As the story of Death and the King’s Horsemen is told a man must commit ritual suicide and the play goes through how people try to stop it and inevitably fail but it never talks about what was going on in the minds of the men completing the ritual, which is what I am going to talk about today.
When the play starts off Elesin who is the kings horseman is having a conversation with the Praise-Singer and it unknown at the time but as the story goes on we find out that the conversation that they are having is about Elesin committing ritual suicide. Ritual suicide is pretty common after the king dies, because he is supposed to provide guidance to the king in the afterlife. What I believe Elesin is thinking right now is that he must follow the king into the afterlife no matter the cost, and he is thinking about all the fun he will have on the other side. But as it gets closer to the end of the play people are trying to change his mind about killing himself, so at the end of act four they arrest him thinking that this will stop him from trying to kill himself, but it doesn’t and that is where we start today.
As of right now since he just got arrested Elesin maybe thinking why am I here? But he might also be thinking how did I get caught up in this mess? He could also be think, why didn’t I complete the ritual before they caught me and took me to prison? To answer the first question Elesin may be thinking that he is in prison, because they wanted to stop him from killing himself and that if he is in jail he can be monitored and have less time to kill himself. For question two towards the end of act 4 Pilkings demands that this guards arrest Elesin to stop the suicide from happening, and all this time Elesin is saying leave me alone and just let me be, but Pilkings won’t let him. As Elesin is trying to find a way out of this he looks to his son Olunde for guidance only to be shunned, because of what Elsein did in his past when Olunde gets sent away to England for work. For the last question I feel like at this point in the play Elesin is really upset with himself and with Pilkings and the guards because they arrested him before the ritual could be completed. I think Elesin and all the reader are thinking why didn’t he do the ritual before he got caught and I think one way we could answer that is by saying perhaps maybe for a spit second he was rethinking it even though he was already weak from starting the ritual, because I think if he was really going to go through with it before the end of the play that he would have done it in act 4 before Pilkings got to him and took him to prison.
In Act 5 we don’t hear much of anything from Olunde, until we find out that he killed himself for the sake of the ritual. But what I can say is at the end of act 4 when he sees Elesin, Olunde is probably thinking, what is he doing here? Isn’t he supposed to be dead already. But he could also be thinking who is this man and why is he talking to me? When Olunde sees Elesin at the end he is pretty shocked and just standing there frozen to the spot, so I’m assuming that he wasn’t expecting to see Elesin alive, because he had received information earlier on in the play that the king was dead and that Elesin was going to follow the king into the after life so Olunde came back to take the kings spot now that he thought both the king and Elesin were dead. I think the reason he may be thinking who is this man is because at the end of act 4 he says I have no father, eater of leftovers. I think here he is kind of shunning Elesin in a way saying you are not my father because you should have already been dead. Another reason he could have said I have no father might be because of the way Elesin treated him in the past when Olunde got sent to work for the Pilkings when he was younger and thought that no father would do that to his son, therefore Elesin is not his father because if he was he would have never let Olunde get sent away.
Since we don’t hear from Olunde in act 5, what I believe is going on in his head is that even though Elesin failed to complete the ritual on his side doesn’t mean that the ritual can’t be completed. So to please their culture Olunde decided to complete the ritual by killing himself off stage so that no one could interrupt it this time around. But when Elesin sees Olunde’s body laying there on the ground, his eyes are glued to the body, and he is probably thinking in this moment, oh my god I can’t believe that my son just killed himself and is so saddened by Olunde’s death that he decides to kill himself too. Immediately after he kills himself Pilkings tried to save him by resuscitating him, but Pilkings was unsuccessful and Elesin ended up dying with his son and going to the afterlife with him and the king.
Explanation
I decided to do a short story rewriting acts 4 and 5 about what was going on through the minds of Elesin and Olunde as they try to complete the ritual. I decided to do the short story because I felt like a lot of this was told from how the author decided to write it and didn’t really include what was going on in their minds as they were trying to figure out how to execute the ritual suicide. Another reason I decided to do a short story was because I’m not the best when it comes to writing essays, so I thought that if I rewrote one or two of the acts from the play that I could get out what I really wanted to happen in the play or what I thought was going on in certain acts of the play. I definitely think that they hit a lot of bumps in the road when it came to the suicide, like Elesin getting arrested and when Amuse tries to take Elesin in act 3 but the woman and the girls refuse to let him by, and says he will use force if they don’t let him take Elesin. Overall I think the play did a really good job of showcasing Elesin and Olunde’s characters but I just wished the author had incorporated what was going on in their minds during this play when it came to the ritual suicide, so that we mad more of an idea of what was going on in the play as a whole. I believe that my response to this literature matters because it makes everything come full circle when it comes to how to play came out and what should have been incorporated into the play to get a full understanding about the play and why Elesin and Olunde felt the need to kill themselves for the sake of what their culture believes in after a king dies. Another reason that I feel like my response is important is because it gives another dimension to the story that we didn’t have before when we were reading the play in class and because it gets people thinking about what Elesin and Olunde could have actually been thinking as the play goes on. One last reason why I think my response matters is because I think some people would have been left wondering why the play ended with both Elesin and Olunde killing themselves with no explanation as to why they both died, other than the fact that Olunde killed himself for the ritual and Elesin just killed himself because he saw Olunde’s dead body just sitting there and was so sad that he took his life for the ritual that Elesin thought he owed his son, so he killed himself to prove that he is a father and so he could be with his son in the afterlife. Overall I really liked this project and thought it gave me the creative freedom to go all out and come up with something that people might not have ever thought to write about, because there wasn’t a lot you could take from the play to rewrite the ending from Elesin and Olunde’s perspectives. But having said that I think I did a really good job trying to explain what was going on through their heads at the end of this play and can’t wait to see what people have to say about it.
Sprockets and Springes 