The ritualistic giving of one's self up when the King dies is tradition. It is expected of the King's right hand man, his lead Horseman. The Yoruba look at this a s a natural part of life and a necessary part of their culture. The missionaries did not understand this a looked at the act as gruesome. For them, death is the end. For the Yoruba tribe, death is the beginning of something new and a way to keep close and remain one with the earth.
It was interesting the way the two sides viewed the ceremony. For the Yoruba, it was a time of celebration. Elesin became one with the earth and was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice and die just as his king died. The missionaries thought all of this was insane and ridiculed the Yoruba for their actions.
I wonder if we, as people, would ever give our lives up for something that was dear to us. Soldiers do it everyday. For Elesin and Olunde, there was no second thought. They had a meaningful and profound relationship with nature and strong beliefs in their religion. They made the ultimate sacrifice and committed ritual suicide, knowing that if they didn't, the communities future could be in shambles. What would you do?
6 comments:
I thought about that some too. Some people have such passion for things, but most of the time, we look at suicide as a negative thing and "nothing is worth dying for" I know that I look at suicide in a certain way because I've been so effected by it. I'm sure that this effects my view on the play differently than it would other who haven't had an experience with suicide or that level of passion.
I think that you make a good point when you talk about the missionaries looking at suicide as and end and the Yoruba looking at death as a beginning. I wonder how a member of the Yoruba tribe or people who grew up in that type of environment would look at this play. Would be as sad as it is for us?
I can understand about dieing for your faith. i mean it's like the ultimate test for what you believe in. But what i can't understand is suicide. Even ritual suicide. dying for what you believe in is one thing but killing yourself for it is entirely different. I've always been taught my life is not my own so, i shouldn't kill myself. God wants us to live for him, yes that does include putting your life on the line if necessary, not die. And for those who say what if god told you to do it, i wouldn't serve a god who would tell me to kill myself, and i don't.
to answer Meredith's question. I'd say that for a member of the Yoruba or someone who grew up in that culture I'm set in my ways because that's the way i grew up so i guess it stands to reason that for this person the upsetting thing would be the interruption of the ceremony by the missionaries instead of the ceremony itself.
Cetainly we react initially from our own conditioned frames of reference- whether we still adhere to or resist that world view. I see now that maybe the point of the opening scene is to not just make the Eurocentric audience feel the imperialistic isolation imposed on the Yorubans, but to show the real function- even beauty- in this idea that our loved ones are never truly gone, just looking over our shoulders, so to speak, in a way we Westerners have given up on.
I completely agree with Meredith. Our view of suicide is very narrow and incomplete when compared to the rest of the world. Right now, there are people killing themselves for their religion, but we would never condone such an act. We view this as uncivilized and unnecessary. But why? Is is because we have the technology and power to decide what is inappropriate and what is not? What about Jesus Christ? He knew he was going to die, and still went on living until the last moment, for his religious and spiritual beliefs. Religious and spiritual leaders have killed themselves in protest, and political activists have used their bodies as a weapon against injustice. What's the difference? I don't know, but I do know its not much different than joining the coveted ancestry of the Yoruba tradition.
This play made me think about suicide in a different way. It made me ask the question,"Are your beliefs so strong that you would die for them?" I think that sometimes people's beliefs can be worn like tee shirts, you wear it and believe in it on Sunday, but by Monday you have on a different shirt and you don't necessarily believe in the same thing you did the day before, making the idea of "dying for what you believe in" a very hard concept to grasp.
Ok, I know this is a kind of lengthy comment, and not really on the subject of sacrifice, but I want to address this theme of do the actions of the Yorubas make sense to us, and do we feel that their practice of ritual sacrifice in this play is right, wrong, or something we aren’t even qualified to judge. For me this conversation thread brings to mind the topic of culture shock. Even though I don’t think that was Wole Soyinka’s goal, I think that’s where we’ve headed. So, I feel compelled to offer a viewpoint from outside our somewhat snug academic setting –therefore, I asked my mom some questions that James's post and the subsequent comments raised for me.
