Lorna Hardwick, Carol Gillespie - Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds (2007)

CLASSICAL PRESENCES
General Editors
Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter
CLASSICAL PRESENCES
The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and
Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in
order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of
change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities,
old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear
on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the
classical past.
Classics in
Post-Colonial Worlds
Edited by
LOR NA H A R DW I C K A N D C A RO L G I L L E S P I E
1
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Preface
This volume grew out of a conference, Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds,

held at the Open University in the West Midlands Centre in Harborne,
Birmingham, in May 2004, organized by the Reception of Classical Texts
Research Project. We thank the following organizations for providing
the financial support that enabled the conference to include participants
from eleven countries and all career stages: The British Academy;
The Arts Faculty of the Open University; The Society for the Promotion
of Hellenic Studies; and the Open University’s Ferguson Centre for
Research into African and Asian Cultures, which also collaborated in
the organization of the conference. The Director of the Ferguson Centre,
Dr David Richards, also took on the role of discussant.
The Ferguson Centre carries the name of the family Trust of
the founding Dean of the Open University Arts Faculty, Professor
John Ferguson (1921–89). Before coming to the Open University,
where he was Dean and Director of Studies in Arts from 1969 to
1979, John Ferguson held academic posts at the Universities of
Newcastle and London (Queen Mary College) and was Professor of
Classics at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria 1956–66. Throughout
his life he worked for peace, conflict resolution and cross-cultural
understanding and dialogue through the medium of Classics. Many
of the issues that he opened up through his research and teaching
continued to be addressed in the debates at the conference.
The conference was a rewarding event marked by a high degree of
cross-disciplinary analysis and debate, both in the formal sessions and
between them. We thank all the conference participants for sharing their
expertise and energy, and the contributors to this collection for their
cooperation and patience during the preparation of the volume. We also
owe a great deal to our Open University colleague, and editorial assist-
ant, Jane Cawkwell, and to Hilary O’Shea of Oxford University Press for
her encouragement of the project. Special thanks also to Nic Williams,
the production editor; Helen Reagan, the proof reader; Jeannie Labno,
the copyeditor; and to Isobel McLean who prepared the index.
Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie
Milton Keynes, December 2006.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
List of Illustrations x
List of Contributors xi
Introduction 1
Lorna Hardwick
PART I: CASE STUDIES

1. Trojan Women in Yorubaland: Femi
Osofisan’s Women of Owu 15
Felix Budelmann
2. Antigone’s Boat: the Colonial and the Postcolonial
in Tegonni: An African Antigone by Femi Osofisan 40
Barbara Goff
3. Antigone and her African Sisters: West African
Versions of a Greek Original 54
James Gibbs
4. Cross-Cultural Bonds Between Ancient Greece and
Africa: Implications for Contemporary Staging Practices 72
John Djisenu
5. The Curse of the Canon: Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not
To Blame 86
Michael Simpson
6. Post-Apartheid Electra: In the City of Paradise 102
Elke Steinmeyer
7. Sculpture at Heroes’ Acre, Harare, Zimbabwe:
Classical Influences? 119
Jessie Maritz
PART II: ENCOUNTER AND NEW TRADITIONS

8. Perspectives on Post-Colonialism in South Africa:
the Voortrekker Monument’s Classical Heritage 141
Richard Evans
viii Contents
9. Imperial Reflections: The Post-Colonial
Verse-Novel as Post-Epic 157
Katharine Burkitt
10. A Divided Child, or Derek Walcott’s
Post-Colonial Philology 170
Cashman Kerr Prince
11. Arriving Backwards: the Return of The Odyssey
in the English-Speaking Caribbean 192
Emily Greenwood
12. ‘If You are a Woman’: Theatrical Womanizing
in Sophocles’ Antigone and Fugard, Kani,
and Ntshona’s The Island 211
Rush Rehm
13. Finding a Post-Colonial Voice for Antigone:
Seamus Heaney’s Burial at Thebes 228
Stephen E. Wilmer
PART I I I : C H A L L E N G I N G T H E O RY: F R A M I N G
FURTHER QUESTIONS
14. ‘The Same Kind of Smile?’ About the ‘Use and Abuse’ 245
of Theory in Constructing the Classical Tradition
Freddy Decreus
15. From the Peloponnesian War to the Iraq War:
a Post-Liberal Reading of Greek Tragedy 265
Michiel Leezenberg
16. Western Classics, Indian Classics: Postcolonial
Contestations 286
Harish Trivedi
17. Shades of Multi-Lingualism and Multi-Vocalism
in Modern Performances of Greek Tragedy in
Post-Colonial Contexts 305
Lorna Hardwick
Contents ix
18. The Empire Never Ended 329
Ika Willis
19. Another Architecture 349
David Richards
Bibliography 364
Index 411
List of Illustrations
Cover picture: Mo Sesay, Golda John and Nick Oshikanlu in Ola

Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To blame (Arcola Theatre, London, 2005).
Directed by Femi Elufowoju, Jr. Photograph: Marilyn Kingwill/Arena-
PAL
Figs 7.1–7.4 Four panels from the monument at
Heroe’s Acre, Zimbabwe. Photographs: Jessie Maritz
Fig. 7.1 Oppression 124
Fig. 7.2 Politicizing 125
Fig. 7.3 Armed Struggle 126
Fig. 7.4 Ceasefire 127
Fig. 8.1 Enclosure of the Voortrekker Monument.
Photograph: Richard Evans. 144
List of Contributors
Felix Budelmann is Lecturer in Classical Studies at the Open Uni-

versity, Milton Keynes. His main research interests are Greek litera-
ture and its reception, in particular tragedy and lyric. He is currently
working on an edition with commentary of a selection from Greek
lyric, and on a project about the Anacreontic tradition. He is also
editor of the review section of the Journal of Hellenic Studies.
Katharine Burkitt recently completed a PhD in the School of English,
Sociology, Politics and Contemporary History at the University of
Salford. Her doctoral studies explored the form of the contemporary
postcolonial verse-novel and the way in which epic is revised and
politicized. Her research interests include postcolonial literature and
theory, contemporary poetry, black British writing, and cultural theory.
Freddy Decreus is a Classical philologist, specializing in the reception
of Classical Antiquity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
He works at the University of Ghent, where he is responsible for
courses in Latin Literature, Literary Theory, Comparative Literature,
and Theatre History. His publications have addressed classical tragedy
and the modern stage, mythology and modern painting, postmod-
ernism and the rewriting of the classics, and feminism and the classics.
John Djisenu is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts,
University of Ghana, and the Manager of the Efua T. Sutherland
Drama Studio, the main performing arts centre of the university. He
lectures in theatre history, as well as technical theatre and design. He
has produced, or been involved in, nearly thirty productions, and has
published articles in The Journal of Modern African Studies, Legon
Journal of Humanities, MATATU: Journal of African Culture and
Society, and Journal of Performing Arts, Legon.
Richard Evans is Lecturer in Ancient History in the School of
History and Archaeology at Cardiff University, and until 2005 taught
at the University of South Africa in Pretoria, RSA. His main interests
are in Roman republican history and Hellenistic Sicily and he is the
xii List of Contributors
author of Gaius Marius: A Political Biography (1994) and Questioning
Reputations: Essays on Nine Roman Republican Politicians (2003).
A monography entitled Syracuse in Antiquity: History and Topography
is forthcoming (2007).
James Gibbs has worked in the Ministry of Education, Khartoum,
Sudan, and he taught at the universities of Ghana, Malawi, Ibadan,
and Liège before joining the staff of the University of the West
of England. He has published extensively on African literature in
English, particularly drama, and that produced in the African coun-
tries in which he has worked. He has edited journals and collections
of essays, was consultant for a Channel 4 Bandung Productions
programme on Wole Soyinka (1987), and has worked with pub-
lishers of African literature in a variety of capacities. His current
projects include the collection and publication of essays on Wole
Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright in whose work he has taken a
particular interest.
Barbara Goff is Reader in Classics at the University of Reading,
England. She has published extensively on Greek tragedy and its
reception, and is the editor of Classics and Colonialism (London:
Duckworth, 2005).
Emily Greenwood is Lecturer in Greek in the School of Classics,
University of St. Andrews. Her interests are in the areas of the
reception of classics in the Caribbean; translation studies and Clas-
sics; classics and comparative literature. She is currently working on a
book manuscript, with the provisional title: Afro-Greeks: Receiving
Classics in the Caribbean (1870–1990).
Lorna Hardwick teaches at the Open University, UK, where she is
Professor of Classical Studies and Director of the Reception of
Classical Texts Research Project. She is currently working on the
relationship between the reception of classical texts and broader
cultural shifts.
Michiel Leezenberg teaches in the Department of Philosophy and
the M.A. program Islam in the Modern World at the University of
Amsterdam. In the the 1990s, he conducted extensive field research in
the Middle East, especially Iraqi Kurdistan. Among his book publications
List of Contributors xiii
are Contexts of Metaphor (2001), an award winning history of Islamic
philosophy, and, most recently, The Curse of Oedipus: Language, Democ-
racy and Conflict in Greek Tragedy (in Dutch).
Jessie Maritz is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Religious
Studies, Classics and Philosophy at the University of Zimbabwe.
A Fellowship from the Onassis Foundation in 2004 and a Research
Fellowship from the Centre of African Studies, University of Cam-
bridge in 2006–07, have made her current research projects possible:
she is currently researching representations of Africa and Africans in
Europe’s classical art.
Cashman Kerr Prince is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of
Classics at the University of Southern California. He is trained in
Classics and in Comparative Literature, holding degrees from Wesleyan
and Stanford Universities, as well as the Université de Paris 8. He works
on early Greek poetry, including didactic, larger questions of Greek
poetics, and the reception of Classical texts primarily in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries
Rush Rehm is Professor of Drama and Classics at Stanford University.
He has written extensively on Greek tragedy, including The Play of
Space: Spatial Ttransformation in Greek Tragedy (Princeton, 2002), and
Radical Theatre: Greek Tragedy and the Modern World (Duckworth
2003). He has contributed essays to Fiona Macintosh et al. (ed.),
Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004 (OUP, 2006) and to
Marianne McDonald and Michael Walton (ed.), Cambridge Compan-
ion to Greek and Roman Theatre (CUP, 2007). He also directs and acts
professionally, and is Artistic Director of Stanford Summer Theater.
David Richards is Professor of English and Director of the Centre
of Commonwealth Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland.
From 2002 to 2006 he was Director of the Ferguson Centre for African
and Asian Studies at The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK.
Professor Richards’ research interests are in the areas of literature,
anthropology, art history and cultural theory, and the material, visual,
creative, and performative dimensions of colonial and post-colonial
cultures. He is currently completing a monograph on the cultural
history of the archaic, which examines the role of anthropology and
xiv List of Contributors
(more centrally) archaeology in modernism and post-colonialism
over the period from 1875 to the present.
Michael Simpson is Lecturer in English at the Department of English
and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of
London, England. His research interests span Romanticism, classi-
cism, and post-colonialism. He has published critical work across the
broad field of Romantic literary culture, on drama and theatre,
poetry and the novel. His interest in the Graeco-Roman Classics
lies particularly in how they have been adapted within postcolonial
and especially African, Afro-Caribbean, and African-American lit-
eratures and theatres.
Elke Steinmeyer is Lecturer in the Classics Programme at the Uni-
versity of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. She obtained her
Staatsexamen in Greek and Latin at the Freie Universität Berlin,
Germany. In 1995 and 1996, she worked as a Foreign Expert for
Classics at the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilisations
(IHAC) in Changchun, People’s Republic of China. Her main areas
of research are Greek Tragedy and Reception Studies. The chapter on
Mark Fleishman is part of her PhD thesis on the reception of the
Electra myth after 1970.
Harish Trivedi is Professor of English at the University of Delhi and
has been Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and the
University of London. He is the author of Colonial Transactions:
English Literature and India (Calcutta, 1993; Manchester, 1995), and
has co-edited Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800–1990
(London, 2000), Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice
(London, 1999), and Interrogating Post-colonialism: Theory, Text and
Context (Shimla, 1996; reprint 2000). He has translated from Hindi
Premchand: His Life and Times (Delhi, 1982; reprint 1991), and co-
edited a special issue with ‘Focus on Translation’ of the postcolonial
journal Wasafiri (London, Winter 2003).
Steve Wilmer is Associate Professor at the Deparment of Drama,
Trinity College Dublin. Steve is also a playwright and his plays have
been produced at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Lincoln Centre, the
Body Politic in Chicago, the Roundhouse, ICA and Cockpit theatres in
London, the Project Arts Centre in Dublin, and toured in various
List of Contributors xv
countries. His play Scenes from Soweto was published in Best Short Plays
of 1979, and has been translated into several languages. Current projects
include a monograph on the development of national theatres in
emerging nations in Europe and editing collections of essays on Native
American Performance and Representation, the formation and devel-
opment of National Theatre Companies in Europe and the represen-
tation of women in ancient Greek drama. Has published numerous
articles in journals and books and is contributing to a new history of
German theatre to be published by Cambridge University Press.
Ika Willis is Lecturer in Reception in the Department of Classics
and Ancient History, Bristol University. She works in the field
of textuality and reception, and is particularly interested in the idea
of the archive, and in the impact of phonographic and photographic
technologies on philosophies of writing, reading, and reception.
She also writes on fan fiction (particularly slash) and the erotics of
rewriting. She is currently working on a book based on her doctoral
dissertation, provisionally entitled Fama in Printing House Square.
Introduction
Lorna Hardwick
In March 2005 the Fellows of the Africa Leadership Initiative

discussed Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone as rewritten by Jean Anouilh
in the context of the occupation of France by the Nazis during the
Second World War. Some supported Creon’s actions on the grounds
that all must live within the law. Others judged that Antigone was
justiWed because the law was unsound. Most found correspondences
with and implications for the situation of their own countries.1 The
occasion highlights many aspects of the paradoxical interaction
between classical texts and post-colonial situations. Are classicists
justiWed in pointing to the importance of the Sophocles’ text for
debates about how rulers should think and act?2 Or should they
shudder at yet another possible example of cultural imperialism
with invocation of the authority of classical material in order to
shape the development of independent nations? And what changes
in perceptions of the ancient world, its ideologies and its writing and
artefacts are created and embedded by contemporary activities that
explore, interpret and translate them into other languages and cultures?
Such issues were central to the conference on Classics in Post-
Colonial Worlds held in Birmingham in 2004 and were further compli-
cated by the ‘industry’ of post-colonial and post-colonial studies (well
summarized in GoV 2005: 1–24). Post-colonial studies has provided
1 Summarized in the report ‘The Promise of Leadership’ (Africa Leadership

