that she will respond to him sexually despite her hatred: For I am only a woman, with a woman’s familiar / Weaknesses. Our Xesh too often, and in spite of itself, / Quickens to a man’s touch, / And a night of loving is all it takes, they say, to tame / The most unwilling among us. (V, compare with Trojan Women 665–66.)

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Case Studies

Sexual attraction and the inability to resist it are a major aspect of gender relations in this play. ‘Talk’, Erelu says, ‘is the only weapon I have left for mourning’ (II), but Iyunloye has understood that her only weapon of consequence is sexual seduction. Slavery is not for her. Erelu again: Women like her are dangerous, / Especially to their lovers. Once they catch you, you’re hooked / For ever: They have such powers of enchantment, eyes / That will set cities ablaze. (V)

For a number of years now, productions and adaptations of Greek tragedy have extensively exploited the gender themes inherent in the ancient plays. Helene Foley (2004) has recently discussed how such work does not just point to female suVering but is often just as interested in powerful and outrageous women. OsoWsan’s and Mike’s Iyunloye can no doubt be looked at against this background, but what about the West African context? As Foley points out in passing, gender themes are generally less prominent in African than in American, Japanese, or Irish versions of Greek tragedies—no doubt reXecting diVerences in local discourses. This is not true, however, for OsoWsan. As one would perhaps expect, he explores gender themes also in the Antigone-play Tegonni, and he does so extensively also elsewhere. Morountodun,11 Yungba Yungba and the Dance Contest and Midnight Hotel, none of them based closely on Western plays, are obvious examples. ‘The female question’, as Muyiwa P. Awodiya (1995: 88–9) puts it, ‘is one of the themes that OsoWsan is most preoccupied with.’12 In a West African context, the prominence OsoWsan gives to women is perhaps noteworthy (if by no means unique), and one might be tempted to detect inXuences from outside the African tradition here.

11 Of all OsoWsan plays, Marantoudoun (published text, OsoWsan 1982) is probably closest to Women of Owu in its treatment of gender. See the discussion by Ajayi (1996). 12 In 1987, when asked why he chooses women and common men as the main heroines and heroes, OsoWsan replied: ‘I don’t really deliberately privilege women in my works. As I see it, women are part of the whole struggle. I’ve written plays in which women are the heroines and I’ve written plays in which women have been demons’ (Awodiya 1993: 79).

Trojan Women in Yorubaland

25

Yet that is too simple a conclusion. Women as powerful seducers, as well as women unable to resist seduction, are Greek themes, written into the Helen myth from early on, but are not perhaps themes that are currently exploited in American or European theatre as much as the violent power of Medea or Clytemnestra. Much of what OsoWsan does with Euripides’ gender themes is remarkably close to the ancient play, and not so close to recent European or American discourses. Emblematically, the second half of Adumaadan’s lines about responding sexually to her new master, quoted above, are almost a translation of Trojan Women 665–66, and at the same time (to me) the uneasiest lines in the entire play. Arguably, in fact, they become even more shocking and even more problematic as they are brought to life in an African context. Nineteenth century Africa may feel distant to many UK spectators, but less distant probably than Wfth century bce Greece. In other words, using an African past, OsoWsan has found a thought-provoking way of translating some of the most problematic aspects of ancient Greek gender relations for today. DiVerent audiences and, indeed, diVerent spectators, with diVerent cultural and personal experiences and expectations, are bound to disagree over whether the result is shocking or not, whether it conWrms or challenges gender stereotypes, and whether the distance created by a nineteenth century Yoruba setting moderates any discomfort. But there can be no doubt about the eVectiveness with which Women of Owu stages a new version of the gender issues in Euripides’ play.

F OR M A ND TO NE As pointed out above, Women of Owu follows the plot structure of Trojan Women for the most part quite closely. This section discusses how OsoWsan and Mike adopt and adapt also the form and tone of Euripides’ play. Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of Trojan Women is its sombre tone. In this respect, there is little to choose between the two plays: Women of Owu, too, is a predominantly sombre play in which suVering never ends. This similarity goes beyond the subject matter and owes much to formal characteristics.

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Case Studies

OsoWsan and Mike keep the formal feature that contributes more than any to the sombre eVect of Trojan Women: the almost neverending lament by all the women, especially the chorus. A way of throwing OsoWsan and Mike’s choices into relief is by comparison with Sartre. When Sartre inXuentially adapted Trojan Women (Les Troyennes)13 in 1965, as a play of protest against European and American imperialism in the aftermath of the Algerian war of independence and during the Vietnam War, he politicized and psychologized Euripides’ play in many ways. His conception of a political play did not leave room for choruses and extensive lament, prompting him to break up or cut most of the sustained choral passages and to tone down all lament. His unease is summed up in his description of Trojan Women as an ‘oratorio’ and not a ‘tragedy’.14 As Nicole Loraux (2002: 1–13) complained recently, what Sartre did is eVectively silence what she regards as one of the main features of Greek tragedy overall: the mourning voice. OsoWsan and Mike’s decision not to go this way is remarkable not least because OsoWsan, an admirer of Sartre, used Sartre’s version as one of his base texts for writing Women of Owu.15 Clearly, however, as it sends forth its mourning voice, Women of Owu departs from Euripides in form and tone in other respects. Most importantly, the lament is punctured repeatedly by comic elements. Women of Owu is less homogenous in tone than Trojan Women. In both performances that I saw, Gesinde’s intimations to the audience of his thoughts on his superiors were rewarded with laughter at various points. Other characters, too, are sometimes (involuntarily) funny. In particular, the Maye´’s smugness and lack of self-awareness is rather comical, and even the divine dialogue has its funny moments. No doubt there are diVerent ways of producing Women of Owu. In Mike’s version, comic elements, carefully spaced, were one of the most intriguing features. 13 For an English translation of Les Troyennes, see Sartre (1969: 291–347). 14 In his essay about his version (Sartre 1969: 285–90 ‘oratorio’ on p. 288). 15 ConWrmed by email (n. 2). Several aspects of Sartre’s adaptation, highlighted in his essay (n. 11), can be traced in Women of Owu; for example, the humorous eVect of the Gesinde’s wisdom, the Maye’s more explicit yielding to Iyunloye, and the addition of a divine epilogue. More broadly, OsoWsan, like Sartre, and others inspired by Sartre, uses Trojan Women to criticize events in his own country.

Trojan Women in Yorubaland

27

Closely connected to these elements of humour are a number of abrupt changes in register. Overall the play is composed in an uncluttered and accessible but not informal idiom, yet at times it stoops consciously to the everyday: ‘Just think of having to clean their toilets’ (II), one of the women says. Elsewhere, they see themselves as: ‘stinking in our underwear’ (V). OsoWsan uses the sustained pathos for regular moments of bathos. Finally, the occasional direct confrontation of the audience in Mike’s production is a further compelling deviation from what we know of ancient productions of Trojan Women. When the women bear their breasts and when they shout: ‘you say you came to liberate us’, they are facing towards the audience. Audience address and explicit present day reference come together here in a way that classicists associate with Old Comedy rather than tragedy. Such persistent eVorts to manipulate the smooth surface of the play can be looked at in various ways. First of all, they may throw the horror into even greater relief, repeatedly varying the mode in which spectators engage with the relentless onslaught. Next they can be put in the context of trends in recent Greek tragedy performances and adaptations. Many productions deviate from the ancient plays in both tone and form. A systematic study of this phenomenon is not yet available, but compared to, for example, John Barton’s, Peter Hall’s and Edward Hall’s Tantalus (2000), Women of Owu is rather conservative in this respect. Or, to take another Trojan Women adaptation, Charles Mee and Tina Landau’s The Trojan Women: A Love Story (1996) uses collage of stories, humour, music, an unusual performance space, and other means to create what Sarah Bryant-Bertail (2000) calls ‘postmodern tragedy’. At least one dominant strand in current Western theatre aesthetics is deeply wary of unbroken and unselfconscious lament. The reasons are complex, including factors as diVerent as ‘emotion fatigue’ resulting from constant bombardment with news of immeasurable suVering, the rarity of public lament in most Western cultures, the rare use of choruses, vague notions of the ‘death of tragedy’ and the high prestige of Shakespeare’s tragicomedies. OsoWsan and Mike’s subtle play with form and tone is by no means unusual. Apart from this perhaps mostly European or American context, there is also a distinctly African side to these characteristics of Women

28

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of Owu, so much so in fact that spectators at ease with certain African traditions may not even Wnd OsoWsan and Mike’s manipulation remarkable. Duru Ladipo’s Oba-Koso (1963), for instance, perhaps the best-known Yoruba folk opera, easily blends what in a European context would be high tragedy and comedy, and so do to a lesser degree several African plays using Greek tragedies. A recent London production of Ola Rotimi’s Oedipus Rex-inspired The Gods Are Not To Blame (published 1971) had its audience laugh in several scenes, giving the performance an attractive lightness that sat quite comfortably with the dark themes it explored.16 The strict separation of tragedy and comedy, with their diVerent canons of content, form and tone, that is maintained by European theorists of various periods and then ostentatiously broken, is probably less inXuential in African drama.17 The issue is complicated further by OsoWsan personal dramaturgic preferences. The self-conscious character of much of his theatre is pointed out by all critics. He says himself that: ‘the area of form constitutes the most visible site of the epistemological break I have made with the [Nigerian] playwrights of the Wrst generation’, (OsoWsan 2001: 139; Jeyifo 2002: 616) such as Soyinka. Women of Owu is in fact by no means the formally most adventurous of his plays. Throughout his output, narrators, plays within plays, audience address, and similar devices abound. ‘These ways,’ he explains, ‘I establish the contingent nature of all experience, and hopefully, reveal through the process the fact that we are not programmed by any supernatural force for failure, or defeat; that society is always determined by the interventions we bring to it; that our present sorry predicament is not permanent or incapable of emendation.’ (OsoWsan 2001: 142; Jeyifo 2002: 617).18 Again and again, he has

16 Arcola Theatre London, directed by Femi Elufowoju, July 2005. 17 Which is not to say that African drama has no discourse of tragedy and comedy. Especially in the seventies and eighties there was a lively debate over what shape tragedy would take in Africa; see Soyinka (1976: 46–9), Ezenwa-Ohaeto (1982), and Agovi (1985). 18 Similar concerns have prompted OsoWsan repeatedly to distance himself from what he regards as the tragic world view of Soyinka and his generation, e.g. Awodiya (ed. 1993: 29–30), OsoWsan (1996: 16–7), OsoWsan (2001: 128–9).

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stressed that his play with form serves to provoke debate and selfawareness among his spectators. Unsurprisingly, many critics have discovered Western inXuences here. OsoWsan frequently attracts the epithet ‘Brechtian’. However, more recently, critics have begun to point out that—once again—African and European inXuences are hard to separate (Richards 1996: 70–3; Ukala 2001). What may look Brechtian to a European or American may be indigenous to a Nigerian. The Greek, African, and European aspects of Women of Owu are impossible to separate neatly.

G R E E C E, AFR IC A, AND THE UK The subtitle OsoWsan has given his play, An African Re-reading of Euripides’ The Trojan Women for the Chipping Norton Theatre, UK, nicely sums up the blend of African, Greek, and modern European elements. Such blending is, of course, a hallmark of much postcolonial literature, making ‘hybridity’ one of the most debated terms in postcolonial theory;19 and from their own perspective, theatre studies, too, have taken an intense interest in the topic for a while now, using the label of ‘intercultural performance’.20 In this section, I shall try to pull together some threads that have run through the chapter so far by looking at how Women of Owu blends diVerent cultural inXuences and, in particular, by asking how this blend opens up diVerent kinds of opportunities for diVerent audiences. Of course many of the issues are well rehearsed, but what distinguishes Women of Owu from most postcolonial plays (and indeed versions of Greek tragedy) is the three-way, as opposed to

19 Bhabha (1994) and Young (1995) are particularly inXuential. Andrew Smith (2004) provides a helpful discussion of the various positions, including recent criticism of an over-enthusiastic use of the concept. 20 Pavis (1996) is still a good starting point. The best known critic of the culturally and politically less attractive sides of intercultural performance is Rustom Bharucha: Bharucha (1993) and Bharucha (2000). The work of one of Bharucha’s main targets, Eugenio Barba, has recently been explored in Watson et al. (2002). Richards (1996: 163–93) and Ukaegbu (2001) debate issues of intercultural performance, respectively drawing on a recent US and UK production of plays by OsoWsan.

30

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two-way relationship, ancient Greek–modern European–African (itself a blend of nineteenth century and current aspects). OsoWsan is highly conscious of the audiences he addresses. He has often stressed that he writes in the Wrst place for all people in Nigeria. He sees his literature as helping to bring about necessary social and political change at home. At the same time, he is aware that by writing in English he does not reach everyone in Nigeria (as indeed, he points out, he would not be able to in any one indigenous language), and has defended any resulting coincidental e´lite focus as beneWcial, at least in so far as the e´lite plays a vital role in any project of large-scale change. Finally, he has repeatedly lived abroad and, especially in recent years, has directed his own and other African plays in the West, and has discussed the implications of this; also he has come to consider publishing no longer exclusively at home, partly to make his work more widely available.21 These complexities help to situate the genesis of Women of Owu as a play by a Nigerian playwright, adapting a Greek tragedy, set in Africa and commissioned and Wrst performed in Europe. In addition, they are worth keeping in mind when thinking about the way this particular play addresses its various audiences. A couple of comments OsoWsan has made on writing Women of Owu will provide a starting point.22 In reply to the question of which audience he had in mind he notes: . . . strange as it may sound, a Nigerian audience, that is, the audience I am familiar with. If I was thinking otherwise, that is of a British audience or any other audience I am not familiar with, I wouldn’t I’m sure have been able to write the play. After all Euripides was writing for his own audience and not thinking of us! You see, as I have said elsewhere, the more ‘local’ an author is, the more universal, paradoxically, he becomes.

And in answer to the question of why he wrote a version of a Greek play: I was commissioned to write this play, so in a sense it wasn’t my own decision to do it. Nevertheless, in spite of my initial misgivings, I did enjoy doing it in the end. I was hesitant to do it, not for the story, but 21 On Nigerian audience, writing in English, and potential e´lite focus, see Awodiya (1993: 24–5, 58–60); OsoWsan (1996, especially 16–7). On directing abroad, see OsoWsan (2001: 174–234). On publishing abroad, see Awodiya (1993: 137). 22 Both responses by email (n. 2)

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31

because it seems to lack dramatic action, is just a pure lament, if you know what I mean. But then that became the challenge for me as a dramatist. . . . Generally however, the world of the Greeks, as you must know, is very close to the Yoruba one—in for instance, the belief in multiple gods, and the need to link with them through ritual. Of course there is a great diVerence in the attributes we give to our gods, and to the way therefore that we relate to them, but such diVerences do not really present obstacles when you are thinking of adaptations. It follows therefore that our own conception of theatre is close to the Greeks’, rather than to the contemporary West’s. Add to this the fact that the subjects that the Greeks treat are those which concern us all as human beings living in a social space we are never in full control of, nor fully comprehend, and having to constantly negotiate our way with the mystery of death and regeneration—themes said to be ‘universal’—you can see easily why the Greek plays would appeal to a Yoruba dramatist.

Women of Owu originated not in OsoWsan choice to adapt a Greek play but in an approach from Chipping Norton theatre.23 Mike even goes as far as to say that in directing the play the Greek source text did not matter to him: he simply put on a new play, a play in its own right. Such statements are a healthy lesson for classicists, who are perhaps inclined sometimes to overestimate just how much value theatre professionals, and indeed audiences, place on any Greek aspects of new plays. More important, though, they go together with OsoWsan emphasis on writing with Nigerians, including presumably non-e´lite Nigerians, in mind, audiences that are likely to be much less concerned with Greek tragedy than are classicists. I am in no position to draw out the present-day Nigerian resonances in any detail, but it is clear that the play reXects OsoWsan concern with Nigeria. Setting, religious and social universe, and themes such as mass killings and dispossessions, or exposure to the whim of armies without eVective protection from the law, will all resonate in Nigeria, and more generally Africa, in ways they probably do not in Chipping Norton; and the same is true even more emphatically for the choice of Yoruba for the songs. By contrast, speciWcally Greek elements that might be alien in a Nigerian context, such as names or gods, are all translated 23 As producer Tamara Malcolm sets out in the programme note, she Wrst had the idea of commissioning the production after a 2001 Mike production of Lorca’s Yerma in Chipping Norton, because of its choral work. OsoWsan was approached after Mike’s 2002 Tegonni production. By contrast, the idea to write an Antigone play had been OsoWsan (OsoWsan 2001: 203).

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into the Yoruba setting. Apart from the subtitle, Women of Owu contains hardly any pointers to its source text.24 Still, OsoWsan accepted the commission for UK performances, and wrote a play that was by no means incomprehensible to its Wrst audiences. What is more, references to the Iraq war, with its contentious UK participation, made the play topical for British spectators, and more generally the suVerings caused by war, for women or men, are not an issue conWned to Africa. More interesting perhaps, the unfamiliar is attractive in its own ways. One does not have to speak Yoruba to be able to engage with the choral songs. There still is the music and the dance, and—just as powerful—the vague sense of being put in touch with another culture, mediated by a composer, a writer, and performers who are themselves familiar with that culture. Something similar is true for the elements of Yoruba religion in Women of Owu; and OsoWsan portrayal of gender relations, I suggested tentatively, could not be as provocative and as eVective as it is without the nineteenth-century African setting. Distance can open up room for the imagination. This is a principal aspect of the paradox that OsoWsan points to, between local grounding—so crucial for giving the play its coherence and moral force—and universality. But what about Euripides? His play is there too, somewhere, and most spectators will know that, if only from the programme note. Those who are familiar with Trojan Women will see its inXuence throughout. At the most basic level, their knowledge will help them follow and (more or less precisely) predict the action of a play that is not structured around a strong narrative. More fundamentally, similarities and diVerences between the two plays are likely to shape and reshape their views of both Trojan Women and Women of Owu. Despite the absence of intertextual pointers, some spectators will look at OsoWsan and Mike in the light of Euripides, and vice versa. Comparisons, if not necessarily sophisticated, between the new and the old, appeared in most of the reviews of the UK performances. What is more, the Greek elements can help those less familiar with West African theatre respond to the play. In a recent article, OsoWsan discusses the 24 Mike stresses that he approached the play as a new play, rather than a version of a Greek play, and OsoWsan statement in the second quote that he merely responded to the Chipping Norton commission may be seen in the same light.

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33

diYculty of producing Nigerian drama on the Euro-American stage (OsoWsan 2001: 174–201). DiVerences in the skills of actors, the circumstances of performances and the cultural knowledge and expectations of spectators all present hurdles, many of which are diYcult to overcome. Arguably, the use of song and dance in Women of Owu, characteristic of many Yoruba plays, may be easier to accommodate for many UK spectators as an engagement with what they may know from or about Greek plays than as a variety of theatre they do not know at all. The Greek source gives them a further entry point. For many spectators, however, in Europe, America, or Africa, the fact that there is a Greek source text is likely to be at least as important as how that text shapes Women of Owu. The idea of Greek tragedy evokes numerous associations, more or less related to the actual plays themselves. In this context, critics frequently point out that ancient plays can provide a particularly suitable platform for mounting anticolonial protest. Postcolonial writers use Greek tragedy as a highproWle European genre to express their protest against European colonial or neocolonial actions (Gilbert and Tompkins 1996: 38–43). Or they use Greek tragedy as a European genre that is less closely linked to the colonizers than for instance Shakespeare, and perhaps itself marginalized, to express their protest against the European colonizers (Wetmore 2002; Budelmann 2004; Hardwick 2004a). Either way, while it would be reductive to see Women of Owu as simply taking a core European genre to the UK and staging it as a critique of UK politics, some such reading is certainly possible. Interestingly, OsoWsan, in the responses quoted above, does not say anything about protest against European politics, but makes two other points about the meaning of Greek tragedy to him. One (as he says) is well known, but is no less true for it: the similarities between Greek and Yoruba drama (Asgill 1980: 175; Gilbert and Tompkins 1996: 38; Budelmann 2004: 15–20).25 Gods, choruses, song, dance, ritual elements, open-door performance spaces—Greek tragedy provides points of contact that Shakespeare and much other early modern or modern Western drama does not provide. The success of the choral work and the portrayal of the gods in Women of Owu owe much to such aYnities between the two theatre traditions. 25 OsoWsan thesis (which I have not seen) was a comparison between African and European forms of theatre.

34

Case Studies

OsoWsan other point is more diYcult. The themes of Greek tragedy, he suggests, are ‘said ‘‘universal’’ ’ and are those that ‘concern us all as human beings living in a social space we are never in full control of, nor fully comprehend’. This raises the perennial question of the universality of Greek tragedy: to what degree is Greek tragedy’s widespread appeal related to something genuinely universal in the plays themselves, such as their subject matter; to what degree is it the reXection of Greek tragedy’s accumulated reputation, including its reputation for universality; and to what degree does it depend on particular circumstances in particular places and periods, such as points of contact with African drama or a heightened sense of exposure and powerlessness? Yes, on the one hand Greek tragedy obviously survived for 2500 years, but on the other hand there has been an explosion in performances in the last thirty to forty years,26 with the once mostly Western genre becoming popular across the world, and with Trojan Women, a once unfancied play, becoming increasingly attractive, especially in contexts of sympathy with victims of military aggression.27 The appeal of Trojan Women as a Greek play to an African playwright and audience is (of course) a cocktail of several ingredients. What matters most in the present context is that spectators unfamiliar with Greek tragedy are, none the less, in more than one way able to engage with both the idea and the detail of a play inspired by a Greek source text. As in the case of European spectators with no experience of African theatre traditions, unfamiliarity need not lead to alienation, hostility, or disregard, but can add a range of extra dimensions to the play. All this, of course, is too schematic. After all, as the London audience of the initial Women of Owu tour illustrates, there is a degree (if only a degree) of convergence between Nigerian and UK audiences, or 26 Hall et al. 2004 see especially Hall’s introduction (2004: 1–46) for a discussion of possible reasons. 27 Victims of aggression: e.g. Sartre’s 1965 adaptation; Holk Freitag’s 1983 Tel Aviv production of Sartre’s adaptation, in the context of the Lebanon War (Levy and Yaari 1998); a Canadian CBC radio play on slavery with black actors (Hall 2004: 25); Courttia Newland’s 1999 Edinburgh (UK) Women of Troy 2099, in which the Greeks, committing atrocities, were repeatedly referred to as ‘English’, and the Trojans were dressed in traditional African costumes. Other high-proWle productions include those by Andrei Serban in 1974, Tadashi Suzuki in 1977, and by Dharmasiri Bandranayaka in 1999 (detailed review at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/troj-a03. shtml (last accessed August 2004)). Brief general discussion of the reception of Trojan Women in Taplin (1989: 261–3).

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African and Western audiences. Similarly, the contrast between audiences familiar and unfamiliar with African or with Greek drama is a sliding scale rather than a clear-cut distinction. But the basic conclusion I would like to draw from the discussion in this section is, I believe, not aVected. The considerable variation in what Greek tragedy may mean to diVerent spectators suggests strongly that speaking (as I have done) of ‘source texts’ or of modern plays ‘translating’, ‘adapting’, or ‘interpreting’ ancient Greek plays does not do justice to how spectators make sense of many plays, certainly plays like Women of Owu, which set up three-way relationships. Such terms are both useful and justiWable, but also limiting. Not only do we need the widest possible understanding of ‘translation’ to accommodate the fact that the idea of Greek or African is as signiWcant as the ancient or modern text, and that the associations that ‘Greek’ or ‘African’ evoke for spectators and indeed theatre professionals often shape the reception of a play just as much as any interest in the way the new play uses the old. More importantly, we have to realize that traYc is more than one way. On the one hand, OsoWsan and Mike translate a Greek play into an African context, but on the other hand awareness of the Greek play may help some European spectators bring an African play into their own world, while some African spectators may feel that the Greek play itself is theirs in the Wrst place, as much as it is European. Depending on a spectator’s position, the Greek side of Women of Owu may be familiar or unfamiliar; close to home or foreign; crucial or insigniWcant; and the source or the catalyst. Some of this is true of all ‘hybrid’ plays and intercultural performances, but I think Women of Owu, both the play itself and OsoWsan comments about it, helps to illustrate that Greek tragedy can be a distinctive element to go into the melting pot.

C ON C LU S I ON : C L A S SI C S A ND P O S TC O LO N I A L S T U D IE S Just as there are diVerent audiences watching Women of Owu, there will also be diVerent scholarly communities reading the play: experts in African literatures, in drama, in postcolonial studies, and in Classics, to name just the most obvious. Like diVerent audiences, they overlap.

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At the same time, however, just as OsoWsan stresses the local grounding of plays as a prerequisite for their universal appeal, scholars crossing disciplines are—inevitably—shaped by the discipline they come from, with its particular assumptions, interests, and methods. I want to end by placing my discussion of Women of Owu in the more general context of interaction between Classics and postcolonial studies, and more speciWcally, classical and postcolonial literary studies. As the essays in this collection and in Barbara GoV’s (2005) edited volume Classics and Colonialism show, interdisciplinary work between these areas is currently burgeoning. For classicists, the dominant context of this work is of course ‘reception studies’. The growing interest on the part of classicists in postcolonial literature is one particular aspect of their growing interest in the modern reception of ancient literature.28 Yet beyond this general place within Classics, several more speciWc factors come into play. First of all, as I have tried to bring out in the case of Women of Owu, and as others have done for other works, the blend of Greek or Roman and various African, South American, or otherwise postcolonial literary traditions can hold its own fascination for classicists and pose its own challenges. Secondly, Classics as a discipline comes with heavy colonialist baggage. As Lorna Hardwick (2004a) has pointed out, studying postcolonial responses to Greek tragedies is one way of confronting this baggage. Yet, thirdly, there is a further motivation for classicists to look at such texts that I think should not be ignored. Over the last ten to twenty years, postcolonial studies have been a success story more than has Classics. Postcolonial studies are attacked for their political opinion-making (what stronger testimony could there be to their perceived strength?), while Classics Wghts a battle against charges of being outdated and quite simply superXuous. One (by no means, of course, the only one) of the attractions of reception studies in general is that they allow classicists to get a share of the vibrancy of subjects such as theatre or twentieth century literature. Surely, postcolonial studies are particularly alluring in this respect. There is, I hasten to add, nothing wrong with that. On the contrary, Classics has been so long-lived a subject not least because of its 28 Rehm (2003); Hall et al. (2004); Dillon and Wilmer (2005); and Hall and Macintosh (2005) are four rather diVerent publications, in diVerent ways representative of recent work in this area.

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Proteus-like ability to change and re-change its shape, and this latest extension of its boundaries is exciting, perhaps even liberating. However, as a classicist, the question that I Wnd diYcult to avoid at this point is what Classics has to oVer to postcolonial studies or, in the case of Women of Owu, to postcolonial literary studies, in return. In concrete terms: why should anybody interested in postcolonial literary studies read this chapter? One way relationships can be good, but dialogue is better. The use of anthropological methods and themes borrowed from anthropology, gender studies or social history have transformed the study of ancient Greece and Rome over the last thirty years or so, but the other way round Classics has made little impact on anthropology, gender studies or the study of social history. To put it strongly, from the perspective of postcolonial literary studies, Greek tragedy is simply one of many Western texts that postcolonial writing engages with, along with those drawn from English, French, or Spanish literature. Like anthropology, postcolonial studies own the overarching theoretical models and methodologies, which can be exported to Classics rather than vice versa. This makes it diYcult to see what the study of classical literature will be able to bring to postcolonial studies. Perhaps indeed there is little potential for dialogue, and what we will see over the next few years is classical literary studies learning from postcolonial literary studies without being able to give much back. Classicists interested in interdisciplinary work in this area should I think be conscious of this possibility. Their excitement may not be shared as widely on the other side. In the context of this volume, however, with contributors from various disciplines, it would be wrong to end on a negative note, and I would like to believe that, within limits, there are also more upbeat points to be made. Firstly, exactly because it is a nervous subject, a subject under pressure, and because it is prepared to question its boundaries, and even purpose, to such a high degree, Classics is genuinely interested in dialogue, and under the right circumstances that might be attractive to other subjects, including postcolonial studies. Secondly, classicists qua classicists will inevitably oVer a new perspective. As they start from a diVerent base—their understanding of classical literature and its reception history—they make diVerent connections and see diVerent things. They have a partial angle on postcolonial studies and, as has become clear, their interest in classical

38

Case Studies

literature may contrast with the interests of some audiences, writers and directors; but as long as it comes without claims to a privileged access to the plays in question, this speciWc viewpoint should lead to speciWc insights and contributions, some of which may be of interest also to experts in other disciplines. Thirdly, and most problematically, Classics has its own characteristic methods. It is not by accident that this chapter has concentrated on a single play. Classicists have traditionally been empiricist in their approach to texts, and often study them in enormous detail. The elaborate commentaries written on ancient texts are a good expression of this. Perhaps few subjects apart from theology have channelled as much eVort into writing commentaries as Classics. It is obvious why these tendencies are often criticized, but I think it would be a mistake to neglect what is valuable about them. They represent one particular way of trying to appreciate individual creativity as broadly as possible, and this, if done selfconsciously, is a worthwhile project with all literary texts. Classicists know that they will not be able simply to fall back on what they have always done, but I think they should still remember where they come from. They will always remain classicists and will be looked at as such: classicists who live in a period rife with postcolonial concerns and who may therefore be interested, personally and professionally, in postcolonial studies, but who will only rarely become card-carrying specialists in postcolonial studies. What interests me in this respect is that some trends in postcolonial studies may well create opportunities for classicists qua classicists to make valid contributions to a Weld that is not theirs. First, authors and theorists in former colonies point out that ‘postcolonialism’ is a Western concept and that ‘postcolonial studies’ are an invention of Western academia. In an interview about Tegonni, OsoWsan speaks of the ‘merely intellectual discourses of ‘‘postcoloniality’’ which are currently fashionable because they serve scholars so well in the western academic circuit, but which are so remote from the concrete concerns of the people on our continent’ (OsoWsan 2001: 206).29 29 A similar point, in a diVerent tone, is made by Trivedi (1999: 269) in response to the question: ‘who is the postcolonial?’: ‘On the basis of the evidence available so far, a postcolonial is an English-speaking theoretically inclined Westward-looking writer or academic of (or more likely from) a former colony which ‘‘gained independence’’ from Britain during the last half-century . . .’.

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39

Related to that, I think, is the longstanding concern about lack of speciWcity in postcolonial literary criticism. The ‘postcolonial’ is a concept that goes beyond particular spaces, moments, and situations. There has been increasing dissatisfaction with the blandness of some postcolonial literary criticism that is not suYciently attuned to the speciWcs of cultures, literatures, and texts. One recent trend, therefore, has been not so much to develop postcolonial literary theory in general as to focus on reading individual texts, and rely on those readings to make their contribution to develop theory more widely.30 In this context, classical literary studies perhaps do have something to oVer, as well as so much to gain. They can oVer the local position of one of the elements that go into the characteristic postcolonial blend—Greek tragedy in the case of Women of Owu; and from this position they can oVer their own response to the individual creative work, a diVerent response from that privileging matters postcolonial. This kind of contribution will probably always be modest, but that is perhaps as it should be. 30 The complexities of the need for speciWcity in postcolonial criticism are analysed at length in Hallward (2001), including detailed references to earlier work. Most recently, Spivak (2003) called for more speciWcity, careful readings and awareness of local cultures in comparative studies.

2 Antigone’s Boat: the Colonial and the Postcolonial in Tegonni: An African Antigone by Femi OsoWsan1 Barbara GoV

Adaptations of classical drama by writers of African descent are increasingly important to students of Classics and the humanities generally, not least because classical drama has been integral to the notion of the Western tradition, and African adaptations raise questions about what it means to claim a ‘Western’ tradition in the wake of colonialism. Such adaptations also struggle with the fact that the very presence of Greek and Roman Classics within African culture, however fruitful for creative endeavour, testiWes to the disruption of African history by decades of colonial exploitation. Most such adaptations address more or less explicitly the ways in which the conditions of their possibility can also undermine their project.2 Within African rewritings, the story of Antigone has proved very popular, and the reasons for this presumably include the fact that the 1 The present essay is derived from a book in progress, which is co-written with Michael Simpson (Goff and Simpson (2007)). My thanks go to the conference organizers for the opportunity to present this work in such a stimulating context, and for their helpful comments and suggestions, to the audience at the conference and the anonymous reader. 2 For general introductions to the topic of African adaptations see, for example: Etherton (1982: 102–42); and Gilbert and Tompkins (1996: 38–43). Wetmore (2002) is a much more comprehensive survey and very relevant. Classicists who have addressed this issue include McDonald (2000), Macintosh (2001), Budelmann (2004), and Hardwick (2004a and 2005a).

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41

story involves a confrontation with overweening power, which can readily be adapted to various situations.3 In Western rewritings, a play based on Antigone often Wgures resistance against an arrogant state, as with Anouilh and Brecht. In African Antigones, one might expect Creon to be identiWed with the colonial occupiers, but in fact, this is rarely the case in any straightforward way. In The Island (1973) by Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona, it is clearly the white apartheid system that throws up its Creons, but there is also a power struggle in the cell, between Winston and John. In Odale’s Choice by E. K. Brathwaite (1967), various aspects of the Creon Wgure suggest that he may be understood not only as a white colonizer but also as a home-grown African tyrant. This muddying of the political waters is linked to an aspect of the character, Antigone, that makes it diYcult to recuperate her simply as a Wgure for African resistance: since she is part and parcel of the cultural equipment that the colonizers drew on to explain the success of their inroads into other cultures, she presumably only comes to Africa by way of colonial Europe. The discourse of resistance that Antigone typically generates must here be related to, perhaps even descended from, the power structures of colonialism that undermine resistance. A recent pertinent adaptation of Antigone is Tegonni: an African Antigone by Femi OsoWsan, Wrst produced in 1994.4 This play centres on a young Yoruba woman’s opposition to British imperialism. The brother of Princess Tegonni was killed in a civil conXict in which the British assisted the other side, and his corpse is inauspiciously exposed on the day of Tegonni’s wedding to the British District OYcer, Allan Jones. Defying the colonial Governor, who has ordered that the body of the rebel be left unburied, Tegonni performs the rites for her brother, and she eventually suVers the penalty of death. Inasmuch as the play directly dramatizes the nineteenth century colonial encounter, it is unlike other African Antigone-dramas, but also unlike the majority of OsoWsan’s plays, which are best known for their probing analyses of postcolonial, especially post-civil war, Nigeria.5 Tegonni 3 On the popularity of Antigone in Africa see Wetmore (2002) and Gibbs (2004) and ch. 3 in this volume. 4 The published text (OsoWsan 1999a) derives from a later production, not that of 1994, and all references to the play are taken from this edition. 5 Jeyifo (1995: 121) also discusses this apparent paradox. On another recent play by OsoWsan, The Women of Owu, which discusses nineteenth-century Africa through the lens of classical reception; see Budelmann in this volume.

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also oVers departures from the Greek version of Antigone, since it introduces several new characters and embraces many surprising shifts in the plot. Although there is not time or space in this essay to discuss all of these elements, it will be clear enough that these diVerences are motivated by the speciWc politics that Tegonni proposes. I shall explore here the ways in which the play coordinates colonial and postcolonial perspectives, suggesting that it oVers diVerent versions of each, and that it Wnds both colonial oppression and postcolonial resistance, in unexpected places. I use the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ in a way that has become fairly received, so that ‘colonial’ refers to the actual historical period of occupation, and to the perspectives of the colonizing metropolis, while ‘postcolonial’ is temporally later but also refers to various kinds of critical thought about and dissent from the ideologies that accompanied occupation.6 I should note at the outset that OsoWsan’s version of postcolonialism also rejects the neocolonialism that puts corrupt indigenous e´lites in place of corrupt colonialists. OsoWsan has in fact gone on record as questioning the usefulness of postcolonial analysis, when what is required is a focus on the contemporary conditions in Africa (see, for example: Jeyifo 1995: 122; OsoWsan 1999c). However, the setting and much of the discourse of Tegonni suggests that the perspectives oVered by postcolonial analysis are highly relevant to an understanding of the drama. I shall investigate in particular the Wgure of Antigone herself, who as a character in the play arrives to share the stage with the nineteenth-century heroine Tegonni, but who also announces that she comes from Greek mythology (p. 26). Since this Antigone is very selfconscious about her provenance in ancient Greek myth and drama, she can be seen to bring with her the weight of theatrical tradition, as well as a particular political stance. In the terms mobilized by the play, she straddles the discourses of ‘myth’ and ‘history’.7 Antigone’s self-consciousness about tradition also means that she becomes the focus for the play’s metatheatrical dimension. By ‘metatheatrical dimension’ I mean the moments—and there are many in this 6 On these distinctions see, for example: Boehmer (1995: 2); Gilbert and Tompkins (1996: 2); and Quayson (2000: 2). 7 These terms are Wrst encountered in the ‘Programme Notes’ to the published drama (p. 10) and are especially signiWcant at later points like the scene between Antigone and Tegonni (pp. 126–7), discussed below.

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play—when the drama makes a point of its Wctional, theatrical status. As we shall see, these moments are also those that most trenchantly discuss the possibilities and problems of resistance, whether to a political authority or to the authority of tradition. In this respect, Tegonni is characteristic of OsoWsan’s drama, which almost always coordinates its progressive politics with a persistent and demanding metatheatricality.8 Through the Wgure of Antigone the play is enabled to make complex arguments about the relations between the colonial and the postcolonial, and through its metatheatrical awareness it is also enabled, at times, to escape from these complexities and assert an authoritative claim of its own. The other important elements of the play for this chapter, as well as Antigone, are the British colonial oYcial Carter-Ross, the soldiers who accompany Antigone, and the boat on which she enters the stage. The colonial aspects of the play’s politics centre on the man who can be understood as the Creon-Wgure, ‘Lt-General Carter-Ross, who is the governor of the southern colony of Nigeria’ (p. 28), otherwise known as ‘de big white man, ‘‘Slap-My-Face’’ the big Oyinbo from Lagos’ (p. 47). We do not meet him until the play is a third of the way through, so that he cannot make the kind of bid for our sympathy that the Sophoclean Creon makes as leader of a community only recently released from the fear of destruction. Instead, he immediately acquaints us with his racist understanding of the relations between colonizer and colonized. He sees the Empire in simple terms of dominance and submission (p. 65): It is time to take a Wrm control here, I see, and show who is in charge! The Empire will assert its power!. . . . Fear! That’s what these niggers respect!’

If Wrmness is for a moment relaxed, then (p. 114): Chaos! Rebellion! All my work undone! And before we know it, they’ll begin to eat each other again! 8 On this feature of OsoWsan’s dramaturgy see, for example: Dunton (1992: 67); Richards (1996: 63 and 83); Jeyifo (1995: 129); and Wetmore (2002: 181–2). OsoWsan’s aesthetics are often labelled ‘Brechtian’; see, for example:. Crow (2000: 30); and Olaniyan (1999: 74), who writes of a ‘consummate dramaturgic sophistication and openness that takes us a few steps beyond Bertolt Brecht’. Richards makes the point that these aesthetics derive at least as much from traditional African performance styles, including ritual, dance, song, storytelling and spectator input, as from Brecht (Richards 1996: 72, 78, 81).

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He does oVer a pious discourse about ‘the white man’s burden’9 and the civilizing mission of the British (p. 131), but this is quickly undermined by his latent violence. His relations with all of the Yoruba characters are characterized by a swift resort to physical force, and he eventually engages in a violent struggle with his own District OYcer as well. A straightforward physical violence is not the end of the account of Carter-Ross, however. Even though he is a man of brute force, he has a Wne sense of occasion and of drama. For instance, some of the characters conclude that he orders the exposure of the corpse of Tegonni’s brother not in order to drive home the political lessons of loyalty, but to aVord a deliberate provocation that will disrupt the planned wedding between Tegonni and the District OYcer (for example p. 121). The exposure of the corpse is thus an action with a staged, theatrical dimension, as well as a political charge. It is also metatheatrical in that the part of the corpse is played by one of the soldiers who accompany the character Antigone on to the stage (p. 29). Not only does the same actor play both parts but the character of the soldier selfconsciously takes on the role of corpse, so that on one level there is no ‘real’ corpse in the play at all. Others of Carter-Ross’s gestures as Governor are also conditioned by theatricality. Thus, when he plans to execute Tegonni and her women friends, he has them watch while the scaVolds are erected, so that they will be the more frightened. This theatrical plan actually backWres, since they remain unmoved (p. 72). Despite his colonial attitudes, Carter-Ross is also brought on two separate occasions: once by the District OYcer (pp. 122–23), and once by the joint eVorts of the Yoruba elders, to countenance a pardon for Tegonni. The Yoruba elders in fact use the theatricality of colonial power against Carter-Ross, because they oVer to stage a scene in which Tegonni is to make a humiliating public apology, in return for a pardon (pp. 87–8). The possibility that Tegonni may be pardoned, and live, sets Carter-Ross apart from the Greek Creon, who never wavers in his determination to execute his niece.10 These 9 This imperialistic and self-serving concept is most familiar from the poem by Kipling, published in McClure’s Magazine of February 1899, in response to the American takeover of the Philippines. 10 Other Creons, such as those of Anouilh and Brathwaite, oVer to overlook Antigone’s deed, but this is usually done on the grounds of family relationship, which is not applicable here, and is usually done in secret.

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oVers of pardon by Carter-Ross may also be seen to constitute a kind of metatheatrical crisis: will the new play save the Antigone-Wgure, the Yoruba princess, or will it save the Antigone-plot in which the protagonists have to die? Such questions, about the possibilities of diVerent endings and of escape from theatrical tradition, can also be understood as questions about the weight of the colonial past, and so bear here a special urgency. Can politics and theatre collaborate to write an Antigone with a new and more positive conclusion? In this connection we should look at Antigone herself, who is the most obviously metatheatrical Wgure in the play; she enters the stage with the words ‘Greetings. Has the play started?’ (p. 25) and she constantly draws attention to the Wctional, theatrical quality of the proceedings. But we should note that the drive behind her metatheatrical utterances is almost exactly the opposite of that which impels the other characters, many of whom are working to save Tegonni. Whereas much of the play is invested in not being like the Greek Antigone, so that the heroine can survive, the character Antigone frequently tries to ensure that this drama repeats the traditional plot, and thus plays out exactly as did her own. When she arrives, she is convinced that this drama is in fact her own (p. 25): I heard you were acting my story. And I was so excited I decided to come and participate.

She reinforces this attitude in her next scene, when she is preparing the soldiers who have accompanied her to take up their new theatrical roles as African mercenaries: ‘A story goes on, no matter when one arrives in it’; ‘It’s just history about to repeat itself again’; ‘You know what to do, you’ve been well rehearsed’; ‘The script is the story we rehearsed, as it’s happened at other times, in other places’ (pp. 28–9). Throughout this scene, then, she insists on the inevitability of the story that they will enact. This stance on the part of Antigone is intriguing for a number of reasons. If we do think of an Antigone as necessarily a Wgure of resistance, we should acknowledge that here she is almost the opposite, and, as we shall see, other characters take it upon themselves to resist her, as well as there being the underlying drive in the play to rescue Tegonni and thus defeat the imperative from the ancient Greek plot. There is only one scene where Antigone also seems to

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try to rescue Tegonni, and thus to overcome the weight of her own legacy, and, as we shall see, this scene has its own diYculties. Overall, there seems to be an identiWcation of Antigone with a form of coercion, and in this respect she may indeed remind us of the coercive dimension of the colonialism that makes her story available to the Nigerian author in the Wrst place. To see her simply as a Wgure of opposition to the colonial power may be insuYcient. So, there are at least two versions of colonialism at work in this drama. Carter-Ross oVers almost a caricature of violent racist attitudes, but also allows us to read his power as largely a matter of theatrical eVects. The character Antigone may also be seen to oVer a version of colonial coercion, despite her usual identiWcation with resistance. There are also, on the reading that I shall oVer here, at least two versions of the postcolonial in Tegonni. These may be broadly characterized as negative and positive. One version concentrates on the internal conXicts within Nigerian society and lays the blame for Nigeria’s problems not only at the feet of the colonizers, but also of the indigenous people. The second version, centring on the Wgure of the boat on which Antigone arrives and later departs, suggests even more forcefully that the colonizers may be irrelevant. These aspects of the play are postcolonial not only in a broadly temporal sense but also in that they subvert the ideologies of colonialism by training their focus on relations among Africans rather than on relations between Africans and the occupying British. Although the play is shaped by the obvious overriding conXict between the Yoruba and the British, there are also several ways in which the African society in the play is shown to be divided against itself. We are invited to see that these divisions characterize a pre-colonial period, and that they extend in signiWcance to the postcolonial period. There is the civil dispute, that kills Tegonni’s brothers, but also a persistent state of hostility with the neighbouring peoples (p. 22), and references to war with the Dahomi and the Nupe (p. 84). Within the town of Oke-Osun, where Tegonni lives, it is made clear that male and female are often antagonistic to each other, sometimes violently so. Tegonni precipitates much of the expression of this hostility by her desire to become a bronze-caster and sculptor, something that no woman has done before. Even though she is its princess, the town is united in its disapproval of her move, and she is

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variously threatened with torture (p. 130) and death (p. 78), from which she is saved by Allan Jones, the white British District OYcer. As well as gender trouble, there is conXict between the representatives of the traditional ways and those of a more progressive tendency (for example p. 21). On a larger scale, the play suggests that discord among Africans aided and abetted the colonizers in their project. Chief Isokun speaks of black participation in the slave trade (pp. 107–8): Take reverend here! When I look at him, for instance—I ask, Who were the people who came and captured him, and sold him to the ship that took him to slavery in America? Was it not our own people, of the same colour of skin as you and me?. . . . Tell me, what cruelties have we not inXicted on ourselves, we black people, as agents in the service of others!

The colonial occupiers do not present the only examples of oppression in the play. The soldiers who accompany Antigone in her entry on to the stage, and who are then assigned the roles of African mercenaries in the Hausa constabulary, constitute the play’s most striking illustration of Chief Isokun’s claim about the propensity for conXict and exploitation among black Africans. They are acting the part of Africans who readily enlist under the colonizer in order to carry out military actions against other Africans—in this case they are deployed by the British against the forces headed by Tegonni’s brother. The mercenary soldiers’ attitude to their task is alarmingly pragmatic: they are working for the British because the British pay more than the Africans’ home communities could (pp. 32–3). There are few signs that Africans can readily make common cause against the colonial occupier, for as Antigone says ‘here the soldiers obey their white commanders blindly, and ask no questions’ (p. 29). The soldiers in the play cannot even make common cause among themselves, and their constant quarrelling becomes a leitmotif of all their stage appearances. This depressing scenario, however, does not run for ever, and even though divided, the soldiers Wnd a way to mount some resistance. As we have seen, Antigone introduces the scenes with the soldiers by impressing on them the inevitability of their participation and the inevitability of the story that they will enact: ‘It’s just history about to repeat itself again’ (p. 28). What is signiWcant is that the soldiers

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immediately undermine her assumptions. For instance, when she delegates one of them to play the corpse of Tegonni’s brother, he immediately protests: ‘Me! But I just woke up, fresh from the grave!’ (p. 29). In the next scene, when the other three are drinking over his body, he jumps up and demands his share (p. 30): 4TH SOL: Give me, make I drink! 2ND SOL: Gerrout ! You supposed to be dead. 4TH SOL: (Standing up) If I no drink my own, I no dey die again! 2ND SOL: (Giving him) Take am! World don spoil Wnish! When dead person begin to drink!

When we recall that Antigone introduces this scene with much emphasis on its preordained quality, we can see that what the soldier who is playing the corpse does is refuse to follow the script. This resistance, the force of which is here almost entirely comic, is played out again on a larger and more serious scale, when the soldiers decide against building the scaVolds that they have been ordered to construct for Tegonni and her friends. While they at Wrst congratulate themselves on their craftsmanship—‘See? Solid! Even the Queen of England go want to die here!’ (p. 71)—they subsequently start to rebel against their task; they become disgusted with their jobs as oppressors and confront Antigone to demand new roles. When Antigone arrives, they describe all the horrible things they have to do while in character (p. 74): 1ST SOL: All we do is carry corpses. 2ND SOL: Or build execution platforms. 1ST SOL: Or terrorize people. 2ND SOL: Burn and plunder houses. 4TH SOL: Collect bribes!

She again tries to sway them with a metatheatrical necessity and claims that they cannot acquire new roles so late in the day: ‘before the play ends? You must be joking!. . . . You can’t quit before the play ends.’ This provokes from them an answering threat to derail the play itself: ‘when we quit, the play will end’ (p. 75). Antigone is forced, by this brief power struggle, to Wnd them new roles as part of the delegation of elders who will plead with the Governor for Tegonni’s life. Far from Wnding the metatheatrical dimension constricting, as

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Antigone earlier on seems to want it to be, the soldiers use it to aVord themselves a measure of resistance and even a kind of freedom of action. Subverting class boundaries, as well as confusing the identities of colonizer and colonized, they convert the role of ignorant oppressors into that of prominent citizens who are working to save Tegonni. The soldiers’ resistance does not encompass only Antigone and the colonial power, however. At the end of their complaints about their roles they sum up (pp. 74–5): We’re so ashamed! Is this all that soldiers do in this country?

and Antigone replies: It’s the times we’ve come into, my friend.

The temporal and geographical vagueness in the exchange allows it to be read as an indictment of contemporary Nigeria, rather than only of the colonial power,11 and this possibility becomes increasingly insistent as Antigone continues (p. 75): It just so happens that the soldiers here are trained to look upon their own people as enemies. As fair game to practice their weapons on.

Given the history of the military’s involvement in the politics of postindependence Nigeria, a reference to their oppressive role in their country is hard to avoid (see also Wetmore 2002: 188–90). The soldiers’ dramatic identity as Africans who are Wghting other Africans, coordinated with their metatheatrical resistance to that identity, clariWes the play’s postcolonial critique. Africans are culpable— they were complicit with the predation of the colonizers, and they bear much of the responsibility for the contemporary failures of the postcolonial period. But if Africans are part of the problem then, by deWnition, they can be part of the solution. The possibility of the soldiers’ resistance to the inevitability of the story, as described by Antigone, opens the possibility of resistance against what OsoWsan has elsewhere called ‘Afropessimism’, a state of mind that consigns the continent to the inevitability of its damaged history (see Jeyifo 1995: 129). 11 The ‘Programme Notes’ to Tegonni similarly target the horrors of contemporary Nigeria rather than its colonial past. See also OsoWsan (1999c), in which, as noted above, he argues that a focus on the colonial, or even the postcolonial, detracts from the pressing business of freedom and justice in present day Nigeria.

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The metatheatrical dimension of this version of the drama Antigone, then, aVords the vehicle for some of its trenchant criticisms of both colonial and postcolonial oppression, but it also works to imagine a way out. The struggle between these two dynamics is evident in the important scene towards the end of the play between Antigone and Tegonni. Antigone gives up the pretence of being just a character alongside other characters and appears as ‘a metaphor. From the past’, and Tegonni accuses her of being ‘a relic in the memory of poets’ (p. 125). At the beginning of this scene the two women are antagonists because, while Tegonni is determined to defy the colonial power, even to the point of death, Antigone counsels quiescence, and survival. She has, she claims (p. 126), given up the practice of freedom, because: I’ve learnt from history, and I have grown wise. Freedom is a myth. . . . Go and look down the ages, my dear. Human beings throw oV their yokes, only for themselves to turn into oppressors. They struggle valiantly for freedom, and in the process acquire the terrible knowledge of how to deny it to others.

This history from which she has learnt has also, she claims, ‘contaminated’ her so that she is no longer the Antigone that Tegonni knows, ‘the hero men remember’ (p. 125). To this extent her discourse here is consistent with her urgings to the soldiers, in that she appears as a Wgure tamed by her knowledge of colonial and postcolonial history into a refusal of resistance and an acceptance of the inevitable. As such, Tegonni violently rejects her—‘Leave my story’—and proclaims her devotion to the ‘undying faith’ of freedom (pp. 126–7). At this point Antigone changes tack, announces that ‘I was testing you’ and joins forces with Tegonni, sure that for all the tyrants who arise, ‘furious to inscribe their nightmares and their horrors on the patient face of history . . . as many times will others come up who will challenge them and chase them away into oblivion’ (p. 127). The two women jubilantly celebrate their solidarity and newfound determination. One interpretation of this scene sees it as straightforwardly celebrating the courage of freedom Wghters throughout history, and thus as shifting the play’s centre of gravity to a point where it can proclaim its faith in an ultimate liberation. But when Antigone speaks of the way in which freedom Wghters turn into oppressors, her arguments cannot simply be dismissed, because she is describing the lived history of many

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contemporary states.12 That she is adopting a pessimistic persona to test Tegonni—that she is acting, in fact—does not mean that she is not speaking the truth. The fact that she reveals her theatrical act also means that it becomes possible to question at what other points she was acting, and thus to query her integrity throughout. In this respect she is like numerous other characters in dramas by OsoWsan who suddenly reveal themselves to be quite diVerent from how they seemed, with alarming consequences for the audience’s faith in its own perceptions.13 Moreover, when Antigone performs her volte-face and encourages Tegonni to resist, the upshot of the scene is that Tegonni does indeed die, replicating the plot of the Greek tragedy. The story is saved instead of the woman. When Antigone claims that she has been ‘contaminated’, she may in fact be correct; we have seen already that she speaks for the inevitability of the Antigone-story with its freight of death, and perhaps she has indeed been made into an oppressor by the weight of history.14 These questions about the signiWcance and indeed identity of the Antigone-Wgure are central to this important scene, but are also posed emphatically at the beginning and end of the play. Those points in the play, Antigone’s arrival and her departure, are marked as spectacular and mysterious, yet oVer a more positive answer to the question of identity. She arrives, the stage directions tell us, in the retinue of a goddess, on a beautiful boat (p. 17):15 12 See Wetmore (2002: 191). Wetmore comments on Antigone’s words here: ‘Antigone oVers an explanation as to why cycles of oppression continue: once power is achieved, it is always abused and then the freedom Wghters are more concerned about holding on to power than about achieving true freedom. Power corrupts. In OsoWsan’s view, this is a false argument, as the history of class struggle is not cyclical but linear. Struggle is a process rooted in the idea of progress. Once the bonds of oppression are truly broken for all, argues Marxism at its most basic, then they will not reform, they will dissolve for ever.’ As will be clear, I think this account is over simpliWed. OsoWsan himself has frequently noted the need for adaptation of basic Marxist notions; see, for example: Awodiya (1993: 37). 13 On this feature of OsoWsan’s dramaturgy see, for example:Dunton (1992: 69 and 71); and Crow (2000: 48). Richards (1996: 4) comments on the use of ‘authorial manipulation’ in early dramas. 14 We might note too that ‘contamination’ is the term used in the discourse of textual criticism to describe what happens when the ideally direct line of reproduction between exemplar and subsequent copies is interrupted or otherwise spoilt. 15 It is not clear from these stage directions that Antigone is on the boat, but in a later scene (p. 24) she descends from it, so that we must retrospectively realize where she came from, and a production would presumably take this into account.

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On a platform, the Water Goddess, Yemoja, in full, resplendent regalia, is rowed in, in a much–decorated boat.

On the boat Yemoja, her boatmen, and her attendants, who include Antigone and Antigone’s soldiers, are singing a song that is at Wrst inaudible, and are perhaps not quite clear to the sight (p. 17): . . . just a spectacle of dazzling colours and Xuid, synchronized movements, all silent, as if observed through transparent glass.

Overall, the arrival partakes of the nature of a dream sequence. At the end of the play, when the action is over and the principals are all dead, the boat appears again in an epilogue (p. 141): Lights come up on the boat of Yemoja, the Wgures frozen on it, as we saw them last. Their song gradually becomes audible again, as the Wgures come alive, rowing around the Goddess.

Antigone then approaches Tegonni, who has been killed in the previous scene of riot, rouses her, and takes her on to the boat, where they are welcomed: There is immediate, visible joy on the boat, with perhaps a few crackers.

The women are further rewarded (p. 141): Antigone and Tegonni kneel before the Goddess, and are each rewarded with a crystal fan and a dazzling blue necklace.

The boat opens and closes the play, and thus invites us to speculate on its signiWcance. I suggest that the boat makes Antigone less a Wgure of colonial coercion and more a Wgure who upholds the independence of African culture, rendering the colonizers almost irrelevant. Wetmore (2002: 183), who is commenting on a performance rather than on the published text, identiWes the boat as a slave ship, and suggests that its movement across the stage recalls that of the Middle Passage. While I cannot completely agree with this interpretation, Antigone’s boat does ask to be situated in relation to the various forms of mobility, forced or voluntary, that have characterized the colonial and postcolonial periods, and that include the trajectory of the dramatist OsoWsan himself, who went from Nigeria to Atlanta in order to direct the Wrst performance of Tegonni. At the same time, however, the boat refuses to be conWned to the historical

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dimension, and takes on a mythical or symbolic aspect. Whereas the weight of history and the myth of freedom are opposed in the scene between Antigone and Tegonni, the more positive connotations of the ship try to coordinate the two. At the end, for instance, when Antigone takes Tegonni on to the boat, the boat may be understood as moving through space and time as a kind of spiritual haven for, and commemoration of, all those who have resisted the many manifestations of tyranny, and have paid the price. This mingling of the historical and the mythical means that, although Antigone presumably comes from somewhere and leaves for somewhere else, the image of the beautiful and uncanny boat obscures her origins and destination. Part of the point, I suggest, is that Antigone does not come by any colonial route; we are not encouraged to imagine her as arriving from ancient Greece, or via Britain, so her advent is attended by none of the anxiety that might be generated if we were invited to think of her as a sign of the colonial inheritance. Instead, her arrival by boat allows her to bypass this inheritance completely. If Antigone resists being thought of as ‘colonial’, then the fact that she arrives on the boat of the Yoruba watergoddess invites us instead to think of her as African. At some level it is clear indeed that she does not arrive at all; in the boat of an African deity, she is already part of Africa.16 If we accept this reading, we can see that one important aspect of the play’s postcolonial politics is this oVer to erase Africa’s colonial history, by making Antigone into an African and subsuming her colonial lineage within her African identity. That she is indeed part of an indigenous tradition is asserted by the play’s title, or rather subtitle; ‘an’ African Antigone reminds us that this drama can acknowledge the plural parentage of Brathwaite and Fugard, as well as of Sophocles and Anouilh. Tegonni’s most postcolonial gesture, perhaps, is to make the colonial disappear. 16 At one point in the play Antigone is described as black (p. 26), but in the longer paper of which this is a version I show that she is not always or necessarily black. See GoV and Simpson (2007).

3 Antigone and her African Sisters: West African Versions of a Greek Original James Gibbs

In The Blinkards, a play written by Kobina Sekyi and produced in Cape Coast, once capital of the Gold Coast, in 1915,1 we encounter members of the Cosmopolitan Club. We see them responding to an invitation to ‘a nuptial ceremony’, where, it is announced: ‘the jolliWcation and refreshments . . . will be of Lucullian magniWcence’. The groom at the forthcoming celebration is called ‘Alexander Archibald Octavius Okadu’ and his bride’s father, from whom the invitation has been received, glories in the name ‘Aldiborontiphoscophorino Chrononhontonthologos Tsiba’ (p.94).2 In this scene Sekyi, who had drunk deep at the Pierian Spring (he had a degree in Philosophy from London University and had been called to the Bar), invited his audience to laugh at the presumptuous, miseducated, misguided, alienated creatures he paraded before them. Jaw-breaking GreekinXuenced names speak of a section of society rendered ridiculous by a little learning. This sad situation has prompted academic analysis as well as satire. ‘The Tragic InXuence of Shakespeare and the Greeks’ was the title of a conference paper delivered at the University of Ife in 1975 by Ime 1 The following primary materials have been used in this paper and, where necessary, are referred to by page numbers only. Brathwaite’s Odale’s Choice (1967); Dove’s, A Woman in Jade ([1934] 2004); Fiawoo’s The Fifth Landing Stage: A Play in Five Acts. (1943); OsoWsan’s Recent Outings. (1999a); Sekyi’s The Blinkards (1974). 2 Sekyi (1974: 94). Yirenkyi (1976: 30) oVers ‘brainless’ as a free translation of ‘Tsiba’.

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Ikiddeh, and it was quoted with approval by Agovi (1990) in his substantial account of theatre in colonial Ghana. Agovi enlisted Ikiddeh’s support to assess how the British employed the theatre, including the plays of Sophocles, as part of their colonial strategy. The promotion of Greek drama was, Agovi argued, part of an ‘organized policy of cultural dissemination’ (Agovi: 1990 p.17), its purpose to subvert and divert genuine cultural nationalist movements. The reference to the ‘tragic inXuence’ summed up the perception. I am interested here in the way Ghanaians, and people working in Ghana, have used one particular classical text, Antigone, to provide a means of communication, self-examination, and helpful self-expression. The paper opens with a survey of the position of the Classics in West Africa, and with a brief overview of European-inXuenced theatre. I then focus on the fortunes of Antigone in the country over a seventy-year period from 1933.3 After considering responses to the play at two schools, I will look at the way radical, progressive dramatists from the Caribbean contributed to Ghanaian theatregoers’ experience of the Antigone story. Reference will be made to Odale’s Choice by Kamau Brathwaite and to Antigone in Haiti by Felix Morisseau-Leroy, and the text of the former will be examined in some detail. Reference will then be made to Antigone in Twi, and to English language adaptations of the play by Evans Nii Oma Hunter and Victor Yankah. The implications are that, in Ghana, a play long recognized and often discussed as a key text in world theatre, has played a signiWcant role in the cultural, theatrical, and political dialogue between Europe and Africa. The essay keeps in mind the political dimension of the play and speculates about the impact of this version during a period when it was ‘oV the boards’. I conclude by insisting that the inXuence of the Greeks was far from ‘tragic’. In fact, I put forward the contrary argument: that the truly liberated post-colonial writer can use inherited material to powerful eVect. In the absence of a Ghanaian text to illustrate this, reference is made in the Wnal paragraphs to Femi OsoWsan’s Tegonni.4 That play is oVered as an example of how a progressive writer has used the Antigone 3 For studies of adaptations of classical plays by West African writers, see: Owusu (1983); and Wetmore (2002). Also Asgill (1980) and Talbert (1983). 4 Published text OsoWsan (1999a).

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material with assurance and panache. OsoWsan employs Antigone as part of a strategy to stimulate debate about pertinent themes without denying local roots and without compromise. As I proceed, it will become apparent that I reject both Ikiddeh’s isolationist thesis and Agovi’s conspiracy theory. For Mr Tsiba, encountered in the opening paragraph, the inXuence of the Greeks may have been ‘tragic’, a colonial inXuence that lumbered him with a name beyond naming. But, in her encounters with the Greek tradition and pace the position taken by Ikiddeh and Agovi, OsoWsan’s Tegonni Wnds much that is positive and sustaining. Like others before her, including Brathwaite’s Odale, she draws strength from being at the conXuence of ways of life; she delights in an awareness of various traditions. She Wnds creative inspiration in the interaction of diVerent cultures. The ephemeral nature of productions and the absence of key texts means that theatre history is often characterized by gaps, by conjecture, and by surmise. This is certainly true in the case of Ghana, a country that lacks a sustained tradition of ‘publications of record’ devoted to the arts, and in which the archival holdings covering drama are inadequate. As a result, this paper marks just a stage in a work in progress, and repeatedly prompts thought about the writing of Ghana theatre history.

THEATRICAL BACKGROUND The theatrical background to this examination includes the varied, complex, changing, and continuing indigenous performance traditions of West Africa. These are often linked with festivals, rituals, folk stories, and rites of passage in which song and dance have major roles. Those elements continue to inXuence some commercial, syncretic conventions in the local theatrical tradition, notably that known as ‘Concert Party’. Of the theatrical genres and styles imported from Europe, some have been easily incorporated, while others have proved resistant to fusion, adaptation, or relocation. During the thirties, when Ghanaian Concert Party ‘trios’ were emerging, the following were among the forms imported into Ghana and vying for attention: cantatas, pantomimes

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(Aladdin and his Magic Lamp), morality plays (Everyman), biblical dramas (Esther the Beautiful, The Good Samaritan), dramatized extracts from novels by Dickens (The Trial of Mr Pickwick) and Hugo (The Bishop’s Candlesticks), Shakespeare (Macbeth), Empire Day Parades, pageants (The Armada, Britannia’s Court), smokers, mess-room entertainments, comic operettas (The King of Sherwood) and, our concern here, classical Greek drama. In subsequent decades, the inXuences of courtroom drama (Witness for the Prosecution), Molie`re (Scapin), melodrama (The Yorkshire Tragedy), (mediated) ‘Chinese’ theatre (Lady Precious Stream), and Epic Theatre (Mother Courage), were among those felt.5 During the twentieth century, local playwrights began to emerge and it is intriguing to see to what imported material they responded. Those in the popular Concert Party tradition worked through devising pieces, but there were others who composed with pen on paper, and a quick survey of their work is in order. In The Blinkards there are elements of wit and of a Xexible structure that is, like the Fanti that is often employed in this bi-lingual text, local in origin. Woman in Jade (Dove 1934) makes concessions to local subject matter and includes local characters, but the text engages with the conduct of expatriates and holds a dialogue with British metropolitan attitudes. The Fifth Landing-Stage (Fiawoo 1943) was composed and Wrst published in Ewe, but it is clear from the preface that the author had waded through prescriptive essays about the Unities and was writing with an acute consciousness of neo-classical expectations. He did not allow himself to be constrained by those and robustly confronted European assumptions about Africa and Africans on a variety of levels. The Third Woman (Danquah 1943) made use of local folk material while engaging in a debate with European historians and philosophers. From this whirlwind tour of the available texts, it can be seen that responses were characterized by variety, and that writers were sometimes concerned with fusing indigenous with imported elements. There were some unproductive engagements but, in certain cases, the imported took deep root in the African soil or was successfully grafted on to a thriving local shoot. More than thirty years passed after The Third Woman before the publication of Efua Sutherland’s 5 The list draws on material collected in Gibbs (2004).

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Edufa signalled the emergence of a local play that incorporated a profound response to a classical text, Alcestis. However, from the 1930s, Gold Coast-based or local translators and directors recognized that Greek drama, particularly Antigone, had much to oVer because of its power, the relevance of the themes, and its stylized convention.

T H E P O S I TI O N O F T H E C L A SS I C S I N THE EDUCATION SYSTEM The importance of Antigone in the Gold Coast/Ghana is apparent in the available literature from 1931 (Agovi 1990:1). This relatively early appearance is not surprising given the colonial experience of the country, and one can oVer a number of reasons why Antigone should have attracted the interest of schoolteachers. The Wrst is that the play was recommended by the position it occupied as a key text in Greek literature, as Wltered through the British educational system. Indeed, in the background to all discussion about the importation of Antigone into Ghana is a sense of the position of the Classics in the history of world drama and of the education system exported from Britain to her colonies. From the end of the nineteenth century, respect for Greek and Latin, and reverence for the books originally written in those languages, was imported into West Africa along with British ideas about education. Many indications of the position of the classical languages in Ghana could be adduced. For the present, I will simply point to the fact that Greek and Latin are listed as being on the syllabus for Mfantsipim School, Cape Coast, when it opened in 1876. Two years later, the records show that all twenty-eight pupils in the school took Greek and twelve took Latin (Boahen 1996: 30–310). When, in 1881, John Mensah Sarbah went from the school to what became Queen’s College, Taunton, it was recorded in the register that he had done ‘Caesar, Books 1 and 2’. For the handful who attended secondary schools in Ghana at this time, the Classics provided an important part of their Western education. Knowledge of ‘Caesar’ was essential in order to secure access to British universities and the Inns of Court. For Sarbah, a classical education opened doors so that he could, Wrst, matriculate

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and, later, be called to the Bar. In order to prepare himself to return to West Africa and take on the colonialists with their own most potent weapon, the law, he had to ‘have the Latin’. The same was true, a generation later, for Kobina Sekyi, whose play I quoted from in the opening paragraph. As a pupil at Mfantsipim, Sekyi was known for his love of all things English, and was immortalized in a school photograph wearing a woollen suit. However, experiences in London and his degree in philosophy led him to rethink his position and he came to espouse an Ethiopianism that put things in their place: woollen suits in cold climes, Greek names in Greece. His satire in The Blinkards is well directed. There is no doubt that some youthful West African scholars, possessing only a smattering of Latin or Greek, made themselves ridiculous by their posturing. As a nationalist, an intellectual, and a playwright, Sekyi exposed such shallowness. Fortunately, his targets were prepared to laugh at themselves and the play that satirized the aVectations of the Cosmopolitan Club of Cape Coast was staged by that very body. Despite the satirical shafts launched by Sekyi in 1915, classical studies remained near the heart of the education provided in West Africa through to the middle of the last century. When the University College of the Gold Coast (UCGC) was established at Legon (1948), the Department of Classics was given an important place, its teaching magniWcently supported by extensive holdings in what became the Balme Library. John Leaning, who taught Classics there from 1971 to 1991, considered these must at one time have been better than those of London University itself.6 Perhaps predictably, classically-trained academics Wlled leadership roles in the early years of the University College and in the country’s intellectual life. This distinguished group included David Balme, the Wrst principal of the University College, and L. H. Ofosu-Appiah, who took on the editorship of The Encyclopedia Africana, a major research project. A role for Latin was preserved even when political and cultural pressures led to changes. In 1963, when the University College became the independent University of Ghana, it was considered appropriate to design a crest that drew on local conventions and to replace the 6 Leaning’s opinion was given in a conversation with Francis Agbodeka held in London on 20 November 1995. It is quoted in Agbodeka (1998: 82).

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inherited motto: Vigil Evocat Auroram [‘the watchful bird calls forth the dawn’]. In his design for the new crest, Manwere Opoku incorporated three ferns that stood for straightness, truthfulness, and integrity, and an adinkra [sign] of locked rams’ horns, a symbol of strength and growth. It was, however, considered appropriate to retain Latin for the motto, and classicist Alex Kwapong, soon to become the Wrst Ghanaian Vice-Chancellor of the University (1966–75), oVered: Integri Procedamus, [moving forward with integrity] (Agbodeka 1998, 373–4).

ANTIGONE IN THE SCHOOLROOM AND ON THE STAGE IN GHANA In about 1930, the Reverand Charles Kingsley Williams, Assistant Principal at the government-funded Achimota School situated on the outskirts of Accra, prepared a verse translation into English of Sophocles’ Antigone (for background, see C. K. Williams 1962). This was given a rehearsed reading by the Accra Dramatic Society, which had been set up by Mr and Mrs J. M. Winterbottom. Winterbottom (1934: 114) provided an account of the (Wnancial) success of such readings and recorded that a double-bill consisting of Antigone and a dramatization of ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ from Redgauntlet, realized £18. The idea of producing his version of Antigone with undergraduates at Achimota College was close to the heart of Williams, and he had Wrm ideas how the chorus could use local dance movements.7 In a report about local performances submitted to a conference on ‘Native Drama in Africa’ (1933), he wrote: I am anxiously considering whether I could manage to train students to do a version of Sophocles’ Antigone. My hope is that for the choruses it may be possible to incorporate some of the rhythm movements of genuine Gold Coast community dancing . . . it is very much alive still in the country and can be more impressively beautiful than any description can suggest. 7 At this point Achimota College was preparing students ‘mainly for the External Intermediate Examinations of the University of London in Arts, Science and Engineering, and for the London external degree of BSc (engineering)’ (Agbodeka 1998: 5).

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Williams was aware of ways in which the play lent itself to intercultural exploration, and was decades ahead of his time as an expatriate enthusiast for local ‘community dancing’. I do not think he managed to get the production on the stage. This is a pity since it sounds as if it would have been a creative bringing together of traditions under a sympathetic guiding spirit. Antigone was Wrst staged in the Gold Coast/Ghana by Adisadel College. Originally known as The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Grammar School, and later as St Nicholas Grammar School, Adisadel is now Wrmly lodged in the awareness of many Ghanaians as yet another excellent Cape Coast school. Information about the precise date of the production is contradictory and, for purposes of dating, I have followed newspaper sources gathered by Agovi’s researchers, rather than information from Amissah (1980), from the Editor of Overseas Education (1934) or from the author of an on-line historical sketch of Adisadel.8 A key Wgure in the development of Greek drama at Adisadel was Stephen Richard Seaton Nicholas. Amissah (1980) notes that Nicholas returned to the school in 1922 to teach Classics with an MA and DTh earned at Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone. Nicholas introduced the teaching of Greek, and in 1932 and 1933 he produced Antigone with (in 1933) the odes sung to ‘Dr Fox’s setting’.9 These productions are to be seen as the result of a teacher’s determination to involve pupils in appropriate major works on stage. The production of a classical text became a fairly regular occurrence at the school for some years, and, on occasions, the lines of the chorus were delivered in Greek. It is not possible to know in detail what the audience made of these productions. An Editorial Note, possibly by Winterbottom, in Overseas Education (1934: 116), recognized the relevance of the themes in Antigone and is worth quoting: We . . . were impressed by the response of actors and audience to the dramatic situations based on the conXict between tribal law and individual conscience. Their bearing on the problems of African tribal life was obviously appreciated. 8 Anon. ‘Adisadel College: A Historical Sketch’, http://members.tripod.com/tettey/ adishist.htm (last accessed 29/12/2005). 9 See Agovi (1990: 15); Musing Light (1933); Newell (2002); and Winterbottom (1934: 116) http://members.tripod.com/tettey/adishist.htm (last accessed 29/12/2005).

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A column by the reviewer Musing Light in The Gold Coast Spectator for 19 August 1933 (quoted in Agovi 1990: 15) included the following recognition of the historical and cultural signiWcance of the production: The Greeks were great players and very fond of the drama. The school’s production is important because it gives us an opportunity—I believe for the Wrst time—to see a Greek play. The production adds to the cultural advancement of the country, and sets up a milestone. It will go down to history, and my annual review will emphasize it.

According to Musing Light ‘the Wrst Antigone’ was well received by the public. The reviewer continued (see Amissah 1980: 8–9): By public request, there was a repeat performance before a full house at Cape Coast. It was later staged at Sekondi, and then moved to Kumasi. The theatrical scenery as well as the costume of the cast as well as their histrionics contributed much to its success.

After recording that the Agamemnon was put on in 1936 and Alcestis in 1944–45, Amissah (1980: 9) added: It is interesting to note that in those plays, the narratives were in English but the choruses were rendered in the original Greek.

The inclusion of choric speeches in Greek suggests that this was a production characterized by respect for the original. Nicholas seems to have been anxious to make good the claim that Cape Coast was ‘The Athens of West Africa’. One perhaps unforeseen outcome of the Adisadel performance tradition was that it provided a vital encounter for an alert young woman, Efua Morgue. Some years later, as Efua Sutherland, she explored the overlap between one of the plays she saw at Adisadel, Alcestis, and Ghanaian culture in composing Edufa. During the 1950s, as political independence approached under the charismatic leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, leading schools in Ghana raided the Western canon for plays to which they could respond. The enthusiasm for localization is reXected in reports of productions in the magazine produced at Achimota School, where Shakespeare, much more diYcult to adapt than Sophocles, provided staple fare for the drama society. In 1952, Muriel Bentley directed Macbeth with African drums, and with royal rank indicated by ceremonial umbrellas. Two

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years later, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was put on with the mechanicals wearing African dress (see, for example: Sherwood and Bentley, unpublished; and Ofosu-Amaah 1955). In 1956, Antigone was produced at Mfantsipim. By that time, the tendency towards localization, represented by Williams and Muriel Bentley, and the spirit of cultural nationalism had grown. I have not located any reviews of the production, but I note that the master in charge of drama at the school, Joe de Graft, subsequently proved himself a major adapter of Western classics, composing versions of Hamlet (Hamile) and Macbeth (Mambo). He was soon to lead Mfantsipim into a new phase of adventurous play selection with the production of plays by West Africans, starting with Nigerians James Ene Henshaw and Wole Soyinka. From there, he took the logical step of putting on locally written plays, including his own Sons and Daughters. Research leads remain to be followed up, but I suspect that there may have been elements of adaptation in de Graft’s 1956 Antigone. In the same year, the Kumasi College of Technology, later the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, put on the play (see Dawes 1956). The fact that there were two productions in one year may suggest that it had become Wrmly established in the local repertoire with a reading that suggested it staged the colonial encounter. At this time, as the nation looked towards independence in March 1957, all the Creons were safely white.

B R AT H WA I T E ’ S V E R S I O N O F A N T I G O N E The earliest adapted version of Antigone originating in Ghana and available to me was prepared by an educational administrator, history teacher, and poet from Barbados, Edward (now ‘Kamau’) Brathwaite. In 1962, when his adaptation, entitled Odale’s Choice, was premie`red at Mfantsiman Secondary School, Saltpond, Brathwaite was approaching the end of an important, extended sojourn in Ghana, during which he had come to an awareness ‘of community, of cultural wholeness’.10 His 10 See ‘Brathwaite’ on Poetry International, http://www.poetryinternational.org/ cwolk/view/15909 (last accessed 29/12/2005). For quotations, see Markham (1989: 18). Brown (1995: 8) has a reference to an eight year stay in Ghana.

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version retains central elements from Sophocles, but he cut out what might be described as the romantic dimension (sometimes seen as resisting easy transplantation), simpliWed the issues of conduct, and skilfully exploited opportunities for the incorporation of local performance traditions.11 A ‘Production Note’ by ‘P.L.R.’ printed in the Evans 1967 edition of the text resolutely combats tendencies to elaborate staging. This stand was necessary because scenery and proscenium curtains had, under the pervasive inXuence of naturalism in the European tradition, come to be regarded as essential to the theatre. P.L.R. insisted, at the cost of some historical distortion (‘in its day’ Antigone was ‘simply mounted’, p. 3), that Greek drama travelled light. By implication, it could leave behind buskins and masks, and appear in ohenema [sandals and local cloth]. It could present hugely poignant conXicts in a highly stylized, very accessible manner. Antigone was also appropriate because the ‘conXict between tribal law and individual conscience’ revolving around burial rites was so relevant. The opening paragraph of P.L.R.’s Note comments on Brathwaite’s version. We read (p. 3): The story and tone of the play is that of Antigone . . . here it is modernized (though to an indeWnite period) and made to apply to an African country, but no country in particular. The theme is timeless: the deWance of tyranny, a situation full of conXict and natural drama.

Despite the excellent advice on staging alluded to, and the recognition of the ‘timeless’ theme, P.L.R. moves rather on the surface in these sentences. One point to be made is that Odale’s Choice carefully oVers opportunities for establishing mood through performance elements with which the pupils at Mfantsima would have been very familiar. Scene 1 opens with a festival in progress, and with Odale in the midst of dancers. Brathwaite does not include detailed stage directions and does not specify a precise cultural context. He simply indicates that Odale is: ‘carried away by the chanting and the drumming’. These words hint at an atmosphere that the pupils, perhaps with help from Ghanaian members of staV, would have been adept at 11 For important comment on the play see Hardwick (2003a: 103). For diYculties with romantic plots, see Baker (1963: 77–82).

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creating from their own observation and experience. SigniWcantly, as if condensing a view of the development of drama, the dithyramb is interrupted and the Wrst actor, Odale, moves out from the mass. Later, when Odale tells Creon that she has responded to a higher law than his in burying her brother, and he proclaims that she ‘must die’, the chorus of women are summoned as mourners. They enter in what Brathwaite describes as ‘a phalanx of supplication’ (p. 29), their costumes instantly recognizable as mourning cloths. They quickly establish an appropriate mood and register the emotional shifts for the rest of the play. Thus, when Creon responds positively to their request for forgiveness, their ‘wailing turns to a shout of joy’, they dance to drums and gongs (p. 30). However, when Odale remains determined to defy her uncle and he orders his soldiers to kill her, the women begin a funeral dirge (p. 32). From these very general stage directions, it is clear that Brathwaite requires the chorus to use familiar conventions of voice and movement to provide context and emotional colouring. His elimination of the romantic interest from the inherited Greek material (Haemon does not appear) shifts the emphasis of the play but the festival element provides new interest and roots the play in a West African context. Brathwaite negotiated his way as an adapter, to re-interpret or ‘re-read’ the original. This is not to say that the adaptation is entirely successful. P.L.R.’s suggestion that no particular country is evoked is challenged by the names Brathwaite has used. ‘Odale’ itself is a Ga name and she is also ‘Akwele’, which would indicate to Ga-speakers that she was a twin. Appropriately for a Ga context, her (twin) sister, Leicho, is sometimes called ‘Akwuokor’. While recognizing Brathwaite’s considerable achievement in this play, I think he underestimated the problems of adaptation that came with setting the play in a country where there are both patrilineal and matrilineal communities. There are several references to Creon as Odale’s ‘uncle’ and yet no suggestion that to some members of his audience this title would mean a very close relationship. In traditional matrilineal societies uncles, in the restricted sense of ‘mothers’ brothers’, are responsible for their sisters’ children. In this context, ‘your uncle’ is in important respects ‘your father’. The language given to the soldiers, however, does support P.L.R.’s contention about ‘no country’ since it shifts from one kind of ‘pidgin’ to another. For

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example, we encounter ‘to chop he’, when we might expect a West African to say ‘to chop am’, and we meet a distinctive Caribbean strain in ‘he cahn come back’. This sits particularly oddly with the Ghanaian ejaculation ‘Cha!’ that I take to be a rendition of ‘Twea!’. Brathwaite may have cultivated the confusion of diVerent popular usages to work against too precise a location. If this is the case, the pidgin becomes a reXection of the play’s origin: it is part of the process by which a Caribbean poet assembled several voices while discovering the accents in which he wished to speak. The publication of Brathwaite’s text by Evans Brothers in its Plays for African Schools series in 1967 (Brathwaite 1967) meant that an inexpensive, simpliWed, acting and reading version of Antigone was available in Ghana. I consider Brathwaite’s Caribbean origin, and his radical position on issues of language and culture, hugely important in the context of this examination of Antigone in Ghana. The fact that he chose to make contact with ‘the Motherland’ through what had become part of a shared classical heritage shows how fruitful Greek drama can be in facilitating communication between returnees and those who remained at home. The adaptation was part of a homecoming for Brathwaite, and an important statement about how the ‘Black Atlantic’ communicated.

A N TI G O N E I N H A I T I I N G H A NA The impact of Caribbean interpreters of Antigone in Ghana continued when Felix Morisseau-Leroy directed his version of the play. Antigone in Haiti had been previously performed in Port au Prince (1953) and at the Theatre of Nations (Paris, 1959). It had earned Morriseau-Leroy, who was already well known as a poet, lawyer, civil servant, and teacher in his native Haiti, a reputation as a committed playwright of international stature. At odds with the repressive regime of ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, Morriseau-Leroy was recruited by Nkrumah’s government as National Organizer of Drama and Literature, and made a signiWcant contribution to the evolving national theatre movement. He threw his weight behind Nkrumah’s ideas about African Personality, African Socialism, and the use of the arts

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in nation-building. He helped set up a fully professional company ‘run on socialist theory’ that promoted plays and Concert PartyinXuenced performances celebrating the heroism of Ghanaian Workers (Morriseau-Leroy 1965).12 In this context, the decision to put on Antigone in Haiti in Ghana in 1963 appears at odds with the main thrust of his work. I have located little on the production and that which I have found intrigues rather than directly illuminates. It seems, however, that the translation (from French/Creole) into English (Ghanaian English) was by a Mary Dorkonou (see Morriseau-Leroy 1994). It is surely revealing that one journalist writing under the title ‘Antigone in Haiti ’ reXected on political rather than aesthetic issues (‘Theatre Scribe’ The Ghanaian, January 1965). He hammered out: . . . by socialism the Ghana artiste can work for the upliftment of the rich cultural heritage of his ancestors which imperialism was bent on destroying, our playwrights must this year make it a point to come out with plays depicting our culture. . . . Plays exposing the vices of colonialism and plays preaching the gospel of the New Africa—the ideology of Nkrumahism. . . . Our producers for the radio, television and the theatre should now see to it that they STAB IMPERIALISM TO DEATH.

This is an extraordinary outburst that indicates the pressures people connected with the theatre were under during the mid-sixties. One can guess at the political situation that prompted it. I have found no record of productions of Antigone at this period, when Nkrumah’s despotic tendencies were becoming clearly manifest. Playwright-politician J. B. Danquah, who combined opposition to colonialism with family ties to traditional oYce-holders, died in detention. Antigone’s clear-cut political message, tolerated when white Creons were in the Wring line, had, following the use of the play to expose a black (Haitian) dictator, become a little too relevant. In the Ghanaian theatre, rarely known for promoting dissident views, the stakes were high, and I suspect that theatre groups were fearful of putting it on. However, on 17 April 2004, a veteran of the Ghanaian theatre, Evans Nii Oma Hunter, emailed me about Antigone as follows: 12 The possibility that Morisseau-Leroy was in some way prompted to adapt Antigone because of the example of Anouilh falls outside this paper.

