Religious Meditations and Mediation in Selected Plays of Wole Soyinka

Abstract

Major critical inquiries into the theatre of Wole Soyinka agree that his plays draw inspiration from two basic levels. One, which is a purely mythic consciousness perceptible in his early plays such as such as The Road (1963) and A Dance of the Forest (1965), presents his etherealisation of African spiritualties and their interpolations with mundane existences. The other is a social or political consciousness which deploys those mythic forms from ancestral memory (especially that of Ogun) as intervening tools on the conditions of dystopia in the postcolonial landscape mirrored in his plays. By isolating his The Trials of Brother Jero (1973), Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) Requiem for a Futurologist (1985) and Alapata Apata (2011) this paper argues that these two thrusts are harmonied in Soyinka’s mimesis on spiritualties or religion in his dramaturgy. The paper locates the ambivalences in Soyinka’s refractions on spiritualties which anchor on the polarities of meditation and mediation and recognizes that while the former medium gives allowance for the playwright to engage on the locus of spiritualties, the latter is inspired by the crises of (between) “modern” spiritualties which has become one of the malaises in Soyinka’s hybridized postcolonial space. The conclusion of the paper is skeptical about Soyinka’s prescription of hybridised spiritualties as panacea to the crises of religion but sees the need for continuous dialogue as precursor to mutual understanding and cohabitation between adherents of diverse spiritualties in the pluralized global community.