Initiative 2005).
2 See for example Nelson Mandela’s reXections on the importance of the play in
his own political development (Mandela 1994: 540–41).
2 Introduction
many of the concepts and theories that enable discussions to take place
across disciplines and yet has also been accused of being another form of
the West’s ‘will to power’ (Ahmad 1992 passim; Azim 2001: 243–47).
Most conference participants were uneasy about the existing concepts
and academic discourses available to them in discussing the central
issues of how, why, and with what eVect writers, theatre practitioners,
poets, thinkers, sculptors, and architects used, abused, rewrote, and
adapted the texts and images of ancient Greece and Rome in the cultural
and political contexts of a supposedly post-colonial world. One aim of
the conference was to develop case studies that would bring together
classicists’ scholarly traditions of working closely with texts and contexts
and the perceived need for post-colonial analysis to avoid overarching
generalizations and theories. Post-colonial critics themselves have
pointed out how such generalizations suppress the speciWcity of
particular national and cultural histories, and the distinctiveness of
individual writers and artists (Boehmer 1995; Walder 1998).
Yet there was also a sense that it was necessary to avoid an
uncritical sense of relief that classical texts have in recent years been
recognized as a source of resistance and liberation as well as, or even
rather than, suppression (see Flashar 1991 for information on the
popularity of performances of Antigone in Nazi Germany, and
Hardwick 2000 for examples of the interventionist role of classical
texts in the second half of the twentieth century). Much debate
therefore centred on the paradoxical situation of classical texts,
especially on the diverse ways that they have migrated and been
transmitted worldwide, and the variations in how they have been
received and reused. Mapping the journeys reveals how perceptions
of, and attitudes to, the ancient world and its genealogies have been
transformed. The process also opens up new questions about the
nature and trajectories of cultural activity in post-colonial contexts.
For example, a test can be banned or censored in one context and
regarded as canonical in another, as was the case with Athol Fugard’s
play The Island, which was considered subversive by the apartheid
regime in South Africa, and too politically sensitive to receive Arts
Council funding in the North of Ireland (Deane 2002: 161). Yet it
subsequently achieved international canonical status.
The preponderance of discussion of drama, and especially of
Greek drama, is a feature and reXects the importance of this art
Introduction 3
form in recent cultural politics. As the Irish dramatist Frank
McGuinness commented: ‘It seems to be happening through the
English-speaking world, that the Greeks are emerging as the domin-
ant international force in our theatre. . . . The strong meat is the diet
they want to feed on’ (Long 2002:280). Nevertheless, a number of
essays also take up the impact of Roman art and architecture and the
increasing resonance of Roman ideas and imperial practices in mod-
ern geo-politics. This last is a phenomenon that echoes Virgil’s
exploration of such themes in the Aeneid (Armstrong 2006).
Because of the conference’s emphasis on the documentation and
analysis of practices and its conviction that practice runs ahead of
theory, there is no section of the book that is exclusively devoted to a
discussion of the ‘great names’ of post-colonial theory and criticism.
The names of Homi Bhabha, Franz Fanon, Paul Gilroy, Ngugi wa
Thiong’o, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and others, appear in the
footnotes and Bibliography, and sometimes their particular insights
are directly discussed. Sometimes ancient and modern coalesce in
unexpected ways; for example, Said (1978, 1993) and Virgil (the Ae-
neid) both make the association between imperial power and the
shaping and dissemination of culture.
The conference was sensitive to the nuances of the terms ‘colonial’,
‘post-colonial’, and their variants. In particular, the terms were used in
their widest sense to include domination and emancipation through
educational, ideological, cultural, and economic means, as well as
through physical force. We were also very aware (not least because of
the practices of the Roman Empire) that imperial power almost always
operates with the complicity or active participation of élites among the
colonized and that the continuing role of these élites after independence
raises special problems. A further major issue was that transitions
from colonial to post-colonial are processes not events (whether or
not marked by ‘independence’ ceremonies) and that post-colonial
activity—emotional, intellectual, psychological, artistic, and political—
takes place when there may still be physical and material repression, and
vice versa (see further Hardwick 2004a: 219–22). The debates also needed
to address questions of neocolonial activity in the contexts of the
geo-politics of the early twenty Wrst century (see Wilmer in this volume).
Even the inscription of the words ‘post-colonialism’ carries its own
problems. Some critics argue that the inclusion of the hyphen implies
4 Introduction
a material historicist closure to the practices, experiences, and insti-
tutions of colonialism, and that such an abrupt and all-embracing
transition cannot be justiWed by the evidence (for the idea of ‘con-
tinual’ colonialism see Rehm in this volume). Theorists also like
to distinguish between the material condition of post-colonialism
(whether or not this is regarded as an event or a process) and the
conceptual categorizations involved; for these they prefer to use the
unhyphenated postcolonial. In this book we have imposed no hard
and fast rule, and contributors have used the terms as they wish. The
use of the hyphen can embrace both event and process; the omission
of the hyphen signals conceptual use. Some authors use both within
the same essay, according to context and meaning (Richards, for
example). There is also a slipperiness in the use of the words ‘classics’
and ‘classical’. The word ‘classics’ focuses attention on the practices
and values of scholarship, including education. The word ‘classical’ is
more Xexible and, depending on context, refers to the history and
culture of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the history of Sanskrit
in the culture of India, or (most ambivalently of all) to the idea of
the classic and the canonical status given to the Graeco-Roman or the
Sanskrit (see Lianeri and Zajko 2008).
The structure of the book reXects the main strands of discussion
in the 2004 conference, and especially our sense that the ongoing
debates have to be based on substance that is informed by case
studies that document and analyse in detail the evidence from mod-
ern literary, theatrical, and artistic practice, situating it aesthetically,
and also contextualizing it, in its colonial and postcolonial histories.
Of course, no case study is judgmentally or ideologically neutral and
authors make their own perspectives clear, either when they intro-
duce and frame their enquiries or in the course of their discussions.
Their perspectives are diverse and express a sometimes complex
interaction between cultural background, academic training, profes-
sional practice and experience, ideology, and aspiration. The Welds of
reference and bibliographical citations in individual essays also
reXect the growth curves and scope of key works in relation to
diVerent questions, areas, and time frames.
The Wrst part of the book is devoted to detailed examination of a
series of examples from diVerent parts of Africa, including some
created in Africa and some in the African diaspora. The second
Introduction 5
part widens the framework, using case studies and comparative
analysis to review the conventional categories of time, genre, and
place as elements in critical judgement. Essays also examine diVerent
conceptions of colonial and post-colonial and how they are perceived
and expressed. This part also introduces the perspectives and con-
texts of the neocolonial and their inXuence on recent and current
analysis. The third part of the book includes essays that take a
broader view and problematize some of the theoretical standpoints
in the Weld. The aim of this Wnal part is to situate both the empir-
ical and theoretical aspects of concepts of the classical and the
post-colonial in wider and diVerent contexts, and to point towards
some areas of future research.
Part 1 begins with Felix Budelmann’s study of the Nigerian play-
wright Femi OsoWsan 2004 play Women of Owu, an adaptation of
Euripides’ Trojan Women. The essay not only publishes new research
and documentation of the world première of the play and its subse-
quent tour, it also identiWes crucial problems and implications for
the whole area of intersections between the classical and the post-
colonial. Budelmann’s academic practice is based on close textual
analysis of ancient and modern, and the piece exempliWes how
treatment of form and tone can be integrated with that of historical
and social context, especially in the overarching theme of theatrical
presentation of an aggressive war, its gendered aspects, and its impli-
cations for a community. Budelmann also raises questions about
how theatre audiences might react to this blend of diVerent tradi-
tions and places the discussion in the broader interdisciplinary
conversation between classical and post-colonial studies, raising
some issues about the problems attached to the use of critical con-
cepts such as hybridity.
This is followed by Barbara GoV ’s analysis of another important
play by OsoWsan, Tegonni: An African Antigone. GoV ’s discussion
relates the play to speciWc issues in postcolonial classical theatre and
explores the paradoxical relationship between the conditions that
created the possibility of African rewritings and those that may in
turn subvert the eVects. She identiWes reasons for the popularity of
Antigone in African rewritings and analyses its double-edged poten-
tial for application to African contexts and not just those of imperial
subjection. GoV examines ways in which the Wgure of Antigone can
6 Introduction
straddle myth and history and allow metatheatrical dimensions to
emerge. These are sometimes unexpected, as in OsoWsan play with its
exploration of diVerent forms of colonialism and its theatrical pre-
sentation of Antigone’s arrival, not from ancient Greece via
imperial Britain, but on the boat of the Yoruba water goddess.
James Gibbs contributes a chapter based on his long experience of
living and working in Africa. The focus of his discussion is prompted
by theatre in Ghana, and the material has an additional importance
outside the Weld of Classics in that it will go some way to compensate
for the lack of publication of a theatrical record in Ghana. Gibbs maps
the interaction between the varied and complex indigenous perform-
ance traditions of West Africa and the genres and styles imported from
Europe. He discusses the impact of Caribbean and Black Atlantic
cultural traYc on rewritings of Antigone, notably Kamau Brathwaite’s
Odale’s Choice and also Morisseau Leroy’s Antigone in Haiti, an
example of multiple translation. Gibbs challenges both ‘isolationist’
and ‘conspiracy’ theories of African encounters with Greek plays,
emphasizing the varied interactions in diVerent performance tradi-
tions in West Africa. He also discusses the educational contexts,
including a production of Anouilh’s Antigone, as a prompt to debate
about leadership. He comments on the importance of the African
diaspora in giving a political edge to rewritings and argues that African
encounters with Greek drama have been liberating.
John Djisenu’s essay is in dialogue with that of Gibbs. From an
analysis of elements that are common, or at least comparable, in
Greek and African theatre and culture, Djisenu argues that, to achieve
a cross-cultural dialogue in theatre, it is necessary to recontextualize
those aspects of drama that Greeks and Africans share. His emphasis is
on contemporary staging practices, since it is through these that myth
is made contemporary and engages audiences.
Michael Simpson shifts the focus to Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not
To Blame, a play that has become canonical in European and American
theatre as well as African theatre. Simpson takes the ante-text, Sopho-
cles’ Oedipus Tyrannos, as a model for how cultures work and con-
siders how the Rotimi rewriting may be regarded as an example of
canonical counter-discourse, especially in the way that it negotiates its
independence from the European canon. Using the psychoanalytical
model developed by Fanon, Simpson examines the variants in the
Introduction 7
models of destiny that underlie the play and suggests that in various
postcolonial contexts the play enables a formal and cultural self-
consciousness that is not necessarily suYcient to outXank the contra-
dictions that produce it.
Elke Steinmeyer moves the discussion to South Africa. The impact
of Greek drama as protest under the apartheid regime has been well
documented, but Steinmeyer considers its continuing impact in the
new South Africa, in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission. She examines the continuing importance of workshop
theatre as means of individual and community transformation, and
discusses the particular methodological issues raised in the reconstruc-
tion of workshop performances for scholarly analysis. She addresses
the continuing Xuidity of myth in modern contexts and argues that
free versions of Greek plays have potential to critique easy assumptions
about the relationship between Truth and Reconciliation.
In the Wnal essay in the Wrst part, Jessie Maritz moves to another
African context and focuses on material culture, using both Greek
and Roman analogues in her discussion of the sculpture at Heroes’
Acre in Zimbabwe. She compares the formal and thematic aspects of
the continuous narrative of the Second Chimurenga (the struggle for
freedom and independence from colonial rule) with those of classical
public sculpture. Her analysis of technique, material, and form,
draws on the Ara Pacis and Trajan’s Column but she also considers
comparative examples from ancient and modern sculpture that sub-
vert a simple ‘classical inXuence’ model. In particular, she addresses
the relationship between Heroes’ Acre and the two thousand year old
tradition of Korean public sculpture, as well as the monument to
the People’s Heroes on Tiananmen Square in China, thus opening
up further questions about patterns of migration of thematic and
stylistic aYnities in public sculpture.
The essays in the second part take further the cross-cultural and
interdisciplinary approaches raised in the case studies of the Wrst
part. Richard Evans continues the examination of material culture in
his study of the Voortrekker Monument in South Africa. He shows
how the history of its design and creation, maps the multi-faceted
history of colonialism in South Africa and considers and problem-
atizes how the monument, and its Pretoria counterpart the Union
Building, draw on Greek and Roman models, including the
8 Introduction
Parthenon Sculptures, Trajan’s Column, and the Mausoleum at
Halicarnassus. The Voortrekker Monument can variously be ‘read’
as an emblem of liberation struggle (Boers against British), as an
expression of the ideology of apartheid, as a transmission of fascist
symbolism, and as a statement of the new South Africa’s openness to
its own histories. In comparing the two sites, Evans develops the view
that the British Empire claimed to inherit the mantle of Roman
Imperialism and Greek democracy by expressing them in the Union
Building, while the Voortrekker Monument has a postcolonial energy
in its desire for self-expression and its communication of a shaping
event in the cultural memory.
The next three essays examine diVerent aspects of genre with an
emphasis on writers in the Caribbean and its diaspora. Katharine
Burkitt takes up the relationship between history and mythology in
the postcolonial verse-novel and argues that Derek Walcott’s Omeros
and Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe represent a post-epic
that sits on the cusp on the genres of poem, novel, and epic. Cashman
Kerr Prince explores Walcott’s intertextuality in his use of classical
literature, situating Walcott’s poetic praxis in a postcolonial context.
Focusing on Walcott’s early work, Kerr Prince argues that Walcott
both draws on and overcomes the fragmentation inherent in the
psychic anxiety provoked by the postcolonial condition. Emily
Greenwood explores readings and counter-readings of the Odyssey
in the modern Caribbean. She starts with J. A. Froude’s metaphorical
appropriations and then moves to discussion of C. L. R. James and
Derek Walcott, arguing that mythological imagination can constitute
a form of knowledge that counters that of the imperial imagination
in colonial literature. She reXects on Wilson Harris’ references to the
‘epic strategems available to Caribbean man in the dilemmas of
history’ and explores the counter-intuitive idea of ‘arriving in a
tradition’ that reorders ethnographic movements and thus sees past
traditions as unWnished and carrying into the future. In this model,
the Odyssey represents a process in which there is no going back and
in which Homer too has undergone a change-inducing journey.
Rush Rehm’s essay discusses another postcolonial text that has in
its turn become part of the western canon, Athol Fugard’s The Island.
Rehm approaches the play via questions about the representation of
women. He anchors his discussion in the text of Sophocles’ Antigone
Introduction 9
and in so doing he sheds light on why Sophocles is so frequently the
author of choice, not only for post-colonial theatre but also for
rewritings, in what Rehm argues are continually colonial contexts.
He shows how in The Island Winston enters a Sophoclean world in
which political resistance and theatrical womanizing are inextricably
linked, and where political struggle has to engage with, and include,
what seems weakest, precisely in order to test its convictions and
strength.
The themes of the continually colonial and the neocolonial are also
prominent in Stephen Wilmer’s discussion of Seamus Heaney’s
Burial at Thebes. Wilmer situates his discussion in the context of
what he regards as the ‘modern McCarthyism’ involved in the sup-
pression by the Government of the United States of the academic
investigation of post-colonialism. He argues that Heaney’s language
in the play relates both to the history of British colonial oppression in
Ireland and to the contemporary neocolonialist actions of the USA
and its allies in Iraq. Wilmer combines close textual and rhythmic
analysis with discussion of the primary sources relating to the com-
missioning and production of Heaney’s play in 2004 to mark the
centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. He suggests that the play
takes up the postcolonial trope of gender politics as an analogy for
geo-political developments.
The third part of the book contains essays that challenge and
dispute some of the current ways of conceptualizing and connecting
classical and postcolonial. Freddy Decreus take a sometimes wry look
at the intellectual infrastructure of concepts of the postcolonial. He
locates these in the polarities between postmodernism and western
humanism but shows how the history and aspirations of post-
colonial approaches actually challenge both systems of thought. In
particular, he investigates the impact of ancient non-western prede-
cessors of the paradigm of tragedy (such as Gilagamesh) and modern
non-western concepts and practices brought into productions of
tragedy from Buddhist and Taoist traditions. Decreus suggests that
postcolonial analysis is part of a general politics of resistance that
challenges closure in the western mind and can enable the previously
colonized ‘Other’ to turn the tables, transposing the western self into
a psychoanalytically repressed ‘Other’. In an approach that both
converges with, and diverges from, that of Decreus, Michiel Leezenberg’s
10 Introduction
essay presents a sometimes iconoclastic challenge to the appropriation of
Greek tragedy for liberal and humanist purposes, and especially for a self-
righteous reassertion of western values. He presents a model of Greek
tragedy as an art form that disengages from aYrmation of democratic
principles or contexts but instead tests to the limits, questioning rather
than aYrming the conventional wisdoms.
Like Decreus, Harish Trivedi situates postcolonial discussion in
modern critical contexts. His essay contests any assumption that
there is a seamless progression from colonial to postcolonial, either
in terms of historical experience or in psychological or intellectual
perception. Trivedi adds a further dimension of critical distance to
the debates, not only by examining the assumptions that classical
texts are originary, foundational, and essential, but by doing so in the
context of Indian culture and its classical (Sanskrit) tradition. He
shows how India provides a contrast with other imperial uses of
Greek and Roman texts and values, and probes the reasons for this,
exploring how the Indian classics and Sanskrit heritage provided a
counter-imperial cultural genealogy and also fed, sometimes para-
doxically, into modern popular culture in India.
Lorna Hardwick’s essay takes as its focus the impact of multi-
lingual productions of Greek drama in modern theatrical contexts,
including community theatre. She examines the status of English as
an imperial language; as a language of cross-cultural communication
that has also been the vehicle for dissent and liberation; and as a
language that was historically subaltern and, in terms of its function
as a language of translation for classical texts, might be said to be
continually so. Hardwick uses examples of theatrical, poetic, and
community practice as a check against totalizing theory. She cautions
against assimilating all examples of multi-lingual productions into
one kind of post-colonial ‘moment’ and suggests that examination of
diVerent kinds of linguistic ‘braiding’ in translations, and in the
staging of classical plays, provides an insight into the processes of
engagement between and within cultures. These processes cross and
reformulate social and cultural boundaries and groupings in the
societies of colonizers and colonized alike.
Ika Willis’ essay identiWes an area for future research. She analyses
the use of the Roman Empire as a metaphor or analogy for global
sovereignty and compares the ways in which imperial sovereignty
Introduction 11
was conceptualized in Latin literature with modern global formula-
tions. She discusses how modes of historicization of the Roman
Empire have made it synonymous with history itself and develops
an analogy with the trans-temporal force of modern telecommuni-
cations technology, against which all resistance might be equally
impossible.
The concluding essay to the volume is contributed by David
Richards. He examines issues of ‘beginnings’ in the narrative founda-
tions of the physical environment and probes its incompatibility with
postcolonial intellectual architecture. He uses this as a basis for his
discussion of temporal uncoupling, which enables present models to
be situated in the past, and vice versa. Richards uses Christopher
Okigbo’s labyrinth as a metaphor for the productive incongruity of
the openness to new experience, which is the deWning feature of the
encounter between the classical and the post-colonial, and argues that
this encounter enables classical and post-colonial to jointly challenge
the conventional architecture of historical progress. Richard’s argu-
ment thus generalizes out from the impact of the detailed case studies
of the Wrst section and then returns to key examples which are
scrutinized through new lenses that are sensitive to the themes of
temporal and genre disjunction that emerged in the second part.
Taken as a whole, the essays in this book are part of an extended
conversation. They show how the engagement between classical and
post-colonial texts and contexts is a crucial part of the dynamic of
modern creative practice. They show how creative practices remake
and sometimes transform conceptions of the ancient texts. They also
mark the signiWcant impact that has been made on the concepts of
post-colonial and post-colonial by their encounter with classical texts
and material culture. There is much research still to be done on
the role of classical texts in modern cultural shifts. We hope that
this book demonstrates how the intersection between classical and
post-colonial is part of that wider picture.
Lorna Hardwick, Milton Keynes, December 2006.
Part I
Case Studies
1
Trojan Women in Yorubaland: Femi
OsoWsan Women of Owu1
Felix Budelmann
This chapter is devoted to Women of Owu, a new adaptation of