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. . . by the encouragement of Leroy, and others, it has been adapted to a greater extent.

This I take to be a statement implying the possibility of indebtedness, but I also enter the suggestion that any evidence of the inXuence was delayed, coming to light after 24 February 1966, when Nkrumah, the only too recognizable home-bred Creon, was toppled and began his long exile.

M O R E P RO D U C T I O N S , T R A N S L AT I O N S , A N D A DA P TAT I O N S I continue to pursue lines of enquiry about productions of Antigone in the wake of the overthrow of Nkrumah and beyond, and I have assembled a few details. In 1968, a Twi version of the play, ‘adapted’ by Alex A. Y. Kyerematen, was presented as part of the Seventh Annual Festival of Arts held at the Cultural Centre in Kumasi, where it was seen and described favourably by James Scott Kennedy (1973: 156–57). It seems, from the tantalizing glimpses aVorded by Kennedy’s brief, outsider’s account, that music, mime, and dance were incorporated into the production, and that courtly elements were stressed. (Kennedy did not speak Twi, ‘although’, as he wrote, he was ‘studying it’, and must have been particularly open to the visual eVects.) He mused in a characteristically vague and infuriating manner: [I]t is possible that Antigone plays even better in Twi than many of the English versions which I have seen. For after all the experience is connected with the traditions and life-styles of African people. And the style is African, which I imagine is similar to what the Greek people were doing in style at Antigone’s moment of time.

Given the silence in his book about other productions of Antigone in Ghana, I assume Kennedy, who taught at the School of Music and Drama, Legon, in the late sixties, was referring to productions outside the country. Kyerematen, incidentally, had been head prefect at Adisadel in 1936, the year in which Agamemnon was put on. His interest in oVering Greek fare to Ghanaian palates through translation represents

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a development of the scheme embarked on in the 1930s when the choruses were spoken in Greek. The interest was shared by L. H. Ofosu-Appiah, already encountered as a classical scholar, who published his Twi translation of Antigone in 1976. Given the slow pace at which Ghanaian publishers were operating at that time, it is possible that the translation, part of a drive to promote major works of world literature in Asante Twi, had been in existence for some time (see Ricard 2004). I recognize the tremendous importance of this development, for the ‘indigenization of Antigone’ but I am not equipped to comment on it. During December 1969, there was a production of Antigone, in English, at St. Augustine’s College, Cape Coast, and another the following year at Nungua Secondary School. While lecturing at the University of Cape Coast at this period, Robert Fraser saw a production of the Sophocles’ version in English and he subsequently directed pupils from Wesley Girls’ High School in Jean Anouilh’s adaptation. In the foregoing discussion I have assumed that directors were working with the Sophoclean original in various editions and translations. The reference to the Anouilh version is of signiWcance because of the model it provides, given the background against which it was prepared. I think it can be assumed that copies of Anouilh’s text were available to the curious with access to major bookshops and libraries from the early 1960s. Fraser has provided the only evidence I have encountered of a production in Ghana.13 During the early nineties, Victor Yankah, a lecturer at the University of Cape Coast, prepared a version that he entitled Dear Blood. A production, directed by Efo Mawugbe, was scheduled for early in the new millennium in the university’s auditorium. It was due to run for two nights, but a power cut made the second performance impossible. As 2005 came to a close, the playwright could not locate a copy of his text! Hunter and his group Audience Awareness presented Antigone in Accra during 1986 and again in 1994. More recently, in 2001, they did Hunter’s adaptation of the play, entitled Little Princess Korkor. Once again, the text is not available but, 13 The Methuen edition with translation by Lewis Galantie`re, had been well distributed from 1960. For an example of the Anouilh version being used to prompt discussion about leadership, see the Africa Leadership Initiative website for a report of a seminar held 9–15 March 2005 entitled The Promise of Leadership.

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according to John Djisenu, in this volume, it was set in ‘a patriarchal Ga indigenous society where concerns are raised about gender issues’. On this occasion, the power supply was on the side of the performers: the Wnal performance at the National Theatre, Accra, was recorded and subsequently transmitted by Ghana Television. The Alliance Francaise then supported a tour of the production to their centres in the country.14

C ON C LU S I ON Further research is needed and will undoubtedly bring to light information about more productions and adaptations, perhaps even about more translations. Even though theatre research in Ghana is in its infancy, an underlying pattern may have begun to emerge that is worth noting. In Ghana, initial contacts with the Classics were made within the British-style educational system. In putting Greek plays on the colonial stage, the Wrst forays were inspired (at Adisadel in 1933) by Wdelity to the original that extended to having parts of the production delivered in Greek. At the same time, there was a movement towards adaptation and this grew stronger as the decades passed. Some early work on classical texts was done by sympathetic, sometimes radical, outsiders who recognized that, when Xexibly handled, classical forms permitted eVective communication with local audiences. In two instances important contributions were made by artists who had been born into the African diaspora. From the text by Brathwaite, it is clear that the playwright recognized the possibility of reshaping the original so that elements of music and dance could be used, and the dilemma facing Antigone/Odale could be sharpened. Morisseau-Leroy, emerging from a brutal dictatorship, must have appreciated the political dimension particularly acutely. Despite his proximity to the centre of power in Accra, the production of his version may have drawn attention to the existence of black dictators. In the Ghana of the mid-sixties, as Nkrumah became increasingly tyrannical, some may 14 Hunter email 17 April 2004.

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have regarded the play as particularly apt: I have seen no records that anyone was brave enough to put it on. Antigone returned to favour at the end of the decade, and translations and adaptations staged since show the continuing relevance of its themes and form, as well as the existence of a suYciently tolerant mood for directors to take up the challenge of staging it. All this hints at the continuing creative engagement of Ghanaian dramatists and directors with classical drama, speciWcally Antigone. In the context of a conference about post-colonialism, it can be asserted that Antigone is a text through which the creative heirs to diVerent traditions have been able to release ideas and spark performances. Nigerian Femi OsoWsan’s conWdent handling of inherited material in Tegonni (see GoV in this volume) shows how eVectively the assured post-colonial playwright can make use of the Classics. Material associated with the former colonial power can be commandeered and exploited: despite the pessimism of Ikiddeh and Agovi, West African exposure to Greek drama was far from ‘tragic’. In many ways, it was liberating.

4 Cross-Cultural Bonds Between Ancient Greece and Africa: Implications for Contemporary Staging Practices John Djisenu

I N T RO DU C T IO N Anyone familiar with the great ancient Greek dramas, written mostly in the far-oV Wfth century (bce), cannot fail to appreciate their most enduring and timeless essence, as well as their cross-cultural bonds with Africa. Indeed, ancient Greek drama has become part of a globalized culture, or what some scholars may refer to as a ‘cultural universal’, because it addresses fundamental and intrinsic human traits, desires, weaknesses, and strengths, as well as, sometimes, our own fair share of excessive pride (hubris) and lack of exercise of discretion and circumspection (blindness) in our contemporary world. Let me dare add that maybe only our perception of God or gods, and our kinds of buildings, machines, or technology, not to mention food, costumes, dances, or movements, music and so on, may have changed from those of the ancient Greeks. Largely, I think we continue to function in the same way they did, as basically human. So long as ancient Greek drama communicates to us and inspires writers about their own mythologies, it will continue to serve as a cultural universal in the sense that it addresses problems that are shared by diVerent times, places, and cultures, and which have a lasting signiWcance for people wherever it is read or performed. That is why it is crucial to adopt contemporary staging practices to enable

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ancient Greek dramas and Greek-inspired, as well as purely African, mythological plays, to shed more light on current global problems and concerns such as wars and their negative consequences, inWdelity and family disloyalty, as well as issues of gender and international political vengeance.

B ON D S A N D L E G AC I E S

Use of Myth in Drama and Society For us in Africa, and Ghana in particular, there exists a number of cross-cultural bonds that facilitate our ready acceptance and appreciation of ancient Greek drama. One of these bonds is the existence and use of myths in African societies. J. H. Nketia, a renowned Ghanaian musicologist, clariWes the nature of myths for us when he writes (Nketia 1999: 7): They [Myths] bring the supernatural within the framework of human experience by structuring gods along the lines human society is structured and making them behave like humans, marrying and intermarrying and in the process getting entangled in moral issues, upholding or breaking certain codes of conduct, etc. Myths do dramatize human problems—moral, spiritual, psychological or political.

In Africa today, myths form the basis of some indigenous religions and modes of worship. They also Wnd expression in creative manifestations such as drama, dance drama, music, dance, prose, and poetry. They permeate history, oral literature, and traditions, and bolster ethnic bonding and identities such as those among the Yorubas of Nigeria, and Asantes of Ghana. Myth-making even continues in our present times; take the case of post-colonial heads of states in Africa, for instance, who constructed myths around themselves as being all-wise, all-knowing, and immortal—the only choices of the gods to lead their peoples throughout their lifetimes. One of the ancient Greek legacies for us in Africa, and indeed the whole world, is the sheer latitude enjoyed by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes in re-working the existing stock of

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myths of their times and spicing them with their own creative perspectives.1 Contemporary mythological playwrights generally tend to take cues from their ancient Greek counterparts to recreate freely from existing myths in order to address current issues. The creative use of myth by ancient Greek playwrights has inspired some African writers to explore their own cultural histories, and provides a basic cross-cultural compatibility that allows the creative fusion of African and Greek traditions. In Ghana, Michael Dei-Anang’s Okomfo Anokye’s Golden Stool (1963) is a case in point. The play explores the myth of the golden stool of Asantes. Commanded mysteriously from the sky in 1697 by Okomfo Anokye, it embodies the souls of all Asantes.2 In the play, we see the hegemony of the Denkyiras broken when their king, Ntim Gyakari, is killed, and the golden stool being used by King Osei Tutu as a symbol of ethnic bonding. Currently, the stool still serves as the major unifying factor of all Asantes under the paramountcy of Asantehene, king of all Asante kings. For example, Martin Owusu’s The Legend of Aku Sika (1999) is clearly an indictment of the indigenous, as well as some sections of the contemporary urban, Ghanaian society for their negative attitude towards the physically challenged. In Nigeria, myth was the creative source for pioneer dramatists like Hubert Ogunde, Kola Ogunmola, and Duro Ladipo. Ladipo’s Oba Koso, for example, was based on the Shango myth. This particular Yoruba god of thunder and lightning has, lately, generated great interest among Nigerian video producers. Femi OsoWsan also bases his play, Many Colours Make the Thunder-King (1997),3 on the same mythical Shango god. His other plays, Morountodun (1982) and Eshu and the Vagabond Minstrels (1991), are similarly inspired by Yoruba mythology, while his Nkrumah Ni! Africa Ni! (1994)4 has pan-Africanist concerns but also captures for us an examination of the myths surrounding the late Presidents Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Sekou Toure of Guinea; as well as Amilcar Cabral, a nationalist of Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde 1 This point will dawn on anyone who may compare and contrast the treatment of mythology in Aeschylus’ The Choephori [The Libation Bearers] with Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electra. 2 See Osei (1999: 151–60) for details of how this myth uniWes the Asantes of Ghana. 3 Premie`red at the Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, in 1997; published text OsoWsan (1999a). 4 Premie`red at the National Theatre, Accra, in 1994 by Abibigromma, the Resident Theatre Company of the University of Ghana, Legon; published text OsoWsan (1999b).

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and Angola. J. P. Clark’s Ozidi (1966) and Song of a Goat (1964), Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame (1971), and Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides (1973) have all been inspired by Greek mythological drama. These plays bring together linguistic and religious allusion, movements or dance, mime, ritualistic elements, and other visual impressions that contemporary staging invests with mythology. Ola Rotimi’s play, The Gods Are Not To Blame (1971), is deliberately paralleled with Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to highlight shared bonds in oracular consultations, and the belief in the gods playing key roles in determining the fate of children, even before they are born. There is also the shared belief that, sometimes, human inventiveness cannot overturn what the gods have determined. Fundamental to all these is the point that one may not always be able to run away from one’s own self, or identity, in spite of all the fatal consequences that may be associated with it.

POLYTHEISM The second cross-cultural bond that exists between ancient Greece and Africa is polytheism. The recurring features of myths and gods are known to be close bedfellows in both African and ancient Greek cultures. As Arnott puts it (1967: 39): Religion played a vital part in Greek life and culture, and the Xowering of that culture was inextricably interwoven with the worship of gods.

The gods tend to feature prominently in the myths and inXuence human life. A certain hierarchical order characterizes the relationship among gods. Each has speciWc prerogatives and may be worshipped with ritualistic observances, such as oVerings of sacriWces and pouring of libations, and may also be consulted as oracles. Another striking feature of both cultures is variety of the objects of religious observation. Both religious systems tolerate simultaneous belief in a chief god, as well other multiple gods and spirits. Additionally, African historical Wgures, such as kings, heroes, heroines, war leaders, or even founders of settlements, may be deiWed. Natural

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forces such as the earth, wind and Wre, as well as unusual trees, mountains, and rivers may also be personiWed as objects of worship in Africa. The Greek system similarly incorporated polytheistic elements within the local framework of religious practice. What is particularly striking is the fact that some ancient Greek gods functioned in ways similar to African deities. Consider the following for a moment: Zeus and Shango—gods of thunder and lightning; Apollo and Orunmila—gods of prophecy, with the most famous oracles of Delphi and Ifa, respectively; Hermes and Esu—messengers of the gods; Poseidon and Olokun or Malokun—gods of the sea. This phenomenal list is long but you may have already noticed that all my examples are drawn from Yoruba gods,5 mainly because they are very well-streamlined, and have speciWc functions and prerogatives. This may well explain why Nigerians dominate in the authorship of West African mythological plays, including those modelled on Greek drama. By sharp contrast, however, mythological Greek gods, unlike the African deities, were non-moral and much less insistent on a moral code for their worshippers (see Arnott 1967: 39–40, 60). It was held that Greek gods shamelessly had carnal knowledge of mortal women with whom they had oVspring. For instance, myth has it that Leda, the wife of Tyndareus, was taken over by Zeus with whom she had twin sisters, Helen and Clytemnestra. However, in a few instances, some of them played roles of arbitration; as found, for example, in Aeschylus’ Eumenides 6 when the goddess Athena cast the deciding vote to exonerate Orestes from the charge of matricide. This was after their mother, Clytemnestra, had plotted with Aegisthus, her lover and her husband’s cousin, to kill her husband, Agammemnon, in Aeschylus’ Agammemnon. Other examples exist where the gods punish instances of hubris,7 as can be seen in Sophocles’ Antigone,8 when Creon, the king, loses his wife Eurydice and son Haemon as a result of his actions in disobeying 5 For further reading on Yoruba gods, see Omosade (1979: 21–57). 6 References to Agamemnon, The Choephori, and The Eumenides are to the Vellacott ([1959] 1986) translation. 7 Hubris was the reason why Agamemnon deWed convention and entered the house by walking on a rich tapestry reserved exclusively for the gods, and one of the reasons why Clytemnestra succeeded in murdering him. See Aeschylus’ Agamemnon for the details, esp. ll.805–958. 8 References to Sophocles’ Antigone are to Watling’s translation ([1947] 1984).

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the gods by denying burial to Polynices, thereby polluting their altars with the carrion of the deceased. Another reason was that he had reversed the natural order of doing things by burying Antigone whilst she was still living, yet denying burial to Polynices who was dead.

INVOC ATION OF TH E GODS This brings me to the third cross-cultural bond that has to do with curses and fatalism. Indeed, wherever there is polytheism, there abound beliefs in curses and fatalism with their attendant practices of oracular consultations. In both African and ancient Greek cultures, one notices the recurring practices of invocation of powers of gods that have potent, disastrous consequences on the fates of adversaries. However, a disparity exists between the two cultures in that whereas, usually, ancient Greek curses were irreversibly potent, and very often resulted in catastrophes, those of Africa could be annulled, with no negative repercussions, by performing some speciWc rituals to gods responsible for changing human destiny. It is generally held in the traditional African setting that humankind’s fate is already sealed by God, or gods, before entering the world, but it is also known that certain gods, such as Orunmilla and Ogun (among the Yorubas), and spirits are capable of changing human destinies. The issue of reversibility of African curses is given adequate treatment in Okoiti Omtatah’s character-titled play, Lwanda Magere (1991).9 This is a Kenyan play that focuses on the mythical ethnic struggles that used to exist between the Luo and the Lang’o peoples. The Lang’o needed to know the secret behind the invincibility of the Luo warlord, Lwanda Magere, if they were to throw oV their political yoke. In order to achieve their aim, they went to every length to exploit his tragic Xaw: his soft spot for very beautiful women. They succeeded in tricking him into marrying their most beautiful princess, and that resulted in his Wnal undoing! Lwanda Magere’s newest wife, the gorgeous princess, swears by a knife (p. 89) not to divulge the secret. This makes her come under an 9 The following page references are to Omtatah’s text (1991).

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oath, or a curse, of death to be inXicted by knife or thunderbolt, if she reveals the most guarded secret that her husband can only be killed only when the shadow cast by his forehead is pierced on the ground. Later, when she escapes to divulge the secret to her husband’s enemies, her own father performs the required rituals with sacriWces (p. 90) in order to reverse the curse and to save her life. According to the myth, her reversed fate makes the Lang’o turn the tables against their former warlords, the Luo. Owusu’s The Legend of Aku Sika10 is not, strictly speaking, a Christianized text but it upholds the indigenous belief in fate sealed by the Supreme Being (p. 5). Even though it does not introduce direct reversal of a curse, one hears echoes of biblical issues of ‘Divine Intervention’ or ‘Divine Grace’ (p. 7) that are to be accorded Aku Sika, the physically challenged heroine of the play, in order to reverse her fate from one ‘plagued by pain from infancy’ to one of ‘eternal happiness’. Eventually, when her deformed left arm is restored, glittering with gold bracelets, and she becomes the wife of the king, it is divine intervention that has reversed her fate. In Africa, the ability to reverse curses or fate is one major cultural diVerence that tends to undermine complete empathy among African audiences for Greek tragic characters who end up in disaster simply because they are unable to reverse their curses.

THEATRE AND SPECTACLE Apart from the commonalities of myths, polytheism, and curses, other cross-cultural bonds exist. Consider the use of spectacle, where ancient Greek dramas employ music, rhythm, dance or movements, and ritualistic elements. You will Wnd that these features are comparable, and indeed compatible, with the holistic theatre concept of Africa where one Wnds an integrated approach to the use of music, dance, and drama. Take also the stunning similarities that exist among some basic costumes, such as the Doric chiton and some African tunics; or the himation, the outer cloak often worn over the chiton, and some indigenous rectangular cloths draped by both women and men. 10 The following page references are to Owusu’s text (1999).

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Further, the communalistic nature of both the African and the ancient Greek cultures makes it necessary to bridge the gap between the audience and performers. While ancient Greek playwrights used the chorus to fulWl this purpose, their African counterparts now resort to the use of crowd scenes and some other devices for involving the audiences to serve as a bridge with the people or the larger society.

IM PL IC AT IONS FOR C ONTEM PORA RY S TAGING The cross-cultural bonds already discussed above have implications for contemporary staging practices of both mythical Greek and African plays. There is no need and, in fact, no justiWcation for rigidly performing classical Greek plays, or those inspired by them, as well as those purely based on African myths, in ways that limit them to their referential contexts alone. If we did that, we would be needlessly encapsulating the mythological dramas in strange worlds completely alienated from our own experiences. You will notice that there is the need to adopt contemporary staging practices in order to make mythical plays relevant enough to serve as useful commentaries on our present circumstances. This calls for recontextualization of mythical plays within a contemporary setting. One way of achieving this is to re-invent the text. Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides (1973) takes pride of place in this regard in that, even though a Greek Xavour wafts in the background of his play, what is generally perceived is a mastery in the use of verse that decorates cross-cultural elements, such as dances, songs, processions, libation-pouring, and marriage ceremonies, whose ingredients are essentially African.

DANCE A ND MOV EME NT Dance and movement are major elements in re contextualization; for instance in Martha Graham’s groundbreaking production of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which she re titled as Clytemnestra (1958). In this production, she re created fragments of spoken language accompanied

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by movements to help place her dance within given rhythms and emotions (Chioles 1993; Yaari 2003). Her Western ballet choreography indicates how an alternative usage of the body language of dance can recontextualize staging. This applies to both mythical Greek and African drama. Similarly, Francis Nii Yartey, the choreographer of the National Dance Company of Ghana, re-created a dance-drama, The Legend of Okoryo (1991), based on the mythology of the political betrayal of the Ga, an ethnic group of Accra and its environs. Okoryo, the legendary lady, had come to ameliorate the plight of her people by availing them of peace, freedom, love, unity, and spiritual blessings, but they rejected these entire panaceas to their woes. Instead, her people demanded material things for instant consumption, which she could not limitlessly produce. Consequently, she was painfully executed. This may be a sad commentary on some African countries that have executed past political leaders for Ximsy political and economic reasons. The choreographer sheds further light in the programme notes for the performance (Yartey 1991): Among all the creatures that inhabit the planets, it is only the creatures of the Earth that are found to be materialistic, wicked and greedy. They are the only ones who build solely to destroy, who take but never give back; and the most vulnerable.

This innovative Ghanaian mythical choreography succeeds in endowing myth with a syncretism of indigenous and contemporary African dance in which Yartey explores dynamism in the use of space, levels, and body language. One also Wnds rare costumes and outsize, symbolic props, such as the depiction of hatching of massive eggs on stage. With the addition of a revolutionary combination of indigenous and electronic sound production, the total eVect achieved with the performance is one of squarely placing the myth amid a contemporary audience.

S OC I A L C O M M E N T Recontextualization also implies investing myths with relevant and current socio-cultural, political, and economic underpinnings, so

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that the plays can mirror or symbolize present-day issues and realities. Such investments are demonstrated in Evans Hunter’s production Little Princess Korkor (2001),11 based on Sophocles’ Antigone. This play is also set in the same patriarchal Ga indigenous society that, like other traditional societies, generally tends to relegate women to the background; in contrast to the fearlessly bold and resolute manner with which Princess Korkor stands up to King Tackie Dzata in order to bury his brother. The denial of burial to Prince Oblite revives memories of some past political leaders of Ghana who were executed without interment rites. It took the collective intervention of their wives and other family members before the State took measures to retrieve their mortal remains from mass graves for proper entombment rites to be accorded them under a new political dispensation. Owusu’s The Legend of Aku Sika similarly explores myth simply as a backdrop for viewing serious social issues, especially negative attitudes and general insensitivity towards the physically challenged, in some sections of African societies. The objection expressed by the people towards the king’s desire to marry Aku Sika, in spite of her deformed arm, is an insidious attitude that is found in most indigenous societies where the royalty are supposed to marry suitors without any physical challenges. Besides, OsoWsan’s Morountodun, based on the ancient myth of Moremi, mirrors the political landscape of Nigeria with assurance of victory and hope, while Eshu and the Vagabond Minstrels re-enacts a rite of fertility in which Orunmila, the Yoruba god of knowledge and prophecy, addresses thematic concerns commonly found in morality plays, such as love and compassion. Omtatah’s, Lwanda Magere, could be misconstrued as a mere rabble-rousing mythical play that seeks only to open wounds of ethnic clashes between the Luo and the Lang’o of Kenya, but, in fact, it confronts its audiences with the needless and mindless bloodshed of those turbulent ancient times, and the need to resolve to preserve the present-day camaraderie. Also noteworthy is Okurut’s The Curse of the Sacred Cow (1994). This play captures the myth of a sacred cow, Kajeru, which was to be given full interment rites like a 11 This play was co-produced with the Alliance Francaise of Accra in 2001, and was subsequently telecast on Ghana Television in the same year. I have not been able to locate a published text.

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human being. Nyabwangu, one of Mutoro’s wives, leads a rebellion against what she sees as ‘unreasonable’ rites to be accorded mere massive beef that must be consumed not only for nourishment but also wisdom and enlightenment. Although she fails to win the support of the most elderly wife, Ndiinga, she manages to sway the rest of the family to her side because of a general mouth-watering desire for meat. As a result of this brash deWance of the explicit instructions of their husband Mutoro, who is away from home, their household is totally submerged by a supernatural lake sent by the gods. Ntangaare sheds further light on the relevance of Okurut’s play (2002: 60): . . . evil image of woman is also central. . . . However, this play also criticizes society for denying opportunities to women like Nyabwangu with leadership potential. . . . Because of Nyabwangu’s evil the whole world becomes disordered . . .

The social focus of the ancient Greek play, Lysistrata, compares well with Harrison and Simmons’ Aikin Mata (1996). Both plays treat the theme of the undesirable social and political impacts of wars on civil society, and the possibility of their abatement through women’s sexual strike. The latter play, in particular, speaks through Magajiya, its key woman, to urge all other women in Nigeria to conspire against their husbands by ending all sexual activities in order to end wars in Nigeria, and for that matter, Africa. This is an indirect reference to civil wars in Nigeria and elsewhere on the African continent. Clark’s Ozidi, Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers, and Sophocles’ and Euripides’ versions of Electra may easily represent the military house-cleaning coups d’e´tat and ethnic cleansing that have characterized some African politics. Even Euripides’ Bacchae may very well typify the violent political vindictiveness that caused the AFRC (Armed Forces Revolutionary Council) regime of Ghana to execute three former Heads of State (see Hansen and Collins 1980). Rotimi’s Oedipus-inspired play, The Gods Are Not To Blame, sheds some light on the gods of the modern age, the so-called superpowers. Some of them have contributed immensely to the impoverishment of a number of Third-World countries, whose leaders themselves are not completely blameless, since most of them have made irresponsible choices of policies that have left their people in social and economic doldrums.

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TECHNOLOGY AND STAGING Re-contextualization requires modernization and originality in the application of stage technology and other stage resources, such as scenery or sets, props, costumes, masks, and so on. Again, a case in point is Owusu’s the Legend of Aku Sika. Take one stage direction for example (p. 4): Sustained celestial music Wlls the atmosphere as the splendour and majesty of heavenly architecture emerges from the clouds and Wre, in thunder and lightning. The structure is a huge solid upper hemisphere occupying the breadth and scope of the stage. A Xight of stairs lead up to an immaculately crafted throne standing against the dome. . . . Then, Wnally as the celestial music rises to a crescendo amidst intermittent thunder, the two halves of the huge dome part. Through the misty opening, the Supreme Being enters.

For eVective creation of visual impressions necessary for staging the above, which is only part of the prologue of the play, one requires audio eVects generated by electronic means, as well as huge semicircular ediWces fashioned out with power machines needed for the curvilinear dome or upper hemisphere. An ‘independent’ Xight of steps, rolling on castors, has to be constructed in front of a dual dome that can be parted mid-way to ensure that the change of scenery can be accomplished in split seconds. The clouds and Wre each require a separate special eVects projector, while the thunder and lightening call for audio eVects backed by a dimmer equipped with Xashers. As for the ‘misty opening’ of the dome, it is impossible without the use of a fog or smoke machine. Likewise, the death of the title character, Lwanda Magere, presents scenic design challenges concerning his body petrifying into a huge boulder (p. 109). One way of dealing with it is to fade out lights on the character’s ‘corpse’ at, say, Upstage Centre (UC), after covering it with a stage rock created with hard-texture fabric. The actor will then sneak out just in time before cool lights fade in to reveal the petriWed remains against a shadowy background, as the story-teller refers to it (p. 109). In the case of staging challenges posed by The Curse of the Sacred Cow, the ghost of Kajeru could be projected from backstage on to a translucent backdrop or a Xat whenever the need arises. A greater challenge may be posed by the submerged homestead. Contrary to

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the director’s suggestion to use a painted backdrop, a better eVect could be achieved by projecting a river, sea, or lake eVect on to a cyclorama. This would require a riverbank ground-row-mounted in front of the cyclorama to, eVectively, mask the base of the plants sticking out of the lake. Also the riverbank might create a better illusion for the two friends, Mwamba and Mutumo, who tragically take their own lives by drowning at the end the play.

AUDIENCE AND ITS PARTICIPAT ION One price to pay for excessive use of contemporary stage technology in staging myth is to create hypnotic tensions in audiences and mesmerize them with spectacular eVects. The audiences may be held spellbound by the performance, sacriWcing their objective intellectual involvement for mere emotional satisfaction. This is where Africa leads the way in breaking hypnotic tensions through audienceparticipatory techniques. For example, characters usually representing the larger society, such as the chorus, townspeople, or crowds, may mix with the audiences to participate in line deliveries, singing, or dancing. As already noted, these are done not only to re-contextualize the performances within the setting of the audiences but, more importantly, also to ensure some objectivity on their part in critically appreciating the productions instead of merely being completely carried away by emotion.

C ON C LU S I ON Cross-cultural bonds exist between Africa and ancient Greece that have inspired some African playwrights to model their dramas on Greek mythological plays. A number of African playwrights currently fashion their own works from indigenous myths, using the performance technique of recontextualization as the fundamental method in contemporary staging of mythology. This performance approach rescues myth from being shrouded in historical antiquity and places

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it within the contemporary realm, while, at the same time, making its performance intelligible and relevant to our day and age. At the dawn of the twenty-Wrst century, whether myths will survive on the stage or not depends largely on the extent to which they are suitably re-contextualized. EVective performances of creative myths contribute to a signiWcant role for Africa in globalized culture.

5 The Curse of the Canon: Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame Michael Simpson

In 1968, at the onset of the most traumatic phase of the civil war in postcolonial Nigeria, Ola Rotimi staged a production of his new play The Gods Are Not To Blame, which is, amongst other things, an adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Although this play, like virtually all of Rotimi’s dramas, is theatrical on a grand scale, it possesses a considerable literary dimension insofar as it adapts the highly literary source of a Greek tragedy and insofar as its very success in the theatre transformed it, ironically, into a dramatic text studied in classrooms across a good deal of Africa.1 It is on the play’s literary status and its resulting relationship to the European canon that this chapter will focus. After the exceedingly successful production of the play at the Arcola Theatre in London during the summer of 2005, some renewed discussion of its extra-theatrical dimension seems timely.2 Notwithstanding its enduring success, the play has attracted criticism, and, indeed, several critics have taken Rotimi’s play at its word and blamed the playwright himself for the drama’s supposed shortcomings. 1 I am grateful to James Gibbs for a conversation in which he vividly described witnessing a production of Rotimi’s play in Ghana; I also thank Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie for their eVorts in bringing together the scholars who contributed to ‘Classics in PostColonial Worlds’, and for their assistance with this chapter. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers for helpful suggestions. 2 Running from 8 June to 2 July 2005, this production was the work of the Tiata Fahodzi company and enjoyed considerable critical success, as well as playing to full houses. ‘Tiata Fahodzi’ is translated in the Programme Notes as ‘Theatre of the Emancipated’. See, also, Hardwick’s discussion of the Arcola production in this volume, ch. 17.

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These failings have been usefully summarized by Dunton (1992: 14–16): Wrst, there is no strategy governing the languages in the play; second, the Yoruba notion of Xexible destiny is at variance with the Greek concept of absolute fate; third, the Wgure of the leader crowds out other forms of agency; and, Wnally, the ethnic strife evident in the play is not convincingly integrated into the plot. This essay will speak to all of these strictures, but it will be especially concerned to contest the proposition that Yoruba and Greek destinies are so incompatible that the play is utterly vitiated by their co-presence. Although this particular issue has all the contours of an old philosophical chestnut, it will devolve onto the more pressing matter of the play’s account of its relationship to the European canon, beginning with Oedipus the King. In dramatizing this account by adapting Sophocles’ play, The Gods Are Not To Blame qualiWes as an instance of what postcolonial theory calls ‘canonical counter-discourse’, in which the terms of the canon are mobilized to challenge the authority and the values that those terms normally articulate. A useful deWnition of canonical counter-discourse is provided in Gilbert and Tompkins (1996: 15–19). My argument will be that the play claims to be able to negotiate considerable latitude for itself within the canon, even as the play’s postcolonial culture within Nigeria is indissolubly infused with that colonial tradition. My argument, in fact, will go one step further than thus regarding The Gods as mere canonical counter-discourse, and will assert that the play also furnishes a theoretical account of its negotiated independence from the European canon.3 Yet this argument immediately poses a question. Why ever would Oedipus the King, which is a play that dilates on the power of the past, in the form of the curse of Oedipus, be adapted so that it might articulate the postcolonial moment in Nigeria? The next question, triggered by the Wrst, is: How might Oedipus the King, of all plays, be so adapted?4 To answer the Wrst question will involve a crucial adjustment, even contradiction, of the standard reading of The Gods Are Not To Blame, whereby the gods in question are the colonial powers, exonerated of historical responsibility for Nigeria’s civil 3 The present chapter is derived from a book in progress, which is co-written with Barbara GoV (2007). 4 Budelmann (2005) situates Rotimi’s play in the context of a group of West African adaptations of Greek tragedies and provides some useful reXections on the group thus framed.

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war after independence. Two inXuential interviews given by Rotimi himself (Enekwe 1984; Lindfors 2002: 345–61) have been instrumental in establishing this reading, which is focused on the protagonist’s declaration: No, no! Do not the blame the Gods. Let no one blame the powers. My people, learn from my fall. The powers would have failed if I did not let them use me. They knew my weakness: the weakness of a man easily moved to the defence of his tribe against others. (Rotim 1971: 71)

Although Rotimi’s voice is that of the playwright, it is only one voice, and the play itself contains many others. An alternative reading of the play, which I shall pursue, is that the very distinction between the colonizing powers on the outside and the indigenous population on the inside is, and was, just as untenable as the ethnic diVerences on the inside of the civil war. There is even a sense in which this reading subserves Rotimi’s reading better than the latter serves itself, since my interpretation extends the dramatist’s argument at least as much as it resists it. This resistance, moreover, might satisfy one of Rotimi’s aims as an artist, stated in the same interview as his interpretation of the play (Lindfors 1984: 65): Well, I think a play. . . must aim at transcending the province of mere aesthetics. FulWlment comes to the artist when he realizes his work [is] being seriously discussed, deductions or lessons drawn, interpretations argued over, new meanings adduced and rationalized.

The alternative to such exchange is allowing the dramatist, like a father, to tyrannize over his Wlial creation. Since this creation can only ever be partly his, I prefer to abet the rebellious son here. The implication of my overall reading of the play with regard to the issue of who causes the war, is that the drama may very well attribute responsibility for the civil war to the inter-ethnic dissension within Nigeria itself, but that it does so precisely by characterizing that dissension in terms of the trope of colonial conquest. So monstrous is this inter-tribal strife that it seems to be modelled on, or otherwise resembles, the racial subordination that characterizes colonialism itself. Rotimi and his character Odewale, the equivalent of Oedipus, may be correct in their exculpation of the colonial gods as strictly historical causes of the war. This exculpation, however, is not extended to the

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cultural causation behind the conXict, since the play itself is constrained by that massive cultural legacy to represent the war in terms of colonialism itself, and to do so, furthermore, in a version of the colonizer’s own text, Oedipus the King. This unXattering comparison between the Nigerian civil war and colonial aggression is staged initially in the scene in which Odewale kills the Old Man, as Oedipus kills Laius, and I shall discuss this scene as the beginning of my attempt to argue that the play is preoccupied with the cultural power of the colonizer, as it persists beyond the demise of his political power. Far from subscribing to the routine argument that colonialism begets postcolonial strife in a historically hydraulic manner, this chapter concurs with Rotimi’s own reading of the play, but then dissents from that reading on the matter of how that strife is motivated, shaped, and represented by the powerful vestiges of colonial culture, as those formerly colonized are shown associating themselves too intimately, even incestuously, with that culture. Played out allegorically in The Gods Are Not To Blame, this latter argument will be traced along the following lines. Seeking to expropriate Odewale’s land and harvest, and deriding his accent, the Old Man is evidently analogous to a colonizer. Despite his force of numbers, however, the Old Man is killed by Odewale, and the allegorical import of this outcome seems to be that disposing of the political power of the colonizer is the easy part. The next development in the plot, and in the historical allegory of colonization that I am correlating with it, is much more fraught. In marrying Ojuola, Rotimi’s equivalent of Jocasta, Odewale enters into an excessively intimate relationship with what the colonizer leaves behind. That vestige, in the terms of the allegory, can only be the culture that remains after the colonizer and his political power have been neutralized. Although the familiar trope of colonization as rape may stipulate that Ojuola represents an indigenous nature ravished by the colonizer, that ravishing also entails that this virgin natural territory has been transformed into a version of the colonizer’s culture. Odewale then comes into a dangerously close relationship with that culture, precisely by playing Oedipus in all his canonical splendour.5 5 See, for example, Boehmer’s remarks (1995: 86–7) on the colonial feminization, and violation, of the colonized subject and territory.

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The allegorical implication of this intimate union between the hero of national liberation and the vestigial cultural power of the colonizer is that there can, in the moment of liberation, be no comfortable regression to an essential pre-colonial identity. What expresses this impossibility in the allegory is not only the fact of this intimate transcultural union but also the fact that Odewale, the hero of national liberation, is himself characterized as a miscegenated product of the initial colonial relationship. He is, after all, a son of the colonizer, as well as of the nature that the colonizer has transformed into his own culture. So much is he, in fact, a product of colonization that his procreation is the colonial encounter itself, at least insofar as Rotimi’s adaptation of the myth of Oedipus and his parentage can be construed as an allegory of colonization and decolonization. Yet The Gods Are Not To Blame seems to be much more than a mere allegory or reXection of these historical processes, and this additional dimension is represented speciWcally by the product of the intrusively close relationship between Odewale and Ojuola. The literal issue of this marriage are children even more miscegenated than Odewale himself, but there is another product of this relationship between the former colonial subject and the colonizer’s culture: it is the play itself, which is similarly miscegenated. Far from being a mere report on, or description of, cultural colonization, the drama is immanent in this process. It is in the context of this reading that the play’s congeries of African and Greek elements makes sense and, moreover, deXects the criticism of the play as lacking in any strategy with regard to its constituent languages. In place of any liberatingly harmonious hybridity, which such a ‘strategy’ might imply, is a hybridity fraught with contradiction.

THEORY VERSUS CURSE In embodying African elements, in the form of Yoruba proverbs and deities, and classical Greek elements in the contours of Oedipus the King, The Gods Are Not To Blame is, in eVect, the intersection of at least two cultural traditions. Now, why the European rather than the

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African tradition is the main object of enquiry in this essay is because it contains within itself a highly assertive account of the very phenomenon of cultural transmission, of how all traditions, including itself, are perpetuated. In virtue of being rewritten by psychoanalysis as a model of how human beings are socially constructed within systems of exchange, the plot of Oedipus the King serves to explain how culture is transmitted from one generation to the next. By showing how much the individual subject must sacriWce of itself to the group, in order to be even constituted as a subject, this plot, in its reinscription as ‘the Oedipus complex’, can explain how the group reproduces itself across time. So, the plot of Oedipus the King, as adapted in The Gods Are Not To Blame, is evidently a narrative of immense authority. Not only is it the plot that the play, and the protagonist, cannot avoid inheriting from colonial culture, it is also, as modelled within colonial culture, a reXexive account of how all traditions are conveyed through history. This explanatory power may even explain why this plot is the one that is inherited by Rotimi’s play. Since this plot, above all others, can explain all cultural transmission, it thereby accounts for its own transmission as the one plot that here represents the whole ediWce of European tradition which weighs on The Gods Are Not To Blame. There may also be another answer to the question posed earlier, about why the plot of Oedipus the King, of all plots, should be mobilized to articulate the postcolonial moment in Nigeria. This answer bears more closely on both the play and the postcolonial reality that it represents: the gods are indeed to blame, because colonization involves a miscegenation which the plot of Oedipus the King allegorically reveals as the precondition of a form of incest. Although miscegenation presupposes an extreme exogamy, which ought logically to preclude incest, colonial miscegenation issues into the extreme endogamy of incest because there is simply no outside beyond the colonial relation against which identity might now be deWned. By insisting on an absolute separation between colonizers and colonized, on the one hand, and a close proximity between them on the other, colonial empire collapses in on itself, both logically and historically. It overrides the very diVerences that it strives to institute, in the very act of this attempted institution. After the colonial embrace, Oedipus’s question ‘Who am I?’ is unanswerable by both sides, because each side

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has changed the other in the process of cultural exchange.6 Exit exogamy; enter incest, at least in the cultural realm. To the extent that colonialism is ethnic conXict writ large, moreover, it proves that such conXict is as logically fallacious as it is historically persistent. Ethnic aggression means Wghting yourself. The second question, about how Rotimi’s play varies its inheritance, serves to qualify this answer by limiting the curse of colonial history with a speciWc adaptation of the cultural precedent of the colonizer. This adaptation is of the prophecy informing Odewale of the patricide and incest that will overtake him (p. 60): ODEWALE: . . . I went to a Priest of Ifa. I asked him: ‘Am I not who I am?’ VOICE: ‘You have a curse on you, son.’ ODEWALE: ‘What kind of curse, Old One?’ VOICE: ‘You cannot run away from it, the gods have willed that you will kill your father, and then marry your mother!’ ODEWALE: ‘Me! Kill my own father and marry my own mother?’ VOICE: ‘It has been willed.’ ODEWALE: ‘What must I do then not to carry out this will of the gods?’ VOICE: ‘Nothing. To run away would be foolish. The snail may try, but it cannot cast oV its shell. Just stay where you are. Stay where you are . . . stay where you are . . .’ He does no such thing, of course, and there is a sense in which his tragedy, like that of Oedipus, is precipitated by his inability to stay put, by this moment of migration. If only Oedipus and Odewale had stayed at home with their parents, none of this might have happened! There is, however, a crucial diVerence between these two cases: whereas the Sophoclean oracle of Apollo delivers only a bleak prognosis, Rotimi’s oracle of Ifa provides both a prognosis and an imperative: ‘Just stay where you are’ (p. 60).7 What this combination implies is that observance of the imperative might deXect the prognosis, and this logical implication is indeed substantiated in the details of the exchange. When Odewale asks about what he might 6 Hardwick (2004a) writes illuminatingly on related matters, and I diVer from her argument about Greek drama ‘decolonizing the minds of both colonized and decolonizers’ (p. 221) only in tracing in Rotimi’s play some of the limits on and conditions of such decolonization as they are dramatized there. 7 Wetmore (2002: 116–18) engages circumspectly with this issue.

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do to avert the future willed by the gods, the ‘voice’ replies: ‘Nothing. To run away would be foolish.’ (p. 60). One way of glossing this response would be, of course, to suppose that the ‘voice’ is advising Odewale of the futility of any evasive action, since the future has been programmed by an inexorable fate. To construe the oracle’s response in this fashion, however, is to presuppose that there can be only one version of fate, which then comes to correspond, in its narrow, tyrannical nature, to this methodological presupposition that there is just this one kind of destiny. One factor that might condition this presupposition of there being just one fate, which is correspondingly absolute in its realization, is the Greek notion of fate, suggested in turn by the lineaments of Greek tragedy Wguring throughout Rotimi’s play.8 Odewale certainly credits this notion of fate, since he promptly runs away, motivated ironically by the horriWc assumption that what he Xees obviates that Xight since it will come to pass anyway. In Xeeing, moreover, Odewale conforms to the trajectory of Oedipus and thus expresses not only the ineluctable momentum of Greek fate but also the whole canonical freight of Greek culture within which that fate and its impact on Oedipus is portrayed. Odewale’s compliance with the Oedipal paradigm both constitutes and advertises this African play’s susceptibility to the European canonical antecedent that is Oedipus the King. Now, The Gods Are Not To Blame may be susceptible to the European canon, but it is not subject to it, as Odewale evidently is. Precluding such abject subjection is the fact that there is another means of glossing the oracle’s stipulations and, consequently, a whole other version of fate on oVer in the play. When Odewale asks what he might do to deXect his destiny, the oracle replies: ‘Nothing. To run away would be foolish. . . . Stay where you are.’ (p. 60). Instead of being understood as a foreclosing of evasive action, this pronouncement might be construed as a demand for evasive inaction. To insist that Odewale remain where he is, with his adoptive parents, is, in a sense, to prescribe the very remedy for which he asks. This interpretation of the oracle thus entails not only a model of fate as more Xexible than the Greek version, already considered, but also the larger notion that there 8 The notion of fate in Oedipus the King is explicated, and complicated, in Winnington-Ingram (1980: 150–78) and in Segal (2001: 53–70).

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is more than one form of destiny. Just as the Greek version of an absolute fate is associated with the presupposition that there is only one kind of fate, so the more Xexible form of fate just canvassed is correlated with the notion that there is more than one form of fate. Whereas the more rigid destiny, to which Odewale subscribes, can be readily identiWed as ‘Greek’, the less rigid destiny can be understood as an element of Yoruba culture. What signiWes the speciWc presence of Yoruba destiny here is the fact that Aberopo, the counterpart of Creon, is despatched to the oracle of Ifa, not Apollo, and the fact that reference is twice made to Ifa’s divine partner in Yoruba prophecy. The partner is called ‘Esu’, and variants of this name are invoked at the moment when Odewale takes his oath about detecting the murderer of the previous king, and later when Baba Fakunle, the counterpart of Tiresias, requires payment from Odewale of just ‘one cowry for Esu the messenger of Ifa and Olodumare’ (p. 28). Understanding what is at stake in the play’s mobilization of Yoruba prophecy requires some acquaintance with the details of Ifa divination, and so I shall provide a quick sketch of them. As messenger of the gods, Esu conveys their will to humankind.9 This will is articulated Wrst, on behalf of all the gods, through the mediation of one god, Ifa, who is eVectively their scribe, enabling them to communicate with one another and with humankind. To communicate with humans, however, a translation of Ifa’s transcriptions is required, and it is Esu who mediates between Ifa and humanity. The human end of this relay looks rather diVerent. To ascertain the will of the gods, the Yoruba priest, or babalawo, places sixteen palm nuts on a divining board and then re-orders them sixteen times. It is with the signs thus conWgured that Ifa writes on to the divining board. The babalawo then interprets these visual signs by translating them into an oral poetry, and it is within this exercise that Esu performs his oYces by directing the interpretation. Yet Esu does not simply decode Ifa’s divine writing into a specialized human discourse in obsequious fashion; he instead interprets Ifa’s writing actively, to the extent that he is responsible for ultimately making it mean. How he does so, furthermore, is by animating the writing with complex, equivocal meanings that must be applied by the human suppliant to his or her 9 An ample and nuanced account of Esu can be found in Pelton (1980: 127–63).

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own circumstances and that may thus be determined in that application (see Bascom 1969: 69).10 The net result of the indeterminacy within this relay, introduced particularly by Esu, is that Yoruba fate is, within limits, negotiable, as the suppliant reinterprets it in the act of applying it. Destiny and prophecy are thus highly contingent on interpretation.11 Our second question, posed earlier, about how the play varies its legacy, has now been answered. It is this relay of interpretation in Ifa divination that Gates (1988) has reconstructed as the basis of the ‘black vernacular’ in the United States, modelling such reinterpretation as the working of a literary canon in which aftercomers can improvize freely on their antecedents without being obliged to murder or to commit incest with them.12 My argument here is not that an African-American theory of AfricanAmerican culture, as identified by Gates, is fully at work in Rotimi’s play. What I do propose, however, is that the play’s references to Esu are the trace of a theory of interpretation that mediates the play’s larger relationships to Oedipus the King and to the European canon which the latter play signifies. Even as Odewale presupposes that there is only one model of destiny and that this destiny is correspondingly monolithic in its realization, the play invokes a more Xexible model, which he misses because he has run amok in this Greek play and gone native, over-investing in the European elements, until, of course, he realizes that it could have been diVerent and that the European gods are, therefore, not to blame. He did not necessarily have to go the way of Oedipus. Had he not identiWed excessively with the Greek component of his cultural identity, he might have been receptive to the Yoruba alternative. Although Odewale may seem quite sensitive to the martial aspect of Yoruba culture represented by Ogun, whose shrine stands at 10 In his extensive account of this divination, Bascom states that ‘The client Wnds his own answer’ and, furthermore, calls the process ‘a projective technique, comparable to the Rorschach Test’. (Bascom 1969:69) 11 Positing some signiWcant common factors across West African religions, the ethnographer Fortes (1983:3) has deployed the Wgures of Oedipus and Job to personify diVering, even opposed, notions of how the individual relates to the cosmos: ‘The Oedipal principle is best summed up in the notion of Fate or Destiny, the Jobian principle in that of Supernatural Justice’. Fortes concludes that ‘in West African religions’ these principles ‘are not opposed but rather supplement each other’ (p. 40), as I propose is the case in The Gods Are Not To Blame. 12 See Gates (1988): pp. 23–43 on the role of Esu and pp. 44–88 on his extrapolation of a theory of tradition.

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the centre of the play, his most compelling Wxation, unbeknownst to himself, is on an Hellenic model, and it is this model that blinds him to the larger scope of his Yoruba identity and the other gods, such as Ifa and Esu, that inform it. The fact that he is blind to his resemblance to, and diVerence from, Oedipus, whom he does not appear to recognize as an antecedent, is an added dramatic irony that Oedipus himself does not have to bear. So intense was this dramatic irony in Tiata Fahodzi’s production at the Arcola that the emerging uncertainty about who is who, exposed by Odewale’s questioning, was played quite farcically, until the massive gravity of the tragedy Wnally impinged. One implication of this intensity is that colonial culture has a way of crushing precisely those who do not know its secrets, with those very secrets. The play, meanwhile, has been aware at an earlier stage of the contortions of its own cultural identity. It knows, before Odewale does, that it is miscegenated, on the one hand, and yet a product of incest, on the other, and this self-consciousness is legible in Odewale’s exchange with the oracle. The importance of this exchange is pointed metatheatrically by the fact that this dialogue is dramatized in The Gods Are Not To Blame rather than merely reported, as it is in Oedipus the King; rendering the Sophoclean report quite faithfully in its content, this scene is, at the same time, a formal departure from that report.13 What this dramatized exchange in Rotimi’s play signiWes, in the terms of the allegorical reading that I have been developing, with particular reference to this passage, is that the play relates to the European canon by two means. On the one hand, its relationship to 13 The main structural diVerences between Rotimi and Sophocles’ plays are three scenes in the former play which show what the latter play only tells: the Wrst is a substantial prologue, which supplies the back story of Odewale before he arrives at Kutuje; the second is a dramatized ‘Xashback’ to Odewale’s killing of the Old Man; and the third is a similar Xashback to Odewale’s encounter with the oracle. There are also several diVerences in the plot, including the following: there is the substitution of an invasion for Sophocles’ Sphinx; there is the replacement of Creon, who is Jocasta’s brother, with Aderopo, who is, just like Odewale, the son of Ojuola and Adetusa; Odewale adopts a baby girl into his family; and, at the end of the play, Odewale, unlike Oedipus, takes leave of his community and his children. Cultural diVerences include the replacement of Greek gods with Yoruba deities, and the intermittent use of proverbs in The Gods. The present chapter focuses selectively on those diVerences that engage with the issue of determinism and that thus serve to theorize the relations of this play to the canon and other cultural traditions.

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the canon is an Oedipal relationship that is already programmed into the canon and which is expressed by the Greek fate that impresses itself on the play, and especially on Odewale as he follows Oedipus’s trajectory; on the other hand, the play relates to the canon by means of a relationship that is not already dictated by the canon and which is Wgured instead by the Yoruba model of destiny and its inherent Xexibility. This destiny is certainly Xexible enough to stand outside of the European canon and to provide a wholesale alternative to the canon’s most powerful account of how it and all other cultural traditions are perpetuated. The power of the story of Oedipus, as Freud recognized, is that it can be used to account for how cultures work. Against the authority of this Greek story refracted through psychoanalysis, The Gods Are Not To Blame poses not only another culture, of Yoruba traditions, but also, and more importantly, another account of how cultural traditions operate through time. Although the Oedipal model of cultural transmission is very capacious, because psychoanalysis predicates it on an ambivalence oscillating between the extremes of murderous hatred and sexual passion, Rotimi’s play exposes this totalizing model as only one totalizing model among others.

B EYO N D FA NO N ? R E C OG N I Z I NG A C H OI C E Even as The Gods Are Not To Blame advertises both a European and an African channel of communication between itself and European culture, it is also linked to that culture by a very speciWc channel that is, in a sense, both African and European. This hybridized relationship is neither a full-scale tradition, like Yoruba culture or the European literary canon themselves, nor is it a grand theory of cultural transmission, such as Ifa divination or psychoanalysis: what stands behind The Gods Are Not To Blame as a hybridized link between itself and European culture is Frantz Fanon’s earlier argument that the Oedipus complex is entirely a colonial export. On the basis of this argument, Fanon’s work develops the Oedipus complex as a diagnostic critique of the traumatically impossible relationship that constitutes the colonial subject. This critique is applied to the colonial relationship most elaborately in Black Skin, White Masks [Peau Noire,

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Masques Blancs] (Fanon 1967). Although this text is extremely well known within postcolonial theory, to the extent that it is one of the seminal texts of the discipline, there is a psychoanalytic pathologizing of colonialism in another of Fanon’s works, which was well known rather earlier and by a much larger audience. An English translation of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth [Les Damne´s de la Terre] was Wrst published in 1963, four years before Black Skin, White Masks received similar treatment. While there is much less psychoanalytic apparatus evident in The Wretched of the Earth, the Oedipal paradigm is still powerfully present in at least two passages. Fanon’s conclusions in this text, about the Algerian revolution, were widely applied to other struggles for national liberation across Africa, and, indeed, one or two of them may be traced reverberating within The Gods Are Not To Blame, especially in its Oedipal shadow. Fanon’s largest critical argument in psychoanalytic terms is that indigenous populations prior to European colonization were subject to neither the Oedipus complex nor Oedipal neurosis and that colonization not only reconstitutes such populations in an Oedipal relationship with the colonizer but also arrests these colonial subjects in that relationship, inasmuch as they are structurally obliged to love and hate the colonizer. Rotimi’s play extends and modiWes Fanon’s argument, Wrst by staging an African protagonist who acts out rather than represses his desires and, second, by staging that protagonist for an audience that had, because of its postcolonial status in independent Nigeria, emerged from the Oedipal triangle imposed by colonialism. In the context of Fanon’s argument, which was widely disseminated at this time, the Nigerian audience originally addressed by The Gods Are Not To Blame can potentially identify itself as having passed through the Oedipus complex to enjoy the same status as the colonizer and, moreover, to be replicating the characteristic behaviour of that status within the civil war. Yet the play furnishes more than the total trajectory from Oedipus himself through the Oedipus complex and then out of the other side of it. By modelling another culture, and especially the distinct account of cultural transmission integral to it, the play asserts a degree of autonomy in relation to colonial culture and the corresponding mode of cultural transmission that this culture prescribes. What is more, The Gods Are Not To Blame, rather than merely asserting this autonomy, enacts and so

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substantiates it, precisely by dramatizing both of the metacultural theories to which it is heir, along with a relation of choice between them. Such choice, however, and the poles between which it could occur, do not permit a transcendence of the colonial inheritance, since the very terms in which the two models are framed oscillate between, and hence within, the two cultures that they also theorize: like Oedipus, Esu is a Wgure that is often located at the site of the crossroads, so that this very trope of cultural intersection is represented as neither Greek nor Yoruba, but both. Any choice here between models of cultural transmission is real and necessary, but it cannot involve a choice between the cultures themselves, which the play insists remain locked in an incestuous embrace. Just how intimately embroiled they are in the play is indicated by the dedication, which reads: ‘For my late mother Oruene’. Rotimi’s later account of the cultural circumstances of his family illuminates the wider signiWcance of this dedication (Lindfors 2002: 348): I grew up in an ethnically heterogeneous family. My dad hails from Yorubaland, my late mother hailed from Ijaw in the Rivers State. My mother was not literate, so she spoke to us in Ijaw, and we responded in that medium or occasionally in the Nigerian pidgin English which she also understood soundly. My dad was educated, so he had the option of speaking either in English or in Yoruba; he could speak no Ijaw.

Even though these cultures split the family, the family, in turn, joins up these cultures. Emphasizing this cultural compression is the fact that the dramatist gives to his mother an artifact that she could not have understood, because of its English and Yoruba vocabularies. In doing so, however, he also gives back to her something with which she is intensely familiar, which is himself, in the form of his own dramatic creation. Since what she could have understood and what she could not have understood are not separable, either in her son or in his work, the sheer compression of cultures is manifest; the intimate and the remote are, as we have observed, intimately conjoined in the postcolonial scene. The very fact, moreover, that the play is haunted both by the Wgure of the dead mother, signiWcant in Yoruba ontology, and by the dead father of the Oedipal paradigm, constitutes an intersection of cultures. What the dead mother signiWes in the Yoruba scheme is

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the adulthood of her children.14 Such adult status in the cultural realm is, however, somewhat constrained, as the play has demonstrated by its own example. Although The Gods Are Not To Blame has been able to negotiate a degree of independence from its cultural forebears, unlike Odewale in his relationship to Oedipus, it has not been able to choose its cultural parents or how they related to one another before its own appearance to mediate between them. So much for my more or less postcolonial reading of The Gods Are Not To Blame, which has been undertaken as a supplement to the more mechanically historical reading of the play as a critical diagnosis of the Nigerian civil war. While I have largely eschewed this consensual interpretation, Wetmore (Wetmore 2002: 119 quoting Banham 1990: 68) has exceeded it by arguing that the play transcends and symbolically remedies the ethnic divisions associated with the war.15 How the play is said to do so is by addressing its audience in English, which is not only the colonizer’s language but also the language that is used most commonly in Nigeria, across ethnic diVerences. My focus, meanwhile, has been on the play’s awareness of the cost entailed in this English address and hence on the play’s inability to transcend the contradictions that give rise to it. What Wgures that cost is the Hellenic aspect of the play as it cooperates with the English address to invoke the curse of the canon. Several strategic conclusions about postcolonial adaptations of classical drama and literature might be inferred from, or conWrmed by, my analysis of Rotimi’s play: Wrst, such adaptations may well be conXicted in their hybridity, as Odewale is, rather than serenely equilibrated; second, such conXict can enable a formal and cultural self-consciousness, as witness in Rotimi’s play a dramatic irony greater even than in Sophocles’ tragedy; third, this self-consciousness is not necessarily suYcient to countervail the contradiction that produces it, since The Gods Are Not To Blame does not elude its Oedipal bind, even as it models an alternative to it; and, Wnally, the 14 See Ibitokun (1995: ix) for an account of the Yoruba belief that the death of the mother signiWes the breaking of the umbilical chord and hence the Wnal passage of the child into adulthood. 15 Wetmore is here developing Banham’s argument about Rotimi’s construction of a ‘trans-Nigerian idiom’ from speciWcally theatrical resources. Wetmore extends this idiom to Rotimi’s use of English.

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relationship between adaptation and canon is not always fully preprogrammed into the canon, since that African alternative subsists beyond it. There is a silent sign at the close of the play bearing witness to at least one cultural genealogy distinct from the Oedipal. While Odewale’s natural unnatural children accompany him as he departs, the baby girl that he adopted into his family in an earlier scene remains behind, like a diVerent, postcolonial Antigone, exempt, by her adoptive status, from the overly familiar family of Odewale and Oedipus.16 Although the play cannot transcend its cultural contradictions as it dramatizes them, the curse can at least be worked, and, to that extent, even blessed. 16 Like Rotimi’s text, Tiata Fahodzi’s production made no reference or gesture at the end to this baby. It is her very status as a ‘loose end’ that saves her and that implies the possibility of a wider postcolonial redemption. Although not outside the play and the traditions that it invokes, since there is no such outside after the colonial embrace, she can exist and begin to grow within the silence of the play and the canon.

6 Post-Apartheid Electra: In the City of Paradise Elke Steinmeyer

In 1998, four years after the Wrst free elections in South Africa, the Cape Town producer (and actor) Mark Fleishman and his team put a new adaptation of the Electra myth on the stage of the Hiddingh Hall Theater on the Orange Street Campus of the University of Cape Town, under the title In the City of Paradise.1 This is, to my knowledge, the Wrst truly South African adaptation of the Electra myth, and it is set against the backdrop of the immediately post-apartheid era in South Africa, a period when the new democratic government tried to deal with the legacy inherited from their apartheid predecessors. This transitional period from a former repressive political system to democracy was a crucial one in South African history. As with so many other countries worldwide, which were governed by totalitarian systems,2 the apartheid era with its strict racial segregation policy was also characterized by gross violations of human rights. Sarkin (2004: 1) points out: How a newly democratic society deals with its past is likely to have a major inXuence on whether that society will achieve long-term peace and stability . . .

and: . . . [e]stablishing a comprehensive account of the past is increasingly seen as a vital element of a successful transition to democracy. 1 There is no published text of this adaptation. I would like to thank Professor Fleishman for making the video of In the City of Paradise available to me, without which I could not have undertaken this study. 2 Jeremy Sarkin (2004) gives details of nine countries that had to deal in the recent past with a similar problematic transition

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There are diVerent ways of addressing this issue, such as blanket amnesty, criminal trials, or a truth commission, which do not necessarily exclude each other. But since ‘no two countries are the same’, there is no single model that can be applied; each country has to decide for itself what seems to be the best way under the given individual circumstances. South Africa’s attempt to deal with these issues consisted in the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1995. It was supposed to provide a forum for former victims and perpetrators of the apartheid regime to share their experiences and to Wnd a way to go on with their lives. Sarkin (2004: 100)3 has observed: It has allowed victims from all political persuasions to be given a platform to testify to their suVerings and reclaim their dignity, while perpetrators had an arena in which to declare their sins and be given amnesty in exchange for the full truth. Thus, a process for a national catharsis was established.

This was not an easy task since, especially in the South African context, the distinction between perpetrator and victim was often blurred; that is, in some cases, one person could be a victim and perpetrator at the same time (p. 82). Countless wounds from the past needed to be healed; questions of vengeance, retribution, and the possibility of forgiveness were hotly and controversially debated, as can be seen from: ‘[a] 1997 survey of the view of the general South African public [which] showed that the majority of South Africans were opposed to the amnesty’ (p. 4). As we will see later, this institution was not a solution for everybody to overcome the past that haunted them, and responses were mixed (p. 8): Some victims believed that there should not have been any amnesty. Others maintained that there should have been a blanket amnesty, since the TRC process reopened wounds, causing more pain and bitterness.

In the following essay, I am going to investigate how Fleishman adapted the Electra myth for these speciWc circumstances: which changes he undertook, which elements in his production illustrate the post-colonial issues in South Africa with special emphasis on the post-Apartheid period, and what innovations he introduced into the reception of this myth. 3 All following page references refer to Sarkin (2004).

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Mark Fleishman and his team of students have devised their own version of the Electra myth by drawing on its ancient sources, in this case the four Greek tragedies that deal with Electra, namely: Aeschylus’ Choephoroi; Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electra plays; and, Wnally, Euripides’ Orestes. He developed the text for his production together with his team and cast as a collaborative enterprise, which is a typical characteristic of so-called ‘workshop theatre’. This theatrical genre emerged in South Africa in the early 1970s and is in itself a post-colonial phenomenon, since it was meant as an opposition to the established, mainstream ‘white’ theatre world. In his article ‘Workshop theatre as oppositional form’ (1990: 89), Fleishman lists the following eight characteristics that deWne workshop theatre: 1. It is made by a group of people together, as opposed to being written by a single playwright in isolation. 2. It is made for performance and has more to do with life than with literature. A workshop play cannot, therefore, be easily published, as the text is not easily divorced from the performance. Any published version of a workshop play is only a crystallization of a process at one particular stage of that process. 3. It has a structural form that is unique and draws on traditional oral form. 4. It has a particular performance style, generic to the South African townships, which is non-naturalistic, physical, musical, and larger than life. 5. It combines various performance forms such as music, narrative, and dance within the context of a single performance. 6. It has more to do with the collective subject than with the individual subject of Western drama. 7. It is an essentially urban form of cultural expression, rooted in the urban experience of South Africa, and is overtly political in nature. 8. It displays an ironic comic vision that is both regenerative in the face of the essential tragedy of the South African situation, and transformative in its ability to estrange power structures through grotesque parody. Fleishman’s production of In the City of Paradise, as we will see, meets all of the above characteristics. I base these observations mainly

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on the video, which was taped on 28 February 1998 during a performance of the play. With the help of the same video, and some excerpts quoted in Margaret Mezzabotta’s article (2000), ‘Ancient Greek Drama in the New South Africa’,4 I was able to reconstruct the text of the actual performance on which I base this chapter, although I have realized, after having watched the video, that the text is only one part of the production and must not be isolated from the context of silent scenes, gestures, body language, music, and dance. In another article, ‘Physical Images in the South African Theatre’, Fleishman (1997: 208) elaborates on the importance of the non-verbal elements in the communication between the actors and the audience: The physical image is multi-valent, ambiguous and complex. It leads to a proliferation of meaning which demands an imaginative response from the spectator. There are those that would argue that such open-ended images are inappropriate for a country struggling to deal with the uncertainties of a changing reality. They would have clarity, single meanings, a narrowing down of options in a manner designed to appeal to the audience’s need for stability and certainty of understanding. I would suggest this is a misguided opinion. The theatre in our country has often been guilty of simplicity as much in its condemnation as in its condonation of Apartheid. What we need now is the opening up of alternatives and options, the promotion of dialogue in a desperate attempt to avoid the replacement of one monologistic absolutism with another. Physical images are essentially dialogical: a double-voiced play of opposites. They are ambiguous, ambivalent, often opaque, but precisely because they do not reduce to simple single meanings, they demand that the audience be actively involved in making individual choices.

He says that (1997: 201): . . . the body is not simply a vehicle for the embodiment of the text; it serves as part of the text in its own right [ . . . ]. Text is created through improvisation, a physical process in which gesture exists before and alongside words as an independent sign system.

For him (1997: 209): . . . the physical body [is a] metaphor for the social body we are in the process of creating with its multilingual and multicultural characteristics. 4 There is also a printed version of Mezzabotta’s article (2000), but I use the electronic version for the references in the text. For full details, see Mezzabotta in the bibliography.

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I would like to go systematically through Fleishman’s eight characteristics of workshop theatre and see how they manifest in his play. Point 1 has been already mentioned: Mark Fleishman elaborated together with his students, who are at the same time the members of the cast, their individual version of the Electra myth. Point 2, the fact that performance and text cannot be separated from each other, becomes clear when one watches the video of the production. It makes one realize how much one misses out by focusing exclusively on the text. Point 3 deals with the inXuence of orality on the structure of the play. The performance of an ancient rhapsode consists of the interplay of text, music, presentation, and improvization; he ‘stitches together’5 single episodes into one narrative. As we will discuss later, Fleishman’s play consists of nine episodes (with subsections) ‘stitched together’ into one plot. Point 4 is the most diYcult to locate in the play, but one can Wnd some characteristic features of South African township life: for instance the portable public toilet in the courtyard, where Orestes is hiding and where Aegisthus attacks and possibly rapes him and where he is killed by Orestes in an act of selfdefence; or Cassandra who secretly sprays the name ‘Orestes’ like graYti on the wall of the house in order to remind everybody of his impending return; or the moment when the vigilantist mob itself wants to stone Electra and Orestes to death after they have been convicted of matricide. There is also a lighter insight into the daily life of the black South African domestic worker when the Nurse complains about the way Clytemnestra chases her around and that she constantly has to hurry (episode 6). Point 5, the combination of various performance forms, has been established already. Point 6, the idea of collectiveness, is covered by the central question of the play, the problem of justice, since this concerns the whole community and not just an individual. The political element under point 7 becomes dominant towards the end of the play, when the text links the action of the play explicitly to the TRC. And lastly, the comic vision in point 8 is manifested in numerous grotesque scenes, with Electra living in a refrigerator, with Agamemnon’s corpse having lain rotting for ten years on a heap of garbage next to the rubbish bin in which Cassandra is living, and with a feast at the end that is strongly reminiscent of 5 This is the etymology for the Greek word rhapsodos.

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Aristophanes’ comedies. Fleishman (1997: 206) comments on the use of the grotesque: By refashioning and re-inventing the material body into extraordinary, often grotesque forms, they subvert and parody aspects of the society and the world.

According to Fleishman (1990: 97–8) we can Wnd some of these characteristics of workshop theatre already in earlier South African theatre history. In 1957, Athol Fugard developed a similar method of creating the text for a production by giving the actors the skeletal structure of the plot, watching their improvizations and writing down the Wnal text only afterwards. Furthermore, in 1959 the so-called Union Artists, under the guidance of Gibson Kente, introduced ‘the broad, physical acting style’ and ‘the episodic structure’ (p. 97), which would later become so important for workshop theatre. And, lastly, the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), which arose around the same time as the Workshop Theatre Movement: ‘emphasized that political goals—the liberation of the black people—could be achieved through cultural expression’ (p. 98). What distinguished the above groups from the traditional theatre was the fact that their cast and directors consisted of black people and that they catered mainly for black audiences. The Wrst three groups to begin workshop theatre in South Africa were Workshop ’71, the Serpent Players (who were to produce later Fugard’s adaptation of the Antigone myth entitled The Island), and the Phoenix Players. Similar developments in theatre history could be observed in other countries as well, just to mention The Living Theatre in New York / USA as one prominent example, which, albeit not an exclusively black, but a predominantly white group: ‘has been known as the most radical, uncompromising, and experimental group in American theatrical history’ (Tytell 1995: XI). Initiated by Judith Malina and Julian Beck in 1946 as ‘an experimental, repertory company’ (p. 33), it would, over the following decades, touch on political and social taboos, and promote creative and sexual openness, including the use of drugs. It also used ‘the free and easy spirit of spontaneous invention’ (p. 182), while elaborating a new play, discussing extensively as a group the ‘meaning of each element’, and so reaching a ‘consensual spirit’ (p. 183) in the group. Fully to appreciate a workshop theatre production, one needs to bear in mind the three following aspects, which Fleishman enumerates as

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‘1. Production; 2. Structure; 3. Social process’ (p. 90). He subdivides the Wrst one, Production, further into three phases: Observation, Improvization, and Selection (p. 100). Observation (pp. 101–4) consists for him in doing research on the topic of the play by contemplating other people’s personal and daily experiences. Improvization takes place after the producer has given the cast a rough structure of the plot, including the beginning and ending. Finally, Selection is the process of Wltering out of the above steps the Wnal version in a collaborative and democratic way. The Structure (pp. 104–8) of a workshop play is, in contrast to the traditional sequentially-developed narrative, episodic, a term often attributed to Berthold Brecht’s theatre, but which can be also attributed to ‘the structure of a traditional oral folk-tale’ (p. 104), since folk tales often consist of a sequence of episodes or mini-stories, which are ‘stitched together’ by the narrator. Also the basic structure of many workshop theatre plays consists of a sequence of actions or functions. The third aspect, Social process (pp. 108–13) is described by Fleishman as follows (p. 113): These workshop plays do not document contemporary history, they do deal with the past, but they do so in relation to the present and it is this relationship which gives them their political function [ . . . ]. They identify traditions which become a resource for present struggles.

If we look at the structure of In the City of Paradise, we can see that it consists of a sequence of nine episodes, each subdivided into two or three smaller sequences with interludes. The setting is a kitchen equipped with a fridge, cupboards, two washbasins, and a waste area—an allusion to the history of the house of Atreus, which includes Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, slaughtering the children of his brother, Thyestes, and serving them up as a meal; and also Thyestes’ curse after sampling the food and realizing the awful crime. In Fleishman’s play, the Xoor is made of black and white tiles like a chessboard. In the background is a house with an open door leading into Clytemnestra’s bedroom. In between there is a veranda and a sort of courtyard with a portable toilet. The multi-racial cast consists of Cassandra (who is still alive at the end), Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Electra, Orestes, the Nurse (who acts also as the leader of the chorus), Aegisthus, Pylades (whose role is played by a woman), Clytemnestra’s parents Tyndareus and Leda, and a chorus of a crowd of people. The appearance of

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Tyndareus has been taken over from Euripides’ Orestes, where Tyndareus appears in a similar role as here. Between episode 1 and 2, ten years have elapsed; in the meanwhile, Agamemnon has returned home and has been murdered, and there are only two reminders of this crime left: his corpse covered by newspapers on the rubbish heap, and the outlines of the bodies of two people drawn with chalk on the Xoor of the veranda like ‘the aftermath of a crime scene’ (Mezzabotta 2000)—strangely enough, two instead of one, since Cassandra (in contrast to the ancient sources) survives in this adaptation. The chorus perform the roles of waiters, cleaners, and maids in the second episode, probably in order to reinforce the kitchen aspect, and in the third and the last episode they take the parts of the citizens of Argos, where the action takes place. A signiWcant diVerence between the ancient sources and Fleishman’s modern adaptation consists in his omission of the gods and therefore of religion as a whole. This is a phenomenon that can be observed also in some other South African adaptations of ancient myths, where the gods do not feature at all or play only a marginal role; for example, in Mervyn McMurtry’s Electra, Athol Fugard’s The Island, or Guy Butler’s Demea. Fleishman’s characters act on their own devices: they do not defer their deeds to the gods or any divine order, but take full responsibility themselves. In this regard, Fleishman is following the footsteps of Euripides who had already minimized the role of the gods in the plot of his Electra play and had transposed the action more strongly to the human level. In many of Euripides’ plays, the gods have either a negative role, as in Hippolytos (Roisman 1999: 151–52 and 156–57), a marginal one, as in Iphigeneia in Aulis (Luschnig 1988: 119–25 and 54, note 1), or a questionable one, as in Electra (Luschnig: 1995: 154 and note 155),6 where Apollo is strongly criticized for his interference in human matters by the demigod Castor in the Wnal deus-ex-machina scene (Diggle 1981: l. 1246) and even more harshly by Orestes himself in Orestes (Murray [1909] 1969: ll. 285–7; see also Gru¨be, 1968: 44 and note 8). In Hecuba, there are no gods at all anymore (see Mossman 1999: 3 and 201).7 By leaving out the religious connotation of the 6 Gru¨be (1968: 41–42) considers ‘[t]hese plays ( . . . ) not primarily an attack upon the god [i.e. Apollo]’, but ‘realistic presentations of men and women’ (p. 42). 7 For a general discussion about Euripides’ criticism of the gods see Decharme 1966: 43–73, especially 55–57.

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question of justice, and reducing the motive for the acts of revenge to purely personal emotions, Fleishman creates on the one hand a frightening scenario of how far human beings can be driven by hatred and their desire for revenge; but on the other hand one might ask which force can overcome these basic destructive instincts. We will come back to this question later. The most important character in the framework of my study is Electra. She bears the traits of most of the earlier adaptations of the Electra myth. She is Wlthy and smells; she is dressed in a Ximsy top and dirty underpants. All this reminds us of her description in Euripides’ Electra—the short hair and the need of a bath (Diggle 1981: ll. 150 and 1107–8)—for in both Euripides and Fleishman, Clytemnestra reprimands her daughter for not having had a bath for a long time. It also reminds us of her appearance in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s drama Elektra ([1903] 1979: 189, 222–3, 225) and Gerhart Hauptmann’s tragedy Elektra ([1947] 1974: 889–90, 895, 901) as the third part of his Atridentetralogie : both emphasize that she is Wlthy and neglects bodily hygiene. Fleishman’s Electra is neurotic; she acts like a psychopath, constantly trembling, suVering from convulsions and uncontrolled movements, and is driven by violent outbursts, when verbal arguments fail her, making her resemble her father. She is full of hatred against Clytemnestra and Aegisthus; very appropriately, her Wrst appearance is accompanied by the Gregorian chant Dies Irae (Day of Anger).8 After Aegisthus’ death, she hovers over his corpse and proclaims how much joy she got over the years from hating him. This scene reminds us of the moment in Euripides’ Electra when Electra delivers a persiXage of a funeral oration for the dead Aegisthus by gloating over him and speaking out all that has piled up in her over the years (Diggle 1981: l. 907–56). As another similarity with the Euripidean Wgure, she relentlessly pushes the weak and reluctant Orestes to kill Clytemnestra against his will. Electra is very emotional and not open to rational argument. She is possessed by her idea of vengeance; she tells Orestes that she wants a ‘proper revenge’ and that it can be done only ‘her way’. She has idealized her father as ‘so true, so powerful, so beautiful’, although she hardly knew him and 8 I would like to thank Professor Bernhard Kytzler for this reference.

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should have rather intimidating memories of him. The reason for her adoration of him remains unclear. But one can understand Electra’s hatred for her mother: Clytemnestra shows without any inhibition the contempt she feels for Electra and her own superiority; she mocks Electra’s virginity, she calls her ‘a disgrace to [her] family and [her] position’ (episode 2), a ‘pathetic excuse for a woman’, and ‘the daughter of [her] father’ (episode 7). In their debates, Clytemnestra enjoys her triumph over the insecure and rather helpless Electra, who cannot match her masterly and self-conWdent mother. The motif of jealousy does not feature here, since Electra’s hatred does not even vanish after she has found her own lover and has discovered sexuality herself. But Fleishman introduces an interesting innovation: in contrast to most of the other versions, his Electra Wgure is able to overcome the past and to start a new phase in her life. This new beginning becomes clear when Orestes washes Electra’s hair and Pylades afterwards bathes Electra’s legs and arms. Pylades also dresses her in new clothes, actually in a man’s suit. During this cleansing process, Electra discovers her feelings for Pylades and, while Orestes is struggling in the courtyard with Aegisthus, she and Pylades make love. Also, at the end of the play, after she has been given amnesty for the matricide, Electra is able to rejoice and to join the feast wholeheartedly. She is not troubled by any remorse or tormented by her conscience; the amnesty has enabled her to close the past of her life and to move on. The basic storyline follows the traditional plot of the Electra myth. The most interesting part, in my opinion, is the last episode, where Fleishman adds quite a revolutionary new dimension by giving Clytemnestra’s parents, Tyndareus and Leda, a prominent position in the plot and so depicting the whole situation from a more understandable point of view, from Clytemnestra’s and her family’s side. To put such an emphasis on the feelings of the victim’s parents is to my knowledge unique in the reception of the Electra myth and allows the audience to see Clytemnestra’s murder from another angle. The representation of Tyndareus is closely based on his depiction in Euripides’ play Orestes. As in Euripides (Murray [1909] 1969: ll. 496–503 and 538–9), Tyndareus reprimands Orestes for having taken the law into his own hands: although it was not right for Clytemnestra to have killed Agamemnon, she would have deserved

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a proper trial. In contrast to Euripides, where Tyndareus is explicitly going to encourage the citizens of Argos to stone Orestes and Electra to death as punishment for the matricide (Murray [1909] 1969: ll. 612–14) and does not make allowance for any kind of mitigation, Tyndareus here stops the mob from stoning Orestes and Electra, and insists on a fair trial to be set up for the crime Orestes and Electra have committed. In both versions he thinks that Electra has deserved death even more because of her having inXuenced Orestes with her intrigues (see Euripides, Orestes; Murray [1909] 1969: ll. 615–21) to the point that the whole palace was burning with hatred. He believes in ‘legal action’ and ‘justice’. In Fleishman, this trial takes place and they are both found guilty of matricide—but worthy of amnesty. Tyndareus, who has believed in a ‘just’ judgement and some sort of punishment, is not able to accept this amnesty conferred on Orestes and Electra; according to him: ‘this amnesty pollutes our law’ and the fact that they can get away with murder and ‘walk free’ is a ‘travesty of justice’. He feels that their own, the parents’, justice has been violated, and ‘a parent’s right to recompense and retribution’ (Mezzabotta 2000 and the video) has been ignored. He and Leda leave the stage full of bitterness. Orestes invites them to the Wnal feast and makes a gesture of reconciliation, but his grandparents are not able to be reconciled with him. Finally, Tyndareus even spits in Orestes’ face in order to express his contempt. Clytemnestra’s parents cannot come to terms with the amnesty and the fact that the murder of their daughter remains unatoned for. The confrontation between the interests of Tyndareus and Leda on the one hand, and of Orestes and Electra on the other, is in many ways typical of the situation which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had to face in South Africa after the apartheid era, with former perpetrators of apartheid crimes on the one side, and former victims and their families on the other. On 26 July 1995 the OYce of the President issued the so-called ‘Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No. 34 of 1995’, upon which the TRC was based. According to this act, the TRC consisted of three committees: a Committee on Human Rights Violations; a Committee on Amnesty; and a Committee on Reparation and Rehabilitation. The purpose of the establishment of these committees was, among others:

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. . . the granting of amnesty to persons who make full disclosure of all the relevant facts relating to acts associated with a political objective committed in the course of the conXicts of the past during the said period; aVording victims an opportunity to relate the violations they suVered; the taking of measures aimed at the granting of reparation to, and the rehabilitation and the restoration of the human and civil dignity of, victims of violations of human rights . . .

The term ‘victim’ was deWned as follows: (a) persons who, individually or together with one or more persons, suVered harm in the form of physical or mental injury, emotional suVering, pecuniary loss or a substantial impairment of human rights . . . ; (b) persons . . . intervening to assist persons contemplated in paragraph (a), who were in distress or to prevent victimization of such persons; and (c) such relatives or dependants of victims as may be prescribed. Fleishman has adapted part of his text from the wording of this Act, as can be seen from the messenger’s speech after the trial (Mezzabotta 2000:257): However, we stand today upon an historic bridge between a past of deep division and discord, and a brighter future of peace and prosperity for all. There is a need for understanding, not for vengeance, for forgiveness not retaliation, for humanity not for victimisation. . . . They [the judges] decree, therefore, that amnesty shall be granted in respects of acts, omissions and oVences committed in the cause of the past, where a full disclosure of the facts is made . . .

If we look at the original text from the Truth and Reconciliation Act, we can see that the formulations are almost identical: Since the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1993 (Act No. 200 of 1993), provides a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided society characterised by strife, conXict, untold suVering and injustice, and a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, belief or

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sex;. . . . And since the constitution states that there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimization;. . . . And since the Constitution states that in order to advance such reconciliation and reconstruction amnesty shall be granted in respect of acts, omissions and oVences with political objectives committed in the course of the conXicts of the past; . . .

There were two major novelties in the South African TRC, which diVered signiWcantly from former similar institutions: ‘it was the Wrst to be given the power to grant amnesty—a power normally retained by government’ (Sarkin, 2004: 3) and: ‘never before had an amnesty process been linked to the providing of the truth about the events for which amnesty was sought, nor were there previously so many criteria that had to be met to obtain amnesty’ (p. 4). It was now the tricky task of the TRC to balance ‘the goals of truth, justice and reconciliation’ (p. 5). Tyndareus and Leda stand for those victims of the apartheid era for whom the revelation of the truth about the past does not oVer comfort or a way to Wnd consolation. This is a typical reaction of victims to the Wndings of the TRC: also other victims in similar situations—parents whose children were killed under the banner of justice—reacted partially in the same way and partially completely diVerently. The South African television channel SABC3 broadcast on 23 April 2004 a documentary about the TRC with four famous cases, among them the stories of the American exchange student, Amy Biehl, who was stabbed to death by four black males (Mongesi Christopher Manqina, Mzikhona Eazi Nofemela,Vusumzi Samuel Ntamo, Ntombeki Ambrose Peni) on 25 August 1993 in the township Guguletu, and of the so-called ‘Guguletu 7’, named after the same township in the Cape, where seven black teenagers were killed by members of the South African Police Force (the police were Wilhelm Riaan Bellingan, and Tikapela Johannes Mbelo). In both cases, the perpetrators applied for amnesty. The amnesty was granted to Amy Biehl’s murderers on 28 July 1998. The hearings (8 July 1997 for Biehl; 17–20 November 1997 and 3–5 February 1998 for the Guguletu 7) were held in the presence of the parents (and some other family members) of the victims. The reactions of the parents varied considerably. The parents of Amy Biehl, obviously inXuenced by a strong Christian belief, made it a point to accept the apologies and to meet with the mothers of the murderers of their daughter, whom they even

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embraced. They wanted to keep a positive relationship to South Africa, because this country had meant so much to their daughter. The mothers of the Guguletu 7 reacted diVerently. Some were able to accept the remorse of the perpetrator, a black police oYcer, who made a special request to meet with them and to ask for their forgiveness. He addressed them as ‘mother’; one of them replied to him as ‘son’. One of them said that she wanted to put an end to the past and not live her whole life with the hatred. But another mother said that she could never forgive him for what he had done. At the end of the hearing, some embraced the police oYcer, but some remained seated and made a deprecatory gesture. After the hearings, the family members of the Guguletu 7 were given the opportunity to ask questions themselves. I would like to quote two statements in this context (Truth and Reconciliation Commission website).9 Mrs Konile, the mother of Mr Zabonki Konile, said (on 19 November 1997): I will never ever forgive Bellingan and my entire family does not want to forgive Bellingan, because he says he was doing his job, that his job was to kill people and I am through.

And Mr Mjobo, the brother of Zennith Mjobo, said (same date) (Truth and Reconciliation Commission website):10 I do not see him [Bellingan] asking for forgiveness, because he keeps on saying that he does not remember some of the things. . . . I do not see him asking for amnesty, I think he has just come to destabilise the whole process of amnesty. As a result, I will never ever forgive him. He has just come to disturb us and destabilise the whole process.

