A Dance of the Forests- Dystopian work.

 Hello readers!

I am Nidhi Jethava and I am a student of MK Bhavnagar University department of English. As a part of our syllabus, we have one paper on ‘African Literature’.  So in this thinking activity, I am going to write a brief note on the Dystopian idea in a drama written by Wole Soyinka, ‘A Dance of the Forests’. 

About Wole Soyinka:

Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 at Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria. After preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, he continued at the University of Leeds, where, later, in 1973, he took his doctorate. During the six years spent in England, he was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London 1958-1959. In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller bursary and returned to Nigeria to study African drama. At the same time, he taught drama and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been professor of comparative literature. In 1960, he founded the theatre group, “The 1960 Masks” and in 1964, the “Orisun Theatre Company”, in which he has produced his own plays and taken part as actor. He has periodically been visiting professor at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Yale.(Nobel Prize) 

About 'A Dance of the Forest' :

A Dance of the Forests is one of the most recognized of Wole Soyinka's plays. The play "was presented at the Nigerian Independence celebrations in 1960, it ... denigrated the glorious African past and warned Nigerians and all Africans that their energies henceforth should be spent trying to avoid repeating the mistakes that have already been made."[1] At the time of its release, it was an iconoclastic work that angered many of the elite in Soyinka's native Nigeria. Politicians were particularly incensed at his prescient portrayal of post-colonial Nigerian politics as aimless and corrupt. Despite the deluge of criticism, the play remains an influential work. In it, Soyinka espouses a unique vision for a new Africa, one that is able to forge a new identity free from the influence of European imperialism.

A Dance of the Forests is regarded as Soyinka's theatrical debut and has been considered the most complex and difficult to understand of his plays.[2][3] In it, Soyinka unveils the rotten aspects of the society and demonstrates that the past is no better than the present when it comes to the seamy side of life. He lays bare the fabric of the Nigerian society and warns people as they are on the brink of a new stage in their history: independence.

The play was published in London and New York in 1963 by Oxford University Press (Three Crowns Books)

 

‘A Dance of the Forest’ as Dystopian work:- 

Answer: 

What is Dystopia?

Essential Meaning of dystopia

: an imaginary place where people are unhappy and usually afraid because they are not treated fairly( Merriam-Webster) 

“A Dance of the Forests’ is a very complicated and confusing play as well as is very magnificent to read also. It discussed the three like Paste. Present and future. In this play, Wole Soyinka has made critiques on politics and governments. Like George Orwell Soyinka through this play put an Idea in the #distopian world. 

What Wole Soyinka depicts is a dystopian past as well as a dystopian present and future. In this way, Soyinka rejects négritude's glorification and idealization of the African past. Based on this negative reconstruction of the African past, which is antithetical to its glorification in the works of négritude writers, Soyinka insists, to borrow the words of Wendy Brown, that there is no "lost way of life and a lost course of pursuits" (qtd. in Robyn Wiegman 806). That Soyinka rejects négritude's idealization of the African past is significant within the aesthetics of utopianism. This is so because in a work that quest for a utopian future, the past must be reconstructed in such a way that the living seek to recapture the past in the future. But as Anyokwu observes "Soyinka" in this play "dramatizes man's proclivity to selectively 'edit' his past, turn a blind eye to the warts and welts of his ignoble past and choose to highlight the halcyon days instead" (121). Likewise, according to Glenn A. Odom, what is revealed in this play of Soyinka is that the future will continue to repeat the present" (207), and one might add "and the past." So while the "Jews thirsted for the lost kingdom of Isreal; the English, for the Saxon Golden Age; and the Chinese, for the Taoist Age of Perfect Virtue" (Starrs and Wright 98), what Soyinka posits with his poetic ruminations is that there is nothing glorious in the African past, and nothing euphoric about the present. For instance, the atrocities committed by the actors in the Court of Mata Kharibu eight centuries earlier are repeated by their reincarnated self under different circumstances in the present world. (Solomon Omatsola Azumurana)

 

To sum, we can say that ‘A Dance of the Forets’ id s a very interesting play that discusses the idea of dystopia. 

Thank you 

Works Cited

Azumurana, Solomon Omatsola. “Wole Soyinka's dystopian/utopian vision in A Dance of the Forests.” Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, vol. 51, 2014, http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0041-476X2014000200006. Accessed 10 February 2022.

“Dystopia Definition & Meaning.” Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dystopia. Accessed 10 February 2022.

Roux, Eddie. “Wole Soyinka – Facts - NobelPrize.org.” Nobel Prize, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1986/soyinka/facts/. Accessed 10 February 2022.