Euripides’ Trojan Women by the Nigerian playwright Femi OsoWsan,
in a production by the US-Nigerian director Chuck Mike. The play
premièred in Chipping Norton in rural Oxfordshire in February
2004, and then toured across England and Scotland, including Lon-
don’s Oval House Theatre.2 Since then, OsoWsan himself appears to
have produced and directed it in a poorly funded semi-staged stu-
dent performance in Ibadan.3 Women of Owu is the latest of a
1 I am grateful to Pantelis Michelakis, the editors, and the anonymous readers for
helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
2 I saw the play twice, on 4 February in Chipping Norton and on 6 March at the
Oval House Theatre. A video recording of one of the Oval House performances is
deposited in the Theatre Museum in London. On the history of the commission see
n. 21 below. At the time of writing this chapter, OsoWsan was still in the process of
preparing the text for publication. I am grateful to him for showing me a working
script and letting me quote from it, and to the good services of Sola Adeyemi in this.
There may therefore be discrepancies from the eventually published text. In the
absence of verse and page numbers, I quote by scene numbers (I–V). In addition,
I draw on the programme notes, as well as an email response from Femi OsoWsan
(7 July 2004) and notes from a conversation with Chuck Mike (London, 13 May
2004). I would like to record my thanks to both of them for being generous with their
time. [Since preparing this chapter for publication, University Press, Ibadan, has
published the play in 2006. The volume is currently available from Amazon.]
3 According to a review in the Nigerian Daily Sun of 23 March 2005, at http://www.
sunnewsonline.com/webpages/features/arts/2005/Mar/23/arts-23–03–2005–003.htm (last ac-
cessed December 2005). I have not been able to Wnd further information on this production.
16 Case Studies
number of West African plays using material from Greek tragedy or,
in the context of this volume, the latest Greek tragedy-inspired play
by a playwright from a postcolonial state. Such plays have become
the subject of increased interest especially among classicists, but also
within drama and postcolonial studies. Kevin J. Wetmore’s The
Athenian Sun in an African Sky (2002) and Black Dionysus (2003)
are book-length accounts of Greek tragedy in Africa and in the
African-American theatre. Greek tragedy in African drama is also the
focus of several pieces in this volume, of a monograph (2007) by
Barbara GoV and Michael Simpson (2007), and of an earlier article of
mine (Budelmann 2004). Greek tragedy-related work by Irish drama-
tists (a rather diVerent sort of postcolonial situation), has recently been
the theme of an edited volume by Marianne McDonald and J. Michael
Walton (2002), and elsewhere in this volume, Steve Wilmer discusses
Seamus Heaney’s recent Antigone version, The Burial at Thebes, Wrst
performed in Dublin in 2004.4 Most wide-ranging, perhaps, Lorna
Hardwick’s article (2004a) on ‘decolonizing Classics’ traces the com-
plex interaction between Greek drama and anti-colonialism in various
regions. This is a selection of just a few recent publications, none of
them earlier than 2002, but probably enough to give an impression of
the surge in work on this topic.
Femi OsoWsan, born in 1946, is probably the best-known Nigerian
playwright of the generation after Ola Rotimi and Wole Soyinka.5
He has written over Wfty plays, about ten of them adaptations, but
also poetry, a novel, a host of academic studies and newspaper
essays. His 1994 play Tegonni,6 using material from Sophocles’ Anti-
gone, is discussed by Barbara GoV in this volume. Chuck Mike
was born in New York but has lived in Nigeria for much of the
time since 1976. His troupe in this production, Collective Artistes,
was made up almost entirely of actors with strong Nigerian aYlia-
tion, half of them having lived in Nigeria for considerable periods.
OsoWsan and Mike have worked together repeatedly, including on
a 2002 production of Tegonni in New York. Their collaboration
4 Several essays in Dillon and Wilmer (2005) are also devoted to Irish versions of
Greek tragedies, as is Taplin (2004).
5 On OsoWsan work in general see especially Dunton (1992: 67–94), Awodiya
(1995, 1996), Richards (1996), and Adeyemi (2006).
6 Published text OsoWsan (1999a).
Trojan Women in Yorubaland 17
is close enough for Mike to be able to change the play-text in the
course of the rehearsals. As with many new plays, it is impossible,
therefore, to separate play and Wrst performance completely, and I
will draw on both. Future performances and the eventual publication
of a text will inevitably change perspectives.
The play is set outside the burning city, not of Troy, but of Owu in
Yorubaland, part of what is now Nigeria. The wider historical backdrop
is the Wghting between rival groups in Yorubaland in the Wrst half of the
nineteenth century, in the course of which large groups of people were
displaced and enslaved. Owu was destroyed in the 1820s after a siege
of many years (on the Owu war see Mabogunje and Cooper (1971);
and Law (1997)). Each of OsoWsan characters corresponds to one of
Euripides’ characters, and his play follows the plot structure of Trojan
Women closely, with just a few signiWcant deviations.7 Owu has
been destroyed. The men have been killed or enslaved. The women,
including the former queen, are camping near the burning ruins. The
play focuses on the group of women lamenting what has happened
to them. As in Euripides’ play, there is relatively little action. The
emotional highpoint is reached when one of the soldiers of the victori-
ous army takes away the child of one of the women to kill it. In the end,
the women go into slavery, each to a diVerent master. It is immediately
clear, then, that OsoWsan sets up a three way relationship: ancient
Greece, nineteenth century Yorubaland, and any present day war rele-
vant to the spectators, whether in the UK, in Africa, or elsewhere. This
relationship, which OsoWsan had exploited in a diVerent way already
in Tegonni, is at the heart of this chapter.
I will Wrst discuss four notable features of the play, all related to
the blend of Greek, nineteenth century Yoruba, and contemporary
European/American and, indeed, African elements: its presentation
7 In my view, the three most substantial deviations in structure are: (1) OsoWsan
moves the discussion between the two gods from the beginning to after the Wrst
interaction between chorus and queen. Instead, Women of Owu opens with a dialogue
between the despondent women of the chorus and just one of the two gods, the
city’s protecting deity Anlugbua. (2) Women of Owu ends with the queen and chorus
performing a ‘ritual valediction to the dead’, eventually bringing Anlugbua back on
stage. (3) The choral songs are not all in the same places as in Euripides. They are in
Yoruba rather than English, and their text does not closely follow the themes of
Euripides’ songs. (I discuss both the gods and the chorus—though not the detail of
the songs—later in the chapter.)
18 Case Studies
of an aggressive war and its consequences; its emphasis on commu-
nality rather than individuality; its treatment of gender; and its form
and tone. On the basis of this discussion, I will then think more
generally about the way diVerent audiences might respond to this
blend of diVerent traditions, characteristic of Women of Owu as
indeed of many other postcolonial plays. Finally, I will Wnish oV
with a section on the more abstract audiences constituted by diVerent
scholarly disciplines, and place this chapter in the interdisciplinary
discourse of Classics and postcolonial studies.
WAR, SLAVERY, AND RESPONSIBILITY
Women of Owu is a play about the suVerings imposed by war. Its