These two statements illustrate the complexity of the question on which the whole institution of the TRC was based. Were the applications for amnesty based on a genuine feeling of remorse and a genuine desire to obtain forgiveness or were they just an attempt to escape punishment? Which criteria could the commission apply in order to Wnd this out, especially given the frequent linguistic diYculties and the problem of the translations? Could the hearings provide satisfactory answers for the victims and the questions that 9 TRC website, speciWc page reference: http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/amntrans/capetown/capetown_belling3.htm (last accessed 26 October 2006). 10 Ibid.

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tormented them? As we can see from the above, there is no single answer, but a multitude of possible reactions depending on the individual perpetrator and victim. One aspect, which is of crucial importance for the TRC, is the element of forgiveness and subsequent reconciliation. The pleading for forgiveness (or its omission) is an essential part of all the amnesty applications. Fleishman puts this aspect into question by leaving it out of his dramatic conception, which is strange, but somehow makes sense in the framework of a context where there is no place for religious belief or faith as discussed earlier. Can forgiveness and reconciliation be at all an issue in an atheistic world? In Fleishman’s play, there is no forgiveness: not by Clytemnestra for Agamemnon; not by Electra for Clytemnestra; not by Tyndareus and Leda for Electra and Orestes. There is no remorse from the side of any of the perpetrators for their crimes either; everybody tries to convince the others that his/her actions were justiWed. There cannot be reconciliation without forgiveness and, as Nelson Mandela put it on 5 June 1995 on the tenth anniversary of the above-mentioned ‘Cradock Four’: ‘There can be no reconciliation without truth’ (Nicholson 2004: IX). In Fleishman, amnesty is not linked to remorse or forgiveness; it is simply granted because of the historic moment between a past to be overcome and a future full of hope. One can only speculate why Fleishman omitted this fundamental aspect. Maybe he wanted to show how fragile the newly established reconciliation is, being based on scars that are too fresh. This could be supported by a quotation from the messenger’s speech: Our learned judges seek to reconcile all diVerences . . . to build anew our fragile lives.

Maybe he wanted to show that the whole idea of reconciliation via truth is only a utopia that can be achieved only in the ‘City of Paradise’, but not in real life. Maybe he wanted to set an example for those who are not able to forgive and to reconcile, and also for those who actually never genuinely regretted their actions in the past and just got away undeserved with the amnesty. Maybe he wanted to make us aware of how tricky the question of amnesty is from the point of view of the victims. How much these questions preoccupied the South African minds can be seen also in the South African Wlm Forgiveness, directed by Ian

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Gabriel, which had its world premie`re at the Durban International Film Festival 2004.11 The scenario is in some ways similar to the case of the Guguletu 7. A former South African Police oYcer, Tertius Coetzee, comes to the town Paternoster on the Cape west coast in order to obtain forgiveness from the family of a young black student, Daniel Grootboom, he has killed during the struggle. He has been given amnesty by the TRC, but now he seeks reconciliation on a personal level. He is portrayed as a traumatized person, depending on large quantities of medication. He has not come to terms with the crime he committed. His Wrst encounter with the family—the parents, sister, and younger brother—of Daniel is a disaster. They are very hostile to him and want him to vanish, despite the presence of a priest, who tries to mediate between them, especially with the sister and brother, who plot revenge by calling three of Daniel’s old friends, who are supposed to shoot Coetzee in the same way he killed Daniel. In order to keep Coetzee in the town until their arrival they pretend to want to hear about their brother’s death. After further conversations with devastating revelations, the family are Wnally led to the point of slowly giving up their hatred and meeting for a joint prayer at Daniel’s grave. At this moment, Daniel’s friends arrive, ready to kill Coetzee. We learn that one of them was actually the traitor, who falsely gave Daniel’s name to the police. It is this man who shoots Coetzee dead next to Daniel’s grave. He tries to explain that he had betrayed Daniel in order to save his own brother, who had been arrested by the police, and who was Wnally sent back home with a broken spine. The Wlm ends with a silent scene with the sister sitting in the cemetery next to Coetzee’s corpse. It illustrates very impressively: ‘the themes of redemption and freedom for a family ripped apart by loss’ (WlmWnesse, 2004: 25) and shows how a family can Wnd peace and close the door on a traumatic past. But it also gives us a glimpse into the dark side of a time of struggle including betrayal, torture, cruelty, permanent damage—facts that cannot be undone and will remain a constant reminder of the atrocities of the past. The character of Tertius is in sharp contrast to Fleishman’s Electra, who does not need forgiveness or reconciliation on a personal level, that 11 Further information about this Wlm can be found at http://www.forgivenessthemovie. com/ (last accessed 26 October 2006).

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is, by her grandparents, but is satisWed by the oYcial decision of the Committee. Another important aspect omitted in the Fleishman production is the fact that amnesty should be granted by the TRC for crimes committed under the political objectives of the former government. This is speciWcally emphasized by Sarkin (2004: 63): . . . the essential requirements for the granting of amnesty were that the act, omission or oVence must have been one with a political objective, committed in the course of the conXicts of the past, and that the applicant for amnesty made full disclosure of all relevant facts.

The term ‘political objective’ does not feature in the text of In the City of Paradise; it has been replaced by ‘conXicts or causes from the past’. So the amnesty granted to Electra and Orestes is given for a crime committed without a political agenda, rather for a family-based cycle of vengeance. Fleishman could have easily given his interpretation a political connotation. By underplaying the political aspect, the question of reconciliation gains a wider, unrestricted dimension; the problem becomes more humanitarian and universal. But at the same time it loses to a certain extent its link to the TRC and its speciWc South African background. Mark Fleishman tried to introduce an innovative aspect into the ancient Electra myth by putting special emphasis on the situation of Clytemnestra’s parents and their feelings. This enabled him to link this speciWc myth to the main questions that were raised in the postapartheid period in South Africa, such as truth, amnesty, forgiveness, and reconciliation, and to the institution that was meant to solve them. Fleishman puts special emphasis on the two latter questions of forgiveness and reconciliation, and shows that there is no perfect solution, acceptable to everybody. He makes clear that the concept of amnesty as devised by the TRC has two sides. His production is a valuable contribution to showing the relevance of ancient myths today. The question, however, whether truth is the way to reconciliation, must remain open.

7 Sculpture at Heroes’ Acre, Harare, Zimbabwe:1 Classical InXuences? Jessie Maritz

THE MONUMENT Against a hill some seven kilometres from the centre of Harare, on the main Harare-Bulawayo road, lies the National Heroes’ Acre, an area of 57 hectares set aside after Independence in 1980 to commemorate the heroes of the liberation struggle. The entrance is marked by a monumental gateway, which, paradoxically, can be missed if one is merely driving past. The pinnacle is a 40–metre tower from which burns the Eternal Flame. Previously the responsibility of the Zimbabwean National Army (with restricted entrance), it now falls under the Ministry of National Museums and Monuments, and is, at the time of writing (2006), open daily from 8 a.m. until 4.30 p.m.. From the summit of the hill it aVords a panoramic view over surrounding bush: to the east, the city centre with its high-rise buildings; to the west, the sprawling high-density suburbs; to the south, the industrial area; to the north, close by, is the National Sports Stadium, and beyond that more suburbs. Three kilometres away is the Warren Hills cemetery, now full, but almost new at Independence. A pragmatist 1 Zimbabwe is the English spelling of the Shona Dzimbahwe (alternative spelling Dzimbabwe) meaning ‘walled grave’, ‘residence of the chief ’, ‘palace’ or ‘house of stone’. It is now used for the name of the country as well as for the archaeological site traditionally called Dzimbabwe, now known as Great Zimbabwe (see Garlake 1973; Pikirayi 2001).

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might say that the memorial is located here simply because the site was open and available when needed. However, tradition has it that the Chiefs of Harare, the rulers of the area in pre-colonial times, used the hill as a lookout point and there are caves in the area that are believed to have been used as burial places for the chiefs. Whether intentionally or not, the function and character of the demarcated space is reXected in its neighbours—a point that will be considered below. At the entrance there is a car park and Heroes’ Acre Gallery;2 and it is planned to start building a war memorial museum in 2007. The actual monument is more than a kilometre from the gate. An amphitheatre that can hold 5000 has been cut into the hill. This is used for annual gatherings on public holidays, speciWcally Heroes’ Day, which is celebrated on 11 August, as well as for public participation at the burial of national heroes. From here one looks directly at the central group of three monumental Wgures (a woman and two men, all in military uniform) situated above the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,3 behind which are the steps leading up to the central tower with its Eternal Flame. On either side is a free-standing wall with bronze panels in relief that form the main subject of this paper. A Zimbabwe Bird,4 the national emblem, is perched on the outer end of each wall. 2 A Guide to Heroes’ Acre, issued by the Department of National Museums and Monuments, and Wrst printed in July 1986, is available at the Gallery. It gives a brief biography of individual heroes. See also Werbner (1998: 71–102). It gives insightful discussion (on memory and anti-memory) of the change in burial patterns of the fallen after World War I and how these function in nation building, particularly in post-colonial countries. He concentrates on Zimbabwe, the diVerence in burial between ‘chefs’ (a colloquial term used for politically and economically prominent Wgures), who will receive marble gravestones, and ‘povo’ (from the Portuguese for poor and in Zimbabwe refers to commoners or the grass-roots community), for whom there is no visible recognition, and the reaction triggered by Heroes’ Acre. Since this publication in 1998, the redistribution of land and devaluation of the Zimbabwean dollar he mentions (pp. 80–2) has continued unabated until time of writing (2006). His comments on the function of Heroes’ Acre are still valid. 3 The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, buried in Westminster Abbey in 1920 in memory of soldiers unburied, or buried unknown, during the First World War (1914–18), has led to similar monuments in many countries. 4 The eight grey-green soapstone birds found at Great Zimbabwe are unique to the site, which was the centre for the Rozvi dynasties and is thought to have been constructed from the twelth to the fourteenth century ce. Known as Zimbabwe

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The walls are approximately 15 m long and 8 m high at the highest point, sloping inwards. There is a base of polished black granite on which the walls are built of red stone, shaped as bricks. The bronze relief extends about halfway up the wall, meeting the ‘brickwork’ in a broken line and leaving it visible in the top section. This means that the Wgures depicted on the panels are well over life-size. Each side consists of three panels, on one side of the wall only; the panels have to be ‘read’ from the inside towards the Zimbabwe bird; when facing the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, one ‘reads’ from right to left on the left-hand wall, and from left to right on the right-hand one. Together the panels depict a continuous historical narrative of the ‘Second Chimurenga’,5 the struggle against colonial rule for the attainment of political independence. This is shown in six stages, three on each wall, each section being clearly marked oV by a break in the metal. The stages are: 1. The beginning of protests against the oppression by the colonial rulers, epitomized by the police, from about 1919. 2. The formation of nationalist political parties and the politicizing of the people, from 1957. 3. The beginning of the armed struggle and camps in neighbouring countries, Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique, during the 1960s. Birds, the sculptures are on average 355 mm in height and have been variously interpreted as religious, dynastic, or totemic symbols. They do not obviously mirror a speciWc species, though they have been called various names, usually a part of the family of eagles, for example the Fish Eagle (Haliae¨tus vocifer: ‘hungwe’ in Shona), which is the totem of the Hungwe family group, and the Bateleur Eagle (Terathopius ecuadatus: ‘chapungu’ in Shona). For diVerent descriptions and interpretations see Garlake (1973: 119–21), Mufuka (1983: 6, 45–52), Pikirayi (2001: 135, 137). For a more complete work see Matenga (1988). Today the Zimbabwe Bird is the symbol of the country’s national cultural heritage, and the national emblem on the Xag and coat of arms; Matenga gives a list of all the companies and associations using it in 1998. 5 Chimurenga is a word that translates from the Shona language as ‘struggle’ and the concept is widely used to describe wars against oppression, especially colonialism. Zimbabweans refer to three periods of chimurenga in their history. The Wrst chimurenga refers to the 1896–97 revolt of the indigenous peoples against occupation and colonial rule by the British South Africa Company. The second chimurenga refers to the guerrilla war which led, in 1980, to the end of white-minority rule in Rhodesia and to the independence of Zimbabwe. The dates of when the second chimurenga began are debated; some argue that it began with the battle at Chinoyi in 1966 whilst others argue for 1972. The present (from about 2000 ce) is commonly referred to as the third chimurenga, relating to the struggle with economic issues, including land resettlement.

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4. The armed struggle 1966–79. 5. Joy and jubilation at the ceaseWre 1980. 6. Independence—and the way forward. This includes the portrait of Robert Mugabe, Prime Minister of the new state of Zimbabwe and leader of the Patriotic Front.6

COMPARISON WITH CLASSICAL MONUMENTS One aspect of Roman sculpture is portraiture (at times veristic) of military and political ‘heroes’ like the emperor, memorial reliefs on tombstones, and commemorative and honoriWc statues in the round of ordinary people, a few recognisably African (Snowden 1976). Another aspect is Roman historical and political relief, found on monuments like the Ara Pacis (13–9 bce), the Arch of Titus in Rome (81 ce) and that of Trajan at Beneventum (114 ce), and the Columns of Trajan (113 ce) and of Marcus Aurelius (180 ce) in Rome, and illustrations of these can be found in almost any book on Roman art. Such narrative portrays characters who are recognizable by their individual dress, in action with accompanying body language and emotion, and sometimes in a setting that shows landscape and perspective, not only linear perspective but also the Roman use of bird’s-eye perspective, similar to that seen in the wall paintings at Pompeii (Wheeler 1964: 119, Fig. 96). One well-known example is the Emperor Augustus shown with colleagues and family, including children, on the Ara Pacis (see: Hannestad 1988: 69 Fig. 47; Henig 1983:74, Fig. 55; Kleiner 1992: 90–9, Figs. 71–80; Strong 1976: 80–4). From the time of Trajan, the Roman Emperor was depicted as considerably larger than the people around him, in a hierarchy of scale (Strong 1976: 318, Fig. 254; Hannestad 1988: 334, Fig. 203; Kleiner 1992: 227, 421). 6 The Patriotic Front was formed from an alliance between ZANU (Zimbabwe African Nationalist Union) and ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) agreed at the Lancaster House conference on independence. The conference, held at Lancaster House in London, opened on 10 September 1979 under the chairmanship of Lord Carrington, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth AVairs in the British Government, and concluded on 15 December 1979.

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Technique and Material There are two types of sculpture at the monument that are also found in ancient sculpture, namely relief and sculpture in the round. The material used for both is bronze, though the relief has been coloured brown and the statues shining gold. They were hollowcast. The depiction of the sack of Troy that Aeneas saw on the bronze doors in Carthage was presumably in relief;7 one suspects that between those and the relief on the doors of Santa Sabina in the early Wfth century ce there were many examples of narrative relief in bronze that have not survived; any comparisons have to be made with surviving reliefs in stone. Narrative technique using an episodic format, like units in a comic strip, was well known in art from the Hellenistic period onwards. The Telephos frieze on the Great Altar at Pergamon, c.150 bce, is usually considered the oldest example of this (Pollitt 1986: 198–200). It showed the life of Telephos in continuous narrative against a ‘shifting but uninterrupted background consisting of landscape scenes, shrines, battleWelds, ships, and architectural interiors.’ (ibid. p. 200). In form, the panels on the Arch of Titus perhaps provide the closest parallel for the panels on the wall at Heroes’ Acre, but the use of continuous narrative is more like that on the Column of Trajan, with one obvious diVerence, namely that of subjective perspective. The Roman relief shows the colonizers’ triumph: the Zimbabwean one shows the successful revolt of the colonized, without the opposing army.

Form None of these Roman monuments, however, provides an original type for the use of a free-standing wall, which is not part of a building or some other structure, as the matrix for relief sculpture. Discussion of form has to relate to other possible comparisons such as composition; 7 Virgil Aeneid I. 446–93 describes scenes from the battles between Greeks and Trojans that Aeneas saw on the bronze doors of the new Temple of Juno that Dido was building. He mentions many characters, hairstyles and clothing, action, background, and even portraiture—Aeneas recognizes himself.

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the depiction of anatomy, drapery, action, and emotion; landscape; perspective; the use of attributes and symbols. The Wrst panel (Fig. 7.1) shows on the left a woman wearing a headscarf and with a baby on her back, facing the viewer’s right. She is seated on the ground with her right leg bent under her and her left knee up, Wghting oV a dog that has its front paws on her left knee and is biting her left arm. It is held on a leash by a policeman on the right, who leans forward. His features are European, he wears a policeman’s uniform with a cap, short-sleeved shirt with epaulettes (with a stripe, and the letters BSAP, that is British South African Police) on the shoulder, shorts, and long socks, and he carries a gun. Behind him a policeman with African features wears a helmet and raises his right arm to strike. Behind him another head wearing a cap is just visible. Behind the woman and the dog are six other Wgures, showing dejection; one is bent forward and appears handcuVed, one holds her head in her hands. The foreground shows grass and prickly pear plants, and in the background are trees and pitched roofs of houses.

Fig. 7.1 Oppression. Photograph: Jessie Maritz.

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The second panel (Fig. 7.2) shows a man holding a book in his right hand, holding his left hand up, and speaking to a group of people sitting on logs, four on the right and two on the left, while two others on the left walk away to the water and hills in the background. Four tiny Wgures are in a boat crossing the river in the background. In the third panel, there are ten people (male and female): two men are standing conversing near the centre, holding a gun between them; one man on the right is handing out guns to a woman and two men who are coming towards him; two men and a woman are already moving oV to the left, holding guns; one man is kneeling holding his gun. In the centre of the panel is a low lying rough table on which lie four guns. At the foot of the table on the ground is a pot and calabash (an implement for scooping liquid out of the pot). The fourth panel (Fig. 7.3) shows a man at the back on the right, his arm in the air, looking back into the picture to call the others forward. Two have guns, one in the centre is about to throw some missile, while on the left a man carries a huge pack clasped to his chest and the woman behind him carries a bath of clothing on her

Fig. 7.2 Politicizing. Photograph: Jessie Maritz

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Fig. 7.3 Armed Struggle. Photograph: Jessie Maritz.

head. They represent the mujiba, those who assisted Wghters by carrying arms, or by supplying the basic necessities. The Wfth panel (Fig. 7.4) shows the ceaseWre, when people from diVerent areas of Wghting gathered at central assembly points. Seven people are shown: three men, two women and two children. One is a toddler, held by its mother and waving. The other is about six, embracing his mother who has returned from the war, with her gun. Everybody moves to the right and the men at the back wave guns above their heads. The sixth and Wnal panel shows the celebration of Independence and has the portrait of Robert Mugabe, behind the national Xag, in front of which people surge forward. Panel 1 (Fig. 7.1) provides many examples of features that are repeated throughout the work. Composition is integrated; crossing lines, linear perspective of roofs, and low relief of a face in the extreme right background create depth of Weld. Anatomy is realistic, though not veristic, and the relative scale of the Wgures is correct. Action is portrayed by pose and gesture, such as raised Wsts or

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Fig. 7.4 Ceasefire. Photograph: Jessie Maritz.

drooping shoulders, which may also suggest rank and status, as with the woman on the ground, a policeman bending over her, his dog straining at its leash. Given a modern weapon instead of a spear, the Wfth-century bce Doryphoros (the well known statue of a ‘Spearbearer’ in classical Greek art) may still be recognized in the policeman’s pose, and there are comparable Wgures in classical art for a back view, a turning head, a fallen enemy, and the dog.8 In panels 3 and 4 (Fig. 7.2), with Wgures kneeling, striding, Wghting, and throwing, one is reminded of the Great Altar at Pergamon (Hannestad 1988: 97–110), which may also provide examples for emotions depicted by facial expression, such as the pain in panel 1 (Fig. 7.1); there is excitement and jubilation in panel 5 (Fig. 7.4). The clothes in each panel at Heroes’ Acre are important signiWers. Dress is used to depict circumstance, status, and even the passing of time. In panel 1 (Fig. 7.1) the diVerent uniforms of the black and the white 8 See, for example, Hannestad (1988: 164 Wgs. 104, 106). A similar dog was found on a second century ce sarcophagus in Rome, Museo Nationale Romano 168186. See also Joosten (2001).

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policemen show the racial discrimination in the pre-Independence police force, and both contrast with the simple dress and Xoral headscarf of the woman. Shoes or bare feet indicate urban or rural dwellers, respectively, when they meet. By panel 6 dress is more sophisticated, representing the fashions of the early 1980s rather than the 1950s. Patterns on the cloth of the women’s dresses are incised or in higher relief. Women wear high-heeled shoes, earrings and pendant, and are bare-headed, not wearing the headscarf of the women in panel 1 (Fig. 7.1) or even panel 5 (Fig. 7.4). One man in panel 6 wears worker’s overalls, one carries a book, another is dressed more formally with jacket and tie, all ready for work in times of peace in the new state. On Mugabe’s tie there is a Zimbabwe bird and stripes, typical of those worn at the time. The ‘political’ uniform is a suit and tie, compared to military uniforms. Only Mugabe wears a suit (double-breasted) and spectacles. These became a trademark.9 There is no ‘heroic nudity’ as is found in classical Greek sculpture. This use of diVerent clothing is reminiscent of Trajan’s Column, which depicts diVerences in uniforms, national dress, and hairstyles; for example, the Praetorian standard-bearers with their bear-head helmets, the legionaries with shields and helmets, the auxiliaries, the Moors with braided hair and wearing short tunics, riding bareback and without bridles, the Germans half naked with wooden clubs, the Dacians with catapults. It also uses pose and gestures—the Emperor raising his right arm when addressing his troops, or the prisoners on their knees in front of him (Hannestad 1988: 154–67) Landscape sets the scene. Rectangular houses with corrugated roofs appear in the background of panel 1 (Fig. 7.1) to suggest the town, speciWcally the high-density townships, but in panel 2 (Fig. 7.2) there are huts, and logs as seats, to indicate the rural setting; plants, hills, and the balancing rocks, which are typical formations in many parts of Zimbabwe, set the rural landscape in panel 3. As in Rome, landscape not only sets the physical scene, but may be symbolic. The conical tower of Great Zimbabwe in the background of panel 6 provides the vision and end of the struggle, the new nation Zimbabwe. The couple who ‘turn their backs’ to the viewer to cross the 9 The President at the time, President Canaan Banana, often wore a mandarin-style collar.

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river are doing so metaphorically as well, leaving the country for military training, as those in the boat are doing. Perspective may be linear or bird’s-eye, as with the boat on the river in panel 2 (Fig. 7.2). Symbolism is found in several places. In panel 2 (Fig. 7.2) the book represents ideology and the politicizing of the masses; compare the use of the book by philosophers or to indicate the law, in late Roman and early Christian art, as for example on the Plotinus sarcophagus; see Grabar (1967: 55, Fig. 50; 150, Fig. 131; 140, Fig. 144; 261, Fig. 290) and Hannestad (1988: 299, Wg. 184). In panel 3, the pot and calabash set the scene as rural and indigenous, but, more important, these are traditionally containers used for the beer meant for the ancestors, when beer is scooped from the pot with the calabash, and poured on the ground for the ancestral spirits, and are therefore also symbolic. On the panel, the pot and calabash are under a rough table on which lie four guns. The unity of this design shows the unity of the villagers (who provided provisions), the Wghters, and the ancestors, the present with the past. It recalls the local proverb: ‘You can’t use a pot without a calabash’. The Zimbabwe bird is another link to the past and Great Zimbabwe (see note 4). In panel 5 (Fig. 7.4), the design on the woman’s dress is heart-shaped. This symbol of love is taken to suggest that, whatever the diVerences in tribe, background, or aYliation of those now meeting at assembly points, in the new state all should live in harmony as brothers and sisters. The Xag, symbol of the new nation, appears at the end (panel 6) as the climax of the sculpture, just as the nation is the climax of the struggle. The sculpture of the Ara Pacis in Augustan Rome, which combined historical events with the mythological and symbolical, may provide a parallel (see below).

Function The monument can be seen as having more than one function. 1. Aesthetic. It is a major work of art in the city. 2. HonoriWc and commemorative. The historical narrative is obviously intended to commemorate the struggle for political independence. The whole complex was designed around sixty gravesites; this

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is being expanded by a further hundred graves. At the time of writing (2006) there are seventy tombstones,10 with portraits etched on the polished back granite, giving the eVect of photos. There are also photo exhibits in the Heroes’ Acre Gallery. In sculpture, the three Wgures in the round are intended to honour all freedom Wghters, both men and women. There is only one recognizable portrait in the sculptural relief, that of Robert Mugabe. 3. Religious. There is also a religious element. According to African traditional religion, the spirits of those who are not accorded decent burial at home return as avenging spirits. Many Wghters died far from home, and were not buried with proper rites. This then is not just a memorial, but a substitute burial for such Wghters, to propitiate their spirits.11 The site of the monument on a hill near caves, the traditional burial places for the chiefs, becomes relevant. 4. Didactic. The fact that Heroes’ Acre is now the responsibility of National Museums and Monuments is an indication that it also has a didactic function, to teach the younger generation, or foreign visitors. 5. Political. There can be no doubt that the monument as originally conceived also had an element of political propaganda. There are not representatives of all the political parties or armies, even those that comprised the liberation movements; there is a deWnite indication of ideological teaching; there is a clear emphasis on a single leader, the only portrait as against all the ‘type’ Wgures, who is shown virtually as a culmination, at the end, about four times larger than the other Wgures and in diVerent dress, the only one wearing glasses. He does not interact with other characters or address them, but, placed strategically above and beyond the rest, he stares ahead into the future. At the time that the sculpture was erected, Robert Mugabe was not President of Zimbabwe (which he later became), but Prime Minister. The then President (Canaan Banana 1980–87) does not feature at all, nor is he buried 10 There have been sixty-seven burials (some re-buried from elsewhere), one cremation and two tombs for heroes who disappeared in action. 11 Note that the ‘graves’ were already laid out at the outset, waiting. Spacing of used graves suggests that Heroes’ Acre was planned not only for the dead, but also for speciWc future use.

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there. The North Koreans built the monument because they were political allies,12 not necessarily because they were the best artists. Ironically, some authorities consider that out of the top ten stone sculptors in the world today, half are Zimbabweans, whose work is entirely diVerent, and yet is not featured.13 These are all categories of function that one may Wnd in classical sculpture. One need only refer to the Ara Pacis. As an altar, it obviously was a religious structure. According to Augustus himself (Monumentum Ancyranum 12.2, Brunt and Moore, 1967; Hardy, 1923), the Senate decided that an altar to Pax Augusta should be erected in honour of Augustus’ successful return from Gaul and Spain, and that magistrates, priests, and Vestal Virgins should perform an annual sacriWce there. It was clearly honoriWc as well as religious. It was commemorative, with historic reliefs on the long sides showing, with portraits, the procession of oYcials, priests, and the Imperial family, including Augustus, that took place on the day that the altar was consecrated: 4 July 13 bce. The four reliefs on the short sides were mythological and allegorical: one showed Aeneas sacriWcing and one showed a personiWcation of Tellus (Earth) or Italy. These had details of landscape in the background. The work as a whole was part of a political programme, and intended to be didactic. Similar functions can be seen in other Roman monuments. It is possible, therefore, to see similarities between Heroes’ Acre and the material, form, and function of classical sculpture. Although the local culture in centuries past included monumental architecture and some sculpture (the birds on stelae at Great Zimbabwe), and 12 There was a Communist/non-aligned trinity of allies in the struggle; the North Koreans built Heroes’ Acre, the Chinese built the National Sports Stadium (1984), and the Yugoslavs built the Conference Centre (1986). 13 For a discussion of the new movement in local stone sculpture, starting with the workshops set up by the Wrst director of the National Gallery, Frank McEwan, in 1957, see Arnold (1981). McEwan encouraged artists to seek content in their own culture; he provided space and materials, but did not teach. Mrs Pat Pearce started a group at Inyanga, and Tom BlomeWeld at Tengenenga. These three groups were set up by people of European descent, but the sculptors were Shona, or from neighbouring areas like Malawi. Their art is not inXuenced by traditional Western art, although the market for their work, in Western countries, is a very signiWcant factor. For further developments see Winter-Irving (1991, 2001, 2004); Ponter, A. and L. (1992); Sultan ([1992] 1994); KileV, C. and M. (1996).

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there were obviously sacred places (tombs, caves, rainmaking sites), war memorials with monumental sculpture, speciWcally over-lifesize, hollow cast, bronze human Wgures, were not an indigenous tradition.14 In 1980 the movement of modern Zimbabwean stone sculpture, mentioned above, was still in its infancy. In any case, this sculpture is quite diVerent: conceptual rather than perceptual and historical. Previous sculpture in Rhodesia, like the statues of Rhodes or the War Memorial for World War I, was very British; the very idea of a tomb of an unknown soldier, a built-up amphitheatre, or a monument with commemorative, honoriWc, political, large-scale historical relief sculpture would seem to derive from a Western tradition, stemming from Britain but ultimately from the GraecoRoman world. Unlike those monuments, which generally were often situated in the city at sites that were visible to many people every day (for example, Trajan’s Column in his forum), Heroes’ Acre, like a cemetery, requires a special visit.

C O M PA RI S O N W I T H M OD E RN MO N UM E N T S However, as mentioned above, Heroes’ Acre in Harare is actually the work of North Koreans,15 in 1982, and one should be asking whether the Zimbabwean monument is comparable to Korean ones. The Mansudae Monument in Pyongyang, North Korea, is a huge monument built in front of the Revolutionary Museum in the city, unveiled in 1972 (Springer 2003: 43). The backdrop is a mosaic of natural stone on the museum wall, depicting the mountain that is the symbol of the nation, from which everything starts. In the centre, at the top 14 Arnold (1981: 8, 12, Fig. 11) refers to two anthropomorphic soapstone Wgures, one now in the British Museum and one in the Paul Tisham Collection in New York, that are said to have come from Great Zimbabwe. She concludes (p. 32) that the Zimbabwe Birds from Great Zimbabwe are an indication of a social, political, or religious need for sculpture, but that this need was possibly atrophied or eliminated after the social and political structure changed in the Wfteenth century ce, and that the only carved forms known to have been produced in Mashonaland from then until the 1950s were artefacts. 15 The Mansudae Overseas Project Group of Companies of the DPR of Korea founded in 1959.

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of a Xight of steps, is a 22 metre high statue of the Great Leader. On either side is a wall of red stone, the colour of the Xag. The shape of the wall, the stripes on it, and the star of the Xag, in relief at the top of the wall, reinforce the symbolism of the wall as a Xag and, ultimately, the nation. Over 300 colossal bronze Wgures around the base depict the period when Koreans, who had been colonized by the Japanese and had been through periods of oppression and then politicizing, decided to Wght. Figures include a girl crying, women struggling, people reading a pamphlet and printing a newspaper, and then picking up arms for the struggle. The faces, with Korean features, express a variety of emotions; the drapery ranges from speciWc army uniforms to peasant dress; the poses, gestures, and grouping bring the action to life. At the apex of the wall a standing Wgure holds a gun. The right hand wall shows the war, the post-war period, and the socialist dream—the hopes and aspirations of the people. The Wgures at the apex of this wall represent the ideological, technical, and cultural aspects of the nation: a worker, a farmer holding a massive sheaf of wheat, a soldier holding a burning torch, the intellectual holding a book, the works of the Great Leader. Even if one did not know, from other sources, who constructed the Harare Heroes’ Acre, there could be no doubt of its similarity. The Korean monument is very much bigger, of course, with many more Wgures, in the round, not in relief. There is no writing on the walls at Harare, whereas in Pyongyang it looms large. However, the form (two walls Xanking a central statue) is the same: there is the same sequence of events as those shown on the Harare monument; it is also divided into the same six stages and many Wgures show similar poses. There is the same combination of narrative, action, symbolism, the conjunction yet distinction between peasants and soldiers, the importance of the book for the ideological message, the same symbolic movement of all Wgures in one direction, the same emphasis on the Xag and on the leader. Both in form and in function the two monuments are remarkably close. Whereas classical parallels may seem far-fetched, given the 2000 years’ time diVerence, the close relationship between the Korean and Zimbabwean monuments is unmistakeable. In fact, on the original Harare monument the faces had Korean features; the heads were later re-done to correct this.

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The Mansudae monument is only one of several in North Korea. The Victory Monument at Pochonpo, in the north, also takes the form of a red wall shaped to represent a billowing Xag, again with colossal bronze Wgures, which depict the struggle and liberation of the nation, grouped on either side of the wall. The idea of an eternal Xame, found in Harare, is also found in huge Torch Towers in North Korea, at the Grand Monument on Lake Samji, for example, and the Tower of the Juche Idea (unveiled in 1982), with three Wgures in front of it reminiscent of those in Harare. There is also a Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetery in Pyongyang, created in 1975 and expanded in 1985 (Springer 2003: 137–8). Again, there is a blood-red Xag carved from granite. Each tomb has a plaque listing highlights of the deceased’s career, and a bronze bust. In Harare there are not individual busts, but engraved portraits have recently been added to the names and dates of birth and death shown on each tombstone. What is similar is that not all the heroes died in battle. In both Korea and Zimbabwe the ‘Heroes’ Acre’ includes the spouse of the leader, and prominent politicians who died after the armed struggle. In Korea there is a tradition of sculpture going back some two millennia,16 and in painting the tradition includes historical narrative.17 However, the monuments mentioned above are not in this traditional style. One need only look at the pagoda from the site of Kyong-Ch’on-Sa temple (1348) (Kim 1963) or the painting of Kim Hong-do (1760) (Griswold and Pott 1963) to realize that the presentday works are very diVerent. As in Zimbabwe, there was a movement of Western education in Korea at the end of the nineteenth century. By 1903 about a hundred primary schools had been established, many of them by the Presbyterians and Methodists (Yoonmi 2000: 79). Scholarly circles and academic societies were being established between 1905 and 1910 (ibid. p. 80). Social Darwinism was introduced and scholars called 16 A Handbook of Korea. Korean Overseas Culture and Information Service (1998: 518–25). 17 For murals in the tomb of King Michon (ANAK tomb no. 3) and a fourthcentury mural procession (10 m
2 m) on the wall of a corridor, with some 250 Wgures around the hero in a carriage in the centre, see Korean Fine Arts. Foreign Languages Publishing House (1978: 32). Paintings of life of peasants show both bird’s-eye perspective and the use of one Wgure on top of another.

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for seventeenth century nationalism to be ‘reformed’. Textbooks became more and more Western, as regards world history, geography, and foreign language; Classics was not part of the curriculum but drawing was. Since in about 1895 the United States, England, France, Germany, and Russia were being treated in a positive way in the curriculum, but China negatively, one may expect that Western art was also being favoured above traditional Eastern art in Korean schools at the time. This has also been said about China, which like Korea was a political ally of the liberation movements involved in the struggle for an independent Zimbabwe. John Young gives the example of contemporary Chinese, Zhang Yonghao, who believes that the development of contemporary art is based on European art of the 1920s and 1930s, because Chinese teachers had studied in the European academies, especially in France (Young 1999: 18–20). They had been exchange students at the time, before the doors to China closed, and they brought back and practised what they had learned. In the 1950s, after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Communists respected art and established Wne art academies all over China. These academies included sculpture. One of the biggest achievements of Chinese art history, according to Zhang Yonghao, was the importation of Western art education into all of China’s major cities by professors who had studied abroad and who created a system based on the Western model which was most familiar to them. He points out that since everything in China was uniWed from the 1950s to the end of 1970, art was less about personal aesthetics and more about serving politics. It might be considered propaganda, yet it contained sensibilities about life and experience of the people in society, peasants, soldiers, hardship, and hard work. ‘We believed in the spirit of the time’ (Young 1999: 19). The inXuence of ancient China was prohibited until 1979; one artist is quoted as saying that it was only after a 1979 conference that they began to explore their own Eastern history combined with their Western training (ibid. p. 22). The monument to the People’s Heroes on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, said to be the biggest monument in that country (not counting the Wall), takes the form of a granite obelisk 14.7 m high. This monument with eight white marble reliefs (2 m high), with

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some 170 Wgures,18 shows the struggle of the Chinese people against internal and external enemies from 1840 onward, and symbolizes the respect they felt for their revolutionary martyrs. The later work in North Korea and in Harare shows some similarities, with emphasis on the people. The resolution to erect the Tiananmen Square monument was passed in 1949; construction lasted from 1952 to 1958. It is roughly contemporaneous with the monuments of World War II.19 If one looks only at monuments at Leningrad, Kiev, and Novorossiis, it is clear that Wghting heroes and an undying Xame were themes in Russia too, and it is clear that even though North Korea and Communist China were politically cut oV from Western Europe, art links may be seen running back through communist allies. It can probably also be said of North Korea, as of China, that there were still professors who had studied abroad, and who created a system based on the Western model. The most obvious example is perhaps the Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang (Springer 2003: 86)20 commemorating the guerrilla wars against Japan between 1925 and 1945. A single arch, like the Arch of Titus, it includes roundels similar to those found on the triple arch of Constantine (312–15 ce) in Rome. Triumphant Wgures bearing a Xag are shown under a date, on each side of the arch, with a Wghting Wgure in a roundel above. These, like the rosettes, are ‘borrowed’ 18 See Hunt, Davies and Holledge ([1979] 1981: 56–7). The events on the monument to the People’s Heroes on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, are given as: (1) the triumphant burning of opium by Lin Zexu in 1840; (2) the uprising at Jiutian village which triggered the Taiping Rebellion in 1858; (3) the Wuchang Uprising in 1911, which signalled the end for the Manchu’s; (4) the rally held in Tiananmen Square on 4 May 1919 to protest the Treaty of Versailles; (5) the 30 May movement demonstration and the uprising of 1927 against Jiang Kaishek, (6) the war against Japan 1937–45; (7) the crossing of the Yangste by the People’s Liberation Army to liberate Nanking on 2 April 1949. 19 Monuments and memorials of World War II present a separate Weld of study. The video A Debt of Honour of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission records memorials ‘as carefully looked after as any cemetery’. The commission tends 145 cemeteries of those buried near battleWelds. There are 72,000 names of those whose graves are unknown. Apart from the well known ‘unknown soldier’ in Westminster, dating from 1920, in 1993 an unknown Australian was re-buried in Canberra, there are Wve memorials with no names at Gallipoli, one for the South Africans at Delville Wood, and several others, including some in east and south east Asia. 20 See Springer 2003: 86 n.25.

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from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which was modelled on the Arch of Titus in Rome. Like its predecessors, it carries a long inscription over the central arch. In spite of its three tiered Korean-style roof, the arch in Pyongyang is ultimately a descendant of classical Roman art. The Korean War, the civil war between Communist North Korea and Western-backed South Korea, lasted from 1950 until 1953. By then 90 per cent of the buildings in the North Korean capital Pyongyang had been destroyed. It was re-planned and re-built by the Soviets. Korean architects and urban planners trained in the Soviet Union (ibid. p. 23) and one would expect Russian inXuence in other art forms as well. South Korea was inXuenced directly by the West from the 1950s onwards. Interestingly enough, a huge Independence Hall to commemorate independence won from the Japanese (1910–45) was being built between 1963 and 1987. Here too there is sculpture in the round, which commemorates a period of growing resistance, Wghting, and victory, culminating in the Xag, which symbolizes independence. There is also the War Memorial, with relief on the walls in front. It is possible to see classical inXuences in the sculpture in Zimbabwe, after British colonialism. Zimbabwean students do recognize similarities between Roman sculpture and that at Heroes’ Acre,21 but 21 In some years, students at the University of Zimbabwe who are doing Classical Studies are given an assignment to visit Heroes’ Acre, to describe the sculpture seen there, and to comment on any similarities (including basic similarities such as material, technique, form, and function) with the sculpture in their Classical Studies syllabus. Since there is no classical (Greek or Roman) sculpture in local museums in Zimbabwe, students cannot see original classical work. There is some sculpture from the colonial period, for example, statues of colonialists like Jameson, now at the archives, and increasingly there is indigenous Zimbabwean sculpture, such as the monumental sculpture outside the National Gallery in Harare. There is an enormous output of stone (and a few metal and wooden) sculptures for the tourist market, but for most students sculpture is a new concept. For most of them a visit to Heroes’ Acre is also a Wrst time experience, through which they can celebrate their country’s history. The terminology used in class becomes clear as they recognize diVerent forms and see diVerent materials used in present-day sculpture. They become aware of possible functions of art when considering why the monument was erected. They begin to look and then notice many other objects—not only sculpture—that they had not noticed before. They compare, contrast, and question. If the question ‘What use is it to do Classical Studies?’ (which can justly be asked by students in their position) has any answer, it must surely include the fact that the world in the twentyWrst century, on all continents, is still in many ways inXuenced by the Graeco-Roman world, even if indirectly. The study itself is another post-colonial phenomenon.

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it must be admitted that any inXuence in this case must have come via Korea. How it reached Korea could still oVer interesting research. Even more interesting, however, is where else it has reached since. The Mansudae Overseas Group of Companies, established in November 1959, has since then built real estate for Wfty-three projects in thirty-eight countries. These include monuments in, among others, Togo, Benin, Egypt, Somalia, Thailand, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Angola, Gabon, Namibia, and the Congo. Several are to commemorate independence, with statues of heroes and martyrs in similar poses, showing similar expressions and holding weapons or Xags similar to the ones at Heroes’ Acre in Harare.22 This is an area larger than Rome could ever have dreamed of. In each country citizens will consider the monument in their country to be their own. Although it does not form a continuum with their ancient artistic traditions, nor come directly from the historical imperial power that colonized them, it will form part of their future national art heritage. In one sense the art seems international, since it is similar across the world—but of course the monuments are similar; they are the work of one company. To what extent is this comparable to the situation in the Roman world, where local ethnic art in diVerent parts of the Empire disappeared in the face of large-scale oYcial projects, constructed by artists from elsewhere who were possibly neither local nor Roman, but who created something that has remained representative of both for centuries? International, interdisciplinary, post-colonial—is there anything new under the sun? 22 Source: Korean Embassy Panphlet (2002) Hierarchy and activities of the Mansudae Overseas Project Group of Companies a pamphlet issued by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and obtained from the Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa.

Part II Encounter and New Traditions

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8 Perspectives on Post-Colonialism in South Africa: the Voortrekker Monument’s Classical Heritage Richard Evans

The name Pretoria may possibly mislead a classicist unaware of the city’s history. Pretoria, originally ‘Pretoria Philadelphia’ or the ‘Brotherhood of Pretorius’ (1854) took its name from the prominent Voortrekker (Afrikaans pioneer) leader Andries Wilhelmus Jacobus Pretorius (1798–1853). It is quite conceivable that his name may have been derived from something like: praetor, praetorius, or praetorium, all good Latin words; and this association has been exploited to lend dignity to Pretoria’s role as administrative capital of South Africa in its various guises.1 The connection was plainly uppermost in the mind of the person who coined the city’s motto ‘Praestantia Praevaleat Pretoria’ [May Pretoria excel in excellence] on its coat of arms (Evans 2001: 121). The inXuence of the classical tradition appears reinforced. The link may be, at best tenuous, at worst spurious, but 1 ‘Brotherhood of Pretoria’ was a congregation established in 1854, the city was proclaimed in the next. In 1860 Pretoria had already become the capital of the ZAR— Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (Andrews and Ploeger 1989: 6), however, at the time of publication there is some uncertainty about the city’s future name. Tshwane has been proposed as an alternative on the basis that the area had already possessed this name, although the authenticity of the argument has been vigorously contested. The process of changing Afrikaans names of towns and provinces began in 1994, but there has been a recent acceleration. The Transvaal province was dismembered into Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, and North-West, while the town of Pietersburg has been renamed Polokwane.

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both the language and the civilizations of Greece and Rome are well represented in the city’s art, architecture, and its urban topography. As a whole, Pretoria possesses a remarkably high incidence of classical names in its suburbs—Arcadia, Akasia, Constantia, Elysium; its streets—Aquila, Cicero, Gladiator, Hercules, Titus, Vespasian; its buildings—Civitas, Didacta, Eureka, Munitoria, Presidia, Unitas (for a consolidated list, see Evans 2001: 119–20). Undoubtedly, however, the two most conspicuous architectural and historical landmarks of the city, which, moreover, display particular classical inXuences, are its Union Buildings and ‘Voortrekker Monument’. While the latter is the main focus of the discussion here, and in particular the frieze, which adorns the interior main Xoor, it will prove useful to set the scene with some note taken of the former, and the various strands that link them spatially, temporally, and ideologically. Herbert Baker (1862–1946) was the architect of a structure intended to house the administration of the ‘Union of South Africa’.2 It was begun in 1910, when a dedicatory plaque was erected to the new King-Emperor George V, coinciding with the declaration of the union that ushered in a governmental system with a parliament in Cape Town and an administration in Pretoria on 31 May of that year.3 This saw completion, in 1912, on the southerly facing slope of the hill called Meintjieskop, on the north-eastern edge of the centre of the city, which it overlooks like an acropolis. The total cost of the Union Buildings was £1,660,640, which included construction and landscaping of the ridge, at the time a fabulous sum (Andrews and Ploeger 1989),4 but also an indication of the resources available to oYcially-sanctioned building ventures. Its conception also excellently 2 Baker spent a number of years in South Africa where he designed, in Cape Town, Groote Schur, home of Cecil Rhodes and for many years oYcial residence of the prime minister of the Union. Baker said of Rhodes: ‘He had the building ambition of a Pericles or a Hadrian’. Baker also designed the main railway station in Pretoria, and also found time for a private house in Troye Street, Muckleneuk, one of Pretoria’s oldest suburbs. However, he is probably best remembered for his design of the London Stock Exchange and South Africa House in Trafalgar Square and, with Edwin Lutyens, the civic centre of New Delhi. 3 The highest court of the judicial system was located in Bloemfontein, capital of the then province of the Orange Free State. 31 May has since been a public holiday, ‘Republic Day’. 4 See between pp. 34 and pp. 35 with a contemporary photograph of the construction phase.

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reXects the imagery of imperialism and the ideology that underpinned it. Drawing an analogy with the Roman Empire, Baker quoted his friend William Marris (Irving 1981:278): Only Rome in her greatest days did what England has been doing, as a matter of course, for one hundred years!

Baker felt that architects, with their allied artists and craftsmen, had an opportunity ‘to immortalize through their arts’ the law and order which British administration had ‘produced out of chaos’. Like Alexander the Great or the Romans, the British might put ‘their own impress on the art which they had Wrst absorbed’ (Irving 1981: 278). A mixture of Italianate Renaissance and Greco–Roman styles, the main plan consisted of two rectangular blocks end-to-end (now the oYces of the State President and the Foreign Minister), 275 m in total length, joined, as if with outstretched arms, by a semi-circular stoa.5 The ends of the stoa are accentuated by twin towers, each of which is topped by a cupola supported on columns. The piazza created by the semi-circular stoa is Wlled with terraces to give the impression of seating, much like that to be found in a Greek theatre, although the altitude of the seating is sacriWced to accommodate an orchestra and scene at the front. At either end of the blocks are buttresses topped by a hexastyle double-colonnade. In the centre of each building the columnal and semi-circular main doorway bears more than a passing resemblance to the reconstruction of the Shrine of Vesta in the Roman Forum. The inspiration was largely from Baker’s own travels in the Mediterranean along with the obvious desire to recreate the ‘glory that was Greece’ and ‘the grandeur that was Rome’.6 5 The stoa was to represent the new unity of the two main language groups of English and Afrikaans, the four buttresses perhaps represented the four original provinces: Cape, Natal, Transvaal, and Orange Free State. 6 Edgar Allen Poe, To Helen, in Mabbott (1969: 165–66). See also Irving 1981: 279: ‘Baker later wrote, a vision came to him of two great buildings connected by a semicircular colonnade overlooking an open theatre of place of democratic assembly’. It is both ironic and poignant that it was only on 31 May 1994, over eighty years later, that this place of assembly celebrated a democratically elected government. An equestrian statue, another typically Roman honour, of Louis Botha, the Union’s Wrst prime minister, stands in the gardens below the piazza.

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Whereas the Union Buildings were meant to illustrate Pretoria’s position as a capital city within the greater framework of the British empire, the Voortrekker Monument represents another sort of ideology and raft of aspirations (Fig. 8.1). And, although it might be assumed that a conscious attempt would have been made to distance this structure from one closely related to a, by then perceived by some, foreign power’s imperial past, yet it is precisely those common classical elements that remain a major feature. The foundation stone of the Monument was laid on 16 December 1938, a century after the victory of the Voortrekkers over the Zulu people at the Battle of Blood River, and was intended to commemorate the pioneers who emigrated from the Cape and later Natal to settle in the Transvaal.7 The Monument was oYcially inaugurated exactly eleven years later

Fig. 8.1 Enclosure of the Voortrekker Monument. Photograph: Richard Evans. 7 16 December, midsummer in the southern hemisphere, ‘Die Slag van Bloed Rivier,’ also popularly known as ‘Dingane’s Day,’ became the ‘Day of the Vow’ a public holiday still celebrated as the ‘Day of Reconciliation’. The Dutch settlers emigrated from the coast to escape from British rule. Work by an Italian construction company, A. Cosani, had actually begun on the site earlier in the year (Pretorius 2003).

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in 1949 when 400,000 attended the festivities, many in period dress, where a speech delivered in English was booed, and a speech delivered by former prime minister Jan Smuts was allowed only in his capacity as a private citizen (Smuts 1952: 522; Lacour-Gayet 1977: 278). No oYcial pronouncements were scheduled, although the Monument had been state-funded to the tune of R719, 202 (£350,000 at 1949 exchange values). The cost was a fraction of that of the Union Buildings and, while the scale is considerably smaller, startling similarities in, for example, position and elevation are immediately noticeable. The Monument was planned to top the hillside adjacent to the Scanskop fort,8 with a view towards the centre of the city from the south, hence the northfacing aspect—the Voortrekker Monument and Union Buildings face each other diagonally across the city from south-west to north-east. For the Monument itself, the architect chosen by the commissioning Central Volks Monuments Committee was Gerard Moerdijk (1890–1958), and the design of the outside enclosure was assigned to E. C. Pienaar and A. C. Bouman. It was plainly intended that the monument should be the centrepiece of quite an elaborate complex, and was not intended as an isolated trophy or commemoration, as are many urban cenotaphs or national monuments. One such single tower monument that may have inXuenced Moredijk is the ‘Hermanndenkmal’ near Detmold, which celebrates nineteenth-century German uniWcation. This tower received its name ‘Hermann’ from Arminius, chief of the Germanic Cherusci, of whom Tacitus writes (Annals 2.88; my translation):9 He was without doubt the liberator of Germany, and he provoked the rule of the Romans not when it was in its beginning like other kings and leaders but when it was most Xourishing. He stalemated battles and was not defeated in war.

Moerdijk was an established architect who had studied in Europe and was familiar with the classical tradition, but also born in South Africa 8 Scanskop and Klapperkop forts guard the southerly approach to the city above the Fountains Valley through which runs the Apies River. 9 For Arminius’ career between 14 and 19 ce, see Tacitus Annals: 1.55–68, 2.9–21, 2.44–6. He was the architect of the great Roman defeat at the Teutoberg Wald in 9 ce where P. Quinctilius Varus was killed with three legions, Tacitus Annals: 1. 60–1, and where the Hermann monument now stands.

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and evidently much aVected by the local Xora and fauna, and with native cultures. A central tower dominating an enclosure, in appearance points to an Hellenistic connection, such as the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The Mausoleum stood to a height of approximately 43 m, and the Voortrekker Monument is 40 m high. The recreation of the Mausoleum by C. R. Cockerell (between 1847 and 1856) has a squat tower topped with a pyramid reached by a grand stairway and surrounded by a terrace, with an enclosure or precinct below. This is the recreation most often produced today (see Smith 1900a: 73–4, plate XIV; Grigson 1992: 25). The Voortrekker Monument is also squat, also reached by a grand stairway, more impressive than the one assumed for the Mausoleum, and is surrounded on each side by a terrace, all above the enclosure. The tower is 40 m2 at its base, the basement containing a cenotaph is 34:5 m2 , and the main chamber on the ground Xoor is 25 m2 . Stairs, and now a lift, allow entry to an upper terrace at the base of an interior dome. The height of the tower equals its base; and this is a further important pointer to classical inXuences, in this case the Pantheon at Rome. Much is made of the ‘hole in the roof ’ of the Voortrekker Monument, which allows sunlight to strike the cenotaph, and its words: ‘Ons vir jou, Suid Afrika’ [‘We for thee, South Africa’], in the basement on 16 December each year. The idea was not, however, novel, for the architect of Hadrian’s restoration of Agrippa’s Pantheon in the Campus Martius in Rome had created a dome for the temple that culminated in a 9m aperture. Although the ‘hole’ in this instance was part of the technique used to prevent the dome’s collapse, it also allows sunlight today to shine on the central areas of the interior.10 The association with the Pantheon does not end there, for it is the remarkable mathematical precision of the Roman construction that is reproduced in the Voortrekker Monument. As noted earlier, the dimensions of the Monument are 40
40
40 m and this is topped inside with a second dome, the one surmounting the other, both with holes. However, the spot where the sunlight falls on 16 December is not only directly below the holes in the centre of the dome, but if the 10 Reconstructions of the Pantheon often illustrate the top of the dome with an ‘umbrella’ over the aperture to prevent rainfall entering the building. Today that is not a feature and perhaps never was. Moerdijk could easily have been inXuenced by what he saw rather than any ideas relating to a reconstruction.

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line of the dome is extended down, it would lie at the bottom of a circle within the square box of the building. This is exactly the same as in Rome’s Pantheon. It is unlikely indeed that this exceptional architectural feature was reproduced by chance. By comparison with the sophisticated ideas put into practice for the overall structure, the entrance is simple and tiny, highly reminiscent of any chapel door, and perhaps not in good proportion to the whole building. Yet this simplicity is exactly what there is at, for example, the chapel at the base of Trajan’s Column, which contained the ashes of the Emperor and his wife Plotina (Lepper and Frere 1988: plate II). Was Moerdijk reminded of this when he designed the Monument’s entrance? But here, he also draws away from the classic to an African context: the head of buValo is dramatically carved above the doorway— is this visual euphemism for protection—and it is also framed by four reliefs of black wildebeest, two each side of the balustrade of the stairway.11 Directly below the buValo head, and centred between the four wildebeest, is a statue in bronze of a Voortrekker woman and two children by the local artist Anton Von Wouw (1862–1945), cast by R. Vignali, another Italian company established in Pretoria.12 At the four corners of the terrace are statues of the Voortrekker leaders, Retief, Pretorius, Potgieter, and another representing all pioneers. Reconstructions of most Greco-Roman religious and public sites illustrate a preponderance of statuary; and clearly this may have been a further instance of an attempt to introduce continuity with antiquity. The tower’s external appearance is also inXuenced by native forms, but also something rather older in conception. The local red sandstone has been worked to give the appearance of wood at the terrace level, and below, and a brick texture on the tower itself. The four massive windows are elongated arches, each divided into Wve vertical sections all of which have a lattice motif in front of yellow glass. The summit has a stepped feature containing the upper terrace with eight small buttresses on each side. The overall eVect is not unlike the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia, built in mud-brick; a biblical association is not improbable, given the visual religious messages inside. 11 Neither the buValo nor the black wildebeest are found on ancient coinage, though many African animals are represented: elephant, rhinoceros, crocodile. 12 Pretorius (2003). The statue is rather more than four metres tall and is 2.5 tonnes in weight.

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It is possible that the Monument’s enclosure is derived from similar stone walls found in the Great Zimbabwe ruins, and although the circular design is common to farmsteads, and even larger communal living areas among African tribes, it was also a logical use of the wagons for defence by the pioneers. However, it is also worth bearing in mind that the very Wrst illustration on the scroll of Trajan’s Column is a single-turreted fort with a circular palisade (Lepper and Frere 1988: plate IV, 2 and 3; Rossi 1971: 131). This kraal, laager, or outspan was never intended as a place of refuge, except perhaps for Afrikaner sensibilities; nonetheless, the 313 metre long wall does present the appearance of fortiWcation. The tower needs protection and this is accentuated by sixty-four wagons carved in relief on the 2.7 metre-high wall, representing both the means of transportation into the interior of the continent and also protection against attack. SigniWcantly, the Voortrekkers had a laager of sixty four wagons at Blood River in 1838. North-east of the Monument’s enclosure, a Greek theatre was excavated out of the north-east facing hillside with an orchestra and seating for approximately twenty thousand. This again mirrors the ‘theatre’ between the two wings of the Union Buildings on Meintjieskop, some distance across the valley. It is as if those responsible for the construction of the Voortrekker Monument were keenly aware that a democratic element must be included for the people for whom this was to be, and still remains, a focus. The interior of the Monument’s Hall of Heroes culminating in its domed ceiling has a patterned marble Xoor (the marble transported from Marble Hall in what is now Limpopo Province), likened to the ripples formed when a stone is thrown into the waters of a lake. The centre of the Hall’s Xoor is an open space, from which an onlooker may gaze down onto the cenotaph in the basement and up to the double holes in the ceiling. The wall between the Xoor and windows contains a frieze in marble imported from Italy. This is the raison d’eˆtre of the tower: a monument to house a monument, just as Trajan’s Forum housed Trajan’s Column; and the parallel does not end there. The internal frieze, at 92 m in length and 2.3 m in width, the largest of its sort in the world, cost R120,000, which was more than one-sixth the total cost of the monument. From the beginning of the scheme, the frieze was obviously to have a pre-eminent place. While

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Moerdijk was the senior architect in charge of the overall project, four sculptors were assigned the task of executing, or rather designing, the work for the frieze. This fact also has parallels for the architect of Trajan’s Forum, the Syrian Apollodorus of Damascus who, like Moerdijk, had a supervisory capacity when it came to the actual details of, in his case, the reliefs on the column. The sculptors for the Voortrekker frieze were Peter KirchoV, Frikkie Kruger, Laurika Postma, and Hennie Potgieter, who made clay and plaster models of the themes and episodes they had agreed on for their storyline. The actual work was undertaken by Wfty stonemasons in Florence at the studio of Romano Romanelli (1882–1968). The models were made between 1942 and 1946, but the frieze was cut between the end of 1947 and the end of 1948 in time to ship the three hundred and sixty tonnes of Quercetta marble out to Pretoria in time for erection before the unveiling ceremony. The carving, supervised by Potgieter and Postma, was in low relief following the style found on, for example, the Parthenon.13 The frieze consists of twenty seven panels, which tell the events of the pioneers’ groet trek between 1835 and 1852. As a piece of historical story-telling it again owes a great deal to the contents of the scroll on Trajan’s Column and its history of the two Dacian Wars (101–2 and 105–6 ce). Its length is obviously considerable shorter than the two hundred and twenty three metres and one hundred and Wfty scenes on the column of Trajan, and the action is less extended and less detailed, although the width is more than double that of the scroll at one metre. The Parthenon frieze is just 160 m long with a height of 1 m (Neils 2001: 33).14 Moreover, a point often missed between modern and ancient work on marble is that the Voortrekker frieze was meant to be plain and unadorned, whereas the bas-reliefs on the Parthenon were painted (Neils 2001: 88–93),15 and further 13 See Alma-Tadema’s Pheidias and the Frieze of the Parthenon for a nineteenth century recreation of the erection and its Wrst viewing in situ by Pericles, (Barrow 2001: 42–3). The low relief of the Parthenon was not more than 5.6 cm above the marble base (Neils 2001: 33). Apparently eight panels were unWnished at the unveiling ceremony in 1949. 14 The area of marble available for working is actually not dissimilar, Voortrekker ¼ 211:6 m2 ; Trajan’s Column ¼ 223 m2 ; Parthenon frieze 160 m2 . 15 The simplicity was presumably intended for the strongly religious community of the time, but Alma-Tadema’s reconstruction with its bright colouration was not far oV the mark.

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Table 8.1. The order of the frieze: from the entrance then left to right around the four walls of the Hall of Heroes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

The Voortrekkers leaving the Cape Colony in 1835.* British settlers present a bible to the Voortrekker leader Jacobus Uys. Louis Trichardt in the Soutpansberg. Trichardt’s arrival in Lorenc¸o Marques/Maputo. Ndebele attack on the Voortrekkers at Vegkop in 1836. Piet Retief is sworn in as governor of the Voortrekkers. Battle against the Ndebele at eGabeni/Kapain in 1837.* Negotiations with the Rolong chief Moroka.* Retief reports on his negotiations with Dingane.* Debora Retief paints her father’s name on a rock.* Crossing the Drakensberg mountains to Natal. Retief and Dingane sign the treaty. The murder of Retief and his men. Zulu attack on the laagers at Bloukrans. The women warn the laagers against the Zulu.* Dirkie Uys protects his father. Marthinus Oostuizen rushes to the aid of a besieged laager. The women spur the men on to persevere. Arrival of the new leader Andries Pretorius. Making the vow. The battle of Blood River on 16 December 1838. The Church of the Vow is built.* The women till the Welds and defend the laagers while the men are out on commando. Mpande becomes king of the Zulus.* Dingane is murdered by the Swazi in 1840. The Voortrekkers leave Natal after the British occupation in 1843. Sand River Convention in 1852. Britain recognises the independence of the Transvaal.

* ¼ panels discussed in this paper.

embellished by metalwork Wxtures for details such as weaponry, as also occurred on Trajan’s Column. Warfare is the primary subject of Trajan’s Column, and although there are episodes of a warlike nature on the Voortrekker frieze, its processional and community themes make it as strongly related to the activities on the Parthenon frieze. A brief examination of a selection of the frieze’s panels will be suYcient to note classical and more speciWc inXuences. Panel one has clear ancient parallels in its theme of the settlers leaving the Cape of Good Hope; Trajan’s Column, for instance, has the army setting out from its camp to cross a pontoon bridge over the Danube (Rossi 1971: 133).16 However, in perhaps a curious departure from 16 Similarly, a frieze shows Domitian leaving for his wars against the Chatti in about 82 ce, and a column dedicated to Antoninus Pius also has a departure scene.

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tradition,17 three of the designers, Potgieter, KirchoV, and Kruger, placed their own images on this initial tableau. This illustrates wagons of the Voortrekkers drawn by oxen, with herds of cattle in the background, a Xock of sheep in the foreground, an armed pioneer on horseback, and various male and female Wgures tending the animals, or in readiness for the march. A particular attention to detail is evident, again faithfully adhering to ancient precedent, with all the paraphernalia needed for a long and uncertain journey, including farming implements and provisions, some in a sack, a teapot, a hot iron, a guitar, the men in hats, the women in bonnets. All this activity is set against the backdrop of the Cape Mountains, familiar by their Xat tops. The Wnal scene of the scroll on Trajan’s Column has many of the same details (Rossi: 1971: 212; Lepper and Frere 1988: plate CXIII lower). Panel seven has the Wrst portrayal of the Ndebele, enemies who were defeated by the Voortrekkers, and as a result migrated north into what is now southern Zimbabwe. Battle scenes are a regular feature of ancient bas-reliefs, and a third of the Voortrekker frieze is devoted such events. The mode of Wghting may have changed in that the pioneers used guns to Wght oV their attackers, but many of the postures remain familiar.18 It is also worth noting some inventiveness in that the Ndebele are pictured riding oV the cattle of the Voortrekkers, who pursue them on horseback, all adding to the confusion of the scene. Panel eight shows the outcome of the previous scene, where the Rolong tribe and their king Moroka are thanked for their assistance in the defeat of the Ndebele. The pioneers’ horses appear in this panel 17 Although there are busts of Pheidias and Apollodorus, we cannot tell if they are present on their best-remembered works. Apollodorus did, however, portray historical Wgures of the Column, not least Trajan (Lepper and Frere 1988: plates IX, XI, XIII, XIV, XVII, XX–XXI, XXVI–XXVII), and his heir Hadrian, and several of the emperor’s closest political allies (plates XLIX, LXXVII, LXXVIII), and his arch-enemy Decebalus, the Dacian king (plate CVI). Pheidias, portraying a contemporary Athenian festival, may have used models known to the community. The ara pacis Augustae [Altar of the Augustan Peace] dated to about 12 bce not only portrays Augustus and his closest ally Agrippa but also many of his family members, most of whom have been identiWed. 18 On one of the Parthenon metopes, carved in higher relief than the frieze, the mythical battle between Lapiths, a Thessalian tribe, and Centaurs is portrayed. Note the outstretched arm of the rider on this panel and that of the Centaur, and the expression of pain on the faces of the Ndebele and the Lapith. The Lapiths fought with the drunken Centaurs at the marriage banquet of their king Pirithou¨s.

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too. The role and importance of the horse is clear enough, featuring on ten of the twenty seven scenes. In fact, animals as a whole are prominent: cattle on Wve panels, dogs on three, sheep on one. The horses quite obviously have to do with movement and the journey, the domesticated animals with the agricultural pursuit of the settlers—a sack of grain is present on the Wrst panel, while dogs are both companions and have a function around the farm.19 From animal to human proWles, on panel nine one of the leaders of the pioneers’ reports back about negotiations with the Zulu king Dingane. Also depicted in the outspanning are domestic chores: rope making, hunting (rabbit/hare?), repairs to shoes, and sewing. Female Wgures are not uncommon on ancient reliefs, such as the Parthenon frieze, while busts, such as those of Livia, with quite severe hairstyles may well have inXuenced the sculptors. The male Wgures here are rather static and, while lacking the vitality of Wgures on Roman frescos or mosaics, they are similar in attitude to some of the riders on the Parthenon. Moerdijk’s ultimate goal was to deliver a monument for all time, recording what was essentially a bitter and diYcult venture and, therefore, it was probably felt that frivolity would be out of place. Still, panel ten is devoted to the portrayal of a lighter moment, but also to a particular date. On 12 November 1837 Piet Retief, one of the leading Wgures of the groet trek, celebrated his birthday, and to commemorate this occasion, his daughter Debora carved his name on a rock at Kerkenberg in the Orange Free State. The panel also provides a contrast with its lack of activity compared to the conXict and scenes of hardship, which mostly Wll the frieze. The portrayal of youthful Wgures on marble has another parallel in the Parthenon frieze.20 19 Horses and their riders feature prominently on the Parthenon frieze, and only the east side has no equestrian activity. Cavalry are commonly portrayed on Trajan’s Column (Lepper and Frere 1988: plates XXXVI, XL, XLIV–XLV). The suovetaurilia, in which a bull, a sheep and a pig were sacriWced, is also portrayed (plates IX–X, XXXVIII). Cattle and sheep and pigs appear elsewhere (plates LXII, LXXVI, CXIII). Dogs have been portrayed in ancient art since early times; see, for example, the tomb of the Merehi (Smith 1900b: plate XIII). Note that neither cats nor domesticated fowl appear on the Voortrekker, but see, for example, the Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia (cats), and Travignoli (chicken) (Modona 1954: 100–1 and 108). 20 Youth is a pervasive theme on the Parthenon frieze, according to (Neils 2001: 200–1), although children as such are not carved here. Youthful Wgures are probably nos. 35 (East), most of the riders on the south frieze, notably no. 70, and the riders on

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Panel Wfteen is of particular interest in that while it may have modern parallels, it has no ancient equivalent. The Zulus were about to attack the settlers, led by Gerrit Maritz, at Bloukrans, when they received a warning and so were able to mount a defence and avoid disaster. There are many scenes of horses and riders in ancient frieze work, but none has such a prominent role given to a woman. She was Theresa Viglione, an Italian trader (and another Italian link with the Monument), who happened to be nearby and risked her own life to save the Voortrekkers. This was much the same sort of message as that carried by Paul Revere when he rode from Boston to Lexington and Lincoln on 18 April 1775.21 This may not be an instance of bringing good news from Ghent to Aix,22 but the imagery is identical, and was probably in the sculptors’ minds, especially with both these messages being associated with liberty from oppression. In panel twenty-two there is the sole representation of a building under construction, the Church of the Vow in Pietermaritzburg. Moerdijk makes a late appearance on this particular panel. Again, some planning clearly went into this design and its meaning. Construction of forts and bridges are common themes on Trajan’s Column,23 but quite clearly this panel towards the end of the Voortrekker frieze was intended to show that the journey was nearly completed. And the architect’s presence is a further doublet in that it celebrates his own monument to the pioneers. Once again we may observe the skill behind an idea, which projected the possession of a monument within a monument for all time. the north and west friezes. However, children certainly appear on the ara pacis Augustae, another possible further inXuential frieze for the Voortrekker sculptors. 21 Paul Revere (1735–1818) brought news of British mobilization against the New England colony of Massachusetts and is celebrated in Longfellow’s poem The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1863). 22 R. Browning (1844); see Woolford and Karlin (1991: 239): ‘‘There is no historical foundation for the poem, ‘merely [a] general impression of the characteristic warfare and besieging which abounds in the Annals of Flanders’. Aix is besieged and about to surrender, and the ‘good news’ that unexpected help is on its way is brought from Ghent . .’. 23 See, for example, the start of the scroll where the legions cross a pontoon bridge over the Danube and later constructions in Dacia (Lepper and Frere 1988: plates VII, XI–XV, XXX, XXXIX, XLII).

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The climax of the frieze is both peaceful and bloody. Dingane, the Zulu king, was expelled and replaced by Mpande, portrayed on panel twenty-four standing on a rock with Andries Pretorius and saluted by the Voortrekkers. This is not unlike the scene of Trajan giving gifts, portrayed on his triumphal arch at Beneventum or on the column (Lepper and Frere 1988: plate XXXIV). The portrayal of Pretorius full-face departs from the normal use of proWles but also emphasizes a change. Panel twenty-Wve pictures the murder of Dingane, the supreme enemy of the settlers, by the Swazi in 1840. His death is reminiscent of the suicide of Decebalus, king of the Dacians, pictured nearly at the end of the scroll of Trajan’s Column. The Wnal panel shows the signing of the treaty in which the British recognized an independent settler state in the Transvaal. The return of peace is also the all-embracing message of the top of the scroll of Trajan’s Column. The Voortrekker Monument was once Wrmly established in the minds of those involved in the liberation struggle, and among white liberals, as an expression of the ideology of apartheid, and with more than a little Fascist symbolism thrown in for good measure. The discussion here has shown that the symbolic components of the Voortrekker Monument were not obviously, if at all, inspired by extremist political movements, which emerged in Europe in the 1920s, but by far older artistic and, arguably, far more pristine, credentials. Because of this classical heritage the monument deserves to be regarded as a place of considerable importance in twentieth-century sculptural and architectural trends. This was not a building conceived by supporters of some fringe element but by an ethnic group seeking to proclaim its unique identity, descendants of Greco-Roman culture yet living in sub-Saharan Africa. The South African artists of the Voortrekker Monument were fully at home with classical art and architecture from which they drew inspiration. The cutters of the frieze were Italians living in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and, while they may have been supervised and have worked from models,24 this was not a time when Fascist forms would have either been tolerated or deemed politically or artistically relevant. 24 I am not aware of any source that mentions the whereabouts of the models and casts, whether they remained in Italy or whether they were shipped back in 1949. This may be a project worth following up.

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For many years this monument was neglected through the isolation of South Africa in the international community. Even those with an emotional tie have been either indiVerent to its existence or have found the structure an embarrassment. It is only in recent years, following the declaration of the Voortrekker as a World Heritage Site,25 and the increasingly easy accessibility of the country, that it has become better known and appreciated. Unlike Pretoria’s Union Buildings, the Voortrekker is not an attractive building from a distance, but the thought and planning of its exterior structure and interior design was every bit as complex as those of its illustrious neighbour. The Union Buildings display British imperial architecture at its apex, designed by one of its greatest exponents; the Voortrekker Monument exhibits a post-colonial energy in the drive for selfexpression by the descendants of white settlers in that region of Africa. And it was the envisaged centennial celebration of the groot trek, which provided the impetus for this burst of artistic endeavour. Together, these structures dominate the city’s skyline almost as if a double acropolis: the one British-inspired, the other Afrikaner. They can be viewed as the architects’ conceptions of what should be portrayed as imperial and counter-imperial ediWces, and so in a post-colonial environment they might be regarded as redundant expressions of past ideologies. Far from it, both Union Buildings and Monument have become integral to the vibrant culture of today’s South Africa. Herbert Baker’s choice of Meintjieskop was inspired precisely by his own experience of Greek and Roman sites, especially those in Greece and Sicily, which gave him the idea of buildings on a high place joined together by a theatre. He was also imbued with a belief that the British empire had inherited all the best of Roman imperialism and Greek democracy. Moerdijk wanted a monument in just as impressive a spot, hence the site at Scanskop, within sight of the former colonial power’s administrative home. But he too was as inXuenced by the classical heritage, examples of which he had seen or was aware of, primarily the Parthenon, Trajan’s Column, and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. It is possible that 25 As a result government funding has clearly been increased. Facilities at the site have been upgraded, and management of the Voortrekker Monument better geared for the, evidently, wide range and increasing number of visitors. The future of the monument in the new South Africa seems assured.

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what was intended to be a celebration of the diYculties of establishing a free settler community in South Africa with purely local reference points became irresistibly drawn to more ancient sources. The design of the tower, precinct, or enclosure, the interior and the dome, the frieze and its contents, and even the creation of the Greek theatre on the hillside, all have ancient precedents. That Greek theatre faces Greek theatre across Pretoria, situated in or close to its most signiWcant buildings, deserves a Wnal comment. It is indeed ironic that a country so long denied democracy should, in a postcolonial epoch, not only have gained the liberty for which this concept stands, but should possess a capital city in whose buildings Greek and Roman art and architecture Wgure so prominently.

9 Imperial ReXections: the Post-Colonial Verse-Novel as Post-Epic1 Katharine Burkitt

‘In Walcott’s epic poem, Omeros (1990), the relationship between history and mythology is at once mutually constitutive and radically nullifying. One may not, in other words, simply choose between the opposed meanings of history and mythology in the poem, as the logic underwriting one mode of representation always implies the logic underwriting the other.’ (Williams 2001: 277)

Ted Williams draws attention to the ideological paradox at the core of epic representation as he explores Derek Walcott’s engagement with the form in Omeros. Williams highlights the problematic relation between history and mythology, and demonstrates that within the conceptual space of Walcott’s text, this apparently polarized relationship is rendered ambiguous, as it is ‘at once mutually constitutive and radically nullifying’. In line with Williams, I regard Walcott’s Omeros as a mindful engagement with epic form,2 and 1 My thanks go to the organizers of the Classics in a Post-Colonial World conference for allowing me to present this paper and providing a supportive environment, which remained challenging and stimulating, and acknowledge the contributions of other conference attendees. I thank the anonymous referees for their constructive comments, and the editors for their support during the preparation of this publication. 2 Epic has been theorized repeatedly since Aristotle’s Poetics; this mirrors the way in which the form has been appropriated and adapted by generations of poets. Recently epic has been considered in line with the following broad deWnition (Preminger et al. 1993: 361): ‘An epic is a long narrative poem that treats a single heroic Wgure or a group of such Wgures and concerns an historical event, such as war or conquest, or an heroic quest or some other signiWcant mythic or legendary achievement

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therefore inherently concerned with the political associations of history and mythology. Walcott’s text is self-aware as it straddles the conXated boundaries of post-colonial history and mythology in St. Lucia, and as such, I posit it as post-epic: a notion that is implicit in the way in which Omeros modiWes epic and its relation to history and mythology. It is also preoccupied with the underlying concerns of epic, including travel, war, and home, but harnesses epic context to correspond to its late-twentieth-century St. Lucian perspective. Whilst Williams characterizes Omeros unproblematically as an ‘epic poem’, Walcott resists this categorization (Walcott 1997: 231): I did not plan this book so it would be a template of the Homeric original because that would be an absurdity. If you consider for instance, the massive parallel that Joyce’s Ulysses constitutes—the exact overlay, moment by moment, between Ulysses and the Odyssey, in which everything in Homer is echoed by the Irish experience—that’s on a scale no artist today with any sensibility would attempt because then you would be doing a third version of the Odyssey via Joyce.

Although related to the ‘Homeric original’, Walcott discredits the notion that Omeros is a straightforward engagement with epic or a repetition of the form. He draws attention to the intertexual nature of epic genealogy and complicates the relationship between his text and Homer’s epic by alluding to Joyce’s Ulysses. This move highlights the recurrent nature of epic and positions Walcott’s text in a tradition of modiWed epics; as ‘Homer is echoed by the Irish experience’, so Homer and Joyce resound in his St. Lucian world. When coupled with other intertextual references, the heteroglot narratives, the novelistic format, and the quotidian drama of Walcott’s text, Omeros resists categorization as an epic, although the resonance of the form is always evident. It is therefore more suited to being considered as verse-novel, or at least a forerunner to that form, which has that its central to the traditions or belief of its culture.’ This is a necessarily brief outline and further to it, it is a form that has developed cumulatively; therefore, the links between epics are necessarily blurry, complex and both ideological and structural. Merchant (1971) charts this history and might be read in conjunction with various contemporaneous theories, collected in Draper (1990), to establish the social roles of epic works. This paper responds to the theorization of epic primarily by Bakhtin (1981). This is a modernist critique of epic which seeks to set it in dialogue with the polyglot novel whilst epic is perceived as unitary.

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burgeoned since Omeros’ publication in 1990. In the context of my argument, the generic ambivalence of the verse-novel supports the notion of a post-epic text, because it is self-conscious in its engagement with the modern novel, as well as the older tradition of narrative poetry, epitomized in epic. It is therefore an exploration of the limitations of form and a harking-back to its literary genealogy. To explore this more fully, I shall refer to Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe: A Novel, published in 2001, as well as Omeros. Evaristo’s text identiWes itself as a novel from the outset, but is constructed as a series of couplets, and follows Omeros in its exploration of the intertwined nature of history and mythology as narratives. Whilst Walcott’s inXuence on The Emperor’s Babe is clear, it is a very diVerent text. It is set in Roman Londinium and charts the progress of the teenager, Zuleika, whose relationship with her Roman husband is complicated by her immigrant status; thus drawing attention to notions of time, empire, and nationality. These texts do not stand alone and unclassiWable, but can be loosely categorized with Evaristo’s Lara, published in 1997, Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1997), Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune (1998), Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1999), Fred D’ Aguair’s Bloodlines (2000), amongst others3. These works can be classed as post-epic, as they operate in the convention of epic whilst also questioning its role in the contemporary world. These post-epic verse-novels provide a selfreXexive space that is aware of their contentious engagement with postmodernism and post-colonialism, and are paradoxical and selfreXexive, as they highlight their own ambivalences and contradictions in order to critique the purported objectivity of epic history and mythology. Walcott’s Omeros and Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe can be read as post-epics, as they draw attention to their uncanny generic aYliations, whilst also suggesting themselves as a contemporary manifestation of epic. They locate themselves ambivalently on the cusps of genres: the poem, the novel, and the epic, which complicates that aYliation even further. As such, they interrogate their relationship with epic, whilst 3 There are a number of verse-novels which are not strictly post-colonial, but are formally aYliated to the texts mentioned. These include: Raine (1994), Maxwell (2000), and Leithauser (2002).

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engaging with epic form and content, and are consciously located at a tangent to that tradition. Therefore, Evaristo and Walcott’s verse-novels question and restructure the epics that have shaped them from a postcolonial perspective, presenting a reciprocal vision of their contemporary worlds. In order to explore this theory more fully, and in line with Williams’ reading of Omeros, I will discuss these post-epics as reworked versions of classical epic and investigate the complex engagement with history and mythology, which is inherent in the form. This will compare the paradoxical aYliation of these post-epics, which are polyglot post-colonial verse-novels, to the structure of epic as it is perceived as monolithic, most notably by theorists such as Bakhtin and Auerbach. It is therefore crucial to bear in mind that the post-epic is a response to their speciWcally modernist interpretation of epic, as well as a direct engagement with the genre. I will then go on to consider The Emperor’s Babe in terms of Neil Lazarus’ post-colonial materialist critique of Theodor Adorno’s notion of ‘Hating Tradition Properly’ and draw attention to the way in which Evaristo’s text is set within the recognizable genre in order to undermine it. As it exceeds and subverts the ideology of its forerunner, I will consider whether the post-epic, with its fragmented and self-reXexive relation to epic, is the only possibility for manifestations of epic in the contemporary post-colonial world. Post-epic texts are part of a genealogy of epic that dates back to classical Greece, a lineage that has guaranteed epic its position as a stalwart of Western literature. Whilst this has ensured it maintains an elevated position in relation to more modern genres, like the novel, it has also led to approaches to epic that are fundamentally prejudiced and based upon critical responses to the perceived characteristics of the genre, rather than on the texts themselves. Bakhtin, writing in the early twentieth century, engages with epic in this way. He sets the distinguishing features of the ‘completed’ epic formation, which establishes itself as a ‘heirarchically organized, organic whole’ (Bakhtin 1981: 4), against his project on the dialogic, heteroglot novel. So, epic becomes a pre-ordained and conservative embodiment of national history (Bakhtin 1981: 13): The world of the epic is the national heroic past: it is a world of ‘beginnings’ and ‘peak times’ in the national history, a world of fathers and of founders of families, a world of ‘Wrsts’ and ‘bests’.

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For Bakhtin, this ‘world of ‘‘Wrsts’’ and ‘‘bests’’ ’ is anterior, objective and unitary; not only is epic an historical form, it also concerns a particular history and documents the mythology of the founding of nations. Bakhtin’s notion of a ‘national heroic past’ is conceptually comparable to Williams’ analysis of Omeros as an epic that demonstrates history and mythology as inherently interdependent. (Williams 2001); however, in contrast to Williams’ reading, for Bakhtin, epic is an outdated and inherently imperial form of Western mythology, which makes it wholly unsuitable to convey the ambivalent subject matter of post-colonial writing. In a similar vein, Auerbach (1953: 3) suggests: ‘the epic is not just inherited from the past, but also dominated by it’. In these terms epic is infused with national history and can be held up as an unquestionable representation of that discourse. This interpretation of epic suggests it as a spectacular narrative that projects a notion of ideological coherence and magnitude, and masks the diVerence between discourses of history and mythology by appending a cultural verisimilitude to epic representation. Post-epic texts function to deconstruct this spectacle of epic; as interactive, fragmentary and elliptical, they are, paradoxically, always in contest with, whilst shaded by, the Wxed and self-ratifying shadow of Bakhtin’s epic, which struggles to maintain its incontestability. The approach to classical epic in Omeros inXuences the post-epic nature of the post-colonial verse-novels that follow in its wake, whilst also raising questions about genre and categorical deWnition. As such, mainly due to this generic ambivalence and Walcott’s unwillingness to classify his text unequivocally, the tradition of epic in Omeros has invited considerable comment. It has been understood as a ‘disavowal’of epic (Davis 1997b, 322), a ‘creolised’ version of epic tradition and form’ (Roberts 2003: 273), or an ‘ambivalent mock-heroic’ form (Thieme 1999: 152). These interpretations insist upon the upholding of the ‘other’ nature of Omeros, and posit the text as a space for discursive interaction. Similarly, readings of Omeros that establish its epic nature, either suggest it as a modiWed form of epic, a work which ‘supplements and reshapes’ epic heritage (Dougherty 1997: 355), or as text that forces re-evaluation of the way in which epic has been read as a monologic form (Farrell 1997). So, in terms of Omeros, epic is an unavoidable but contentious label, as the text sits uneasily within the narrative and ideological coherence,

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which some readings of the form demand. Walcott draws attention to the uneasy relationship between his text and epic: There’s a pivotal section that says: Why make an epic of two Wshermen quarrelling in a rum shop? Why do you have to make this so grand that you turn it into Hector and Achilles talking about Helen of Troy? Why do you need that? Why can’t you just be two Wshermen quarrelling in a rum shop? Why do you have to make it sublime? Why do you have to make it heroic? Why do you have to make an epic out of it? (Walcott 1997: 233)

Walcott foregrounds the self-reXexivity of his narrative and suggests it as a space that is at once epic and anti-epic, as he problematizes the suitability of the form to convey contemporary post-colonial experience. In the same interview, he calls Omeros a ‘long poem’ (ibid. p. 229) and in so doing de-politicizes the generic structure, acknowledging the debt to Homeric formation, but denying any epic proportion to his text as history and mythology are replaced by ‘two Wshermen quarrelling in a rum shop’. Omeros is, therefore, inherently concerned with navigating the borders of Western literary genre, and involved in both self-critique and analysis of the form. This self-reXexive examination of form and ideology lends itself particularly well to post-colonial writers. As the post-epic provides a space to explore the scope of epic narrative, it both interrogates the representation of history and mythology, and reveals its imperialist reputation as stereotype, undertaking an analysis of both the adaptable potential of epic form and the way in which it has been interpreted. Therefore, a re-imagining of epic for the contemporary post-colonial world is at the core of Walcott’s Omeros. His representation of epic complicates Bakhtin’s ‘completed’ genre as the text is self-reXexive and vacillating. In this way, Robert Crawford reads Omeros as a representation of postmodern poetics in an epic framework (Crawford 1990/91: 9): Walcott’s epic narrative of a postmodern age is aware not so much of an older, unitary concept of history as of a postmodern plurality of histories. [ . . . ] History, like narrative and like Literature is seen as something remade, each time with diVerent inclusions and exclusions.

