Tussles. Collected Plays: Collected Plays

Preface

Preface Ever since creation, at least in so far as the Judeo-Christian paradigm goes, man has played within the reaches of his own volition. He has also been made to play by forces outside his grasp. Eve played with the serpent in absolute defiance of divine prescriptions. The result was recurrent calamity for her descendants. Even the serpent played with its celestial Nemesis, causing a permanent rift between felicity and duplicity. Man has inherited the ensuing paradoxes and tensions, and burns his earthly stay coming to terms with them. Today, ritual, dance and festival take up and dramatize our worldview and its inherent throbs. Those modes of intrinsic expression bring to life the essential powers of our sacred places, the sweeping force of our rhythmic sounds, but also the felicitous manner in which we celebrate our being. But this harmony, time-old and beneficent, is shot through by shafts of western presence, so that these days we can no longer talk about ourselves without also talking about that other whose otherness so colours our view, so directs it, really. This is where the new African dramatist receives his assignment. We call him new because he comes touched with a new mission, one that carries him away from the nihilistic bemoaning of pains inflicted, into the exhilarating vista of therapeutic propositions. He is no longer content with just recording and echoing ills and evils suffered; he must now prescribe healing formulae. That way his place and mission in society are restored to their primordial centrality. These plays articulate in unique ways my own understanding of the playwright’s redemptive attributes. They do not emphasize entertainment only; they reach into the psychology of human relations and individual drives, and intimate responses to occasioned challenges. A playwright is a wide, penetrating mind meandering in society. He detects the drunk before he takes his first drop; uncovers the embezzler even before he lays his hands on the collective holding; steels the masses before the calamities of misrule descend on them; hoists the flag of freedom long before revolutionaries come anywhere near the mast. He uses the play for healing purposes. x Tussles: Collected Plays This collection groups together four plays written between 1995 and 2006. It opens with The Bite, my first ever dramatic experiment. Like much else that prologues the complex experience of inventiveness, this first play relies considerably on lived experience. It therefore has a very strongly psychoanalytical edge to it, fed essentially by the turbulent times of the early 90s in my own personal life. Although the title is used metaphorically, it does carry some literal truth with it, and so does much of the action. In essence, this first play is a bildungs drama, not very far away in intention from its novelistic forebears. Things Fall in Place, the second in terms of composition, is in actual fact a tribute to Chinua Achebe whose work Things Fall Apart provides the inspirational thrust to the play. The masquerade performance of traditional ritual and western religion, and the integrated ecstasy resulting from that performance: these are the play’s essential argument. I pursue this line of thinking further in Facing Meamba, my second novel. The Will and The Imprisonment of Sende Ghandi are just the head and tail of the same coin both in their themes and social statements. Women as one will realize are creatures of high premium in my thinking and worldview. These two plays show their moral strength in environments made insipid by the destructive drives in men; and actually feature them as the alternative agents of orderly existence. ...