main mode is empathy and pity for the victims of war, especially the
women. Owu is in ruins. Its former inhabitants are constantly threa-
tened by rape, displacement, slavery, degradation, and death. Even
the victors are aVected as war changes their behaviour: Okunade, the
Mayé or war leader of the aggressors, corresponding to Menelaus in
Euripides, was once a peaceful artist but has turned into a ruthless
killer. Gesinde, a herald of the attackers and based on Euripides’
Talthybius, has worked out that only opportunism will bring sur-
vival. Repeatedly, he stresses that he only executes orders, against his
will. In Mike’s production, the perversion of normal human relations
is epitomized by the scene in which the baby boy of the Andromache
character, Adumaadan, is taken away to be killed: although he is
about to smash the child’s head against a tree, Gesinde handles him
with great care.
Despite the nineteenth century setting, moreover, OsoWsan and
Mike give the war present-day resonances, as two examples will show.
First, the slavery theme that runs through Euripides’ play is made
even more prominent in Women of Owu. An aim, or at least an
inevitable by-product, of the war seems to be the enslavement of
the female population of Owu. Throughout, the women voice their
fear of slavery, aware of their imminent departure for their new fates.
In the Wnal speech of the play, the Poseidon-character Anlugbua, the
ancestral and now deiWed founder of Owu, says:
Owu will rise again! Not here, / Not as a single city again, but in little
communities / Within other cities of Yorubaland. Those now going / Into
slavery, shall form new kingdoms in those places. (V)
This and other statements about slavery open out perspectives, well
beyond Yorubaland, onto the black diaspora across the centuries.
Secondly, the play quite obviously alludes to the 2003 invasion of
Iraq, in which the US, along with some other nations, including the
UK, deposed ruler Saddam Hussein. The besieging army is called the
‘Allied Forces’ (of Ijebu and Ife), as was the US-led coalition. It claims
to have come to liberate Owu rather than to act out of any material
greed, but the women repeatedly pour scorn over this assertion,
evoking intense and prolonged debates over the complex motivations
for invading Iraq, for example:
They do not want our market at all—/ They are not interested in such petty
things / As proWt—Only in such lofty ideas as freedom,
divided between three speakers (II). At one point, in Mike’s produc-
tion,8 they even turn to face the audience and shout something like:
‘you say you came to liberate us’. The programme note mentions Iraq
in the Wrst sentence, and also refers to Kuwait, Bosnia, Rwanda,
Algeria, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Although set in a colonial context,
Women of Owu has clear postcolonial and neocolonial overtones. It is
about the consequences of military aggression any time, anywhere: in
nineteenth and twentieth century Africa, in the Middle East, and
wherever spectators care to make connections.
Against the backdrop of this stark account and indictment of the
brutality and lies of war, one of the most interesting aspects of
the play is its subtlety in treating responsibility and causation. The
immediate cause of the women’s misery is the sack of their city, but
why was the city sacked? Partly no doubt because of greed, as the
women suggest, but that is not all. First, as in Euripides, there is also
the complex issue of the Helen-character, called here Iyunloye. She
caused her husband to take up arms as the leader of the Allied Forces
as she left him, voluntarily or otherwise, to live with the youngest
prince of Owu (V).
8 Based on my performance notes (n. 2); not in the draft play text.
20 Case Studies
In addition, OsoWsan introduces a further element, drawing on
both Euripides’ gods and the history of the Owu war. The goddess
Lawumi, grandmother of Anlugbua and based on Euripides’ Athena,
wants the Owus punished because they enslaved other Yoruba in the
past, and behaved arrogantly against Ife Ife, the most renowned
Yoruba oracle (III). OsoWsan likes using gods, calling them in an
interview: ‘metaphors of some of the enduring qualities of society’,
but presents them (like other aspects of society) rarely as beyond
criticism (Awodiya 1993: 48, similarly 80). In this play, he develops
Euripides’ gods in such a way that it becomes even more diYcult to
disentangle individual shares of responsibility. Anlugbua comes too
late to save his city and is angrily scolded for this by the women (I);
Lawumi does not just seek the destruction of Owu but also talks
Anlugbua into unleashing a storm on the attackers on the way home
to make them pay for their religious impropriety, yet appears any-
thing other than digniWed as she makes her, rather personal, case
against both the warring parties (III). Scenes I and III show that the
gods have a role in the human suVering, yet in the end (V), Anlugbua
puts the blame squarely on humans, leaving it to the spectators to
draw their own conclusions:
You human beings, always thirsty for blood, / Always eager to devour one
another! I hope / History will teach you.
OsoWsan gods, like Euripides’, are inXuential and moral, yet pettish,
elusive, and the target of human attacks.
Finally, in this complex web of responsibilities, the role of the
European colonizers is handled subtly, too. The whites are there: they
have provided Wrearms and they are slave traders, but they are in the
background. They do not appear on stage, they did not take part in
the siege, they are not the only slave traders, and they are not the only
brutal oppressors. OsoWsan has repeatedly attacked the notion that all
postcolonial drama focuses on protest against the ‘centre’ (much as
such protest matters to him), and has stressed the importance of
engagement also with the challenges of present-day Africa in his
work.9 The open-endedness of his treatment of responsibility should
9 In particular: OsoWsan (2001) 153–73. On OsoWsan general concern with present-

day Africa, see also below pp. 29–35.
probably be seen in this context. Nobody is innocent in this play, and
nobody is the sole guilty party.
COMMUNALITY
Perhaps more than any Greek tragedy, Trojan Women dramatizes the
story of a group; the chorus and the individual women all face similar
struggles. What Mike and OsoWsan have done is to increase further
the emphasis on communal suVering that is already present in
Euripides. As one would expect, the chorus dance dances and sing
songs. But there is more. Throughout the performance, diVerent
combinations of two or three actors form mini-choruses chanting
together. In some scenes the chorus provide a vocal audience to the
interaction of other characters, whether with words or just exclam-
ations. Moreover, Mike stresses the emphasis on ensemble work and
the avoidance of star cult in his rehearsal work. He calls the rehearsal
process a ‘sociology’. Actors were allocated their roles only a good
week into the rehearsal process; and many of the clearest expressions
of communality were the result of improvization in rehearsals rather
than original scripting. As a result of all this, the production achieves
an unusually powerful solution to the notorious problems posed by
Greek choruses. As in Wfth century bce Athens, the chorus here is
not an embarrassing interruption of a good plot, but central to the
play and, as in Athens, participation in the chorus is conceived as a
social act.
However, and I think this is important, the play does not portray
the women’s enforced community as bliss, or choral song and dance
as a panacea for all woes. The women quarrel; most of the dances
seem to be cut short as members of the army arrive on the scene;
a soldier even urinates during one of the dances; and (again as in
Greek tragedy) there is the concept of the perverse song: the deranged
seer Orisaye (Cassandra in Euripides) keeps asking for a song to
celebrate her imminent forced marriage with one of the victors, but
the chorus refuse this kind of song (IV). OsoWsan and Mike force
spectators to reXect upon what they see at the same time as submitting
to its power.
22 Case Studies
Moreover, there are lines of demarcation between communality
on stage and in the auditorium. The choral songs are in Yoruba,
a language few members of the, mostly white, Chipping Norton
audience are likely to have understood. Moreover, Chipping Norton
theatre—with a raised stage and a proscenium arch—sets obvious
limits to the degree the audience will feel part of any dances on stage.
Unsurprisingly, audience reaction was more vocal in London’s Oval
House, a more informal and integrated performance space, with
a predominantly Afro-Caribbean audience, including people with
Nigerian connections. Communality set in nineteenth century Yoruba-
land can extend into twenty-Wrst century Britain, but only to a degree.
GENDER
It hardly needs pointing out that Women of Owu is, among other
things, a play about relations between men and women: women
suVer at the hands of men. As OsoWsan puts it10:
. . . women, and children, are the ones who suVer most from the eVects of
war—brutalized, raped, disWgured—and are then left alive to face the
consequences. . . . In a way therefore it is easier for the men, they are gone
from the scene and so beyond pain. But think of the widows and orphans,
the mutilated women left with their wounds and memories. . . . Euripides
must have chosen to concentrate on these victims in order to further
highlight the horror and brutality of war. A message which is particularly
pertinent today, with Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, etc.
But, as in Euripides, the women’s suVering and powerlessness is
poised against their resilience and resistance. The male characters
are not just a minority, they are also rather weak. Especially, the Mayé
is brutal and uncaring, altogether lacking the women’s stature. The
women tend to have the better of the arguments, repeatedly exposing
the senselessness and cowardliness of the war propaganda, and
maintain their dignity throughout. In performance terms, their
actions as a group create a sense of organized resistance. The
women sing together, they dance together, they curse together;
10 By email (n.2)
at one point in Mike’s production they all bare their breasts as a
weapon of last resort, an ill-omened act in many African cultures.
Interestingly, this dramatization of the women’s powerlessness and
resistance is juxtaposed with a rather diVerent treatment of gender in
Women of Owu’s version of Euripides’ Helen scene (V). The Mayé
comes to punish his wife Iyunloye, undecided whether to take her
back home or have her die straightaway. A scene of debate ensues
between Iyunloye and the Hecuba-character Erelu. Iyunloye portrays
herself as a victim of circumstances, always missing her husband,
while Erelu tries to persuade the Mayé to kill her for lightly abandon-
ing him for her rich and handsome youngest son. OsoWsan and
Mike’s scene resembles Euripides’ in many ways, but deviates in a
vital point: it increases the erotic charge that is already present in
Euripides. Quite explicitly, Iyunloye tries to seduce the Mayé. Threa-
tened with execution, Iyunloye, dressed in bright red with long
plaited hair and set oV against the other women in sombre blue
and with shaved heads, pulls all the stops to make herself desirable to
him, both physically and rhetorically. The scene ends without Wnal
decision but, as we hear later from Gesinde, Iyunloye eventually
succeeds. The Mayé succumbs to her allure.
It is not easy to say what messages to take away here about gender.
Iyunloye is perhaps the conceptually most daring and problematic
character in the play. Even more than Gesinde or the Mayé, she shows
how extreme situations can force people into certain roles. She makes
herself a sexual object and succeeds. Powerlessness or power? Legit-
imization of patriarchal authority or female subversion? The ambiva-
lence increases further if we bring in statements characters make
about male–female relationships. ‘I know as a woman how it feels /
To be chosen as the favourite of such a man’ (V), Erelu says to
Iyunloye, referring to the physical attraction and status of her son.
And Adumaadan, having learned that she has been selected to live
with a particularly loathed member of the victorious army, worries
that she will respond to him sexually despite her hatred:
For I am only a woman, with a woman’s familiar / Weaknesses. Our Xesh
too often, and in spite of itself, / Quickens to a man’s touch, / And a night
of loving is all it takes, they say, to tame / The most unwilling among us.
(V, compare with Trojan Women 665–66.)
24 Case Studies
Sexual attraction and the inability to resist it are a major aspect of
gender relations in this play. ‘Talk’, Erelu says, ‘is the only weapon
I have left for mourning’ (II), but Iyunloye has understood that her
only weapon of consequence is sexual seduction. Slavery is not for
her. Erelu again:
Women like her are dangerous, / Especially to their lovers. Once they catch
you, you’re hooked / For ever: They have such powers of enchantment, eyes /
That will set cities ablaze. (V)
For a number of years now, productions and adaptations of Greek
tragedy have extensively exploited the gender themes inherent in the
ancient plays. Helene Foley (2004) has recently discussed how such
work does not just point to female suVering but is often just as
interested in powerful and outrageous women. OsoWsan’s and
Mike’s Iyunloye can no doubt be looked at against this background,
but what about the West African context? As Foley points out in
passing, gender themes are generally less prominent in African than
in American, Japanese, or Irish versions of Greek tragedies—no
doubt reXecting diVerences in local discourses. This is not true,
however, for OsoWsan. As one would perhaps expect, he explores
gender themes also in the Antigone-play Tegonni, and he does so
extensively also elsewhere. Morountodun,11 Yungba Yungba and the
Dance Contest and Midnight Hotel, none of them based closely on
Western plays, are obvious examples. ‘The female question’, as
Muyiwa P. Awodiya (1995: 88–9) puts it, ‘is one of the themes that
OsoWsan is most preoccupied with.’12 In a West African context, the
prominence OsoWsan gives to women is perhaps noteworthy (if by no
means unique), and one might be tempted to detect inXuences from
outside the African tradition here.
11 Of all OsoWsan plays, Marantoudoun (published text, OsoWsan 1982) is prob-