Crawford’s review of Omeros fuses the postmodern and post-colonial preoccupations of the text with its epic structure and suggests

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Omeros as an epic space, within which history, mythology, narrative, and literature are convergent and can be explored. But in Walcott’s epic, the discourses are self-aware, correlated, and shifting, and as such, it is a structure that is unstable and always evolving. Walcott’s text revises its epic status: he engages with its recurring motifs and geographical dimensions, but interrogates the legitimacy of an epic standpoint. In Omeros, Walcott (1990: VLI. ii. 207) acknowledges his paradoxical ‘reversible world’: at once introverted and extroverted, peripheral and central, anti-epic and epic, set up to dismantle narrative authority from the Xuctuating borders of ideology, genre, and tradition. From early on, Omeros maintains a tangential position to classical epic, as Walcott sets his poem within that tradition, whilst communicating its speciWcally St. Lucian scope: I said, ‘Omeros,’ and O was the conch-shell’s invocation, mer was both mother and sea in our Antillean patois, os, a grey bone and the white surf as it crashes and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore. (Walcott 1990 II. iii. 14)

Walcott represents the local aspect of his poem, placing it Wrmly outside the essentially Western, Homeric, epic tradition, although the Greek aYliations are always in proximity. Joseph Farrell highlights this dual etymology which characterizes ‘Omeros’ (Farrell 1997: 264): The Greek word is ‘derived’ from elements of the French Creole dialect spoken, not written, on the islands and from the natural sounds of the Caribbean environment.

Therefore the epics suggested in the title, and recalled throughout Omeros, are distanced in favour of Walcott’s indigenous narrative. However, the preoccupations foregrounded in this passage mirror the concerns of epic: history and mythology, genealogy and heritage, the sea and the sailor are all manifest as uncanny representations of Western epic features. This ambivalent positioning between epic and indigenous tradition is the driving force behind Walcott’s verse-novel. It is used throughout to complicate the politics of the historical, mythological, and narrative ellipses, which Walcott presents in the complexities of his world-view. Walcott’s text is a narrative tapestry, an allegory for the conXation of history, mythology, geography, sexual

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politics, cultural and personal heritage, and the modern human condition, with epic as its framework. Whilst the subversive ideologies draw attention to the structure of Omeros throughout the text, they Wnd their momentum in the negotiation and negation from within of the impenetrable spectacle of Bakhtinian epic. The Emperor’s Babe follows Omeros in claiming an uncanny and unsettling space within the framework of the classical epic. Evaristo establishes a position of equality within the hierarchy of epic poetry for the diasporic, British, female poet. By ironically setting her novel in Roman Londinium, Evaristo’s text demonstrates a long history of inter-racial relationships, and the concomitant interactions of oppression and subversion, which is historically embedded in international culture. The text is written in an up-to-date street language, ensuring its contemporary relevance, and draws parallels between the role of women and settler communities in the Roman and the modern world. The poet’s critique of epic operates in a binary relation to her own dialogic textual construct. Evaristo engages with epic narrative structure to grant voice, consciousness, and agency, if limited, to the woman; and Zuleika can initially articulate her own position only from within the boundaries of classical myth: I passed out. Pluto came for me that night, and each time I woke up, it was my Wrst night in the Kingdom of the Dead. (Evaristo 2001: 29)

Zuleika invokes the mythology of Roman epic to illustrate her plight. At this point she can only express herself in terms of the masculine narrative structures with which she is familiar. Hers is not an autonomously constructed poetic voice: she articulates her insurgence in the words of her oppressor, or at least the history of mythology, which has been utilized to represent an overbearing version of masculinity in Western culture. Whilst she is unable to escape the threat of oppression in her diction, by adopting that language for her own purposes, Zuleika enacts a double subversion: articulating her own wedding night repulsion, in her husband’s terms. Despite her struggles to locate her own political and poetic voice throughout The Emperor’s Babe, Zuleika repeatedly undermines from within the

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language of oppressive masculinity. She utilizes the structure and lexis of canonical epic and myth to problematize the prejudices with which the form is greeted, and complicates conventional notions of its boundaries and the subjects who have legitimate access to it. Neil Lazarus’ post-colonial re-reading of Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia can be used to contextualize this approach to epic. In ‘Hating Tradition Properly’, Lazarus utilizes the Adornoian principle that ‘one must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly’ (Lazarus 1999a: 9). This notion is suggestive: it highlights the potential for subversion within, even, a forcibly imposed tradition. It implies that indoctrination is dependent on internalization, understanding, and mimicry, all of which provide the tools to operate subversively within that recognizable context. Lazarus is aware of the potentially e´litist and Eurocentric undertones in Adorno’s work; however, his reading of Adorno’s theory provides a cogent perspective upon the post-epic representation of classical epic in the post-colonial world. As he states, if we can concur with Adorno, that modernity is the ‘modern tradition’, and implicated in the construction of its historical and mythological narratives, the only possibility for post-colonial subversion must come from within that structure: For those opposed to bourgeois class domination, it is necessary, on Adorno’s reading, to think with modernity against modernity. For no other kind of thinking possesses the capacity to drive the historically actualised globality of the existing social order beyond its own ideological limits. (ibid. p. 13)

This argument redresses the location of post-colonial writers who are politically contentious as they combine their indigenous intellectual status with the utilization of ‘high’ modern theory. Lazarus (ibid. p. 15) lists a number of contemporary post-colonial intellectuals in this category, including Walcott, and suggests theirs is a ‘simultaneous commitment to the ‘‘philosophical discourse of modernity’’ and to its urgent critique’. This is symptomatic of the shifting borders of post-colonialism and postmodernism that characterize contemporary society; it is a marginalized and paradoxical position which is inevitably compromised, as Walcott recognizes in ‘A Far Cry from Africa’:

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Encounter and New Traditions I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken oYcer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both or give back what they give? How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live? (Walcott 1992a: 18)

Despite his unease about his own status, Walcott presents the dual relation to Europe and Africa as inherent within his indigenous culture and tradition. Thus, the adaptation of epic in Omeros is a contingent, naturalized representation of St. Lucian post-colonial life, not a textual contrivance, and the text is positioned as an intrinsic point of generic and cultural conXation. As Burian (1997: 360) suggests: Walcott does not abandon the language and literary culture of the European tradition, [ . . . ] but he supplements, deconstructs and remakes them with particularly Caribbean sounds, sights and smells—above all with a sense of the lived life of his islanders.

‘Hating tradition properly’ might also be construed as contentious on a number of levels: Lazarus appears to close down the political potential of the margins, and accept the notion of a ‘historically actualised globality’, which is in itself questionable from subject positions ‘outside’ Western modernity. However, Walcott’s poetry works to subvert Western narrative structure with his indigenous poetics, whilst maintaining a position of ambivalence as he alludes to both, but aligns his text with neither. Therefore, post-epic texts, in line with Lazarus’s interpretation of Adorno, locate their political impetus in the re-vision of Western literary tradition. The conceptual force of the form is derived from the poets’ propulsion of epic structure, mythology and its generic principles ‘beyond its own ideological limits’. Evaristo’s protagonist goes on ironically to articulate the paradoxical relation between adoption of form and ideological subversion in her reaction to the role of poetry and the epic poet provided by her male teacher:

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He made me read Homer’s Iliad, Which I found bloody tedious, quite frankly. ... And then he made me learn Virgil’s Aeneid oV by heart for my Roman History class. It’s all about the founding of Rome. And it’s Oh, only twelve books long. Contemporary ‘cos it’s oh, only over two hundred years old. You should hear him go on about Virgil, Noster maximus poeta, about how the Aeneid will still be a classic text in two millennia from now. As if. Says all the notable poets were men, except for some butch dyke who lived with a bunch of lipstick lesbians on an island in Greece, but she was really a minor poet and did I know what asclepiad meant? Or trochee? Or spondee? Or dactyl? Or cretic? No? Oh, surprise, surprise! Well, when I did, then I could give him backchat, and anyway I’d never write good poetry because what did I know about war, death, the gods and the founding of countries? (Evaristo 2001: 83)

This passage oVers a clear critique of the role of the education system, particularly the classics in education, and the elevated position of the epic sub-genre. The texts and poets that are considered classic by Theodorus are foregrounded and shown to construct national identity through epic and its mythology, as Zuleika learns Virgil’s Aeneid for her ‘Roman History class’. She highlights the inappropriateness of this approach to learning and the construction of her identity, yet, whilst the tone of the piece is overtly dismissive, there is an underlying irony that the poet has chosen a carefully constructed composition with a resonance of classical epic to express anti-epic concerns. Thus, the tradition of epic ideology, as read by Theodorus, Zuleika’s teacher, or theorists like Bakhtin and Auerbach, rather than just the form itself, is revealed as constraining and predetermined. Evaristo

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self-reXexively utilizes, yet critiques, an epic structure in order to vocalize a political agenda of race, gender, and literary hierarchy. Therefore, The Emperor’s Babe is in a paradoxical location that epitomizes ‘hating tradition properly’: at once colluding with, whilst subverting, classical epic structure. Evaristo, like Walcott, exploits her text’s post-epic position; as its dual aYliation to post-colonial politics and Western literary tradition determines that, it is from this innate but compromised position that insurgence is best articulated. The notion of ‘hating tradition properly’ supports readings of Omeros and The Emperor’s Babe as post-epic texts. Both works adopt epic form as a device to demonstrate the restrictions of the perceived ‘completed’ genre, which can only present cliche´ and unchallengeable conservative ideology. Moreover, they demonstrate these restricted readings as ideological rather than structural, and both texts eventually present a re-imagined form of epic. Accordingly, Walcott and Evaristo’s works are post-epic: texts that are philosophically and structurally unsteady and that both reXect and dissemble classical epic, or at least modernist interpretations of it. Furthermore, in the contemporary verse-novel form, the poets are not merely engaging with a tradition of narrative poetry that can be seen to have begun with epic, but capitalizing on its generic ambivalence. It is in this context of otherness, set against canonical notions of epic that the conXation of postcolonialism and postmodernism is foregrounded against a paradoxical engagement with history and myth. Derek Walcott recognizes this in his 1992 Nobel lecture, as he describes his engagement with St. John Perse’s epic Anabasis (Walcott 1992b: 27): A boy with weak eyes skims a Xat stone across the Xat water of an Aegean inlet, and that ordinary action with the scything elbow contains the skipping lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and another child aims a bamboo arrow at a village festival, another hears the rustling march of the cabbage palms in a Caribbean sunrise, and from that sound with its fragments of tribal myth the compact expedition of [Perse’s] epic is launched, centuries and archipelagos apart.4 4 Walcott’s Nobel Lecture is a discussion of Saint-John Perse’s Anabasis, which foregrounds the history of epic in the Caribbean. It is signiWcant that he has identiWed Perse’s work, as a representation of this fusion: Perse was born in the Antilles to French plantation owner parents; he wrote Anabasis after a long residence in China. T. S. Eliot translated the epic into English in 1924 and Perse won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1960. Walcott draws attention to Perse as his forerunner, and highlights the hybridity of epic form and the diversity of indigenous history that informs it.

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Walcott foregrounds epic as a form that is inevitably intertextual and adaptable, he highlights the historical nature of the form and the similarity of human experience that has fed into various engagements with it. These engagements are diverse and multifarious, and Walcott uses Anabasis to draw attention to the parallels and refractions that have become recognizable and recurrent aspects of the form, including local detail, comparative histories, and cultural references, mythologies and engagement with formal traditions. Therefore, epic is deWned recursively by its post-epic oVspring, as it is presented as a form that can be utilized in a number of instances to represent diverse versions of identity. This fractured and unformed epic is set in direct contrast to Bakhtin’s ‘completed’ genre and has a new take on familiar concerns, in this way reiterating the conXuence of the ‘two meanings’, which Williams (2001: 284) identiWes in Omeros. The post-epic, therefore, encourages engagement with classical epic, whilst also operating subversively in relation to Bakhtin’s interpretation of that structure, thereby, as Williams suggests, repeatedly frustrating the binary logic which has been perceived to characterize the form (ibid. p. 285): The yoking together of opposed meanings in the text, therefore, may be achieved only as the result of an interested disavowal of the binary logic which gave each discourse its particular meaning in the Wrst place.

This form of epic is a conscious polyglot that denies polarization and categorization, and implies the re-visionary nature of the form. In contrast to Bakhtin’s thought, and just as Walcott articulates epic narrative as benign and inclusive, productive and universally applicable, modiWed epic becomes a viable mode of representation in the contemporary world. This is a present-day, post-colonial, epic perspective that is projected from the classical into the contemporary, global, post-epic world

10 A Divided Child, or Derek Walcott’s Post-Colonial Philology Cashman Kerr Prince

Derek Walcott’s career attracts the academic notice of scholars interested in English, post-colonial, and classical literatures; Walcott’s œuvre seems to invite interdisciplinary interest. Engaging scholarship from these perspectives, I argue for a more nuanced understanding of Walcott’s intertextual usages of classical literatures and situate his poetic praxis in a post-colonial context. While I will refer to various works by Walcott, the primary focus will be on the Wrst section of Cul de Sac Valley a lyric poem from Walcott’s 1987 collection, The Arkansas Testament, and on his 1973 book-length autobiographical poem, Another Life.1 The Arkansas Testament is divided into two sections, ‘Here’, and ‘Elsewhere’; Cul de Sac Valley is the second poem in the section 1 In addition to the speciWc debts acknowledged in this chapter, my entire reading is deeply inXuenced by the remarks of Zetzel. I thank the participants of the Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds conference for their stimulating contributions; the Arts Research Board at McMaster University, which made it possible for me to attend the conference; Nasrin Rahimieh for her support; and Indira Karamcheti for Wrst encouraging me to work on Walcott. Voor Meisje, als altijd. All citations to Another Life appear parenthetically in the text using the format: [part number]. [chapter number]. [section number, where appropriate]; [page number]. The chapters are numbered consecutively throughout the work; the reference by part number is for the beneWt of tracing themes or development in the poem as a whole. I cite Another Life from its original edition; the full text is reprinted in Collected Poems 1948–1984, 141–294. The latter edition reproduces the page layout of the original; references to Another Life in that edition may be found by adding 142 to the page numbers I cite.

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‘Here’, and also the second poem of this collection. From other titles in this section, such as Saint Lucia’s First Communion and Gros-Ilet, we infer that ‘Here’ refers to the Caribbean, if not Walcott’s native Saint Lucia. This is not mere autobiographical fallacy; the landscape described in Cul de Sac Valley supports such a reading.2 However, the unwary reader encountering ‘Here’ after the title The Arkansas Testament, might expect ‘Here’ to refer to the United States, since Arkansas is both a North American Indian tribe and a state’s name. A quick reference to the table of contents reveals that the title poem closes the second section, ‘Elsewhere’, and also the collection as a whole. As Edward Baugh observes (Baugh 1991: 126): In the reality of the poems, the relationship between ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’ is more complex than the simple opposition of the two terms would suggest.

Thus there is one reversal, one hermeneutic about-face, between the opening of the collection and the opening of this poem; this manoeuvre, achieved by the ordering of the collection, is not without meaning. Baugh holds that (ibid. p. 126): with Walcott, ‘here’ has increasingly become a place to which one returns, a place one has to reclaim repeatedly in an eVort made more and more precarious and compulsive as the gulf of memory widens.

This spatial dislocation or ambiguity is one of the many tensions which Walcott spans, and to which we shall return later in this chapter. The seven-page lyric poem, Cul de Sac Valley consists of four sections, each written in quatrains of verses three to Wve words long. The form of the poem is the theme of the opening quatrain: A panel of sunrise / on a hillside shop / gave these stanzas / their stilted shape.

This statement of form, a complete sentence in one quatrain, gives way to an eight-quatrain long sentence concerned with poetics—a conditional sentence followed by an indicative statement. The apodosis opens: If my craft is blest; / if this hand is as / accurate, as honest / as their carpenter’s . . . 2 The length of line and the form of stanzas derives from the landscape: ‘A panel of sunrise / on a hillside shop’ (vv. 1–2. That this is a Caribbean hillside is guaranteed by the towns named in vv. 163–64: ‘. . . Forestie`re, / Orle´ans, Fond St. Jacques’.

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The speaker of the poem compares ‘my craft’ (v. 5) and ‘this hand’ (v. 6)—the writing hand, and, metonymically, the writing itself—with the craft, the hand (and, metonymically, the handiwork) of ‘their carpenter’ (v. 8).3 The apodosis Xows into the protasis, beginning in the third stanza: every frame, intent / on its angles, would / echo this settlement / of unpainted wood . . .

The English subjunctive would tells us the comparison is not valid. In grammatical terms, this is a present contrafactual condition; the present scenario, of a poetic craft equal to the craft of the builder of the hillside shop, is unrealized. The speaking poet is found wanting in the face of the ‘unpainted wood’ (v. 12) of the ‘settlement’ (v. 11). The settlement’s carpenter wins out. Nevertheless the contrafactual condition remains in the poem, so each reader can know the poet thinks the carpenter more accurate, more honest. Whether this conditional should be read as a literal comparison or as a disingenuous piece of poetic rhetoric must remain unanswered for some lines yet. While the carpenter’s skills may be better than the poet’s, the speaker repeats the metaphor of poet as carpenter. The protasis continues: as consonants scroll oV my shaving plane in the fragrant Creole of their native grain; from a trestle bench they’d curl at my foot, C’s, R’s, with a French or West African root from a dialect throng3 Since ‘their’ is plural in number, there are two possible referents: ‘this settlement’ (v. 11), a singular noun referring to the collectivity of the buildings that comprise the settlement; or, ‘hand’ (v. 6), a noun used in the singular, then referred to in the plural (a pair of hands sharing the same body, the same maker). The carpenter is then either a builder (a literal carpenter) or a deity (a metaphorical carpenter), respectively. I prefer the former reading, which is in keeping with the corporeality of the imagery in this section of Cul de Sac Valley even though the poetic grammar demands a reader read on for another three lines before Wnding the referent of ‘their’ (v. 8) in the ‘settlement’ (v. 11).

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ing, its leaves unread yet light on the tongue of their native road; (vv. 13–24)

The speaking poet is now a carpenter who uses ‘my shaving plane’ (v. 14), labouring to make ‘every frame, intent / on its angles’ (vv. 9– 10); the carpenter planes wood to create structures, the poet shaves oV consonants to create the structure of a poem. (The image of whittling down language is hardly surprising in a poem of such short verses, where each unnecessary word must be shaved away; this image admirably captures the poet’s process of revision, and resonates with many writers.) Both the carpenter and the poet, then, engage in an act of poiesis, in its radical, Greek sense. The English word poetry, and its cognates, comes from the Greek poie´o (
Øø), signifying ‘I make, I create’; the Greek poı´ema (
Æ), root of our English poem, signiWes ‘a thing made; a work of art; a poem’. The polysemous resonances of the Greek terminology subtend this Wrst section of Cul de Sac Valley. Both poet and carpenter are crafting poie´mata: literally, both are making objects; the speciWc object which each makes is, in its own right, a poı´ema. Just as stray wood is scrolled away, yielding a frame intent on its angles, so too are stray letters scrolled away from the poem. Since wood-shavings resemble the piece of wood from which they were planed, we know that the speaking poet hypothesizes a work of art crafted ‘in the fragrant Creole / of their native grain’. Being planed to craft the very poem we are reading (a perhaps not unlikely conceit) the word is heavily planed indeed, producing such a compact poem of short verses (iambic trimeters, in fact). The poet’s material, ‘a dialect throng- / ing, its leaves unread / yet light on the tongue / of their native road’ is an oral language, with the thronging dialect recalling the multiplicity of Caribbean patois or a similar linguistic scenario replete with Creole languages. The leaves of this dialect are unread but frequently spoken; the negative expression of this orality (unread / yet) reminds the readers they are reading this poem which has oral roots. The ‘leaves unread’ continues the ambiguity between poet and carpenter, recalling the leaves of trees stripped when it becomes wood or building material, and also the leaves of poems, as in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass or the Latin pagina, which is ‘leaf’, ‘writing surface’, and

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‘written text’ (Lewis and Short 1969).4 Yet this idyllic portrait of eVortlessly rendering oral language into written verse is the culmination of the present contrafactual condition; the enjambment of ‘throng- / ing’ carries the reader to the semicolon at the end of the sixth stanza and the culmination of the portrait of what might be. Instead, this poet must work. The seventh stanza begins with the adversative conjunction ‘but’, bursting (as it were) the preceding idyll. Unlike the carpenter, the speaking poet faces rebellious wood: but drawing towards my pegged-out twine with bevelled boards of unpainted pine, like muttering shale, exhaling trees refresh memory with their smell: bois canot, bois campeˆche, hissing: What you wish from us will never be, your words is English, is a diVerent tree. (vv. 25–36)5 4 For Whitman, the interplay between material support and poem runs throughout Leaves of Grass. Consider ‘Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand’ (from the 1891–92 edition of Leaves, ‘Calamus’ section), which oVers one succinct example of this juxtaposition: the poetic voice speaks to the reader: ‘But these leaves conning you con at peril, / For these leaves and me you will not understand, . . .’ (p. 271); so, too, ‘Scented Herbage of My Breast’ from the same section and edition: ‘Scented herbage of my breast, / Leaves from you I glean, I write, to be perused best afterwards, / Tombleaves, body-leaves growing up above me above death, / . . . / Every year shall you bloom again, out from where you retired you shall emerge again . . .’ (p. 268). From the earlier, 1855, edition of Leaves of Grass, the preface (especially 5–7) and part of what becomes ‘Song of Myself’ (31: ‘A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; . . . Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, . . .’) express a similar commingling of nature and the materiality of the written book of poetry. See Nathanson (1992: 65–7 and passim for a study of Whitman’s juxtaposition of body, nature, and writing. Walcott plays with this classical convention, referring to ‘some novel’s leaves’ (III.15.i; 96) and again: ‘All of the epics are blown away with the leaves, / blown with the careful calculations on brown paper; / these were the only epics: the leaves’ (IV.22.1; 142). More elaborately, he uses the phrase ‘turning pages of the sea’ (16.1; 104); once more nature and literature combine, but now in a new way. 5 This passage has parallels in Another Life: ‘I watched the vowels curl from the tongue of the carpenter’s plane, / resinous, fragrant / labials of our forests, / over the

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No matter how many French or West African consonants are shaved away, the very odour of the wood reminds the poet he is not crafting a poem of English wood. No yew trees here. Rather these trees, the bois canot, bois campeˆche, signify their Caribbean roots by their aroma, by their similarity to ‘muttering shale’.6 Additionally, on a linguistic level, these trees mark their distance from the Queen’s English by the numeric disparity between the subject ‘words’ and the verb ‘is’ in vv. 35–6. What, precisely, is this ‘muttering shale’? The metaphor highlights the rustling of the leaves as wind blows through trees; the words ‘muttering shale’ can be read as imitating the sound of this rustling, much more vividly than does the ‘hissing’ in v. 33. The trees exhale and hiss; the wind wafting the ‘smell’ of v. 31 is absent. Rather, the trees themselves exhale, personifying the trees. Shale is deWned as, dialectically, ‘loose ore’, or ‘an argillaceous Wssile rock’.7 Literally this makes no sense; however, the sounds of the words ‘muttering shale’ imitate the sound of a wind setting the leaves in motion and the staccato sound (note the double t in muttering) of leaves—especially dry leaves in autumn—hitting against one another. Onomatopoeia, but also a red herring: ‘muttering shale’ recalls ‘murmuring shoals’. The latter expression both recalls the aural similarity of babbling brooks to rustling leaves and also situates the bois canot and bois campeˆche in an island context. Just as the leaves rustle, so too do the ocean’s waves whoosh: the ‘muttering shale’ of v. 29 encapsulates the metapoetic tension, which is the subject of this Wrst section of Cul de Sac Valley. Walcott’s leaves of poetry come from Caribbean (colonial), not European (imperial centre), trees, and, as they declaim, they will never be the Queen’s English; like the muttering shale, Walcott’s English will always be a language made anew. Walcott’s language like ‘muttering shale’, is an innovative language striving to express the non-traditional experiences of colonialism within the tradition of English language poetry. plain wood / the back crouched, / the vine-muscled wrist, / like a man rowing, / sweat-Xeck on blond cedar. / Disgruntled Dominic.’ (II.12; 74); ‘Dominic, from whose plane vowels were shorn / odorous as forest, . . .’ (IV.20.iv; 135). 6 I hope the reader will forgive my alteration of Walcott’s metaphor into a simile. 7 OED 2 (s.v. shale, sb:1 and sb:2 ).

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Is this innovation without precedent? Consider two poetic examples, one Greek and one Latin, which can be read as antecedents to Walcott’s imagery and use of language. The Wrst is from Theocritus, Idyll 1: ± Ø łØŁæØ Æ ŒÆd ±
 ı, ÆN
º , Æ, ±
 d ÆE
ƪÆE Ø,  º  ÆØ, ±f b ŒÆd 

ıæ  · [Sweet is the whispered music of yonder pinetree by the springs, goatherd, and sweet too thy piping, . . . ] (Gow 1952 vol. 1: 4–5)

For Theocritus, as for Walcott, the trees speak; Walcott takes this poetic image one step further with his ‘muttering shale’.8 The onomatopoetic eVects attest to the disciplined mastery of Walcott’s technique, even as the imagery recalls classical literature; this is not a servile imitation, however, but the invocation of a conceit from classical poetry in order to create it anew with speaking stones. At the same time, Walcott has his trees tell us a story—the wood being planed in Cul de Sac Valley recounts Walcott’s engagement with the English language. Recall Catullus 4, where the story is told is by the ship: Phasellus ille, quem uidetis, hospites, ait fuisse nauium celerrimus, . . . (Fordyce 1961) [That skiV, whom you see, friends, says it was the swiftest of ships, . . . ] (author’s translation)

Catullus places the narrative of the poem in the mouth, as it were, of a boastful sailing vessel. For Walcott, the wood, which is now the raw material for his craft, recalls, metonymically, the trees that once they were: bois canot, bois campeˆche. This parallels the move in Catullus 4, where the boat recalls the forest it once was (v. 10 V., especially with the comata silua in v.11).9 Walcott makes a poem, then, about the making of a poem; Creole vowels may be recalcitrant, but they are 8 There are Homeric echoes in Walcott, too; the sound-image of the
ººØ  ŁÆº

Æ recurs in Omeros. 9 Edition Fordyce (1961).

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disciplined ‘in accurate iambics’.10 So, too, wood is planed into houses. The poet of Cul de Sac Valley is a craftsman, a builder. Even this conception of poetry has a classical antecedent. Nagy (1979: 300) has found traces of this Indo-European notional tradition in the etymology of the name of Homer.11 While the etymology may not be known to Walcott, we can assume the poetry of Pindar is. Recall Pythian 3.113–14: K K
ø Œ ºÆ H, Œ   xfi Æ fid –æ Æ, [from famed words, such as carpenters—wise men (poets) / fashion].12 The context makes it clear that Homer is one of the poet-carpenters Pindar has in mind.13 For Pindar it is a compliment to refer to Homer as a builder or craftsman, even if those of us schooled in Plato consider such a banausic comparison shocking. Likewise for Walcott there is no shame in foregrounding the crafter of poetry; in Cul de Sac Valley the narrative voice of the poet expresses a wish to have a craft as blest as that of the carpenter’s.14

10 I borrow this line from Prelude, a poem appearing in the 1948 collection 25 Poems, which now stands at the head of Collected Poems 1948–1984 (Walcott 1986). The context of this verse is: ‘And my life, too early of course for the profound cigarette, / The turned doorhandle, the knife turning / In the bowels of the hours, must not be made public / Until I have learnt to suVer / In accurate iambics’. See also the comments of Brown (1991: 17). 11 ‘I conclude, then, that the root *ar- in Ho´meros traditionally denotes the activity of a poet as well as that of a carpenter, and this semantic bivalence corresponds neatly with the Indo-European tradition of comparing music/poetry with carpentry, by way of the root tek(s)-.’ 12 Text from Snell et al. 1980. 13 Consider too the usage of the verb ›æ Ø (Liddell and Scott 1968) ‘I. imitate Homer, use Homeric phrases. II. act scenes from Homer; III. indulge unnatural lust (with an intentional equivoque; Ach. Tat. 8.9’. In imitating Homer, weren’t the ancient Greeks adapting his Creole (poetic dialect, an artiWcial Ionic) wood to Wt their own structures? 14 The word ‘carpenter’ here may refer only to a craftsman, so invokes solely the classical poetic antecedents adumbrated above, or there may also be a Christian resonance, and the carpenter in question is Jesus, proxy for the god who provides the sunshine. In Empson’s terms, both signiWcations are equally present; as he writes (Empson 1989: 15–16): ‘the immediate context of the use of the word now in view may also be felt to ‘‘imply’’ the extra meaning, and indeed will commonly support the habit of giving the word this Implication by providing another example of it. . . . People make words do what seems to be needed, and whether one of the normal uses of a word carries a given Implication is a question of fact, however hard to decide.’

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At this point one might question the validity of my reading, and especially the intertextual moments adduced above.15 As Walcott himself writes: ‘Exegesis, exegesis, writers / giving their own sons homework’ (IV.22.iii; 145). After all, what is to stop me from adducing manifold intertextual moments? And do I know if Walcott intended to allude to these passages from Theocritus or Catullus or Pindar? Do I know if Walcott read these texts in their original languages or in translations? (Does it matter?) Contemplating Ce´saire and Perse, Walcott asked, in his 1970 essay ‘The Muse of History’,16 about the relations between these two writers (Walcott 1998: 50–1): I do not know if one poet is indebted to the other, but whatever the bibliographical truth is, one acknowledges not an exchange of inXuences, not imitation, but the tidal advance of the metropolitan language, of its empire, if you like, which carries simultaneously, fed by such strong colonial tributaries, poets of such diVerent beliefs as Rimbaud, Char, Claudel, Perse, and Ce´saire.

In the remainder of this chapter I want to shift my focus away from a close textual reading of Cul de Sac Valley and toward such metapoetic questions as these, including their foregrounding in Another Life. In his 1970 essay, ‘Meanings’, Walcott oVers autobiographical remarks together with a critical narrative of his involvement in theatre, especially the Trinidad Theatre Workshop; the two histories merge because, as he writes: ‘it is almost death to the spirit to try to survive as an artist under colonial conditions, which haven’t really changed with our independent governments.’ (Reprinted in Hamner 1993: 45–50). This spectre of death was particularly pronounced for the young Walcott, whose family life was shadowed by the spectre of his dead father, invoked at the opening of this essay. At the same time, Walcot watched friends succumb to these spiritual deaths: in Another Life he writes about the death of Harry Simmons, the breaking of the spirit of Gregorias, as well as his own crise d’artiste.17 Walcott escaped this spiritual death, thanks in part to literature, at least as it is received 15 Hinds (1998: 21–5) discusses the diVerence between ‘allusion’ and ‘intertextuality’, as well as the stakes in our choice of name. 16 ‘The Muse of History’ reprinted in What the Twilight Says: Essays (Walcott 1998: 36–64). 17 Another Life (IV.19–21; 127–40) discusses Simmons and Gregorias; Walcott’s own crise is the subject of IV.18; 119–16.

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and inXected by West Indian experience (Walcott in Hamner [1993] 1997: 50): We love rhetoric, and this has created a style, a panache about life that is particularly ours. Our most tragic folk songs and our most self-critical calypsos have a driving, life-asserting force. Combine that in our literature with a long experience of classical forms and you’re bound to have something exhilarating. I’ve never consciously gone after this in my plays, nor do we go after this kind of folk-exuberance deliberately in my theatre company. But in the best actors in the company you can see this astounding fusion ignite their style, this combination of classic discipline inherited through the language, with a strength of physical expression that comes from the folk music. It’s probably the same in Nigeria with Wole Soyinka’s Company. It’s the greatest bequest the Empire made. Those who sneer at what they call an awe of tradition forget how old the West Indian experience is. I think that precisely because of their limitations our early education must have ranked with the Wnest in the world. The grounding was rigid—Latin, Greek, and the essential masterpieces, but there was this elation of discovery. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Horace, Vergil—these writers weren’t jaded but immediate experiences. The atmosphere was competitive, creative. It was cruel, but it created our literature.

The cruelty of an imperial education may be a lamentable fact, yet it is also a potential for creativity, as Walcott notes. He even embeds elements of this colonial education in his poetry, making poetry of the process whereby Walcott himself was educated to be a proper colonial subject. Consider this example, one among many, from Another Life (II.11.i; 69):18 Cramming halfheartedly for the Scholarship, I looked up from my red-jacketed Williamson’s History of the British Empire, towards the barracks’ plumed, imperial hillsides where cannon-bursts of bamboo sprayed the ridge, riding to Khartoum, Rorke’s Drift, through dervishes of dust, behind the chevroned jalousies I butchered fellaheen, thuggees, Mamelukes, wogs. 18 For details concerning Walcott’s education, see King (2000: 24–6). According to King, Walcott studied Latin but not Greek: ‘On Barbados he would have learned Greek’ (p. 26). For a fuller account of the role of Classics in Caribbean education, see Greenwood 2005, 2007.

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Walcott’s education, as in his half-hearted studying depicted here, is focused on the British Empire; as a colonial subject Walcott sides with the British not the ‘fellaheen, thuggees, Mamelukes, wogs’, even as he undercuts his own identiWcation with the British by his use of the verb ‘butchered’. Certainly Walcott (both narrative voice and poet) escaped these literal deaths of colonial subjects narrated here, as well as the spectre of spiritual, artistic death—a telling and crucial aspect of the colonial condition, certainly on the level of social or personal history—but the cruelty of this education is part of the price.19 Rather than express outrage at this cruelty in excoriating prose, Walcott oVers restrained commentary in his poetry; it is to this commentary that we now turn. Using rhetorical subtlety and some of that same ‘classical discipline inherited through the language’ that he praises in company actors, Walcott presents scenes of imperial instruction in Another Life. Here at the outposts of empire,20 we see schoolmaster and boys engaged in the pedagogical project: ‘ ‘‘Boy! Who was Ajax?’’ the voice of the schoolmaster asks’ (I.3; 16). That question prompts a recounting of Walcott’s personal mythology; the balance of I.3 is structured as an abecedary where Ajax cedes to Berthilia (compared to Cassandra), next Choiseul (‘surly chauVeur from Clauzel’s garage, / [who] bangs Troy’s gate shut!’ [1.3; 17]). The cast of characters includes: ‘Gaga / the town’s transvestite, housemaid’s darling,/ . . . most Greek of all, the love that hath no name’ (I.3; 18–9); ‘Helen? / Janie, the town’s one clear-complexioned whore’ (I.3; 19); ‘Kyrie! kyrie! twitter / a choir of surpliced blackbirds in the pews’ (I.3; 19; culminating in ‘Zandoli, / nicknamed The Lizard, / rodent-exterminator’, I.3; 22). This mythology is not exclusively classical: ‘These dead, these derelicts, / that alphabet of the emaciated, / they were the stars of my mythology’ (I.3; 22), as Walcott summarizes at the end of this chapter. As the verses just quoted show, classical past and Caribbean past 19 See Bhabha (1994: 213–14) on the psychic anxiety which marks the post-colonial condition, as well as Fanon (1963: 35–95, especially p. 58). For a Wctional portrayal of this diYculty, see Dangarembga (1998). Consider too these lines from Another Life which express the fear of another sort of spiritual death: ‘Baron, ship-chandler, merchant, water-clerk, / the Wction of their own lives claimed each one’ (I.6.iii; 39). 20 Walcott’s description: ‘Broken, decrepit port / for some rum-eyed romantic, / his empire’s secret rusting in a sea-chest’ (I.6.ii; 36) seems not inappropriate. This marks, in fact, one of the beauties of Another Life: a polyphony of competing attitudes and ideas are amalgamated into a polysemous narrative.

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combine.21 Rather than using Greek mythology to elevate Caribbean characters (the position of Ismond 2001:11), Walcott calls all myths into question and amalgamates them in his revision of history. In fact, this combinatory mythology begins even before the schoolmaster’s voice is heard at the start of this abecedary: ‘The black lamplighter with Demeter’s torch / ignites the iron trees above the shacks. / Boy! Who was Ajax?’.22 Sometimes this combination of Classical mythology and Caribbean reality is consciously playful, as with the name Gregorias; at the end of Another Life (IV.23.14; 151–52), Walcott writes: But, ah Gregorias / I christened you with that Greek name because / it echoes the blest thunders of the surf, / because you painted our Wrst, primitive frescoes, / because it sounds explosive, / a black Greek’s!

It is this amalgam of mythologies that animates Walcott’s poetic practice. These citations are a perfect illustration of Walcott’s view of myths in Caribbean culture, expressed in a 1977 interview:23 What appears to be the most old-fashioned aspect of Third World writing, or to West Indian writing in particular, is really its most powerful aspect: the tribe is being told a story that comes from the memory of that tribe.

Here, the memory of the tribe includes the Caribbean reality as well as the imperial education which they received. Elsewhere, he writes about his inculcation into the realm of English literature (Walcott 1998: 62):24 I knew, from childhood, that I wanted to become a poet, and like any colonial child I was taught English literature as my natural inheritance. Forget the snow and the daVodils. They were real, more real than the heat and the oleander, perhaps, because they lived on the page, in imagination, and therefore in memory. There is a memory of imagination in literature which has nothing to do with actual experience, which is, in fact, another life, and that experience of the imagination will continue to make actual the 21 Baugh and Nepaulsingh (2004: 236–44) adumbrate these references, classical and Caribbean, noting (p. 236): ‘The playful challenge to the reader in this chapter is to decipher how each association was made between St. Lucian and Greek lore. As St. Lucians reminded the editors in 2003, the names and nicknames for St. Lucians in this chapter are real, not Wctional.’ Rather than deciphering the conjoined associations, I am interested in how the collocation of classical past and Caribbean present interrogate both mythological systems even as Walcott uses these other, fused, mythological constellations to mirror post-colonial reality in a new poetics. 22 This quotation concludes I.3.i; 16 (only the last verse of which I cited previously). 23 The interview was with Sharon Ciccarelli; the quotation is at Baer (ed. 1996: 44). 24 See also the discussion at Hardwick (2002: 240).

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quest of a medieval knight or the bulk of a white whale, because of the power of a shared imagination.

The schoolmaster’s stern tones give rise to a creative revision of the academic subject. Walcott returns to this point, this pedantic interjection, in I.5 (which bears as epigraph the Vergilian tag):25 ‘Boy! Name the great harbours of the world!’ ‘Sydney! Sir.’ ‘San Fransceesco!’ ‘Naples, Sah!’ ‘And what about Castries?’ ‘Sah, Castries ees a coaling station and der twenty-seventh best harba in der world!’ ‘In eet the entire Breetesh Navy can be heeden!’ ‘What is the motto of Saint Lucia, boy?’ ‘Statio haud maleWda carinis.’ ‘Sir!’ ‘Sir!’ ‘And what does that mean?’ ‘Sir, a safe anchorage for sheeps!’ (I.5; 29–30)

This is an education in geography designed to reify the hierarchy of cultural values which places Castries, Saint Lucia twenty-seventh; the value of this harbor is that it can hide the entire British Navy. At the same time that this scene presents one instance of the cruelty Walcott mentions in ‘Meanings’, the seriousness is undercut by the transcription of dialect and the ‘sheeps’ taking anchorage.26 The cruelty revealed, the sophisticated wit brings us back from the precipice of anger: ‘High on the Morne, / Xowers medalled the gravestones of the Inniskillings, / too late’ (I.5; 30). The narrative poem, like the waves of the ever-present ocean, continues come what tempests may. 25 The Latin tag reverses Aeneas’ description of Tenedos once Troy has fallen (Virgil, Aeneid II.21–3): ‘Est in conspectu Tenedos, notissima fama / insula, diues opum Priami dum regna manebant, / nunc tantum sinus et statio male Wda carinis: . . .’ (Mynors 1969). [‘There is before the eyes Tenedos, an island most known to fame, rich in goods while the states of Priam stood, now just a bay and a harbor scarcely safe for ships: . . . ‘] (author’s translation). 26 Baugh notes a similar ‘sophisticated play of wit, mimicking a French pronunciation of ‘‘this’’ ‘ in ‘The French are very good at these / sort of thing’ (‘Vers de Socie´te´ ’ from The Arkansas Testament); Baugh (1991:125).

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One makes the best of the situation, much as Vergil’s assessment of Tenedos is turned on its head. Walcott’s poetics is an instantiation of post-colonial philology, as signalled in the title of this essay. Philology as we know it, or New Philology as it is also known, traces its beginnings back to the work undertaken while in India by Sir William Jones from 1785 to 1792 (see AarsleV 1967: 121–39; Dowling 1994: 70–7).27 This is the model and the historical origin for philology as practiced by scholars in the last two centuries. Some elements of Jones’s understanding of philology go back to at least the time of Erasmus;28 the diVerent objective is what marks the newness of this philology. The new philology seeks not the originary Divine Word, but that Ursprache, proto-Indo-European, 27 Dowling discusses the connections between Balliol College, Oxford (thanks to Jowett’s revision of the Greats curriculum) and the running of the British Empire. As Jones ([1771] 1969) writes in the preface to his Grammar of the Persian Language (pp. xii–xiii): ‘A variety of causes, which need not be mentioned here, gave the English nation a most extensive power in that kingdom: our India company began to take under their protection the princes of that country, by whose protection they gained their Wrst settlement; a number of important aVairs were to be transacted in peace and war between nations equally jealous of one another, who had not the common instrument of conveying their sentiments; the servants of the company received letters which they could not read, and were ambitious of gaining titles of which they could not comprehend the meaning; it was found highly dangerous to employ the natives as interpreters, upon whose Wdelity they could not depend; and it was at last discovered that they must apply themselves to the study of the Persian language, in which all the letters from the Indian princes were written. . . . The languages of Asia will now, perhaps, be studied with uncommon ardour; they are known to be useful, and will soon be found instructive and entertaining; the valuable manuscripts that enrich our public libraries will be in a few years elegantly printed; the manners and sentiments of the eastern nations will be perfectly known; and the limits of our knowledge will be no less extended than the bounds of our empire.’ I have quoted this passage at length since it narrates a history of Western motives for knowledge of the East, scripts the knowledge of Persian into this regime of knowledge, and explicitly demonstrates that Persian is here viewed only as a tool whose pedagogical value (entertaining though it might be) lies precisely in its ability to support the bounds of the British empire. Cronin (2000: 39) quotes from this document to underscore the ‘eVectiveness of the translator as imperial subject (informer/informant)’. 28 AarsleV (1967: 124) writes: ‘The origin of Jones’s method [which he called ‘philology’] is no doubt to be found in part in the careful and precise Greek and Latin scholarship, which he had learned from Robert Sumner at Harrow; but it has its foundation also in Jones’s own systematic and critical bent of mind.’ Jones himself (vii) connects his philological enterprise to ‘the models of taste and elegance’ of the learned men of Ptolemaic Egypt; thus the history of philology—both Jones’s new and the ‘old’ of Alexandrian scholars during the Hellenistic period—is enmeshed with the history of imperialisms. This connection, I argue, is not lost on Walcott.

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foundation of the Indo-European family of languages. In the quest for this linguistic original, the modern discipline of historical linguistics came into being. The scholarly enterprise of philology thus is founded upon the institution of the British Empire; it is this geopolitical order which took Sir William Jones to India and brought him into contact with Sanskrit, thereby granting him the opportunity to see the connections between classical Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and other Indo-European languages. Thus, we can consider the academic discipline of philology as a colonial enterprise; the two are deeply imbricated and may well be inseparable.29 Since philology is linked to the rule of empire, what then is post-colonial philology? This, I submit, is the process of linguistic creation, that we have already observed in Walcott’s poetry. Language is created anew; this is not the search for linguistic origins or historical connections between languages. Rather, this is the process of creating new language and new connections between languages. Consider this further example, discussing the characters of Captain Foquarde and his wife in Another Life (I.5.ii; 31): . . . I’d hear the Captain’s Wife, / sobbing, denying. / Next day her golden face seemed shrunken, / then, when he ulysseed, she bloomed again, / the batswift transients returned, / so many, perhaps they quartered in the eaves.

To ulyssee is not a canonical verb listed in the dictionary, yet we know what it means here. Walcott’s Caribbean present is observed through the scrim of classical literature—and indeed classicizing French literature; we have here not odysseed but ulysseed. The French resonance is reinforced a few pages later: ‘Heureux lui qui comme Ulysse, / ou Capitaine Foquarde’ (I.6.iv; 39). Classical and French literatures (among many traditions) provide Walcott with antecedents and inspiration, both poetic and linguistic. In tandem with his attention to the formal discipline of poetry, Walcott exhibits a certain freedom of invention in his choice of language. In creating new words or meanings for words, Walcott

29 See Cronin (2000: 33–4) for an analysis of knowledge as power in the imperial context; Cronin goes on to discuss (p. 39) William Jones as a translator working within an imperial context. See also Trivedi in this volume. Note that this imbrication is not exclusively an attitude of the past.

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draws on the traditions of world literature in a rich admixture.30 This is, as the trees in Cul de Sac Valley pronounce, a sign of Creolity. Even as Walcott works to craft poems in English, he enriches the English language he receives. The trees may express the self-abnegation, which is part of the process of colonization, but Walcott resists this process and enlarges the realm of Caribbean aesthetics, the concept of the Universal (which is typically marked white, European, male, and imperial), and the nobility of English language poetry. 31 Walcott enacts the Creolity, which Bernabe´, Chamoiseau and ConWant (1993: 26) demand be praised: La Cre´olite´ est l’agre´gat interactionnel ou transactionnel, des e´le´ments culturels caraı¨bes, europe´ens, africains, asiatiques, et levantins, que le joug de l’Histoire a re´unis sur le meˆme sol. . . . Notre cre´olite´ est donc ne´e de ce formidable ‘migan’ que l’on a eu trop vite fait de re´duire a` son seul aspect linguistique ou a` un seul des termes de sa composition. Notre personnalite´ culturelle porte tout a` la fois les stigmates de cet univers et les te´moignages de sa ne´gation. Nous nous sommes forge´s dans l’acceptation et le refus, donc dans le questionnement permanent, en toute familiarite´ avec les ambiguı¨te´s les plus complexes, hors de toutes re´ductions, de toute purete´, de tout appauvrissement. [Creolity is the aggregation of interactions or transactions, of Caribbean, European, African, Asian, and Levantine cultural elements which the yoke of History has brought together in the same land. . . . Our Creolity is thus born of this wonderful ‘migan’, which is far too quickly reduced to only its linguistic aspect or one of its constituent elements. Our cultural personality bears at the same time the stigmata of this universe and the witness of its negation. We ourselves are forged in the acceptance and the refusal, the state 30 We Wnd a similar remark about the range of reference of Creolity in Bernabe´ et al. (1993: 48): ‘le domaine [de la cre´olite´] c’est le language. Son appe´tit: toutes les langues du monde.’ 31 Thus, Walcott’s practice is similar to the observation of Bernabe´, Chamoiseau, and ConWant. While these three authors rail against value-laden hierarchies and the dynamics of cultural delimitation, Walcott addresses the problem in his poetry, oVering an implicit resolution or reversal of this paradigm at the same time as he broaches the subject. This does not mean he is free of polemic; see ‘Muse’ (pp. 38–9) and the discussion at Hardwick (2002: 237–8); the distinguishing feature is that Walcott does not limit himself to polemic or to anger. He distances himself from ‘all the syntactical apologists of the Third World / explaining why their artists die, / by their own hands, magicians of the New Vision. / Screaming the same shit’ (IV.19; 127). Instead he takes as his goal a new art and the culture to support it; as he puts it: ‘Who want a new art, / and their artists dying in the old way’ (IV.19; 128). So he is not bound by this history, even as he acknowledges it.

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of permanent questioning, completely familiar with the most complex ambiguities, removed from all reductions, all purity, all impoverishment.] (author’s translation)

The process of forging a cultural personality in the face of complex ambiguities, polyglot polysemy, and the twin poles of acceptance and negation is the principle theme of Walcott’s Another Life. The same process is thematized in Cul de Sac Valley: a Creole heritage, frequently denied and infrequently accepted, gives rise to an enriched language of English poetry and an expression of the ‘moi profond’ which ‘la rivie`re de notre cre´olite´ alluviale’ [the river of our Xuvial Creolity] creates and reiWes. As Bernabe´, Chamoiseau, and ConWant (1993: 43) argue: Notre premie`re richesse, a` nous e´crivains cre´oles, est de posse´der plusieurs langues: le cre´ole, franc¸ais, anglais, portugais, espagnol, etc. Il s’agit maintenant d’accepter ce bilinguisme potentiel et de sortir des usages contraints que nous en avons. De ce terreau, faire lever sa parole. De ces langues baˆtir notre language. [Our primary wealth as creole writers is the possession of several languages: Creole, French, English, Portuguese, Spanish, etc.. Now we must accept this potential bilingualism and move beyond the constrained styles we have. From this land, raise our speech. From these languages, build our language.] (author’s translation)

As Bernabe´, Chamoiseau, and ConWant (1993: 48) argue, this Creolity is a polyglot richness with liberatory potential: . . . c’est surtout rompre l’ordre coutumier de ces langues, renverser leurs signiWcations e´tablies. C’est cette rupture qui permettra d’ampliWer l’audience d’une connaissance litte´raire de nous-meˆmes. [ . . . it means especially to rupture the customary order of languages, to reverse their established signiWcations. This rupture allows us to expand the audience’s literary awareness of ourselves.] (author’s translation)

Breaking the customary order of languages, reversing the accepted signiWcations, marks a Creole writer’s liberation from the hegemony of one language or culture, from the tyranny of a masterful imperial culture. Is it any wonder, then, that traces of Walcott’s voracious appetite for the literatures of the world erupt in his poetry? The

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wealth of inXuences, only a few of which I have discussed in this chapter, are an integral aspect of Walcott’s poetics even as they become, in turn, subject of metapoetic pronouncements in the selfsame poems. Accepting the relations between Walcott’s texts and their wealth of antecedents, how are we to theorize their inXuence? One prominent theory is Harold Bloom’s ‘Anxiety of InXuence’. For Bloom, the history of literature, speciWcally poetry, can be described as the Freudian Oedipal complex writ on a larger scale. As he writes in the preface to the second edition of A Map of Misreading (Bloom 2003: 12): ‘Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli’ is a Wne reminder in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a book whose true subject is inXuence.

Imitation of a poet’s predecessor-fathers gives way to rejection and strong misreadings. For Bloom, Walcott does not count as a ‘strong poet’, or one successful in protecting himself against the stimuli of predecessor-poets; further, to explain Walcott’s poetics in such a fashion misses the point of his post-colonial hybridization (see also the discussion in Terada 1992: 43–81). It is true that Walcott writes out of the tension so succinctly expressed in his 1962 lyric poem A Far Cry from Africa: ‘. . . how choose / Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?’ (Walcott 1986: 18). The answer is to mediate between the two. Alan Shapiro comes closer to pinpointing this phenomenon than does Bloom; he describes Walcott (Shapiro 1986: 38):32 As a West Indian . . . writing in English, with Africa and England in his blood . . . Walcott is inescapably the victim and the beneWciary of the colonial society in which he was reared. He is a kind of a Caribbean Orestes . . . unable to satisfy his allegiance to one side of his nature without at the same time betraying the other.

Like Orestes, Walcott is caught in the intersection of two equally valid yet contradictory cultural imperatives. Like Orestes, Apollo comes to the rescue; here it is not the God of Prophecy who assists this Caribbean Orestes, but the God of Poetry. Not only has Walcott embodied the discipline of his classical education, he has also incorporated the 32 Hardwick (1996: 13) refers to Walcott himself likening ‘the experience of a poet rejected by his own society to the suVering of Philoctetes’.

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accuracy of English iambics, the history of world literatures in fact, to create a new, synthetic and organic, Creole poetics. This use of Creolity or hybridization as a core element of his poetics places Walcott Wrmly within Caribbean discourses and practices. The meanings of ‘hybridity’ within post-colonial contexts are much discussed; the importance of this concept cannot be overstated. As Wolf writes (Wolf 2000: 142): Hybrid identities and the multiplicity of cultural borders are permanent features of contemporary societies. They call for a state of knowledge and a state of consciousness that can withstand the pressure of constantly being called into question.

Within speciWcally post-colonial contexts, hybridity is a means to resist the colonial powers and frequently involves issues of doubling (if not of double consciousness). Wolf (ibid. pp. 131–35) reviews some of the vast scholarship on hybridity. In her reading of Bakhtin, Wolf writes:33 . . . hybridity describes the process of the authorial unmasking of another’s speech through a language that is ‘double-accented’ and ‘double-styled’; this idea is picked up and elaborated by Homi Bhabha, who holds that ‘the colonial encounter is . . . embedded a priori in power relations, and requires constant awareness of the limits and possibilities of representation. . . . Cultural diVerence is no longer seen as the source of conXict, but as the eVect of discriminatory practices; the production of cultural diVerentiation becomes a sign of authority.’

Since the production of knowledge is tied to the imperial project, the act of hybridization refuses the imperial project of precise delineation as it creates an amalgamation of cultures, languages, world views.34 As he writes in Another Life (II.11; 72): I am all, I am one / who feels as he falls with the thousand [runners who will break on loud sand / at Thermopylae] now his tendons harden / and the wind-god, Hourucan, combing his hair . . . 33 Wolf (2000: 134), redacting Bhabha. See also Hardwick (2002: 240), on one of the ‘deWning feature[s] of post-colonial literatures [being] awareness of and resistance to continuing colonialist attitudes’. 34 Terada (1992: 13–8) discusses how Walcott ‘viviWes conventional cartographical abstractions’. Cronin (2000: 33–52) especially pp. 33–8) discusses the Ordnance Survey Project in Ireland and the construction of imperial archives; this is another example of the imperial production of knowledge.

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The wealth of multiple cultures and languages are material for Walcott’s work.35 Walcott oVers clues to his own poetic praxis when he discusses the New World poets and their Adamic Covenant of naming in ‘The Muse of History’. As an epigraph to part two of Another Life (II; 47), Walcott excerpts Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps, describing ‘Adam’s task of giving things their names’. Walcott describes this covenant thus (Walcott 1998: 37–8): The great poets of the New World, from Whitman to Neruda, reject this sense of history. Their vision of man in the New World is Adamic. In their exuberance he is still capable of enormous wonder. Yet he has paid his accounts to Greece and Rome and walks in a world without monuments and ruins . . . Fact evaporates into myth. This is not the jaded cynicism which sees nothing new under the sun, it is an elation which sees everything as renewed.

Rather than a return to a lost, wholly innocent and positive paradise, this renaming is an exuberant and creative act in the face of the multiple valences and complexities of the New World; renaming expresses the historical horrors deWning the New World and moves beyond ‘the phonetic pain, the groan of suVering, the curse of revenge.’ (Walcott, ibid. pp. 39–9).36 Despite Walcott’s claim at the end of Another Life: ‘We were blest with a virginal, unpainted world / with Adam’s task of giving things their names, . . .’ (IV.23; 152), the world is not virginal; the cruel history recounted before we come to this passage aVects our reading of these penultimate lines.37 Aware of, 35 Butler (1993: 31–32) discusses material and its connection to women, starting from Plato, but does not address speciWcally the use of material in post-colonial contexts. While Walcott’s poetry is gendered, post-colonial philology need not be gendered inherently as male. 36 These horrors of history are part of what nature tells; see Another Life (III.22; 143). As Morrison (1999: 257) writes, in speciWc reference to Omeros and Walcott’s use of Golden Age imagery: ‘Although he rejects the idea of St. Lucia as a paradise, he has found heroes in the people of his homeland—not heroes who display valour on the Weld of battle—but men and women who bravely face the challenges of the sea and the tragedies of life. The world of Omeros contains suVering, but there is also the possibility of cathartic resolution and a transcendent heroism.’ 37 The Old World is not innocent of history, either; the history of twentieth century Europe makes that point abundantly clear. In the Old World, however—at least as I understand Walcott’s logic—there is the possibility to believe in actions having been undertaken for some ‘greater good’ (such as the Empire), or of being inherently and innately—dare one say ‘naturally’?—included in the category of the Universal. But the

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and responding to, the literary antecedents and indeed the newlyliberated Classics, Walcott—himself a New World poet in the vein of Neruda and Whitman—partakes in the elation of new perceptions and connections. This world is virginal in that it provides the raw material from which Walcott crafts his poetics (cruelty and all). From this impetus he Wghts against those forces which would see him still, see him dead.38 The epigraph by Andre´ Malraux (from his Psychology of Art) to section one (‘The Divided Child’) of Another Life, conjures precisely those forces. Narrating an encounter between the painters Cimabue and Giotto, Malraux observes (p. 1): What makes the artist is the circumstance that in his youth he was more deeply moved by the sight of works of art than by that of the things which they portray.

Yet, as Breslin notes, Walcott observing works of art (visual, but also literary) and comparing them to the reality he inhabits, encounters ‘disparities of race and culture [which] exacerbate the inherent split between body and representation’ (Breslin 2001: 164, but see 163–71 more generally). The basis for Walcott’s Wght against such forces is his exuberant love aVair with language: ‘It is the language which is the empire, and great poets are not its vassals but its princes.’ (Walcott 1998: 51). A prince himself of the empire of language, which he traces in the poetry of others, Walcott rules over his English with a benevolent, a generous, hand. English as the language of his poetry was not an intuitive or easy choice for Walcott; it is this, his own non-innocent engagement, and indeed active questioning, of the heritage of his second (not Wrst) language, which motivates Walcott’s post-colonial philology. He does not seek a return to a reiWed unity in his lifelong engagement with literature, but a means to navigate the divisions inserted into his post-colonial reality by the imperial educational system (and its language, English) which very fact of being a post-colonial subject forecloses this possibility. See Ismond, (2001: 9–10) for a succinct overview of the freighted question of history in a Caribbean context. 38 Another Life (IV.18.iii; 122–3): ‘how many would prefer to this poem / to see you drunken in a gutter, / and to catch in the corner of their workrooms / the uncertiWed odour of your death?’ I take these lines to be addressed by the narrative voice to the poet-narrator, with perhaps also a secondary, embedded, address to the narrator’s ‘master’.

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marked, deWned, created, and reiWed him—as subject and as poet. Walcott does not succumb to the cleavages inherent in the ‘nervous condition’ of colonialism,39 rather, his poetics bridge the chasm of fragmentation—here rendered as less of a gaping maw than a pool of polysemous inspiration. 39 I borrow the title from Dangarembga (1988) and allude to the work of Fanon (1963) and Bhabha (1994); this division or separation of lived, colonial reality from the reiWed and aYrmed imperial reality (in this instance the diVerence between the British reality valorized by literature and studied at school versus the Caribbean reality of life on St. Lucia) creates psychic anxiety within the colonial subject. Walcott implies the state of the colonial subject—in this instance, of his younger self—is one we might label ‘schizophrenic’: the psychological subject is cut oV (separated, divided—as in Walcott’s Divided Child ) from him or herself, and lived reality is devalued in the face of the imperially-centered and -sanctioned reality.

11 Arriving Backwards: the Return of The Odyssey in the English-Speaking Caribbean Emily Greenwood

On long voyages I take Greeks as my best companions. (Froude 1888: 321)

I N T RO DU C T IO N My aim in this chapter is to explore readings and counter-readings of Homer’s The Odyssey in the modern Caribbean, in terms of what the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris has referred to as the ‘epic stratagems available to Caribbean man in the dilemmas of history which surround him’ (Harris 1999: 156). Starting with J. A. Froude’s metaphorical appropriation of Ulysses/Odysseus in The English in the West Indies (Froude [1887] 1888), I examine how writers have turned this colonial reading of The Odyssey around in the modern Caribbean. I attempt to identify key tropes that deWne readings of the epic in a Caribbean context and to relate these readings to a speciWc ‘New World’ model of classical reception.

F RO U D E ’ S U LYS S E S In a travel account that has provoked a counter-tradition of classical receptions in the English-speaking Caribbean, the Victorian scholar Froude chose the metaphor of ‘the bow of Ulysses’ to deWne the state

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of Britain’s relationship with her Caribbean colonies in the late 1880s.1 In fact, the metaphor does duty for a series of relationships. In the Wrst instance, ‘Ulysses’ is England, out at sea due to the liberal government of Gladstone that had already begun to entertain the prospect of ‘home rule’, for some of England’s colonies. To Froude’s way of thinking, England as Ulysses had absented itself from its duty, leaving its colonies—like Ithaca and Penelope—to be ravaged by suitors (Froude [1887] 1888: 14; see also 315): The bow of Ulysses is unstrung. The worms have not eaten into the horn or the moths injured the string, but the owner of the house is away and the suitors of Penelope Britannia consume her substance, rivals one of another, each caring only for himself, but with a common heart in evil. They cannot string the bow. Only the true lord and master can string it, and in due time he comes, and the cord is stretched once more upon the notch, singing to the touch of the Wnger with the sharp note of the swallow; and the arrows Xy to their mark in the breasts of the pretenders, while Pallas Athene looks on approving from her coign of vantage.

Although Froude’s chief targets were Gladstone and his supporters, his choice of metaphor also hints at the ideal manhood of the English statesman as a man of action who is Wt to govern and to string Ulysses’ bow, unlike the colonial subjects in the Caribbean whom Froude regarded as unWt for self-government. Lastly, there is also a sense in which Froude, whose account of the West Indies is the outcome of a ‘voyage of discovery’ in the region, is himself a Ulysses Wgure, appalled at the state that his house is in and determined to restore England’s Empire to its rightful order. In the Caribbean, criticism of this work, the idea of Froude trying ‘to pass himself oV as the Ulysses of the Empire’, Wrst occurs in Nicholas Darnell Davis’s work, ‘Mr. Froude’s Negrophobia, or Don Quixote as a Cook’s Tourist’, published in British Guiana in 1888.2 J. J. Thomas, the Caribbean school master and scholar, who published a rebuttal of Froude’s work in 1889, also points out the motif of Froude as Ulysses.3 Froude’s self-fashioning as Ulysses is reminiscent of what 1 Froude undertook the voyage on which this account is based in 1887, setting sail from England in December 1886. 2 I have not seen Davis’s work and have relied on the references in Smith (2002: esp. 155). 3 Thomas ([1889] 1969: 63); see Greenwood (2005: 79) for comment.

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Pratt refers to as the ‘heroics of discovery’ in Victorian travel narratives (Pratt 1992: 201–4). This latter aspect of Froude’s Ulysses/ Odysseus can be traced back to the post-Homeric tradition of Ulysses as a ‘frontier-man’ who voyages to the ends of the earth to establish the limits of knowledge and to reclaim his identity (Hartog 2001: especially 3–39); in Froude’s case, the voyage is a quest to reclaim English masculinity and imperial authority. Aside from the conspicuous metaphor of the bow of Odysseus in the title, Froude’s engagement with the Odyssey is minimal. I cite just one Odyssean motif, to illustrate the loose and incidental nature of such allusions in Froude’s work. In chapter 8, Froude recounts that, before leaving Trinidad, he had an audience with Charles Warner— an elderly member of a longstanding British West Indian family in Trinidad—who forecasts the dismal future of colonial government in the Caribbean, endorsing Froude’s thesis. SigniWcantly, Froude describes Warner as a Tiresias Wgure, as though this audience were Froude’s katabasis (Froude 1888: 84–5): His eyes still gleamed with the light of an untouched intelligence. All else of him seemed dead [ . . . ]. He spoke like some ancient seer, whose eyes looked beyond the present time and the present world, and saw politics and progress and the wild whirlwind of change as the play of atoms dancing to and fro in the sunbeams of eternity [ . . . ]. A month later I head that Charles Warner was dead. To have seen and spoken with such a man was worth a voyage round the globe.

More signiWcant than Froude’s pretensions to being a latter-day Odysseus, is the fact that he travels with The Odyssey in his head and sees Caribbean territory through the visor of Greek literature. At one point we Wnd Froude dispensing advice on colonial government, based on a prescription that a committee of Parian advisors allegedly made for good government in Miletus—a prescription recounted by Herodotus’ Histories 5.28–9 (Froude 1888: 79). Commenting on his reading of Plato’s Republic during the return voyage, Froude writes ‘on long voyages I take Greeks as my best companions’ (ibid. p. 321).4 Froude’s statement about his choice of reading calls to mind Gikandi’s phrase the ‘pre-texts of empire’—texts on which the mythology of 4 Froude also quotes Euripides and Aeschylus on the same page.

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empire was based (Gikandi 1996: 102); Froude’s reading of ‘the classics’ preWgures his experience of the people and landscape of the Caribbean. Froude’s prepossessing projection of The Odyssey onto the Caribbean had the unwitting eVect of making the reinterpretation, or counter-interpretation, of this myth a vital part of the creative imagination of Anglophone Caribbean literature and art in the twentieth century. The reception of The Odyssey in Anglophone literature in the modern Caribbean is an example of a text that was expropriated by colonial writers to underwrite empire, and has subsequently been revisited and rewritten to undermine empire and to rewrite (perceptions of) the region’s history. As such, it runs parallel to other texts that have shaped both colonial and anti-colonial images of the Caribbean—most obviously Shakespeare’s Tempest.5 In the colonial period, writers such as Froude were inXuenced by, and contributed to, what Pratt has referred to as ‘the overdetermined history of imperial meaning-making’ (Pratt 1992: 4). Overdetermination is also a feature of the inventive mythologies of the post-imperial Caribbean, with artists and writers able to pluck from the history and myths of diverse traditions (European, African, Indian, Amerindian). In fact, for all that Wgures such as Odysseus appear in the modern literature of the Caribbean, their appearance has been altered signiWcantly by the circuitous routes that they have travelled through a literary map. Indeed, The Odyssey itself has been Wltered through many diVerent contexts, most notably via Virgil, Dante, and modernist authors such as T. S. Eilot and James Joyce. In addition, the Wgure of Odysseus has also been subject to interference from other traditions, ranging from the Christ of the gospels to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

N O S TO S : A R R I V I N G B AC K WA R D S Colonial discourse—speciWcally the sub-branch of travel writing—is riven with what anthropologists have termed ‘temporal inequality’: to travel into the unknown world is to travel backwards in time and 5 See Lamming’s analysis of the signiWcance of The Tempest for the modern Caribbean ([1960] 1992: esp. 95–117); for comment see Nixon (1987), and Hulme (2000).

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to regress in terms of civilization.6 Consequently, encounters with the New World, which is ‘new’ because unfamiliar to the Old-World traveller, often had recourse to the very old world, using co-ordinates from classical or biblical texts to map out the new territory in the imagination (Hulme 1992: 3). Froude’s description of the leisured life on the average Antillean homestead, where the soil brings forth fruit in abundance, untoiled, blends the prelapsarian world of genesis, golden-age mythology, and the description of the Cyclopes’ island in The Odyssey 9.106–11: In the Antilles generally, Barbadoes being the only exception, Negro families have each their cabin, their garden ground, their grazing for a cow. They live surrounded by most of the fruits that grew in Adam’s paradise—oranges and plantains, bread-fruit, and cocoa-nuts, though not apples. Their yams and cassava grow without eVort, for the soil is easily worked and inexhaustibly fertile. The curse is taken oV from nature and, like Adam again, they are under the covenant of ignorance (Froude 1888: 42–3).7

In response, Caribbean engagements with Greek and Roman classics are characterized by knowing tricks with time that play on the gulf between their newness and the antiquity of Greece and Rome. The most common way in which this gulf has been bridged is by denying the temporal, historical distance, and asserting simultaneity in its place. The classic articulation of this position is Walcott’s essay ‘The Muse of History’ Wrst published in 1974 (Walcott 1998: 36–64), which substitutes ‘history as myth’ in place of ‘history as time’ (ibid. p. 37). As critics have observed, the transcendence or rejection of history is itself a historical move, insofar as it originates in speciWc, historically located intellectual movements.8 In this case, myth is used as a stratagem to counter the historical inequality between Old World and New World, where the very nomenclature signals a denial of history in the case of the latter. Against this backdrop, Harris oVers an engagement with the classical past that poses an original and dynamic model of classical 6 Fabian (1983: 31); McClintock (1994: 254); Youngs (1997: 4). 7 The relevant passage in The Odyssey is Book 9 ll. 106–11. 8 On the rejection of history as itself an historical phenomenon, see Cooper (2005: 402) and passim. For the inXuence of Modernism on the rejection of history in Caribbean Wction, see Gikandi (1992: 8–9).

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reception. In place of passive receiving or returns to the past, Harris promotes a radical artistic imagination in which the past is unWnished, and still to be completed in the future. In an essay entitled ‘Quetzalcoatl and the Smoking Mirror: ReXections on Originality and Tradition’, Harris counters the perception of epic ‘. . . as something that belongs to the past and is now a museum-text to be imitated in the theatre or in performances of virtuosity’ with the idea of ‘arrival in an architecture of space that is original to our age.’ (Harris 1999:187)9 The obscure notion of ‘arrival in an architecture of space’ is glossed in another essay, ‘History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas’ (ibid. pp. 152–66), where Harris writes that ‘the journey across the Atlantic for the forbears of West Indian man involved a new kind of space’ and connects this space with the architecture of limbo, which he visualizes as a multi-dimensional gateway where cross-cultural traditions meet. He elaborates (Harris 1999: 187): To arrive in a tradition that appears to have died is complex renewal and revisionary momentum sprung from originality and the activation of primordial resources within a living language. We arrive backwards even as we voyage forwards. This is the phenomenon of simultaneity in the imagination of times past and future . . .

This counter-intuitive idea of ‘arriving in a tradition’ or ‘arriving backwards’ entails a subtle reordering of the ethnographic movement, where journeys to diVerent lands are regressive journeys back in time. Instead, past traditions—including but not limited to classical mythology—are seen as unWnished and carry over into the future. Harris indicates that this does not mean that the future is the same as the past, but rather that the two are continuous (Harris 1999: 257–8). This idea is explained in the essay ‘The UnWnished Genesis of the Imagination’, where Harris, discussing Sophocles’ Antigone, proposes that an ‘invisible text’ runs parallel to the ‘visible text’ of the play and ‘secretes a corridor into the future’ (Harris 1999: 249), when elements of the play will be treated with diVerent insights. 9 This theory (rejecting the formal appropriation of the past as a passive object, in favour of a ‘numinous arrival’ in tradition) is repeated in similar terms in the essay ‘Creoleness: The Crossroads of a Civilization’; Harris (1999: 243).

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Harris’s idiosyncratic method of reordering literature and cultural traditions spatially, rather than temporally, means that there is no tension between tradition and originality, since the two exist in the same space. It is not a case of ‘returning’ to The Odyssey, which would be an impossibility, but of arriving in a new space, via an original route, where one recognizes or encounters elements of The Odyssey and other myths. In its New World context, this ancient Greek text serves as a ‘contact zone’, where diVerent cultures of interpretation can meet. Pratt coined this phrase, in the context of colonial discourse theory, to denote ‘the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures’ (Pratt 1992: 6–7). Frequently the term applies to textual spaces and can be extended to cover readings and counter-readings on either side of colonialism, from Froude reading The Odyssey in 1887, to Harris, Walcott, and others reading The Odyssey—and Froude’ s odyssey—in the twentieth-century Caribbean.

RE TUR N IN G THE ODYSSEY ( WA LCOT T ) Already in Homeric epic, Odysseus is an accommodating Wgure with a wide range of signiWcation. We see this in the very Wrst line of The Odyssey, where the adjective polutropos is ambiguous and can signify both his versatility (‘of many turns’, ‘ingenious’) and his wandering (‘much roaming/travelling’). Heubeck et al. (1988: ad loc.) emphasize the sense of versatility in polutropos, arguing that Odysseus’ travels were a result of accident and that, in the opening line of the poem, it would be appropriate to refer to a trait that is characteristic of the hero, rather than a trait that is an accident of circumstance. This explanation seems unduly schematic and the decision to rule out the suggestion of wandering in polutropos is questionable, given that wandering— whether voluntary or not—deWnes Odysseus’ situation in the Wrst half of the poem. Stanford rightly preserves the ambiguity in this adjective with his neat translation ‘the man of many moves’ (Stanford 1974: ad loc.). This ambiguity is exploited by Walcott in his reWguring of both the character of Odysseus and The Odyssey, which return a very diVerent

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Odysseus. In Walcott, Odysseus’ ‘many moves’ evoke the forced migrations and uprooting that led to the modern settlement of the Caribbean, and the legacies of exile and alienation that resulted. However, the ‘many moves’ are also reminiscent of the resourcefulness celebrated in Caribbean folklore, derived from Wgures such as Anansi in African folklore, or Br’er Rabbit and Tar Baby.10 Furthermore, several critics have observed the importance of Odysseus for Walcott’s ‘writing of the self’.11 As poet, Walcott embodies the dual signiWcation of Odysseus polutropos: the geography of his career is certainly one of many moves, and his handling of the myth, turning it through many diVerent traditions simultaneously, also suggests ‘many moves’. Correspondingly, Walcott’s Homer is envisaged as ‘that old wave-wanderer’ in poem 34 of Midsummer (Walcott 1984: 47). In the later works, Omeros (1990) and The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1993), Homer’s migratory identity and versatility are evident in the alternative bardic personae Seven Seas and Billy Blue, who are modelled on the West African Griot and the African-American blues singer, respectively.12 Even the ‘Homer’ Wgure, Omeros, does not conform to the traditional image of a Western Homer, frozen in a marble bust.13 Commenting on the signiWcance of Robinson Crusoe as a mythical archetype in The Castaway and Other Poems, Walcott explained to an audience at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, Trinidad, that his Crusoe:14 . . . [i]s not the Crusoe you recognize. I have compared him to Proteus, that Mythological Wgure who changes shapes according to what we need him to be [ . . . ]. My Crusoe, then, is Adam, Christopher Columbus, God, a missionary, a beachcomber, and his interpreter, Daniel Defoe. 10 On the former, see Burnett (2000: 303–4), who discusses the character of Anansi as one of the inXuences for Walcott’s characterization of Odysseus in The Odyssey: a Stage Version. For Br’er Rabbit and Tar Baby, see Walcott ‘Meanings’ (1970) repr. in Hamner ed. ([1993] 1997: 45–50, at 49). 11 Baugh (1997: 316–17); Burnett (2000: 119–20); and Dougherty (2001: 19 and 78). 12 See Burnett (2000: 168–70) on ‘the other Homer’ in Walcott, and Hardwick (2004a: 231) on cultural Xuidity in Walcott’s stage Odyssey. 13 See Hamner (1997: 34). The ‘traditional’ image of Homer is articulated by the narrator in Book 1 (1.II.iii, 14–15), but is corrected through the course of the poem (see especially chapters LVI–LVII, 279–88). 14 Walcott ‘The Figure of Crusoe’; this talk was originally delivered in 1965, and has been edited and published in Hamner ed. ([1993] 1997: 33–40, at 35).

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Both Walcott’s Homer and Odysseus are similarly free-form. In her review of Omeros for the New York Times, Lefkowitz identiWed Walcott’s Homer as ‘a Protean Wgure, inWnitely knowledgeable but elusive, constantly changing shape’.15 For his part, Walcott has identiWed this free-form choice as characteristic of art in the ‘New World’ (Walcott 1997: 243). Walcott has often commented on the paradox of the ‘amnesiac memory’ of the New World and has spoken of the act of erasure as the beginning of art in the Caribbean. However, this erasure and amnesia prove fully compatible with remembering the past through epic mythologies from other worlds. In this context, Maes-Jelinek uses the perceptive phrase ‘Ulyssean palimpsest’ to describe Harris’s metamorphosis of Homeric characters in The Carnival Trilogy (Maes-Jelinek 1995: 47). In Walcott’s poetry, the constant (re)turn to erasure also proves to be a refreshing take on one of The Odyssey’s most famous tropes. Or, to put it more precisely, a new spin on one of the smartest tropoi of polutropos Odysseus: his punning self-naming on the island of Polyphemus the Cyclops, where he declares his identity as ‘no-one’ (Homer The Odyssey 9.366–67): No-one is my name; my father and mother call me no-one and so do all of the others who are my friends.’

In what follows, I explore Walcott’s fresh use of Homer in terms of Harris’s conception of the ‘epic stratagems available to Caribbean man in the dilemmas of history which surround him’ (see introduction to this chapter). One of the most explicit reXections on naming in Omeros is the sequence where Achille, guided by a god in the form of a swift, travels back through time, recrossing the Middle Passage, to encounter his father in Africa (Omeros 3.XXV–XXVIII. 133–52). Hardwick has examined how this sequence of the poem evokes the katabasis of ‘classical’ epic,16 and has subsequently suggested that the failure of recognition may also serve as ‘a metaphor for the deracination of 15 Lefkowitz ‘Bringing Him Back Alive’ in Hamner ([1993] 1997: 400–3, at 400). See also Breslin (2001: 268) on Walcott’s ‘protean’, metamorphosizing Homer; and Callahan (2003: 49 and 60) on the ‘protean’ quality of the metres in Omeros, which Walcott shifts repeatedly. 16 Hardwick (2000: 105–8, and 2002: 242–44). See also Callahan (2003: 85–6) on ‘descent-like’ passages in Omeros.

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texts’ (Hardwick, 2007a).17 When asked the meaning of his name, Achille replies: Well, I too have forgotten. Everything was forgotten. You also. I do not know. The deaf sea has changed around every name that you gave us; trees, men, we yearn for a sound that is missing. (Omeros 3.XXV.III, 137)

We can compare Achille’s statement to that of the ‘nameless’ narrator in the early poem ‘Origins’, who claims ‘I remember nothing’ (Walcott 1992a: 11–6, at 11).18 Afolabe is distressed at the notion of a name without meaning (‘a name means something’). He explains that if a name has no meaning (means nothing) then its referent must be nothing, too: Unless the sound means nothing. Then you would be nothing. Did they think you were nothing in that other kingdom? (Omeros 3.XXV.III, 137)

For Breslin this linguistic impasse poses ‘an untenable choice’: either the narrator has to resort to Homeric epic in order to assign meaning to the name Achille, which would be to overwrite Achille’s African ancestry, or else ‘accept a severance of language from meaning as a consequence of diasporic estrangement’, which would tell against the epic allusions and Homeric etymologies (Breslin 2001: 267). However, in this particular sequence, the fact that Achille’s name means ‘nothing’ resonates Homer, even while the signiWcance of the Homeric Achilles is forgotten. The perplexing idea of a name that means nothing takes the reader back to Book 9 of The Odyssey and the ruse with which Odysseus outwits Polyphemus. In the context of the latter poem, the countercultural absurdity of a name that means ‘nobody’, and the Cyclops’ lack of culture and civilization in not recognizing this, is cued by a remark by the Phaeacian king Alkinoo¨s as he

17 Hardwick’s suggestion of deracination poses an interesting supplement to Breslin’s analysis of this passage as a meditation on the collapse of signiWcation as a consequence of diasporic migration during the course of which names come adrift from their meanings (Breslin 2001: 266). 18 ‘Origins’ was Wrst published in Selected Poems (1964).

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requests Odysseus to declare his name and his origins (Homer Od. 8.550–4):19 Tell me the name [onoma] by which your mother and father called you in that place, [ . . . ]. No one among the peoples, neither base man nor noble, is altogether nameless [anoˆnumos], once he has born, but always his parents as soon as they bring him forth put upon him a name.

We might object that, in Homer, the incident where Odysseus strategically assumes the name of ‘Nobody’ is one of the crafty stratagems [doloi] for which he has told us he is famous (the opposite of nameless) at The Odyssey 9.19–20. This is voluntary anonymity in the service of self-promoting fame. However, the Odyssey with which Walcott engages is a fragmentary Odyssey, which has arrived in the New World in bits and pieces. Appropriation of a single detail does not necessarily activate the broader narrative context; consequently there are many diVerent—sometimes contradictory—Odysseuses in Walcott’s oeuvre, and Odysseus can appear as both cultural hero and as estranged wanderer. This metamorphic approach to Homer/Odysseus is shared by Harris, who has argued that ‘it is no longer possible for him [Odysseus] to arrive in New World El Dorados [ . . . ] as a single man. He has become plural’ (Harris 1992: 91; for discussion, see Maes-Jelinek 1995: 55 and passim). Although nothingness has very speciWc connotations in the context of Caribbean history, Walcott’s echoing of Odysseus’ namelessness is ‘like’ Odysseus, insofar as it serves as a literary strategy/stratagem on the part of the narrator to secure the fame of St. Lucia and St. Lucians, like Achille and Hector.20 The trope of the Caribbean as a blank space containing nothing but the landscape has been a constant theme in Walcott’s poetry and prose, as has the valorization of this ‘nothing’. However, the farreaching signiWcance of this theme only emerges fully in the long poem Another Life ([1973] 2004),21 which is also the Wrst poem in which Walcott plays with sustained Homeric allusions. Towards the 19 The Odyssey references are to Lattimore 1991. 20 For the idea of the narrator’s stratagems in Omeros, see 6. LIV. ii (271), referring to the diVering approaches adopted by Major Plunkett and the narrator in writing Helen’s history: ‘Except we had used two opposing stratagems/ in praise of her and the island’. 21 All references to Another Life refer to the annotated edition, edited by Baugh and Nepaulsingh (Walcott 2004).

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end of the poem a child—Walcott’s son Peter—hears the Caribbean’s history in the howl of a shell (Walcott 2004: 143, l.3386), and ‘hears nothing, hears everything/that the historian cannot hear’ (ibid. ll.3387–88). Faced with the accumulated histories of conquest and enslavement, Walcott proposes beginning again, ‘from what we have always known, nothing’ (ibid. p. 144, l.3430), repeated again in lines 3339–40, ‘nothing, then nothing,/and then nothing’ (ibid. p. 145). In this counter-historical scenario ‘nothing’ is, paradoxically, a positive object of knowledge that frees the Caribbean subject from the master narrative of colonial history. In fact, Afolabe’s question, ‘Did they think you were nothing in that other kingdom’, pointedly alludes to the colonial nulliWcation of cultural identity in the Caribbean. The repetitive focus on ‘nothing’ answers a colonial refrain, present in Froude and taken up by V. S. Naipaul, that ‘nothing has ever been created in the Caribbean’.22 In an essay ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?’ published in 1974, shortly after the publication of Another Life, Walcott theorized that: ‘Nothing will always be created in the West Indies, for quite a long time, because what will come out of there is like nothing one has ever seen before’ (Hamner [1993] 1997: 51–7, at 54).23 Walcott has used the Odysseus-nobody trope elsewhere in his oeuvre; Breslin remarks that: ‘in many of his works the indeterminate nature of an Odyssean ‘‘nobody’’ becomes a source of strength, a way of eluding deWnitions imposed by others’ (Breslin 2001: 2; see ibid. 1–2 for an excellent overview of the ‘nobody’ trope in Walcott). The most famous incidence of this trope occurs in the poem 22 The relevant passage comes from Froude’s The English in the West Indies: ‘There has been romance, but it has been the romance of pirates and outlaws. [ . . . ]. There has been no saint in the West Indies since Las Casas, no hero unless philonegro enthusiasm can make one out of Toussaint. There are no people there in the true sense of the word, [ . . . ].’ (Froude 1888: 306) Naipaul chose this passage from Froude as the epigraph to his Caribbean travel account The Middle Passage (Naipaul [1962] 2001). Picking up on this well-worn trope, Walcott used this passage for the epigraph to the poem ‘Air’, Wrst published in 1969 in the collection The Gulf and Other Poems, (repub. in Walcott 1992a: 113–14; for discussion see Terada 1992: 161–3). The last line of this poem is ‘there is too much nothing here’. Poem I of Midsummer also echoes this theme: ‘there’s that island known/ to the traveller Trollope, and the fellow traveller Froude,/for making nothing. Not even a people.’ (Walcott 1984: 11). 23 See Terada’s comment on Walcott’s inversion of Naipaul: ‘Walcott makes ‘‘nothing’’ positive, a persistence rather than an absence’ (1992: 79).

