Black Theatre: Ritual Performance In The African Diaspora

Introduction

Victor Leo Walker II Introduction The actual events which make up the enactments . . . in ritual theatre [are] a materialization of [the] basic adventure of man’s metaphysical self. Theatre then is one arena, one of the earliest that we know of, in which man has attempted to come to terms with the spatial phenomenon of his being. . . . And this attempt to manage the immensity of his spatial awareness makes every manifestation in ritual theatre a paradigm for the cosmic human condition. —Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. . . . The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child’s mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles. Nor does the commonwealth know any more potent unwritten law than the mythic foundation which guarantees its union with religion and its basis in mythic conception. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy The essays in this section on Mythology and Metaphysics seek to explain, through select African diasporic epistemologies, the connection between performative rituals and the phenomenology of myth and metaphysics as the culmination of the dramatic experience. The epistemological underpinnings of these essays are rooted in the belief that “ritual is the affective technique common to most theatrical exercises in the Black world. . . . It is, rather, a creative elixir—Nommo force—that activates the dramatic mode. . . . Embedded in this mode are references to . . . myths and significations that define the collective moral universe.”1 Ritual drama rooted in the Nommo force of myth and metaphysics is a drama that is a “cleansing, binding, communal, recreative force,”2 where all aspects of life, whether complementary or contradictory, absurd or sublime, poetic or prophetic, are integral to human experience. Nearly all of the essays in this section deconstruct the complex landscape of Yoruba myth and metaphysics. As in Greek mythology, the orisas (gods, deities) of Yoruba mythology represent aspects of nature and humankind. But unlike Greek mythology, Yoruba mythology was conceived in an act of resistance, and that resistance translates into the creative spirit that is represented by the orisa Ogun. According to Yoruba myth, there was a time when there was only one being in the universe—the “Original One” or “Essence.” The Original One had a slave named Atunda (which means “re-creation”) who rebelled against the first ancestor by rolling a giant boulder down a hill onto the Original One’s farm, shattering the ancestor into a thousand and one fragments. Some of the fragments became orisas and the rest became the people who inhabited the earth. Separated by an abyss, both humans and orisas were feeling incomplete, so the orisas attempted repeatedly to cross over to the other side but failed. Then came Ogun, the god of iron, artistry, creativity, and its obverse, destruction . Ogun carved a path from the spirit world to the material world, from heaven to earth. According to Wole Soyinka, “The creation of the multiple godhead began a transference of social functions, the division of labor and professions among the deities whose departments they were thereafter to become. The shard of Original Oneness which contained the creative flint appears to have passed into the being of Ogun, who manifests a temperament for artistic creativity matched by technological proficiency. His world is the world of craft, song and poetry. . . . With creativity, however , went its complementary aspect, and Ogun came to symbolise the creative-destructive principle.”3 Yoruba myth and metaphysics are critical to Wole Soyinka’s philosophy of theatre and drama—hence the topic of his essay, “The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy.” The fourth stage is the metaphysical landscape situated outside and between the dead (the past), the present (the living), and the future (the unborn). For Soyinka, the fourth stage is the heart of the Yoruba mysteries , “the fourth space, the dark continuum of transition where occurs the intertransmutation of essence—ideal and materiality,” “the vortex of archetypes and home of the tragic spirit.”4 In addition, the fourth stage is cemented in the conviction that the essence, the roots, of African drama and literature (as well as African cultural criticism and worldview) can only be extracted from the traditions, intellect, and cultural artifacts “characteristic of a continuously changing and lived African world; the elicitation , implicit or explicit, of aesthetic, theoretical, and critical criteria from African sources, epistemologies, and cosmologies; and...