ably closest to Women of Owu in its treatment of gender. See the discussion by Ajayi
(1996).
12 In 1987, when asked why he chooses women and common men as the main
heroines and heroes, OsoWsan replied: ‘I don’t really deliberately privilege women in
my works. As I see it, women are part of the whole struggle. I’ve written plays in
which women are the heroines and I’ve written plays in which women have been
demons’ (Awodiya 1993: 79).
Yet that is too simple a conclusion. Women as powerful seducers,
as well as women unable to resist seduction, are Greek themes,
written into the Helen myth from early on, but are not perhaps
themes that are currently exploited in American or European theatre
as much as the violent power of Medea or Clytemnestra. Much of
what OsoWsan does with Euripides’ gender themes is remarkably
close to the ancient play, and not so close to recent European or
American discourses. Emblematically, the second half of Adumaa-
dan’s lines about responding sexually to her new master, quoted
above, are almost a translation of Trojan Women 665–66, and at the
same time (to me) the uneasiest lines in the entire play. Arguably, in
fact, they become even more shocking and even more problematic
as they are brought to life in an African context. Nineteenth
century Africa may feel distant to many UK spectators, but less
distant probably than Wfth century bce Greece. In other words,
using an African past, OsoWsan has found a thought-provoking way
of translating some of the most problematic aspects of ancient Greek
gender relations for today. DiVerent audiences and, indeed, diVerent
spectators, with diVerent cultural and personal experiences and ex-
pectations, are bound to disagree over whether the result is shocking
or not, whether it conWrms or challenges gender stereotypes, and
whether the distance created by a nineteenth century Yoruba setting
moderates any discomfort. But there can be no doubt about the
eVectiveness with which Women of Owu stages a new version of the
gender issues in Euripides’ play.
F OR M A ND TO NE
As pointed out above, Women of Owu follows the plot structure of

Trojan Women for the most part quite closely. This section discusses
how OsoWsan and Mike adopt and adapt also the form and tone of
Euripides’ play. Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of Trojan
Women is its sombre tone. In this respect, there is little to choose
between the two plays: Women of Owu, too, is a predominantly
sombre play in which suVering never ends. This similarity goes
beyond the subject matter and owes much to formal characteristics.
26 Case Studies
OsoWsan and Mike keep the formal feature that contributes more
than any to the sombre eVect of Trojan Women: the almost never-
ending lament by all the women, especially the chorus. A way of
throwing OsoWsan and Mike’s choices into relief is by comparison
with Sartre. When Sartre inXuentially adapted Trojan Women (Les
Troyennes)13 in 1965, as a play of protest against European and
American imperialism in the aftermath of the Algerian war of inde-
pendence and during the Vietnam War, he politicized and psycholo-
gized Euripides’ play in many ways. His conception of a political play
did not leave room for choruses and extensive lament, prompting
him to break up or cut most of the sustained choral passages and to
tone down all lament. His unease is summed up in his description of
Trojan Women as an ‘oratorio’ and not a ‘tragedy’.14 As Nicole Loraux
(2002: 1–13) complained recently, what Sartre did is eVectively
silence what she regards as one of the main features of Greek tragedy
overall: the mourning voice. OsoWsan and Mike’s decision not to go
this way is remarkable not least because OsoWsan, an admirer of
Sartre, used Sartre’s version as one of his base texts for writing
Women of Owu.15
Clearly, however, as it sends forth its mourning voice, Women of
Owu departs from Euripides in form and tone in other respects. Most
importantly, the lament is punctured repeatedly by comic elements.
Women of Owu is less homogenous in tone than Trojan Women. In
both performances that I saw, Gesinde’s intimations to the audience
of his thoughts on his superiors were rewarded with laughter at
various points. Other characters, too, are sometimes (involuntarily)
funny. In particular, the Mayé’s smugness and lack of self-awareness
is rather comical, and even the divine dialogue has its funny
moments. No doubt there are diVerent ways of producing Women
of Owu. In Mike’s version, comic elements, carefully spaced, were one
of the most intriguing features.
13 For an English translation of Les Troyennes, see Sartre (1969: 291–347).

14 In his essay about his version (Sartre 1969: 285–90 ‘oratorio’ on p. 288).
15 ConWrmed by email (n. 2). Several aspects of Sartre’s adaptation, highlighted in
his essay (n. 11), can be traced in Women of Owu; for example, the humorous eVect of
the Gesinde’s wisdom, the Maye’s more explicit yielding to Iyunloye, and the addition
of a divine epilogue. More broadly, OsoWsan, like Sartre, and others inspired by
Sartre, uses Trojan Women to criticize events in his own country.
Closely connected to these elements of humour are a number of
abrupt changes in register. Overall the play is composed in an
uncluttered and accessible but not informal idiom, yet at times it
stoops consciously to the everyday: ‘Just think of having to clean
their toilets’ (II), one of the women says. Elsewhere, they see them-
selves as: ‘stinking in our underwear’ (V). OsoWsan uses the sustained
pathos for regular moments of bathos. Finally, the occasional direct
confrontation of the audience in Mike’s production is a further
compelling deviation from what we know of ancient productions of
Trojan Women. When the women bear their breasts and when they
shout: ‘you say you came to liberate us’, they are facing towards the
audience. Audience address and explicit present day reference come
together here in a way that classicists associate with Old Comedy
rather than tragedy.
Such persistent eVorts to manipulate the smooth surface of the
play can be looked at in various ways. First of all, they may throw the
horror into even greater relief, repeatedly varying the mode in which
spectators engage with the relentless onslaught. Next they can be put
in the context of trends in recent Greek tragedy performances and
adaptations. Many productions deviate from the ancient plays
in both tone and form. A systematic study of this phenomenon is
not yet available, but compared to, for example, John Barton’s,
Peter Hall’s and Edward Hall’s Tantalus (2000), Women of Owu is
rather conservative in this respect. Or, to take another Trojan Women
adaptation, Charles Mee and Tina Landau’s The Trojan Women:
A Love Story (1996) uses collage of stories, humour, music, an
unusual performance space, and other means to create what Sarah
Bryant-Bertail (2000) calls ‘postmodern tragedy’. At least one domin-
ant strand in current Western theatre aesthetics is deeply wary of
unbroken and unselfconscious lament. The reasons are complex, in-
cluding factors as diVerent as ‘emotion fatigue’ resulting from constant
bombardment with news of immeasurable suVering, the rarity of
public lament in most Western cultures, the rare use of choruses,
vague notions of the ‘death of tragedy’ and the high prestige of
Shakespeare’s tragicomedies. OsoWsan and Mike’s subtle play with
form and tone is by no means unusual.
Apart from this perhaps mostly European or American context,
there is also a distinctly African side to these characteristics of Women
28 Case Studies
of Owu, so much so in fact that spectators at ease with certain African
traditions may not even Wnd OsoWsan and Mike’s manipulation
remarkable. Duru Ladipo’s Oba-Koso (1963), for instance, perhaps
the best-known Yoruba folk opera, easily blends what in a European
context would be high tragedy and comedy, and so do to a lesser
degree several African plays using Greek tragedies. A recent London
production of Ola Rotimi’s Oedipus Rex-inspired The Gods Are Not
To Blame (published 1971) had its audience laugh in several scenes,
giving the performance an attractive lightness that sat quite comfort-
ably with the dark themes it explored.16 The strict separation of
tragedy and comedy, with their diVerent canons of content, form
and tone, that is maintained by European theorists of various periods
and then ostentatiously broken, is probably less inXuential in African
drama.17
The issue is complicated further by OsoWsan personal dramaturgic
preferences. The self-conscious character of much of his theatre
is pointed out by all critics. He says himself that: ‘the area of
form constitutes the most visible site of the epistemological break
I have made with the [Nigerian] playwrights of the Wrst generation’,
(OsoWsan 2001: 139; Jeyifo 2002: 616) such as Soyinka. Women of
Owu is in fact by no means the formally most adventurous of his
plays. Throughout his output, narrators, plays within plays, audience
address, and similar devices abound. ‘These ways,’ he explains,
‘I establish the contingent nature of all experience, and hopefully,
reveal through the process the fact that we are not programmed
by any supernatural force for failure, or defeat; that society is always
determined by the interventions we bring to it; that our present
sorry predicament is not permanent or incapable of emendation.’
(OsoWsan 2001: 142; Jeyifo 2002: 617).18 Again and again, he has
16 Arcola Theatre London, directed by Femi Elufowoju, July 2005.

17 Which is not to say that African drama has no discourse of tragedy and comedy.
Especially in the seventies and eighties there was a lively debate over what shape
tragedy would take in Africa; see Soyinka (1976: 46–9), Ezenwa-Ohaeto (1982), and
Agovi (1985).
18 Similar concerns have prompted OsoWsan repeatedly to distance himself from
what he regards as the tragic world view of Soyinka and his generation, e.g. Awodiya
(ed. 1993: 29–30), OsoWsan (1996: 16–7), OsoWsan (2001: 128–9).
stressed that his play with form serves to provoke debate and self-
awareness among his spectators. Unsurprisingly, many critics have
discovered Western inXuences here. OsoWsan frequently attracts the
epithet ‘Brechtian’. However, more recently, critics have begun to
point out that—once again—African and European inXuences are
hard to separate (Richards 1996: 70–3; Ukala 2001). What may look
Brechtian to a European or American may be indigenous to a
Nigerian. The Greek, African, and European aspects of Women of
Owu are impossible to separate neatly.
G R E E C E, AFR IC A, AND THE UK
The subtitle OsoWsan has given his play, An African Re-reading of