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‘The Schooner Flight’ (The Star-Apple Kingdom, 1979) where the narrator, Shabine, confronts the reader with his Creole ancestry, asserting: ‘I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,/and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation’ (Walcott 1992a: 346). Peter Burian points out that in Shabine’s rhetorical question: ‘Who knows/who his grandfather is, much less his name?’ (ibid .p. 353), there is also a parallel with Telemachus’ words to Athena in Book 1 of the Odyssey: ‘No man has yet known who his father is’ (Od. 1.216; Burian 1997: 366). As the poem progresses, Shabine’s nationhood is revealed as that of the imagination: ‘I had no nation now but the imagination’ (Walcott 1992a: 350). In History’s eyes, Shabine is a nobody: ‘I met History once, but he ain’t recognize me’ (ibid.), but through a complex web of allusion this non-recognition is aligned with Odysseus’ situation in The Odyssey—the strategic obscurity that secures his successful return. Burnett glosses the verb ‘recognize’ in the phrase ‘he ain’t recognize me’ as ‘choose to acknowledge’ (Burnett 2000: 85). However, given the signiWcance of sight and ways of seeing in Walcott’s work, as well as the broader motif of the imperial gaze in the colonial and postcolonial literature of the Caribbean, it is important to preserve the visual connotations of the verb ‘recognize’. Hardwick has argued convincingly that there is a sophisticated postcolonial poetics and politics of Homeric recognition in the work of Walcott, Harris, and Bearden (Hardwick, 2007a). In his estranging engagement with Homer, Walcott challenges readers to a play of recognition. Like Odysseus, who goes unrecognized on his return and whom Athena at Wrst prevents from recognizing his home (Odyssey 13.187–94), the Wgure of Odysseus returned in Walcott’s work has undergone radical changes. While Omeros and the more overtly Homeric, The Odyssey: A Stage Version are not quite ‘like nothing one has ever seen before’ (Hamner [1993] 1997: 54), any traces of recognition are fraught with diYculty and ambiguity. Walcott also involves himself in this play of recognition, since in Omeros the narrator has diYculty recognizing the apparition of the metamorphic Homer Wgure (Omeros/Seven Seas), initially confusing the bard’s bust with a coconut shell (7.LVI.I. 279–81). The very pronouncement of erasure and of beginning again ex nihilo turns out to be rooted in one of Odysseus’ most notorious strategies, hence asserting the presence and absence of Homer at the

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same time. This evocation of Odysseus, the nobody, suggests a New World reading of the epic, in which the protagonist—transported away from home against his will—resorts to obscurity in order to reach home and, in many senses, begins again. Rather than ambivalence and tension, Walcott opens up a reciprocal exchange with Homeric epic. In the same way that, by the end of Omeros, Homer belongs to Walcott and to the Caribbean, similarly the Caribbean also belongs to Homer, as island-poet, who is included in the Creole aesthetic. Commenting on Walcott’s tendency to emphasize the universal potential of Caribbean hybridity, and Wnding analogies between the Caribbean archipelago and other archipelagos—most notably the Aegean—Dash cites the passage in ‘The Schooner Flight’ where Shabine: states ‘this earth is one/island in archipelagoes of stars’ (Walcott 1992a: 361). He concludes that (Dash 1996: 51): Walcott checks the tendency to create a Creole essentialism which would turn the Caribbean into a centre of exemplary creolity. The ultimate aim of Walcott’s imaginative enterprise is the dissolution of categories like centre and periphery, classic and modern, sameness and otherness.

Foley has warned against the uncritical use of ‘epic’ as a homogeneous generic form to order and categorize what are, in reality, heterogeneous forms of long narrative. To do so, he argues, runs the risk of ‘unintentionally colonizing [other cultures’] verbal art’ (John Foley 2004: 173). For this very reason, much Walcott criticism has contested the use of the term ‘epic’ in relation to Omeros.24 However, the ‘international epic’ that Foley advocates has come about, in part, through colonization in reverse: reading back from the rich cultural diversity of long narrative poems in the modern world to Homeric epic. Alternatively, we might see this as the ‘decolonization’ of Homeric epic, via a process similar to that which Hardwick has suggested in modern receptions of Greek drama (Hardwick 2004a: 42). Walcott’s creolizing version of this ‘colonization in reverse’ is non-proprietary and distinctly anti-colonial, locating all poetry as it does in an empire of art (see, for example, Walcott 1998: 51 on language as empire, and 24 For discussion of this debate and for an analysis of Walcott’s ‘congruity’ with epic that takes into account shifting deWnitions of epic as an expansive, assimilationary genre, see Hofmeister (1996, passim, but esp. pp. 536–46). See also Hamner (1997: 8–32), and Breslin (2001: 242–45).

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the line ‘art obeys its own order’ in ‘The Hotel Normandie Pool’ (Walcott 1992a: 444).

SEEING DOUBLE AND THE REVERSIBLE GAZE This play on recognition, in which Old World forms are scarcely recognizable, responds to the trope in colonial travel literature where the colonial tourist or travel writer—the ‘seeing man’ as Pratt has called him—has his gaze disappointed by a landscape that does not correspond to the expectations created by ‘Old World’ names (Pratt 1992: 7). For instance, describing a visit to the Botanical Gardens in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Froude lists the ways in which the local Xora is ‘anomalous’ (Froude 1888: 61): They had Old World names with characters wholly diVerent: cedars which were not conifers, almonds which were no relations to peaches, and gum trees as unlike eucalypti as one tree can be unlike another. Again, you saw forms which you seemed to recognise till some unexpected anomaly startled you out of your mistake.

From the ‘reverse’ New World perspective, the same Old World names are found to be equally disappointing. As Walcott has written in the essay ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’, ‘a century looked at a landscape furious with vegetation in the wrong light and with the wrong eye’ (Walcott 1998: 75). In response to colonial travel accounts, such as that of Froude, cultural critics have pointed out that the baZed gaze of the traveller was returned or reciprocated by the object of the gaze, leading to conXicting perspectives on the same scene.25 Unfortunately, very few native impressions of colonial travellers survive; when they do, we are often reliant on the traveller’s account of how the natives perceive him (and, less often, her). However, the gaze is reciprocated belatedly in twentieth-century Wction and critical prose, where Caribbean authors supplement the Old World perspective with a New World ‘way of seeing’. The clearest exponent of this view is the Bajan novelist 25 See Pratt (1992: ch. 1; Youngs 1997: 7; Smith 2002: 128).

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George Lamming, who has written about the growth of the Caribbean novel in the context of travel writing (Lamming 1992: 37–8): We have had travel books, some of them excellent, like Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Traveller’s Tree. We have had the social and economic treatises. The anthropologists have done some exercises there. We have had Government White papers as well as the Black diaries of Governor’s wives. But these worked like old-fashioned cameras, catching what they can—which wasn’t very much—as best they could, which couldn’t be very good, since they never got the camera near enough. As it should be, the novelist was the Wrst to relate the West Indian experience from the inside. He was the Wrst to chart the West Indian memory as far back as he could go.

Correspondingly, evoking the genres of travel writing and Weld reports, Lamming frames his essays as ‘a report on one man’s way of seeing’ (ibid. p. 13, repeated on p. 56). Similarly, in the essay ‘What the Twilight Says’, Wrst published in 1970, Walcott comments on the need for Caribbean artists to establish distance and diVerence from the literature of the Old World through looking for themselves (Walcott 1998: 9): . . . only our own painful, strenuous looking, the learning of looking, could Wnd meaning in the life around us, only our own strenuous hearing, the hearing of our hearing, could make sense of the sounds we made.

The challenges presented by the gaze are manifest in Froude’s account, in which classical referents are used to mark out and describe what he sees. Froude Xuctuates between a cautious empirical approach, according to which what he thinks is informed by what he sees, and an assumptive approach, where what he sees is informed by what he thinks and what he has read. The Wrst approach is evident in the conclusion of his account of his visit to Barbados, where he comments on the novelty of the sights and his experience of them and rejects the representational accuracy of books (Froude 1888: 41; see also 55): For the moment my mind was Wlled suYciently with new impressions. One reads books about places, but the images which they create are always unlike the real object. All that I had seen was absolutely new and unexpected. I was glad of an opportunity to readjust the information which I had brought with me.

Froude (ibid. p. 113) declares his motivation to visit Haiti to see things for himself, wary of prejudicial accounts and stating that: ‘[he]

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would not take with [him] a mind already made up, and I was not given to credulity’. However, this cautionary approach is jettisoned elsewhere, where Froude is content not to see for himself, and to rely instead on the accounts of others—for instance in the case of the black, pitch lake in Trinidad (ibid. 1888: 64): I had no doubt that it existed, for the testimony was unimpeachable. Indeed I was shown an actual specimen of the crystallised pitch itself. I could believe without seeing and without undertaking a tedious journey.

Elsewhere, Froude bases the authority of his account on the authority of his informants, claiming privileged access to the governing classes of the islands: from Government House in Barbados (Froude 1888: 92), and from the Colonial Secretary in Jamaica (ibid. p. 177). In spite of Froude’s attempt to be seen to be observing strict ethnographic protocols, he frequently resorts to comparisons that substitute alien and, typically, Greco-Roman models for the Caribbean objects of his gaze. Gazing out from a balcony in Barbados, Froude compares the local women with ‘the old Greek and Etruscan women’ (1888: 38): Like the old Greek and Etruscan women, they are trained from childhood to carry heavy weights on their heads. They are thus perfectly upright, and plant their feet Wrmly and naturally on the ground. They might serve for sculptor’s models, and are well aware of it.

There are many points of interest here: Wrstly, the apparent naturalness of comparing women from ancient civilizations with these Bajan women who inhabit the same age as Froude. Secondly, Froude’s implicit familiarity with the women of ancient Greece and Italy is in keeping with his epic credentials as a traveller in the tradition of Ulysses. Thirdly, he sees the scene as a work of art; here the medium is sculpture, but elsewhere it is watercolour painting or engraving. Froude’s gaze translates into an impressionistic image that the reader of The English in the Caribbean can take away from his work, enabling them to ‘see’ what he has seen. Froude’s descriptions recall Lamming’s criticism that colonial travellers ‘never got the camera near enough’ (Lamming 1992: 37–8). Although Froude’s way of seeing has been eclipsed comprehensively in modern Caribbean writing, the problem of the writer’s metaphorical camera still persists, and authors and critics are conscious of the

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fact that modern Caribbean literature is complicit in ‘framing’ Caribbean society. In one of the Wrst modern Caribbean novels—C. L. R. James’ novel Minty Alley (1936)—the narrator, Haynes, is a voyeur on his own society, literally spying on the people around him and reporting on their behaviour as though an outsider. Haynes is a welleducated Trinidadian, who is alienated from the lower class Trinidadians, who are the objects of his gaze and narrative. James’s situation of his narrator on the outside looking in has been interpreted as a reXection of the writer, artist, thinker from the Caribbean people— the internal exile that Carew describes (Carew 1998). In his essay ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’, Walcott catches himself in the act of framing the Trinidadian village of Felicity with nostalgic, historical evocations (in this case, evocations of India), he refers to himself Wltering the scene, ‘Looking around slowly as a camera would’ and remarks that he ‘wanted to make a Wlm that would be a long-drawn sigh over Felicity’ (Walcott 1998: 68). The play of recognition and resemblances in Omeros, in which the narrator transposes Homeric phantoms in St. Lucia, elicits a selfcorrecting discourse that informs the reader that this is all in the imagination. However, this mythological imagination is no less important than the ‘real’ island characters who occupy the poem’s foreground,26 since it constitutes a source of counter-knowledge to the imperial imaginary of colonial literature about the Caribbean, which used classical mythology as its/an exclusive possession and aVected colonial rule.

C ON C LU S I ON In the context of Caribbean and African rewritings of The Tempest in the late Wfties and early seventies (crucial periods for regional Independence movements in Africa and the Caribbean), Nixon described the play as . . . ‘a Trojan horse, whereby cultures banned from the 26 ‘Real’ in inverted commas because, as Terada has pointed out (1992: 184–5), the ‘real-life’ St. Lucia of Omeros is an artistic creation, made to look more ‘real’ through the juxtaposition of Homeric mythology.

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citadel of ‘universal’ Western values could win entry and assail those global pretensions from within’, adding that writers could use this Trojan horse both as a means of ‘getting in’, or ‘getting out’ of the citadel (Nixon 1987:578). As Odysseus’ most famous stratagem at Troy (Homer Od. 8.492– 515), the ‘Trojan’ horse is also an excellent metaphor for the uses of Odysseus and The Odyssey in the Caribbean receptions that I have discussed in this chapter. Although, like the Trojan horse, Odysseus is an instantly recognizable Homeric icon, his appearance in New World contexts is not what it seems and demands closer inspection, if not a new way of seeing. In the process we learn to look at Homer’s The Odyssey diVerently, recognizing that the epic is as versatile and well travelled as its protagonist. These journeys change Homer and, like the voyage to the New World, there is no going back.27 27 See Dougherty (2001: 83–92) on The Odyssey and New World discourse.

12 ‘If You are a Woman’: Theatrical Womanizing in Sophocles’ Antigone and Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona’s The Island Rush Rehm

It strikes me as central to any consideration of Classics in a post-colonial (and in many respects a continually colonial) context, to consider the complicated issue of the representation of women and female characters, and their uses (if I may be allowed this shorthand term) on the stage. As any student of Greek tragedy knows, female performers (as far as we can tell) never appeared in a dramatic presentation at the theatre of Dionysus. Males played female characters and choruses, and classicists and scholars interested in issues of gender and gender construction have investigated this phenomenon with imagination and fervour. Without pretending to be comprehensive or nuanced, let me summarize six views on the subject that operate in relevant discussions: 1. All theatre uses conventions of representation, even theatres where women ‘play themselves’, so one must be wary of misreading or over-interpreting a more general theatrical phenomenon.1 2. Although the convention of all-male performers suggests social and historical realities—the second class status of women in Wfthcentury Athens, the view that women should not expose themselves 1 One might apply this caveat to theatrical forms and periods as diVerent from one another as Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Carolean public theatre and classical Japanese Kabuki and Noh theatre. More generally, see Rehm (1992: 43–74).

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3.

4.

5.

6.

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to the public gaze of the crowd, and deeper rooted misogyny—the extraordinary fact remains, as Steiner (1984: 237) concludes in his magisterial Antigones, that Greek tragedy presents ‘in speech and action a constellation of women matchless for their truth and variousness’. Given traditional Greek associations of women with rites of transition—menarche, marriage, death ritual, and childbirth—and their relative freedom to express emotion, female characters in tragedy ‘allow’ for the exploration of emotional extremity that would not seem possible among male characters. Given strictures on male expressivity in the ancient world, a hero in myth sheds blood with near impunity, but only rarely sheds tears. Male performers served as the purveyors of those expanded expressive possibilities, in the culturally safe heterotopos2 of the theatre. (See, among others, Rehm 2002: 19, 236–9, 268–9.) Male performers playing females in Greek tragedy and comedy participate directly in a cultural process of ‘creating the Other’, which contributes to a dynamic of misogyny, although ‘playing the Other’ may occasionally complicate that dynamic by opening up an alternative understanding of that ‘other’ (Zeitlin 1996). Male performers of female roles are part and parcel of a system of male dominance, oVering the equivalent of drag shows written by men for a male audience, which has its estimation of females and female behaviour, and its stereotypical fears of the same, conWrmed. Such a theatre has predictable and ‘culturally desirable’ consequences, validating female inferiority and strengthening male dominance, in a closed system of male cultural production (see, for example, Cantarella 1987, and Case 1985). Males playing females in the ancient world provide one (artistic) example of a more fundamental reality, namely that all gender is constructed, via a series of ‘performances’ that can be read and deciphered given suYcient intellectual and cultural awareness, reXecting the fact that gender diVerences have little or no compelling ontological or biological basis in reality. We might categorize this view as ‘performance and performativity u¨ber alles’. In

2 Literally ‘diVerent place’, suggesting a place (relatively) free from normal constraints of culture, society, politics.

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the immortal words of drag queen RuPaul: ‘Everyone is born naked; after that it is ALL drag’. Or in the more intellectually respectable terms of Judith Butler: ‘What kind of gender performance will enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire?’ (see Fleischer 2000). In my work on Greek tragedy, I adopt the Wrst three views, am somewhat persuaded by the fourth, Wnd the Wfth needlessly reductive, and feel about the last a little like the joke about the man facing the maWa deconstructionist, who makes him an oVer he can’t understand. My resistance to the performance model—which in the area of performance studies has been applied to just about everything— explains why I have subtitled my contribution ‘Theatrical Womanizing’ and not the more contemporary-sounding ‘Performing the Woman’ or some such, as what follows skirts any claim about gender as something performed per se.3 Rather, I will focus on the way that Antigone and The Island use the theatre to explore female characters (via male performers), to ‘womanize’ male characters, to demonstrate solidarity within gender boundaries, and to extend that solidarity beyond them—all aspects of the struggle against political oppression, colonial or otherwise. Let us turn to the scene in Antigone when Haimon makes his Wrst entrance. His opening words declare his love and respect for his father, the sine qua non of his identity:
 æ,  NØ· [Father, I am yours], (l. 635; also ll. 701–4, 741, 749).4 ReXected in his name, Haimon begins with ties of blood, linking him to his natal family, ties that prompt him to confront his father and try to persuade him to change political course. Haimon speaks not on behalf of his Wance´e Antigone, but on behalf of Creon, urging him to show Xexibility and remain responsive to the citizens over whom he rules. Accused by his father of siding with women: fi B ªıÆØŒd ıÆ E [This one, it seems, Wghts on the side of the woman] (l. 740), Haimon responds: Y
æ ªıc · F ªaæ s
æŒÆØ· [If you are a woman; it is for you, in fact, that I show familial concern] (l. 741). I will return to this startling hypothetical, ‘If 3 For further discussion of the problems with performance studies, see the introduction in Rehm (2003). 4 I follow Sophocles’ text as edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones ([1994] 1998).

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you are a woman’ below. At this juncture, however, I would like to consider the term
æŒÆØ, with its root ŒB invoking a complex of meanings including ‘care for’, ‘grief over’, ‘funeral’, and ‘connection by marriage’. Via the related Œ  [guardian or protector], the word also suggests the relationship that, in fact, obtains between Creon and his niece Antigone. The familial concern that Haimon shows for his father suggests an array of related issues, including guardianship, marriage, and funeral obligations. If not literally a woman, Creon is nonetheless tied to women by a set of relationships that cannot be ignored or denied without tragic consequences, as the play makes clear. As Haimon points out, who better than a loyal son to report what the citizens are saying amongst themselves? And what they are saying is worth repeating: I can hear these murmurs in the dark, how the city laments for this girl: ‘No woman’, they say, ‘ever merited her doom less, dying so shamefully for the most glorious of actions. For she, when her own brother had fallen in bloody combat, would not leave him unburied to be devoured by Xesh eating dogs and birds. Doesn’t she deserve the highest honor?’ This is the speech that spreads [through the city] in secret. (ll. 692–700)

Creon expresses utter disdain for Haimon’s report and for his advice, revealing paternal contempt for the urgings of youth, a tyrannical conception of state power (l’e´tat, c’est moi), (ll. 734–39), and a deep-seated misogyny.5 Indeed, Creon manifests that combination of fear of and disdain for women that, as noted earlier, some critics associate with Greek tragedy across the board. In his initial response to Haimon, for example, Creon implores him (ll. 648–52): Do not, my son, dethrone your reason / for the sake of pleasure with a woman. Know that / this clasping embrace soon grows cold / with an evil woman sharing your bed and home. 5 For an account of Creon that relates his point of view to more contemporary political trends, see Rehm (2006).

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Creon concludes the same speech (ll. 677–80): We must support the cause of order, / and never in any way be defeated by a woman. / If we must fall from power, let it be from a man; / that way we would not be called weaker than a woman.

Later, in reaction to Haimon’s arguments, Creon responds more aggressively: t ØÆæe qŁ ŒÆd ªıÆØŒe o æ [What polluted conduct, to follow after a woman] (l. 746), and 10 lines later: ªıÆØŒe J º ıÆ, c Œ غº  [You’re just the slave of a woman, don’t try to fool me] (l.756). Only after this onslaught does Haimon ‘abandon’ his father, rushing oV the stage, eventually to join Antigone in death. If Creon is slow to understand the ways in which he might be a woman, or be deWned via his relationships to women, he is all too swift to accuse his son for being too much like a woman, living under their thrall. But what about the actual female characters in the play, those more fully ‘womanized’? As critics have increasingly come to understand, Antigone’s rebellion is rooted in traditional notions of the woman’s role in death ritual, especially as regards her brother (see, particularly, Helene Foley 1996). In this Antigone appears traditional and even conventional, and yet her courageous stance against Creon marks her as an anomaly, a singularity, at least at the outset of the play. Given this obvious tension, it hardly surprises that judgements about the character of Antigone vary. Some dismiss her as an egotist with a martyr complex, a sister with no feelings for her own sister, a young woman whose behaviour is so far removed from Wfth-century norms as to appear alien and monstrous to the original Athenian audience (see: Ostwald 1986: 156–57; Sourvinou-Inwood 1989). Others admire Antigone, but think that if she had been ‘nicer’, Creon might have proven more Xexible, a reading that my undergraduates (the beneWciaries of speech codes and sensitivity training) sometimes argue—as if Creon responds to reason and persuasion. His scene with Haimon oVers no such prospect. On the contrary, Creon does not resemble a tree that bends so as not to break, nor is he like the captain who reefs his sails in the storm: examples that Haimon brings up, to no avail. Other scholars view Antigone as a symbol of democratic resistance, supporting Whitman’s (1951) underappreciated view that Antigone is a model citizen. Whitman’s stance reXects the period of McCarthyism during

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which he wrote Sophocles: A Study in Heroic Humanism;6 a time, like the Wrst decade of the twenty-Wrst century, in which Americans were afraid to stand up to state power for fear of being branded a communist, a traitor, or, in current parlance, an unpatriotic terrorist sympathizer. Finally, there are those whose admiration for Antigone leaves the secular realm, Wnding in her a holy character, a martyr, a saintly heroine (Jebb [1900] 2004: xxvii–xxxv). Within that broad range, most agree that Antigone is far from exemplifying Bernard Knox’s famous ‘heroic temper’, that quality of unchanging conviction and single-minded purpose purportedly found in Sophoclean protagonists (Knox 1964). Antigone seems a far more complex, or at least multi-faceted, character, one who changes over the course of the play, as death (and the recognition of what that means) draws near. In her Wnal scene, for example, Antigone abandons the full generality of the unwritten law of the gods to which she refers earlier, a law that requires burial rites for the dead, presumably each and every one of them. Before she leaves the stage for the last time, Antigone states that she would defy Creon’s edict only for her brother, not for her husband or her children, if she had had them, as they could at least nominally be replaced with new ones.7 And as we soon discover, Antigone ends her solitary conWnement by committing suicide, a desperate act in the grim and utterly un-heroic environment of her cave/tomb. If not exactly the epitome of the heroic temper, Antigone shows many sides, perhaps—as the great Sophoclean scholar Karl Reinhardt suggests—in order to ‘invest her life with human fullness’ in contrast to Creon, who ‘ends as the personiWcation of nothingness’ (Reinhardt [1947] 1979: 93). Let us turn to Antigone’s sister Ismene, who begins as a dramatic foil, much as Chrysothemis in Sophocles’ Electra. Although sympathetic to her sister’s cause, Ismene is initially unwilling to act against the powers that be, accepting the realities of political and patriarchal control. However, after Antigone’s arrest, Creon summons Ismene from the palace (ll. 526–30), accusing her of ‘lurking in the house like a snake’, of ‘having a share in this burial’ along with Antigone (ll. 531–35), a charge Ismene chooses not to deny in the presence of her sister: 6 See also: Hamilton (1991); Lane and Lane (1986); Rehm (2006). 7 On this apparent turn-around, see Foley (1996); also Murnaghan (1986) and Neuberg (1990).

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Iºº K ŒÆŒE E E  FŒ ÆN ÆØ 
ºı KÆı c F
Łı
Øı [In your time of trouble I am not ashamed/to make myself a fellow voyager in your suVering]. (ll. 540–1)

Ismene’s change of heart arises from Creon’s sense that she must be a co-conspirator in Antigone’s plan, something the audience knows from the opening scene to be false. Although Antigone rejects her sister’s belated solidarity—their exchange (ll. 536–60) resembles the prologue in reverse—Ismene’s willingness to accept responsibility for the act anticipates the growing support for Antigone’s deWance indicated later in the play. Ismene not only chooses—albeit belatedly—to stand with Antigone in defying Creon’s edict forbidding Polyneices’ burial, but she also protests on behalf of her sister’s marriage to Haimon, a union that Creon wilfully destroys: Ismene: Will you kill the bride of your own son? Creon: There are other furrows for him to plow. Ismene: But that would not suit him or her. Creon: I loathe evil wives for my son. Ismene: Oh dearest Haimon, how your father dishonors you. Creon: You grieve me too much, you and this marriage of yours. (ll. 568–73) Ismene’s last stand on stage presents a double challenge to Creon’s authority, as ruler of the polis and as patriarch of his family. In a sense, Ismene in her last scene uniWes the values represented separately by Antigone and Haimon (once he joins Antigone in the cave); namely loyalty to the natal and to the nuptial family, two strands of Greek female experience that Creon fails to honor. Ismene’s return to the conWnes of the house (her eVective dismissal from the play after line 581) does not discredit her awakened sense of resistance. Although ‘locked away’ in the oikos, Ismene’s virtual presence behind the fac¸ade suggests that resistance to Creon’s edict has spread to the inner sanctum, where it Wnds its symbolic voice in another female character—played, quite possibly, by the same (Ismene) actor—namely, Creon’s wife Eurydice.8 8 For actor divisions, see Rehm (2006: 210, n.30).

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The suicide of Eurydice at the household altar of Zeus herkeios oVers the culminating image of Creon’s failure to understand Haimon’s hypothetical, ‘yes, I side with women, if you are a woman’. On hearing the news of her son’s death, Eurydice withdraws silently into the recesses of the house only to re-emerge with a vengeance. Announcing her death to Creon, the Messenger emphasizes Eurydice’s maternal role as the F
Æ øæ  ŒæF [all-mother of this dead young man] (l.1282), referring to the corpse of Haimon, which Creon has brought back from the cave. Balancing his body is Eurydice’s corpse: ‘there to behold; it is no longer hidden indoors’ (l.1293), as the Messenger proclaims. Draped over the altar revealed on the ekkukleˆma (a ‘roll out machine’, which allowed the exposure, through the centre door, of indoor scenes in the ancient Greek theatre), the dead Eurydice pollutes the heart of Creon’s home, in response to his part in Haimon’s suicide. In the Messenger’s description of her act, we learn of another son, whose death Eurydice also blames on Creon: ŒøŒ Æ Æ . . .  ªÆæø Œ e º [lamenting . . . the empty bed of Megareus] (ll. 1302–3). The ‘all-mother’ Eurydice refers to her elder boy who, in other versions of the myth, was sacriWced to ensure Thebes’ victory over the Argive invaders led by Polyneices.9 The language describing Eurydice’s grief pointedly recalls that of Antigone at the sight of Polyneices’ corpse (ll. 423–5):10 shrieking out a lament [IÆŒøŒ Ø] . . . / like a bird who sees her empty [Œ B] nest, / the bed [º] orphaned of her nestlings.

Sophocles’ conveys the female resistance to Creon—if I can call it that—from both Antigone and Eurydice in terms of maternal grief, a Wnal aspect of the traditional female world that Creon ignores or undervalues. 9 Previously unmentioned in the text, Megareus (ll. 1302–05) was sacriWced to save the city from the Argive invaders, a subject dramatized in Euripides’ Phoenissae, where he is called Menoeceus (‘Stay at Home’?); see Jebb (2004: l. 1303). After cursing Creon as ‘childkiller’ ( fiH
ÆØŒ fiø) (l. 1305) of both her sons, Eurydice imitates their modes of death, stabbing herself with a sword like Haimon and dying like a sacriWcial victim at the altar like Megareus. 10 For other parallels between Antigone and Eurydice, see Segal (1995: 126–27). Developing the mother-bird imagery, Katz (1994: 81–103), claims that Antigone has ‘precipitated herself into a premature and surrogate maternity,’ her challenge to Creon ‘not so much a refusal of male authority as . . . an assertion of maternal rights’, with Polyneices functioning as her surrogate son (pp. 93–4).

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As the play closes, Creon’s twisted eVort to seal oV Polyneices’ corpse from the earth and the living Antigone from the sun has spread to his own home, which he now calls ‘the implacable harbor of Hades’ (l. 1284). Like his son, when he reaches the cave and confronts his dead bride-to-be, Creon arrives home to Wnd his partner slain by her own hand, his oikos robbed of its future. Creon at the end also resembles Antigone on her way to prison: ‘desolate of loved ones, ill fated, / still living I go to the grave-dug world of the dead’ (ll. 919–20). Creon sees himself as a man bereft of what ties him to life, a man ‘who exists no more than no one’ (l.1325). To return to Haimon’s hypothetical ‘if you are a woman’, the play suggests that Creon’s failure to accept that proposition, at least symbolically, leads to his becoming a living corpse. Turning from Sophocles’ play to Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona’s The Island, we move to the realization of a comparable theatrical womanizing in the context of apartheid South Africa. One of the miracles of this short, brilliant play is how it uses Sophocles’ prototype so appropriately, and yet so surprisingly.11 Winston, one of the two prisoners whose experience and dialogue constitutes the play, states the issue succinctly: . . . this Antigone is a bloody . . . what you call it . . . legend! A Greek one at that. Bloody thing never even happened. Not even history! Look, brother, I got no time for bullshit. Fuck legends. Me? . . . I live my life here! I know why I’m here, and it is history, not legends. I had my chat with a magistrate at Cradock and now I’m here. Your Antigone is a child’s play, man.12

Within the greater struggle against South-African apartheid that has led John and Winston to their imprisonment on Robben Island, we are asked to take seriously the seemingly trivial problem of convincing Winston to perform the play for the upcoming prison concert and, in particular, to play the role of Antigone. But, as I will argue, these two struggles—at least so far as the play is concerned—prove inextricable.13 11 For the way the play reworks Sophocles’ original, see: Durbach (1984); Foster (1982: esp. 208–17); McKay (1989); Wertheim (2000: 88–99); Wetmore (2002: 194–203). 12 All quotations of the play are from Fugard et al. (1976). 13 My understanding of the play has been inXuenced by the powerful and moving performance I attended by the University of California, Davis, in March 2006, produced by the Department of Theatre and Dance, directed by Peter Lichtenfels, and starring Dahlak Brathwaite as John, and James Marchbanks as Winston, part of

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Dragging his feet from the start, Winston can not (or will not) remember his lines, nor can he keep straight the basic four-part plot of the Trial of Antigone (Winston appears as a kind of Ismene Wgure at the start). Using legal terms that would speak to the prisoners on Robben Island, John outlines the Brechtian gestus for the play: (1) the State represented by Creon lays charges against Antigone; (2) Antigone pleads guilty; (3) she then pleads in mitigation of her sentence; and (4) the play ends with the ‘State Summary, Sentence, and Farewell Words’. Through patient instruction and rehearsal, John apparently overcomes Winston’s reluctance and gains his cooperation. John’s Antigone-like commitment to the performance of the Trial of Antigone is manifest in many ways, most movingly in a bit of business indicated in the stage directions: He pulls out three or four rusty nails from a secret pocket in his trousers. We realize that John has risked punishment or worse by smuggling nails out of the quarry or the prison yard. He has not done so to make a weapon against Hodoshe, the sadistic prison guard whose presence the two men continually evoke. Nor has he saved them so they might serve as a Shawshank Redemption-like tool to eVect a slow and meticulous escape. Nor does he hope to fashion the nails into something practical, like the scrap of steel that Ivan Denisovich picks up while laying bricks at the labour site, thinking that if he can get it by the friskers he might grind it down to repair his boots, one of many memorable details in Solzhenitsyn’s great prison novel. No, John runs the risk in order to complete a necklace that Winston will wear as Antigone in the prison concert. Assembling it with string, John measures out the pattern: ‘Three Wngers, one nail . . . three Wngers, one nail . . .’.14 Later the conference ‘Sophoclean Drama and its Continuing Cultural Impact’, organized by Seth Schein. I earlier had seen the revival of the original production of The Island (directed by Athol Fugard, with John Kani and Winston Ntshona) at The Old Vic in 2001. For all the nostalgia and thanksgiving at viewing the play with its original cast in a post-apartheid world (Kani and Ntshona originated the parts of John and Winston in 1973), the performances of the younger actors at Davis had an energy and desperation that made the Davis production more compelling, perhaps because their youth gave a stronger sense of the lost potential that lay ahead. For a discussion of the play’s inception and various early manifestations, see Fugard (1983: 192, 208–9, 212), and Gray (1982, 7, 9–12, 190–97). 14 John presumably has run a similar risk to procure the jam-tin lid and twine he uses to fashion Creon’s pendent, which he conceals in his bedroll (p. 53).

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in the scene he says: ‘Nearly Wnished! Look at it! Three Wngers’, and, as if in a Sophoclean hemistich, Winston completes the line ‘One nail’ (pp. 50–1). This example of restored union between the two men, a recovered singleness of purpose, is one of many in the play. It seems at this juncture that the performance will come to fruition, that Winston will Wnd his feet in the part, and The Trial of Antigone will take its place in the prison concert, along with cell 42’s performance of the Zulu War Dance, whose rehearsal singing John and Winston hear echoing down the cell block. But at the next rehearsal (the beginning of Scene Two), a diVerent sound almost brings down the curtain. When Winston appears as Antigone wearing a wig and false breasts, John cannot contain his laughter. Winston refuses to participate any further in this play-acting, only agreeing to rejoin the performance after slamming the wig and false breasts into John’s hands: ‘take these titties and play Antigone. I’m going to play Creon. Do you understand what I’m saying? Take your two titties . . . I’ll have my balls and play Creon’ (p. 61). Winston would rather play the villain of the piece, as long as he’s male, than risk being laughed at in the role of a female, with his manhood insulted and degraded. Before delving deeper into the source of Winston’s humiliation, his fear of ‘becoming a woman’, let us look brieXy at the other representations of women in the play. Looking for their lapie (washrag), John insists that Winston had it last, prompting his friend to protest: ‘Haai, man! You got no wife here. Look for the rag yourself’ (p. 50). In this Odd Couple moment, Winston is quick to suspect and forcefully reject any hint that he may be playing a woman’s domestic role. In a quite diVerent vein, John later recalls the performance of Antigone they saw years before in New Brighton, at St. Stephen’s Hall: ‘Shit, those were the days! . . . Nomhle played Antigone. A bastard of a lady that one, but a beautiful bitch. Can’t get her out of my mind tonight’ (p. 54). As one might expect in a world of men without women—a brute reality of prison, political or otherwise—the prospect of sex with the opposite sex arises, one might say, naturally. Perhaps it is signiWcant that John ‘goes there’ while he is remembering a theatrical performance, and one of Antigone no less. In his memory, a woman as a Wgure of political resistance merges with the female actress playing the role, who arouses his sexual desire.

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The dream of women returns with greater force in the games of imaginary escape that the two men create to pass the time. The night before, Winston ‘took them’ to the bioscope (cinema) by recreating Fastest Gun in the West, like Murphy in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, who keeps the World Series game alive after Nurse Ratched switches oV the television. Now his turn, John converts an empty mug into a telephone and begins an imaginary conversation with The Shop, their old drinking haunt in Port Elizabeth. Eventually he speaks to their pal Sky, bringing Winston into the story: ‘Hey, Winston is asking how are the punkies [prostitutes] doing? You bloody lover boy! Leave something for us, man’ (p. 57). Given the proximity of The Shop to their homes, John asks Sky to visit their wives; Wrst Winston’s and then his own wife, Princess. The message: one more day at Robben Island, everything’s OK. But why doesn’t she write? How are the kids, especially his daughter Monde? How are his father and mother? We get a view of the worlds the two men have lost: sexual, domestic, marital, paternal, Wlial. But it is interesting that these worlds emerge through the memory of a performance (Antigone, staged years before), and then via a game of imagination. In her paper ‘Antigone under Apartheid’, the Dutch scholar Astrid Van Weyenberg discusses the various metatheatrical aspects of The Island, which ‘foreground the relationship between the real and the Wctive’ in the play.15 To her valuable analysis I would add that—perhaps unsurprisingly—the various games of escape invented by John and Winston carry with them not simply the image of freedom from conWnement at Robben Island, but also as yet undetected areas where the need for liberation remains. Let us return to the rehearsal that begins Scene Two and look again at John’s reaction to Winston’s appearance as Antigone. After breaking out with laughter, he bangs on the wall, announcing to the next cell: ‘Hey, Norman. Norman! Come this side, man. I got it here. Poes!’ The stage directions indicate that John circles ‘her’ admiringly, he fondles her breasts, he walks arm in arm with her down Main Street. . . . He climaxes everything by dropping his trousers, and then exclaims: ‘Speedy Gonzales! Here I come!’ With that, Winston tears 15 Astrid Van Weyenberg, ‘Antigone under Apartheid’, unpublished essay, presented at the Migratory Aesthetics workshop held at Leeds University, January 2006.

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oV his costume, storms over to the water bucket and starts to wash himself. The look, smell, prurience, and disrepute of being taken for an actress/whore must be wiped away: ‘And in case you want to know why’, Winston explains, ‘I’m a man, not a bloody woman./ . . . I am not doing your Antigone! I would rather run the whole day for Hodoshe. At least I know where I stand with him. All he wants to do is make me a ‘boy’, . . . not a bloody woman’ (pp. 59–60). At this moment, Winston’s fragile sense of his own status focuses on gender, and he clings to the remnants of his self-image by insisting on his masculinity, debased as it is under apartheid and all the more so in prison, where his power is minimal. Just such clear divisions of status and hierarchy are what apartheid introduced into the law of South Africa, but in terms of race: Whites, Indians, Coloureds (or mixed), Blacks, clearly deWned, in that order. Both John’s and Winston’s reactions to imaginary women suggest that within each of these categories, there exists another, implicit hierarchy, male then female. In this declension, a black man—a ‘boy’—is near the bottom, but not as low as a black woman. So, Winston says, give me Hodoshe rather than this Antigone nonsense. In addition to the laughter, Winston fears that the role might stick (hence his washing it oV) (p. 60): Every time I run to the quarry . . . ‘Nyah . . . nyah . . . Here comes Antigone! . . . Help the poor lady!’ Well, you can go to hell with your Antigone.

What self-respecting male would want to be stuck with this hyperinferior status? Winston’s concern reXects the reality of prison life (certainly in the Unites States, and I would imagine at Robben Island), which encourages the sexual domination of men by other men. Although the play never makes this possibility explicit, we catch a hint of its potential when the scene is interrupted, as if out of the blue (p. 62): The two men break apart suddenly, drop their trousers, and stand facing the wall with arms outstretched. Hodoshe calls John.

Naked with their asses facing toward the oppressor, these men’s sexual vulnerability to their ‘superiors’ could not be plainer. After John leaves at Hodoshe’s order, Winston continues his protestations, stomping on the wig (p. 63):

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Shit, man! If he [John] wants a woman in the cell he must send for his wife, and I don’t give a damn how he does it. I didn’t walk with those men and burn my bloody passbook in front of that police station, and have a magistrate send me here for life so that he can dress me up like a woman and make a bloody fool of me.

John’s earlier arguments—invented, one feels, on the spot—have failed to work. He tried to persuade Winston that the theatre has diVerent rules, that he was preparing Winston for a boisterous reaction from the audience, that he was helping him overcome stage fright. Finally, John puts on the Antigone costume himself and asks Winston to laugh at him. Although he tries to accommodate, Winston cannot sustain his derision. ‘Why did you stop?’ John asks. ‘Must I tell you why? Is it because behind all this rubbish is me, and you know it is me. You think those bastards out there won’t know it is you? Yes, they’ll laugh. But who cares about that as long as they laugh in the beginning and listen at the end. That’s all we want them to do . . . listen at the end’ (pp. 61–2). At this point, Winston is in no mood to listen. However, he has no choice once John returns from his interview with Hodoshe and announces that he’ll be free in three months, and oV Robben Island in two. The penultimate scene explores how this new reality threatens the long-standing relationship between the two men, Winston takes over most of the dialogue, inventing a new ‘game’ to pass the time— imagining what John will do once he’s free and back home: Winston: You’ll tell them about this place, John, about Hodoshe, about the quarry, and about your good friend Winston, who you left behind. But you still won’t be happy, hey. Because you’ll need a fuck. A really wild one! John: Stop it, Winston! Winston [relentless]: And that is why at ten o’clock that night you’ll slip out through the back door and make your way to Sky’s place. . . . They’ll Wll you up with booze. They’ll look after you. They know what it is like inside. They’ll Wx you up with a woman . . . John: NO! Winston: Set you up with her in a comfortable joint, and then leave you alone. You’ll watch her, watch her take her clothes oV,

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you’ll take your pants oV, get near her, feel her, feel it. . . . Ja, you’ll feel it. It will be wet . . . John: WINSTON! Winston: Wet poes, John And you’ll fuck it wild! After a long silence indicated in the stage directions, John continues: John: Winston? What’s happening? Why are you punishing me? Winston [quietly]: You stink, John. You stink of beer, of company, of poes, of freedom. Your freedom stinks, John. John: No, Winston! Winston: Yes! Don’t deny it. Three months time, at the hour, you’ll be wiping beer oV your face, your hands on your balls, and poes waiting for you. You will laugh, you will drink, you will fuck and forget. (pp. 70–71)

Throughout the play, Winston and John face the threat of mutual division and hatred, as Hodoshe uses the tried and true technique of the powerful: divide and conquer. Recall the diabolical forced labour mimed at the play’s outset, which the two inmates later describe. One prisoner Wlls a hole with sand after the other has dug it out, and this daisy chain of back-breaking, Sisyphean work continues all day, pointless, futile, and divisive. John and Winston admit hating each other at the time, but they rise above the guards’ eVort to set them apart, realizing that mutual hatred between cellmates and compatriots is precisely what Hodoshe wants. John’s impending release, however, presents a greater challenge, for the prospect of select or partial freedom threatens their solidarity more than anything else Hodoshe could do.16 In what might be an oblique reference to Sophocles’ original, Winston talks about what lies in store for him 16 Recall Winston and John’s description after their trial, waiting to start the long trip towards Robben Island: Winston: . . . when they lined us up for the vans . . . John: And married us! They lock left and right hands together to suggest handcuVs (p. 65). With John free, the ‘marriage’ threatens to end in divorce. By taking on the role of Antigone, Winston reconWrms his commitment to the cause, even as he acknowledges his individual isolation, with no prospect of release, like the heroine with whom he comes to identify.

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after John leaves: a life sentence with no release, ever. He reminds John of another lifer, old Harry, whom they see every day when they work in the yard chiselling blocks: ‘Look into his eyes, John. Look at his hands. They’ve changed him. They’ve turned him into stone’ (p. 71). We think of Antigone walled up in her cave, and also of Niobe, evoked by Antigone in her kommos (ll. 823–33). But Winston isn’t worried about petrifaction leading to suicide, or to endless weeping like a spring down a cliV face. He fears the living death of the spirit, turning him into a man like old Harry ‘who’s forgotten everything . . . why he’s here, where he comes from’. It is this prospect, I think, that prompts Winston to forget about the shame and humiliation of false breasts and hair, and a makeshift skirt and a necklace. He becomes proud to play the role of a legendary woman in an old Greek play. To remember why you are here and where you come from, at least on this island, requires Winston to enter another persona, because that person’s story mirrors his own. John may leave, but the stories of those who struggle, who have struggled, who have come before, who live in legend, keep one company. This is how one can recall oneself to oneself, as a means of survival and resistance. Winston may have begun the play as a kind of Ismene, draggling his feet at the prospect of performing the play, but he eventually grows fully into the part of Antigone. Of course, most of us—mutatis mutandis, and in our own way— resemble the liberated John of Winston’s imagination, drinking our beer, taking our pleasure, enjoying our version of good times and wet poes, forgetting the world of the many who remain imprisoned, subjugated, dominated, oppressed, locked away out of sight and out of mind. In The Island, the nameless and forgotten are recalled to us via an eVort at theatrical solidarity, and one that leads us back to the real world. Antigone’s story, John and Winston’s story, and their intersection at Robben Island represent a cry for solidarity in the Wght against injustice and illegitimate power. And it is the power of Sophocles’ Antigone, recaptured in Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona’s The Island, that this call to solidarity arises from a female Wgure— who, in the social, historical, and political contexts which gave rise to each play, represented an apparently ‘inferior’ being. Of course, we could read Haimon’s ‘if you are a woman’ in its most obvious sense, with the implication: ‘but of course you’re not, Creon,

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so don’t worry about my siding with women. That’s as impossible as your being one!’. The parallel in The Island might be John’s insistence that he remains fully himself beneath Antigone’s costume, with the unstated implication, ‘Don’t be a fool, Winston, you’re unchanged and unaVected by playing this legendary female’. But, as I have argued, the theatrical womanizing of these plays challenges that set of clear distinctions. It is only by taking on the mantle of the oppressed—in the context of these two dramas, ‘becoming a woman’—that resistance takes hold, that the struggle for liberation can sustain itself. We see this in the way resistance to Creon’s edict spreads through Thebes, from Antigone to Ismene, to Haimon, to Eurydice, to the city at large. We see it in the powerful image near the end of The Island, when Winston speaks as Antigone: Brothers and Sisters of the Land! I go now on my last journey . . . to my grave, my everlasting prison, condemned alive to solitary death.

Of course he speaks for himself as well, and it is no radical change of persona when he removes his wig and confronts the audience as Winston, yet still using Antigone-like language (p. 77): Gods of our Fathers! My land! My Home! . . . I go now to my living death, because I honoured those things to which honour belongs.

Winston and the play have entered a Sophoclean world where political resistance and theatrical womanizing are inextricably linked, where the struggle against political tyranny must go down to a stratum that appears weaker, more vulnerable, more easily dominated, in order to Wnd the strength of its convictions, and the strength to sustain them.

13 Finding a Post-Colonial Voice for Antigone: Seamus Heaney’s Burial at Thebes Stephen E. Wilmer

Today post-colonialism has become an endangered topic of academic inquiry. The US House of Representatives recently debated a bill threatening academic programmes that incorporated post-colonial theory. In a speech to Congress in June 2003, Stanley Kurtz argued: The ruling intellectual paradigm in academic area studies (especially Middle Eastern Studies) is called ‘post-colonial theory’. . . . The core premise of post-colonial theory is that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge of foreign languages and cultures at the service of American power.

In his speech to the House Subcommittee on Select Education, Kurtz (2003) urged the Congress to pass a measure that would divert funds out of programmes using post-colonial theory and into language programmes in the Defense Language Institute:1 The Defense Language Institute would then be in a position to fund scholarships for college graduates to do advanced language training, leading to full time jobs in our defense and intelligence agencies. Under the umbrella of the Defense Language Institute, students with a desire to serve their country would have no fear of retaliation or ostracism from professors who view cooperation with the American government as immoral. 1 The full text of Stanley Kurtz’ testimony before the Subcommittee on Select Education, Committee on Education and the Workforce, US House of Representatives on 19 June 2003, is available at: http://edworkforce.house.gov/hearings/108th/ sed/titlevi61903/kurtz.htm (last accessed 16 January 2006).

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So, who said the cold war and McCarthyism are dead? They have just changed into diVerent forms. For the cold war, read the ‘war on terror’; for the House Un-American Activities Committee, read the Department of Homeland Security,2 and for communism, read terrorism, or in this case its apparent bedfellow, post-colonialism. At the risk of incurring the wrath of the US Defense Department and gaining the attention of government detectives under the recent USA Patriot Act,3 I want to take issue with Kurtz’s notion that postcolonialism focuses on America. Britain is an equally valid focus. In this chapter I will discuss the recent production at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin of Seamus Heaney’s version of Burial at Thebes, both in terms of its anti-American but also its anti-British representation. I intend to show that in his attempt to make Antigone resonate for a modern Irish audience, Heaney uses language evoking current events concerning the US invasion of Iraq, as well as historical events relating to British colonial policies in Ireland. Textually and subtextually, the American Government’s aggressive policies in the Middle East echo the British Government’s legacy in Northern Ireland, and mark Heaney’s adaptation as a post-colonial work. At the same time I want to employ a somewhat more measured, analytic, and scholarly deWnition of post-colonialism that has been proposed by Loomba (1998: 12), viz. the ‘contestation of colonial domination and the 2 The House Un-American Activities Committee was created in 1938 to inquire into subversive activities in the USA. By the late 1940s, HUAC was gaining considerable publicity because of its inquiries into Communist activities in Hollywood. Many prominent theatre and Wlm personnel were threatened with contempt of Congress and prison if they refused to inform on the activities of their peers. Senator Joseph McCarthy exploited the fear of being labelled as a Communist in his Senate inquiries by threatening to expose people employed by the government. The Department of Homeland Security was established following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. The new Department is designed to prevent terrorist attacks on the USA and improve internal security. 3 This act, which was introduced hurriedly after the September 11 attacks, allows the US Government to infringe the civil liberties of ordinary citizens on suspicion of their support for terrorist organizations. Thus, for example, the Government now has the right to inspect the library records of individuals to Wnd out what books they have been reading. In 2003 the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Government for infringement of the US constitution, challenging ‘the constitutionality of Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, which vastly expands the power of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain records and other ‘tangible things’ of people not suspected of criminal activity’ Bohn (2003).

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legacies of colonialism’. Likewise, Hulme argues that post-colonialism ‘refers to a process of disengagement from the whole colonial syndrome, which takes many forms and is probably inescapable for all those whose worlds have been marked by that set of phenomena’.4 Needless to say, Ireland is a country that has been marked by colonialism and is in an ongoing process of disengagement from it. Northern Ireland is still arguably a colony of Britain. However, postcolonialism is not an approach that is necessarily deWned by political structures, but more by political attitudes. As Kiberd (1995: 6) argues: . . . post-colonial writing does not begin only when the occupier withdraws: rather it is initiated at that very moment when a native writer formulates a text committed to cultural resistance.

Seamus Heaney’s Burial at Thebes bears witness to the indelible marks of colonialism and oppression, and to the process of disengagement from it. In a personal statement about writing the adaptation for the centennial year of the opening of the Irish National Theatre (known as the Abbey Theatre5), Heaney indicates that George Bush and his war on terror provided an immediate justiWcation for staging Antigone, but that the British treatment of Irish people in Ireland over the centuries helped him Wnd a voice for Antigone as well as a moral context for her stance. In thinking about the struggle between Antigone and Creon over who owns the body of Polyneices and who can have access to it, Heaney remembered the situation of Francis Hughes, his 25 year old neighbour in Northern Ireland who died in 1981 after being on hunger strike for sixty-nine days.6 His body was in the custody of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, but his family and friends wanted to pay their last 4 Quoted in Loomba (1998: 18–19). 5 The Irish National Theatre Society was established in 1903 and moved into the Abbey Theatre in 1904. The Abbey receives the largest share of Irish Arts Council subsidy for theatre, and acts as a cultural Xagship for the nation, touring abroad and attracting foreign tourists at home, particularly in the summer months. The 2004 centennial of the opening of the Abbey Theatre was a major cultural event, and Ben Barnes, the Abbey’s artistic director, approached Seamus Heaney, a Nobel Prizewinning poet resident in Dublin, to provide a play to mark the occasion. 6 Heaney discussed this memory in his question and answer session with the Abbey Theatre audience on 27 April 2004. The death of a hunger-striker was also evoked in Heaney’s, The Cure at Troy, in the line: ‘A hunger-striker’s father / Stands in the graveyard dumb’ (1990: 77).

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respects and to bury it. The battle over his body was emotionally heated, setting the hunger-striker’s family against the state, and reXected the division between the regulations of the state authorities on the one hand and the personal needs of the family to observe the traditional rites on the other. For this and other reasons Heaney decided to emphasize the word ‘burial’ in changing the title of Antigone to the Burial at Thebes. The play for him is primarily about the need to pay respect to the dead, and burial is the traditional Irish (as well as Greek) way of doing so (see, for example, Macintosh 1994: 30–7).7 As in ancient Greek society,8 the traditional Irish way of paying respect to the dead is the custom of keening or lamenting, usually performed by women at a wake. Thus it was that Heaney used one of the most beautiful poems in the Irish language, Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill’s eighteenth century Caoineadh Airt Uı´ Laoghaire [Lament for Art O’Leary], as a model for Antigone. Eibhlin’s husband Art O’Leary had refused to sell his fast horse to Abraham Morris, the High SheriV of Cork. Morris tried to pressure him, and so O’Leary challenged him to a duel. Morris then declared that O’Leary was an outlaw and had his men shoot O’Leary, leaving him on the road to die. Eibhlin Ni Chonaill immediately composed a poem as a lament or keen to his memory that evokes both her love for her husband and her sense of loss, as well as her anger at the state authorities. In Heaney’s view (Heaney 2005: 172): As the poem proceeds, this cadence of lamentation heightens and gathers, an indeXectible outpouring of rage and grief. It is the voice of woman as mourner and woman as avenging fury, a woman Werce in her devotion to a beloved whom she eventually Wnds lying beside a little furze bush, dead without the last rites.

That the poem was written in Irish by a woman mourning her husband, who had been killed by the English and left to rot, evokes a strong anti-colonial sentiment. 7 The importance that the ancient Greeks gave to observing proper respect for the dead is particularly illustrated in Achilles’ observation of traditional funeral rites for Patroklos in the Iliad, Book 23 (by contrast with his shameful treatment of Hector). For a discussion of the desecration of the deceased, see Sophocles Antigone (ed. Mark GriYth 1999: 30). 8 For a discussion of the ancient Greek ritual of lamentation, see Alexiou (1974) and Holst-Warhaft (1992). See also Oakley (2004: ch. 6); and Hardwick (1993: 147–62).

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Ni Chonaill’s poem polarizes the Irish against the English, especially in seeking revenge for her husband’s death: The English bowed To the ground before you, Out of no love for you, Out of their fear . . . Grief on you, Morris! Heart’s blood and bowel’s blood! May your eyes go blind And your knees be broken! You killed my darling And no man in Ireland Will Wre the shot at you! (A Lament of Art O’Leary, tr. O’Connor 1940)

The poem written in a plain and direct language, with intimate references to her home environment and to her life with her husband and their children, possesses an urgency about it as it progresses (like Electra’s lament in the Choephoroi)9 from a eulogy for the dead man to a call for justice and revenge. Heaney recollected this poem as he was trying to Wnd a voice for Antigone (Heaney 2005: 172): In a Xash I saw refracted in Eibhlı´n Dubh the Wgure of the stricken Antigone, and heard in the three-beat line of her keen the note that Antigone might 9 In her opening speech of the Choephoroi, Electra says: ‘Supreme herald of the realm above and the realm below, O Hermes of the nether world, come to my aid, summon to me the spirits beneath the earth to hear my prayers, spirits that watch over my father’s house, and Earth herself, who gives birth to all things, and having nurtured them receives their increase in turn. And meanwhile, as I pour these lustral oVerings to the dead, I invoke my father: Have pity both on me and on dear Orestes! How shall we rule our own house? For now we are bartered away like vagrants by her who bore us, by her who in exchange got as her mate Aegisthus, who was her accomplice in your murder. As for me, I am no better than a slave, Orestes is an outcast from his inheritance, while they in their insolence revel openly in the winnings of your toil. But that Orestes may come home with good fortune I pray to you, father: Oh, hearken to me! And as for myself, grant that I may prove far more circumspect than my mother and more reverent in deed. I utter these prayers on our behalf, but I ask that your avenger appear to our foes, father, and that your killers may be killed in just retribution. So I interrupt my prayer for good to oVer them this prayer for evil. But be a bearer of blessings for us to the upper world, with the help of the gods and Earth and Justice crowned with victory. Such are my prayers, and over them I pour out these libations. It is right for you to crown them with lamentations, raising your voices in a chant for the dead.’ (ll. 123–150, tr. Herbert Weir Smyth, [1926] 1957)

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strike at the start of the proposed translation. There was no distinction at that moment between the excitement I felt at the discovery of the trimeter as the right metre for the opening and the analogies I could sense between the predicaments of a sister aVronted by a tyrant in Thebes and a wife bereft by English soldiery in Carriganimma in County Cork.

Thus Heaney assigned a trimeter verse structure to Antigone lines as she calls for respect for her dead brother and immediately takes action in spite of the state decree: Ismene, quick, come here! What’s to become of us? Why are we always the ones? (The Burial at Thebes 2004: 1)

By contrast Heaney used a four-beat rhythm for the chorus who speak in a much more Xorid style. Heaney characterized this as: ‘the four-beat, Old English alliterative line, the line of the veteran AngloSaxons, gnomic and grim, but capable also of a certain clangour and glamour’ (Heaney 2005: 173). Thus Heaney viewed Antigone as an impatient, plain-speaking Irish woman and the chorus as wellspoken but dispassionate English gentlemen, who reXect on the situation but are not anxious to get involved.10 The language that they use is carefully phrased and reXective, and the metre is more drawn-out and slower by comparison with the anxious urgency of Antigone. The four-beat rhythm, according to Heaney, ‘was an echo of the metre that Anglo-Saxon poets used for their grim old pagan wisdom and their new Christian hymns of praise, and it therefore seemed right for a Chorus whose function involves both the utterance of proverbial wisdom and the invocation of gods’ (Heaney 2004). The chorus opens with: Glory be to brightness, to the gleaming sun, Shining guardian of our seven gates. Burn away the darkness, dawn on Thebes, Dazzle the city you have saved from destruction. (p. 8)

10 When Creon urges them to act as ‘agents of the law’, the chorus responds: ‘Younger men would be better for that job’ (p. 11).

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So for Heaney the chorus was a kind of passive English voice reXecting on life and current circumstances. At the same time this English voice can appear threatening at times, such as in the ‘wonders’ chorus where they warn against anyone taking action against the state: But let him once Overstep what the city allows, Tramp down right or treat the law Wilfully, as his own word, Then let this wonder of the world remember: He’ll have put himself beyond the pale. (p. 17)

The phrase ‘beyond the pale’ is used several times in the play and contains speciWc resonance for an Irish audience, where the pale represented the area within English jurisdiction in Ireland, and beyond the pale was a wild and unaccountable area where anything might happen. In that phrase one can hear echoes of Art O’Leary and the grim justice that was meted out to him. By contrast with the urgency of the three-beat line of Antigone and the more reXective four-beat line of the chorus, Heaney used iambic pentameter11 for Creon as the voice of authority: ‘to honour patriots in life and death.’ (p. 11) Creon establishes his authority over the citizen chorus, declares the importance of civic over family duty, and extols the value of strong leadership: Worst is the man who has all the good advice And then, because his nerve fails, fails to act In accordance with it, as a leader should. And equally to blame Is anyone who puts the personal 11 Heaney’s use of various rhythms to diVerentiate character also reXects the variety of rhythmic patterns in the original Greek that, according to GriYth (1999: 13, n.47), tends to be ignored in most translations, reducing the script ‘to a formless monotone’. GriYth notes the diVerent use of language by the various characters in the original Greek, with Antigone using simpler language than Ismene and a staccato delivery, which is ‘more particular, personal, and direct’, while ‘Kreon’s rigid and controlling temperament is represented throughout by the harsh imagery of his language . . . and by his disrespectful habit of referring to people in the third person, even when they are present . . . or, when he does address them directly, of doing so in a crudely imperious manner’ (p. 20; see also pp. 36–7).

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Above the overall thing, puts friend Or family Wrst . . . For the patriot, Personal loyalty always must give way To patriotic duty. (p. 10)

Creon stresses the need for unity and loyalty to the cause: Solidarity, friends, Is what we need. The whole crew must close ranks. The safety of our state depends upon it. Our trust. Our friendships. Our security. (p. 10)

In this passage, Heaney uses the aggressive dictatorial policies of Creon not only as a metaphor for British colonial attitudes in Ireland but also for American imperialism. Creon’s language starts to resemble the rhetoric of George Bush in his war on terror. By emphasizing such words as ‘patriot’, ‘patriotic duty’, ‘patriots in life and death’, as well as ‘safety’ and ‘security’, Creon’s phraseology calls to mind the post-9/11 climate of fear, loyalty (to the government), and vengefulness, which was encouraged by the US president through the adoption of the USA Patriot Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.12 Moreover, there is an underlying parallel between Creon’s treatment of Polyneices and Bush’s denial of human rights in the interrogation and imprisonment of anyone labelled as a ‘terrorist’. Creon decrees:

12 One can see the evocation of Bush’s rhetoric more clearly by comparing this passage with the Jebb (2006) translation, which Heaney used as a basis for his own work: ‘For if anyone who directs the entire city does not cling to the best and wisest plans, but because of some fear keeps his lips locked, then, in my judgment, he is and has long been the most cowardly traitor. And if any man thinks a friend more important than his fatherland, that man, I say, is of no account. Zeus, god who sees all things always, be my witness—I would not be silent if I saw ruin, instead of safety, marching upon the citizens. Nor would I ever make a man who is hostile to my country a friend to myself, because I know this, that our country is the ship that bears us safe, and that only when we sail her on a straight course can we make true friends. Such are the rules by which I strengthen this city.’(Jebb 1900: ll. 177–92)

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And with regard to Polyneices: He is forbidden Any ceremonial whatsoever. No keening, no interment, no observance Of any of the rites. (p. 11)

The phrase ‘no observance of any of the rites’ in the performance of the play echoed the denial of human rights and dignity to Iraqi and other prisoners. At the time, the US military was being accused of torturing prisoners, denying them access to lawyers, and justifying such treatment because of the exceptional conditions engendered by terrorism. (For a discussion of the US media’s justiWcation for torturing prisoners, see Zˇizˇek 2002: 102–3.) Like George Bush, who denied the applicability of the Geneva convention (relating to prisoners of war) to those detained in Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan, Creon regards Polyneices as undeserving of human rights.13 Teiresias later warns him in words that anticipated the rising backlash in Iraq against the US military torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison: . . . enemy cities [will] rise to avenge each corpse You left dishonoured. (p. 46)

Justifying the comparison between Creon and Bush, Heaney has written (Heaney 2005: 170): Early in 2003 we were watching a leader, a Creon Wgure if ever there was one, a law-and-order bossman trying to boss the nations of the world into uncritical agreement with his edicts in much the same way as Creon tries to boss the Chorus of compliant Thebans into conformity with his.

13 Fleischer (2003); see also Zˇizˇek (2004). In his article, Zˇizˇek quotes Rumsfeld as saying that the Geneva Convention is ‘out of date’.

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Heaney regarded his version of the ‘wonders chorus’ as a ‘sort of open letter’ to George Bush: Let him once . . . Tramp down right or treat the law Wilfully, as his own word, Then let this wonder of the world remember . . . When he comes begging we will turn our backs. (p. 17)

Like Bush, who boasted of the Taliban, ‘We’ll smoke ‘em out’,14 Creon in Heaney’s version says of potential saboteurs: ‘I’ll Xush ‘em out’ (p. 3). And, virtually quoting Bush’s speech at a news conference in 2001, where he declared to coalition partners:15 You’re either with us or against us in the Wght against terror,

Creon warns: Whoever isn’t for us Is against us in this case. (p. 3)

Again, Haimon’s line to Creon: ‘I ask you: reconsider. Nobody, / Nobody can be sure they’re always right’ (p. 31) echoed Bush’s behaviour in never admitting he was wrong, which he joked about with the press on 5 May 2004, the day before he Wnally apologized to the Iraqis for the abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison. When the chorus suggest that Haimon might have a point, Creon answers: ‘Do my orders come from Thebes and from the people?’(p. 33). Creon’s refusal to listen to popular criticism evoked memories of Bush and Blair not listening to the huge demonstrations in London and Dublin against the war,16 as well as foreshadowing Donald Rumsfeld’s 14 ‘Bush: ‘‘We’re Smoking them out’’’, CNN, 26 November 2001: http://archives. cnn.com/2001/US/11/26/gen.war.against.terror/ (accessed 13 January 2006). 15 ‘You are either with us or against us’, CNN, 6 November 2001: http://archives. cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/gen.attack.on.terror/ (accessed 13 January 2006). In the same speech, Bush threatened other countries with unspeciWed consequences for failing to comply with America’s wishes for them to join in the coalition to invade Afghanistan: ‘Over time it’s going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity’. 16 The demonstration in Dublin on 15 February 2003 was one of the largest-ever protest demonstrations (with about 100,000 people). The demonstrators in London

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announcement, to the applause of US soldiers in Iraq on 13 May 2004, that he was no longer listening to media criticism: ‘I’ve stopped reading newspapers’ (McCarthy 2004). Another aspect of Heaney’s translation is the emphasis on money as a corrupting force. As in the original play by Sophocles, Creon accuses the guard and Teiresias of acting for Wnancial motives.17 This theme hints at one of the legacies of colonialism in Ireland: the neocolonial dependence on Britain and America, not only militarily but also economically.18 One aspect of the reliance on foreign trade is the currying of favour with British and American Governments for economic investment in Ireland. As a result the Irish Government has been continually tongue-tied when it comes to criticizing British and American Governmental policies. Emblematic of this is the use of Shannon airport as a strategic site for the transportation of arms and personnel to the Middle East.19 Ireland makes a pretence of political neutrality but has been dragged in as an accessory to the war on terror. The Irish economy beneWts from the added income in landing fees (and other generated income) from American military traYc through Shannon airport. Thus, the reference in the play to the power of money to corrupt has echoes in the Wnancial dependence of Ireland on its bigger neighbours. It was a surprise and an embarrassment to the Irish Government when the imminent invasion of Iraq generated one of the largest demonstrations in Dublin’s history, and the Irish Prime Minister was mocked for trying to straddle the fence (see, for example, O’Toole 2003). on the same day were variously estimated at one and two million people (see Anderson and Burke-Kennedy 2003 and ‘Thousands stage Iraq demo’, 27 September, BBC Website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3143062.stm (accessed 13 January 2006)). 17 This dramaturgical device is also used by Sophocles in Oedipus Rex where Oedipus accuses Teiresias in a similar manner (ll. 388–90). For a discussion of the tragic hero alienating himself from his friends and advisors, see Knox (1966: 32–4). 18 According to the Irish Times: ‘Ireland is the second-most exposed European country to the North American market, deriving 32.5 per cent of total revenues from North America, behind the Netherlands at 41.8 per cent’ O’Cleary: (2004). The references to bribery in the play would also have called to mind for the audience the many current Dublin tribunals investigating domestic political corruption. 19 In an article in the Irish Times, Paul Cullen estimated the income from the US military traYc through Shannon at 30 million euro. A further issue is whether the Irish Government has allowed the CIA to route suspected terrorists through Shannon to unknown destinations for interrogation and torture; see Cullen (2005).

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While the language of Seamus Heaney’s translation is strongly rooted in post-colonial and anti-imperial discourse, the production of the play at the Abbey presented a diVerent agenda. In Ireland, the Wgure of Antigone can evoke the memory of Bernadette Devlin during the civil rights marches in Derry at the end of the 1960s. Such was the eVect of Conall Morrison’s version of Antigone that toured Ireland in 2003,20 especially as he cast an actress with a Derry accent to play Antigone, juxtaposed with a very English-accented Creon. Given the Heaney text, this might have been a likely choice. However, rather than dressing Creon as Bush, the chorus as English gentlemen (perhaps toeing the American line, like Blair, while providing some minor criticism), and casting Antigone as a Derryaccented colleen, the director’s choice of Ruth Negga as Antigone seemed striking. Rather than a pale-faced Irish lass, Negga looked more Mediterranean and sounded more English than most of the cast. Creon was dressed in a white suit and red sash somewhat reminiscent of a Latin American dictator. Furthermore, the chorus were dressed in beige suits and felt hats that seemed more European than English. The only presentational connection with the war in Iraq appeared in the set, which depicted a concrete fortress with a rope net, which hinted at a kind of prison area underneath, and sandy soil on the forestage. In a sense, the choice of Lorraine Pintal, a Quebecoise, to direct the play made a diVerent kind of post-colonial statement. The Abbey in its centenary year was combining a retrospective of its repertory over the last century with an outward-looking welcome to Europe and abroad. Many of the productions at the National Theatre in 2004 were coming from the new countries of the EU: Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, and so on. Similarly, directors from abroad, such as Lorraine Pintal from Quebec and La´zlo´ Marton from Hungary, were presenting a diVerent aesthetic from that to which the Abbey Theatre had been accustomed.21 In a sense, this production season was saying that Ireland was part of 20 Storytellers Theatre Company produced Antigone in a version by Conall Morrison, which toured to Cork and Dublin in February and March 2003; see Causey (2003) for a review of the production. 21 The Abbey Theatre has been regarded as a literary theatre placing heavy emphasis on textual accuracy in production and staging Irish plays with elegant dialogue, and presenting notions of national identity through peasant, historical, and mythological characterization. The European and Canadian directors came from a

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Europe and part of the wider theatrical world. As opposed to oVering a programme that continually accented national identity, the centennial year’s season was suggesting that Ireland was regarding itself as part of a global community, rather than in a stultifying relationship with the old British oppressor. Pintal’s production created an international perspective on stage where the costume, set, and sound design referred to no particular country. The references in the text to geopolitics were to some extent upstaged in production by gender politics, which also features in Heaney’s, as well as the original, text. In the opening sequence, Antigone danced with Haimon and, subverting the ballroom dance where the male leads, she took charge and left him abandoned. As a woman of action and no regrets, Antigone forcefully challenged Creon’s authority in the performance, such that his fear for his status rang true: Have I to be The woman of the house and take her orders? (p. 22)

And later: No woman here is going to be allowed To walk all over us. Otherwise, as men We’ll be disgraced. (p. 31)

By contrast with Antigone, Eurydice, who has only a few lines in the play, provided a silent presence throughout many scenes with Creon (like a dutiful Laura Bush supporting her husband and not stealing the limelight), until she rather lamely exited, snuYng out candles in anticipation of her suicide. At the same time, the emphasis on gender politics in the production served as an analogy for the geopolitical relationships in the text. This is quite a common trope in post-colonial discourse. As Williams and Chrisman (1993: 18) have argued: For some theorists and critics, colonial, imperial and indeed post-colonial or national discourses are largely allegories of gender contests. more visual and physical tradition of theatre in which the director often takes more liberty with the text.

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Thus, Ireland has often been posited as the feminine Other in relation to the aggressive male British Empire, and so, in a romantic nationalist interpretation, Antigone still can represent oppressed Ireland Wghting for her rights, regardless of whether she looks Irish or speaks with a Derry accent. Antigone as Ireland (or the nationalist community in Northern Ireland) is clearly given the morally superior position, justifying action against the colonial oppressor, whether it involves acts of civil disobedience, hunger-strikes, or even more violent acts. With regard to Creon’s edict, Antigone says: I chose to disregard it . . . If I had to live and suVer in the knowledge That Polyneices was lying above ground Insulted and deWled, that would be worse Than having to suVer any doom of yours. (p. 21)

And later: I never did a nobler thing than bury My brother Polyneices . . . There’s no shame in burying a brother. (p. 23)

Moreover, Haimon argues that the people support Antigone: As far as they’re concerned, She should be honoured—a woman who rebelled! (p. 31)

Seamus Heaney, who moved from Northern Ireland to Dublin in the 1970s during the height of the ‘troubles’, has often drawn attention in his poetry to his personal experience of the oppressive nature of the British military presence in Northern Ireland.22 However, he 22 For example, in ‘The Toome Road’ ([1979] 1998b), the poet observes: One morning early I met armoured cars In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres, All camouXaged with broken alder branches, And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets. How long were they approaching down my roads As if they owned them?

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says that he regretted the speciWc allusions to Northern Irish politics in The Cure at Troy, his earlier adaptation of Philoctetes. He felt that the references to a ‘police widow’ and ‘hunger-strikers’ in that version reduced the eVectiveness of the play.23 In this second version of a Greek tragedy, Heaney hoped to create a more universal message.24 Perhaps he succeeded,25 but the legacy of the British colonial past (as well as the American imperial present) is still very much in evidence, both in his memory and in his metre. Applying Hulme’s deWnition of post-colonialism, one could conclude that Heaney may be involved in a ‘process of disengagement from the whole colonial syndrome’, but the process is a slow one, as that colonial syndrome ‘is probably inescapable for all those whose worlds have been marked by that set of phenomena’ (Loomba 1998: 18–19). Moreover, the American Government has arguably adopted the mantle of the British Empire (where the sun never sets) to engage in a perpetual war against terror, so that ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ and US ‘vital interests’ may reign everywhere in the world.26 Thus, Heaney’s version reXects that Ireland’s emergence from under one empire seems only to have led to its subservience to another. 23 Heaney mentioned this to my students in a classroom discussion in 1995; see Wilmer (1998: 207). 24 Question and answer session with the Abbey Theatre audience, 27 April 2004. 25 The production received very mixed reviews, largely because of the direction rather than the adaptation. Meaney (2004), for example, criticized the direction heavily concluding: ‘Antigone will, of course, survive this production, especially in Heaney’s new version which has taken Sophocles’ dense, concentrated poetry and decanted it into a beautifully transparent contemporary idiom.’ Heaney’s adaptation received better reviews when it was revived in a production directed by Lucy PitmanWallace at the Nottingham Playhouse in 2005, which depoliticized the setting and costumes but retained the force of the text; see Dunnett (2005). 26 For a discussion of America’s policy of ‘perpetual war’, see Laxer (2005: 329). Laxer argues: ‘We live in an age of the US Empire, which aggressively asserts its own right to unilateral action, while demanding that the sovereignty of every other political community be breached’ (p. 317).

Part III Challenging Theory: Framing Further Questions

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14 ‘The Same Kind of Smile?’ About the ‘Use and Abuse’1 of Theory in Constructing the Classical Tradition Freddy Decreus

T H E P O S T- G E N E R AT I O N VE R S US GOOD OLD HUMANISM In present-day cultural and intellectual discussions, we are constantly reminded of the pervading existence of some post-feelings. What this tricky preWx does is to tell us that people have realized from the beginning of the century on (or more speciWcally, from the Parisian May revolution of 1968) that something is over and that there has emerged a deWnite gap between the times of former ideals (history and knowledge as they used to be) and an era that came afterwards, see Hall’s well-documented interpretation of the year 1969 (2004:1– 46). During these decades, Western history clearly went through an important transitional period and a series of fundamental transformations obliged us to re-examine our traditional habits of thinking, 1 In Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche ([1874: part II] 1998) discussed ‘The Use and Abuse of History for Life’. This work has always fascinated me, and especially the idea that (historical) discourses, in order to be valuable, should really be of actual relevance for our concrete experiences and sensitivities (‘we need it for life and action, not for a comfortable turning away from life and action’). Transferring it to the domain of Classics, this statement means that the main discussions about our disciplines really should concern life and the general public, not the maintenance of the Academy as such. This reference may also be seen as a compliment to the organizers of the colloquium, who stimulated us to actualize and to deWne our profession of classical philologists as broadly as possible.

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talking, and writing. This post-feeling has not always signiWed a radical new departure or a revolutionary new start; rather, it has often implied a sharpened awareness of former ideological and intellectual positions.2 In this period of transition, a great number of Welds of human experience, and hence sciences, were concerned, which made this process of change look neither an historical nor a philosophical ‘accident’: indeed, for centuries, human sciences both used and questioned principles belonging to the Cartesian process of cognition, both favoured and criticized traditional techniques of colonizing the mind, and privileged them as cornerstones of rationality and scientiWc behaviour. Still modernity, starting in the Age of Enlightenment, discovered a world that could be described in empirical, objective, and rational terms, but, at the same time, from Ce´zanne, Mahler, and Mallarme´ on, it was fascinated by the explosion of light, sounds, and words. One of the latest searches for this ultimate proof of rational thinking, twentieth century structuralism, stressing the systematic interference of phenomena and wanting to detect fundamental principles or invariants,3 made people believe in a new scientiWc objectivity and stimulated the quest for underlying structures of the mind that could account for the human condition in general. However, from the sixties on, its role was taken over by a post-structuralism that rejected all totalizing and foundational processes (Young 2004). Signifying systems were no longer considered stable and unambiguous representations of a world that could be known in a direct way, isomorphic with human thought. Notions that had always been considered ‘natural’ (like history, humanism, tradition, freedom, patriarchy, etc.) turned out to be speciWc constructions of the (Western) mind; they were in fact ‘cultural’. In the wake of Roland Barthes, a great number of intellectuals transferred this idea of doxa (the ‘voice’ 2 Fokkema (1986: 82): ‘The world view of Postmodernism is the product of a long process of secularization and dehumanisation’. For a diVerent interpretation of modernity, see Max Weber ([1905] 2003) (modernity starting with the Age of Enlightenment, and leading to both the disenchantment and rationalization of the world), and Lyotard (1983) (a postmodern plea for radical plurality). See also the reply from Habermas (1980) and the application of the Habermas-Lyotard discussion to Classics in Rocco (1997). 3 Cf. Saussure’s language, Propp’s fairy tale motives, Troubetzkoy’s phonemes, Le´vi-Strauss’ mythemes, Barthes’ gustemes, etc.

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of nature, or public opinion, and the social consensus it enhances) to diVerent cultural representations in order to ‘de-doxify’ them, to ‘denaturalize’ them (see Barthes [1975] 1977 and Hutcheon 1989). In fact, what had to be analysed was diVerent versions of the way that reason has been functioning in diVerent political and ideological contexts. Hence the attempts made by Michel Foucault (1973; 1977) to delineate ‘discursive practices’, ways that revealed the historical functioning of knowledge and power, an exercise that allowed him to discover an ‘archaeology of knowledge’. It became obvious that a culture never was made up by ultimate or innate explications, but rather by patterns of discourse shaping both our everyday life and our scientiWc behaviour. Developments in the philosophy of science were less dramatic and spectacular, yet, even so, from Thomas Kuhn (1962) on, a view of science rooted in post-empiricism began to show that even the most ‘normal’ practice of (exact) ‘science’ is also to be situated within a whole framework of sociological and historical (r)evolutions, and has to be considered ‘paradigmatic’.4 In the eyes of many, positions like these lead us into a posthumanist abyss. Indeed, Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan made us forget that we are all characterized by a stable Self, by operations that are largely based upon order, rationality, and free will; in short, it became apparent that we were not, as human beings, completely in control of ourselves. In the end, the concept of metaphysical man as deWned by Enlightenment and idealist philosophy, leading as it did to the assumption of an autonomous individual, governed by a sovereign mind that was the source of all processes of meaning and value, had to be abandoned (Schechner 1982). It was replaced by the notion of the ‘subject’, created through constant interaction, dialectic integration of Otherness, and changing cultural practices. In a post-structural sense, deWning a person in terms of humanistic values never was meant to rest upon the support of transcendent and universal truths. Hence, humanism has been analysed by contemporary studies in 4 For the notion of progressive and regressive research programmes determining scientiWc development, see: Lakatos and Musgrave (1970). For the idea that in general, in science, ‘anything goes’, see Paul Feyerabend (1975). His outline for the development of science is: ‘Science is an essentially anarchistic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives’ (p. 17).

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terms of the changing contexts of its deWnition. It has therefore mainly been diVerentiated in terms of romantic, idealizing, liberal, and socialist constructions; that is to say, it has been placed as so many local and historical versions of humanism versus anti-humanism, thus exposing, in the wake of Nietzsche, ‘the illusory or fraudulent pretensions of much nineteenth-century humanism’ (Davies 1997: 36). That is why a post-structuralist subject deWnitely had to acknowledge the big Other that existed—outside us—before we were born, and that turned us into Strangers to Ourselves (Kristeva 1991), characterized by a post-essentialist desire. Research like this can also be captured in terms of a series of successive ‘deaths’: indeed, most of the new methodologies implied the death of forms of essentialism, and also of the existence of an independent reality beyond language, such as God, the patriarchal order, the Self, consciousness . . . After the death of God, prophesied by Nietzsche in 1882, came the death of Man (Foucault 1966), the death of the author (Barthes [1984] 1968), followed later by the death of (traditional) history (White 1973), the death of character (Fuchs 1996), and even by the death of (representational) theatre (Lehmann 1999); see also Baudrillard (1992). Since post-structuralism was particularly interested in the way that subjects constantly produce and reproduce meaningful stories and symbolizing systems, this practice has also been considered post-metaphysical. Already in 1957, Roland Barthes (Mythologies) studied the way that French bourgeois society created images of itself, generating a whole system of ‘myths’ replete with bourgeois ideology. Post-modernism attacked the idea that contemporary societies are still organized by means of grand narratives. This attitude signalled a lack of conWdence regarding the stories (Progress, Emancipation, Liberalism, Socialism, etc.) a culture imagined about its own functioning. Contrary to Old Historicists, who considered texts to be transparent windows through which one could detect the past in a direct way, New Historicists studied the whole realm of culturally connected contexts and speciWc discourses governing the actual insertion of the human into the temporal and the local. (For an application, see Decreus 2004a: 237–61). Post-essentialist of course is their denial that history, conceived as a whole, must have a meaning (see White 1973 and Greenblatt 1980).

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Put in the most general way, post-colonialism continues the philosophic and ideological assumptions shared by most of these POSTmovements and applies them to the political, economic, and cultural practices that characterize a politics of resistance and reaction to colonialism. It raises the question of the role and functioning of Western theory, language, formation of texts, and discourse and can be seen as a part of recent attempts in Western critical theory to deconstruct traditional cultural ideas that have been taken as natural or normal. In a more concrete way, it investigates the use of binary thinking, universal models, teleological structures, and essentialist positions. From the very start, post-colonialism has analysed the ideological and cultural impact of Western colonialism on other civilizations and national origins, but, as such, it cannot yet be considered a uniWed and well-deWned discipline. It is a heterogeneous collection of deconstructive practices that study processes of diVerence and diversity, and scrutinize our use of binary ways of organizing our daily perceptions, such as the West versus the Rest, totalizing history versus local histories, self/other, us/others, mind/body, white/non-white, oppressor/ oppressed. In the wake of post-structuralism, it sees reality as being much more fragmented, diverse and culture-speciWc than did traditional humanism.5 It pays more attention to speciWc histories, to the local establishment and re-establishment of value and meaning, and to the way that physicality has been used to express Self and Other.

C L A SS I C S A N D E S SE NT I A L I S M Every statement about ‘classics in a post-colonial setting’ has to be situated in the above mentioned epistemological and philosophical climate, which, at Wrst sight, might give the idea of a very hybrid and inXationary Weld of theory and practice, but which, nevertheless, is built upon a variation of a number of common themes. Although discussions like these have been fundamental in the actual practice of 5 See the hot discussions between Schechner, Brook, Pavis and Bharucha about the intercultural staging of The Mahabharata, in Pavis ([1990] 1992: 183–216 and 1996), Bharucha ([1990]1993: 68–87).

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all of the humanities over the last century, generally, they have not been the major concern of classicists. Most of the latter think that they are not touched by (critical) theory and that ‘Classics’ does not have to prove its credentials at all, a long lasting Western tradition being proof enough to motivate the high standards of its value and survival, compare with Decreus (ed. 2002). ‘Theory’ even became one of the most dangerous and polluting notions in a number of contemporary discussions in the Weld of classics, the profession of ‘theoretician’ being a main term of abuse, amounting almost to a synonym for ‘anti-Western’ (Hanson and Heath 1998: 96). Current interpretations of the responsibility for having ‘killed Homer’ set oV from clearly essentialist positions: indeed, some classicists pretend to know what invariable ‘Greek wisdom’ is, how one can turn it into a corpus of moralistic sentences, and make a claim on fundamental values that have remained the same throughout history and have resulted in the ‘free West’. A pronounced essentialism invites some to say that we must acknowledge ‘our unchanging Western center’ and respect ‘the blueprint’ [the Greeks provided] ‘for an ordered and humane society that could transcend time and space’, really ‘a foundation’, since ‘human nature is constant over time and place’ (Hanson and Heath 1998: 93–100, 40).6 Reductive statements like these score well in contemporary American neoconservative camps, from the highly selective reading of Greek mythology in William Bennett’s Book of Virtues. A Treasury of Moral Stories (1993) and his Moral Compass to it (1995), to the highly selective interpretation of Western history in Donald Kagan (1995), and a ‘cartoon version of ancient Greece’, presenting ‘a simplistic, ahistorical view of human nature’ (duBois 2001: 25). Back-to-basics, an ideological programme promoted during the Reagan Government (1981–89), and patronized by the same William Bennett, former Secretary of Education, even succeeded in selling a national bestseller, ‘Cultural Literacy’, which emphasized the importance of ‘5000 essential names, phrases, dates, and concepts’

6 Bassi (1998: 247): ‘Within scholarly disciplines and practices, the ancient past is constructed out of the desire for universal essences embodied in a universal subject. Whether we view the Greek theater through the lens of Aristophanes’ comic wit, Freud’s Oedipal dream, or the history of Classical scholarship, all the lenses attest to the force of that desire.’

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(Hirsch 1987) and restoring traditional visions on the ‘canon’ (Allan Bloom 1987; see also Harold Bloom 1994).7 DiVerent forms of closure, a more contemporary term for essentialism, were at the heart of what Don Fowler (2000: 5) considers to be a caricature of classics: ‘Closure’ in all its senses has often been seen as a distinguishing characteristic of classicism. The classic work is a rounded organic whole, simplex et unum [‘simple and unique’]: it ends in resolution, ‘all passion spent’. Antiquity is a closed system, providing a canon of texts whose perfection is beyond time: criticism of those texts is an eternal return, the rediscovery of the timeless verities that they contain. The Classical Tradition is a golden chain which enables us to ‘take our journey back’, as Edwin Muir puts it. And at the end of all our journeying are those same everlasting Forms of Beauty that have always been there and always will be. No one, of course, has ever really believed this nonsense.

