At the Crossroads of Ruin: Cultural Liberation in Death and the King’s Horseman
In Wole Soyinka’s play Death and the King’s Horseman, the paralleled stories of father and son Elesin and Olunde, specifically their demises, function as a symbolic conversation about the reclamation of individual will necessitated by cultural liberation. Both Elesin and Olunde call out the misleading nature of direct British rule, criticizing its deceptive use of idyllic and distracting imagery. However, Olunde problematizes Elesin’s embodiment of victimhood amid British occupation by exploring the significance of duty as the sole effective path to reviving and preserving the Yoruban soul. Ultimately, Olunde’s duty-driven demise symbolizes budding hope for his people, juxtaposing Elesin’s near-permanent ruin of them in his shameful symbolic death.
Elesin and Olunde aren’t blind to the direct ways through which British colonial power operates - they are both subtly vocal about the facade of stability the British attempt to establish through the methodical glorification of silence and extravagance. After Simon takes Elesin away to his cell, Elesin asks Simon, “And does quiet mean peace for you?” (61). The rhetorical tone with which this line is delivered not only works as a way for Elesin to highlight Simon’s ignorance but underscores a more malicious way through which oppressive power operates: the silencing of a people to create ‘peace’ in the sense of hegemony. Elesin sees past the romantic image that Simon attempts to illustrate with his shallow description of the “beautiful night” (61), instead casting a negative light on Simon’s indifference to wrecking a community he does not care to understand. In a similar vein, when conversing with Jane, Olunde asks “What name would you give this?” in reference to the British ball, and later on explains, “...your greatest art is the art of survival” (53). He likewise uses a rhetorical question to highlight the absurdity through which the British mask faults and tragedy with deceivingly idyllic images, this time with an extravagant ball. His ambiguous delivery of the second line regarding survival, his vocabulary of slight admiration but his tone of half disdain, undermines the British perception of its survival. The grandiose diction of “art” and “greatest” act as a superficial echoing of the British self-perception, but hidden in Olunde’s tone is a subtle association of British conquest not with true thriving, but bare living of a nation defined solely by its defeat of others’ survival. Through rhetorical questioning and ambiguous delivery that parallel the various layers of phrases within dialogue, Elesin and Olunde solidify their awareness of the facade through which outright demonstrations of British colonial rule develop.
Despite their shared recognition of the blatant manifestations of colonial rule, Olunde’s emphasis on the individual will as a means of dismantling the colonial power structure critiques Elesin’s unintentional reinforcement of it through self-victimization. When Elesin tries to explain himself to Iyaloja, he describes how, “[his] will was squelched in the spittle of an alien race, and all because [he] had committed this blasphemy of thought - that there might be the hand of the gods in a stranger’s intervention” (69). Elesin uses the graphic imagery of being “squelched in spittle” to dehumanize and degrade himself - like the picture he attempts to create, he drowns in his own self-pity, unable to do anything but grasp at sympathy by labeling his only fault that of thought. Convinced of his victimhood, he will inevitably be trapped within a self-destructive cycle that inherently reduces him to the powerless being the British want him to be. Elesin symbolizes the trap of unintentional complicity an oppressed culture falls into when it is swallowed by its defeat, in a tragic act of self-silencing catalyzed by the subtle ways through which British colonial rule distorts the mentality of those it oversees. However, Olunde’s conceptualization of death and defeat through the lens of duty in the Yoruba tradition illuminates how a culture can liberate itself from the shackles of this distortion. As he explains his mentality to Jane, Olunde delineates how he has “lived with [his] bereavement so long now that [he] cannot think of him [Elesin] alive” (57). His acceptance of his father’s destiny signifies his continued adherence to the Yoruban cosmology at its core - untethered to the myopic perception of death as a tragedy Western society prefers to prescribe, the metaphorical fire of the Yoruban spirit is kindled within him. This line is a commentary on the tribe as a whole - extrapolated onto the greater community Olunde represents, it is the very ability of accepting injury without wallowing in it that ultimately serves to liberate Yoruba, enabling it to evolve beyond the bounds of the British colonial system.
Thus, Olunde acts as a model for the unconditional commitment to duty necessitated by liberation in a cultural sense - in contrast to Elesin’s self-imposed destruction of the Yoruban spirit (himself along with it), Olunde’s death functions as a renewed life for it. As Elesin confronts the shame of his failure to commit suicide initially, he tells Olunde, “Oh son, don’t let the sight of your father turn you blind” (60). The combination of Elesin’s position at Olunde’s feet and his despairing cries highlight the pathetic man Elesin has become by his own hands - he can now do nothing but wallow in his shame, the lifeblood of the tribe derailed by his doing. The familial diction of “son” and “father” further highlight Elesin’s vulnerability - in a last-ditch effort to win Olunde’s sympathy, he grasps at the blood connection between them. Even before he strangles himself, he has already died metaphorically, devoid of honor and respect. His fate represents that which a culture condemns itself to when it stays silent, complacent in the face of foreign intervention. Unlike Elesin however, Olunde’s steadfast adherence to his telos works to remedy Elesin’s destruction- when Iyaloja presents Olunde’s dead body, she explains how, “because he could not bear to let honor fly out of doors, he stopped it with his life. The son has proved the father Elesin…” (75). The transitionary diction of “doors” and flight symbolizes a passageway to a land of no return, beyond which Yoruba culture finds itself doomed to destruction, just as Elesin was. Olunde’s sacrifice symbolizes a last chance for his tribe - he has enabled it to live on metaphorically, immortalizing its honor-driven spirit in his death. Thus, the familial diction returns, this time serving a dual function: the illumination of Olunde’s role as the father of his tribe, leaving a critical legacy behind, and the juxtaposition of Olunde’s fulfillment of fatherly duty to Elesin’s blunder of it. Olunde’s liberation of his community begins where Elesin’s ends – escaping the oppressive trap of self-pity, Olunde enables the continuity of the Yoruba tribe whilst Elesin nearly drives it to near destruction.
Both Elesin and Olunde condemn the deceitful and contorted manners through which British occupation operates on a greater scale, but the two characters more significantly exemplify the two opposing extremes at which the ideological power of colonialism functions within the very identity of a culture and its people. Elesin’s tragic reinforcement of his own systematic suppression at the hands of the British is placed in stark contrast to Olunde’s reclamation of power through his embodiment of traditional values. Their fates, Elesin’s symbolic suicide versus Olunde’s symbolic rebirth, ultimately speak to the intrinsic link between duty, the embodiment of tradition, and the liberation of a culture. Just as William Butler Yeats describes in his poem The Second Coming, the Yoruban world finds itself on the brink of ruin amid abrupt foreign change. Elesin and Olunde personify the lone two paths the Yoruban cosmology has left to follow: only by following in Olunde’s example, breaking its silence and embodying the heart of its spirit can it be realigned, Yoruba itself liberated from the poison of colonial power.
References
Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King's Horseman. London :Eyre Methuen, 1975.