Euripides’ The Trojan Women for the Chipping Norton Theatre, UK,
nicely sums up the blend of African, Greek, and modern European
elements. Such blending is, of course, a hallmark of much post-
colonial literature, making ‘hybridity’ one of the most debated
terms in postcolonial theory;19 and from their own perspective,
theatre studies, too, have taken an intense interest in the topic for a
while now, using the label of ‘intercultural performance’.20 In this
section, I shall try to pull together some threads that have run
through the chapter so far by looking at how Women of Owu blends
diVerent cultural inXuences and, in particular, by asking how this
blend opens up diVerent kinds of opportunities for diVerent audi-
ences. Of course many of the issues are well rehearsed, but what
distinguishes Women of Owu from most postcolonial plays (and
indeed versions of Greek tragedy) is the three-way, as opposed to
19 Bhabha (1994) and Young (1995) are particularly inXuential. Andrew Smith
(2004) provides a helpful discussion of the various positions, including recent criticism
of an over-enthusiastic use of the concept.
20 Pavis (1996) is still a good starting point. The best known critic of the culturally
and politically less attractive sides of intercultural performance is Rustom Bharucha:
Bharucha (1993) and Bharucha (2000). The work of one of Bharucha’s main targets,
Eugenio Barba, has recently been explored in Watson et al. (2002). Richards (1996:
163–93) and Ukaegbu (2001) debate issues of intercultural performance, respectively
drawing on a recent US and UK production of plays by OsoWsan.
30 Case Studies
two-way relationship, ancient Greek–modern European–African (it-
self a blend of nineteenth century and current aspects).
OsoWsan is highly conscious of the audiences he addresses. He has
often stressed that he writes in the Wrst place for all people in Nigeria.
He sees his literature as helping to bring about necessary social and
political change at home. At the same time, he is aware that by
writing in English he does not reach everyone in Nigeria (as indeed,
he points out, he would not be able to in any one indigenous
language), and has defended any resulting coincidental élite focus
as beneWcial, at least in so far as the élite plays a vital role in any
project of large-scale change. Finally, he has repeatedly lived abroad
and, especially in recent years, has directed his own and other African
plays in the West, and has discussed the implications of this; also he
has come to consider publishing no longer exclusively at home,
partly to make his work more widely available.21 These complexities
help to situate the genesis of Women of Owu as a play by a Nigerian
playwright, adapting a Greek tragedy, set in Africa and commis-
sioned and Wrst performed in Europe. In addition, they are worth
keeping in mind when thinking about the way this particular play
addresses its various audiences.
A couple of comments OsoWsan has made on writing Women of Owu
will provide a starting point.22 In reply to the question of which
audience he had in mind he notes:
. . . strange as it may sound, a Nigerian audience, that is, the audience I am
familiar with. If I was thinking otherwise, that is of a British audience or any
other audience I am not familiar with, I wouldn’t I’m sure have been able to
write the play. After all Euripides was writing for his own audience and not
thinking of us! You see, as I have said elsewhere, the more ‘local’ an author is,
the more universal, paradoxically, he becomes.
And in answer to the question of why he wrote a version of a Greek play:
I was commissioned to write this play, so in a sense it wasn’t my own
decision to do it. Nevertheless, in spite of my initial misgivings, I did
enjoy doing it in the end. I was hesitant to do it, not for the story, but
21 On Nigerian audience, writing in English, and potential élite focus, see Awodiya
(1993: 24–5, 58–60); OsoWsan (1996, especially 16–7). On directing abroad, see
OsoWsan (2001: 174–234). On publishing abroad, see Awodiya (1993: 137).
22 Both responses by email (n. 2)
because it seems to lack dramatic action, is just a pure lament, if you know
what I mean. But then that became the challenge for me as a dramatist. . . .
Generally however, the world of the Greeks, as you must know, is very close
to the Yoruba one—in for instance, the belief in multiple gods, and the need
to link with them through ritual. Of course there is a great diVerence in the
attributes we give to our gods, and to the way therefore that we relate to
them, but such diVerences do not really present obstacles when you are
thinking of adaptations. It follows therefore that our own conception of
theatre is close to the Greeks’, rather than to the contemporary West’s. Add
to this the fact that the subjects that the Greeks treat are those which concern
us all as human beings living in a social space we are never in full control of,
nor fully comprehend, and having to constantly negotiate our way with the
mystery of death and regeneration—themes said to be ‘universal’—you can
see easily why the Greek plays would appeal to a Yoruba dramatist.
Women of Owu originated not in OsoWsan choice to adapt a
Greek play but in an approach from Chipping Norton theatre.23
Mike even goes as far as to say that in directing the play the Greek
source text did not matter to him: he simply put on a new play, a play
in its own right. Such statements are a healthy lesson for classicists,
who are perhaps inclined sometimes to overestimate just how much
value theatre professionals, and indeed audiences, place on any Greek
aspects of new plays. More important, though, they go together with
OsoWsan emphasis on writing with Nigerians, including presumably
non-élite Nigerians, in mind, audiences that are likely to be much less
concerned with Greek tragedy than are classicists. I am in no position
to draw out the present-day Nigerian resonances in any detail, but it
is clear that the play reXects OsoWsan concern with Nigeria. Setting,
religious and social universe, and themes such as mass killings and
dispossessions, or exposure to the whim of armies without eVective
protection from the law, will all resonate in Nigeria, and more
generally Africa, in ways they probably do not in Chipping Norton;
and the same is true even more emphatically for the choice of Yoruba
for the songs. By contrast, speciWcally Greek elements that might be
alien in a Nigerian context, such as names or gods, are all translated
23 As producer Tamara Malcolm sets out in the programme note, she Wrst had the
idea of commissioning the production after a 2001 Mike production of Lorca’s Yerma
in Chipping Norton, because of its choral work. OsoWsan was approached after
Mike’s 2002 Tegonni production. By contrast, the idea to write an Antigone play
had been OsoWsan (OsoWsan 2001: 203).
32 Case Studies
into the Yoruba setting. Apart from the subtitle, Women of Owu
contains hardly any pointers to its source text.24
Still, OsoWsan accepted the commission for UK performances, and
wrote a play that was by no means incomprehensible to its Wrst
audiences. What is more, references to the Iraq war, with its conten-
tious UK participation, made the play topical for British spectators,
and more generally the suVerings caused by war, for women or men,
are not an issue conWned to Africa. More interesting perhaps, the
unfamiliar is attractive in its own ways. One does not have to speak
Yoruba to be able to engage with the choral songs. There still is the
music and the dance, and—just as powerful—the vague sense of being
put in touch with another culture, mediated by a composer, a writer,
and performers who are themselves familiar with that culture. Some-
thing similar is true for the elements of Yoruba religion in Women of
Owu; and OsoWsan portrayal of gender relations, I suggested tenta-
tively, could not be as provocative and as eVective as it is without the
nineteenth-century African setting. Distance can open up room for the
imagination. This is a principal aspect of the paradox that OsoWsan
points to, between local grounding—so crucial for giving the play its
coherence and moral force—and universality.
But what about Euripides? His play is there too, somewhere, and
most spectators will know that, if only from the programme note.
Those who are familiar with Trojan Women will see its inXuence
throughout. At the most basic level, their knowledge will help them
follow and (more or less precisely) predict the action of a play that
is not structured around a strong narrative. More fundamentally,
similarities and diVerences between the two plays are likely to shape
and reshape their views of both Trojan Women and Women of Owu.
Despite the absence of intertextual pointers, some spectators will look
at OsoWsan and Mike in the light of Euripides, and vice versa. Com-
parisons, if not necessarily sophisticated, between the new and the old,
appeared in most of the reviews of the UK performances. What is more,
the Greek elements can help those less familiar with West African
theatre respond to the play. In a recent article, OsoWsan discusses the
24 Mike stresses that he approached the play as a new play, rather than a version of
a Greek play, and OsoWsan statement in the second quote that he merely responded to
the Chipping Norton commission may be seen in the same light.
diYculty of producing Nigerian drama on the Euro-American stage
(OsoWsan 2001: 174–201). DiVerences in the skills of actors, the
circumstances of performances and the cultural knowledge and expect-
ations of spectators all present hurdles, many of which are diYcult to
overcome. Arguably, the use of song and dance in Women of Owu,
characteristic of many Yoruba plays, may be easier to accommodate for
many UK spectators as an engagement with what they may know from
or about Greek plays than as a variety of theatre they do not know at all.
The Greek source gives them a further entry point.
For many spectators, however, in Europe, America, or Africa, the
fact that there is a Greek source text is likely to be at least as important
as how that text shapes Women of Owu. The idea of Greek tragedy
evokes numerous associations, more or less related to the actual plays
themselves. In this context, critics frequently point out that ancient
plays can provide a particularly suitable platform for mounting anti-
colonial protest. Postcolonial writers use Greek tragedy as a high-
proWle European genre to express their protest against European
colonial or neocolonial actions (Gilbert and Tompkins 1996: 38–43).
Or they use Greek tragedy as a European genre that is less closely
linked to the colonizers than for instance Shakespeare, and perhaps
itself marginalized, to express their protest against the European
colonizers (Wetmore 2002; Budelmann 2004; Hardwick 2004a). Either
way, while it would be reductive to see Women of Owu as simply taking
a core European genre to the UK and staging it as a critique of UK
politics, some such reading is certainly possible.
Interestingly, OsoWsan, in the responses quoted above, does not
say anything about protest against European politics, but makes two
other points about the meaning of Greek tragedy to him. One (as he
says) is well known, but is no less true for it: the similarities between
Greek and Yoruba drama (Asgill 1980: 175; Gilbert and Tompkins
1996: 38; Budelmann 2004: 15–20).25 Gods, choruses, song, dance,
ritual elements, open-door performance spaces—Greek tragedy pro-
vides points of contact that Shakespeare and much other early
modern or modern Western drama does not provide. The success
of the choral work and the portrayal of the gods in Women of Owu
owe much to such aYnities between the two theatre traditions.
25 OsoWsan thesis (which I have not seen) was a comparison between African and
European forms of theatre.
34 Case Studies
OsoWsan other point is more diYcult. The themes of Greek tra-
gedy, he suggests, are ‘said ‘‘universal’’ ’ and are those that ‘concern us
all as human beings living in a social space we are never in full control
of, nor fully comprehend’. This raises the perennial question of the
universality of Greek tragedy: to what degree is Greek tragedy’s
widespread appeal related to something genuinely universal in the
plays themselves, such as their subject matter; to what degree is it the
reXection of Greek tragedy’s accumulated reputation, including its
reputation for universality; and to what degree does it depend on
particular circumstances in particular places and periods, such as
points of contact with African drama or a heightened sense of
exposure and powerlessness? Yes, on the one hand Greek tragedy
obviously survived for 2500 years, but on the other hand there has
been an explosion in performances in the last thirty to forty years,26
with the once mostly Western genre becoming popular across the
world, and with Trojan Women, a once unfancied play, becoming
increasingly attractive, especially in contexts of sympathy with vic-
tims of military aggression.27 The appeal of Trojan Women as a Greek
play to an African playwright and audience is (of course) a cocktail of
several ingredients. What matters most in the present context is that
spectators unfamiliar with Greek tragedy are, none the less, in more
than one way able to engage with both the idea and the detail of a
play inspired by a Greek source text. As in the case of European
spectators with no experience of African theatre traditions, unfamili-
arity need not lead to alienation, hostility, or disregard, but can add a
range of extra dimensions to the play.
All this, of course, is too schematic. After all, as the London audience
of the initial Women of Owu tour illustrates, there is a degree (if only
a degree) of convergence between Nigerian and UK audiences, or
26 Hall et al. 2004 see especially Hall’s introduction (2004: 1–46) for a discussion of
possible reasons.
27 Victims of aggression: e.g. Sartre’s 1965 adaptation; Holk Freitag’s 1983 Tel Aviv
production of Sartre’s adaptation, in the context of the Lebanon War (Levy and Yaari
1998); a Canadian CBC radio play on slavery with black actors (Hall 2004: 25);
Courttia Newland’s 1999 Edinburgh (UK) Women of Troy 2099, in which the Greeks,
committing atrocities, were repeatedly referred to as ‘English’, and the Trojans were
dressed in traditional African costumes. Other high-proWle productions include
those by Andrei Serban in 1974, Tadashi Suzuki in 1977, and by Dharmasiri Ban-
dranayaka in 1999 (detailed review at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/troj-a03.
shtml (last accessed August 2004)). Brief general discussion of the reception of Trojan
Women in Taplin (1989: 261–3).
African and Western audiences. Similarly, the contrast between audi-
ences familiar and unfamiliar with African or with Greek drama is a
sliding scale rather than a clear-cut distinction. But the basic conclusion
I would like to draw from the discussion in this section is, I believe, not
aVected. The considerable variation in what Greek tragedy may mean
to diVerent spectators suggests strongly that speaking (as I have done)
of ‘source texts’ or of modern plays ‘translating’, ‘adapting’, or ‘inter-
preting’ ancient Greek plays does not do justice to how spectators make
sense of many plays, certainly plays like Women of Owu, which set up
three-way relationships. Such terms are both useful and justiWable, but
also limiting. Not only do we need the widest possible understanding of
‘translation’ to accommodate the fact that the idea of Greek or African
is as signiWcant as the ancient or modern text, and that the associations
that ‘Greek’ or ‘African’ evoke for spectators and indeed theatre pro-
fessionals often shape the reception of a play just as much as any interest
in the way the new play uses the old. More importantly, we have to
realize that traYc is more than one way. On the one hand, OsoWsan and
Mike translate a Greek play into an African context, but on the other
hand awareness of the Greek play may help some European spectators
bring an African play into their own world, while some African spec-
tators may feel that the Greek play itself is theirs in the Wrst place, as
much as it is European. Depending on a spectator’s position, the Greek
side of Women of Owu may be familiar or unfamiliar; close to home or
foreign; crucial or insigniWcant; and the source or the catalyst. Some of
this is true of all ‘hybrid’ plays and intercultural performances, but I
think Women of Owu, both the play itself and OsoWsan comments
about it, helps to illustrate that Greek tragedy can be a distinctive
element to go into the melting pot.
C ON C LU S I ON : C L A S SI C S A ND
P O S TC O LO N I A L S T U D IE S
Just as there are diVerent audiences watching Women of Owu, there will
also be diVerent scholarly communities reading the play: experts in
African literatures, in drama, in postcolonial studies, and in Classics,
to name just the most obvious. Like diVerent audiences, they overlap.
36 Case Studies
At the same time, however, just as OsoWsan stresses the local grounding
of plays as a prerequisite for their universal appeal, scholars crossing
disciplines are—inevitably—shaped by the discipline they come from,
with its particular assumptions, interests, and methods. I want to end
by placing my discussion of Women of Owu in the more general context
of interaction between Classics and postcolonial studies, and more
speciWcally, classical and postcolonial literary studies. As the essays in
this collection and in Barbara GoV’s (2005) edited volume Classics and
Colonialism show, interdisciplinary work between these areas is cur-
rently burgeoning.
For classicists, the dominant context of this work is of course
‘reception studies’. The growing interest on the part of classicists in
postcolonial literature is one particular aspect of their growing inter-
est in the modern reception of ancient literature.28 Yet beyond this
general place within Classics, several more speciWc factors come into
play. First of all, as I have tried to bring out in the case of Women of
Owu, and as others have done for other works, the blend of Greek or
Roman and various African, South American, or otherwise post-
colonial literary traditions can hold its own fascination for classicists
and pose its own challenges. Secondly, Classics as a discipline comes
with heavy colonialist baggage. As Lorna Hardwick (2004a) has pointed
out, studying postcolonial responses to Greek tragedies is one way of
confronting this baggage. Yet, thirdly, there is a further motivation for
classicists to look at such texts that I think should not be ignored. Over
the last ten to twenty years, postcolonial studies have been a success
story more than has Classics. Postcolonial studies are attacked for their
political opinion-making (what stronger testimony could there be to
their perceived strength?), while Classics Wghts a battle against charges
of being outdated and quite simply superXuous. One (by no means, of
course, the only one) of the attractions of reception studies in general is
that they allow classicists to get a share of the vibrancy of subjects such
as theatre or twentieth century literature. Surely, postcolonial studies
are particularly alluring in this respect.
There is, I hasten to add, nothing wrong with that. On the con-
trary, Classics has been so long-lived a subject not least because of its
28 Rehm (2003); Hall et al. (2004); Dillon and Wilmer (2005); and Hall and
Macintosh (2005) are four rather diVerent publications, in diVerent ways representative
of recent work in this area.
Proteus-like ability to change and re-change its shape, and this latest
extension of its boundaries is exciting, perhaps even liberating.
However, as a classicist, the question that I Wnd diYcult to avoid at
this point is what Classics has to oVer to postcolonial studies or, in
the case of Women of Owu, to postcolonial literary studies, in return.
In concrete terms: why should anybody interested in postcolonial
literary studies read this chapter? One way relationships can be good,
but dialogue is better. The use of anthropological methods and
themes borrowed from anthropology, gender studies or social history
have transformed the study of ancient Greece and Rome over the last
thirty years or so, but the other way round Classics has made little
impact on anthropology, gender studies or the study of social history.
To put it strongly, from the perspective of postcolonial literary
studies, Greek tragedy is simply one of many Western texts that
postcolonial writing engages with, along with those drawn from
English, French, or Spanish literature. Like anthropology, postcolonial
studies own the overarching theoretical models and methodologies,
which can be exported to Classics rather than vice versa. This makes
it diYcult to see what the study of classical literature will be able to
bring to postcolonial studies. Perhaps indeed there is little potential for
dialogue, and what we will see over the next few years is classical
literary studies learning from postcolonial literary studies without
being able to give much back. Classicists interested in interdisciplinary
work in this area should I think be conscious of this possibility. Their
excitement may not be shared as widely on the other side.
In the context of this volume, however, with contributors from
various disciplines, it would be wrong to end on a negative note, and
I would like to believe that, within limits, there are also more upbeat
points to be made. Firstly, exactly because it is a nervous subject, a
subject under pressure, and because it is prepared to question its
boundaries, and even purpose, to such a high degree, Classics is
genuinely interested in dialogue, and under the right circumstances
that might be attractive to other subjects, including postcolonial
studies. Secondly, classicists qua classicists will inevitably oVer a new
perspective. As they start from a diVerent base—their understanding
of classical literature and its reception history—they make diVerent
connections and see diVerent things. They have a partial angle on
postcolonial studies and, as has become clear, their interest in classical
38 Case Studies
literature may contrast with the interests of some audiences, writers
and directors; but as long as it comes without claims to a privileged
access to the plays in question, this speciWc viewpoint should lead to
speciWc insights and contributions, some of which may be of interest
also to experts in other disciplines. Thirdly, and most problematically,
Classics has its own characteristic methods. It is not by accident that
this chapter has concentrated on a single play. Classicists have trad-
itionally been empiricist in their approach to texts, and often study
them in enormous detail. The elaborate commentaries written on
ancient texts are a good expression of this. Perhaps few subjects
apart from theology have channelled as much eVort into writing
commentaries as Classics. It is obvious why these tendencies are often
criticized, but I think it would be a mistake to neglect what is valuable
about them. They represent one particular way of trying to appreci-
ate individual creativity as broadly as possible, and this, if done self-
consciously, is a worthwhile project with all literary texts.
Classicists know that they will not be able simply to fall back on
what they have always done, but I think they should still remember
where they come from. They will always remain classicists and will be
looked at as such: classicists who live in a period rife with post-
colonial concerns and who may therefore be interested, personally
and professionally, in postcolonial studies, but who will only rarely
become card-carrying specialists in postcolonial studies. What interests
me in this respect is that some trends in postcolonial studies may well
create opportunities for classicists qua classicists to make valid con-
tributions to a Weld that is not theirs. First, authors and theorists in
former colonies point out that ‘postcolonialism’ is a Western con-
cept and that ‘postcolonial studies’ are an invention of Western
academia. In an interview about Tegonni, OsoWsan speaks of the
‘merely intellectual discourses of ‘‘postcoloniality’’ which are
currently fashionable because they serve scholars so well in the
western academic circuit, but which are so remote from the concrete
concerns of the people on our continent’ (OsoWsan 2001: 206).29
29 A similar point, in a diVerent tone, is made by Trivedi (1999: 269) in response to

