A Guinean Antigone

A Guiñean Antigone Kathleen McNerney is Professor of Spanish Literature at West Virginia University. She has published books and articles dealing with Catakn women writers, including Double Minorities of Spain (MLA 1994) and two collections of essays on Mercè Rodoreda . She is currently revisinga civilization textbook and preparing transktions of stories by Caterina Albert. Gabriel Quirós Alpera was born in Valladolid, Spain, in 1978, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in 2001. He continued his studies at West Virginia University where he received a Master of Arts in Foreign Languages while teaching Spanish. He is currently working towards hu Ph.D. at Universidad Complutense in Madrid where he is specializing in theatre, a topic he has never abandoned as scholar, actor, or transktor. Most commentatots on the literature of Equatorial Guinea mention the oral quality of its prose narrations and refer to texts recited or sung by the griots? In the rather picaresque tales by Maximiliano Nkogo found in Adja-Adjâ y otros relatos, for example, the author enriches the orality of the language with bits of "officialese" that are repeated so that everyone knows them by heart and recites them ironically. This tendency from the ancient storytelling custom leads naturally into works of the theater, where the musicality of the word is joined, in some cases, by a kind of chanting and/or specified musical instruments played with a gay or somber tone, dictated by the scene. The three plays included in the anthology by M'baré N'gom and Donato Ndongo share a common theme with the Nkogo stories as well as with many other literary works—that of corruption, the struggle of the individual to survive within a system rife with bribery, favoritism, and a hellish bureaucracy to boot.2 In Pancracio Esono Mitogo Obono's play, El hombre y la costumbre, Juan, the womanizing protagonist, is sent to town to solve various problems, but his position as an official gives him privilege and he is much more interested in using his status to attain objects and attract women than in solving anything. In fact, as he becomes more and more of a problem, his assistant Jesusa covers for him, creating an interesting contrast between the independent working woman and Michaela, who becomes Juan's lover and who contains her fits of jealousy because she is completely dependent on Juan. Esono uses a good deal of local vocabulary in this play, rendering it difficult to put on successfully in other SpanishArizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 8, 2004 236 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies speaking regions. In the rather open end, the spectator is not sure whether Andrés, the government bureaucrat, has convinced Juan to make a clean start, or even whether the clean start Andrés recommends is anything but the sort of "buena costumbre" typical of the "Sección femenina" adapted to a masculine code of behavior. Such an interpretation would leave Juan to continue with just a bit more discretion and moderation , rendering the title quite ironic. J. Tomás Õ vila Laurel's Los hombres domésticos, winner of the "Premio de Teatro 12 de Octubre" in 1993, is replete with dysfunctional families living in crowded quarters and constantly bickering over the little space they have to share. The intervention of Frantz Weber recalls one of Nkogo's narrations as well, since they both highlight the difficult relations between the Africans and post colonial Europeans. In the story "Emigración," Miko's family becomes dependent on a well-intentioned Spanish doctor, who then departs to help in war-torn Kosovo, returning the family to their previous destitute condition after having gotten them used to a better life. Avila's play portrays Weber as a truth-seeker, whose criticism of radio news makes him an enemy of the regime, but since he is a white enemy, the black bureaucrats keep kicking him upstairs: they know not to touch the case. At the conclusion of the sixth act, the "Jefe" sums up life in his country: Not only are strikes prohibited, but also "se prohibe la charla, la danza e incluso se prohibe vivir" (26). Both Nkogo and Õ vila display...