You see, reading the Author's Note at the start of DEATH AND THE KING'S HORSEMAN, what really stood out to me was Soyinka's "caution to the would-be producer of this play." He wrote about how easily people immediately turned this play into one about a clash of cultures, which doesn't seem to have been his intent at all. He wanted to write an elegiac play about the concept of death as a transition. He even flat out said that “The Colonial Factor” was “a catalytic incident merely.” This is something I took into special consideration when doing my letter to the playwright assignment.
It is because I read and reread the playwright's preface to the play and thought so much about what it would take to present this play as something other than a clash of cultures play, that I am fascinated with the blog responses to this play focusing so intently on the way the colonists, in turn European audiences, viewed ritual suicide in the Yoruba society.
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Although, sadly, I remember very little about it, I spent my formative years (sic conception―1wk past my fourth birthday) living in South America. My parents were missionaries in Bolivia, and even though my dad was the minister of the only English-language congregation in Santa Cruz, he and my mother also both worked in education during their 5 years in country. Our family friends primarily included people working in healthcare and community development.
I asked my mother what some of the biggest cultural differences were, what caused the most ‘culture shock’, what the biggest challenges were in accepting the lifestyles of the people of Santa Cruz. She cited things like differences in the markets and the way you bought and prepared your food. As well as experiencing their “first (and probably the worst) ‘golpe de estado’ ―revolutionary take over of the government― just seventeen days after arriving.” One big challenge was trying to get licensed the new school they were opening―in Bolivia, you bribed someone if you wanted to expedite things; but Dad refused, and doing things the legal and legit way took way longer than the greased-palm way. But that was all small stuff―the things that were hardest to accept were “poverty, poor nutrition, and poor healthcare.”
In the interests of full disclosure, my mom also said that they (my parents and older sisters) didn’t experience as much of a sense of culture shock moving to Bolivia, as they did returning ‘home’ to the US five years later. Culture shock for me, also came when we moved to Louisville; life in the States is very different and I was freaked out by unfamiliar things. Like riding in the shopping cart at an indoor grocery, or those toilet seats like you see in public restrooms that aren't full ovals; the ones with the inexplicable gap in the front. Granted, my moving to the States with my American parents and siblings to help me adjust to a new country, is a far cry from the Colonial Brits moving, as adults, to Nigeria and living surrounded by people so different from themselves that they considered themselves superior and dismissed the native customs and traditions as primitive―unenlightened and barbaric.
I went on to ask my mom, in response to the comments I just read, what the single biggest challenge to her beliefs was, from the native customs and traditions, and how it framed her view of the indigenous people:
A Catholic priest friend of ours (also a missionary) said the Catholic church in Bolivia in the 1980’s was roughly where the church in Europe was roughly where the church in Europe was in the middle ages. There was a tremendous mixture of Christian beliefs and what we would call superstitions. Some of the “superstitions”―or lack of knowledge―also impacted lifestyles in terms of health and well-being…In general, people were not very knowledgeable about health care, especially preventative care and nutrition. That was hard to accept because so much of it could have been changed fairly easily.
However, I had to learn that I didn’t know everything either.
The thought of how indigenous peoples throughout history, professing to have converted to the faith of Missionaries, the Crusaders, or even just the Colonists, but retaining their own traditions and rituals, privately reminds of me of Pilkings’s interaction with Amusa, the way he blandished him for being superstitious about the Egungun costumes―cracking on him about wasn’t he supposed to be a good Muslim, so why should he fear the costumes.
This play is not about whether or not ritual suicide is ok, or whose standards that should be judged by. You could maybe say it’s about the Colonists learning that interfering with the order of the Yoruba society causes nothing but grief for all involved. But even that seems to miss the mark. This play is not about a guy killing himself and the white ghost man trying to stop him, this play is about a man fulfilling his obligations to his society. And leaving behind a family, a legacy to carry his name on so that he may join the honored ancestors. And wouldn’t you know, good old Pilkings, deciding he knows what s best for another man’s life, just had to go and muck it up for everybody.
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