the question: ‘who is the postcolonial?’: ‘On the basis of the evidence available so far,
a postcolonial is an English-speaking theoretically inclined Westward-looking writer
or academic of (or more likely from) a former colony which ‘‘gained independence’’
from Britain during the last half-century . . .’.
Related to that, I think, is the longstanding concern about lack of
speciWcity in postcolonial literary criticism. The ‘postcolonial’ is a
concept that goes beyond particular spaces, moments, and situations.
There has been increasing dissatisfaction with the blandness of some
postcolonial literary criticism that is not suYciently attuned to the
speciWcs of cultures, literatures, and texts. One recent trend, there-
fore, has been not so much to develop postcolonial literary theory in
general as to focus on reading individual texts, and rely on those
readings to make their contribution to develop theory more widely.30
In this context, classical literary studies perhaps do have something to
oVer, as well as so much to gain. They can oVer the local position of
one of the elements that go into the characteristic postcolonial
blend—Greek tragedy in the case of Women of Owu; and from this
position they can oVer their own response to the individual creative
work, a diVerent response from that privileging matters postcolonial.
This kind of contribution will probably always be modest, but that is
perhaps as it should be.
30 The complexities of the need for speciWcity in postcolonial criticism are

analysed at length in Hallward (2001), including detailed references to earlier
work. Most recently, Spivak (2003) called for more speciWcity, careful readings and
awareness of local cultures in comparative studies.
2
Antigone’s Boat: the Colonial and the
Postcolonial in Tegonni: An African Antigone
by Femi OsoWsan1
Barbara GoV
Adaptations of classical drama by writers of African descent are