Essentialist and Eurocentric is the positivistic and ultimately romantic idea of one continent, one history, one culture, one homeland, which eliminated Africa and Asia from our history books, which restricted the possibility of studying comparative philosophy and religion on an academic level,8 and cut back the Dionysian heritage till Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. Purity, in a racial and mythic sense, has a long history of fetishizing and idolizing ancient Greece as the only origin of Western civilization.9 Ernest Renan’s Prayer on the Acropolis ([1883] 1956) led him to invent ‘le miracle

7 Hirsch (1987) and Bloom (1987) dealt with the idea that the masterpieces of our cultures should be studied, once again, by an e´lite and not be disturbed by the ideals of the Parisian May Revolution, which pleaded for social commitment and a systematic critical distrust. For a systematic review of all critical reactions on Hirsch, see Barbara Hernstein Smith (1990: 75–94). See also the reaction of Paul Lauter (1991), who argues that Hirsch’s list was no less than a political and ideological programme. Harold Bloom (1994) studied twenty-six writers, ‘with a certain nostalgia’, knowing very well that ‘things have however fallen apart, the center has not held, and mere anarchy is in the process of being unleashed upon what used to be called ‘‘the learned world’’ ’ (p. 1). 8 Finkelberg and Stroumsa (2003: 2): ‘Odd as it may appear, there seems to have been no comparative study of canon’. 9 Concerning Bernal’s claims to replace the ‘Aryan Model’ by the ‘(Revized) Ancient Model’ and his ideas about racism in eighteenth century (esp.) German thoughts, see: Palter (1996: 349–402).

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grec’, a second miracle next to one from Judaism, but the recognition of those two cultural wonders never prevented him or his fellow researchers (in the same paradigm) from purifying Christianity from its Semitic aspects. Nowadays, culture is no longer considered a homogeneous, reliable and knowable set of Eurocentric values, ‘the best that has been known and said’ (Arnold [1873] 1914). On the contrary, it is interpreted in terms of conXict, diVerence and hybridity,10 and leads to deWnitions of culture as ‘a declaration of war’ and ‘a battleground’ (Hamacher 1997: 286, 291), or as a ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1996), as ‘colonial’ by nature (Belsey 2002: 64).11 This change of perspectives may imply that ‘our’ culture is in crisis, that our Western culture is ‘getting tired’, as Pavis said ([1990] 1992: 13) and that the barbarians are already at the gates (Skinner 1989, especially 208–9). More speciWcally in terms of an interpretation of Classics, this leads to a literature of ‘writing back’, of ‘responding to critics’, ‘revisiting’, and using the magic power of notions like ‘heresy’, ‘demise’, ‘bonWre’, ‘abuse’.12 For classicists, it is indeed an ‘epistemic shift’ when ‘Greekness’ is deWned today as a permanent cultural battleWeld, ‘shaking the foundations’ and challenging periods of discontinuity when Greek civilization was not important. Greekness (and ‘Classics’) is not something that permanently ‘is’, but that is always ‘becoming’: it changes and can be forgotten, it is based upon an interdisciplinary (and no longer purely literary) approach, and is part of a more general problem of understanding cultural identity and globalisation (Goldhill 2002: 1–13). This is the moment when it becomes possible also to recognize a ‘classical moment’ in other cultures, ‘across languages and cultures to see whether some of its eVects and presuppositions are similar, or whether the case of Wfth-century Athens

10 Bourdieu (1979), de Certeau (1988); Said (1993); Huntington (1996); de Vries and Weber (eds. 1997); Gilroy (2000); Nancy (2000). 11 Discussing Jacques Derrida’s ([1996] 1998) Monolingualism of the Other: ‘Culture is always ‘‘colonial’’, in that it imposes itself by its power to name the world and to instil rules of conduct. No one inhabits a culture by nature. As a matter of deWnition, no culture comes naturally. We are all exiles’. See consequently, the battles of translating languages and worldviews (Hardwick, 2000: 9–22). 12 Lefkowitz and Rogers (1996); Hanson and Heath (1998); Berlinerblau (1999); Wyke and Biddiss (1999); Moore (2001); Hanson et al. (2001).

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was singular in its dominance over Western European culture’ (Holst-Warhaft and McCann 1999: ix–xi).13

T H E TR AG I C A N D UN I V E RS A L I S M Recently, a number of intriguing questions have been asked about (Greek) tragedy and its place in an epistemological discussion about universals. Is tragedy a typical product of the Western imagination? Since tragedy, in four or Wve waves, kept on (re)appearing in Western history, one has to accept that the tragic experience is really constitutive of the Western perception of life. And if tragedy so dominantly and necessarily characterizes the West and only the West, can it be anything more, in colonial and post-colonial stagings, than a borrowing from the Western homeland, a peripheric and hybrid construction, bound profoundly to disturb local visions on man, his language and imagination? The most famous statement about the kind of cultural position occupied by Western tragedy, has been made by George Steiner (1961: 3–4), and repeated ever since: All men are aware of tragedy in life. But tragedy as a form of drama is not universal. Oriental art knows violence, grief, and the stroke of natural or contrived disaster; the Japanese theatre is full of ferocity and ceremonial death. But that representation of personal suVering and heroism which we call tragic drama is distinctive of the western tradition. . . . Tragedy is alien to the Judaic sense of the world.

In this fragment, Steiner diVerentiates three notions which, for the sake of the discussion, have to be considered apart: tragic events occurring in real-life time (something lamentable); tragedy as a form of drama, to be studied as a literary, logocentric, and generic composition; and the tragic as a philosophical (ontological, existential, 13 ‘The idea of a ‘‘classical moment’’ is something that begs, in this age, to be undone. It reeks of elitism, of Wxed canons, of the romantic worship of an idealized past. ‘‘Classical’’ is doomed by its relation to ‘‘class’’, ‘‘moment’’, by its temporal and cultural claim to uniqueness. In an age perhaps unparalleled in its willingness to question its own bases of legitimacy, its prejudices, and its canons, the idea of a single ‘‘classical moment’’ that deWned our culture was bound to come under scrutiny.’ (Holst-Warhaft and McCann 1999:ix–xi)

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religious) dimension of life (Eagleton 2003: 9).14 William Storm (1998: 28–33; also compare with Most 2000: 18–32), in a more reWned form of this theory (hardly mentioned by classicists), proposed to discriminate between tragedy, the tragic, the Dionysian, and tragic vision. Tragedy, in the West, he said, is ‘among the most ephemeral of all artistic phenomena’, since it has Xourished in only four historical epochs (hence the ‘desultory quality of its appearances’). By contrast, the condition of the tragic: ‘is not bound by any such historical frameworks. . . . The tragic, when understood purely as an ontological situation—as distinct from its select manifestations in art—is timeless. It is eternal to precisely the extent that mortal beings live and continue to be aware, not only of their own mortality but of the divisive forces that inevitably separate being from all that is held as valuable’ (compare with Poole 1987: 2–3). The ‘Dionysian’ then, being intimately related to the tragic, is its more active and aggressive side, which in dramatic productions leads to sparagmos. Finally, tragic vision can be deWned as: ‘the degree to which such a condition is felt by a particular society, or the extent to which it demands aesthetic expression’, a speciWc need to express a tragic world view by speciWc writers, cultures and periods. These four categories must allow us to discuss the main issues pertaining to the (post)-colonial study of tragedy.15 Tragedy is a Western generic and literary creation, which has mainly been studied from a Eurocentric and literary perspective, and has mostly been analysed as an immanent structure. It has been functioning as a quarry for elementary building materials pertaining to character, action, and plot, but has remained ultimately a house of words, inhabited for rationalistic (and not pragmatic, or context-based) reasons. This is a logical consequence of the restricted design of Aristotelian Poetics, which treated tragedy as a form of poetry, not philosophy (Most 2000: 15–35). 14 ‘Like comedy, it can refer at once to works of art, real-life events and worldviews or structures of feeling’ (Eagleton 2003:9). 15 The history of Western tragedy, the nature of the tragic as a generative source of art and philosophy and the speciWc vision, world view, or ‘sense of life’ (Unamuno) it generates, have been aVecting classical studies only in a marginal way. Classicists are also poorly represented in recent books like Tragedy (Drakakis and Liebler 1998), ‘Tragik’. Von Oidipus bis Faust (Boehm 2001), or Sweet Violence. The Idea of the Tragic (Eagleton 2003).

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As an expression of logos, of Western logos, tragedy has been ordering thoughts and themes in terms of a ‘realistic theatre’, based on a textual bedrock and performed in an illusionary, mimetic way, ending its historical career in (neo)classicist times (after Racine, according to Steiner 1961). Mieke Kolk (2003: 68–76) has studied the ‘westernness of the western model’ of tragedy, and more speciWcally, the ‘ideological structure of story, plot, telos and perspective’. Referring to Lotman’s analyses of the origin of plot, she has pointed at the becoming of ‘the hero that does or undoes norms and values of the artistic texts reXecting the cultural context’ and which has been criticized in feminist and cultural studies (see also Lehmann 1999). In her words: The predominance of the white/male subject and the overall question: who is allowed to speak, to come into existence, to plead with us and win our sympathies have been topics of discussion in intercultural debates and in avant-gardistic artistic processes, striving for multiform perspectives and diVerent speaking-positions in their texts.

In the same way, Paglia ([1990] 1991: 7), analysing tragedy as: ‘a male paradigm of rise and fall, a graph in which dramatic and sexual climax are in shadowy analogy’, has asked attention for ‘climax [as] another western invention’, since ‘traditional eastern stories are picaresque, horizontal chains of incident’, having ‘little suspense or sense of an ending’. Marianne McDonald (1992: 56, 210), in her interpretation of Tadashi Suzuki’s theatrical style, has conWrmed these diVerences: There are no tenses in Japanese, as we know them, and no such thing as causality, in the Western sense. . . . And ‘unlike Barthes’s—and Aristotle’s— model, the shosetsu (sc. the artistic medium) rejects the interpretive beginning, middle, and end.

She has explicitly called this perpetual longing ‘for clearcut beginnings, development, and endings’ an example of the ‘culturally imperialist’ criticism that ‘Edward Said dealt with so brilliantly in his book Orientalism’. After the collapse of Aristotelian and Brechtian poetics, both of which deWned tragedy in terms of: ‘its unitary language, . . . unity in the story-line, its utopian ending and its diVerent perspectives well organized under the authorial mastermind’(Kolk 2003: 73), (post)modern

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theatre/tragedy refused to accept any longer the mimetic relationship between representation and referent, and ended in a postmodern ‘landscape’ of association and fragmentation, in which all the formal building stones gradually lost their old meaning and function (see Poschmann 1997; Lehmann 1999; Decreus 2004b: 11–35). However, the extinction of neoclassicist and realistic/mimetic forms of tragedy never implied the death of tragic experience as such (Aylen 1964; Domenach 1967; Omesco 1978; MaVesoli 2000). Just as Greek epic (especially The Iliad ) and poetry, long before the arrival of Wfth-century Athenian tragedy, already expressed so many tragic themes, contemporary society transferred the tragic feeling to other artistic Welds. However, in the intercultural atmosphere of the last centuries, thematic and formal aspects of Greek tragedy have also become cherished examples for non-Western artists (Hardwick 2000; Hall 2004: 1–46). Its form and content have been copied, translated, transferred, adapted in an incredible variety of ways, illustrating the political, social, and existential situation of the new homelands, stressing the universal importance of their cultural heritage, but also using Greek tragedy as a favourite ‘arena for the articulation of anti-colonialist ideas’ (Hardwick 2004a: 219). The tragic experience (never an Aristotelian concern) addresses the functioning of human ‘selfhood’ and the permanent threat of those rending and separating forces that might invade it. In the eyes of Storm (1998: 1, 71), it is Dionysus, as the ‘render of men’, who: . . . becomes the representation of a sparagmos that may have a spiritual or psychological manifestation as well as a corporeal one, and it is this rending that has always been central to the experience of selfhood in tragic drama. Whereas the protagonist is typically involved in a struggle toward selfhood, the Dionysian, or ‘tragic’ antagonism stands forever in the way of such a realization. A tragic paradigm may in this sense be formulated as an Oedipus-Dionysus dialectic: the will toward cohesive identity (‘I will know who I am’) antagonized by the inescapable sentence to sparagmos.

Interesting for post-colonial reasons is the question where this tragic feeling found its origins. Steiner (1996: 535–6) called tragedy the ‘dramatic representation, enactment, or generation of a highly speciWc world-view’. This world-view is ‘summarized in the adage preserved among the elegies ascribed to Theognis, but certainly older,

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and present also in Middle Eastern sacred texts: ‘‘It is best not to be born, next best to die young’’ ’. However, like most Western intellectuals, he refrains from taking the next step and does not investigate non-Western predecessors such as The Epic of Gilgamesh (last redaction around 1200 ce, texts covering more than 1000 years). Andrew George (1999: xxxii–xxxvi), author of its recent English translation, has warned us to read the story of the ruler of Uruk, the absolute favourite of Rainer Maria Rilke’s, neither as a myth nor as a religious poem. He points to the Assyriologist William L. Morgan, who has: . . . recently expounded Gilgamesh’s story as a tale of the human world, characterized by an ‘insistence on human values’ and an ‘acceptance of human limitations’. This observation led him to describe the epic as ‘a document of ancient humanism’, and indeed, even for the ancients, the story of Gilgamesh was more about what it is to be a man than what it is to serve the gods. As the beginning and end of the epic make clear, Gilgamesh is celebrated more for his human achievement than for his relationship with the divine.

Referring to Thorkild Jakobsen, who once described the epic as a ‘story of learning to face reality, a story of growing up’, Andrew George summarizes the story of Gilgamesh as follows: the king: . . . begins as an immature youth, capable of anything and accepting no check; eventually he comes to accept the power and reality of Death, and thus he reaches reXective maturity.

But, what is more: . . . in charting the hero’s progress, the poet reXects profoundly on youth and age, on triumph and despair, on men and gods, on life and death. It is signiWcant that his concern is not just Gilgamesh’s glorious deeds but also the suVering and misery that beset his hero as he pursues his hopeless quest.

And therefore: . . . the message of the Gilgamesh epic is the vanity of the hero’s quest: pursuit of immortality is folly, the proper duty of man is to accept the mortal life that is his lot and enjoy it to the full.

Although the author does not explicitly use ‘tragic’ vocabulary, one must recognize that this story, the most important Oriental forerunner of Achilles’ tragic behaviour in The Iliad (West 1997), shows all

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the symptoms of later Greek tragic experience. In fact, what Morgan has been describing, is one of the Wrst accounts of the tragic feeling as such. It therefore comes as no surprise that F. M. Th. De Liagre Bo¨hl (1971), in his article on Gilgamesh in the Reallexikon der Assyriologie (III, 364), plainly considers The Epic of Gilgamesh as a forerunner of Greek tragic poetry (see Janssen 2004: 323). Its origins may be Mesopotamian but intercultural investigation on the tragic experience proves that this hypothesis about life and death, selfhood and identity, is far from being a universal answer. A quick glance at Buddhist or Taoist conceptions reveals totally diVerent basic attitudes. As has been proposed many times, the tragic situation Wrst sets itself up against nature and then dramatizes ‘its own inevitable fall as a human universal, which it is not’ (see Paglia ([1990]1991): 6–7; compare with Decreus 2003: 61–82). Chirpaz (1998: 108) noticed that Greek tragedy Wrst creates a position of being torn apart, in order to add later on a moment of reconciliation, ‘par un autre de´tour’ (‘by another detour’). In doing so, he says, tragedy, from the very start, introduces a major distortion between man and world, and between man and himself. Greek tragedy only arrives at wisdom and illumination, after having postulated and enlarged an existential ‘gap’ between man and nature, life and death, being and becoming. Hence a generalized Western sensibility to the extreme fragility, speciWcity and uniqueness of the human person, accompanied by feelings of culpability, fear of death and personal loss. Apparently, the Wrst mythopoetic processes responsible for the creation of cosmogony, theogony and anthropogony generated totally diVerent imaginations in the East and the West, inviting Western minds to privilege the exploration of rationalism (understanding an objective world), Buddhist minds to look for a mystic kernel (experiencing a mystic authenticity and meditating on the presence of the numinous), and Taoist minds to explore the internal yin-yang dynamism of Tao (adapting oneself to the cosmos, practising non-transcendental processes of ‘doing nothing’, wu-wei). In those three diVerent world views, trying to get to know yourself resulted in foregrounding processes of ‘Being’, ‘Not-Being’, and ‘Becoming’, respectively, and in creating three fundamentally diVerent ontological and epistemological constructions of identity. The Western imagination clearly supported the idea that objects and persons can be

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entirely understood, since this world is considered intelligible and (rational) interpretation is believed to lead to the discovery of truth.16 Nature, with all its gifts and riches, is mainly regarded as a source which has to be reorganized and must obey human needs. Lately, one of the most famous Japanese directors, Tadashi Suzuki, staging his Oedipus Rex in 2000, said (Suzuki, in Karasmanis 2000: 57–9): Noh focuses on the vanity of human passions seen under the vision of eternity, whereas Greek tragedy stresses the indefatigable power of the human spirit in Wghting against Fate. Even though the Wght is destined to be lost, Greek heroes overwhelm us with their will to know the whole truth about their failure. Rather than indulging in reminiscences, they dare to look the present misfortune in the face and act to enlarge their awareness of the predicament. Oedipus is the representative case: with all the sinister premonitions, he pursues his own past sins like the severest of prosecutors.17

This totally diVerent attitude towards the Wnal order of things is the reason why, in his staging of Greek tragedy, Suzuki refrains from showing the last awful sequences (Sophocles’ Oedipus), softens the Wnal outcome of things, while explicitly drawing lots of circles on the stage (Euripides’ Bacchae, Clytemnestra;), and leads his productions often enough to an open-ended conclusion. In his opinion, catharsis mainly creates the occasion for new calamities and, therefore, the cycle of life and death is the only absolute certitude people have; this is also the reason why, at the end of many plays, ghosts and spirits return to evoke the everlasting revenge of death (The Trojan Women, Clytemnestra). Commenting on his Du¨sseldorf production of Oedipus (2002), Suzuki used the Buddhist terminology of the unfathomable and inscrutable depths of the ocean to illustrate the hopeless eVorts of the Greek hero (Suzuki 2002: 92): 16 Libbrecht (1995–2002). See the diYculties a Western mind has in understanding and staging a buddhist ‘koan’, an exercise and meditation in going beyond apparent oppositions (cf. ‘The sound of one hand clapping’, staged by Jan Fabre, Ballet of Frankfurt, 1993 ); cf. Suzuki, Fromm, and De Martino (1960). For the use of Orientalism in Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, see: Mulrooney (2002 especially chapter 2). 17 See also Suzuki, in Storch, 2002: 89–96; in general, Carruthers and Yasunari, 2004: 124–79.

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History is an ocean of memories. Normally we only see its surface. But, sometimes, terrible facts rise up from the depths of the ocean and show us what caused the suVerings of our deceased ancestors and what they fought against. It tells us that the fundamental problems have yet to be solved and must not be forgotten, that we must constantly be aware of their existence and that we must go on Wghting.

That is why Marianne McDonald, writing on his productions, says (McDonald 1992: 44): In Suzuki’s presentations, one is continuously aware of the eternal, and of the powerlessness of the individual to Wght cosmic forces. There is a sense of futility that makes the suVerings even more pathetic than in Euripides.

Or, talking about the same productions (McDonald 2002: 154): Time is perceived in cycles rather than in Wxed and discrete periods. The Xuidity of the Zen world predominates, and what is required of us is the freedom and abandon of a ‘mind of a Wsh’ as it swims in water to appreciate fully Suzuki’s reality.

Therefore, in his 2002 version of Oedipus, Suzuki called Oedipus’ internal struggles ‘conXicts which can never be resolved’ and visualized them by drafting lots of scenic circles that Oedipus had to follow (Suzuki 2002: 96): The circle stands for a permanent, unchanging obsession of the heart, worrying away constantly at the problem. In traditional Japanese theatre, circular movements are called ‘insane dance’ and represent madness. If an animal has something wrong with it, physically or ‘mentally’, it will always move in circles.

No wonder that the idea of karma also determines the Buddhist interpretation of Oedipus’ fate, or, in the words of one of Dave Williams’s students in Taiwan, when questioned about the ending of this tragedy: ‘The reason that Oedipus has such a bad fate is that perhaps he had done too many bad things in his last life’ (Williams 1999: 217). Answers like these make it clear that tragic vision is a factor of stark diVerentiation between as many diVerent answers to the tragic experience as such. Often enough, in the West, philosophy has been in the act of deploring the limited nature of the condition humaine,

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interpreting life, from the very start as an irreparable loss (Orr 1981; Desmond 1995), as an absurd proposal (Sartre, Beckett). On the other hand, others have welcomed the tragic as a sane and brave attitude towards life (Nietzsche, Camus). In regular Christian, Islamic, or Marxist interpretations, the tragic is an impossible and unwelcome guest, since in those three ‘grand narratives’ the world is conceived as a place where, at the end, no unresolved problems should remain. In Christianity, from the outset, a fundamental kind of reconciliation between God and Man has been planned, leaving Man enough freedom to cope with God’s soteriological intentions. For that reason, really tragic tragedies are non-compatible with any plan of salvation or any vision of an ordered life. It was not by accident that the Bacchae was totally unknown to Dave Williams’s Taiwanese students (Williams 1999: 214): The Chinese are well-known for their preference for stability, as attested to by the dominance of Confucianism for over two millennia; it is quite possible that the sight of an authority-Wgure such as Pentheus being utterly destroyed by an outside deity might simply be, in the Foucauldian sense, unthinkable, whereas Oedipus himself brings about his own destruction while achieving spiritual insight as a result. Moreover, the gender hierarchy in Chinese culture remains heavily biased in favor of males; for example, even today many companies will Xatly refuse to do business with a woman from another company, no matter how qualiWed. The powerful, violent, and successful maenads might simply arouse so much masculine anxiety that the Taiwanese frame of reference cannot acknowledge them.

Eastern visions of life in general are not interested in representing the consequences of a stubborn search for knowledge, or in questioning the limitations of the Self. The (world) views of Western authors, dramas, societies, and historical periods, over the course of 2500 years, have been reXecting all possible aspects of the tragic vision, not in a continuous Xow, but in a series of shifting moments. A tragic vision imposes itself: ‘in any society which has fallen from prosperity, losing not only the material reality but the psychological sense of well-being’ (Brereton 1968: 61). In the history of the West, tragic visions only appeared in a limited number of historical periods and

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each time represented answers to major challenges. In this way, the tragic was constitutive of the formation of Western identity, an uninvited but important guest in major political transitional periods, always present to illustrate the extreme demise of a given cultural set, since, as phrased by Boullart (2004: 265): ‘tragic action reveals the Wniteness of our problem-solving capabilities. It makes their limits explicit and, by doing so, transgresses them’.

CONCLUDING REMARKS Has the study of English literature ever been harmed by the introduction of ‘theory’? Is Shakespeare, ‘our contemporary’, less popular today, because of Greenblatt’s New Historicism, Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowing, Lyotard’s Postmodernism? The history of Classics has always been both the history of its interpretations, of ‘doxiWed’ readings, and of historical conXicts, hybrid forms of discussions, which, Wnally, have been questions about an ever-changing Western ‘cultural identity’. Today we smile upon the naı¨vety of Renan’s outburst on the Akropolis, upon Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn, Winckelmann’s ‘noble simplicity and silent greatness’ and Alma Tadema’s Victorian Greeks, but a present-day exploration of the relationship between Classics and post-colonialism just demands the same kind of smile. The history of ‘Classics’, or of ‘Greekness’, never has been a totalizing and foundational process which, once and for all, in an unambiguous and direct way, determined the value and meaning of an ancient civilization. Despite many attempts to prove the opposite, Classics is not a grand narrative that regulates a universal truth embodied in a universal subject. On the contrary, it has always been totally dependent on a distance between worlds, it has always been living in and thanks to a gap, uniting and separating contemporary and distant societies. Therefore, post-colonialism can be a very healthy exercise in a general politics of resistance, since it deWnitely makes us aware of the frames (or Kuhnian paradigms) we are currently working in. It is an intellectual exercise that challenges us to open our minds and that asks questions about the way we have

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been mentally colonized and determined by a generalized Hegelian attitude which invited us to do universal statements only based upon limited empirical knowledge. Nothing of our own ideas of the past is natural or un-mediated; on the contrary, it is cultural and it depends on varying paradigms. Current investigation into Classics is leaving behind historicist models for semiotic ones, old historicism for new historicism, thematics for pragmatics, text for context (Segal 1999: 4–5). In fact, the present-day agenda on deconstruction and the whole juggling with the post-terminology continues the discussion started up in the seventeenth century about the value of the classical model (including classical ways of structuring the mind) in the light of progress and a new interpretation of modernity. The ‘Battle of the Books’ concerned the question of the validity of the ancient models (both science and art) in the development of new visions of society and history. Ever since, Classics had to leave the cyclical idea of Wguring as a model in a never-ending series of Renaissances and Humanisms, and had to explore, from Romanticism on, new ways of being inserted in general deWnitions of histor(icit)y and nationality (does history as such have a meaning, a telos?; how many homelands are there?), and of intercultural identity (whose humanism? whose history? history as a Western myth? histories instead of Hisstory, Her stories instead of His-story) (Lauter 1991: 256–71). At the dawn of the twenty-Wrst century, Europe, homeland of ‘Greekness’, has Wnally learned to ask some questions concerning aspects of the Other and of Otherness, about blind spots, hidden agendas, and the stranger in ourselves; and is no longer ashamed to confess ‘the end of cultural nostalgia’. However, seen from an historical point of view, this angle of incidence means only one of the many historical changes in terms of ‘discursive practices’ we adopted regarding antiquity (Bassi 1998).18 It might stimulate us to complement the internal Western vision we developed of ourselves and of Classics (too often relying upon essentialism and universalism), with an external one: an

18 Bassi speciWes that ‘the theatre and its critical discourses in ancient Greece— and, by extension, in the European canon—are forms of a cultural nostalgia’. This concerns a ‘model of cultural production, born from a desire to resurrect an idealized and ever receding past and the masculine subject who occupies and sanctions that past’ (Bassi 1998: 245).

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appreciation coming from abroad, from intercultural and postcolonial perspectives. This might amount to a beautiful exercise in informing us of our place in history and culture, undertaken by the colonial Other, who is looking at us often enough as the psychoanalytic and repressed Other.

15 From the Peloponnesian War to the Iraq War: a Post-Liberal Reading of Greek Tragedy Michiel Leezenberg

TRAGEDY A ND TH E P OST- 9/11 WO RLD The assaults on 11 September 2001 not only destroyed the lives of thousands of civilians, they also shook a widely held liberal view of a stable and coherent political and economical world-order based on international and other law.1 They also dealt a serious blow to humanist hopes that all humans, as humans, share broadly similar moral priorities; and, once more, reinforced alternative perceptions of the world as irreducibly conXictual and carved up into irreconcilably antagonistic civilizational blocs. What it brought home to many, in other words, was the irreducible presence of, or potential for, violent conXict. The subsequent American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have served only to strengthen antagonisms between, in particular, America and the Arab-Islamic world. 1 In a coordinated action, several civilian airplanes were hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center in New York and into the Pentagon, the main building of the American Defence ministry, in Washington. Both WTC towers subsequently collapsed, crushing almost 3000 people under the rubble. A fourth airplane, allegedly intended to hit the White House, was also hijacked, but crashed in Pennsylvania. The assaults were not claimed by any group, but soon appeared to be the work of the Islamist al-Qa’ida network headed by Usama bin Laden. In October, an American-led coalition invaded Afghanistan to crush al-Qa’ida bases and personnel there, and to oust the Taliban regime that harboured the network.

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It may well be that these developments mark a historical rupture comparable to the 1989 collapse of the Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe; but regardless of whether they mark a new phase in the postcolonial constellation or a return to classical colonializing imperialism, they pose new empirical, conceptual, and even normative challenges to postcolonial scholarship in the humanities. It would be presumptuous, perhaps even tasteless, to suggest that the study of classical literatures can help us understand such dramatic contemporary events. But, conversely, I think it is fair to say that reXection on post-9/11 developments may reshape our ways of reading the Classics, and, by extension, our idea of humanistic culture more generally. Such contextualizations are relatively widespread among military historians. Earlier studies, like Donald Kagan’s multi-volume account of the Peloponnesian War (now summarized in Kagan 2003) implicitly or explicitly compared the Peloponnesian War to the great wars of the twentieth century, and the cold-war confrontation between capitalist America and the communist Soviet Union. More recently, in A War Like No Other, Victor Hanson (2005) contrasted the strategies and leadership of the Peloponnesian War with those of American war eVorts in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.2 Somewhat less intensively studied, however, is the fact that the Peloponnesian War also provided the backdrop for much of the cultural production of Wfth century Athens—in particular tragedy—and the implications of this fact for modern-day readings. Liberal and humanist sensibilities may perceive pervasive armed conXict as a temporary interruption of civil life; but it is the depressing normality in much of the contemporary world, as it was in the ancient world. It should be kept in mind that most of the surviving tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides were originally written and performed against the background of the Peloponnesian War; indeed, the last plays of both, Oedipus at Colonus and Bacchae, respectively, virtually coincided with the Wnal defeat of Athens in 404 bce. Both had also witnessed (and in part been involved in) violent conXict even within

2 Ironically, Hanson’s account of the often brutally self-righteous Athenian attempts at exporting democracy may provide an unwitting commentary on his vocal support of the 2003 Iraq war; for but one of his numerous statements, see Hanson (2003).

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the city, in particular the aristocratic coup of 411 bce.3 Below, I will try to tease out some of the political implications, for antiquity and for the present, of the fact that the Greek tragedians do not so much take sides in contemporary or mythical conXicts, as expose the irreducible and inevitable character of—possibly violent—moral and political dilemmas. In doing so, I will largely restrict myself to Sophocles’ plays, and especially to the Oedipus at Colonus (henceforth OC).4 Just as there is a genuine dilemma between two equally defensible but mutually incompatible conceptions of justice, guilt, and responsibility in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, and especially its conclusion, the Eumenides,5 so there was a genuine moral dilemma surrounding the 2003 Iraq war. It was perfectly clear in advance that the three main justiWcations for the war oVered by the Bush administration6 (Iraq’s alleged possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD); its alleged links with the al-Qa’ida network; and its allegedly immediate danger to the West) were at best inconclusive.7 It was equally easy to criticize American unilateralism and pre-emptive war from the high principles of international law. Especially in Germanlanguage media, Kant’s famous absolute prohibition against oVensive wars—based on the absolute principle of state sovereignty—was quoted time and again. In the United States, the opponents of the Iraq War (as earlier of the war against Afghanistan) were small in number and could hardly make themselves heard in the mainstream 3 Famously, Sophocles is reported to have approved of forming a council of four hundred, which went on to establish a short-lived tyrannical rule; when asked whether his anti-democratic vote was not a wicked action, he replied, according to Aristotle: ‘yes, for there was nothing better to be done’ (Rhetoric, III.18.6). About Euripides’ involvement in local politics, nothing is known with any reasonable degree of certainty. 4 Translations from Sophocles are based on Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s recent Loeb edition, and modiWed where I have deemed it necessary (Lloyd-Jones [1994]1998). Other translations are my own. 5 Apollo constrains Orestes to take revenge for the death of his father; the Furies, by contrast, persecute him for slaying his mother. ConXicting arguments are presented as to whether he should, or even could, have acted otherwise; whether he is legally guilty, ritually clean, and even whether he has killed a relative at all (ll. 657–60). In the face of such dilemmas, the human jury fails to reach a verdict, and a decision in Orestes’ favour is reached only by Athena’s divine intervention. 6 The most famous statement of the American case for war is probably the 5 February, 2003 UN Security Council speech by the then Secretary of State, Colin Powell (for a transcript see Powell 2003). 7 Before the start of the war, I argued in public the second point, the only one for which I can claim a more substantive specialist knowledge (see American Enterprise Institute for Policy Research 2003).

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media;8 in Europe, however, opposition to the war was widespread, risk-free, and, on occasion, almost smug. The dilemma that such criticisms missed, however, was that international law has failed miserably in protecting the Iraqi people since at least the 1980s, and did not show any signs of oVering them more protection under an enduring regime of Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi regime had come to power by illegitimate means, had itself started two oVensive wars (against Kuwait and Iran, respectively), and its crimes against its own population and against neighboring countries (not to mention countless immigrant workers from Egypt and the Sudan) included war crimes, crimes against humanity, and, demonstrably, genocide.9 All the noble principles of international law had failed to protect the Iraqi population, as did virtually all the main actors on the international stage: the diVerent bodies of the UN, the US and its NATO allies, and the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies. Probably a very substantial part of the Iraqi population, and certainly the vast majority of Iraq’s Kurds, actually favoured a foreign military intervention to oust Saddam’s regime, without, for that reason, necessarily trusting American intentions.10 Lame appeals to international law in the face of the 2003 American-led war, therefore, were at best naı¨ve, and at worst reXected an obsession with American power, rather than any genuine concern for the suVering of the Iraqi people. The latter-day Kantian, Habermas (2003), acknowledges this fact, but does not appear to think it of any consequence. 8 Thus, even famous commentators like Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and Gore Vidal had diYculties airing their views on the main American channels, and in part had to resort to alternative internet sites and foreign publishers. 9 The March 1988 chemical attack against Halabja, in which the Iraqi regime gassed over 5000 Kurds, is well known. Less well known, however, is the fact that this attack was but a sideshow of a much larger, much more systematic campaign of extermination, the so-called Anfal operations, in which the Baath regime murdered up to 100,000 Iraqi civilians and destroyed over 1000 Iraqi villages. For a meticulous account, see Human Rights Watch 1995. For a scholarly account of Saddam Hussein’s rise to power, see Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett ([1987] 1991). 10 Thus, the Wrst Iraqi voices able to speak freely following the fall of Baghdad publicly castigated their fellow Arabs for their support of Saddam’s dictatorial regime (Lynch 2005: ch. 3); likewise, in a debate among six Iraqi exiles on the Open Democracy website (not exactly a pro-Bush forum), all were highly critical of the conduct of the occupation, but not a single participant unambiguously condemned the American-led war as such (see ‘Iraq in the Balance’, Open Democracy 2004).

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One speciWcally humanist way of criticizing the American war eVort is to assimilate it to a classical tragedy in which rulers bring disaster upon themselves and their countries by their folly. Such assimilations, however, should be resisted, for political, literary, as well as methodological reasons. First, depictions of George Bush as a Creon or Pentheus who brings disaster to himself, his family, and his country, by refusing to heed good advice, are as misleading as they are tasteless. In general, the comparison with such classical models confers on contemporary rulers an aura of aesthetic and moral grandeur that they do not necessarily possess or deserve: unlike the tragic rulers, for example, their policy decisions do not generally plunge their own families into misery. Worse, such comparisons come perilously close to the ways in which Iraqi government propaganda tried to glorify Saddam as a hero comparable in stature to Gilgamesh, Nebuchadnezzar, or Saladin. Second, alluding to contemporary persons and events is a technique not of classical tragedy, but of old comedy. Tragedy has been persuasively argued to raise radical questions about life in the Wfth-century Athenian polis;11 but remarkably, it does not do so by simply suggesting a juxtaposition of Wctional characters and real persons. On the contrary, barring such signiWcant exceptions as the Eumenides and the Persians, the extant tragedies are remarkably reluctant to discuss people and events of their own time.12 It is rather in Aristophanic comedy that we Wnd allusions to contemporary events and politicians, at times with an astonishing frankness. Try and imagine the Bush administration and the collective Pentagon chiefs of staV being present at a theatre performance where their war eVorts are being savagely ridiculed in front of the electorate; but this is precisely what Aristophanes did in the midst of the Peloponnesian War, apparently causing a good deal less controversy than did Michael Moore in 2003.13 11 The most inXuential argument for such a political reading is probably Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1986), which argues that Wfth century tragedy expresses the ambiguous status of central ‘political’ or polis-related notions like those of justice [dike`], the law, and the family. 12 The story of how Phrynichus was Wned 1000 drachmas in 492 bce for moving his audience to tears with his staging of The Capture of Miletus and ‘reminding them of their own evils’ (Herodotus, 6.21) is too well known to need extensive discussion here. Fear of Wnes or prosecution, however, was probably but one among various reasons for locating tragedy in a mythical past rather than in the political present. 13 Aristophanes ridiculed the Athenian general Cleon on several occasions, notably Acharnians and Knights. American Wlm-maker Michael Moore caused enormous uproar

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Third, by simply projecting notions and characters directly from Greek tragedy onto the present, one risks losing from sight the historic speciWcity of that very particular genre of literature. The Greek city was vastly diVerent from the modern state, and classical Greek subjectivity likewise diVered signiWcantly from modern sensibilities: Athenian radical democracy was participatory rather than representative, and based on the majority vote rather than the rule of law, let alone a constitution; likewise, in Wfth-century Greece, there was no uniWed concept of man as a bearer of inalienable rights or of the will as the driving force of human actions.14 For better or for worse, the whole of the postcolonial world has been shaped not only by relations of (post-) colonial political and economic power, but also by concepts (like those of culture, civilization, tradition), spheres (the state as distinct from civil society, the public as opposed to the private, the religious as opposed to the secular), and institutions (the apparatus of government, state-based schools and universities, hospitals, and so on) that are distinctly modern.15 Importantly, these were not simply unilaterally copied from, or imposed by, the West, but articulated and developed in a highly asymmetric interaction between colonial and quasi-colonial rulers and ruled, in which both sides were shaped and reshaped. The interactive dimension of this, however, is only gradually starting to get the attention it deserves (compare Van der Veer 2001; Bayly 2004). For these reasons, one should be cautious with one obvious, and relatively uninteresting, postcolonial approach to Greek tragedies, namely to read them against the background of Athenian empire. Pace Rehm (2003) and others, the Athenian empire [arkhe`] bears only the vaguest of family resemblances to modern English and American imperialism. For more detailed discussion of the similarities by speaking out against the impending Iraq war in his acceptance speech at the 2003 Oscar award ceremonies; his subsequent movie, Fahrenheit 911, used various satirical means to criticize the Bush administration’s policies in the wake of the 9/11 assaults. 14 See also Vernant, ‘E´bauches de la volonte´ dans la trage´die grecque,’ in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1986: ch. 3). 15 Thus, it has been persuasively argued that, for example, both the nationalist movement in colonial India and Arab nationalism and Islamism in the decolonizing Middle East have much more in common with modern European (and, more speciWcally, German romantic) notions than with any local pre-modern Hindu or Muslim ‘traditions’ or ‘cultures’ (Chatterjee 1986; al-Azmeh 1995).

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and contrasts between the Athenian arkhe` and modern imperialism, see for example Balot (2001). Another fashionable thematic from which to read tragedy is that of exile, which admittedly informs most, if not all, of the extant plays. Here, one risks reducing tragedy to the politically urgent but dramatically unexciting message that asylum seekers are human beings deserving of compassion and hospitality, not to mention elementary rights.16 Another universalizing strategy seems equally misguided: humanist readings abstract away from such allegedly local and contingent factors as the society and politics of Wfth-century Athens, and instead focus on the allegedly more universal matters of the human psyche and the family. The Wrst author approaching such a position was, of course, Aristotle, who treated tragedy as a private literary genre producing individual emotional eVects, rather than as a political ritual performed at the City Dionysia.17 There is no good reason, however, to believe that public matters of law and justice, government and power, and war and peace, should be any less timeless or universal than individual emotions, or private matters of the family. Conversely, matters of human psychology and subjectivity are as historically variable and contingent as are liberal presumptions of individuals as subjects of law and as bearers of inalienable rights. Against such universalizing humanist and liberal readings, the centrality of the political—in the generic sense of matters concerning the polis—in tragedy can, and probably should, be emphasized; but precisely what does this political component amount to? Two extreme answers can be discarded straight away. On the one hand, one should not analyse tragedy as just ‘ideology’; that is, as Athenian self-aYrmation or self-congratulation as, for example, Zeitlin ([1986] 16 The theme of modern-day asylum seekers informed, among others, Wole Soyinka’s Oyedipo in Kolhoni (no known published text), Wrst staged in Delphi, Greece, in July 2002, which transferred Oedipus in Colonus to a group of Afghan refugees oV the Australian coast; and Peter Sellars’ June 2004 Amsterdam staging of Euripides’ Children of Heracles, employing genuine young asylum seekers as the chorus, in an otherwise breathtakingly static performance. 17 A recent statement of this claim is Hall (1996: 305): ‘Aristotle’s Poetics has certainly played no insigniWcant part in obscuring precisely those local, historical, and ideological speciWcities of which its other contemporaries were so aware. . . . In a transhistorical and apolitical sense, it has made [the tragic corpus] accessible to ‘‘everyman’’, precisely because its reader is encouraged to assess tragedy in complete dissociation from civic concepts’ (emph. in original).

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1990) at times seems to be doing; the ambiguous, disturbing, and disrupting overtones in tragedy do not Wt in well with such views.18 Conversely, authors like Rehm (2003) attempt to read Greek tragedy as a form of ‘radical theatre’; that is, as raising fundamental and potentially politically dangerous questions, as much about their own world as about ours. Rehm thus construes tragedy as presenting a timeless message on the corrupting eVects of power, and especially presenting power politics from the perspective of its victims; that is, as challenging the dominant Athenian ideology (Rehm 2003: 92). But this approach likewise risks stripping tragedy of all its ambiguity and unsettling power, by reducing it to a more unambiguously oppositional counter-ideology. The Greek tragic poets were neither opposition intellectuals nor anti-war activists. This is not to say, of course, that readings focusing on the political aspects of Greek tragedy are undesirable or inevitably anachronistic; but it does suggest that there is room for another kind of politicized reading of Greek tragedy, which may be labelled ‘post-liberal’ or ‘antihumanist’, in so far as it is alive to the centrality of power, politics, and conXict, while resisting any such obvious political contextualizations or even anachronisms. Instead, the reading suggested below focuses on the politics of the one thing all tragic protagonists do: speaking.

LIBERAL AND NON-LIBERAL APPROACHES TO P OL I T IC S A N D L A N G UAGE Liberal political theory is founded on the two notions of the rights and autonomy of the individual and the rule of law.19 It links these two in the concept of a social contract, especially as embodied in a constitution stating the citizens’ basic rights and duties. The idea of a social contract, that is, of civil society as the end of conXict, is one of 18 Compare notably, Vernant ‘Tensions et ambiguities dans la trage´die grecque’ in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1986 vol. 1: ch. 2). 19 One could also rephrase the Wrst notion in humanistic terms, as taking individual human freedom as both the foundation and telos of social and political action. For an overview of the various social contract theories around, see, for example, Boucher and Kelly (1994: esp. 1–34).

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the great master thoughts, if not foundational myths, of liberalism: famously, Kant argued that as it appears in Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, the social contract is not a historical description of the origin of political society from a pre-social war of all against all, but a Wction of sorts: it is the rational criterion of a just polity. See Boucher and Kelly (1994: 8) for a summary; and for more detailed discussion, Howard Williams’ chapter on Kant in the same volume. Communitarian criticism of the liberal-contractarian assumption of autonomous individuals as conceptually and normatively prior to, and separated from, society soon emerged: thus, Hegel, in his Philosophy of Right ([1896] 1942), not only criticized the social-contract theorists’ assumption of autonomous agency, but also distinguished the contractual relation, which he dismissed as arbitrary and subjective, from what he saw as the objective moral necessity of the state.20 But his position is still as teleological as liberal ones, in so far as it involves freedom and a resolution of conXict as the end or telos of history; moreover, and of particular relevance in this context, he tends to portray the Greek polis as still a harmonious community of shared norms and values (in a highly romantic view that does not square particularly well with his own remarks on Greek tragedy elsewhere). Likewise, later Hegelinspired communitarian critics of liberalism tend to depict human communities (as did Hegel with states) as more homogeneous, harmonious, traditional, and unchanging than they are.21 More recently, the liberal distinction between civil or political society and a conXictual state of nature has been challenged by two otherwise radically opposed thinkers. On the one hand, the conservative legal theorist Carl Schmitt ([1930] 1996) argues that the distinction between friend and enemy is the criterion of the political, just as the distinction between good and bad is the criterion 20 See especially Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Hegel [1896] 1942 para. 75). Twentieth century communitarians like the philosophers Alisdair MacIntyre (1981) and Charles Taylor (Rosa and Laitinen 2002) likewise emphasize the Hegelian point that the individual is shaped by and in a community, rather than wholly isolated and autonomous as supposed by liberal theories. 21 Thus, Taylor explains the September 11 assaults as resulting from an overly strong adherence to (Islamic) tradition and a refusal to reinterpret that tradition so as to enable for a peaceful coexistence (Rosa and Laitinen 2002); it would be more appropriate, though, to emphasize that these assaults are wholly without precedent in the Islamic tradition, regarding style, scale, and deliberate targeting of civilians.

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of the ethical, and that between beautiful and ugly the criterion of the aesthetical. This distinction, he continues, should not be thought of as an unchanging essence or deWnition; neither should it be conXated with, for example, moral distinctions between good and evil. On this view, the establishment of a social contract marks not the birth but the end of political society; hence, Schmitt evaluates the liberal neutralization of conXict as a depoliticization, that is, as a denial of the political. This conception is extremely one-sided, even formalist, in so far as it does away with all substantial questions of power and government, let alone social and economical ideology. But, whatever the validity and moral implications of Schmitt’s argument, the point that there is no politics without antagonism is surely thoughtprovoking, even if Greek tragedies, and Sophocles’ plays in particular, assume the distinction between friends (philoi) and enemies (echthroi) less as a criterion of the political, than as an articulation of a much more general moral attitude in aVairs of the polis, individual contacts with foreigners, and so on; see also Blundell (1989). Starting from a radically diVerent political attitude, Foucault ([1997] 2003) comes to conclusions remarkably similar to Schmitt’s. Basing himself on historical analyses of developments in medieval and Renaissance France, he forcefully criticizes the idea of civil society as marking the end of conXict, as it is suggested by the social contract tradition starting with Hobbes. In his view, the establishment of the rule of law marks less a voluntary agreement and cessation of hostilities by both sides than a—temporary—victory of, and imposition of norms and rules by, one side in a conXict (Foucault [1997] 2003: ch. 5). Instead of resolving all violent conXicts and establishing a peaceful community of shared norms and values, he argues, the rise of political society merely marks the emergence of new strategies in old conXicts; the underlying antagonisms remain. In other words, reverting Clausewitz’s famous dictum, Foucault ([1997] 2003: ch. 7) conceives of politics as the pursuit of war by other means. Anti-liberal analyses like Schmitt’s and Foucault’s have not only gained a new currency following the 9/11 attacks; they also provide us with new and fruitful perspectives from which to approach Greek tragedy, as I will argue shortly. Finally, the social contract is not only a cornerstone of liberal political theory; it also appears to be a root assumption of many modern theories of language; see also Leezenberg (2002). The notion

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of a langue, or language system, as a social fact, in the Durkheimian sense of an inherently consensual collective representation that is oriented towards social integration, was introduced by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure;22 but the idea that a language system is a shared common good serving both individual self-interest and mutual beneWt is much more widespread. It appears, in fact, to be considered such a self-evident starting point in virtually all approaches in contemporary theoretical linguistics that it is hardly ever made explicit.23 Once teased out, however, it loses much of its self-evidence. We may raise new questions, and get new answers, by systematically looking for conXict and power asymmetries in language; this holds in particular for the language used in tragedy (see Leezenberg 2005 for a more detailed argument along these lines).

ANCIENT GREEK TRAGEDY AS A P O S T- L I B E R A L G E N R E Unlike modern liberal doctrines, classical tragedy presumes no social contract either at the level of society or in its language. SuperWcially, this might seem a trivial point: after all, the very set-up and plot structure of tragedy as a dramatic genre would seem germane to an agonistic and conXict-ridden, rather than a consensual, view of language. The nonchoral and non-narrative parts of tragedy often involve heated argument or agoˆn, which often descends into an exchange of conXicting, if not violent, one-liners or stichomythia; and the chorus often raises a dissenting voice, wishing to be heard—at times in vain. But all this need not yet contradict a social contract view of language; after all, liberal polities obviously do not preclude debate and diVerence of opinion either. The reasons for the Greek non-contractual view of society and 22 Saussure’s introductory chapters (chapter III on how to characterize langue) are formulated in extremely Durkheimian terms of social facts, principles of classiWcation, and collective representations that are exterior to the individual; on p. 31, he explicitly states that it existed only by virtue of a kind of contract between the members of a community. 23 Cf. Leezenberg (2002) for more discussion and references; it should be noted that such assumptions are rather less widespread in sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics.

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communication go much further, however. First, social, civil, or cultural life is not opposed to an alleged state of nature involving a war of all against all. There was no Greek, or even Athenian, civil ‘society’, as distinct from an Athenian state, or as based on a social contract that sacriWced individual freedoms in exchange for social peace, order, and security.24 Rather, social or cultural life was itself characterized by various forms and kinds of conXict: between gods and men, between cities, within the city, within the family, and even within the self. The central notion here is that of stasis, a term with a broad spectrum of meanings ranging from ‘political faction’ to ‘civil war’. The perception that stasis was an undesirable but inevitable, indeed almost ‘natural’, feature of life in the polis, appears to have been almost commonsensical in Wfth-century Athens. The word does not occur all that often in the plays of Sophocles; but the idea, and even the reality, of conXict are pervasive in his work.25 Second, in more strictly legal terms, classical Athens can hardly be considered a constitutional democracy. That is, there was little or nothing like the liberal sense of the rights of the individual, or even the sovereignty of the state, as an absolute corner-stone, whether or not enshrined in a basic law or constitution: neither the ‘state’ nor the individual was strictly conceptually separated or autonomous from the body of politically active citizens. A simple decision of the majority in court or in the assembly could decide on questions of war or peace for the city, or exile or citizenship, and even life or death for an individual. Despite the eVorts of lawmakers like Solon, the Athenians had no concept of law as codiWed, universal, and based on precedent (see de Romilly 1971 and Dover 1974: ch. VI). More than that, in tragedy, law 24 There does not appear to be any widespread sense of Athenian society being based on a social contract prior to Plato’s Crito (de Romilly 1971: ch. VI); and, even there, it is the laws themselves that are introduced as speaking characters, who, moreover, represent themselves not only as contract partners but also as parents. According to Boucher and Kelly (1994: 2–4), contra Gough (1957: ch. 2), sophists like Antiphon and Hippias hardly qualify as contractarians, because they do not attempt to ground legitimate authority in consent, but ridicule the conventional basis of law and morality. 25 Following Findley and, indirectly, Van Loenen, Vidal-Naquet argues for the centrality of stasis to classical Greek literature in general: ‘Oedipe entre deux cites’, in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1986, vol. 2: 179); JuVras (1988) makes an extended case for seeing (fear of) stasis as a main concern and indeed driving force of action in Antigone, Ajax, and Oedipus in Colonus. Foucault (2001a) analyses Oedipus the King as centered around a struggle for power and Oedipus’ fear of losing that power to a rival.

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and justice appear to have a very ambiguous, and indeed contested, status. ConXicting views on substantial points of guilt, punishment, and justice, and on procedural matters of how justice should be administered, appear in both Eumenides and Antigone, to mention but the most famous examples. Should it be gods, kings, or citizens who decide what counts as just punishment, or as the rules of a fair trial? And if there is no agreement, how should such matters be settled? Liberal political theory appears bound to postulate a consensus at some level, whether about substantial norms and values or about procedural rules ensuring fairness. Fifth-century Athenian political thought, by contrast, appears to view human societies as complexes of antagonistic forces, which only temporarily and with great eVort have been laid to rest, and which can relapse into violent confrontation at any time. In this respect, it appears closer to Schmitt’s and Foucault’s analyses than to modern liberal thought. It is but a small step from acknowledging the essentially contested character of concepts like justice, law, kinship, and so on, to arguing that justice itself is inherently and irreducibly conXictual; this is the step taken in Hampshire’s provocatively entitled Justice is ConXict (2000).26 The sense of conXict in Greek tragedy, however, goes beyond even such claims: Hampshire merely argues that no universal agreement on substantial ethical and juridical questions will ever be reached, and that one should therefore ensure the procedural means for all positions to get a fair hearing; but in Greek tragedy, even such procedures for resolving conXicts and hearing the diVerent sides appear ad hoc: and are seldom seen as balanced. Even divine authority in arbitration and elsewhere is often unjust or unfair, or at least criticized for being so.27 That is, securing the right to a fair hearing is precisely a problem; the rule of law is not an end to conXict, but merely the predominance of one side in a conXict. 26 The allusion is, of course, to Heraclitus, fr. 80 (Diels / Kranz 1952): eidenai khre`n . . . dike`n. 27 Witness, among others, the disproportionate punishment meted out to Pentheus by Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae, which is criticized by Pentheus’ father Cadmus (Bacchae: v. 1348); likewise, Sophocles has Athena drive Ajax, the hero of the eponymous play, to insanity and ultimately suicide, merely for his boastful, if true, claim that he can Wght without any divine support. In Eumenides, Athena’s vote is accepted in advance as decisive by the Furies, but still leads to anger when actually cast.

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Finally, tragedy displays no view of language as a social contract. It involves no notion of language as a consensual social fact in Durkheim’s sense, or structure in Saussure’s sense. More generally, in classical Athens, languages were not seen as ordered structures but as collections of words to be used for various purposes. Languages are not necessarily seen as shared systems either: the pervasive tragic confrontations about what is just, or whether or not a speciWc person is guilty or polluted, are also debates about the precise meanings of words like dike` [justice], aitia [guilt], or miasma [pollution]. Sophocles’ tragedies in particular involve an extremely complex imagery (if such it is) of language, words, and speaking. Thus, the Oedipus in Colonus is shot through with expressions like logos, epos, legein, and so on; intriguingly, the word polis also occurs more often in this play than in any other of Sophocles’ surviving works. At times, words are seen as opposed to actions, especially when idle talk is contrasted with deeds (ll. 382–83); but there is also a perception that the use of words itself may be a form of action. Thus, the aged Oedipus complains that one single utterance could have decided whether or not he went into exile: 
ı ØŒæF æØ ıª Ø ø [for want of a small word I went into exile] (OC: ll. 443–44)

That is, Oedipus and others display an awareness of the performative power that language, or perhaps its users, may have; see Leezenberg (2004); there is a clear perception that the uttering of speciWc words may conjure up the very realities named by those words. Thus, the chorus in OC does not dare to call the Furies by their own name, but instead refers to them as the ‘kindly ones’ or ‘those we dare not name’ (ll. 128–29).28 Further, language is not thought of as a means for mutual understanding, let alone cooperative communicative action; rather, words are seen as instruments or weapons, potentially even deadly ones. Thus, the aged Oedipus knows well that words may be the weapons of the weak: powerless as he is, he realizes that his words, 28 For more detailed discussion of the performative and often conXictual character of language in tragedy, (see Leezenberg 2004; 2005). See also Butler (2000), which, however, spends rather more time on discussing Lacan and Hegel than on tracing the richness of performative language in the Antigone.

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and even his silences, may have far-reaching consequences for others. When his son Polyneices comes to him as a suppliant, Oedipus at Wrst refuses to speak to him at all (ll. 1177–78; 1271–72), and when the latter asks for his father’s blessing in reconquering Thebes form his brother, Oedipus retorts by violently cursing him (ll. 1372–96). It should be emphasized that this belief in the power of words is by no means simply a primitive belief in magic; that is, it does not rest on a mere confusion between the natural, the social, and the supernatural spheres. The exact delimitation of these spheres, and the hero’s ambiguous position in between them, is precisely what is being radically questioned in tragedy. According to Vernant’s famous characterization, tragic action presupposes that the human and the divine spheres are distinct enough to be at odds with each other, but at the same time requires them to appear inseparable (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1986: 72). This perception of both the city and language as being ruled by conXict rather than contract diVers from some of the more inXuential politicized readings of tragedy. Thus, Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1986: 180), basing himself on Zeitlin’s ([1986] 1990) argument, construes tragedy as expatriating conXict from Athens. He sees tragedy as presenting politics, and especially political conXict, as a central part of life in Thebes, but not as a feature of Athenian civil life. Noting the exception of the Eumenides, he argues for a quasi-structuralist opposition between Athens as a city of law and Thebes as a city of stasis. Such a self-congratulating view of Athens as a city free of stasis and injustice may indeed emerge in some plays, notably those of Euripides; but it is demonstrably not there, or only ambiguously there, in the two plays explicitly dealing with questions of justice in Athens: Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Sophocles’ Oedipus in Colonus, respectively. In Eumenides, the conXict between the Furies and Apollo is not really resolved by rational or deliberative means (after all, the human jury is evenly divided over the guilty-not guilty verdict), but by the outright bribery of the Furies: Athena promises them eternal gifts and favours from the Athenians (ll. 867–69). She does so not merely to establish justice but also to protect the Furies’ honour (time`):  Ø ªæ Ø B  ªÆ æfiø Ł ØÆØ ØŒÆø  e
A Øøfi  [A great and lasting heritage awaits you here; thus honour is assured and justice satisWed] (Eumenides: ll. 890–91, tr. Vellacott, 1956)

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Thus, even in that most Athenian of tragedies, conXict is not solved but shelved. Likewise, in Oedipus in Colonus, in many ways a complement to the Eumenides, there are too many dissonant noises for it to qualify as a smug piece of Athenian self-praise: it expresses a constant fear of the Furies erupting on the stage again. For one thing, the nightingales repeatedly referred to in the praise of Athens (ll. 668– 719) are birds of mourning, a fact which has led some observers to conclude that in this ode, Sophocles was not boasting of Athenian glories but in fact lamenting the impending, and by then virtually inevitable, downfall of his native city. (For this argument, see McDevitt 1972.) Further, it is explicitly denied that Theseus’ Athens is a democracy (ll. 66–7), and the king’s behaviour makes it clear that it is his individual words and decisions, rather than consensus or consultation of the people, that determines the city’s policies. Thus, he actually overrules the Athenian chorus’ initial desire for Oedipus to be chased out of the city. The relevant question here is not, however, whether Sophocles agreed with Theseus on this point, that is, whether he was a conservative monarchist or a democrat, but rather how he describes people as acquiring and maintaining the authority to speak and to make their words actually do things. To another respect in which Sophoclean Athens is not liberal-democratic, I will turn later. SuperWcially, the conXict-oriented character of a post-liberal reading of the kind presented here might look Hegelian, involving a dialectical development of a conXict and its resolution, but it should be kept strictly distinguished from it. Hegel’s inXuential readings argue that plays like Antigone and Oedipus in Colonus not only involve an initial clash or conXict but also an eventual synthesis, resolution, or reconciliation. Thus, Hegel famously analyses Oedipus’ heroization at the end of OC as a quasi-Christian redemption ¨ stheafter a long life of undeserved suVering (Vorlesungen u¨ber die A tik, III.551, Hegel 1986). On closer inspection, however, it turns out that none of the underlying conXicts is resolved by this beatiWcation, nor even that Oedipus is in the end reconciled with his own past or future: on the contrary, he explicitly states that his wrath will never abate, but that even when dead and buried, his dead body will drink the blood of his fellow Thebans:29 29 For a more detailed argument against the Hegelian reading of OC, see Bernard (2001).

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¥  e ıø ŒÆd Œ Œæı Œı łıæ 
  ÆP H Ł æe ÆrÆ
 ÆØ, [Then shall my dead body, sleeping and buried, cold as it is, drink their warm blood,] (OC: ll. 621–22)

Perhaps one may generalize this point that not even death necessarily marks a conclusion or Wnal reconciliation. Thus, on the approach defended here, conXict is treated as irreducible and ultimately irreconcilable. War and stasis may not be normative ideals, but they are inevitable factual realities in relations between and within cities.

T H E S C A N DA LO US VO I C E S O F T R AG E DY A Wnal way in which language and politics meet in tragedy is in the question of the limits of what can be said in public. In Athenian public life, there certainly were limits to free speech; but both on the Pnyx and in the theatre (and especially on the comic stage), they could be pushed very far indeed. No matter how badly or unjustly the gods may behave in the tragedies we know of, none of the tragic poets was ever seriously in danger of being prosecuted for impiety [asebeia]. On the contrary, Sophocles, who has diVerent divinities strike down such noble characters as Heracles, the young king Oedipus, and Ajax, for no particularly good reasons, even had a reputation for piety. Reading his tragedies, one occasionally wonders why. It seems that in classical Athens, the limits to what could be said were societal and political, rather than religious in nature. For example, using foul language in public was not legally prohibited, but generally held to be unbecoming for a free and honourable man; but even these rather unclear limits are systematically extended and indeed challenged in both tragedy and comedy, which thus claim or presuppose a speciWc kind of theatrical free speech or parrhe`sia (see Halliwell 1991). This is not the place to discuss whether and how far the classical Athenian spaces for debate and decision-making, like the Agora and the Pnyx, were anything like the liberal public sphere that rose and declined in nineteenth-century Germany; see Habermas

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([1962] 1989);30 but relevant here is the observation by Butler (2004: 126–27) that, in general, such a public sphere is partly constituted by what cannot be said, not only by excluding persons but also by diVerent ways of censoring claims. Now what is crucial to tragedy is the ambiguous delimitation, and systematic contestation, of this ‘public sphere’, and thereby of what can legitimately be said. To employ Hampshire’s distinction, tragedy often involves the contestation of not only the substance but also the very procedures of justice as fairness. This contestation is primarily done by what one may call ‘scandalous voices’: voices that are not normally allowed to speak, let alone speak out in public, and saying things that rulers do not normally want to hear. Quite generally, tragedy carries nothing like a presumption of the right to free speech; in particular, children are not expected to disagree with their parents, regardless of the circumstances. Thus, when Haemon speaks up against Creon in the Antigone, he realizes that he is violating expected patterns of behaviour and has to ask for special permission to do so: Kªg  ‹
ø f c ºª Ø OæŁø  ); h  ¼ ıÆ   K
Ø Ø ºª Ø· [I could never say, and may I never know how to say, that what you say is wrong:] (Antigone: ll. 685–86)

Likewise, when Sophocles’ Electra starts reproaching her mother Clytaemnestra for Agamemnon’s murder, the latter’s reaction is merely to castigate such insolence; and indeed Electra herself admits that she feels shame for thus speaking up against her own mother at all (Electra: ll. 616–18). In a sense, Antigone is the exception that proves this rule; she precisely arrogates to herself the right to speak like a male citizen, and indeed like an equal to the king, which is what makes her so disturbing and indeed unacceptable to Creon. In classical Athens, women, minors, slaves, and exiles could not take the right to speak in public for granted, and this situation is clearly reXected in tragedy. 30 Habermas makes the debatable claim that the bourgeois concept of a public sphere, involving discussion of cultural and political questions by educated private individuals regardless of rank, actually originated in ancient Greece (para. 1); likewise, his suggestion that the eighteenth-century German theatre provided a surrogate public sphere (para. 2) would be worth exploring in, and contrasting with, ancient Greek drama.

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At times, even the spatial location in which a voice may legitimately be raised is quite explicitly circumscribed. The chorus in OC, when Wrst encountering Oedipus at the Furies’ sacred grove, refuse even to speak with him until he leaves the sacred ground on which he has trespassed (ll. 166–69). Once he has done that, they promise to protect him; but when they discover that he is the parricide and incestuous exile Oedipus, they no longer consider themselves bound by this promise, and try to chase him away for fear of pollution. Conversely, Polyneices can secure the right to be heard by his father only by sitting down at the statue of Poseidon and thus claiming the status of a suppliant (ll. 1156–62; 1285–88). But tragedy not only includes both male and female minors publicly criticizing relatives in power as in Sophocles’ Electra and Antigone. Other scandalous voices that demand to be heard are those of persons who are polluted by crimes that are considered so horrible that these actions themselves should not even be spoken of. When Oedipus is reminded of his past crimes by the chorus at Colonus, his reaction shows that he considers the very mention of his actions as an act of violence: þØ; ŁÆ  b  IŒ Ø; [Woe, it is death to hear such things,] (OC: l. 529)

Numerous tragedies in fact involve characters guilty of, or people speaking on behalf of those guilty of, crimes or transgressions for which male citizens would have been stripped of their right to speak in public in Wfth-century Athens: incest (for example, in Oedipus the King and Hippolytus); the slaughter of one’s own closest relatives (Oresteia, Electra, Seven Against Thebes, Medea); cursing and betraying one’s own fatherland (Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus). The latter point was a particularly sensitive one: in the Athens of the Peloponnesian War and Alcibiades’ treason, Antigone’s claims regarding the burial of a traitor were in all likelihood considered just as scandalous and unacceptable by many as the self-justiWcations of a religiously motivated suicide terrorist would be today.31 A legal-religious prohibition 31 One should avoid falling into an anachronistic trap by pushing this analogy too far, though, because of the abovementioned historicity of categories like those of state, law, and indeed, terrorism.

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against burying parricides in their native soil even appears elsewhere in Sophocles’ own plays; thus, in the OC, Ismene states that her father Oedipus may not be buried in Thebes (l. 407), a point not contested by Antigone on that occasion. Likewise, Creon argues that Oedipus is polluted and driven by anger [thumos], and that his words therefore carry no moral or political weight (ll. 944–52). In short, the very fact that the polluted and enraged exile Oedipus can speak up at all is something of a scandal, or—from his point of view—a miracle. It is not just the persons speaking, however, but also what they say, that may cause scandal. Creon literally says that he cannot bear to hear the thought that the gods might care for the corpse of a traitor, and hence that Antigone might be right: ºª Ø ªaæ PŒ I Œ a ÆÆ ºªø
æ ØÆ Y  Ø F F  ŒæF
æØ: [What you say is intolerable, that the gods are concerned for this corpse!] (Antigone: ll. 282–83)

One need not assume that Demosthenes’ famous later quotation from Antigone (ll. 175–90) in his speech Against Aeschines, showing clear approval of Creon’s demand for loyalty to one’s native city (Demosthenes 19.247), was typical for a classical Athenian audience, in order to appreciate that her point is not as self-evidently valid as believed by many a modern reader. Many read Creon’s words as a Wrst indication of his fatal blindness to other points of view; but if Demosthenes’ speech is anything to go by, it is a reaction that at least part of the audience would Wnd reasonable. The point of Antigone is, of course, that as intolerable as Antigone’s words might be, they make a point that is at least as valid as Creon’s. Likewise, many of the words spoken by Oedipus at Colonus are scandalous, if not appalling: his is not only a voice of religious pollution but also one of political treason. His angry denunciation of his relative Creon, his horrendous cursing of both his sons, and his transfer of loyalty in war from Thebes to Athens are not merely acts of aggression against his family, but amount to a betrayal of his native city. The disturbing power of Sophocles’ Wnal play may well lie precisely in its allowing this terrible voice to speak without any obvious condemnation. Scandalous voices are irreducibly conXictual, if not confrontational; but they are democratic. By calling attention to them, a post-liberal

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reading may provide some new light on postcolonial approaches to the Classics, as it attempts to steer clear of both the increasingly selfrighteous reassertion of Western liberal values and increasingly desperate Third-Worldist anti-imperialist rhetoric, and seeks to explicate forms of discursive and other power articulated in them. Greek tragedy grants a hearing to voices otherwise excluded as female, under age, polluted, or insane, and thus involves a temporary and Wctional extension of the right to free speech that is normally restricted to male citizens (see Hall 1997: 126). Greek tragedy, so to say, is more radically democratic even than Athenian radical democracy. Thus, the scandalous voices in tragedy are reminiscent of, but not identical to, the thematic of parrhe`sia or ‘fearless speaking’ of the truth in the face of the king, studied by Foucault (2001b), or the subaltern voices theorized by Spivak (1988): they often, but by no means necessarily, are the voices of the weak, the powerless, and the victimized speaking against power.32 They need not speak the truth or anything more than a partial or partisan truth. Instead, they test the limits of what we can say at all and, more precisely, what we can say in public. Conversely, they should be distinguished from the occasionally violently confrontational rhetoric of modern-day populist or xenophobic politicians; from racist, sexist, or ethnic jokes; and from other forms of ‘hate speech’. Tragedy, with its scandalous voices, questions rather than aYrms; it does not voice political propaganda or counter-propaganda but raises doubts and problems; and, most of all, it does not seek to polarize but to bring together, even in the midst of war. 32 Foucault distinguishes ‘monarchic’ parrhe`sia, which involves asking to speak the truth to a king without risking harm to oneself (such as is done by the herdsman in Euripides’ Bacchae: ll. 668–71), from ‘democratic’ parrhe`sia among equals such as on the classical Athenian agora). He slightly over-emphasizes the aspect of truthtelling; thus, Polyneices requests the right to a hearing, not with the aim of speaking the truth but of getting Oedipus’ support in the conXict with Eteocles. For more recent scholarship on parrhe`sia in Greek tragedy and comedy, see the papers by Halliwell, McClure, Roisman, and Sommerstein in Sluiter and Rosen (2004).

16 Western Classics, Indian Classics: Postcolonial Contestations Harish Trivedi

Classics and the postcolonial would seem to be strange bedfellows. Classics are nothing if not pre-modern, and to speak of them in these post-al times as classics is necessarily to have to pick up the gauntlet of aYrming that they are indeed originary, foundational and even ‘essential’ texts—such as postmodernism would not admit any text or thing to be. Anyhow, both postmodernism and postcolonialism stand at the opposite end of the chronological spectrum from the classics, in being quite as new and current as the classics are old and hallowed. Postcolonial discourse, in particular, comprises probably the most widely transformative global experience of modern times, concerned as it is in common critical view with, not only the period since decolonization, but equally the period of colonization.1 The major postcolonial issues to address in this context would, therefore, obviously be just how the classics inspired, shaped, and aided and abetted or, alternatively, moderated, reWned, and ‘civilized’ the whole colonial enterprise. Would the experience of colonization have been the same without the classics? How far were the classics ideologically, instrumentally, or ornamentally deployed in the imperialist cause, and used to validate it? Did the classics, as beacon lights of Western civilization, also disseminate certain values which 1 For a formulation and controversion of the view that the colonial and the postcolonial exist in a seamless continuity, see, respectively, Ashcroft et al. (1989) and Trivedi (1996).

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could, on the other hand, be appropriated and exploited by the colonized as a tool of resistance against colonial rule? And how do the classics now live on in the postcolonial consciousness and sensibilities of the former colonizers, as well as the colonized, while still serving their function as timeless texts?

W H O S E C L A SS I C S? Before one begins to address any of these questions, there is, however, another larger and overriding question to ask: just which classics and whose classics are we talking about here? There would appear to be an unqualiWed assumption, at least in anglophone discourse, that when we talk of the classics, the only classics are Western classics, and that it is their impact on the colonizer, as well as the colonized, that is all there is to study. But it may be no less important to focus instead on indigenous non-Western classics, to see how they were deployed by the colonized peoples to contest the literary, cultural, and ideological space with Western classics, and how well or ill these indigenous classics have withstood the colonial onset and hegemony of Western classics, to persist into the postcolonial times and to continue to serve as foundational texts of the newly independent nations. In this context, India as a colony is probably a singular exception. It is a curious and remarkable fact that, though the ‘classics’, that is, the canon of Greek and Latin texts that traditionally constituted the core of a gentleman’s education in Europe—were also included in the school and college syllabi introduced by the British in their colonies all over the globe, from Australia to Canada, and from Africa to the Caribbean, no Greek or Latin texts were ever taught in India, not even in the most e´lite government or missionary institutions. This is, on the face of it, so improbable a fact that in a recent American novel (1999) entitled Love in a Dead Language (which is centred on the classic Sanskrit text, the Kamasutra), the author Lee Siegel could not even imagine it. In this novel, an Indian student who has gone out to do a PhD in Sanskrit at a university in the USA (and there is of course rich but plausible postcolonial irony in such academic contraXow) is said by the novelist, who is himself a professor of Sanskrit and knows

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his India very well in most other respects, to have learnt Latin at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi. But Latin (or for that matter Greek) was never taught, even in this exceptionally highly anglicized institution, which is the oldest college in Delhi (having been founded at the high noon of the British Empire in 1880 by a group of English missionaries called the Cambridge Brotherhood) and which is still sometimes accused of being one of the most ‘e´litist’ centres of higher education in India.2 The fact that Western classics were not taught in India, in either school or college, becomes especially signiWcant in the light of the long history of the evolution of colonial education. In this respect too, as in some others, India was the jewel in the crown, where the British Wrst envisioned and devised a policy of colonial education to promote the kind of hegemony, which has been called by Viswanathan (1989) a ‘mask of conquest’, a policy that became a model for spreading colonial education elsewhere and which served in fact as a laboratory for experiments that were later adopted in the home country itself. English literature, for example, was taught as a university subject Wrst in India and only subsequently in England, after a time-lag of about half a century. This contrasts with the case in the White settler colonies such as, initially, Ireland and the USA, and subsequently Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which both the colonizers and the colonized, not always readily distinguishable one from the other, regarded in many respects as home from home, and where the same pattern of education prevailed as in Britain. On the other hand, in Africa, where no written indigenous classics were to be found and where ‘the richness and ubiquity of oral narrative traditions’ and their performative aesthetics proved diYcult to convey in ‘bald translation’, a study of the Western classics could be inserted into the colonial education system as supplying a local lack (see Furniss 2000: 127–8). India was thus uniquely exempted from being obliged to read the Western classics for reasons that seem to be nowhere clearly and directly articulated by the British. It could be argued, perhaps, that 2 (Siegel 1999). My own counter-assertion derives from personal knowledge, from my having taught at St. Stephen’s College from 1969 to 1984, having edited the college centenary volume St. Stephen’s in Our Times (1980), and having contributed both the Wrst and the last pieces to The Fiction of St. Stephen’s (Bhattacharjca and Chatterjee (ed.) (2000): pp 3–7 and 207–24).

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the most likely reason for such diVerent treatment of India in this respect was that, unlike any of the other colonies, whether White or Black, India had classics of its own, which had been ‘discovered’ and acknowledged by Britain well before it had, eVectively, conquered India and was in a position to promulgate its own educational and cultural policy. It was through the now much-maligned ‘Orientalism’, that is, the study and translation of the older Indian texts by the British, which began in the 1770s, that not only Britain but also the rest of the Western world realized that India had a tradition of ancient literary works (unlike, for example, the tradition of orature in Africa), which were recognizably ‘classics’ in the Western sense, were fully comparable with Western classics, and were written in Sanskrit, a language that was fully the match of Latin and Greek. The making of the Orientalist canon through translations into English, mainly from Sanskrit, from the 1770s and throughout the nineteenth century, may have been determined to a considerable extent by pragmatic imperialist considerations (as Edward Said has inXuentially argued). But it was in many notable instances also sustained by a spirit of disinterested inquiry, engaged with local literary works so old and esoteric that they could not possibly further any utilitarian British design, and was thus often (in a phrase that seems to have become almost obsolete) a labour of love (see Said [1978] 1985 and Trivedi 2006). One of the Wrst Britishers in India to learn Sanskrit and to begin translating from it was Sir William Jones (to be acclaimed as ‘Oriental’ Jones), who had earlier distinguished himself as a classical scholar at Oxford. Though he is now often tarred with the broad brush of complicity with the British imperialist enterprise in India, some of the statements Jones made in that Wrst Xush of Orientalist discoveries, still sound stunning in their comparative liberality and openmindedness. The Sanskrit language, he declared in a discourse delivered in 1786 (Jones [1807] 1999), was: ‘of wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely reWned than either’; he also recalled that: ‘[W]e are told by the Grecian writers, that the Indians were the wisest of nations’ (Jones [1807] 1999).3 He was the Wrst to translate a 3 Emphases in the original. For a fairly comprehensive recent discussion of Jones’s ‘orientalist’ achievement, including a defence of Jones against Said, see Holes (2005).

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major literary text from Sanskrit into English in 1789 (after the scriptural Bhagavadgita had been translated by Charles Wilkins in 1785): the play Abhijnanashakuntalam by the epic poet and dramatist Kalidasa, fourth century ce. In his ‘Preface’ to the translation, while expressing some reservations about certain features of the play, such as it comprising seven acts which could, he suggested, be collapsed into Wve, Jones paid Kalidasa what may be regarded as the ultimate compliment it is possible to pay any writer, especially by a Britisher, by calling him ‘the Shakespeare of India’ (Jones [1789] 1999: 205 and 203). Altogether, the Western discovery of Indian classical literature, both religious and secular, caused such shock and wonder in Europe in the late eighteenth century that Schwab (1984) and Clarke (1997), in the titles of their studies of this Oriental impact and inXuence, described it, respectively, in terms of a new Renaissance or a new Enlightenment, probably the two most deeply transformative developments in the Western world. In India itself, such unstinted acclaim by orientalist scholars of the literary excellence of Sanskrit literature fed substantially into the tide of cultural nationalism that had begun to surge by the end of the nineteenth century, as a means of resistance to British rule. After the British had won a succession of military victories in India at the turn of the eighteenth century, including most notably the triumph over Tipoo Sultan in 1799 and the battle of Delhi in 1803, and after they had quelled the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 with such a heavy punitive hand as to eliminate forever after the possibility of another military revolt against them, this comparison between Kalidasa and Shakespeare was to be appropriated by Indian cultural nationalists. It was on the strength of the orientalist dissemination and valorization of Indian literary classics that many Indians felt enabled to claim a cultural seniority and even superiority over the ruling British; it was sometimes pointed out, for example, that as Kalidasa had preceded Shakespeare by more than one thousand years, it would perhaps be more Wtting to call Shakespeare the Kalidasa of England! It was argued, more generally, that the British anyhow had no classics of their own, excepting the Greek and the Latin, which were even half as old or great as the Indian classics, that even Shakespeare was not philosophical or profound enough for Indian taste, and, therefore, the British could hardly claim to justify their occupation and rule of

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India on the high moral ground that they were there to ‘civilize’ the Indians; see, for example, Shahani (1932) and Dutt (1923); for a discussion of both, see Trivedi (1995a).

C L A SS I C A L C OLO NI A L I S M However, as Metcalf (1995: 39) has noted: ‘[T]he British were nevertheless determined always to mark out the Raj as a moral, ‘‘civilized’’ and civilizing re´gime’. In order to be able to do so, British administrators and ideologues had either to Xy in the face of their own ‘discoveries’ of the Indian classics or, alternatively, to shift ground. With regard to a country colonized by the British some time before they colonized India, John Milton (quoted in Cronin 1996: 52) had spoken of the ‘most absurd and savage Customes’ of the Irish and ‘their true Barbarisme and obdurate wilfulnesse’, so as to be able to justify the ‘civilizing Conquest’ of Ireland by the British. Now in India, Lord Macaulay, faced with the vast body of Indian learning, some of which had already been made available in English translation by his compatriots, chose to dismiss it all through a sweeping comparison with Europe: ‘a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’ (Macaulay [1835] 1972: 241). And this despite the incidental personal circumstance that, however well-versed he might have been in classical European literature, he knew by his own admission hardly anything of the literatures of the East. At the same time, Macaulay turned round to open another front in the battle to justify British rule in India, when he projected the view that English language and literature would serve as the new classics of India. This was not merely a matter of substituting one set of classics for another; it was, more ambitiously, to cast the British imperial project in India in the mould of the Roman Empire. SigniWcantly, Macaulay had gone out to India to serve from 1834 to 1838 as the Member for Law in the Council of the Governor-General Lord Bentinck, and it was his primary oYcial task to impose on India ‘the rule of law’ as deriving in the West from the Roman model. The Indians had in common British view, existed in a state of violent

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lawlessness until the British arrived and through their own (decisively violent) intervention established peace; what came to be called Pax Britannica (celebrated in the title of James Morris’s (1979) three volume popular history of British rule in India), was clearly modelled, of course, on Pax Romana. The notoriously corrupt and thoroughly unprincipled commercial adventurism and naked greed that marked the early history of the East India Company from its establishment in the year 1600 up to the chicanery and the immoral practices of Robert Clive and Warren Hastings in the late eighteenth century (as exposed subsequently in the impeachment proceedings in British parliament of the latter, for example), could later be sanitized and sanctiWed through the British claim to occupy the high moral ground of ‘civilizing’ India, along familiar and hallowed Roman lines. It was through self-Xattering comparisons with the Holy Roman Empire that the British in India developed a sense of holiness of their own colonizing ‘mission’, famously formulated by Kipling as ‘the white man’s burden’ laid on the white man’s shoulders by Providence, no less. Increasingly in postcolonial discourse, Macaulay is seen as a Wgure more important than almost any British Governor General or Viceroy of India on the strength of an oYcial document of some 5000 words: his ‘Minute on Indian Education’, which he submitted on 2 February 1835 to the Governor General Lord Bentinck. In it he argued successfully for a reversal of policy through which an annual subsidy of 100,000 rupees, so far granted to native institutions of indigenous learning for ‘encouraging the study of Arabic and Sanscrit’, was to be withdrawn and henceforth used instead to promote English education among the natives, who could then serve as interpreters or mediators between the British rulers and the countless millions who had now been brought under British rule. These interpreters were not merely to be taught the English language but, in Macaulay’s scheme of things, to be so thoroughly hybridized as to become cultural clones; they were to be ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’ (Macaulay [1835] 1972: 249). Macaulay’s project may be said to have succeeded probably beyond his own greatest expectations, for it is just such an anglicized or, more generally speaking, Westernized class of persons that Wrst collaborated with the British in

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India and then, after independence, came to succeed the British as the ruling class. Indeed, since current postcolonial discourse seems to be constituted exclusively in English and even the most self-avowedly radical and resistant postcolonial theorists and critics from India write in English as a rule, and hardly ever in any of the Indian languages, they too—in a deep historical irony—must be counted among Macaulay’s great-grandchildren. While advocating that a select class of natives should learn English and acquire Western knowledge, Macaulay seems to have had constantly at the back of his mind a classical pattern of education. In fact, whenever he mentions English, we can clearly hear echoes of Greek and Latin. This double classical–colonial perspective is deployed by Macaulay as a constant underlying strategy to justify the introduction of English in India; he advances in favour of teaching English all the familiar arguments trotted out in favour of teaching Greek and Latin, except that in places, he claims even more for English as being the modern culmination of the ancient classical languages (ibid. pp. 241–2): It [English] stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West. It abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us. . . . Whoever knows that language, has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth, which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations.

A key point of reference in these reXections, inevitably, had to be the Renaissance, when modern Europe reclaimed its lost classical heritage, and Macaulay fully exploits a parallel he institutes here between Europe in the Wfteenth century and India in the nineteenth (ibid. p. 243): I refer [to] the great revival of letters among the Western nations at the close of the Wfteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century. At that time almost everything that was worth reading was contained in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Had our ancestors acted as the Committee of Public Instruction [in India] has hitherto acted; had they neglected the language of Cicero and Tacitus; had they conWned their attention to the old dialects of our own island; had they printed nothing and taught nothing at the universities but Chronicles in Anglo-Saxon, and Romances in Norman-French, would England have been what she now is?

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This grand Xight of rhetoric culminates in the clearest identiWcation that Macaulay makes between the classics and English in the entire ‘Minute’ (ibid.):4 What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India. The literature of England is now more valuable than that of classical antiquity.

The classics are used by Macaulay here to confer similar value on English, and at the same time pronounced to be inferior to English whenever it suits his purpose to say so. This unwitting paradox is staged yet again when, answering the objection that no Indian could ‘attain more than a smattering of English’ because it was so diVerent and diYcult, Macaulay (p. 249) says: ‘Nobody, I suppose, will contend that English is so diYcult to a Hindoo as Greek to an Englishman’. This comparison deWes all logic and seems to be based on nothing more, presumably, than painful childhood memories of having an alien language thrust upon one for, surely, the gap between Greek and English is far narrower, in view of the extensive etymological and cultural connections between the two languages, than it could ever be between say Hindi or Bengali on the one hand and English on the other. Macaulay’s assertion may be irrational, but perhaps for that very reason is deeply symptomatic of the fact that the very temper and template that vitally shaped the British colonial perception of India were inherently classical. In particular, a persistent overlaying of the Roman Empire over British rule in India served to validate the latter, as well as to aggrandize and glorify it. The culmination of this process of classical legitimization, through which not only the frame but the very fabric of British rule in India was self-consciously modelled after the Roman Empire, came in 1876 when Queen Victoria was proclaimed the Empress of India. Thus, ironically, she was raised a notch further above, not only the masses of India but also the numerous erstwhile 4 It is interesting to Wnd that, within the next two decades, this classical comparison had been accepted and internalized by at least one of the more impressionable or sycophantic of the Indian students to be trained under Macaulay’s new system of English education. ‘The English are to us what the Romans were to the English’, wrote Nabinchunder Dass, student at Hooghly College, Calcutta, in an essay predictably included in the British Parliamentary Papers 1852–53. Quoted in Viswanathan (1989: 139).

