Biyi Bandele-Thomas’ Film Adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King!s Horseman: A Promise Deferred
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Cornelius Hamelberg
Harrow, Kenneth
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Sunday, December 4, 2022 6:21 PM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Biyi Bandele-Thomas’ Film Adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King!s Horseman: A Promise Deferred
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/03166874-475d-46d8-8247-2204b2563587n%40googlegroups.com.
Toyin Falola
I don’t like the film, but the recent death of the Director, whom I know, means I must keep my mouth shut. The cinematography is terrific; the rest is minimalist.
TF
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/BL1PR12MB5191FE123973D457041CEE71DA189%40BL1PR12MB5191.namprd12.prod.outlook.com.
Harrow, Kenneth
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Sunday, December 4, 2022 10:23 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Toyin Falola
Netflix
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/BL1PR12MB5191A546B7048595D691C98BDA189%40BL1PR12MB5191.namprd12.prod.outlook.com.
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
--
Ibukunolu A Babajide
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/03166874-475d-46d8-8247-2204b2563587n%40googlegroups.com.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats
1865-1939
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Evaluative Parameters and Evaluative Questions
Between Wole Soyinka’s Play Death and the King’s Horseman and Biyi Bandele’s Cinematic Adaptation of the Play
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Linguistic Continuities and Transformations
How best may one translate ''Olohun Iyo'', Owner of the Voice of the Sweetness of Salt, Seasoner of Nourishment, Sanctifier of Sacred Offerings, Seductive Voice of the Honey Tongued One, Overwhelming Force of Verbal Genius, a spectrum of associations in Yoruba culture in which the varied uses of salt in food and perhaps ritual is used in evoking recreative verbal powers?
May the challenge of such translation, moving beyond the minimalist “praise singer” in terms of which that name is at times rendered in accounts of Soyinka’s play Death and the King’s Horseman, to “Honey Voiced One”, suggesting an intense concentration of natural sweetness evocative of the sustained beauty of Olohun Iyo’s expressions, an interpretation evident in Yoruba as a means of evoking superlative verbal expression, suggest the dynamics of metaphoric transposition within a language, of cross-cultural mediation demonstrated by the play and inter-medium translation represented by its filmic rendition?
From Dramatic Source to Cinematic Adaptation
Whatever individuality a cinematic adaptation of a creative work wants to demonstrate, should that involve truncating its essence, even though the understandings of the essence of an imaginative creation could be controversial?
If that is done, would it not involve generating a new essence, a recreative act one may subsequently compare with the original in terms of imaginative creativity and ideational power?
It may be argued that Bandele's film adaptation of Soyinka's play Death and the King’s Horseman “did not set out to perfectly capture Prof. Soyinka’s mastery and genius, he simply interpreted it in his own unique way [ particularly since] Nobody can fully capture the pure genius of a Soyinka literary work.”
One may, however, examine the levels of sensitivity to the creative power of the original that this adaptation demonstrates or the degree to which the adaptation contributes something beyond immediate fascinations, reaching into profundities of human thought and experience through poetry and action of enduring power, as the original does.
To what degree has Bandele creatively retold Soyinka’s story, recreating the original in a manner demonstrating the director’s own individual creativity?
Does Bandele’s adaptation tell a story beyond the immediacies of its visual power, musical force and impressive acting?
To what degree does the film’s memorable dancing, poetry, acting, setting and spectacle deliver something beyond its evident entertainment value?
Is it possible to adequately assess Bandele’s adaptation of Soyinka’s play without addressing the degree to which the adaptation engages the nexus of Yoruba spirituality, theatre and poetry at the core of the play in structure and thematic orientation?
Evaluative Analysis
I understand Bandele’s film as representing the foundations of an adequate engagement with Soyinka but foundations that are yet to be built upon.
The film is rich in theatrical displays, exquisite settings, memorable acting and resonant poetic expressions, but is less sensitive to the kinds of poetics Soyinka is working with, poetics understood here as the imaginative fusion of plot, dialogue and action, nor does the film develop its own unique poetics beyond those impressive qualities I’ve already mentioned.
For the film to go beyond its powerful cinematography, melodious music, fine acting and rich poetry to deliver something more that resonates with Soyinka’s effort at generating an immortal vision of the tension between life and death, of the continuity between terrestrial and post-terrestrial universes, bringing distinctively alive that dimension of Yoruba thought, even if the director does this in a way not identical with Soyinka’s method, this would have involved going beyond the largely entertainment value of what the film currently achieves, an effort likely requiring more time than was spent on the film and intense training, practice and demonstration in dance, music, filming and editing, the best of which would be distilled through repeated efforts, initiatives beyond what the film demonstrates at present, an effort taking perhaps a year or more in addition to the work already done.
