PRODUCT
Hello Father,
I heard news of the King’s death via cable. A relative sent it my way and I understood that your duty to the King is as important as my duty to you at this moment. I have plans to travel back home as soon as possible. My time in England has been… enlightening… in many ways. I have learned medicine, but four years here has given me enough time to learn and reflect on much more than that.
Though travelling right now may be dangerous, be sure that the risk won’t stop me from fulfilling my obligation to the greater culture. As for you, Father, I trust that your will has ensured that the ceremony has gone according to plan.
Olunde
Reflection:
This “unsent letter” from Olunde to his father was inspired by Olunde’s reaction to his Father’s death. As most of what the reader initially learns about Olunde is from an “outside” perspective (ie: from the perspective of Jane, Pilkings, with the help of guiding questions by Joseph in act one), we’re forced to take on a rather limited attitude towards Olunde and his situation. In this sense, what we learn about Olunde is funneled through colonial rhetoric and ideology before he gets to make a case for himself and tell his own story. In this sense, Olunde, as a character, functions eerily similarly to Wole Soyinka’s opening statements about the novel: In Death and the King’s Horseman’s preface, he states that this is not a text about “a battle of the cultures”, as that would be reductive and consequently paint the othered culture as uncivilized, old, mysterious, “backwards” etc., by comparison. Rather than perpetuating a legacy of cultures which are constantly at odds, which prefer an understanding in bianarisims, Soyinka’s aim is to use archival records as a basis which has the potential to accurately depict the historically othered culture represented. In doing this, though, one must acknowledge the legacy of colonialism for what it is: a systematic method which silences, filters, erases, and does violence. Even though Soyinka uses factual, archival accounts from the British Colonial Administration, he also acknowledges these sources shortcomings in a way which allows him to use his play as a medium to act against them. In this sense, this reminds me of Sadiya Hartman’s concept of Critical Fabulation, a term coined in her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts”. As foregrounding, this essay grapples with the inherent impossibility of finding space for black women’s agency in archival accounts of the transatlantic slave trade, given that the literature kept from this time period is reductive in the sense that it 1.) posits personhood as a tradable numerical value (ie: tax records, monetary value, identity as something to be “consumed” or commodified, in various ways) 2.) is written from the perspective of often white, or otherwise privileged, people: literature preserved in the archive therefore delimits actual people to the narrative perspective of the oppressor. Although this summary is incredibly brief for a 15 page essay, this gets to the core of why Hartman decides to use archival records to actively work against them via Critical Fabulation: by using factual accounts of oppression, in many cases written from the perspective of the oppressor, Hartman paints a picture of the lives previously silenced in a way which both illuminates what was lost, while simultaneously critiquing the restrictions the archives impose on actual human subjects:
“The intention here isn’t anything as miraculous as recovering the lives of the enslaved or redeeming the dead, but rather laboring to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible. This double gesture can be described as straining against the limits of the archive to write a cultural history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration.” (Hartman 11).
While Soyinka and Hartman’s work indisputably draws on different (How Hartman’s work has been adapted visually, for reference) cultural influences and situations, the creative acts which dismantle preceding rhetoric about culture works in a similar fashion. Going back to Soyinka’s preface, he states that “It is thanks to this kind of perverse mentality that I find it necessary to caution the would-be producer of this play against a sadly familiar reductionist tendency, and to direct his vision instead to the far more difficult and risky task of eliciting the play’s threnodic essence” (Soyinka n.p.). In this, Soyinka is explicitly rejecting the notion that this is a play about clashing cultures: rather, the emphasis should be placed on the play’s attention to death, longing, and commemoration, a phenomenon which all humans experience — what are we missing, or overlooking, in filtering dialogue through a preexisting cultural funnel which has implicit bias?
To go back to my own product, the fact that we’re missing a letter from Olunde (and a large portion of his perspective on his leaving his country) in the first place is, in a sense, exemplary of the kind of erasure that Hartman outlines in her work. Where colonial narratives are consistently privileged in the records & modes of thought we have acess to, the subsequent portrayal of “othered” individuality is hindered.
Works Cited
“Critical Fabulations.” MoMA, https://www.moma.org/calendar/galleries/5378
Hamer, Chloe. “Saidiya Hartman’s Critical Fabulation Can Help Inspire Today’s Activists”. StudyBreak. 2020. https://studybreaks.com/thoughts/critical-fabulation/
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1-14. ProQuest, http://libproxy.plymouth.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/venus-two-acts/docview/195789319/se-2?accountid=3778.
Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman. W. W. Norton & Company, 2002.
Sprockets and Springes 