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kings of the various parts of India, now demoted by the British to be called merely ‘princes’ and ‘nawabs’. Many of them still held their customary rights and privileges under the umbrella of British paramountcy and, as the Prime Minister of the day, Disraeli, acknowledged, apparently without any sense of irony, they continued to ‘occupy thrones which were Wlled by their ancestors when England was a Roman province’ (quoted in Metcalf 1995: 61). The constant evocation of the Roman comparison thus added a halo to the materialist, pragmatic and ‘improving’ functions of the satraps of the British Raj, as acutely felt for example by the Collector (that is, the head of the district), Hopkins—probably one of the most thoughtful and reXective British characters ever created in all the literature of the Raj, in the Booker Prize winning novel The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell (Farrell 1973: 37): But Hopkins had gone further. Not only had he returned to India [from long leave in England] full of ideas about hygiene, crop rotation and drainage, he had devoted a substantial part of his fortune to bringing out to India examples of European art and science in the belief that he was doing as once the Romans had done in Britain.

Among the ‘statues, paintings and machines’ that Hopkins has brought to India are metal busts of the major British authors, the new classics of Macaulay. But presently, the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 breaks out, and when the besieged English community at Krishnapur runs out of ammunition to Wre back at the Indian mutineers, the same Hopkins orders that these cultural icons should be used as cannon balls instead. In this brute transition from canon to cannon, the electrometal heads, Wred as missiles, achieve widely varying results. While the curly haired head of Keats Xies oV ‘very erratically indeed’, the head of Shakespeare proves the most lethal of all (ibid. p. 335): . . . it had scythed its way through a whole astonished platoon of sepoys advancing in single Wle through the jungle. The Collector suspected that the Bard’s success in this respect might have a great deal to do with the ballistic advantages stemming from his baldness.

Apparently, before the British civilized their Indian subjects with culture, they had Wrst to subdue them with sheer Wre-power, and when it came to the crunch, classics could kill.

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While Greek and Latin may not have been taught in India, even though they were taught in perhaps all the other colonies (including neighbouring Sri Lanka),5 the one classical language and literature that was actually taught in the Indian universities set up by the British on the Western model was Sanskrit (with some universities also teaching Arabic and/or Persian on a smaller scale, as part of the British policy to institute a strategic political parity between the Hindus and the Muslims). Though oYcial British subsidy for the teaching of these classical languages in the traditional indigenous way in the pathshalas and the madrassas had been cut oV after Macaulay’s peremptory intervention (he had threatened to resign if his recommendations were not accepted), the British perhaps could not visualize a university in India in which some classical literature or the other was not taught, as it always had been in the British universities. In contrast, the modern Indian languages were not taught in any Indian university until about 1920, the same time more or less when English as a university subject Wnally began to be taught at Oxford and Cambridge.

5 The singular exception of India in this regard is further underlined by the fact that even in the neighbouring (post)colony Sri Lanka, the Western classics have been taught in Greek and Latin in school at both Ordinary and Advanced levels, as well as in college, even well after independence. However, as Rajiva Wijesinha (who read Latin till A level in Sri Lanka and then went on to take a BA degree in the Classics and a DPhil from Oxford) remarks, very few students in Sri Lanka choose to study Latin, which is now threatened with abolition, whereas a new subject called ‘Greek and Roman Civilization’, introduced in the 1960s and requiring study of classical literature and society in English, remains a popular option with students where it is oVered at some of the more e´lite schools and at two of the universities (personal communication, 24 October 2004). Ashley Halpe, senior Professor of English in Sri Lanka, points out that following the academic reform of the universities in Sri Lanka in 1973, what were called simply ‘Classics’ before have begun to be called ‘Western Classics’, as the Departments of Classics at the only two universities to have them, Peradeniya and Kelaniya, have since also included Sanskrit (personal communication, 27 and 29 October 2004). The vital diVerence, thus, between India and Sri Lanka in this regard seems to have been that, in India, the Sanskrit classics had a strong indigenous claim, which they did not in the largely Buddhist Sri Lanka, where the study of Pali was subsumed within Buddhist Studies as Pali has little secular literature.

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The British adoption of Sanskrit as an academic discipline in India may have been facilitated by the fact that it had been a classically (and safely?) dead language for about six to eight centuries already. But the persistence of Sanskrit in its classical role, both directly and indirectly, has probably been far more potent in India than was the case with Greek and Latin in the West. Of the eighteen ‘national’ languages of India recognized by the country’s constitution, for example, the vast majority have derived directly and substantially from Sanskrit, and the four languages that belong to another linguistic family, the Dravidian, have also, right since their origin, been extensively Sanskritic in terms of their vocabulary, especially in the higher, literary registers. In all these languages, the great Sanskrit classics, the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, were recreated, some time broadly between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries, and these reborn classics have in turn assumed the status of the greatest classics in each of these modern languages. More importantly, Sanskrit has been the bedrock of the cultural mainstream that has Xowed through India continuously for the last four thousand years or more. It may, like old Greek and Latin, be a dead language, but the religion and culture of which it was, from the start, the vehicle, are far from dead or supplanted, even now. Unlike the Greek gods, the Sanskrit/Hindu gods are still the gods worshipped by a vast proportion of the population of India, and unlike in Persia, the older civilization has not been wiped out beyond living trace and been replaced by another younger and radically diVerent civilization. Like Persia, India too was conquered by the Muslims but even after six centuries of continuous and extensive Muslim rule, from the end of the twelfth century to the beginning of the nineteenth, India did not become predominantly Muslim, nor could 150 years of subsequent British rule turn it into a Christian country. (The proportion of Muslims in India was never higher than approximately 25 per cent in the 1940s, which after Partition and the creation of Pakistan in 1947 dropped to about 13 per cent. The proportion of Christians in India is as high now as it has ever been, at a little over 3 per cent, while Hindus comprise 82 per cent of the population.) India may, in Naipaul’s (1979) eponymous phrase, be a (repeatedly) wounded civilization, but it is not a civilization transformed culturally out of recognition or riven right down the middle.

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Thus, the oldest Indian classics have had a continuous presence in the land ever since they began to be composed, from approximately 1000 bce onwards. Not only are our classics our own classics (unlike in England or America where they come from foreign lands in foreign languages), they are still our classics in a living sense. One way to demonstrate the live charge that Indian classics have continued to carry, may perhaps be to cite one or two emblematic cases of their eVective deployment against political authority during both the colonial and the postcolonial periods. Of the literary works banned by the British Government in India, one of the most celebrated was Kichaka-vadha [The Slaying of Kichak] (1907) by the Marathi playwright Krishnaji Prabhakar Khadilkar. The plot and the characters in this play were taken straight from the Mahabharata, and overlaid with a political allegory, in which the heroine was identiWable with subjugated India, the eponymous villain who attempted to rape the heroine with the particularly despised viceroy of the day, Lord Curzon, and the hero Bhima, who slew the villain and saved the heroine’s honour, with Bal Gangadhar Tilak, leader of the militant or ‘extremist’ section of the nationalist Congress Party. Of the nine other Marathi plays banned around the same time as Kichaka-vadha, two others had similarly deployed other episodes from the Mahabharata, apparently as part of the (eventually infructuous) artistic strategy that, while the insider audience would grasp the political import, the British Government would be none the wiser. In order to have the full intended impact, this procedure assumed, of course, that the audiences would be fully alive to each turn and nuance of the original classical story, as Rakesh Solomon explains (Solomon 1994: 327):6 The dramatists . . . utilized such subjects because the audience was intimately familiar with these . . . mythical plots and personalities and was thus alert to their accumulated meanings, associations, and resonances. Such coded sources facilitated subtle, indirect, and surreptitious communication.

It was as if a shared knowledge of Indian classics (and of Indian history, in the case of some other oVending plays) could be turned into a secret weapon of resistance against the British rulers. 6 Cf. V. B. Deshpande ‘The public clearly understood all the intended equations [in Kichaka-Vadh]’ (Banhatti and Joglekar 1998: 118).

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In postcolonial times, the Indian classics have continued to be an equally rich mine of plots and situations, which could be used for political opposition, and though the allegory now hardly needs to be (or indeed can be) covert, artistic ingenuity lies in being able to institute acute and startling parallels between the classical past and the urgent present. For example, in Dharmavir Bharati’s (2004) Hindi verse-play Andha Yug [The Age of the Blind], written in 1955, not only is the old patriarch Dhritarashtra blind, as in the Mahabharata, but so metaphorically are most of the other characters around him, thus representing what many readers saw as the confused and directionless condition of the Indian nation in the Wrst decade of independence. In fact, the Hindi critic Ramsvarup Chaturvedi (1994: 283–4) went so far as to say of the contemporary relevance of this play: At the level of the narrative, the original plot of the Mahabharata is here very closely allied with its contemporary resonances. It may even seem at times that the epic war, the mahabharata, is actually being played out only now, and that what the [original] Mahabharata by Vyasa described was merely an imaginary sketch of it. (author’s translation)

The seemingly compulsive urge to retell Indian classics in a topically relevant way perhaps Wnds its simplest and least persuasive expression in Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989), so called to echo, somewhat unconvincingly, the very title the Mahabharata (which could literally be construed as ‘great India’); it narrates under a thin veneer of the epic the events of the politically turbulent period in the 1970s and the 1980s when Indira Gandhi was prime minister. While it may seem remarkable that the Mahabharata has over the last one hundred years been put to such diverse political uses, these topical and allegorical retellings constitute only a partial index of its continued popularity in the nation. Perhaps a truer mark of a classic is to be re-read and re-performed, even when there is no ostensible or intended connection between it and the present, apparently for its own sake and without any ulterior motive. Thus, at about the same time that Khadilkar’s politically subversive version of the Slaying of Kichaka was being banned in Marathi, other dramatic versions of the

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same episode were written in other Indian languages without any contemporary import, such as Kichaka-vadham (1891) and Kichakavilacam (1897) (Das 1991: 117, 273, 281, 282). The most remarkable instances, however, of a surge of renewed dissemination of the Indian classics occurred in the late 1980s and the early 1990s when Wrst the Ramayana and then the Mahabharata were turned into television versions broadcast serially in weekly parts for over a year, each on Sunday mornings (not because that is the so called God-spot, as in the television schedules of some Christian countries, but because that is the weekly holiday when everyone would be home to watch it). The wide popularity of both these productions was so stunning as to take by surprise all concerned, and the ratings achieved, and consistently sustained, by both the epics in their new versions have not been even remotely matched by any other broadcast on Indian television. This was partly because of the circumstance referred to above, that though the two great Sanskrit epics are not the Hindu ‘Book’, as the Bible or the Koran is for Christians or Muslims (and how could two very diVerent books be The Book, in any case), they still enjoy scriptural status for a considerable section of the population. Thus, if the classics live on in India in a way that they perhaps do not in the West, it is partly because there is considerably more of living—and sometimes positively kicking and screaming!—religion in India than in the West. But this correlation between the Indian classics and the Indian scriptures can be easily exaggerated or distorted, especially in anglophone discourse, where the very deWnitions of the religious and the secular are radically diVerent and therefore not quite applicable to the Sanskrit epics. Thus, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are often compared, in terms of their oral composition and literary merit, with The Iliad and The Odyssey, without any religious considerations entering such a discussion. In any case, even in the most strictly secular and enlightened of intellectual and creative spheres in India, the foundational Indian classics continue to provide an inexhaustible topic of celebration as well as interrogation. For example, at the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the Sahitya Akademi (the Indian National Academy of Literature) in 2004, the theme of the show-piece three-day international conference was a single text: the Mahabharata.7 7 ‘Mahabharata: Text, Contexts, Readings,’ international conference held by the Sahitya Akademi at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, 27–29 March 2004.

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Yet another criterion by which to judge the afterlife of classics may be to see how large a space they occupy as a subject of study in the modern and secular domain of school or university. In this regard, the changing fortunes of both Western and Indian classics in the various syllabi of the Department of English of the University of Delhi (where I have myself taught since 1969) may provide a singular case study of the conXicting postcolonial impulses. In 1975, in a comprehensive revision of the BA (Honours) syllabus, it was successfully argued by a section of the English faculty (which then numbered about 700 and even now numbers over 600) that in order to acquire a proper understanding of ‘English’, namely, British literature (which is all that was to be taught, with the token exception of two authors: Hemingway and Naipaul), our students needed to study some selected Western classical texts and accordingly, a compulsory course was introduced comprising The Odyssey, Antigone, Lysistrata, selections from The Republic (all in English translation, of course) and The Book of Job from the Authorized Version of the Bible. This was at a time when Commonwealth literature already existed as a new alternative to more and more of the same old canonical British literature, and Indian writing in English was already being studied in British universities such as Leeds and in several American universities. Meenakshi Mukherjee, then a voiceless young lecturer in the University of Delhi but now probably the doyenne of postcolonial critics in India, has ironically recounted how this ‘radical change’, introduced ‘with much fanfare’, struck her as only partially progressive, if not actually retrograde (Mukherjee 2003: 39): I taught Homer with much enjoyment and gusto, but I occasionally did wonder why I could not teach sections of the Mahabharata in English translation side by side, to place the genre called [the] epic in a global context . . . a senior colleague explain[ed] to me patiently that our business [was] to study English literature; and that the [Western classics were] important only to the extent that they [were] part of the heritage that [had] shaped literature in Britain. Vyasa [did] not come into the picture.

It has often been noted that the spread of the English language, and of Westernization generally, has paradoxically increased in India since independence rather than diminishing, so that the old comprador class that succeeded the British could conserve and continue to enjoy

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its old privileges, and this academic change seemed to be a literary and academic manifestation of it, especially at a university where a large proportion of the senior faculty had been trained at Oxbridge. Anyhow, by the time the next round of revision of the BA (Honours) syllabus was eVected, which was not until a quarter of a century later, in 1999, there was a large enough number of young college teachers of English in Delhi who were postcolonially sensitized to oppose and seek to mitigate, if not entirely to countermand, this reactionary step (though Mukherjee herself had meanwhile moved on to other younger and more innovative universities). As a result, the new ‘Classical Literature’ course now comprises, not only The Iliad, Medea, and Lysistrata but also a 60 page selection from the Mahabharata, and the play Abhijnanashakuntalam (also known as Sacontala or Shakuntala) by Kalidasa, so that the rubric ‘classical’ embraces equally Western and Indian classics. Even this was, for some of us, a compromise, but so is the postcolonial condition in most of its aspects in many newly independent societies.8 In the long and colonially chequered history of India, classics have thus played a continually vital and varied role. The Indian classics were obviously not thought of as ‘classics’ in the modern Western sense by the Indian readers, until Western scholars ‘discovered’ them and acknowledged them to be classics, nor did they perform a function comparable with that performed in the West by the Western classics. One crucial diVerence in this regard has been that, while the Western classics themselves have embodied a particular Greco-Roman set of religious and social beliefs and cultural practices, their postRenaissance readers have adhered to quite another, predominantly Christian, set, so that the Western classics have been in a sense merely 8 This account is based on personal knowledge. I happened to be the Head of the Department of English of the University of Delhi (1997–2000) and also chair of the syllabus committee (1997–98) when these revisions were adopted and implemented. For my personal (and yet only partially fulWlled!) agenda in the matter, see Trivedi (1995b), in which I plead, inter alia, for the study of any one classical literature in that classical language as one of the Wve necessary elements of a literary syllabus, for the reasons that: ‘the very literariness of literature depends on its ability to evoke what lies behind and around it by way of resonance and association, through allusion and tradition . . . to read a classical literature in a classical language is to deepen our conception of literature and to become aware of its eternality (or, if we prefer it, of many of the conventions and continuities which determine the modes of production of modern literature)’(p. 212).

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academic classics. (Incidentally, there is no obvious word in the Indian languages, including Sanskrit, which may serve as a translation for the English ‘classic’; the very concept seems alien and imported.)9 In India, on the other hand, the Sanskrit classics, even when read in their avatars in the modern Indian languages, have continued to be living classics.

CLASSICS AND THE GLOBAL-POSTCOLONIAL To sum up, the exceptional fact of colonial India being altogether exempted from reading the Western classics in Greek or Latin is to be accounted for on two diVerent grounds: the Wrst, that the British themselves acknowledged that India had classics of its own, which then continued to be taught in Sanskrit even under the Westernizing Macaulayan educational dispensation; and the second, that works of English literature instead were sought to be projected in India as the new colonial classics, while the Raj itself was more and more selfconsciously moulded and validated in the image of the Holy Roman Empire. The Indian classics, meanwhile, were by nationalist Indians Xung in the face of the British imperialists to refute their claim that they were ruling India so as to civilize the country; some of the Indian classics were, indeed, mobilized through political adaptations as a strategy of political protest and resistance to such a seditious extent that these newly rewritten classical texts were banned by the British Government. The otherwise hugely transformative period of British rule and hegemony thus could not rupture the potency of the indigenous classics, especially when deployed as a vital instrument of political and cultural expression; a radical tradition that has continued unimpaired into postcolonial times. At the same time, classics 9 The standard English–Hindi dictionary oVers for ‘classic’ Hindi words that mean: ‘1. excellent, ideal; 2. long acclaimed’, as well as the imitative neologism ‘klassikal’; while for the noun it says: ‘1. books to take pride in’ and ‘2. established writer/artist’; see Angreji-Hindi Kosh: An English-Hindi Dictionary by Bulcke ([1968] 1991:110). On the other hand, a Hindi–English dictionary contains the headword ‘klassiki’, and explains that it is derived from the English ‘classical’ and means in English ‘classical’; see The Oxford Hindi–English Dictionary, McGregor (ed.) ([1993] 1998: 221).

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have continued to be reread for their own sake and recently also have been widely disseminated through the electronic visual media. However, there now appears to be a new twist in this long tale of the (after)life of the indigenous classics in India. While they may have survived the colonial period undiminished and unsubdued, the Indian classics seem to be in some danger of being eroded and forgotten in the ever-strengthening postcolonial trend of further Westernization, as well as an increasing preference for ‘fast’, user-friendly and bite-sized objects of consumption in our new global village. The Indian poet and translator A. K. Ramanujan once observed: ‘In India and in Southeast Asia, no one ever reads the Ramayana or the Mahabharata for the Wrst time. The stories are there, ‘‘always already’’ ’ (Ramanujan 1999: 158).10 Perhaps unwittingly, however, this remark also conWrmed the truth of the old witticism that a classic was a book one had always meant to read but had not yet got round to reading. Certainly, in contemporary India, the fact of the matter seems to be that not many Indians are reading the Ramayana or the Mahabharata for the second time either, though it is not clear whether because of some complex slow-release postcolonial eVect of colonial rule or whether simply in step with the devaluation and diminution of the place of classics globally, in the East as well as the West. This constitutes a huge postcolonial irony, especially as the Wrst Xush of the Orientalist discovery of the Indian classics in the eighteenth century had seemed to have in the West, as Schwab (1984: 11) put it: ‘an eVect equal to that produced in the Wfteenth century by the arrival of Greek manuscripts’, and the early French orientalist Anquetil Duperron had even gone so far as to recommend, as Clarke (1997: 57) recounts: ‘that the Indian classics should be treated and studied [in the West] on par with those of Greek and Rome’. Such a contestation of classics Western and Indian at the cusp of the pre-colonial and colonial periods seems now to be merely a dim memory of a lost historical moment in an increasingly less literate global culture. 10 What Ramanujan says of the Indian Classics may, on the face of it, seem to be universally true of all classics, as indicated in the very Wrst of the fourteen deWnitions of the Classic oVered by Italo Calvino: ‘The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying, ‘‘I’m re-reading . . .’’ never ‘‘I’m reading . . .’’ ’. However, this is not because people ‘know’ their Classics without actually having read them (as Ramanujan implies), but rather represents, as Calvino puts it: ‘a small act of hypocrisy on the part of people ashamed to admit they have not read a famous book’ (Calvino: 2000: 3).

17 Shades of Multi-Lingualism and Multi-Vocalism in Modern Performances of Greek Tragedy in Post-Colonial Contexts Lorna Hardwick

This discussion takes as its focal point the impact of multi-lingual practices in recent productions of translations and adaptations of Greek tragedy and their implications for post-colonial practice and theory. I shall conWne the discussion to examples drawn from contexts that are recognizably anglophone, in that either much or most of the text is spoken in English or the target audience is signiWcantly or predominantly anglophone. This will allow a certain amount of comparison of the contributing linguistic and cultural strands. It will also recognize the ambivalent status of English as a language for the translation of Greek and Latin texts into modern contexts in which English has come to be associated with colonial domination, including the suppression of other languages. The Wrst point to be made is that the English language itself actually has a mixed colonial history. The territory now known as England was dominated by Romans for four hundred years, followed by Vikings, Germanic tribes, and Normans. The ‘English’ language developed as a result of the impact of invasions; for centuries it was a subaltern language, third in order behind Latin and Norman French; it was subsequently spread and modiWed by various colonial activities. This has a confusing and sometimes ironic history. For instance, The Statute of Kilkenny (1366) ordained that ‘every Englishman [sc. in Ireland] do use the English language’. The document itself

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was written in Norman French; the context was the prevention of the ‘irishing’ of English immigrants (see Crowley 2000: 1–17). An uneasy association between colonialism and classical culture was created by the use of the English language as the medium of colonial education during the British Empire (and subsequently) and as the medium for translation of the Greek and Latin texts, which were associated with cultural superiority in the Western European tradition.1 Yet classical texts, whether accessed in the original or in translation, have been the medium of resistance to colonial domination and have had a culturally and sometimes politically interventionist role in the struggle against colonial, nationalist, or ethnic oppression.2 This is partly a case of ‘the empire writing back’ to de-appropriate, recast, and recontextualize texts that were not in any case ‘English’, or ‘British’, in origin. There are, too, signiWcant distinctions between ‘English’ as a marker of languages and ‘English’ as an inaccurate synonym for British colonialism or cultural politics. Moreover, the association of the English language with interventionist productions of Greek plays has also been generated by the formal and thematic aspects of the ancient plays themselves. Raymond Williams’ comment that in theatre, form is ‘inherently multivocal’, points to the way in which theatre can liberate from linguistic domination as well as from authorial authority (Williams 1994: 287; discussed in Rehm 2002: 244). In the case of comedy, the plays embodied a speciWcally democratic convention of free speech against contemporary politics and politicians, and in the case of tragedy, they gave a voice, especially in the convention of the Chorus and the Messenger Speech, to the oppressed, marginalized, and under-privileged. Greek drama provided this alongside its other strands of xenophobia, patriarchy, and imperialism; both sides of the coin can be mined for cultural authority (and have been).3 There is also a sense in which the ancient languages themselves still exert a quasi-colonial aura of power and authority, giving a subaltern status to any language of translation, including English. This has perhaps facilitated engagement with classical texts by modern writers 1 For detailed discussion of a range of examples of the history and varieties of English and extensive bibliography, see Talib (2002). 2 See Rehm in this volume and Hardwick (2000: esp. ch.4). 3 For detailed analysis and bibliography, see Hall (1997).

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who are speakers of English alongside other languages.4 Furthermore, the multi-lingualism in performance that I shall discuss is by no means unique to obviously post-colonial contexts of production. It also has other histories as a theatrical device, both to signal the linguistic and cultural distance between ancient and modern, and to show how the ancient plays relate to diverse modern situations and cultures.5 Of course these aspects are also relevant to post-colonial situations but they are not solely determined by them. So, in framing the discussion, I recognize that the issues cross the theory and practice of translation of the texts, of subsequent or concurrent translation to the stage, of performance histories and traditions, as well as of post-colonial perspectives. My examples also raise questions about the varieties of English that are used, as well as about the juxtaposition of English with other languages and I shall consider the interfaces within languages as well as between them.6 The emphasis will be on the practice of writers and theatre directors, and on the extent to which they contend with, and to some extent outXank, the problems of post-colonial angst prioritized by theorists and critics, whose resulting theories are sometimes considered to replicate colonial systems of cultural domination rather than to subvert them (Azim 2001). A document that raises crucial issues for this type of investigation is Femi OsoWsan’s 1999 discussion of the battles of identity within which post-colonial scholarship has situated African playwrights (OsoWsan 1999c). OsoWsan began by examining the view that the main characteristic of work by (black) African and by Asian writers is their demonstration of the value of their cultural past and the recovery and proclamation of their autonomous identity. This view assumes that contemporary writers will follow the pattern set by what OsoWsan calls ‘our Negritude predecessors’ in their struggle 4 A contrasting position, though not developed through engagement with classical texts, is that of the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who chose to reject English in order to write in his mother tongue Gikuyu and thus avoid risking the reinscription of colonial domination—‘literary enslavement to European languages’ (see Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1986; 1997: 53). 5 For example, the multi-linguistic strategies developed by Andrei Serban in successive melanges of Greek plays, see Macintosh (1997: 319–20). 6 McRae and Findlay (2000: 34–8) is an informative general introduction that also raises the question of the relationship between English and Scots. For Caribbean/ English/Creole relationships, see Greenwood in this volume.

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against being written out of history and culture. OsoWsan calls this the ‘grand myth of Absence’. He claims that what has come to be called ‘postcolonialist discourse’ is primarily based on lament about the erasure of identity. This claim makes his discussion applicable to a variety of post-colonial contexts. OsoWsan argued that such a model of the cultural process, whatever its justiWcation in the past, should not shape analysis of contemporary literature. There are two reasons for this. The Wrst is that such a focus diverts attention from more important issues in the present, especially the global domination by late capitalism, which actually makes the poor and marginalized even less ‘visible’ (OsoWsan 1999c: 1). By implication, Western-dominated post-colonial theory then becomes complicit with the forces it claims to subvert. OsoWsan’s second main objection is that deWning identity-struggles in terms of post-colonial theory does not provide an accurate representation of the particular battles of identity that are relevant to contemporary culture and writing in Africa. In this respect, he attacked the assumption in much post-colonial discourse that the focal point of cultural resistance is still deWned by its relationship to the (European) colonial centres of power. He also distinguished between diVerent sites of African culture and politics, and focused on the urgency of their current problems. These arguments, he wrote, have implications for how we ‘read’ such well known positions as Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s rejection of colonially inherited languages. OsoWsan interprets this rejection not as an end in itself but rather as a necessary measure in the process of creating ‘an egalitarian society on the continent’ (OsoWsan 1999c: 3). Similarly, OsoWsan cites Efua Sutherland’s fusion of Western and traditional African theatre as a means of discovering meaningful and accessible African theatrical forms. Thus, OsoWsan advocates the development of forms of cultural orientation in Africa that recognize origins, roots, and the scars created by colonization, and yet also develop its own originality and conWdence. He regards the ‘wound of invisibility’ as the greatest impediment to this because it leads to a quasi-colonial impulse to imitate the popular culture of the West. Precisely how the ‘wound of invisibility’ is perceived and how it is overcome is, I think, a deWning feature of the engagement of African writers with Greek and Roman material. Naı¨ve mimicry is quickly

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exposed as laughable (see Gibbs in this volume). Simple appropriation of Greek plays, for instance, might appear to acknowledge that they continue to represent the ‘Western’ values and culture, which previously appropriated them. Yet seizure of the texts away from domination by Western writers and critics can be a step in the development of an autonomous African/Greek dialogue, while exchange and hybridity in poetic and theatrical forms and language might enable a cultural present and future that acknowledges the impact of diVerent ‘pasts’ without being constrained by any one of them. OsoWsan has worked through these problems both in his critical writing and in his theatre practice. In his article ‘The Revolution as Muse’ he referred to the way in which, under state oppression (whether colonial or indigenous), a ‘recourse to ruse’ is essential to drama. The dissenting artist can confront, expose, and overthrow terror through the gifts of ‘metaphor, parody and parable, masking and mimicry’ (OsoWsan 1998: 11). To achieve this in the 1970s in Nigeria, his own practice focused on low-resource ensemble work that depended on the versatility of the actors and collaboration among the players and with the audiences. His work with students (both as actors and audiences) was designed to transform the perspectives of future leaders and empower them—‘to help transcend our tragic cycle’ (OsoWsan 1998: 33). Although it aimed to break down the ‘gap’ between actors and audiences, OsoWsan’s approach was nevertheless, to some degree, e´litist in its aims. In contrast is the theatre work with rural communities developed by the South African playwright and novelist Zakes Mda, who, drawing on the approaches of Boal and Freiere, regards the practitioner as a catalyst in the raising of consciousness among the disadvantaged.7 Moreover, OsoWsan’s aim to ‘mobilize the educated class’ was not merely a question of working in his own country. To become internationally inXuential, a playwright must attract commissions from overseas, and that means the West (in the sense of Europe and the US, as well as the West of Africa). The dramatist’s response to the commissioning of Women of Owu OsoWsan’s version (published text 2006) of Euripides’ Women of Troy, thus combines the aims of 7 This follows the principles of Paulo Freiere and is described in Mda (1993). Mda’s novels are palimpsestic in their approach to the interplay of cultures. For an insightful study of the resonances for classical texts, see Steinmeyer (2003).

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re-examining the culture and history of West Africa with gaining international recognition for African theatre. It also involves the interplay of European and African theatrical traditions in order to transform consciousness internationally (see Budelmann and GoV in this volume). The role of Greek tragedy in this process is therefore complex, not merely a counter-appropriation from the Western canon, but also a seizure of an opportunity to work with African theatrical conventions of song, dance, movement and lament in a commission that would also maximize the international proWle of the dramatist. OsoWsan’s analysis also diVerentiates carefully between three categories of African literature that contribute to its visibility. The Wrst is works written and published in the diaspora (‘Africans living in exile’). The second is works written by Africans, wherever they might live, either in response to their experience of Europe and America (an experience that he says probably includes racism), or as the result of commissions for performance in the West. The third category is works written by those living and working in Africa. These are also mainly published in Africa and focus on contemporary socio-political disjunctions and/or the human relationships involved in these (OsoWsan 1999c: 5). He thinks that it is both arrogant and inaccurate to assume that all these categories of writing have the same concerns with culture clash between African and European or with the other problems that are the focus of post-colonial discourse. The issues of identity, cultural politics, and, by extension, dramaturgy, characterization, and language, are diVerent for theatre written and staged in Africa and for Africans.8 OsoWsan identiWes post-colonial concerns as ‘a return to the past, to the trenches of Negritude’, whereas what he calls ‘our identity crisis in Africa’ is concerned with problems of ‘creating national identities out of our disparate ethnic communities’ and ‘creating committed, responsible, patriotic and compassionate individuals out of our civil population’ (OsoWsan 1999c: 6). In the rest of this essay I shall consider some non-African examples of how the translation and performance of Greek plays has reXected the priorities set out by OsoWsan—creation of an autonomous cultural 8 See also Djisenu in this volume on the importance of recontextualization.

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identity; replacing absence by presence; invisibility by visibility; transforming the consciousness of actors and spectators; exploiting the potential of ‘ruse’.9 I shall also suggest that the implications are as important for post-colonizing societies as for those that were colonized. To tighten the analysis in comparing what is inevitably sometimes disparate material, I shall focus on the holistic relationships between multi-lingualism and other aspects of performance, and will begin with a case-study of an example of a multi-lingual workshop performance in Britain. Aeschylus’ Agamemnon was staged by Foursight Theatre in Wolverhampton, England in February 2004, directed by Dorinda Hulton.10 The production raised important issues about the nature of language communities and their interaction, as well as about the relationship between the verbal play-text and the semiotics of staging. The example also demonstrates the range of ‘contexts’ from which multi-lingual theatre practice springs and in the light of which its hermeneutic implications become Xuid. I shall therefore discuss the production in some detail, taking it as a paradigm for the kind of documentation needed before more general judgements can be made. The play was performed by professional actors preceded by four weeks of workshop/rehearsal. It was staged in a community centre in a culturally and ethnically diverse area of the West Midlands of England. The English translation used was a close translation by Philip de May (2003). This was part of a series that speciWcally aimed to make available translations that were both accurate in terms of the ancient Greek and speakable in terms of the norms of modern English: 9 For the importance of the theatre workshop and multi-lingual practice in South Africa, see Steinmeyer in this volume, Mezzabotta (2000) and van Zyl Smit (2007). 10 Foursight is a theatre group based in the West Midlands and touring nationally. It develops much of its own work and from its inception had a particular focus on gender issues. From 2001 to 2004 it presented three Greek plays in English translation, Medea (2001), Agamemnon (2004), and Hecuba (2004). I am grateful to the artistic director, Naomi Cooke, and members of the company for facilitating this research. The director of Agamemnon, Dr Dorinda Hulton, kindly recorded an indepth interview and gave me access to her Rehearsal Notes. Since preparing this chapter, three interactive DVDs of Foursight’s Greek productions have been published. Both the Medea and Agamemnon DVDs contain a video record of the performance, together with Hulton’s extensive notes linked to the audio-visual material (Hulton: 2006).

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The aim of the series is to enable students to approach classical plays with conWdence and understanding: to discover the play within the text. The translations are new. Many recent versions of Greek tragedy have been produced by poets and playwrights who do not work from the original Greek. The translators of this series aim to bring readers, actors, and directors as close as possible to the playwrights’ actual words and intentions: to create translations that are faithful to the original in content and tone; and that are speakable, with all the immediacy of modern English.11

De May’s translation from the Greek followed the source text closely. However, the staged production departed from the translation in three important respects, two of which also involved departure from the Aeschylus ante-text. Firstly, the director decided to end the action before the appearance of Aegisthus. This occurs in line 1549 of de May’s Aeschylus translation. Aegisthus’ exchange with the Chorus dominates the exodos [closing sequence] and puts the case that the killing of Agamemnon is just recompense for the killing of Thyestes’ children by Agamemnon’s father. However, the director wanted to streamline both the action and the arguments (Hulton 2004):12 Because time is tight and it is such a monumental play, we thought it wise to only attempt selected sections. In relation to this I thought it would be interesting and provocative for our audiences if we ended the play early, before Aegisthus’ entrance, thereby focussing on Clytemnestra’s motivation for murder and the sacriWce of Iphigeneia.

Secondly, the production changed the composition of the Chorus from the Elders of Argos (‘Old Men of Argos’ in de May’s translation) and instead played the Chorus as ‘made up of those who were left at home whilst the Argive armies went to war’ (Hulton 2004). This stretched the notion of ‘those left at home’ to include a range of groups aVected by the war and the Chorus’ lines were divided up to reXect this. The decision regarding the Chorus was derived from the main production concept, which centred round the themes of ‘home’ and ‘war’.

11 John Harrison and Judith AZeck, Preface to the series, reproduced in de May (2003: vi). 12 Director’s Notes, section 1 ‘The Approach’, circulated to the cast prior to rehearsals.

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The third departure from de May’s translation was that the cast did not speak all their lines in English. The use of a variety of languages to represent the experiences of those caught up in the eVects of war aimed to show that the cast—whether in the Chorus or through other characters—would represent diverse cultural projections of ‘home’. So some of the characters spoke occasional lines or small sections of text in other languages. For example, the Watchman in the Aeschylus and de May texts became the Watchgirl and was played with a Jamaican accent. She sang in patois. Other members of the cast translated lines from the de May translation into their ‘home’ languages—Spanish, Turkish, and Gujerati.13 The extension of those aVected by the war from ‘Elders’ to include all kinds of subalterns was also linked with emphasis on the suVering and awareness of children. The Watchgirl cradled a puppet that represented the ghost of Iphigeneia as a white child of about 7 or 8 years of age. The puppet wore a saVron robe that trailed down as her sacriWce by Agamemnon was related in the parodos [entry Ode of the Chorus]. The ‘watchful’ expression of the puppet resonated with the body language of the Watchgirl who cradled her and she also appeared as a ghost in Episode V (lines 1314–548 in the de May translation). In choosing to represent Iphigeneia with a puppet, the aim was to depersonalize her as a character and to extend her referentiality from the daughter of Agamemnon to: ‘all young children who have been sacriWced in the name of a principle perceived to be of higher value than the life of a child’ (Hulton 2004).14 The use of puppetry was also extended to give an additional dimension to the Wgure of Cassandra. She was represented both as a character played by an actress and also as a puppet signifying the disembodied self of the child-woman. The Cassandra puppet was slightly smaller than life-size, a black child-woman with braided hair and brightly patterned dress. The face of the puppet had a mask-like quality, alluding to the conventions of ancient Greek theatre. This, 13 The slipperiness of the term ‘home’ language is shown by the need for help from the British Asian actor’s grandfather for the translation into Gujerati. 14 The use of puppets is a feature of the Foursight Company’s approach to staging. In their Medea, also directed by Hulton, puppets were used as Medea’s children. In their Hecuba, directed by Naomi Cooke, a life-size puppet was used for the body of Polydorus.

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combined with the impact of the actress, who later emerged from under the puppet’s veil as the speaking Cassandra, signalled the combination of object/victim and prophesying subject represented in Aeschylus’ play. The enactment of the production concept was shaped by the acting space. The play was performed traverse in a studio theatre, with the audience on two sides of a long narrow rectangle. At each end were altars, surrounded by objects. One end represented ‘war’, the other ‘home’. This provided another dimension both to the problematic nostos of Agamemnon and to the constructions of ‘home’ in the memories of the displaced and the children of diaspora.15 The open space between the two ends of the acting space provided a place for encounter, conXict, and resolution. The traverse also allowed the movement of the Chorus to take place in the space between the polarities of ‘war’ and ‘home’. This was especially resonant, given the diversity in gender, age, ethnicity, and social status represented in the Chorus. The cast were actively involved in the design and creation of the set. The Director’s preparatory Notes emphasized the collaborative approach (Hulton 2004): The idea is to create a space/place that in spite of or even because of its diversity, represents ‘home’ to us as a group. It will also represent a connection between our own personal ideas of ‘home’ and the theme of ‘home’ within the play. . . . For this altar, please could you each bring to the start of rehearsals, a small collection . . . that represent the idea of ‘home’ for you as an individual . . . by deWnition perhaps among these objects there is something that represents a person or a quality that you would risk your life in order to protect.

The perceptions of ‘war’ expressed round the altar at the other end of the traverse acting space were also collaborative (Hulton 2004): At the other end, against two screens, will be a ‘war’ altar, which we will create collectively in the second two weeks. The idea with this altar is to create a space/place that represents our own perceptions of ‘war’ as it is experienced in our contemporary global society. It will also represent a connection between these perceptions and the theme of ‘war’ as it is explored in the play by Aeschylus: the suVering on both sides caused by war, the mass-killing, the 15 I have discussed the relationship between nostos and diaspora politics in modern productions of tragedy, in Hardwick (2006a).

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sacriWce of children, the justiWcation, or not, for the reasons the war was started in the Wrst place, the destruction of property and so on . . . for this altar, please could you each bring as many newspaper cuttings and photographs as possible that connect with the theme of ‘war’. These cuttings will be arranged by us on to the two screens.

The ‘war altar’ also featured a video screen that showed live images at key points of the action; for instance, in order to create an association between a media news item and Agamemnon’s speech on his return from Troy, when the ‘war zone’ provided him with a platform and microphone to show how he was still operating in that sphere even though he had notionally returned ‘home’.16 The semiotics of the staging also extended into the tapestry scene in which in Aeschylus’ play, Agamemnon is persuaded by Clytemnestra to enter the house by treading on the purple cloths that represent the riches of the house. In the Wolverhampton production, this was represented by a cloth made from contemporary images of children who have suVered in war. This was perhaps also a metatheatrical allusion to the sequence in Katie Mitchell’s production of The Home Guard, Part 1 of Ted Hughes’ version of The Oresteia, staged at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1999. In that production, Agamemnon entered the house not by walking on valuable tapestries but by trampling a collage of little girls’ dresses, stained blood-red in memory of his destruction of his own child and of others (see Hardwick 2005b and Walton 2005). Thus through exploitation of the collaborative workshop approach, the words, costume, images, and performance space all reXected the individual backgrounds and experiences of members of the cast, and also testiWed to their perceptions of how the play might resonate for twenty Wrst century audiences. However, the context of the source text and performance in the Wfth century bce was also respected (Hulton 2004): Conceptually, we want to bring the text alive for a contemporary audience . . . but we don’t want to go too far in pursuit of relevancy when clearly there are values in the play that don’t translate into the twenty-Wrst century . . . we are hoping to collectively create a mixture of visual signs for our audiences— without tying the production down exclusively to any speciWc period or place.

16 The visual sequences were created by the video artist Jonathan Tritton.

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The overall eVect was to put the audience in the place of those caught up in something that was both familiar and strange, a war and its aftermath, in which they sometimes directly understood the words and sometimes watched as cultural strangers, sometimes grasping meaning communicated through movement and gesture rather than words. And, of course, diVerent members of the audience understood diVerent languages and movements. There can have been few who were Xuent in all, yet the total experience was also part of the changing dynamics of culture in contemporary Britain. Thus, the production developed the potential of the workshop both as an oppositional form, in its representation of the eVects of violence and oppression on the powerless, and also as an integrative form, in its collaborative use of the words, movement, and material signs of cultures in ways that gave a voice to the historically disempowered, and to the creators of new forms of artistic and social expression in post-colonial Britain (see Fleishman 1990: 88–118; and Steinmeyer in this volume). The value of Greek drama in the processes of creating new senses of community in Britain was also explored in the Citizens Cultural Diversity project in Glasgow in 2004. This included a version of the Oresteia, called House of Murders, staged at the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow in September 2004, directed by Peter Arnott. In this production the (amateur) actors were drawn from a variety of nationalities, including asylum-seekers, wishing to make their home in Scotland. The production celebrated the potential of theatre to enable people to use the cultural forms at their disposal in order to develop multi-faceted identities that make the intercultural become intra-cultural. The intra-cultural recognizes repressed traditions and attempts to situate them better in relation both to their origins and to their transformative power (see Pavis 1996). In this sense the Wolverhampton Agamemnon involved both the cast and the audiences as participants in a patchwork of cultures in transition. The verbal and semiotic multi-vocalism of the production reXected diversity within communities rather than between them.17 17 See also OsoWsan (1999c) for examples of experiments in Nigeria and Minnesota in which actors used the variety of languages that were naturally spoken by the cast. In both contexts the multi-lingualism reXected diversity within communities.

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Hulton’s Agamemnon was designed as workshop theatre for a community arts project in an area that exempliWed the eventual eVects exerted in Britain by colonialism and the diasporas it created. However, there are other examples of multi-lingualism in recent productions of Greek plays that suggest further insights. In his discussion of OsoWsan’s play, Women of Owu, Felix Budelmann pointed out speciWc aspects in which OsoWsan diverged from Euripides’ Women of Troy. These included a signiWcant change to the opening sequence, so that the women of the Chorus were given prominence in dialogue with a god; the importance of the ritual lament at the end; and the variations in the placing of the choral songs, accompanied by the use of the Yoruba language (see Budelmann in this volume and the Appendix to the published text, OsoWsan 2006: 68–78). The importance given to the Chorus or Chorus Wgure, the cultural centrality of the lament, and the metatheatrical implications of placing not one but two modern languages in dialogue with the Greek ante-text, are also crucial to the impact of the 2005 performance in Britain of Ola Rotimi’s play The Gods Are Not To Blame, based on Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos and directed by Femi Elufowoju for Tiata Fahodze.18 This production of the play at the Arcola Theatre in Hackney represented a particular moment in the ongoing reception of the Sophocles play and of Rotimi’s now canonical version. It also marked a particular moment at the intersection of several post-colonial histories. It exempliWed the open-ended possibilities of each new translation and staging, and suggested ways in which both temporal and cultural barriers between sources and receptions can be bridged. Changes in the meanings of words over time have frequently been considered as impediments to the transfer of meaning, while the diVerence between words as words, and words used in a dramatic context, adds another layer both of richness and of possible obfuscation (see, respectively, Steiner [1975] 1992, and Walton 2006). In production interviews, the British-African director Femi Elufowoju told of the intense impression made on him by The Gods Are Not To Blame, when in 1975 as a boy of eleven he saw it performed in a 18 For discussion of Rotimi’s play, see Simpson in this volume, and for a comparable study of the cultural and linguistic interactions in Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, see Macintosh (2007).

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reconstructed Greek theatre at a university campus in Ife, western Nigeria. He spoke of the experience as ‘my baptism into African theatre tradition’ and when he was preparing the 2005 production he revisited Nigeria to consult the original cast, especially about the rhythms of the movements that go with the songs but are not indicated in the text (Cripps 2005). By 2005, the impact of the Biafran War was fading. This conXict had shaped the response of earlier audiences but early twenty-Wrst century audiences were more inclined to Wnd allusions to contemporary problems, especially in the context of the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign that was in the news headlines at the time. The early scene, in which the Oedipus-Wgure, Odewale, advises the villagers on their responsibility to take action to Wght disease among the children, drew an audible response from the multi-racial audience.19 Most important of all in this combination of Greek, African, and British theatrical elements, was the use of lament, especially as sung in Yoruba by the Antigone-Wgure after the blinding of Odewale. This marked a change in register in a way that is diYcult to communicate in the more emotionally and ritually constrained English language. The lament also marked a re-Africanization of the performance of Rotimi’s play. It marked the ability of the African tradition to bring out possibilities latent in the ancient text but not inscribed by the ancient author at precisely that point. This is analogous to OsoWsan’s variations on Euripides in Women of Owu, in which the role of the Chorus in ritual lamentation was enhanced. This kind of variation bypasses the shortcomings of the English language and its associated theatrical traditions in a way that accords both with the ancient text and with African theatre. In Rotimi’s published text of 1971, the scene at the end of the play, in which the blinded Odewale leaves with his children, has a stage direction: [They start on their journey, passing through a mass of Katuje townspeople who kneel or crouch in Wnal deference to the man whose tragedy is also their tragedy. Soft Choral dirge] (Rotimi 1971: 72).20 The 2005 production expanded on this stage direction and embedded the ritual lament in the production. This added the Yoruba lament register to the Yoruba songs of the 19 Documented from the performance of 11 June 2005. 20 In the Sophocles text (ed. and tr. Lloyd-Jones ([1994] 1998), the lines of the Chorus in the exodos are at 1524–30.

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Towncrier and Townsmen earlier in the play.21 The stress on the authentic voice in which the cultural memory is constructed resonates also with Ojuola’s storytelling to the children, where it provided an immediate contrast in language to register with the aggressive ‘public address’ mode of the Royal Bard.22 Elufowoju’s approach thus made a linguistic addition to a canonical text (Rotimi’s) that both reaYrmed the distinctive contribution of African culture and theatre conventions to elucidating the ancient text and enabled the play to communicate more strongly to its modern audience. The post-colonial conversations in this play were, in this production, brought back to a site in a country that had imposed colonial regimes on the West of Africa. Yet the genesis and practice of the production and its reception by its audiences also showed that Britain itself is now a postcolonial country, a site for changes in cultural identities of both colonizers and colonized. The aesthetic success of the production testiWed to the success of the ‘braiding’ of Greek and African theatre also represented through the contribution of the English and the Yoruba languages. ‘Braiding’ has been discussed by the Caribbean novelist and critic Wilson Harris in his address to the British Braids conference in 2001 as a means of intertwining strands that should not be artiWcially separated (Harris 2001: 260): . . . ‘braids’ is a term which seems to me to be crying out for cross-culturality—not multi-culturality but cross-culturality, which is quite diVerent . . . it also cries out urgently for us to begin to approach art and Wction diVerently from how we have been conditioned to receive them.

At the same conference, Harris spoke of ‘moving through wounds into timelessness’ (p.274) as a way of understanding the arts in history, and the metaphor has special application to post-colonial history (see, for example, Ramazani 1997, as well as OsoWsan, supra). In the next and last section of this chapter, I want to look at two rather diVerent examples of the ‘braiding’ of language in recent stagings of Greek plays. The Wrst is the use of diVerent registers of Irish– English in versions of Sophocles’ Antigone.23 The second examines the 21 Act 1 Scene 1 (Rotimi 1971: 17–8). 22 Act 2 Scene 3 (Rotimi 1971: 36). 23 For discussion of reasons for the prevalence of Sophocles’ plays in post-colonial contexts, see Hardwick (2006b).

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same play in a less obviously post-colonial intra-cultural context in England. Taken together, these suggest that polysystemic development within a language, as exempliWed by diVerent aspects of ‘braiding’, can also shed light on post-colonial practice and theory. The post-colonial and neocolonial contexts within which Seamus Heaney developed his The Burial at Thebes (2004) from Sophocles’ Antigone have been discussed by Stephen Wilmer in this volume. Here, I want to focus only on how Heaney used and developed a language with a strong colonial history, English, in a way that both recognized its force in Irish culture and also embedded Irish tonal and lexical qualities in the text of a play that was in its turn a ‘translation’ or version of a classical text.24 Heaney is sensitive to the strands—from Anglo-Saxon and Latin through Irish to Ulster-Scots—that have contributed to the development of Hiberno-English, and has acknowledged their presence and the cultural and ideological decisions that have sometimes shaped their use (see Heaney 1999: xxx). Because Ireland is unique among colonized countries in having a classical tradition that pre-dates colonial activity and that was associated at an early stage with European and Irish culture rather than English, the classicizing elements in the English language may not necessarily be perceived as inevitably colonial in resonance. It is, however, true that English became the language of the public domain, and of politics and much intellectual authority, including dominance as a target language for translators, and therefore a site for contest and exchange between markers of culture and politics.25 So, the English that increasingly became the ‘literary vernacular’ in the late nineteenth century was Hiberno-English, stimulated by the desire of translators to implant the Irish idioms of their mother tongue into English. Michael Cronin (1996: 135–36) has described this as ‘a transition from translation as an act of exegesis to translation as an agent of aesthetic and political renewal’. This could also serve as a comment on Heaney’s ‘translations’ of Greek

24 Of course, this is not peculiar to Burial but is also a feature of Heaney’s (1990) The Cure at Troy, a version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and of his poetic diction in general as well as of other Irish writers using classical material such as Tom Paulin and Michael Longley. 25 See Cronin (1996: ch.3). For persistence of Latin in rural areas into the nineteenth century, see ibid. p. 120. For the Irish classical tradition, see Stanford (1976), Hardwick (2000: ch. 5), and Arkins (2005: esp. ch.1)

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plays, in which literary traditions in English, Hiberno-English and Irish come together on the site of Greek theatre and its conventions. However, the pursuit of a ‘braided’ diction in Irish writing has been ideologically and aesthetically problematic. The Irish poet and leader of the 1916 Rising, Patrick Pearse, attacked the cultural nationalism of the Irish National Theatre project as a betrayal of the Irish language and culture (Pearse [1899] 2000: 188–9):26 Here we have the Anglo-Irish heresy springing up in a new form, the ‘Irish’ Literary Theatre. . . . Let us strangle it at its birth. Against Mr Yeats personally we have nothing to object. He is a mere English poet of the third or fourth rank, and as such he is harmless. But when he attempts to run an ‘Irish’ Literary theatre it is time for him to be crushed.

Linguistic conXict in Ireland has been emblematic of cultural and ideological Wssures (Crowley 2005: ch.7). The lack of a theatrical tradition for the Irish language was a serious obstacle to the development of nationalist theatre and Yeats admitted his sense of guilt at the dominance of his English-language heritage (Lee 1995: 166–70). In his general introduction to The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Seamus Deane commented that: It is in the two languages of Ireland that the history of power and powerlessness is most deeply inscribed. Latin and Norman French have a historical importance which is recorded here, but it is in Irish and English that the experience of conXict is most memorably registered. . . . Yet it must also be remembered that since the eighteenth century, the English-speaking Irish have been engaged in a long struggle to possess the Irish language and culture, partly as a means of redeWning themselves as other than English, partly as a way of Wnding in culture a reconciliation of those forces and interests that remain steadfastly opposed in politics. (Deane 1991: xxiv)

The persistence of ambivalent attitudes towards the cultural and ideological impact of the Abbey Theatre is shown in the history of disturbances that accompanied performances of plays that were thought to challenge central aspects of nationalist cultural ‘mythology’—for example, in the initial reception of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 and of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars

26 For recuperation of Yeats as a post-colonial writer, see Said ([1988] 2001: 291–313).

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in 1926.27 It is perhaps signiWcant that, in 2004, Heaney chose not to link his treatment of Creon’s attitudes in the Antigone with the civil war in 1920s Ireland and the production concept itself further distanced the play from a speciWcally Irish context, substituting a pseudo-Latin American setting.28 Heaney’s approach to language has sometimes been described as a Middle Voice. In his poem ‘Making Strange’, the Middle Voice is a cunning intervention that tells the poet ‘Be adept and be dialect’.29 In Heaney’s adaptations from Sophocles, his use of local forms or idioms not only subverts the political authority of ‘public’ language but also encodes commentary and critical insights on the resonances of the Sophoclean context for modern audiences. For example, in the sequences involving the Guard in The Burial at Thebes, Heaney plays with another register of language, broadening the social scope of the play and, like Sophocles, intruding a diVerent perspective from that of the ruling e´lite who have Wgured so far. There is a particular contrast with the formal public speeches of Creon who has just rhetorically elided family relationship and the sanctioning of his own position (Heaney 2004: 9): Two brothers badged red with each other’s blood And I, as next of kin to those dead and doomed I’m next in line. The throne has come to me.

The Guard speaks in prose: ‘Sir, I wouldn’t exactly say I was panting to get here’ and his idiom is colloquial: ‘I was over a barrel’ (ibid. p. 12). Heaney also makes the idiom that of Irish/English ‘Somebody’s after attending to it, right’ (ibid. p. 13). The Guard’s language becomes plainer and penetratingly direct. He also becomes an observer/commentator drawing on his knowledge of the land to remark on the absence of tracks: ‘No rut 27 For the details, see Morash (2002: ch. 4 and 5). 28 See Wilmer in this volume for discussion of the disjunction between Heaney’s text and the production style. It is signiWcant, however, that a subsequent production at the Nottingham Playhouse in 2005, directed by Lucy Pitman-Wallace, presented the Heaney text in a setting that was neutral in terms of time, place and design and which emphasized the role of Greek theatrical conventions, such as the Chorus. This proved to be aesthetically eVective since the production concept related to a strand that was already present in the language and structure of the play, rather than introducing a new one. 29 Heaney (1984: 32–3); discussed in O’Donoghue (1994: 21–4). See also Heaney (1988: 123 and 143) for his application of the term to aspects of the work of Robert Lowell and WH Auden.

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marks from a wheel/Nothing but the land, the old hard scrabble’.30 There is a humorous side to the scene but this is not just a comic interlude. In the course of the scene the Guard moves from the appearance of a working class stereotype (perhaps even with parodic elements of a ‘stage Irishman’) to being an authentic voice for truth: ‘Your conscience is what’s doing the disturbing’; ‘the judge/has misjudged everything’ (ibid. pp. 15, 16). The sequence with the Guard is followed by the Choral Ode on Man.31 Heaney’s rewriting of the material Wrst created by Sophocles emphasizes the aspects that ancient Greek and modern Irish consciousness might have in common, including traditions of agriculture and religious observance. He also transplants into an Irish context the contrasts between city life as a site for politics and the rural environment as a site for discovery of truth. Heaney’s reference to ‘beyond the pale’ alludes to the area in and around Dublin that was from the times of Henry ll associated with colonial domination and with the supremacy of urban civic administration and society over the rural hinterland. So the sequence not only picks up the Sophoclean contrast between the laws of the city-state and the persistence of traditional values and practices, it also metaphorically relates the situation in Thebes to that of the colonially dominated Ireland of the past. Then let this wonder of the world remember: He’ll have put himself beyond the pale. When he comes begging we will turn our backs. (Heaney 2004: 17)

Comparison of Heaney’s reworking of Sophocles with the scholarly translations on which he drew shows how closely he kept to the sense of Sophocles, including the almost literal tracing of the agricultural references. He also infuses the Guard’s speeches, and therefore the whole encounter with Creon, with a subaltern voice that both ‘plays to the gallery’ of the audience’s expectations and yet also emerges from this partial ‘ruse’ to assume a voice of moral authority in the Guard’s searing comment on Creon’s conscience. 30 Heaney’s rendering here both reXects the close observation of rural practice characteristic of his poetry as a whole and also follows closely the translation of Antigone by Richard Jebb ([1900] 2004). Heaney also uses the translation by Lloyd-Jones ([1994] 1998), see Battersby (2004), quoted and discussed in Hardwick (2006c: 204–15). 31 Sophocles ll. 332–83 and in Heaney (2004) pp. 16–7.

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The sequences with the Guard are also key elements in other Irish versions of the Antigone. For example, Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act (1985), has the Guard using the vernacular and speech rhythms of the North ‘we were all dead scared after the sleggin’ you’d given me . . . soft and pobby he was, and he smelt rotten’; this brings out the striking contrast with the public ‘Stormont’ rhetoric of Creon’s address (Paulin 1985: 23–5).32 Thus, in Irish translations and versions of Greek plays the ‘braiding’ of language in the distinctive Irish–English developed in the Irish literary tradition is also accompanied by an ‘unbraiding’ that distinguishes between the vernaculars and registers that together make up the totality of the text. In Heaney, the ‘adept’ and the ‘dialect’ work together. The braiding within the text as a whole holds and marks the cultural and political tensions that underlie the development of varieties of English in the colonial and post-colonial contexts. However, this inter-relationship between sense of place, vernacular, and cultural politics also occurs in less obviously post-colonial situations. In his version of the Antigone, which was almost contemporary with Heaney’s, Blake Morrison related the Guard’s idiom and outlook to the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales of England. Like Heaney’s, Morrison’s text was created especially for the theatre. It was commissioned for performance by the company Northern Broadsides, directed by Barrie Rutter. In his introduction to the published text, Morrison discussed the aims of Northern Broadsides to: . . . take the classics into communities and parts of the country which theatre doesn’t always reach. That sense of mission has left its mark on these two texts [sc. Oedipus and Antigone]. Zeus and Dionysus are present but so are the landscapes of the Yorkshire Dales and through the lines of blank verse, and the lyrics of the Chorus, there’s the music of a rough-tongued northern vernacular. Occasionally I depart from Sophocles (in beginning Antigone with the choric victory celebrations, for instance), because the performance seemed to demand it. But I’ve tried to honour the spirit of the original, in a language really spoken by men (sic). (Morrison 2003: introduction 4–5)33 32 For a list of modern Irish translations and versions of Greek plays, including those in the Irish language, see McDonald and Walton (2002). 33 In a contribution to the Introduction, the director Rutter commented: ‘the tactile sensuality of bringing to life the in-built performability that the ancient poets crammed their texts with is one of the great pleasures of theatrical life’.

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Morrison’s version is a colloquial text and, in comparison with Heaney, he moved further away from the Sophocles, partly to round out the sense of place and partly to add a rough-and-ready edge to the Wgure of the Guard. In response to Creon’s question, ‘Who’d dare to break my law?’ Morrison’s Guard responds: How would I know? It’s not like they left a spade with their name on it. The ground’s so rock-hard you can’t sink a shovel or pickaxe in, and if a cart were used it left no wheel-ruts . . . As for us lot, we were stunned—we thought the body had gone at Wrst until we spied a mound of white Xesh, sprinkled with dirt, like a new potato lying in the earth. We poked about to see how it had got there: had a gun dog buried it like a bone? (Morrison 2003: 75)

Both Heaney’s and Morrison’s responses to Sophocles are examples of creative ‘translations’. They mediate Sophocles via the intervening translations, which they have used directly or which have shaped their conception of the Greek play. They also mediate Sophocles through the language of their own literary traditions. One eVect is to create new works in some respects distant from both source and target languages. Another eVect is a pragmatic emphasis on the target language and culture as a means of communicating to the assumed audiences the purposes for which the translation was made. The Morrison version provides a more overtly regional English counterpart to Heaney’s strategy. Heaney braids together in the play as a whole particular lexical and idiomatic strands that reXect the diversity in the linguistic history of the language in which he writes, and also shows how those strands can scrape against one another. Morrison’s approach in some respects maps the north/south cultural faultlines in England, an approach also developed by Tony Harrison, both in his poetry as a whole and in his classical work.34 Yet Morrison’s approach, in addition to its socio-political and even class-based emphasis, can also be aligned with a post-colonial phenomenon in 34 For example in his Wlm-poem Prometheus which reconxtualizes the myth in a coal-mining society in Yorkshire (Harrison 1998).

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English culture which, in the aftermath of loss of empire, has refocused on ‘home’ territory. Heaney himself commented on this in a 1976 lecture ‘Englands of the Mind’ in which he suggested that an almost defensive celebration of ‘home’ was not only a characteristic of poets regarded as working in colonial contexts (such as Yeats and MacDiarmid) but was also beginning to be found in the strong strands of regionalism or nationalism in the post-imperial poetry of writers as diverse as Larkin, Harrison, and Hughes.35 This suggestion points to an aspect of the relationship between classical texts and post-colonial literature and drama that merits further research. At one end of the spectrum the reinscription of classical material in the modern texts could simply point to a nostalgic reappropriation of Greek and Roman culture to turn the clock back to a lost ‘ideal’ of an unproblematic literary tradition in English, whether ‘regional’ or ‘national’. At the other end of the spectrum the reinscription might involve a democratic, even subaltern, seizure of the classical material from its domination by the political and cultural establishment, and an infusion of energy from the margins into literary writing in English, analogous to that coming from literatures from countries of the former empire. The most interesting examples on the spectrum involve reversals of expectation. A prime example occurred in the Scottish dramatists’ response to Greek tragedy commissioned and performed in Glasgow in 2000 to mark the re-opening of the Scottish Parliament after a gap of nearly three hundred years. David Greig’s Oedipus, set in India under the setting sun of the British Raj showed Oedipus and Creon battling for supremacy in Scottish idiom and accents that reminded the audiences that Scots were active makers and administrators of the British Empire as well as a people who had lost their own parliament to Westminster.36 The diversity of the examples of ‘braiding’ that I have discussed demonstrates that multi-lingualism and multi-vocalism in modern 35 Quoted and discussed in Armitage and Crawford (1998: xxiv). For discussion of Hughes’ use of classical material, see Rees (2008); for the relationship between ancient texts and creative practices in modern poetry and drama, see Harrison (2008). 36 For discussion of the idiom and imagery of Greig’s play and of its diverse colonial contexts, see Hardwick (2004b); for further aspects of inter and intralingualism in Scottish contexts, see Burke (2003), Hardwick (2003b: 1–12), McLure (2004), and Neill (2004).

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rewritings of Greek plays can take complex forms, taking place within languages as well as between them. While it may well spring from the senses of ‘wound’ that Femi OsoWsan and Wilson Harris identiWed, the practice certainly does not lead to a ‘universal’ outcome in the sense that ‘universal’ implies transcendence. As a practice, braiding does, however, construct new commonalities of experience and understanding and promote double, or even multiple, consciousness of power relations and the cultural potential of the subaltern. Indeed, the diVerent examples suggest that the process is ongoing, that the strands involved in the braiding sometimes still chafe against one another, and are meant to do so, but that the existence and energy of the braids themselves testify to creativity that may reach out and beyond the origins of the individual strands. The examples of multi-lingualism that were discussed in the Wrst half of this chapter might perhaps be designated as ‘inter-lingual braiding’. The examples discussed in the second half suggest that intra-lingual braiding can also arise, expecially from post-colonial contexts that have long histories that include inter-lingual braiding. The artistic contexts from which the multi-lingual examples were taken indicate the importance of workshop theatre. This can bring out the latent possibilities in the language and theatrical conventions of the classical plays for audiences that contain both anglophones and speakers of other languages. The examples suggest that pragmatic models of translation are useful as a Wrst stage in the documentation and analysis both of the translation of words to the page and of the non-verbal semiotics involved in the further translation to the stage. They show that the recent history of translation and performance of Greek plays in post-colonial contexts is also important in performing wider social, political, and cultural functions, in ascribing and circulating meanings that are continually reworked, reinterpreted and re-evaluated.37 This process both disrupts historical and cultural continuity in meaning and values, and also keeps the ancient texts open as sites for literary, theatrical, and political contest, refashioning and reXection. It also inscribes a diVerent kind of historical 37 Venuti (2008) includes this type of process in his third, or axiological, order of translation, in which a chain of signiWers accumulates meaning and value through its circulation.

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pattern in which the ancient text and the processes of interpretation and evaluation associated with it are re-contextualized and the resulting work in its turn accrues multiple meanings and resonances that enable it to interact with a range of further contexts and literary and theatrical traditions. Multi-lingualism in stage productions, both inter-lingual and intra-lingual, is playing an important role in activating these developments and in redeWning both the classical texts and the concept of the post-colonial.

18 The Empire Never Ended1 Ika Willis

In the dream he again was a child, searching dusty used-book stores for rare old science Wction magazines. . . . He had looked through countless tattered issues, stacks upon stacks, for the priceless serial entitled ‘The Empire Never Ended’. If he could Wnd it and read it he would know everything.2 (Dick 2002)

This chapter is an attempt to mark out a terrain for future research,3 indicating some possible areas for theoretical enquiry at the intersection of classics and post-colonial thinking, and gesturing towards some of the theoretical work already done on which classical scholars 1 This chapter was originally presented as a paper during the conference ‘Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds’ given by the Open University’s Reception of Classical Texts Research Project in collaboration with The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies, in May 2004. It was researched during the course of, and is closely related to, my doctoral research, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), whom I thank. I am also very grateful to my anonymous reviewer and to Duncan Kennedy, both of whom made helpful and generous comments on drafts of this piece. Any errors or Xaws remaining are entirely my responsibility. 2 As Duncan Kennedy pointed out to me, the connection between endless Empire and ‘knowing everything’ is also Roman: see, for example, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura [‘On the Nature of the Universe’] 1.72–9 (Bailey 1947), where Epicurus’ enquiries into the nature of the universe are described in language suited to the activities of a Roman general (he is called a victor, p. 75) and/or surveyor: ‘in mind and thought he surveyed’ (peragravit, a technical term) ‘immeasurable Everything’ (omne immensum, p. 74). The language of imperial military activity here mediates between the universe as immeasurable and Roman techniques of measuring/knowing. I discuss this further in note 8. 3 In my doctoral dissertation (‘Discors Machina: Rome and the Teletechnology of History’, University of Leeds, 2004) I have followed up some of the possible consequences of the problematic set out here.

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can build. I begin by sketching out the conceptual pattern according to which the Roman Empire is deployed as a metaphor or analogy for contemporary global sovereignty, insofar as the latter is understood in terms either of cultural continuity or of control over information technology, and I show how this pattern corresponds to one of the ways in which imperial sovereignty was conceptualized in Latin literary writing in the second and Wrst centuries bce.4 Since ‘Empire’ thus connects political sovereignty, cultural continuity, and information technology, I go on to indicate how this connection has begun to be thought about in the work of Jacques Derrida. I then propose Empire as a ‘transtemporal’ Wgure linking the contemporary and the Roman Imperial moments of global sovereignty according to the interrelation of political/military and telecommunications technologies; I include an extract from Philip K Dick’s novel Valis, from which the title of this chapter is taken and which provides a useful set of metaphors for thinking about the temporality and technical speciWcity of Empire, and I conclude by suggesting that postcolonialism should be considered in terms of a postal network. ‘Empire’s rule’, write Hardt and Negri in their bestselling 2000 book, Empire, ‘has no limits’. They expand on this (p. xiv):5 [First,] the concept of Empire posits a regime that eVectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really that rules over the entire ‘civilized’ world. . . . Second, the concept of Empire presents itself not as a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order that eVectively suspends history and thereby Wxes the existing state of aVairs for eternity.

Hardt and Negri’s Empire is, then, unbounded in both space and time, as though Jupiter’s prophecy in the Wrst book of the Aeneid had, in truth, been fulWlled: 4 As Duncan Kennedy pointed out to me, in following the convention that redesignates the Christian system of dating as the ‘Common Era’, I am here reinscribing the universalizing and naturalizing gesture of Empire; the term ‘common’ covers over the speciWc imperial, colonial and/or religious practices which imposed this global system of measurement and notation. 5 Rome is explicitly positioned as the origin and the model of this concept of Empire. Hardt and Negri begin their ‘genealogy of the concept’ by saying that it ‘comes down to us through a long, primarily European tradition, which goes back at least to ancient Rome’ (p. 10) and conclude a brief overview and deWnition of contemporary Empire by saying: ‘These characteristics . . . were precisely those that deWned ancient Rome’ (p. 20).

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His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono: imperium sine Wne dedi. [I place no boundaries in time and space for them; I have granted them empire without limit.]6 (Aeneid: ll. 278–79)

Or, in the words of the cosmological exegesis constructed by Horselover Fat, the narrator of Dick’s novel Valis after his psychotic breakdown: ‘The Empire never ended’ (Dick 2001: 53 and passim). Widely separated in their temporal and generic contexts—a twenty-Wrst century work of political analysis, a twentieth-century science-Wction novel/autobiography, and a Wrst century bce epic poem—these three versions all deWne the particularity of ‘Empire’ as a regime without end in time or in space, being thus somehow outside or prior to time and space; moreover, all three specify that this Empire is Roman (for the Romanness of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, see note 5). In this chapter I explore what function Rome performs in conceptualizing the spatial and cultural forms of (global) sovereignty. Horselover Fat’s formulation, ‘the Empire never ended’, insists on the literal (material-political) survival of the Roman Empire into the late twentieth century; but Horselover Fat is a character in a scienceWction novel,7 and insane to boot. Yet more reputable thinkers, too, assert the survival of the Roman Empire. T. S. Eliot (1957: 130), for example, writes ‘We are all, so far as we inherit the civilization of Europe, still citizens of the Roman Empire’, and goes on to say that ‘Time has not yet proved Virgil wrong when he wrote . . . imperium sine Wne [Empire without end]’. Catharine Edwards’ (1999: 4) introduction to her collection of essays on reception, Roman Presences, claims that ‘Rome’s empire continues to be irresistible’. What is at stake in such an assertion? What claim is being made when continuity of cultural transmission or literary survival is said to be contingent upon the continued existence of the Roman Empire— that is, upon the continuing irresistibility of Rome’s political sovereignty? There is a slippage here from European culture to Roman Empire as if the two were synonymous or mutually deWning; as if the 6 This and all subsequent translations from Latin in this chapter are my own. 7 Each of these elements—‘psychotic’ speaker, ‘science-Wction’ (not obeying the observable material realities of its contemporary real-world setting), ‘novel’ (work of Wction)—marks a further distance between the formulation’s bald assertion of truthvalue and its performative context.

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continuing legibility of Latin literature,8 the process of transmission of European civilization or culture, were necessarily dependent upon readers being politically part of the Empire, citizens of the Roman Empire. This would mean that Roman literary texts (and the civilization of Europe, insofar as it has been shaped by those texts and the conceptual systems on which they rely and which they transmit) are legible in the present day only to the extent that their readers/ receivers take up a position created and maintained by the Roman Empire. Acceding to the conditions of legibility of Roman texts is tantamount to accepting citizenship in the Roman Empire, in Eliot’s terms, or to failing to resist the Empire, in Edwards’.9 Of course, as the very existence of the term ‘cultural imperialism’ suggests, the idea that cultural transmission is an important element in the material-political process of imperial domination is familiar both to scholars working in what we might provisionally call the Weld of post-colonial studies10 and to classicists. The insight dates from at least the Wrst century ce: in the Agricola (circa 98 ce), Tacitus writes of the adoption of Roman dress and customs that ‘this was called ‘‘civilization’’ [humanitas] among those who had no experience of it, when it was a part of their enslavement’.11 8 In this chapter I restrict my focus to literary transmission and survival. The endlessness of the Roman Empire is not only a literary phenomenon, however: this has been shown by, for example, Trevor Murphy’s (2004) illuminatingly-subtitled Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopaedia. Rather, endless empire was also deeply implicated in the ways in which Rome conceptualized knowledge more generally: as Horselover Fat puts it in the passage I have chosen as my epigraph, the possibility of ‘know[ing] everything’ is dependent upon the endlessness of Empire—or at least upon the continuing availability and legibility of the text which asserts that ‘the Empire never ended’. 9 ‘Failing to resist’ the Empire entails being subjected to it in the double meaning of that term: being dominated by it at the same time as being made a [reading] subject through it. 10 I use the term ‘post-colonial’ with reference to the terms set by the title of the conference at which the Wrst version of this paper was delivered, but I use it provisionally; that is, with reservations as to its usefulness. I hope that the redeployment of the ‘post’ in terms of Bennington’s ‘postal politics’ at the end of this chapter both illustrates and addresses my concern about the ways in which the notion of the post-colonial may be used to consign Empire to the past and thus to construct a reassuring historical distance between ourselves and colonialism, including ongoing colonial or neocolonial practices. See, for example, Shohat (1992: 99), who criticizes the term’s ‘ahistorical and universalizing deployments, and its potentially dehistoricizing implications’. 11 See, of course, Agricola 21.3 (Ogilvie and Richmond 1967): ‘inde etiam habitus nostri honor et frequens toga; paulatim discessum ad delenimenta vitiorum, porticus et

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But the slippage between European culture to Roman Empire with which I am concerned here seems to go further than that. In fact, in this chapter I will argue that it is precisely through this slippage between the appropriation of time and space by Empire and by networks of cultural transmission that Empire presents itself as endless in space and time. It is through this equivocation that Empire can, in Hardt and Negri’s terms, identify ‘spatial totality’ with ‘the entire ‘‘civilized’’ world’ and hence present itself as endless in space and time—that is, in a space and time produced by networks of imperial/textual transmission. The idea that the endless space/time of Empire is related to the space/time of textual transmission can, in fact, itself be traced in certain Roman literary models of imperialism and literary survival. In certain moments of the Roman literary presentation of imperialism, a model of Empire can be perceived in which Roman sovereignty extends along channels opened by Roman military conquest and/or by literature as an oral transmission network which constructs historical and cultural continuity.12 In the closing lines of the Metamorphoses, for example, Ovid imagines Roman political power and the Weld of reception of his poetry to be coextensive in time and space: quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris, ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam. [Wherever Roman power lays open the conquered earths, I shall be read on the mouth of the people, and through every age, in fame, if poets’ foretellings have any truth, I shall live.] (Metamorphoses: 15.877–79)13 balinea et conviviorum elegantiam. idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabantur, cum pars servitutis esset’ [‘whence also [came] a high valuation of our [Roman] dress and a fashion for the toga; little by little a going-over to the temptations of vice: arcadewalking and bath-houses and elegant dining. This was called civilization among those who had no experience of it, when it was a part of their enslavement’.] The passage is well known, and I cite it in order to be able to move on more quickly to the main part of my argument, rather than to provide any fresh insight into the Agricola passage itself. 12 The complexity of this relation is perhaps brought to light in a new way in the present moment, with its ever closer relations between information technology and military activity—see, for example, Virilio ([1991] 2002). In this chapter I argue that one of the things that the Wgure of Empire is called upon to do today is to enable us to think about this intertwining of cultural transmission and global sovereignty, which seems to be speciWcally Roman. 13 I use Tarrant’s (2004) text.

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Here Ovid is deWning a political-oral apparatus of literary transmission. He claims that the potential spatial extent of the oral transmission of his poetry is limited only by the geopolitical limit of Roman military conquest (Romana potentia, Roman power;14 domitis terris, conquered earths), and its temporal extent limited only by the reliability of poets’ speech (siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, if poets’ foretellings have any truth). It is not simply the case here that Roman military conquest opens and maintains the channels of transmission for literary texts: rather, in these lines we can trace a model of the interrelation of poetic speech and political power in the imperial production of space, time and history, where the continued existence of Roman power both guarantees and is guaranteed by the truth-value of Latin poetic utterance. This model operates in such a way as to disrupt any possibility of a stable distinction between sovereignty as an apparatus of transmission and literature as the content transmitted. In his epitaph, preserved by Cicero, the early Latin poet Ennius also imagines his survival after death in an oral medium: Aspicite, o cives! senis Enni imaginis formam: Hic vestrum panxit maxima facta patrum. Nemo me lacrimis decoret nec funera Xetu Faxit. Cur? Volito vivos per ora virum. [Behold, citizens, the shape of old Ennius’s statue: he revealed the great deeds of your fathers. Let no-one deck me with tears or make me a funeral with weeping. Why? I Xy, living, through the mouths of men.] (Tusculanae Disputationes: 1.15.34)15

Bloomer (1997: 27) performs a convincing reading of this epitaph, writing that in it Ennius ‘represent[s] the Roman as coterminous with Latin speech’. Ennius imagines the ora virum—the oral medium of poetic survival—as extending over the same space, mapping the same 14 Ovid uses the term potentia, rather than imperium, for Roman ‘power’ here; the word designates to a type of power that is not necessarily determined politically or militarily (as opposed, for example, to potestas). However, as I show below, the extension of Roman political power is also conceived as interrelated with the extent of transmissibility of Latin literature; consequently, I do not think that potentia in the Ovid lines needs to be strictly diVerentiated from potestas and imperium. 15 I use Dougan’s (1905) text.

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territory, as the boundary of Rome. Again, as in Ovid’s sphragis,16 it is not simply the case that Roman military/political power determines the space over which Latin culture may then spread. Rather, Ennius claims that the poet too, as a transmitter of Latinity, inaugurates and maintains the coterminous space(s) of ‘the Roman’ and of ‘Latin speech’. Ennius stakes a claim for the poet not only as the user or transmitter of an already-constituted national language—a Latinity determined by, and freighted with, Roman sovereignty—but as the shaper and creator of a national literary language. It is through this poetic language that ‘citizens’ become acquainted with ‘the great deeds of [their] fathers’. That is, it is through the oral transmission of literature that the historical continuity of the state—its temporal extension—is accomplished, and that citizens are able to take up their position in Rome.17 It is in this sense that, in Bloomer’s words, Ennius’ epitaph ‘present[s] the poet as founder of Latin’ (Bloomer 1997: 26):18 indeed, the poet founds the medium in which Rome extends itself. Literature is here making a claim to be the medium of Romanness.19 16 sphragis: a Greek word meaning ‘seal’, and used to refer to a self-contained passage at the end of a poem which ‘signs’ the work, directly addressing the reader in the author’s own voice and referring to the circumstances of the work’s composition. Ovid’s Metamorphoses ends with such a passage (15.871–79). 17 Cicero makes a similar claim about the necessity of an informational dimension to citizenship in a celebrated passage of the Academica (1. 3), where he says to Varro: ‘nam nos in nostra urbe peregrinantis errantisque tamquam hospites tui libri quasi domum deduxerunt ut possemus aliquando qui et ubi essemus agnoscere’ [‘for we were wandering and straying in our city like foreigners: your books, so to speak, led us home so that we might in time recognize who and where we were’] (Rackham 1933). Varro’s books allow Roman citizens to position themselves within Rome in a more-than-geographical sense. 18 I adopt Bloomer’s term ‘founder of Latin’ because it accurately indicates the strength of the claim being made for poetry’s actively political dimension. 19 This is not the only context in which literature appears to be the medium of Romanness, and in which this is put in terms of a foundation or refoundation. In fact, literary and political foundation and refoundation are intertwined in the Roman Empire, as can be seen from Suetonius’ account of how Octavian came to take the name ‘Augustus’. Suetonius writes: ‘Finally he took on the cognomen Augustus . . . by a motion of Munatius Plancus who, when certain people had proposed that he should be called Romulus as if he too was a founder of the city, prevailed upon them that rather he should be called Augustus, not only a new but also a greater cognomen, since sacred places and those in which something has been consecrated by augury are called august . . . as also Ennius teaches, writing: after illustrious Rome was founded by august augury ’ (Carter1982, ‘Vita Divi Augusti’ 7.2 ). That is, the name ‘Augustus’ was chosen speciWcally because of its literary allusions; Augustus names himself not after the city’s public name, Romulus/Rome, but after its trace in Latin literature, after the literary dimension of Romanness.

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As I have argued, sovereignty is not simply the vehicle that transmits literature as content: but neither is the converse true—that is, literature is not simply the vehicle of sovereignty. Ennius’ epitaph sets up a dual relation between poet and citizen, so that the poem is transmitted on both a sovereign and a poetic network—or rather, as I argued for Ovid’s sphragis, on an oral-political apparatus that inaugurates a Roman imperial space where sovereignty and literary transmission are mutually implicated. Firstly, Ennius interpellates the readers of his epitaph as cives [citizens] (in Bloomer’s words, he addresses the ‘Latin speech community’, Bloomer 1997: 27): he thus positions the reading of his poetry within the community of Roman citizens, suggesting that his existence as poet is fully identiWable with his existence as citizen.20 He goes on, however, implicitly to identify himself with his own literary works, distinguishing his poetic survival from his citizen existence: he claims that he survives through the mouths of men (volito vivos per ora virum, [I Xy living through the mouths of men]), and asks that no funeral rites should be observed for him as citizen. Thus, he claims that literary transmission through the mouths of men inscribes him himself into the historical continuity of Rome—just as his revelation of ‘the deeds of your fathers’ inscribes the citizens into historical continuity—and implicitly opposes this literary medium of survival to the traditional funerary practices whereby Roman aristocrats were inscribed into historical continuity.21 That is, Ennius now claims that he survives—virtually, spectrally, textually—entirely as a poet, through this oral transmission within the community of Roman citizens/Latin-speakers. In this way he equivocates between poet and citizen, using each to deWne and guarantee the other, and constructs a model of imperial space and time as a sovereign transmission network. Roman literary presentations of imperialism involve a self-reXective relationship to systems of telecommunication: the transmission of 20 Ennius himself was not born a Roman citizen and Latin would not have been his Wrst language. See Dalby (1998: 7–8) for a discussion of writing literature in Latin as an alternative mode of access to the political construction and maintenance of Rome for people who were not born into aristocratic families. 21 Bloomer glosses funera Xetu as a reference to aristocratic funeral ritual: Ennius’ refusal of such rites thus distinguishes him from the aristocratic citizenry of Rome, and proposes oral-literary transmission as a non-genealogical mode of inscription into Roman history.

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information across space and time. So literary models of the Roman Empire represent it as a sovereign transmission network. Sovereignty is conceptualized as extending in space and time by means of a technical apparatus that enables the transmission of information along channels or paths determined by speciWc material, technical, linguistic, and conceptual constraints. This technical apparatus is the network of male, citizen voices, which Ennius (ora virum) and Ovid (ore populi) represent as the medium of both literary survival and Roman sovereignty.22 In her book on the uses of Latin in Europe from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries (suggestively subtitled The Empire of a Sign), Franc¸oise Waquet traces the ways in which this technical apparatus survived materially through the institutional production of male, Latin-speaking mouths by European schools and churches, often in the name of a universal ‘humanity’, which in practice recalls the use of the term humanitas in Agricola 21.3 (cited above). She calls her project a ‘cultural history of Latin’ and ‘a record of the presence of Latin in the modern West’, and she works by taking Latin as a ‘historiographic object’ (Waquet 2001: 3, 1), exploring the uses to which Latin was put. My purpose here diVers from Waquet’s in that my ‘object’ is not Latin in itself and/or in its historiographic dimensions: as Waquet makes clear, the Latin language itself has been put to non-normative, non-communicative, and, at times, non-Latin uses.23 Rather, I am here seeking to account for the continuing Romanness/imperialism of Latin literature and culture, for the construction of a sovereign transmission network, which is not reducible to historical-linguistic continuity. Above, I designated this transmission network as a ‘technical apparatus’ in order to make visible the way in which its speciWc 22 This representation is not in itself neutral. As Starr has shown in his essay (1991: 337–43), the ora virum or ore populi (‘mouths of men’, ‘mouth of the people’) on which Ovid’s and Ennius’ works were transmitted were as likely to be the mouths of slave men as those of Roman citizens. The fantasy of a citizen transmission network eVaces the labour of slaves and other non-citizens in the maintenance of this network, just as Empire—as Hardt and Negri argue in the Wrst passage cited in this chapter— eVaces the historical violences of conquest. 23 See ch. 4, ‘A Familiar World’, 100–7, especially the Wrst section ‘Latin and the Faithful: Taming the Unintelligible’, 101–9, on the ways in which non-Latin-speakers nevertheless interpreted Latin words—sometimes as homophonic vernacular words—and put them to use, sometimes as magical and/or musical signiWers.

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characteristics—including material and technical characteristics, such as the material existence of male, Latin-speaking mouths— determine not only the mode in which information is transmitted (who has access to the apparatus?) but also the content that can be transmitted, to the point where the distinction between content and transmitter is brought into question. This provokes us to rethink the relationship between sovereignty, literature, and transmission networks. In both Ovid’s sphragis and Ennius’ epitaph, the vocal network is brought into play in opposition to the physical/material limit of bodily death, and functions to signify a potentially boundless Weld of transmission. But what kind of endlessness is being produced here? This is a crucial political question if we take seriously the tendency of Empire to present itself as endless, and its answer must take account of the way in which the ‘endless’ Weld of imperial transmission is constituted through the speciWc characteristics of the sovereign transmission network. A Wgure of Empire inextricably linked to telecommunications systems can thus be used to link the material–political–cultural imperialism of ancient Rome with contemporary understandings of global sovereignty as materially conditioned—enabled and constrained—by the speciWc capabilities of contemporary technologies of information storage, retrieval, and transmission. In fact, as I will show, the Wgure of the Roman Empire is indeed being taken up at the moment precisely as a way of thinking about global sovereignty and information transmission. In the rest of this chapter, I seek to explore what is at stake in the use of ‘Empire’ to make such an anachronistic— or, as I will later call it, ‘transtemporal’—connection.24 Some theoretical work has begun on the relationship between sovereignty and information transmission, which potentially can illuminate the usefulness of this Wgure of Empire; the work follows, in particular, Derrida’s The Post Card. This book is itself a relay station between Of Grammatology, in which Derrida considers ‘political 24 This chapter was originally written before the publication of Miriam Leonard’s Athens in Paris (2005), and consequently I have not been able to engage here with this important book in any depth. Here I would just like to note the relevance to my argument of her insistence that the reception of the classical past is an act of political engagement in the present: my engagement with ‘Roman telecommunications systems’ is precisely intended to be a contribution to a rethinking of contemporary modes of sovereignty.