The Union of the Theatrical and the Ritualistic in the Play Death and King’s Horseman
There are two major elements in the play Death and the King’s Horseman, the theatrical and the ritualistic, which Soyinka fuses into one. It is this fusion that the play’s title derives from-the horseman’s confrontation with death without entering into it. The director was able to dramatize the theatrical but missed the ritualistic.
The theatrical is the matrix of the ritualistic, the womb that gives birth to it as the ultimate direction of the play, as referenced by the playwright’s statement prefacing the work, “The confrontation in the play is largely metaphysical, contained in the human vehicle which is Elesin and the universe of the Yoruba mind – the world of the living, the dead and the unborn, and the numinous passage which links all: transition. Death and the King’s Horseman can be fully realized only through an evocation of music from the abyss of transition.”
Since the film sharply truncates the magnificent ritual climax of the play, sustained by extended chanting by Olohun Iyo and poetic responses from Elesin, a sequence in which the expressive force of the play and its metaphysical power reaches its height, what are we given in place of that dramatization of a climatic point of the great writer’s powers?
How realistic is it to eliminate from a recreation of Death and the Kings Horseman Elesin’s progressive entry into the world beyond death as evoked by the chanting of Olohun Iyo and Elesin’s responses, a movement into unseen spaces yet reverberating in the theatrical tableau within which the ritual progression unfolds, as Olohun Iyo, impersonating or possessed by the departed Alaafin of Oyo, calls out a sequence of challenges and exhortations to Elesin about Elesin’s readiness for the great journey, crossing into the beyond to guide the Alaafin on his final journey, to which Elesin responds by repeatedly insisting on his readiness for the ultimate sacrifice?
“If you cannot come, tell my horse, I will ride on through the gates alone, if you cannnot come tell my dog, I cannot stay the keeper too long at the gate, the darkness of this new abode is deep, will your human eyes suffice?” Olohun Iyo calls out in a series of calls reaching a crescendo demonstrating his realization that Elesin is actually proceeding resolutely on that epic journey, upon which Olohun Iyo, drawing on imagery of river and sea, human and deity, breaks into metaphors evoking Elesin’s indomitable will, as the chanter tries to auditorize-to perceive through sound- the new universe Elesin is entering into, “are the drums on the other side tuning skin to skin with ours at Osugbo [ the Ogboni cult house]?” he enquires of Elesin, "do the sounds of gbedu [ a sacred, unique royal drum] cover you, like the sounds of royal elephants, do you see those whose touches are often felt, whose wisdoms come suddenly to the mind when the wisest have shaken their heads and muttered ‘it cannot be done’? Elesin Alaafin, if the world were not greater than the wishes of Olohun Iyo, I would not let you go!’’
Lighting, sound, movement, scenery, the varied tools of the filmmaker’s craft, how are these employed to generate the sense of motion between life on earth and life beyond death as mediated by the duet between Elesin and Olohun Iyo in that climatic ritual sequence?
Would the truncation of that sequence, the suppressing of its structural centrality and thematic power represent a creative rethinking by an adaptation of the play or a reworking inadequately alive to the core of the creative form being engaged with?
There is a lot of impressive poetry in the film but without being focused in that ritual centre where it climaxes in the play, is the expressive potential of the film not diluted?
What we have in the film may be seen as the foundation for an adequate engagement with Soyinka’s play, a foundation on which may be built a careful study of the play’s ritual core and a painstaking effort to actualize it, even if this actualization is not identical in all particulars to its literary inspiration.
Recreations of Literature in Theatre and Film
Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s drama has, after all, been recreated in terms of settings very different from those historical contexts in which he set them, yet the tragic core of such works as Macbeth and King Lear, dramatizing the tension between individual free will and the universe, between self direction and the full range of forces that shape human experience, must be given prominence if the plays’ contributions to drama are to be actualized, as different from being simply stories about the vicissitudes of rulers and their families and subjects and not also the anguished metaphysical explorations they may be seen as actualizing.
Can the sequence and the outcome leading to the terrible moment when Macbeth realizes that, while thinking he and his wife were building a great future for themselves, they were actually leading themselves to destruction, a realization erupting in his great speech on “life as a brief candle, a poor player who struts and frets for a moment on the stage and is gone to be heard no more, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” be truncated without significantly compromising any rendition of the work?
