Between Drama and Epic
Toward a Medium for Ozidi
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9250072 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Titi Adepitan (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2002 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 120-132 |
| Publication date | 2002-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Research in African Literatures (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044 |
| Publisher | Indiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2979/ral.2002.33.1.120 |
| OpenAlex | W2063060103 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
A certain critical ambivalence has always attended the career and stature of John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo. More than any of his contemporaries, he has been the one who frequently stands the risk of being forgotten. Indeed it is quite easy to forget that he belonged there with the other three--Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, and Wole Soyinka--at the beginning. 1 The critical neglect from which Clark-Bekederemo suffered may have been occasioned as much by the creative drought that has punctuated his career now and then as by his early maturation as a writer, which makes even his most coherent works at best apprentice pieces. From the title and resolution of tragic conflict (Song of a Goat), the dramatic convention of a sequel, sourced in a donnée held in common in the lore of the people (The Masquerade), to the absurdist notion of Mankind uprooted from the ancestral terra firma of beliefs and conceits, and floundering in a sea of caprice and uncertainty (The Raft), the dramatist in his first three plays was searching for an appropriate form and mode in which to anchor his impending statement for an African tragic spirit, protagonist, and worldview. As attested by The Ozidi Saga, when this statement came it was not as drama but as epic. Ozidi the play is, quite simply, Clark-Bekederemo's attempt to force (not distill) this statement into the straitjacket of the medium he knew best: drama. No doubt Clark-Bekederemo will ultimately occupy his hallowed place in the pantheon of Nigerian literature, but this is not likely to be on the strength of these early works. There is, instead, an understated significance for what is increasingly turning out to be his life's work, the Ozidi corpus, 2 and it is in due analysis and assessment of its value and merit that Clark-Bekederemo's true stature will ultimately reside. Ozidi the drama is a fine example of the new directions to the performing arts opened by the writer
Art · Drama · EPIC · Literature · African history and culture analysis · History
| Highly cited | No |
|---|