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spacing’ in terms of the ‘spacing’ that opens the possibility of language (that is, communication across space), and Archive Fever, in which Derrida considers the problem—crucial to sovereignty—of the ‘border’, of inside/outside, through the politicized Wgure of the archive. In his essay ‘Postal politics and the institution of the nation’, GeoVrey Bennington (1990: 121), admitting that ‘it is tempting to try and approach the question of nation directly, by aiming for its centre or its origin’, warns that ‘the approach to the nation implies borders, policing, suspicion and crossing (or refusal of entry)—try to enter a country at the centre (by Xying in, say), and the border is still there to be crossed, the frontier shifted from periphery to centre’. The nation—that is, the spatial extension of sovereignty, its inscription in terrestrial space—constitutes itself through the practices by which it determines its edges. In this it conforms to the structure of the ‘archive’, as this Wgure has been proposed by Derrida (1996: 8) in Archive Fever: ‘Where does the outside commence? This question is the question of the archive. There are undoubtedly no others.’ Derrida gives a preliminary etymology of the term ‘archive’ on the Wrst page of Archive Fever, as follows (ibid. p. 1): Arkhe . . . names at once the commencement and the commandment. This name apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence—physical, historical or ontological principle—but also the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given—nomological principle.

In a brief discussion of the etymology of ‘archive’ from the Greek arkheion [the house of the archives], Derrida describes the archive as being ‘at the intersection of the topological and the nomological’ (ibid. p. 3) and writes of the archons that (ibid. p. 2): . . . they are Wrst of all the documents’ guardians. They do not only ensure the physical security of what is deposited. . . . They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence.

The archive—or what Derrida calls ‘the archontic function’ associated with the archive—thus associates a spatial disposition of information, its material survival, and the conditions of its transmissibility or availability, with a ‘hermeneutic competence’. As such, the Wgure of the

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archive allows us to account simultaneously for geopolitical and telecommunicative space, or for the articulation of the two spaces, since the archive is the spatial disposition that links reading—information transmission—with sovereignty. Moreover, the archive is constituted by a determined technological apparatus of reading, writing and sending.25 The Wgure of the archive therefore articulates the world as surface of inscription with the literary-sovereign paths of transmission through space and time. The archive allows us to make, with Bennington, a subtle but important shift in the understanding of political space: the nation’s frontiers are not necessarily isomorphic with the boundary drawn on a map, particularly when the speciWcity of technologies of movement across boundaries (‘by Xying in, say’) is taken into account. Rather, the space of the political is opened and structured, in the Wrst instance, according to an ‘archival’ structure: the technically and historically conditioned organization of telecommunication networks, where a telecommunication network is understood as the set of material and technical constraints on the transmission and availability of information through and in space and time (Bennington 1990: 124–8).26 The metaphor of the Roman Empire in particular as a telecommunications network is familiar.27 In her ‘Introduction’ to Roman 25 See Derrida (1996: 15–17), on how, for example, ‘psychoanalysis would not have been what it was (any more than so many other things) if email, for example, had existed [in Freud’s lifetime]’ (p. 17). 26 See, in particular, his citations of Vaille´ (p. 124): ‘As an institution indispensable to social life, the post, whose utility is manifest from the beginning of civilisation, must have appeared along with the constitution of that life’; and Montesquieu (p. 125): ‘It is the invention of the post which has produced politics’. The link between post/telecommunications and sovereignty could also be thought via The Post Card, where Derrida writes, for example (1987: 71): ‘Every time that it is a question of courrier . . . there is police, royal police—and a basilica, a royal house . . . or a temple, a religious metropolis. All of it, if possible, in the service of the king who disposes of the courrier, the seals, of the emissaries as well as of the addressees, his subjects’. The connection is not, moreover, conWned to political theory, postal history or deconstruction: Kevin Costner’s 1997 movie The Postman demonstrates how a nation is founded by and consists in its postal system. 27 It is not just a metaphor, of course. See, for example, Siegert (1994: 311) on ‘the postcard structure of the imperium’. He argues that ‘The empire exists . . . only by means of its postal system’ (p. 305) and that ‘the demise of the Roman archival and postal systems represented the end of the panoramic moment, where the empire was solitary and never-ending’ (p. 317). If, then, as I am arguing, the Roman archival and postal systems still survive in some form, then the end of the never-ending empire may indeed never have come.

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Presences, Edwards writes that Shelley ‘credits Rome merely as a means of spreading Greek civilization’,28 as if Rome were an eYcient channel of transmission for information from Greece, being itself without cultural content; and, as she argues in the same piece, the Roman empire was also understood as an eYcient global delivery system for Christianity. As in the proverb ‘all roads lead to Rome’, ‘Rome’ names the political-bureaucratic apparatus that builds the roads and lays the ‘telephone cables’ in the Wrst place, before any content can be transmitted. Of course, as I have been arguing throughout this chapter so far, systems of information transmission cannot, in fact, be neutral with respect to their content: Empire might be fantasized as pure instrumentality, in which information passes intact from sender to receiver through neutral space, but it is Empire as telecommunications system that produces that space and designates it ‘neutral’ in the Wrst place, although it is in fact highly determined. ‘Transmitting’ cultural ‘content’ involves a complex set of operations, which produce the eVect of continuity between the sending and the receiving position; which determine what will count as transmittable ‘content’; and which lay down a set of protocols for legibility at each end. The telecommunications system of Empire— its roads and telephone cables—functions according to the haunted, troubling telephonicity of Ronell’s Telephone Book: it is a system of divided origins and insecurely diVerentiated self/other relations, where self and other are simultaneously diVerentiated and connected by their positions on the telephone network (Ronnell 1989). I use the analogy between Roman roads and telephone cables advisedly, since the Wgure of the (Roman) Empire is frequently called upon to conceptualize the link between contemporary globalized telecommunications networks and the new forms of imperialism that result from this new virtualized geopolitical environment. For example, Hardt and Negri (2000: 298) quote ‘an adviser to the Federal Communications Commission, Peter Cowhey’ as saying that ‘the construction of the new information infrastructure . . . provides the conditions and terms of global production and government just as road construction did for the Roman Empire’. Virilio analyses informational politics along similar lines, and with the same analogy (Virilio 1997: 82): 28 In his preface to Hellas, cited in Edwards (1999: 4).

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Indeed, if geopolitics once required Roman roads or terrestrial motorways, the metropolitics that is taking place will essentially require electronic information highways and satellite networks capable of achieving unity of time for a telecommunications system that is now universal.

Empire would thus be endless in space and time (as they are traditionally conceived) because it no longer operates in geopolitical space/ time, but in the virtualized space and time of telecommunications, whose speed is limited not by any considerations of the material geopolitical landscape, but only by the ‘limit-speed’ of light.29 The analogy drawn by Cowhey and Virilio—and there are many other examples—between contemporary globalized/virtualized sovereignty and Roman imperial sovereignty connects, but also diVerentiates, the present and the past. The structure of comparison requires that the two entities being compared should be discrete and diVerentiable: ‘Roman roads’ must be a known quantity in order for the analogy or the metaphor successfully to deWne their comparandum. That is, metropolitics/information transmission must be not Roman roads in order to be like Roman roads. The idea that contemporary sovereignty functions now in virtual space through telecommunications networks just as Roman sovereignty functioned then on the surface of the earth through its road network means that Roman sovereignty must be diVerent from contemporary sovereignty. However, the situation complicates itself. According to the structure I have just sketched out, the Roman Empire survives to be available as a Wgure for contemporary sovereignty (among other things) precisely through being a telecommunications network, 29 See Virilio’s Open Sky on the ‘dromological shift’ operated by the widespread availability of light-speed technology (for example p.13: ‘Since the turn of the century, the absolute limit of the speed of light has lit up, so to speak, both space and time. . . . It is the constant nature of light’s limit-speed that conditions the perception of duration and of the world’s expanse as phenomena’ [bold in original]). Communication in a medium that allows information to travel at light-speed is said by Virilio here to have been developed only in the twentieth century; however, it is recorded in texts earlier than Roman, as Eric Prenowitz pointed out to me in a discussion of the famous beacon speech in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. See Clytemnestra’s conversation with the chorus, Agamemnon ll. 264–316, with the repeated insistence on the speed of communication (for example at ll. 278–80 when the Chorus ask ‘What messenger could arrive here with such speed?’ in response to Clytemnestra’s insistence that Troy has only just fallen).

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through the element of cultural transmission that, according to its own logic, is part of its political domination. This complicates the idea that the relation between Rome and contemporary imperialism is simply ‘metaphor’. If we are dependent on the metaphor of Rome as metaphor to be able to model contemporary imperialism, then we cannot securely rely on the diVerentiation that underlies and enables metaphoricity: that Rome is not contemporary imperialism, it is only being compared to it. Imperial sovereignty could not be thought (could not exist?) without the Wgure of Rome as a support. But Empire is precisely a Wgure for support, metaphoricity (carryingover), and telecommunications.30 What the notion of Rome as a telecommunications network does, then—like any communications network—is, precisely, to disrupt the idea that the two periods in communication are two discrete entities that can be securely diVerentiated. Furthermore, the idea put forward here of communication through (or across) time rather than distance—or perhaps time as distance—has important consequences for the ways in which we can think about imperialism, survival, and temporality. I opened this chapter by saying that it was as if Jupiter’s prophecy had been fulWlled:31 am I now claiming, like Horselover Fat, that the Empire really—materially, politically, historically—never ended? For if Empire is deWned not in terms of the existence of a political entity whose boundaries are inscribed in terrestrial space, but in terms of the channels of information transmission that it inaugurates and maintains, then the survival and legibility of Roman texts—the 30 In fact, the metaphor of Empire as telecommunication network here works in a similar way to the phrase ‘father of logos’ as Derrida (1981: 80–1) analyses it: ‘It is precisely logos that enables us to perceive and investigate something like paternity. If there were a simple metaphor in the expression ‘‘father of logos,’’ the Wrst word, which seemed the more familiar, would nevertheless receive more meaning from the second than it would transmit to it’. See also, for a discussion of the ‘metaphor’ of the post, Derrida (1987: esp. 64–6), for example: ‘If . . . I think the postal . . . on the basis of the destinal of Being . . . then the post is no longer a simple metaphor, and is even . . . the site of all transferences and all correspondences’ (p. 65). 31 This fulWlment of the prophecy does not only consist in Hardt and Negri’s analysis: I am not arguing for an analogy between a determinate form of sovereignty as analysed in Empire and a determinate form of sovereignty as extant in the Roman Empire. The question of the survival of Empire is complicated by the fact that ‘Empire’ is—implicitly or explicitly—one of our primary conceptual tools for thinking survival in the Wrst place.

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Roman archive—would indeed entail the continued political domination of the Roman Empire. By using the Dick quotation, ‘The Empire never ended’, I want to draw attention to the outrageousness, the counterfactual dimension, of the claim that the Roman Empire survives. The way that the claim is made in Valis, however, in accordance with the generic requirements of the science-Wction novel, makes explicit the hidden teletechnological dimension of our understanding of the continuity of culture, and explicitly models the imperial production of space and time through these transmission networks. Dick uses a technological anachronism in order to produce this model of Empire’s sovereignty/information transmission, claiming that Empire operates through hologrammatic technology and/or satellite transmission of information. The third person protagonist of Valis, Horselover Fat, who both is and is not the Wrst person narrator of the novel, Philip K Dick, experienced a divine revelation or psychotic breakdown in 1974. The book deals with his attempts to explain the theological and cosmological background to his vision, in which Fat saw two time periods or two ‘worlds’ superimposed on one another (California in 1974 and ancient Rome). Dick explains (2002: 54) that during his vision, Fat: . . . had discerned within the superimposition a Gestalt shared by both space-time continua, their common element: a Black Iron Prison. This is what the dream referred to as ‘the Empire’. . . . Everyone dwelt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world. . . . Once, in a cheap science Wction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me A River over that, you got the Empire, the Black Iron Prison, as the super or transtemporal constant.

Fat uses the name ‘Empire’ (elsewhere in the novel it is speciWed as the Roman Empire, for example, ibid. p. 70: ‘The Romans, the Empire . . .’) for the ‘super- or trans-temporal constant’, the Gestalt, which brings together the present, ancient Rome, and the future. The superimposition of the three time periods brings them into the same space, collapsing the distance between them: it is the transtemporal

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Empire, the ‘common element’ of the diVerent space-time continua, which enables this communication—in the physical/spatial sense32— between diVerent time periods. This is why the superimposition of time periods is itself a trope of Empire:33 Empire here represents the medium of transmission, which determines what appears to us to be linear chronological time and terrestrial/astronomical space. It is the medium in which time happens, the element within which we are able to superimpose two diVerent time systems—that is, to bring them into the same space, to place them in communication. Further, in the cosmology of Valis, the Roman Empire is the apparatus which produces the space and time of ‘our world’, which, we are told, is a hologrammatic projection (‘our universe is a hologram’).34 In fact, however (2002: 258, Tractates Cryptica Scriptura no.14): The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three-dimensional and not in space and time. The information fed to us we hypostatize into the phenomenal world.

It is the Empire, then, which mediates the information that, in fact, makes up the universe, translating it into the hologram that is the entirety of the universe as we experience it existing in space and time. That is, the Empire is the telecommunications technology that makes the informational space of the universe coextensive with the geopolitical. In Valis, history and terrestrial space are only an eVect of the hologrammatic transmissions of the Roman Empire: the teletechnological apparatus is literally prior to the geopolitical spatiality/temporality in which it operates. To return to Bloomer’s (1997) 32 For the relationship between physical/spatial and semantic/linguistic communication, see Derrida (1978: 307–8): ‘To the semantic Weld of the word communication belongs the fact that it also designates nonsemantic movements. Here at least provisional recourse to ordinary language and to the equivocalities of natural language teaches us that one may, for example, communicate a movement or that a tremor, a shock, a displacement of force can be communicated, that is, propagated, transmitted. . . . Nevertheless, we will not say that this nonsemiotic sense of the word communication such as it is at work in ordinary language, in one or several of the so-called natural languages, constitutes the proper or primitive meaning, and that consequently the semantic, semiotic, or linguistic meaning corresponds to a derivation, an extension or a reduction, a metaphoric displacement.’ 33 Kennedy (1999) gives some examples of this trope (including, of course, the canonical passage in Aeneid 8 [beginning at line 337], where Aeneas walks through the landscape that will become the centre of imperial Rome) in a diVerent context. 34 Dick (2001: 258, Tractates Cryptica Scriptura no. 10).

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formulation, the Empire makes ‘the Roman coterminous with Latin speech’; in Ovid’s terms, it is the apparatus which guarantees the coextensivity of the Latin-poetic information transmission network with the space opened/conquered by Roman imperial power. The Empire in Valis functions, then, very like the form of imperial sovereignty called ‘Empire’ described in the quotations from Hardt and Negri (and Eliot/Virgil) with which I began this chapter. The endlessness of Empire, from which we began, consists in its universalizing function (‘it rules over the entire ‘‘civilized’’ world . . . presents itself . . . as an order that eVectively suspends history and thereby Wxes the existing state of aVairs for eternity’). In Valis, this is literalized: the Empire produces the universe. The transtemporal constant that Dick/Fat describes in my Wrst citation from Valis (above) corresponds to the paths of cultural transmission that allow Roman texts still to be legible in the present to us, citizens of the Empire that we are. In Valis, these paths of transmission are literalized as this hologrammatic transposition of information, which precedes and produces the phenomenal world: this imperialism produces a world such that it can be ruled imperially. In his essay on place, Rome, Empire, and history, Kennedy (1999: 26) notes that there is a mode of ‘historicization of the Roman empire’ that ‘seeks to make it synonymous with history itself ’ (see also Siegert 1994: 303, on Rome as ‘an empire synonymous with history itself ’). Valis does precisely this; the disappearance of the apparatus into the landscape is also a characteristic of telecommunications technologies. In fact, Bennington (1990), in his discussion of postal politics, identiWes this as the point where the political and the postal correspond: the aim of both is to eVace themselves, disappearing into the natural. He writes (Bennington 1990: 128): The post wants the letter to arrive at its . . . ‘brilliant end’: this end is the death of the postman and the end of the post. As postal network, all politics wants politics to end. The arrival of the letter should erase its delivery. The end of politics is the end of politics. All this would have to be inscribed more generally in a notion of nature as a postal network, in which, as Montesquieu says . . . ‘toutes les creatures . . . s’entretiennent par une correspondance qu’on ne saurait assez admirer’ [‘all creatures communicate by means of a correspondence which one does not know how to admire enough’]. For a whole Enlightenment, what is admirable in this natural correspondence is

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that it is ruled by inXexible and necessary laws; the end of politics would be to be absorbed into a simulacrum of this natural and necessary network.35

In Valis, the political Empire is indeed ‘absorbed into a simulacrum of the natural’. Empire becomes the condition of possibility of physical space and historical time; and thereby, fully naturalized, it disappears as an entity within physical space and historical time, so that the ‘transtemporal constant’ appears to be nothing more than time itself, rather than a complex apparatus which produces temporality according to a particular teletechnological or archival structure. My reading of Valis suggests—and this is the hypothesis that I took up from Edwards and Eliot at the beginning of this chapter—that Empire is the condition of possibility of (the legibility of) the world as we inhabit it. If this is the case, what ‘outside’ of Empire could be possible; that is, how could the Empire end? In Valis, the locus of resistance to the Empire is the eponymous satellite (the Vast Automated Living Intelligence System), which functions as an ‘unscrambler’, in the terms which one of the characters uses to explain Fat’s vision to him (Dick 2002: 205): You were given a set-ground discriminating unscrambler, you realize. We normally can’t distinguish set from ground; VALIS has to Wre the unscrambler at you . . . so you could see . . . the false work that’s blended with the real world.

VALIS, that is, retranslates the universe back into information and, by guaranteeing a distinction between set and ground, signal and noise, ‘false work’ and ‘real world’, makes the universe legible according to a ‘hermeneutic competence’, which is authorized on other grounds than the Empire. We, however, do not have such a deus ex machina (or rather, as it appears in Valis, machine-from-the-god). This is not simply because the correct hermeneutic technique has not yet been developed by which we could determine the diVerence between the false world of Empire and the real world of information. The impossibility of the existence of VALIS—a set of hermeneutic tools that would come from outside Empire and be entirely without implication in its political/teletechnological apparatus—is an inescapable result of the structure of the 35 This desire for (totality and hence for) ending can also be seen in the imperial structure of Roman knowledge to which I have alluded above (notes 2 and 8).

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archive as I described it above; for the archive is the mutual dependence of the spatial disposition of information and a hermeneutic competence. That is, an archival understanding of sovereignty complicates our understanding of the relation between cultural continuity and the spatial extension of political power. It is for this reason that I suggest that the endless Empire in Valis provides an excellent Wgure for the problem with which I started. If ‘the universe is information’, as Fat asserts; if, in other words, sovereignty takes place in the space of telecommunications; and if the Roman Empire is the teletechnical apparatus that translates that information into the ‘natural’, phenomenal, spatio-temporal world, which is in truth only an eVect of Roman transmissions, what resistance could be possible? And so Empire continues to be, in Edwards’ words, irresistible. In fact, ‘Empire’ seems now to designate the irresistible State that Derrida conjures for a moment: ‘Imagine a city, a State in which identity cards were post cards. No more possible resistance’ (Derrida 1987: 37). The Roman Empire is the State in which identity cards are post cards, and this is why it is irresistible. Its irresistibility, which is closely connected to its endlessness, its limitlessness in time and space, derives from this speciWc organization of the relation between cultural transmission and political domination. As Eliot (1957) said, we become citizens of the Roman Empire through our position in the continuous transmission of European civilization: our Roman identity cards must, therefore, be post cards. They do not bind us to a speciWc name or identity, to a bounded existence in material time and space. It is not in this that our citizenship consists; rather, they position us within a postal system, a system of information technology or cultural transmission, and it is for this reason that subjection to the conditions of legibility of European culture entails a subjection to Rome’s irresistible Empire.36 In which case, should we perhaps be thinking, not in terms of post-colonialism, but in terms of a postal colonialism, one which produces and maintains itself precisely through the post by which we seek to distance it in time and space?37 36 Although perhaps we are Xattering ourselves when we think we are ‘citizens’: see note 19. 37 For a similar move in relation to post-structuralism, see Bennington (1990: 124): ‘I shall insist on another network, or translation, of ‘‘post’’.’

19 Another Architecture David Richards

Inside the National Museum in Lagos, the exhibits testify to Nigeria’s extraordinary cultural diversity in displays of artefacts ranging from the northern Sahel and desert peoples to those from the Niger delta and near-equatorial southern forests. The dimly lit labyrinth of glass fronted ethnographic displays winds through the building in a familiar fashion, reminiscent of the colonial regime’s passion for antiquities in an outpost of empire, where previously there had been little regard for ‘artefacts’, which were simply discarded once they had served their purpose: food for termites. Yet the Wnal and most recent gallery adds an ironic commentary on the museum’s triumphant message of e pluribus unum, a single nation from so much diVerence. ‘The Government of Yesterday and Today’ gallery displays exhibits reXecting Nigeria’s postcolonial civilian and military governments imaginatively, if not a little startlingly, arranged around the bullet-riddled Mercedes in which President Murtala Mohammed was assassinated in 1973. Outside, the museum stands in the centre of Lagos, on Lagos Island, between modern high-rise oYces and apartments, close to government buildings, not far from the marina and a sports stadium often used for political rallies, surrounded by the chaotic road system which has rendered the city barely able to function. It stands amidst the noise and brutalism of modernity, and, just as its antiquated displays open onto a gallery of quite spectacular contemporary violence, the museum seems to evoke a clash of worlds, which have little correspondence or sympathy. Faded and deteriorating, the museum seems an anachronistic trace of a half-forgotten desire to remember a deep past in a dysfunctional present.

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I am, of course, trying to draw an (admittedly crude) analogy; that classics could be seen to stand in a similar space in postcolonial modernity to the museum’s site in modern Lagos. After all, did not Postcolonialism arise in opposition, and is it not habitually antagonistic, to classics and all such colonial archives? It debates the meaning of ‘historylessness’, and has little time for the remembrance of profound time. Viewed from this particular vantage point, therefore, neither classics in postcolonial knowledge, nor the museum in Onikan, seems to Wt its surroundings and each appears to be radically out of place. Ludicrous monuments to the irrelevant past, or sinister reminders of colonial epistemes, they are built in a diVerent, outmoded architectural style. Yet there is another point of view of another architecture, which is more accommodating to both the classical and the postcolonial, but to see this postcolonial-classical ediWce, it is necessary to take a short, postcolonial detour. Edward Said, in his early work Beginnings, characterized a familiar form of narrative sequence: stories ‘of constantly experienced moments’ where ‘relationships [are] linked together by familial analogy’, both in their internal structure and in their external connections to a history of similar narratives (Said 1998: 76). These comparable stories appear as repeated beginnings from an ancient source, reaching backwards, down through time, and deeper into an origin where all beginnings cease. They seem to evoke a continuum, which is also a repetition: a series of reprises of an ancient master narrative, which, returning through time to their present manifestation, beat to a rhythm of diVerent but similar events, each containing an analogical trace of that which came before. Said evoked the metaphor of ‘family resemblances’ related in dynastic sequence to an ancient original, but such a model is not without a certain architectural quality also, since narratives of repeated beginnings are structures erected on the foundations of speciWc places. An extreme example of this narrative chain of repeated beginnings might be conjured in the apocryphal legends of Golgotha. According to tradition, Golgotha means ‘skull’ in Aramaic because the skull of Adam was found there. Adam was created in the exact same place as the Annunciation of the Virgin, and his body was buried beneath Golgotha immediately below the spot where the Holy Cross was raised and Christ was cruciWed: Christ’s blood redeeming Adam’s bones. The Cross was made from the Tree of Knowledge of

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Good and Evil, and stood where Abraham prepared an altar on which to sacriWce Isaac, at the centre of the Earth and at the point around which the Sun, planets, and stars all turn (Fraser 1977: 176; Halbwachs 1992: 216–17). Said’s narratives of repeated beginnings are constructed from an original blueprint of ‘natural(ized), unifying discourses’ of the nation, the people, the ‘folk’, and the ‘embedded myths of a culture’s particularity’ (Bhabha 1994: 172). Although Said’s book is a product of the pre-postcolonial-theory phase of his writings, postcolonialism is nonetheless latent in, and intrinsic to, his argument, as he subjects the ‘temporal and transitive’ series of repeated beginnings to a distinctly postcolonial turn. What happens when the narrative is played according to diVerent, opposite, rules? Instead of the ‘temporal and transitive’ series it is ‘intransitive and conceptual’, where ‘instead of a source we have the intentional beginning, instead of a story a construction’, where ‘complementarity and adjacency’ characterize ‘discontinuous concepts’. This alternative model is ‘a bristling paradox in the modern mind’ (Said 1998: 66, 77): to break the narrative, to step ‘out of the frame of the existing order’ of the past, and to ‘rupture the continuity of time, opening it up to new cognitive and sensory experiences’ (Buck-Morss 2000: 49). Instead of the ancient sequence, the inWnite chain, there is a ‘landscape of echoes and ambivalent boundaries’, ‘furrowed horizons’, and new conditions for the ‘practice of history and narrative’ (Bhabha 1994: 189, 105). The postcolonial-classical ediWce cannot be built on narrative foundations of continuity of repeated beginnings, which bring us from the classical to the postcolonial in transitive sequence. Rather, Said’s ‘paradoxical’/dialectical other narrative enables the conception of, in Greimas’s term, a ‘temporal uncoupling’ (Fabian 1983: 78) whereby present models are situated in the past, and vice versa; the ancient and the contemporary are fused together in productive contradiction, a ‘temporal illusion’, in which the ancient past and the postcolonial present bleed into each other until it becomes diYcult to distinguish between times and places, the living and the dead. It is this postcolonial-classical imaginary, already loosed from its moorings, this gap in the narratives of time and space, where another architecture is possible. In a comparable manner, and with similar intentions, Gayatri Spivak evoked catachresis, a Wgure from classical rhetoric: the misapplication of words, concepts,

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and forms: ‘a concept-metaphor without an adequate referent’, ‘reversing, displacing, and seizing the apparatus of value-coding’, ‘pervert[ing] its embedded context’ (Bhabha 1994: 183; Spivak 1987). Catachresis describes postcolonial praxis as the wilful disregard of decorum: mixing metaphors, making inappropriate conjunctions, switching codes to foreground the productive ‘friction’ of worlds which collide. Bhabha, like Said and Spivak, has the postcolonial founding a ‘social imaginary’— a repository of cultural artefacts, images, and inscriptions through and by which social life is both represented and constituted—on the ‘articulation of diVerential, even disjunctive moments of history and culture’, where ‘unifying discourse(s)’, ‘those embedded myths of culture’s particularity, cannot be readily referenced’. Postcolonial space and time are, according to Bhabha: ‘interstitial’, ‘in-between the claims of the past and the needs of the future’ and, to extrapolate from this, ‘the contingent and the liminal become the times and the spaces’ for the encounter between classical and postcolonial (Bhabha 1994: 176, 172, 219, 179). To follow Said, Spivak, and Bhabha is to envision a postcolonial-classical architecture of consciously evoked inappropriate likenesses, incommensurable and conditional, and therefore perfectly and appropriately ‘like’ the postcolonial place(s) of articulation. In these contexts then, classics in postcolonial worlds is neither sinister nor ludicrous, nor is it irrelevant, and the National Museum in Lagos is, its mixed messages taken all together (native artefacts, bullet-riddled car, all jostling for space in that place, marooned on a traYc island in the chaotic postcolonial city), a potent instance of ‘another architecture’ and possibly the most important building in Lagos. Nigerian history and literature are extraordinarily rich in such locations; ‘referential illusions’ in places and texts, which oVer unique insights into the social imaginaries of the postcolonial classical and the Nigerian nation: the polis, the ethnos, the nation. Femi OsoWsan’s 2004 play The Women of Owu (published text 2006), which has already been discussed in this volume, engages with Euripides’ response to Homer, of course, but the dislocation of The Trojan Women to nineteenth century West Africa creates a catachresis, an interstitial place and time. The Women of Owu is set at a signiWcant moment in Yoruba history, before the foundation of the Nigerian colony, before the idea of the nation, as the powerful

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city-states, having risen, begin to fall. Just as Euripides’ play, after the event, can be relocated in the ‘transitive and temporal’ narrative of Virgilian imperial epic, so too OsoWsan’s play is ‘in-between the claims of the past and the needs of the future’ (Bhabha 1994: 219), situated at the crossing of multiple, competing narratives and myths embedded in the mind of the audience. Owu’s extinction occurred after a prolonged period of intense political unrest and civil war in South West Nigeria. By the 1830s, Fulani raids into Yoruba lands destabilized and eventually caused the collapse of the Oyo Empire, and Wnally the destruction of the city of Old Oyo itself. Refugees escaped to the south where the Atlantic slave trade had made a greater impact on the city-states and caused them ‘to turn on themselves to meet the demand for slaves’ (Awe et al. 1967: 13). The city of Ife enlisted the Oyo refugees to Wght alongside their Ijebu allies in their slave war against the city-state of Owu and, with their victory, the disintegration of the southern part of Yorubaland began as, one after another, the Egba Yoruba towns and cities were destroyed. The motley remnants of the wars—refugees from destroyed cities, warlords and their followers from the allied armies of Ife and Ijebu, the Oyo migrants—descended on a still-habitable Egba village, Ibadan, where they made a permanent camp. Ibadan grew at a phemonenal rate until in a relatively short time its power eclipsed, not only the newly founded city of New Oyo to which it was nominally subject, but also Ife and all the other longstanding Ijebu and Egba kingdoms. All the while, of course, the British kept a watchful eye on developments, looking for the opportunity to impose the pax britannica on the warring states (Awe et al. 1967: 11–27; see also Johnson 1921). Kings and heroes, descendants of the gods and rulers of great cities, engage in perpetual warfare, destroy cities and eradicate all traces of their existence. The few survivors not killed or forced into slavery Xee the carnage and seek sanctuary in the wilderness, where they create a new city, which will be more powerful, and a new identity, which will be more pervasive, than that which has been destroyed. Is this Bronze Age Europe, or nineteenth-century Africa? Mycenae, Troy, and Rome, or Ife, Owu, and Ibadan? Is this the foundational myth of civilization or a squalid colonial war? Temporal, transitive, dynastic, or intransitive, adjacent, discontinuous? These diVerences mark the diVerence, and makes classics in postcolonial

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worlds a site of productive incongruity: a ‘bristling paradox’ (Said 1998: 77). OsoWsan’s mapping of the historical narrative of the Owu War, the collapse of the Oyo Empire, and the rise of Ibadan on to the Homeric/Virgilian narrative of the Trojan War and the founding of Rome signals an event in Nigeria of contingent, comparable signiWcance: the advent of colonial modernity. But another kind of narrative, or rather narratives, lie behind the historical, which are concerned with how the Yoruba conceive of their mythical, archaic past, their social self-construction, and the impact of modernity. Myths of the polis, of the ethnos, and of the nation: narratives which are further linked to the image of the classical Greek city-state. Comparisons between the pre-colonial Yoruba kingdoms and the Greek polis arise from the beginning of the colonial period. Frobenius, writing in 1913 about the Yoruba ur-city, Ife, refers to an ideal plan of the Yoruba city, which perfectly reXects Yoruba cosmology and mythical authority in architecture and the organisation of urban spaces. According to these myths, Ife was the site where the high god Oduduwa descended to earth and gathered the chief gods around him in conclave, arranging them in a circle radiating outwards from his presence. From this Frobenius (1913) claims that it: . . . is perfectly clear that the famous hill . . . in the centre of Ife was in ancient days the ‘navel’ of the Yoruba idea of the universe. The descendants of the sixteen gods must have had their abiding places in the old sixteen divinations of the compass, while the centre was occupied by the [oba’s] palace, which was regarded as the umbilicus of the world. (Cited Krapf-Askari 1969: p.40.)

All subsequent city states were created in imitation of the sacred by a form of apostolic succession from the original ideal model of Ife. Anywhere not so founded was simply not regarded as a city in any meaningful sense. Frobenius’s account of the ideal and sacred nature of the traditional Yoruba city was supplemented, during the period up to and after Independence in 1960, by a remarkable Xowering of African urban studies,1 which was little short of revolutionary in proposing new models for investigating and theorizing colonial and postcolonial 1 See, for example, Balandier (1955), Busia (1950), Cappelle (1947), Forde (1964), Guilbot (1950), Lerner and Schramm (1967), Mitchell (1966), and Schwab (1965 and 1970).

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social formations. Yet, while debating new urban phenomena, these writings nonetheless repeatedly returned to the comparison of the Yoruba city state with the Greek polis.2 Writing in 1969, the anthropologist, Eva Krapf-Askari explored the key Yoruba term ara ilu: which refers to those who are by birthright members of an ilu: . . . the name given both to nucleated settlements and to the advisory executive council of chiefs which, in conjunction with the sacred king or oba, constituted the government of each settlement (Krapf-Askari 1969: p.25).

Like the Greek polis, Yoruba towns: ‘extended into the farmlands beyond, which were cultivated by people who also regarded themselves as ara ilu’, so ‘conceptually, the city was not distinguished from its farming hinterland and the whole complex was seen as a unit, radiating out from a core consisting of the oba and council’. Thus, in traditional Yoruba political thought each clustered settlement is the residential expression of the political unity of a wider and more extensive State which is in turn expressed in the morphology of the city itself (Krapf-Askari 1969: p.27). The traditional town plan was deliberate: . . . with the Oba’s palace as the converging focus of all interests; each road passed through a quarter under a quarter-chief, and all the quarters, as well as the compounds of their chiefs, looked towards the palace (Krapf-Askari 1969: p.39).

The plan of a Yoruba town: . . . resembled a wheel: the Oba’s palace being the hub, the town walls the rim, and the spokes a series of roads radiating out from the palace and linking the town to other centres. Beyond the walls lie the farm plots merging imperceptibly with the Welds of the next town (Krapf-Askari 1969: p.39).

This form of town plan derives from the socio-political structure of each Yoruba kingdom and: ‘imposes on Yoruba towns a more or less identical morphology’ (Krapf-Askari 1969: p.39). The myth of the ancient and divine structure of the Yoruba city as polis lay somewhere near the centre of Yoruba cultural identity as it was 2 See Balandier (ibid.), Barbour and Prothero (1961), Busia (ibid.), Capelle (ibid.), Forde (ibid.), Guilbot (ibid.), Kuper (1965) and Miner (1967).

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conceived and articulated by cultural nationalists at Independence and beyond. In many respects it spoke of an exceptional African, speciWcally Yoruba, cultural achievement, which nonetheless reXected many Weberian and Durkheimian notions of the ancient Greek city contrasted to the city of modernity (Durkheim 1984; Weber 1958). It was another kind of architecture—an aesthetic, cultural, and political architecture, as well as a built environment—of small face-to-face integrated communities pitted against London, Paris, Berlin, the colonizers’ anonymous ‘de-cultured’ cities. The myth of the polis seemed, therefore, to yield an alternative model of the state, which was sanctioned by divine intervention and the power of antiquity. This model comprised the multiple sacred centres of traditional cities from which authority radiated to the exterior borders of their neighbours’ territories, with each unique piece of the mosaic being an identical replica of the original sacred model: a temporal and transitive series expressing the embedded myths of a culture’s particularity in architectural form. OsoWsan’s play about the obliteration of Owu—by another polis with the same narrative-mythical genealogy—carries resonances beyond the merely Euripidean. The treatment of the myth of the Yoruba polis by Nigerian artists and writers was ambivalent and contradictory, combining aesthetic reverence with political revulsion. Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) is set in the city of Oyo during the Second World War. Based on a historical event, the drama recounts the fate of Elesin Oba, the horseman of the AlaWn—the oba or ritual king—of Oyo, whose duty it was to commit ritual suicide on the death of his master in order to accompany the king to the world of the ancestors. In the prelude to the rituals, which should end in his death, Elesin’s lengthy monologues build a vivid description of the traditional Yoruba polis exempliWed by the city of Oyo, as Elesin calls into presence a procession of Yoruba social types—kings, warriors, farmers, priests, courtesans, hunters, gods, and animals—to create an image of social cohesion and completeness. But Soyinka’s dramatic setting for Elesin’s evocation of the myth of the polis is both surprising and of key signiWcance. With the death of the AlaWn, Elesin is the most important surviving member of the traditional authority system and, until his suicide at least, he embodies the State. Yet Soyinka locates Elesin’s revelations not, as

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Yoruba tradition and state morphology would dictate, in the palace, ‘the converging focus of all interests’, but in the market, or rather at a point between the market and the palace. In most traditional Yoruba towns, the main market is located in front of the palace, and Oyo is no exception. The market and the palace are, thus, both spatially and ritually related to each other as an expression of the relationships between sacred authority and profane existence: between the governors and the governed, male aristocrats and female traders. Markets, as Krapf-Askari relates: . . . had a widely recognized ritual importance: a common feature of Yoruba town markets is a shrine housing a laterite pillar over which cult oYcials daily pour palm oil on behalf of the whole town. This pillar betokens the presence of the orisa Esu or Elegba, the mischievous trickster deity of the Yoruba pantheon (Krapf-Askari 1969: p.47).

Esu, unlike the other orisas of the founding myth of the Yoruba polis, is associated with no ‘particular descent group, is specially connected with crossroads and markets, with all commercial transactions, with quarrels and trouble, as well as with uncertainty in general’. (Ibid.) The traditional ilu functioned by drawing together in a single sacred centre the political, economic, ritual, and geographical range and focus of the state. But by locating his drama in this ‘interstitial’, liminal space, Soyinka depicts the uncertain fate of the ancient polis as—to adopt Frobenius’s image of the city as the physical embodiment of the divinations of the compass—metaphorically turning, precariously, on Esu’s pillar. Esu’s place in traditional Yoruba society lay outside the dominant relationships of space and power within the city, whereby location was indelibly associated with the authority of familial relationships and descent. The location of the dramatic action in the shadow of Esu’s pillar therefore underlines the theme of contested genealogies, which will end in Elesin’s tragic failure to submit to his fate and join the AlaWn in the world of the ancestors, thus sending the world of the Oyo polis ‘tumbling in the void of strangers’ (Soyinka 1975: 69). In many respects, it is the destruction of the Yoruba—Greek polis as a model of the Nigerian state that Soyinka’s and OsoWsan’s plays dramatize. While the polis held a conservative aesthetic appeal as an ancient trace of lost cultural identities, its introspective focus upon

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the divine king and his cult auxiliaries as the centre of all existence, was also seen as an unworkable model of the postcolonial nation. But the myth and model of the ancient polis is crucial to an understanding of the role modernity plays in the social imaginary of the emerging state of Nigeria. If the comparison of the Owu wars, with their classical counterparts, was followed through to its logical conclusion, then the ‘New Troy’, Nigeria’s ‘Rome’, could be found in Ibadan. Ibadan’s distinctiveness, its diVerence from the traditional polis, is expressed in its own, unique, foundation myths, according to which Ibadan was founded by act of divination, not by the direct act of divine intervention through the sacred authority of an oba descended from Oduduwa. At its foundation, so the myth tells, a babalawo, or priest-diviner, sprinkled a powder used in divination, which had been invested with the power of the odu, a sacred verse, on the shells of 200 snails, which he then scattered in several directions. The oracle proclaimed that the town would be as wide as the extent to which the snails crept. The snails, we are told, travelled far and wide in all directions, hence the ever-expanding size of Ibadan (Idowu 1967: 235–6). In many respects, the myth marks Ibadan’s absolute diVerence from the traditional Yoruba polis: where the foundation myths of Ife and Oyo emphasize the centrality of the palace complex as the ritual, political, and economic nucleus, Ibadan’s narrative emphasizes, not convergence, but spreading, multiple divergences. The myth perfectly reXects Ibadan’s origins as Ibadan grew to become the largest of all Yoruba settlements, but one which never had an Oba, and therefore no centralizing focus, and is thus, by deWnition, not a city at all. Because of its emergence out of the remnants of Old Oyo, Ibadan owed allegiance to the AlaWn of Oyo, but for most of its history this observance was honoured more in the breach. In Ibadan, the emancipation from tradition, and from the British colonial policy of indirect rule through traditional authority, allowed the development of a relatively free, ‘interstitial’ zone outside the orbit of direct interference from both traditional and colonial authority. As a consequence, it was in Ibadan, the largest city in Africa at Independence, but not a city at all in a traditional sense, that Nigeria and Africa experienced their greatest and most immediate engagement with modernity. Ibadan’s relative ‘. . . openness’ enabled the city’s populace to connect with a range of technology transfers,

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transnational social and economic networks, and a dynamic popular culture of consumption. It also enabled a remarkable group of artists and writers to engage with alternative models of the city as projections of the emerging postcolonial state of Nigeria. It was the cultural nationalist artists and writers of Ibadan—Soyinka, Achebe, Okigbo, Clark, the sculptors and painters of Mbari, and many others3—who contributed to new ethnic and political identities within the postcolonial state, and, as Achebe famously wrote, helped their ‘society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self abasement’ (Achebe 1975: p.45). But it could also be argued that the cultural nationalists replaced the myth of the polis with myths of the ethnos, and in so doing, as Mahmood Mamdani has argued in a diVerent context, merely: . . . reproduced the legacy of colonialism by continuing to divide the population ethnically, [ . . . ] making cultural identity the basis of political identity (Mamdani 2001: p.25).

The colonial state is replicated in its absence because the myth of the ethnos is uncritically reproduced as authentic tradition but now in a state where the population, very much larger than the traditional polis, comprises multiple ethnicities all claiming rights as ‘indigenous’ subjects. As Mamdani has it: ‘we turned the colonial world upside down, but we did not change it. As a result, the native sat on the top of the political world designed by the settler’. He goes on to comment ruefully, that this kind of colonially crafted ethnic authority model of the state ‘had two big African homes in the colonial period. One was Nigeria; the other was [Apartheid] South Africa’ (Mamdani 2001: 26) The classical (with its foundational ideas of the polis, the state, its destruction and its recreation) and the postcolonial (with its oppositional struggle for cultural and ethnic identity in the individual and the state) converge in the repetition of epic, cosmological, tragic narratives. Where would one seek another, a truly other, architecture? Of all the Wrst-generation, postcolonial, Nigerian writers (the ‘Ibadan boys’ as Obiola Irele calls them) (Na’Allah 2005), only Christopher Okigbo had a classical education. An Igbo by birth, he was the product of the British colonial education system; studying 3 See, for example: Achebe (1975), Clark (1966 and 1977), Okigbo (1971) and Soyinka (1976).

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classics at the University of Ibadan, he later taught Latin at a grammar school, became a librarian at Nsukka University, and joined Cambridge University Press. His Wrst published poem was an imitation of Virgil and he was profoundly inXuenced by traditional Igbo, modernist, and classical poetry. It was these latter allegiances that led to Okigbo’s contemporary reputation being eclipsed. In a sometimes ferocious debate, the critics Jemie, Madubuike, and Chinweizu denounced Okigbo as a traitor to African traditions, who wrote in an apolitical, e´litist style, which was inaccessible, incomprehensible, and irrelevant to the majority of African people. They advocated a return to the traditional oral poetry of pre-colonial Africa, and to them, Okigbo was ‘an obscurantist ‘‘poets’ poet’’’ whose loyalties lay, not with traditional African orality, but with European modernism and classicism (Chinweizu and Madubuike 1980: p.193). The Troika (as Jemie, Madubuike, and Chinweizu came to be known) contributed to an important and necessary debate on the nature of postcolonial African identity, yet their prescription for a decolonization of African culture, which was to purge it of all colonial contamination, paid scant regard to the complexity of Okigbo’s relationship with both modernism and classicism. Far from being an apolitical voice of neocolonialism, Okigbo articulated an oppositional poetics of subtle engagements and critiques. On the eve of the Nigerian Civil War, Okigbo, added an ‘Introduction’ to his collection of poems, Labyrinths (Okigbo 1971: xiv): Labyrinths is thus a fable of man’s perennial quest for fulWlment. (The title may suggest Minos’ legendary palace at Cnossus, but the double headed axe is as much a symbol of sovereignty in traditional Ibo society as in Crete. Besides, the long and tortuous passage to the shrine of the ‘long juju’ of the Aro Ibos may, perhaps, best be described as a labyrinth.)

Okigbo’s reference to the ‘Aro Ibos’ refers to Arochukwu, a powerful confederation of three ethnic groups, which predominated in southeastern Nigeria from about 1690 until its destruction during the early period of British colonization. The State held sway through the ‘long juju’, an oracle that combined religious and judicial functions, the main purpose of which was to ensure peace between the diVerent groups, and to mitigate and arbitrate inter-ethnic conXict. For Okigbo, the labyrinth of Arochukwu was an earlier predecessor of

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the twentieth century Nigerian confederacy, but whereas Arochukwu endured for more than two centuries as a successful synthesis of ethnicities welded into a sovereign entity, Nigeria was convulsed by civil and ethnic strife in less than half a decade of independence. Few Nigerian readers of the time could have missed the irony of Okigbo’s allusion as he awakens the historical memory of another lost ‘sovereignty’, the Arochukwu confederacy, just as the Nigerian confederacy was on the verge of self destruction.4 But Okigbo looks not only to Arochukwu to supply him with a political critique of contemporary Nigeria, but also to Knossos. Okigbo, as a classicist, knew well Sir Arthur Evans’s works on the excavation of the palace complex of King Minos at Knossos. This can be seen from his care in identifying correctly the palace itself with the labyrinth, and not as two separate constructions, which had been Evans’s major discovery, and the etymology of the word labyrinth as being derived from labrys, the two-headed axe and symbol of the Minoan state (Evans 1921). This passage, like the labrys, is at least double-edged. Evans’s work transformed the modernist perception of the ancient world in a way that was more radical even than the excavations at Hisarlik and Mycenae in the previous century.5 Evans uncovered a place unlike any other; ‘the palace’s unlit, convoluted passages and stairways leading nowhere’, revealed a kind of Greek architecture unlike any known before (Florman 2000: 142). This was no shining acropolis, nor was it the image of the ancient past as a Golden Age founded upon the Athenian myth of progress, according to which, Theseus, by entering the labyrinth and killing the Minotaur: . . . sever[ed] all ties to both the dark, archaic world represented by Crete and the human bestiality incarnated in the monster. (ibid.)

The hero brought about a revolution in the history of civilization: an irrevocable turning away from the Labyrinth towards the Acropolis. But Evans had uncovered an architecture of a diVerent kind. Knossos was dark, introvert, irrational. For European modernists, particularly 4 I have written elsewhere about the Igbo historical contexts of Okigibo’s evocation of the labyrinth (Richards 2000). In this chapter I refer to the archaic Greek side of the question. On Arochukwu see Nwauwa (1995: 353–64). 5 See Schliemann (1875 and 1878) and Richards (2001).

362

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the dissident surrealists Bataille, Leiris, Masson, and Caillois, who enthusiastically embraced the image of the ancient past, which the Minoan labyrinth symbolized, it was (to borrow the title of Denis Hollier’s book on Bataille) an architecture that was ‘against architecture’.6 The archaic world appeared to modernists in the shape of Knossos as the very model of the subconscious in architectural form. Okigbo also saw the labyrinth of Igbo state history through the prism of Evans’s Knossos and, in a similar way as the dissident surrealists, as a return of the repressed: dark, introvert, irrational. Arochukwu as Knossos was also another symbol of dissent from the victor’s myths of progress; here British rather than Athenian, but the labyrinth was also an Igbo (Arochukwu), alternative architecture to the ethnically-determined Nigerian confederation. But yet another, much darker, and contradictory labyrinth occupies the same space. In the section of the collected poems entitled ‘Initiations’ Okigbo refers to the practice of branding slaves to signify ownership: SCAR OF the cruciWx over the breast, by red blade inXicted by red-hot blade, on right breast witnesseth mystery which I, initiate, received newly naked upon waters of the genesis. (Okigbo 1971: p.6)

His evocation of Christian imagery has been correctly interpreted as a critique of missionary activity in Africa, but the poem is not so clear-cut in its anti-imperialism. Arochukwu was also implicated in the enslavement of her own people and, as the state began to decay, the sacred functions of the oracle were replaced by a violent trade in human Xesh, and those not killed by the priests were sold into slavery. There are more shapes than just the cruciWx in this labyrinth, and the patterns burned into the Xesh assume ever more elaborate conWgurations: ‘At conXuence, of planes, the angle: / man loses man, loses vision . . .’ (Okigbo 1971: p.6)as an extraordinary geometry of human-architectural 6 See Hollier (1992) for a stimulating account of Bataille’s interest in Knossos and other ‘labyrinthine’ structures in architecture and the unconscious.

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shapes Xoods out of the poem, building another kind of labyrinth. If Arochukwu was for Okigbo both a political and historical model of the state, and a counter to the imperialist myths of progress, it was also, in the same space and at the same time, the dark labyrinth of subjection, violence, and death, a bodily architecture ‘against architecture’—a sharp, angular geometry of pain. For Okigbo, as for the dissident surrealists, the labyrinth, at the very least, is a place where contradictions multiply. Good juju, bad juju, there is no way out of the labyrinth: the children of the high god are also the slaves of the oracle; heroes of the resistance to imperial rule are still bound by their own history of subjections. As Okigbo writes: ‘We carry in our worlds that Xourish / Our worlds that have failed’ (Okigbo 1971: p.41). If we seek ‘another architecture’ for the postcolonial classical, neither the ‘Ionian white and gold’7 (Eliot 1922), the polis, nor the ethnos, then Okigbo’s labyrinth brings us closer to the ‘productive incongruity’ and ‘bristling paradox’, which Said championed, over the ‘familial analogies’ and transitive series, which constitute the embedded myths of empire, nation, and ethnicity. The labyrinth has a brutal, angular, and unaccommodating architecture: paradoxical but open to new experiences, Wlled with troubling echoes, displaced and catachrestic spaces, and temporal uncouplings; it is a social imaginary located in gaps in the narratives of time and space. The labyrinth is (to borrow again from Hollier) the ‘locus of an event’, an ‘explosion of aVective potential’ (Hollier 1992: p. 30), which radiates outward in multiple conXicting directions. For Okigbo, the classical and the postcolonial meet in the labyrinth to challenge the ediWce of historical progress, denying the ‘Athenian’ victory. Through this accumulation of images, which contain references, which contain cross-references to allusions, there is not a building towards a telos, but a compulsion to sustain indeWnitely, permanently if possible, that state which exists before the image succumbs to a ‘temporal and transitive’ grand narrative or dynastic sequence. It is another architecture. 7 The phrase is from TS Eliot’s ‘The Fire Sermon’, part 3 of The Waste Land, line 265.

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Index Abbey Theatre, Dublin 9, 229, 230, 321–2 Abhijnanashakuntalam 290, 302 Abraham 351 Adam 350 Adisadel College, Ghana 61–2 Adorno, Theodore, Minima Moralia 160, 165 Aeneid (Virgil) 3, 167, 330 Aeschylus 73 Agamemnon 62, 76, 311–16, 317 Choephoroi 104 Eumenides 76, 269, 277, 279, 280 The Libation Bearers 82 Oresteia 79–80, 267, 315, 316 Afghanistan, war in 265, 266, 267 Africa cross-cultural bonds with ancient Greece 72–85 see also Ghana; Nigeria; South Africa African drama adaptations of classical drama 40–1 braiding of Greek and African 319–29 and Tegonni: An African Antigone (OsoWsan) and The Gods Are Not To Blame (Rotimi) 6–7, 28, 75, 82, 86–101, 317–19 and Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 27–8, 31–2, 34–5 African playwrights, and postcolonial scholarship 307–10 Agamemnon (Aeschylus) 62, 76 Hulton production 311–16, 317 Agovi, KoW E. 55, 56, 61, 71 Aikin Mata (Harrison and Simmons) 82 Alcestis 58, 62 Alexander the Great 143 Anabasis (St-John Perse) 168–9 Andha Yug (Bharati) 299 Another Life (Walcott) 170, 179–83, 184–6, 188–90, 202–4 Anouihl, Jean, adaptation of Antigone 1, 6, 41, 53, 69

Antigone in Haiti (MorrisseauLeroy) 55, 66–7, 70 Antigone (Sophocles) 1, 5–6, 76–7, 277, 282, 283, 284 Anouihl adaptation 1, 6, 41, 53, 69 ‘braiding’ of Irish–English languages in 319–26 and Brathwaite’s Odale’s Choice 6, 41, 53, 55, 56, 63–6, 70 and Fugard’s The Island 8–9, 41, 109, 213, 219–27 and Ghana theatre 55, 60–2, 63–71 and the Ghanian education system 58–60 and Heaney’s Burial at Thebes 229–42, 320–3, 325 in India 301 and OsoWsan’s Tegonni 5–6, 16, 24, 38, 40–53, 55–6, 71 theatrical womanizing in 213–19, 226 Apollodorus of Damascus 149 Archive Fever (Derrida) 339–40 Arcola Theatre, London 86, 96, 317–19 Aristophanes 73 Aristotle Poetics 254 and tragedy 271 Arnott, Peter 75, 316 Arochukwu 360–1, 362–3 The Athenian Sun in an African Sky (Wetmore) 16 Athens classical Athens and postliberalism 275–7, 281–2 Wfth-century Athens and European culture 252–3 Parthenon 149–50, 152, 155 audiences and stage technology 84 and Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 22, 30–1, 34–5 Autobiography of Red (Carson) 159

412

Index

Bacchae (Euripides) 82, 259, 261, 266 The Bacchae of Euripides (Soyinka) 75 Baker, Herbert 142–3, 155 Bakhtin, M. 160–1, 162, 167, 169, 188 Balme, David 59 Barthes, Roland 246–7 Mythologies 248 Barton, john 27 Baugh, Edward 171 BCM (Black Consciousness Movement) 107 Beckett, Samuel 261 Beck, Julian 107 Beginnings (Said) 350–1 Bennett, William, Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Moral Stories 250 Bennington, GeoVrey, ‘Postal politics and the institution of the nation’ 339, 340, 346–7 Bentinck, Lord 291, 292 Bentley, Muriel 62, 63 Bernabe´, J. 185, 186 Bhabha, H.K. 352 Bhabha, Homi 3 Bhagavadgita 290 Bharati, Dharmavir, Andha Yug 299 Biehl, Amy 114–15 Birmingham Conference on Classics in PostColonial Worlds (2004) 1, 4 Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) 107 Blair, Tony 237, 239 The Blinkards (Sekyi) 54, 57, 59 Bloodlines (D’Aguair) 159 Bloomer, W.M. 334, 335, 345–6 Bloom, Harold, ‘Anxiety of InXuence’ 187 Bo¨hl, F.M. De Liagre 258 Boullart, Karl 262 Bouman, A.C. 145 braiding, of Greek and African theatre 319–28 Brathwaite, Kamau 53 Odale’s Choice 6, 41, 53, 55, 56, 63–6, 70 Brecht, Berthold 41, 108 Breslin, P. 201, 203 British Braids conference 319

Buddhism, and tragedy 258, 260 Budelmann, Felix 317 Burial at Thebes 9, 16, 229–42, 320–3, 325 Burian, P. 166, 204 Bush, George 230, 235, 236, 237, 239, 267, 269 Bush, Laura 240 Butler, Guy, Demea 109 Butler, Judith 213 Cabral, Amilcar 74–5 Cambridge Brotherhood 288 Camus, A. 261 canonical counter-discourse 87 Caoineadh Airt Uı´ Laoghaire (Lament for Art O’Leary) (Ni Chonaill) 231–2 Caribbean colonies, and Homer’s Odyssey 192–210 Caribbean writers 8–9 post-epic texts 157–69 Carpentier, Alejo, The Lost Steps 189 Carson, Anne, Autobiography of Red 159 catachresis 351–2 Chamoiseau, P. 185, 186 Charturvedi, Ramsvarup 299 China, Tiananmen Square People’s Heroes monument 7, 135–6 Chipping Norton theatre, and Women of Owu 15, 22, 31 Chirpaz, Franc¸ois 258 Choephoroi (Aeschylus) 104 Christianity, and tragedy 261 Citizen’s Theatre, Glasgow, House of Murders 316 civil society and ancient Greece 276 and social contract theory 272–4 Clarke, John J. 304 Clark, J.P. Ozidi 75, 82 Song of a Goat 75 classical monuments, and Heroes’ Acre (Zimbabwe) 122–32 classics and colonialism 286–7 and essentialism 249–53 in the Ghanain education system 58–60, 70

Index and India 287–91 theory and the classical tradition 245–64 and Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 35–8 classics/classical, use of the terms 4 Classics and Colonialism (GoV ) 36 Clive, Robert 292 Clytemnestra (Euripides) 259, 260 Clytemnestra (Graham) 79–80 Cockerell, C.R. 146 Cold War 266 Collective Artistes 16 and Indian texts 291–5 colonialism and African adaptations of classical drama 40, 41 and the classics 286–7 and Heaney’s Burial at Thebes 230–1, 235, 238–9, 242 and OsoWsan’s Tegonni: An African Antigone 41–2, 43–53 and Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame 87–90 communality, in OsoWsan’s Women of Owu 18, 21–2 communitarian critics of liberalism 273 ConWant, R. 185, 186 conXict, in Greek tragedy 279–80 ‘continual’ colonialism 4 Cowhey, Peter 341, 342 Crawford, Robert 162–3 critical theory 250 Cul de Sac Valley (Walcott) 170–8, 185, 186 cultural hybridity, and Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 29–35 cultural imperialism 1 and the Roman Empire 332 Cultural Literacy (Hirsch) 250–1 cultural nationalism, and Indian texts 290 cultural politics, and Greek drama 2–3 cultural universals 72–3 The Cure at Troy (Heaney) 242 curses, in ancient Greece and Africa 77–8 The Curse of the Sacred Cow (Okurat) 81–2, 83–4 Curzon, Lord 298

413

D’Aguair, Fred, Bloodlines 159 dance, in mythical Greek and African plays 79–80 Danquah, J.B. 67 The Third Woman 47 Dante 195 Davis, Nicholas Darnell, ‘Mr Froude’s Negrophobia, or Don Quixote as a Cook’s Tourist’ 193 Deane, Seamus, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing 321 Dear Blood (Yanhah) 69 Death and the King’s Horseman (Soyinka) 356–7 Decebalus, king of the Dacians 154 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe 195 Dei-Anang, Michael, Okomfo Anokye’s Golden Stool 74 De May, Philip, English translation of Agamemnon 311–13 Derrida, Jacques 330 Archive Fever 339–40 Of Grammatology 338–9 The Post Card 338–9 Devlin, Bernadette 239 Dick, Philip K., Valis 329, 330, 331, 343–5, 347–8 Dingane, Zulu king 154 Dionysus 256 discursive practices 247, 263 Djisenu, John 70 Dorkonou, Mary 67 Doryphoros statue 127 Dove, Mabel, Woman in Jade 57 Dublin Abbey Theatre 9, 229, 230, 321–2 Dunton, C. 87 Duperron, Anquetil 304 Durban International Film Festival (2004) 117 Durkheim, E. 278 Duvalier, ‘Papa Doc’ 66 Eastern Europe 266 East India Company 292 education Ghana 58–60, 70 India 287–8, 293, 294, 296, 301–2, 303 Korea 134–5

414

Index

Edufa (Sutherland) 57–8 Edwards, Catharine, Roman Presences 331, 340–1, 347 Electra (Euripdes) 82, 104, 109, 110–12 Electra (McMurtry) 109 Electra myth, In the City of Paradise 102, 104, 106–7, 110–12, 118 Electra (Sophocles) 82, 104, 216, 283 Elektra (von Hofmannsthal) 110–12 Eliot, T.S. 195, 331, 347, 348 Elufowoju, Femi 317–18 The Emperor’s Babe (Evaristo) 8, 159–60, 164–8 Empire (Hardt and Negri) 330, 331, 333, 341 Encyclopaedia Africana 59 English language 10 ‘braiding’ of Irish–English in Antigone 319–26 and classical texts 305–7, 311–13 and Walcott’s poetry 176–7, 190–1 English literature, in Walcott’s poetry 181–2 Enlightenment 246, 247 Ennius, Latin poet 334–5, 336, 337, 338 Epic of Gilgamesh 257–8 epic representation, in Walcott’s Omeros 157–8 Eshu and the Vagabond Minstrels (OsoWsan) 74, 81 essentialism 248 classics and 249–53 Eumenides (Aeschylus) 76, 269, 277, 279, 280 Euripides 73, 109 Bacchae 82, 259, 261, 266 Clytemnestra 259, 260 Electra 82, 104, 109, 110–12 Hecuba 109 Hippolytos 109, 283 Iphigeneia in Aulis 109 Orestes 109, 111 Trojan Women 5, 15, 17, 19, 23, 25–6, 27, 32, 34, 259, 309, 352, 353 Eurocentric culture 251–2 and tragedy 254 European culture, and the Roman Empire 331–3 Evans, Sir Arthur 361–2

Evaristo, Bernardine Lara 159 The Emperor’s Babe 8, 159–60, 164–8 Fahodze, Tiata 317 Fanon, Franz 3, 6–7 Peau Noire, Masques Blanc 97–8 The Wretched of the Earth 98 Farrell, Joseph 163 fatalism, in ancient Greece and Africa 77–8 Fellows of the Africa Leadership Initiative 1 Fiawoo, F. Kwsai, The Fifth LandingStage 57 Fleishman, Mark In the City of Paradise 102–18 ‘Physical Images in the South African Theatre’ 105 on workshop theatre 104, 106, 107–8 Foley, Helene 24 Forgiveness (South African Wlm) 116–18 Foucault, Michel 247, 262, 274, 277, 285 Foursight Theatre, Wolverhampton, production of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 311–16, 317 Fowler, Don 251 Fraser, Robert 69 freedom myth, in OsoWsan’s Tegonni: An African Antigone 50–53 French literature, in Walcott’s poetry 184 Frobenius, L. 354 Froude, J.A., The English in the West Indies 8, 192–5, 196, 198, 206, 207–9 Fugard, Athol 53, 107 The Island 2, 8–9, 41, 107, 109, 213, 219–27 Gabriel, Ian 116–17 Gandhi, Indira 299 Gates, H.L. 95 gender and Heaney’s Burial at Thebes 240–1 theatrical womanising 211–27 in Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 18, 22–5, 32 George, Andrew 257

Index Ghana 82 classics in the education system 58–60, 70 myth and drama in 74 theatre 6, 55, 56–8, 60–8, 70–1 Gilagamesh 9 Gilroy, Paul 3 Gladstone, W.S. 193 Glasgow Citizen’s Theatre 316 Oedipus performance (2000) 326 global sovereignty, and the Roman Empire 330–48 The Gods Are Not To Blame (Rotimi) 6–7, 28, 75, 82, 100, 317–19 Gold Coast see Ghana The Gold Coast Spectator 62 Golgotha legends 350–1 Gow, Andrew S.F. 176 Graft, Joe de, Sons and Daughters 63 Graham, Martha Clytemnestra 79–80 and the post–9/11 world 267, 270–1 Greek and education in India 287, 288, 293, 294, 296, 303 translation of classical texts into English 306, 311–13 Greek drama 4 and African culture 40, 55, 72–85 and cultural politics 2–3 gender in 211–13 and Ghanian theatre 55, 57 and Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 29–35, 39 Greek mythology, and essentialism 250–1 Greek polis, and the Yoruba traditional city 354–9 Greek tragedy multi-lingualism/multi-vocalism in modern performances 305–28 and the post 9/11 world 265–72 as a post-liberal genre 275–81 scandelous voices in 281–5 and universalism 253–62 Greenblatt, Stephen 262 ‘Guguletu 7’ (South Africa) 114, 115

415

Habermas, J. 268, 281–2 Haiti, Morrisseau-Leroy’s Antigone in Haiti 55, 66–7, 70 Halicarnassus, Mausoleum at 146, 155 Hall, Edward 27 Hall, Peter 27 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 63 Hampshire, Stuart 282 Justice is ConXict 277 Hanson, Victor, A War Like No Other 266 Hardt, M. 330, 331, 333, 341, 346 Hardwick, L. 2, 200–1 ‘decolonizing Classics’ 16 Harrison, T. 82, 325 Harris, Wilson 8, 192, 196–8, 202, 204, 319 ‘History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas’ 197 ‘The UnWnished Genesis of the Imagination’ 197 Hastings, Warren 292 Heaney, Seamus Burial at Thebes 9, 16, 229–42, 320–3, 325 The Cure at Troy 242 ‘Englands of the Mind’ 326 Hecuba (Euripides) 109 Hegel, G., Philosophy of Right 273 Henshaw, James Ene 63 Hermanndenkmal monument, Detmold 145 Herodotus, Histories 194 Heroes’ Acre (Zimbabwe) 7, 119–38 and China 135–6 comparison with classical monuments 122–32 functions 129–32 and North Korea 130, 132–5, 137, 138 panels 121–2, 123–9 site of 119–20 technique and material 123 Hiberno–English 320–1 Hippolytos (Euripides) 109, 283 Hirsch, E.D., Cultural Literacy 250–1 history, in Walcott’s Omeros 157–8 Hobbes, T. 273, 274

416

Index

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, Elektra 110–12 Holy Roman Empire 292, 303 Homer 177, 352 Iliad 256, 257–8, 300, 302 Odyssey 8, 192–210, 300, 301 Hughes, Francis 230–1 Hughes, Ted, version of The Oresteia 315 Hulme, P. 230, 242 Hulton, Dorinda, production of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 311–16, 317 humanism 9, 247–8, 263 Hunter, Evans Nii Oma 55, 67–8, 69 Little Princess Korkor 69–70, 81 hybridity and Walcott’s poetry 188–9 and Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 29–35 Ibadan, and Women of Owu 15 Ikiddeh, Ime 56, 71 ‘The Tragic InXuence of Shakespeare and the Greeks’ 54–5 Iliad (Homer) 256, 257–8, 300, 302 In the City of Paradise (Fleishman) 102–18 India 10, 286–304 British rule in 291–5, 298 classical texts 4, 10, 289–90, 296–304 education 287–8, 293, 294, 296, 301–2, 303 languages 297 and Western classics 287–9, 304 Indian ‘Mutiny’ (1857) 290, 295 international law, and the Iraq war 267–8 Iphigeneia in Aulis (Euripides) 109 Iraq war 9, 265, 266, 267–9 and Heaney’s Burial at Thebes 229, 235–8 and Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 19, 32 Ireland ‘braiding’ of Irish–English in Antigone 319–26 and Heaney’s Burial at Thebes 229–30, 230–1, 238–40, 241–2 Irele, Obiola 359–63

Irish dramatists, and Greek drama 9, 16 The Island (Fugard) 2, 8–9, 41, 109, 213 theatrical performativity in 219–27 Jakobsen, Thorkild 257 James, C.L.R. 8 Minty Alley 209 Jesus Christ 350–1 Jones, Sir William 184, 289–90 Joyce, James 195 Ulysses 158 justice, in Greek tragedy 276–7 Kagan, D. 266 Kalidasa 290 Kamasutra 287 Kani, John 219 Kant, I. 273 Keats, John, Ode to a Grecian Urn 262 Kennedy, D.F. 346 Kennedy, James Scott 68 Kente, Gibson 107 Kerr Prince, Cashman 8 Kesey, Ken 222 Kiberd, D. 230 Kickaka–vadha 298 Kilkenny, Statute of 305–6 Kipling, Rudyard 292 KirchoV, Peter 149, 151 Knossos labyrinth 361–2 Knox, Bernard 216 Kolk, Mieke 255 Korea 137–8 Western education in 134–5 see also North Korea Korean public sculpture 7 Korean War 137 Krapf-Askari, Eva 355, 357 Kristeva, J., Strangers to Ourselves 248 Kruger, Frikkie 149, 151 Kuhn, Thomas 247 Kurtz, Stanley 228 Kwapong, Alex 60 Kyerematen, Alex A.Y. 68 labyrinths 360–3 Lacan, J. 247 Ladipo, Duro, Oba Koso 74 Lamming, George 207

Index Landau, Tina 27 language and Greek tragedy 278–85 as a social contract 274–5 Lapido, Duru, Oba-Koso 28 Lara (Evaristo) 159 Latin and education in India 287, 288, 293, 296, 303 and the Roman Empire 337 translation of classical texts into English 306 law, in Greek tragedy 276–7 Lazarus, Neil, ‘Hating Tradition Properly’ 160, 165 Leaning, John 59 Lefkowitz, M. 200 The Legend of Aku Sika (Owusu) 74, 78, 81, 83 The Legend of Okoyo (Yartley) 80 Leroy, Morisseau, Antigone 6 The Libation Bearers (Aeschylus) 82 liberalism Greek tragedy as a post-liberal genre 275–81 and social contract theory 272–5 Little Princess Korkor (Hunter) 69–70, 81 Living Theatre, New York 107 London theatres Arcola 86, 96, 317–19 Oval House 15, 22 Lwanda Magere (Omtatah) 77–8, 81 Lyotard, J.-F. 262 Lysistrata 82, 301, 302 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 291–4, 296 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 62 McDonald, Marianne 255, 260 McGuinness, Frank 3 McMurtry, Mervyn, Electra 109 Maes-Jelinek, Hena 200 Mahabharata 297, 298, 299–300, 302, 304 Malina, Judith 107 Malraux, Andre´ 190 Mamdani, Mahmood 359 Mandela, Nelson 116

417

Mansudae Monument (North Korea) 132–4 Many Colours Make the Thunder-King (OsoWsan) 74 Maritz, Gerrit 153 Maritz, Jessie 7 Marton, La´zlo´ 239 material culture 7–8 matrilineal societies 65 Mawugbe, Efo 69 Mda, Zakes 309 Mee, Charles 27 metatheatricality, and OsoWsan’s Tegonni: An African Antigone 42–3, 45–6, 48–50 Metcalf, Thomas 291 Mezzabotta, Margaret, ‘Ancient Greek Drama in the New South Africa’ 105 Midnight Hotel (OsoWsan) 24 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare) 63 Midsummer (Walcott) 199 Mike, Chuck, and Women of Owu 15, 16–17, 19, 21, 24, 25–6, 27–8, 31, 35 Minty Alley (James) 209 Mitchell, Katie, production of The Home Guard 315 modernity 246 Moerdijk, Gerard 145–6, 149, 152, 153, 155 Mohammed, Murtala 349 The Monkey’s Mask (Porter) 159 Moore, Michael 269 Morgan, William L. 257 Morgue, Efua (later Sutherland) 62 Morountodun (OsoWsan) 24, 74, 81 Morris, Abraham 231 Morris, James 292 Morrison, Blake, adaptation of Antigone 324–6 Morrison, Conal, adaptation of Antigone 239 Morrisseau-Leroy, Felix, Antigone in Haiti 55, 66–7, 70 Morris, William 143 Mugabe, Robert 126, 128, 130 Mukherjee, Meenakshi 301

418

Index

multi-lingualism/multi-vocalism, in modern performances of Greek tragedy 305–28 Murray, Les, Fredy Neptune 159 Mythologies (Barthes) 248 mythology in African/Greek drama and society 73–5, 81, 84–5 Golgotha legends 350–1 in Walcott’s Omeros 157–8

North Korea Arch of Triumph, Pyongyang 146–7 and Heroes’ Acre (Zimbabwe) 130, 132–5, 136, 137, 138 Mansudae Monument 132–4 Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetery, Pyongyang 134 Torch Towers 134 Ntangaare, Mercy 82 Ntshona, Winston 219

Nagy, Gregory 177 Naipaul, V.S. 203 Nazi Germany, and Sophocles’ Antigone 1, 2 Negga, Ruth 239 Negri, A. 330, 331, 333, 341, 346 neocolonialism, and OsoWsan’s Tegonni: An African Antigone 42 New Historicism 248, 262 New Philology 183–4 New York Living Theatre 107 Ngugi wa Thiong’o 308 Ni Chonaill, Eibhlin Dubh, Caoineadh Airt Uı´ Laoghaire (Lament for Art O’Leary) 231–2 Nietzsche, F. 248, 261 The Birth of Tragedy 251 Nigeria Arochukwu 360–1, 362–3 Ibadan 358–9 myth and drama in 74 National Museum, Lagos 349–50, 352 and OsoWsan’s Tegonni: An African Antigone 41 and OsoWsan’s Women of Owu 31–2 and Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame 86, 87–8, 91, 98, 100 see also Yoruba history and culture Nixon, R. 209–10 Nketia, J.H. 73 Nkrumah, Kwame 62, 66–7, 68, 70–1, 74 Nkrumah Ni!Africa Ni! (OsoWsan) 74 Northern Broadsides 324 Northern Ireland, and Heaney’s Burial at Thebes 229–30, 230–1, 239, 241–2

Oba Koso (Lapido) 28, 74 O’Casey, Sean, The Plough and the Stars 321–2 Odale’s Choice (Brathwaite) 6, 41, 53, 55, 56, 63–6, 70 Ode to a Grecian Urn (Keats) 262 Odyssey (Homer) 8, 192–210, 300, 301 Oedipus in Colonus (Sophocles) 266, 267, 278–81, 283, 284 Oedipus complex 97–8, 187 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 75, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91–3, 95, 96, 259, 283 Oedipus (Suzuki production) 259 Oedipus Tyrannos (Sophocles) 6, 317 Of Grammatology (Derrida) 338–9 Ofosu-Appiah, L.H. 59, 69 Ogunde, Hubert 74 Ogunmola, Kola 74 Okigbo, Christopher 11, 359–63 ‘Initiations’ 362 Labyrinths 360 Okomfo Anokye’s Golden Stool (DeiAnang) 74 Okurat, M.K., The Curse of the Sacred Cow 81–2, 83–4 O’Leary, Art 231, 234 Omeros (Walcott) 8, 157–8, 159–60, 161–4, 166, 168, 169, 200–1, 204, 205, 209 Omtatah, Okoiti, Lwanda Magere 77–8, 81 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 222 Opuku, Manwere 60 Oresteia (Aeschylus) 79–80, 267, 315, 316 Orestes (Euripides) 109, 111 Orientalism 289 Orientalism (Said) 255

Index OsoWsan, Femi 327 Eshu and the Vagabond Minstrels 74, 81 Many Colours Make the ThunderKing 74 Midnight Hotel 24 Morountodun 24, 74, 81 Nkrumah Ni!Africa Ni! 74 on post-colonialism and African playwrights 307–10 ‘The Revolution as Muse’ 309 Tegonni: An African Antigone 5–6, 16, 24, 38, 40–53, 55–6, 71 Yungba Yungba and the Dance Contest 24 see also Women of Owu (OsoWsan) the Other 263–4 and gender in Greek drama 212 and Ireland 241 Oval House Theatre, London, and OsoWsan’s Women of Owu 15, 22 Overseas Education 61 Ovid 333–4, 335, 336, 337, 338, 346 Owusu, Martin, The Legend of Aku Sika 74, 78, 81, 83 Ozidi (Clarke) 75, 82 Paglia, Camille 255 Paulin, Tom, The Riot Act 324 Pavis, P. 252 Pearse, Patrick 321 Peloponnesian War 266–7, 269, 283 performativity and gender 212–13 and language 278 Pergamon Great Altar 127 Telephos frieze 123 Perse, St-John, Anabasis 168–9 philology, and Walcott’s poetics 183 Philosophy of Right (Hegel) 273 Phoenix Players 107 Pienaar, E.C. 145 Pintal, Lorraine 239 Plato, Republic 301 Plays for African Schools 66 Poetics (Aristotle) 254 political propaganda, and Heroes’ Acre (Zimbabwe) 130–1

419

politics and Greek tragedy 278–85 liberal 272–5 polytheism, in ancient Greece and Africa 75–7 Pompeii, wall paintings at 122 Porter, Dorothy, The Monkey’s Mask 159 The Post Card (Derrida) 338–9 post-colonialism/postcolonialism and OsoWsan’s Tegonni: An African Antigone 41–2, 43–53 theory and the classical tradition 249, 262–3 post-colonial/postcolonial concepts 9 use of the terms 3–4 post-colonial/postcolonial studies 1–2 and OsoWsan’s Women of Owu 35–9 in the United States 228–9 post-empiricism 247 Postma, Laurika 149 postmoderism 9, 159, 165, 248, 286 and tragedy 255–6, 262 post-structuralism 246, 247, 248, 249 Potgieter, Hennie 149, 151 Pratt, M.L. 194, 195, 198 Prayer on the Acropolis (Renan) 251–2, 262 Pretorius, Andries 141, 147, 154 public sphere, in classical Athens 281–2 puppetry, in the Hulton production of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 313–14 Ramanujan, A.K. 304 Ramayana 297, 300, 304 Rehm, R. 4, 272 Reinhardt, Karl 216 religion, polytheism in ancient Greece and Africa 75–7 Renaissance, and India 290, 293 Renan, Ernest, Prayer on the Acropolis 251–2, 262 Republic (Plato) 301 responsibility, in OsoWsan’s Women of Owu 20–1 Retief, Piet 152 Revere, Paul 153 Rilke, R.M. 257

420

Index

Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 195 Romanelli, Romano 149 Roman Empire and British colonialism 143 and British rule in India 291–2, 294–5 and global sovereignty 339–48 imperial sovereignty 10–11 Roman epic, and Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe 164–5 Roman monuments Agrippa’s Pantheon 146–7 Arch of Titus 122, 123 Forum 143 Trajan’s Column 122, 123, 147, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155 Triple Arch of Constantine 136 Roman Presences (Edwards) 331, 340–1 Romanticism 263 Rome, ancient 4 Ronell, A. 341 Rotimi, Ola 16 The Gods Are Not To Blame 6–7, 28, 75, 82, 86–101, 317–19 Rumsfeld, Donald 237–8 Rutter, Barrie 324 Saddam Hussein 19, 268, 269 Said, Edward 3, 289, 352, 363 Beginnings 350–1 Orientalism 255 Sanskrit language and literature 4, 10, 289–90, 296–300, 303, 304 Sarbah, John Mensah 58–9 Sarkin, J. 102, 103, 118 Sartre, Jean-Paul 261 Les Troyennes 26 Saussure, Ferdinand de 275, 278 scandalous voices, in Greek tragedy 281–5 Schmitt, Carl 273–4, 277 Schwab, R. 304 science, and post-empiricism 247 Sekyi, Kobina 59 The Blinkards 54, 57, 59 Serpent Players 107 Shakespeare, William 27, 33, 57, 62 Hamlet 63 and Indian classics 290

Macbeth 62 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 63 Tempest 195, 209–10 Shelley, P.B. 341 Siegel, Lee, Love in a Dead Language 287–8 Simmons, Harry 178 Simmons, J. 82 slavery, in OsoWsan’s Women of Owu 18–19, 24 Smuts, Jan 145 social comment, in African and Greek drama 80–2 social contract theory 272–5 and ancient Greece 275–6 Solomon, Rakesh 298 Solon 276 Song of a Goat (Clarke) 75 Sons and Daughters (de Graft) 63 Sophocles 73, 274, 276 Electra 82, 104, 216, 283 Oedipus in Colonus 266, 267, 278–81, 283, 284 Oedipus Rex 75, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91–3, 95, 96, 259, 283 Oedipus Tyrannos 6, 317 see also Antigone (Sophocles) South Africa 102–18 apartheid 8, 41, 112, 154, 219, 359 and Fugard’s The Island 2 Pretoria Union Buildings 7–8, 142–4, 145, 148, 155 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 7, 103, 112–16 Voortrekker Monument 7–8, 143, 144–56 workshop theatre 7, 104–5, 106, 107–8 Soviet Union 267, 268 Soyinka, Wole 16, 28, 63 The Bacchae of Euripides 75, 79 Death and the King’s Horseman 356–7 spectacle, in African and ancient Greek cultures 78–9 Spivak, Gayatri 3, 285, 351–2 staging practices, mythical Greek and African plays 79–84 Steiner, George 212, 253, 256–7

Index Storm, William 254, 256 structuralism 246 Sutherland, Efua 308 Edufa 57–8, 62 Suzuki, Tadashi, production of Oedipus 259 Synge, J.M., The Playboy of the Western World 321 Tacitus 332 Annals 145 Tadema, Alma 262 Taiwanese students, and the Bacchae 261 Tantalus (Barton, Hall and Hall) 27 Taoism, and tragedy 258–9 technology, and staging 83–4 Tegonni: An African Antigone (OsoWsan) 5–6, 16, 24, 38, 40–53, 55–6, 71 telecommunication systems, and the Roman Empire 336–48 The Tempest (Shakespeare) 195, 209–10 terrorism, tragedy and the post 9/11 world 265–72 Tharoor, Shashi, The Great Indian Novel 299 Theocritus, Idyll 176 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa 3 The Third Woman (Danquah) 47 Thomas, J.J. 193 Toure, Sekou 74 tragedy see Greek tragedy travel writing, and the Caribbean 192–6, 206–9 Triple Arch of Constantine 136 The Trojan Women: A Love Story (Mee and Landau) 27 Trojan Women (Euripides) 5, 15, 17, 19, 23, 25–6, 27, 32, 34, 309, 352, 353 Ulysses (Joyce) 158 United States 9 and essentialism 250–1 and Heaney’s Burial at Thebes 229, 230, 235–8, 242 Living Theatre, New York 107 McCarthyism 9, 215–16

421

and the post 9/11 world 265, 267–9 and postcolonial studies 228–9 universalism, and Greek tragedy 253–62 Valis (Dick) 329, 330, 331, 343–5, 347–8 Vernant, J.-P. 279 Victoria, Queen 294–5 Vidal-Naquet, P. 279 Vietnam War 25, 266 Viglione, Theresa 153 Vignali, R. 147 Virgil 195 Aeneid 3, 167, 330 Virilio, P. 341–2 Viswanathan, G. 288 Voortrekker Monument (South Africa) 7–8, 143, 144–56 architects 145 enclosure 144, 148 ‘hole in the roof’ 146–7 inaugration 144–5 internal frieze 148–52 size 146 as a World Heritage Site 155 Walcott, Derek 8, 168–9, 170–91, 198–206 Another Life 170, 179–83, 184–6, 188–90, 202–4 ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’ 206, 209 The Arkansas Testament 170 The Carribean: Culture or Mimicry? 203 The Castaway and Other Poems 199 Cul de Sac Valley 170–8, 185, 186 ‘A Far Cry from Africa’ 165–6, 187 Gros-Ilet 171 ‘The Hotel Normandie Pool’ 206 ‘Meanings’ 182 Midsummer 199 ‘The Muse of History’ 178, 186–8, 196 The Odyssey: A Stage Version 199, 204 Omeros 8, 157–8, 159–60, 161–4, 166, 168, 169, 200–1, 204, 209 ‘Origins’ 201 Saint Lucia’s First Communion 171

422

Index

Walcott, Derek (cont.) ‘The Schooner Flight’ 204, 205 ‘What the Twilight Says’ 207 Waquet, F. 337 war in the Hulton production of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 314–15 Nigerian civil war 87–9, 98, 100, 353, 360 in Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 18–21, 26 A War Like No Other (Hanson) 266 Warner, Charles 194 Wetmore, Kevin J. 51, 52, 100 The Athenian Sun in an African Sky 16 Black Dionysius 16 Weyenberg, Astrid Van, ‘Antigone under Apartheid’ 222 Whitman, Cedric H., Sophocles: A Study in Heroic Humanism 215–16 Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass 173–4 Wilkins, Charles 290 Williams, D. 260, 261 Williams, Raymond 306 Williams, Reverend Charles Kingsley 60–1 Williams, T. 157, 158, 169 Wilmer, Stephen 320 Wolf, M. 188 Wolverhampton, Foursight Theatre production of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 311–16, 317

Woman in Jade (Mabel) 57 women see gender Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 5, 15–39, 309–10, 317, 318, 352–4, 356 and Euripides’ Trojan Women 5, 15, 17, 19, 23, 25–6, 27, 32, 34 form and tone 18, 25–9 gender in 18, 22–5, 32 productions 15 and war 18–21, 26 workshop theatre Hulton’s Agamemnon as 317 in South Africa 7, 104–5, 106, 107–8 Wouw, Anton Von 147 Yankah, Victor 55 Dear Blood 69 Yartley, Francis Nii, The Legend of Okoyo 80 Yeats, W.B. 321, 326 Yoruba history and culture 352–4 destiny 87, 94–6 and the Greek polis 354–9 mythology 74 Yungba Yungba and the Dance Contest (OsoWsan) 24 Zeitlin, Froma 271–2, 279 Zimbabwe see Heroes’ Acre (Zimbabwe)