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and the Biblical Book of Exodus
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novelistic cycle
creates its own mythic universe in telling a heroic story, resonant with the Biblical cosmos culminating in the Book of Exodus, literary achievements inspiring those directors who have best visualized
those works in films actualizing efforts to give flesh and visuality to
the verbal.
Peter
Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Cecil D.B. Mill’s The Ten Commandments are films that are
great in giving adequate weight to the stories’ central themes of struggle and triumph, of dedication
and transformation, rather than elevating supporting themes to the centres of their
cinematic efforts.
Jackson does not privilege the
multifarious universe of Lord of the Rings, its
varied depictions of intriguing characters and great settings within glory and conflict unfolding over vast landscapes, over
the lonely, agonizing journey of Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee into and across the desolation of Mordor to destroy the One Ring of Power, a lonely, unglamorous struggle at the core of the story's depiction of paradoxes of power in terms of greater power consisting in the struggle
to destroy and relinquish rather than amass power, the driving force of
the narrative.
DeMill does not centre the spectacle and politicking of Egypt or even the desolation of the desert in the Hebrew exodus over
the role of these developments in the growing relationship with the divine in surrender, triumph and loss at the
heart of Exodus.
These themes are largely unavoidable, however one wishes to retell those
stories, if one is to dramatize their uniqueness, their distinctive
contributions to humanity’s narrative universe.
The film director needs to at least try to actualize such thematic centers, not downplay them in the name of the director’s individuality. If such drastic reworking is done, what emerges is a variant of the original rather than an effort to actualize the creative essence of the original, however that essence may be perceived.
If the director tells a different story from the original, though inspired by it, one may nevertheless explore both stories for their comparative power.
There is even less room for such creativity in translating literature, at its best another kind of artistic recreation, because the translator is not free to try and create a new text, reworking the source text by truncating sections of the work being translated.
The Drama, Theatre and Ritual Nexus in African Theatre Studies and Practice and Soyinka's Progression Within this Matrix
One of the richest themes in African theatre and drama studies is the relationship between drama, theatre and ritual, an enquiry shaping Soyinka’s artistic work as well as an enquiry to which he has contributed at the formative stages of African theatre scholarship.
Soyinka’s purely theatrical works are represented by such earlier texts as The Lion and the Jewel and perhaps The Jero Plays. By the time of Death and the Kings Horseman the master had entered into his full maturity, illuminating forcefully the kind of spiritual transformation at the core of such earlier works as A Dance of the Forests and The Strong Breed, projecting these transformative processes beyond the more abstruse yet powerful forms of A Dance of the Forests which had moved Biodun Jeyifo to declare that:
So far, indeterminacy, contortions of form and convolutions of masks and dramatic poetry mark the union of the non-verbal, extra-literary techniques with the verbal, dramaturgical modes in many of our finest literary dramas…at the very point of dramatic climax and thematic significance…intelligible communication breaks down and the poet lapses into obscurity and indirection, even [though] these scenes are metaphorically, visually and theatrically stunning.
The most famous or notorious example of this pattern is the central, emblematic scene in the heart of the forest in Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests. The same is true of the shattering climaxes of The Road and Madmen and Specialists…
[The way] out of [ a drama] which is eminently stageable and theatrical yet often obscure and inaccessible [ is for] unconscious, instinctive formalistic experiments [to] become conscious and determined ( “Literary Drama and the Search for a Popular Theatre in Nigeria,” Drama and Theatre in Nigeria, ed Yemi Ogunbiyi, 1981, 411-421, 417-418).
Through a union of structural simplicity and concentration in ritual with poetic clarity and evocative range, reinforced by potent dialogue within eloquent simplicity of action in Death and the King's Horseman, Soyinka moves beyond the powerful but perplexing convolutions Jeyifo references in relation to the writer's earlier works, achieving a luminous core accessible to a broad audience while resonating with a breadth of reference both rooted in the Yoruba universe and radiating echoes of universal force.
Along with the union of simplicity and power, of mythic vividness and philosophical distillation of the seven stanza poem of his essay ''Credo of Being and Nothingness,'' a poem later republished as ''The Stanzas of Existence,'' and the uncompromisingly exploratory ideational architectures of the verbally challenging force of his essay collection Myth, Literature and the African World, Death and the King's Horseman is one of Soyinka's greatest achievements in transmuting Yoruba cosmology in his own inimitable way.
How best may such inimitabilities be transmuted or transposed in various media, further projecting their possibilities?
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CADKs6Wtd%3DUgpLFy_S1_%2B48h%3Dqh_6v3j7XskJpik7DenUeAuCNQ%40mail.gmail.com.