increasingly important to students of Classics and the humanities
generally, not least because classical drama has been integral to the
notion of the Western tradition, and African adaptations raise ques-
tions about what it means to claim a ‘Western’ tradition in the wake
of colonialism. Such adaptations also struggle with the fact that the
very presence of Greek and Roman Classics within African culture,
however fruitful for creative endeavour, testiWes to the disruption of
African history by decades of colonial exploitation. Most such adap-
tations address more or less explicitly the ways in which the condi-
tions of their possibility can also undermine their project.2
Within African rewritings, the story of Antigone has proved very
popular, and the reasons for this presumably include the fact that the
1 The present essay is derived from a book in progress, which is co-written with
Michael Simpson (Goff and Simpson (2007)). My thanks go to the conference organizers
for the opportunity to present this work in such a stimulating context, and for their
helpful comments and suggestions, to the audience at the conference and the anonymous
reader.
2 For general introductions to the topic of African adaptations see, for example:
Etherton (1982: 102–42); and Gilbert and Tompkins (1996: 38–43). Wetmore (2002)
is a much more comprehensive survey and very relevant. Classicists who have
addressed this issue include McDonald (2000), Macintosh (2001), Budelmann
(2004), and Hardwick (2004a and 2005a).
Antigone’s Boat 41
story involves a confrontation with overweening power, which can
readily be adapted to various situations.3 In Western rewritings, a play
based on Antigone often Wgures resistance against an arrogant state, as
with Anouilh and Brecht. In African Antigones, one might expect Creon
to be identiWed with the colonial occupiers, but in fact, this is rarely the
case in any straightforward way. In The Island (1973) by Fugard, Kani,
and Ntshona, it is clearly the white apartheid system that throws up its
Creons, but there is also a power struggle in the cell, between Winston
and John. In Odale’s Choice by E. K. Brathwaite (1967), various aspects
of the Creon Wgure suggest that he may be understood not only as a
white colonizer but also as a home-grown African tyrant. This muddy-
ing of the political waters is linked to an aspect of the character, Anti-
gone, that makes it diYcult to recuperate her simply as a Wgure for
African resistance: since she is part and parcel of the cultural equipment
that the colonizers drew on to explain the success of their inroads into
other cultures, she presumably only comes to Africa by way of colonial
Europe. The discourse of resistance that Antigone typically generates
must here be related to, perhaps even descended from, the power
structures of colonialism that undermine resistance.
A recent pertinent adaptation of Antigone is Tegonni: an African
Antigone by Femi OsoWsan, Wrst produced in 1994.4 This play centres
on a young Yoruba woman’s opposition to British imperialism. The
brother of Princess Tegonni was killed in a civil conXict in which
the British assisted the other side, and his corpse is inauspiciously
exposed on the day of Tegonni’s wedding to the British District OYcer,
Allan Jones. Defying the colonial Governor, who has ordered that the
body of the rebel be left unburied, Tegonni performs the rites for her
brother, and she eventually suVers the penalty of death. Inasmuch as
the play directly dramatizes the nineteenth century colonial encoun-
ter, it is unlike other African Antigone-dramas, but also unlike the
majority of OsoWsan’s plays, which are best known for their probing
analyses of postcolonial, especially post-civil war, Nigeria.5 Tegonni
3 On the popularity of Antigone in Africa see Wetmore (2002) and Gibbs (2004)
and ch. 3 in this volume.
4 The published text (OsoWsan 1999a) derives from a later production, not that of
1994, and all references to the play are taken from this edition.
5 Jeyifo (1995: 121) also discusses this apparent paradox. On another recent play
by OsoWsan, The Women of Owu, which discusses nineteenth-century Africa through
the lens of classical reception; see Budelmann in this volume.
42 Case Studies
also oVers departures from the Greek version of Antigone, since it
introduces several new characters and embraces many surprising shifts
in the plot. Although there is not time or space in this essay to discuss
all of these elements, it will be clear enough that these diVerences are
motivated by the speciWc politics that Tegonni proposes.
I shall explore here the ways in which the play coordinates colonial
and postcolonial perspectives, suggesting that it oVers diVerent ver-
sions of each, and that it Wnds both colonial oppression and post-
colonial resistance, in unexpected places. I use the terms ‘colonial’ and
‘postcolonial’ in a way that has become fairly received, so that ‘colonial’
refers to the actual historical period of occupation, and to the perspec-
tives of the colonizing metropolis, while ‘postcolonial’ is temporally
later but also refers to various kinds of critical thought about and
dissent from the ideologies that accompanied occupation.6 I should
note at the outset that OsoWsan’s version of postcolonialism also rejects
the neocolonialism that puts corrupt indigenous élites in place of
corrupt colonialists. OsoWsan has in fact gone on record as questioning
the usefulness of postcolonial analysis, when what is required is a focus
on the contemporary conditions in Africa (see, for example: Jeyifo
1995: 122; OsoWsan 1999c). However, the setting and much of the
discourse of Tegonni suggests that the perspectives oVered by post-
colonial analysis are highly relevant to an understanding of the drama.
I shall investigate in particular the Wgure of Antigone herself, who
as a character in the play arrives to share the stage with the nine-
teenth-century heroine Tegonni, but who also announces that she
comes from Greek mythology (p. 26). Since this Antigone is very self-
conscious about her provenance in ancient Greek myth and drama,
she can be seen to bring with her the weight of theatrical tradition, as
well as a particular political stance. In the terms mobilized by the
play, she straddles the discourses of ‘myth’ and ‘history’.7 Antigone’s
self-consciousness about tradition also means that she becomes the
focus for the play’s metatheatrical dimension. By ‘metatheatrical
dimension’ I mean the moments—and there are many in this
6 On these distinctions see, for example: Boehmer (1995: 2); Gilbert and Tompkins
(1996: 2); and Quayson (2000: 2).
7 These terms are Wrst encountered in the ‘Programme Notes’ to the published
drama (p. 10) and are especially signiWcant at later points like the scene between
Antigone and Tegonni (pp. 126–7), discussed below.
play—when the drama makes a point of its Wctional, theatrical status.
As we shall see, these moments are also those that most trenchantly
discuss the possibilities and problems of resistance, whether to a
political authority or to the authority of tradition. In this respect,
Tegonni is characteristic of OsoWsan’s drama, which almost always
coordinates its progressive politics with a persistent and demanding
metatheatricality.8 Through the Wgure of Antigone the play is enabled
to make complex arguments about the relations between the colonial
and the postcolonial, and through its metatheatrical awareness it is
also enabled, at times, to escape from these complexities and assert
an authoritative claim of its own.
The other important elements of the play for this chapter, as well
as Antigone, are the British colonial oYcial Carter-Ross, the soldiers
who accompany Antigone, and the boat on which she enters the
stage. The colonial aspects of the play’s politics centre on the man
who can be understood as the Creon-Wgure, ‘Lt-General Carter-Ross,
who is the governor of the southern colony of Nigeria’ (p. 28),
otherwise known as ‘de big white man, ‘‘Slap-My-Face’’ the big
Oyinbo from Lagos’ (p. 47). We do not meet him until the play is a
third of the way through, so that he cannot make the kind of bid for
our sympathy that the Sophoclean Creon makes as leader of a
community only recently released from the fear of destruction.
Instead, he immediately acquaints us with his racist understanding
of the relations between colonizer and colonized. He sees the Empire
in simple terms of dominance and submission (p. 65):
It is time to take a Wrm control here, I see, and show who is in charge! The
Empire will assert its power!. . . . Fear! That’s what these niggers respect!’
If Wrmness is for a moment relaxed, then (p. 114):
Chaos! Rebellion! All my work undone! And before we know it, they’ll begin
to eat each other again!
8 On this feature of OsoWsan’s dramaturgy see, for example: Dunton (1992: 67);
Richards (1996: 63 and 83); Jeyifo (1995: 129); and Wetmore (2002: 181–2). OsoWsan’s
aesthetics are often labelled ‘Brechtian’; see, for example:. Crow (2000: 30); and Olaniyan
(1999: 74), who writes of a ‘consummate dramaturgic sophistication and openness that
takes us a few steps beyond Bertolt Brecht’. Richards makes the point that these aesthetics
derive at least as much from traditional African performance styles, including ritual,
dance, song, storytelling and spectator input, as from Brecht (Richards 1996: 72, 78, 81).
44 Case Studies
He does oVer a pious discourse about ‘the white man’s burden’9 and
the civilizing mission of the British (p. 131), but this is quickly
undermined by his latent violence. His relations with all of the
Yoruba characters are characterized by a swift resort to physical
force, and he eventually engages in a violent struggle with his own
District OYcer as well.
A straightforward physical violence is not the end of the account of
Carter-Ross, however. Even though he is a man of brute force, he has a
Wne sense of occasion and of drama. For instance, some of the charac-
ters conclude that he orders the exposure of the corpse of Tegonni’s
brother not in order to drive home the political lessons of loyalty, but to
aVord a deliberate provocation that will disrupt the planned wedding
between Tegonni and the District OYcer (for example p. 121). The
exposure of the corpse is thus an action with a staged, theatrical
dimension, as well as a political charge. It is also metatheatrical in
that the part of the corpse is played by one of the soldiers who
accompany the character Antigone on to the stage (p. 29). Not only
does the same actor play both parts but the character of the soldier self-
consciously takes on the role of corpse, so that on one level there is no
‘real’ corpse in the play at all. Others of Carter-Ross’s gestures as
Governor are also conditioned by theatricality. Thus, when he plans
to execute Tegonni and her women friends, he has them watch while the
scaVolds are erected, so that they will be the more frightened. This
theatrical plan actually backWres, since they remain unmoved (p. 72).
Despite his colonial attitudes, Carter-Ross is also brought on two
separate occasions: once by the District OYcer (pp. 122–23), and
once by the joint eVorts of the Yoruba elders, to countenance a
pardon for Tegonni. The Yoruba elders in fact use the theatricality
of colonial power against Carter-Ross, because they oVer to stage a
scene in which Tegonni is to make a humiliating public apology, in
return for a pardon (pp. 87–8). The possibility that Tegonni may be
pardoned, and live, sets Carter-Ross apart from the Greek Creon,
who never wavers in his determination to execute his niece.10 These
9 This imperialistic and self-serving concept is most familiar from the poem by
Kipling, published in McClure’s Magazine of February 1899, in response to the American
takeover of the Philippines.
10 Other Creons, such as those of Anouilh and Brathwaite, oVer to overlook
Antigone’s deed, but this is usually done on the grounds of family relationship,
which is not applicable here, and is usually done in secret.
oVers of pardon by Carter-Ross may also be seen to constitute a kind
of metatheatrical crisis: will the new play save the Antigone-Wgure,
the Yoruba princess, or will it save the Antigone-plot in which the
protagonists have to die? Such questions, about the possibilities of
diVerent endings and of escape from theatrical tradition, can also be
understood as questions about the weight of the colonial past, and so
bear here a special urgency. Can politics and theatre collaborate to
write an Antigone with a new and more positive conclusion?
In this connection we should look at Antigone herself, who is the
most obviously metatheatrical Wgure in the play; she enters the stage
with the words ‘Greetings. Has the play started?’ (p. 25) and she
constantly draws attention to the Wctional, theatrical quality of the
proceedings. But we should note that the drive behind her metathea-
trical utterances is almost exactly the opposite of that which impels
the other characters, many of whom are working to save Tegonni.
Whereas much of the play is invested in not being like the Greek
Antigone, so that the heroine can survive, the character Antigone
frequently tries to ensure that this drama repeats the traditional plot,
and thus plays out exactly as did her own. When she arrives, she is
convinced that this drama is in fact her own (p. 25):
I heard you were acting my story. And I was so excited I decided to come and
participate.
She reinforces this attitude in her next scene, when she is preparing the
soldiers who have accompanied her to take up their new theatrical
roles as African mercenaries: ‘A story goes on, no matter when one
arrives in it’; ‘It’s just history about to repeat itself again’; ‘You know
what to do, you’ve been well rehearsed’; ‘The script is the story we
rehearsed, as it’s happened at other times, in other places’ (pp. 28–9).
Throughout this scene, then, she insists on the inevitability of the story
that they will enact.
This stance on the part of Antigone is intriguing for a number of
reasons. If we do think of an Antigone as necessarily a Wgure of
resistance, we should acknowledge that here she is almost the oppos-
ite, and, as we shall see, other characters take it upon themselves to
resist her, as well as there being the underlying drive in the play to
rescue Tegonni and thus defeat the imperative from the ancient
Greek plot. There is only one scene where Antigone also seems to
46 Case Studies
try to rescue Tegonni, and thus to overcome the weight of her own
legacy, and, as we shall see, this scene has its own diYculties. Overall,
there seems to be an identiWcation of Antigone with a form of
coercion, and in this respect she may indeed remind us of the
coercive dimension of the colonialism that makes her story available
to the Nigerian author in the Wrst place. To see her simply as a Wgure
of opposition to the colonial power may be insuYcient.
So, there are at least two versions of colonialism at work in this
drama. Carter-Ross oVers almost a caricature of violent racist atti-
tudes, but also allows us to read his power as largely a matter of
theatrical eVects. The character Antigone may also be seen to oVer a
version of colonial coercion, despite her usual identiWcation with
resistance. There are also, on the reading that I shall oVer here, at least
two versions of the postcolonial in Tegonni. These may be broadly
characterized as negative and positive. One version concentrates on
the internal conXicts within Nigerian society and lays the blame for
Nigeria’s problems not only at the feet of the colonizers, but also of
the indigenous people. The second version, centring on the Wgure of
the boat on which Antigone arrives and later departs, suggests even
more forcefully that the colonizers may be irrelevant. These aspects of
the play are postcolonial not only in a broadly temporal sense but
also in that they subvert the ideologies of colonialism by training
their focus on relations among Africans rather than on relations
between Africans and the occupying British.
Although the play is shaped by the obvious overriding conXict
between the Yoruba and the British, there are also several ways in
which the African society in the play is shown to be divided against
itself. We are invited to see that these divisions characterize a
pre-colonial period, and that they extend in signiWcance to the
postcolonial period. There is the civil dispute, that kills Tegonni’s
brothers, but also a persistent state of hostility with the neighbouring
peoples (p. 22), and references to war with the Dahomi and the Nupe
(p. 84). Within the town of Oke-Osun, where Tegonni lives, it is
made clear that male and female are often antagonistic to each other,
sometimes violently so. Tegonni precipitates much of the expression
of this hostility by her desire to become a bronze-caster and sculptor,
something that no woman has done before. Even though she is its
princess, the town is united in its disapproval of her move, and she is
variously threatened with torture (p. 130) and death (p. 78), from
which she is saved by Allan Jones, the white British District OYcer.
As well as gender trouble, there is conXict between the representatives
of the traditional ways and those of a more progressive tendency
(for example p. 21). On a larger scale, the play suggests that discord
among Africans aided and abetted the colonizers in their project.
Chief Isokun speaks of black participation in the slave trade
(pp. 107–8):
Take reverend here! When I look at him, for instance—I ask, Who were the
people who came and captured him, and sold him to the ship that took him to
slavery in America? Was it not our own people, of the same colour of skin as
you and me?. . . . Tell me, what cruelties have we not inXicted on ourselves, we
black people, as agents in the service of others!
The colonial occupiers do not present the only examples of oppression
in the play.
The soldiers who accompany Antigone in her entry on to the stage,
and who are then assigned the roles of African mercenaries in the
Hausa constabulary, constitute the play’s most striking illustration of
Chief Isokun’s claim about the propensity for conXict and exploitation
among black Africans. They are acting the part of Africans who readily
enlist under the colonizer in order to carry out military actions against
other Africans—in this case they are deployed by the British against
the forces headed by Tegonni’s brother. The mercenary soldiers’ atti-
tude to their task is alarmingly pragmatic: they are working for
the British because the British pay more than the Africans’ home
communities could (pp. 32–3). There are few signs that Africans can
readily make common cause against the colonial occupier, for as
Antigone says ‘here the soldiers obey their white commanders blindly,
and ask no questions’ (p. 29). The soldiers in the play cannot even
make common cause among themselves, and their constant quarrel-
ling becomes a leitmotif of all their stage appearances.
This depressing scenario, however, does not run for ever, and even
though divided, the soldiers Wnd a way to mount some resistance. As
we have seen, Antigone introduces the scenes with the soldiers by
impressing on them the inevitability of their participation and the
inevitability of the story that they will enact: ‘It’s just history about to
repeat itself again’ (p. 28). What is signiWcant is that the soldiers
48 Case Studies
immediately undermine her assumptions. For instance, when she
delegates one of them to play the corpse of Tegonni’s brother, he
immediately protests: ‘Me! But I just woke up, fresh from the grave!’
(p. 29). In the next scene, when the other three are drinking over his
body, he jumps up and demands his share (p. 30):
4TH SOL: Give me, make I drink!
2ND SOL: Gerrout ! You supposed to be dead.
4TH SOL: (Standing up) If I no drink my own, I no dey die again!
2ND SOL: (Giving him) Take am! World don spoil Wnish! When dead person
begin to drink!
When we recall that Antigone introduces this scene with much
emphasis on its preordained quality, we can see that what the soldier
who is playing the corpse does is refuse to follow the script.
This resistance, the force of which is here almost entirely comic, is
played out again on a larger and more serious scale, when the soldiers
decide against building the scaVolds that they have been ordered to
construct for Tegonni and her friends. While they at Wrst congratu-
late themselves on their craftsmanship—‘See? Solid! Even the Queen
of England go want to die here!’ (p. 71)—they subsequently start to
rebel against their task; they become disgusted with their jobs as
oppressors and confront Antigone to demand new roles. When
Antigone arrives, they describe all the horrible things they have to
do while in character (p. 74):
1ST SOL: All we do is carry corpses.
2ND SOL: Or build execution platforms.
1ST SOL: Or terrorize people.
2ND SOL: Burn and plunder houses.
4TH SOL: Collect bribes!
She again tries to sway them with a metatheatrical necessity and
claims that they cannot acquire new roles so late in the day: ‘before
the play ends? You must be joking!. . . . You can’t quit before the play
ends.’ This provokes from them an answering threat to derail the play
itself: ‘when we quit, the play will end’ (p. 75). Antigone is forced, by
this brief power struggle, to Wnd them new roles as part of the
delegation of elders who will plead with the Governor for Tegonni’s
life. Far from Wnding the metatheatrical dimension constricting, as
Antigone earlier on seems to want it to be, the soldiers use it to aVord
themselves a measure of resistance and even a kind of freedom of
action. Subverting class boundaries, as well as confusing the identities
of colonizer and colonized, they convert the role of ignorant oppres-
sors into that of prominent citizens who are working to save Tegonni.
The soldiers’ resistance does not encompass only Antigone and the
colonial power, however. At the end of their complaints about their
roles they sum up (pp. 74–5):
We’re so ashamed! Is this all that soldiers do in this country?
and Antigone replies:
It’s the times we’ve come into, my friend.
The temporal and geographical vagueness in the exchange allows it to
be read as an indictment of contemporary Nigeria, rather than only
of the colonial power,11 and this possibility becomes increasingly
insistent as Antigone continues (p. 75):
It just so happens that the soldiers here are trained to look upon their own
people as enemies. As fair game to practice their weapons on.
Given the history of the military’s involvement in the politics of post-
independence Nigeria, a reference to their oppressive role in their
country is hard to avoid (see also Wetmore 2002: 188–90).
The soldiers’ dramatic identity as Africans who are Wghting other
Africans, coordinated with their metatheatrical resistance to that iden-
tity, clariWes the play’s postcolonial critique. Africans are culpable—
they were complicit with the predation of the colonizers, and they
bear much of the responsibility for the contemporary failures of the
postcolonial period. But if Africans are part of the problem then, by
deWnition, they can be part of the solution. The possibility of the soldiers’
resistance to the inevitability of the story, as described by Antigone,
opens the possibility of resistance against what OsoWsan has elsewhere
called ‘Afropessimism’, a state of mind that consigns the continent to
the inevitability of its damaged history (see Jeyifo 1995: 129).
11 The ‘Programme Notes’ to Tegonni similarly target the horrors of contemporary

Nigeria rather than its colonial past. See also OsoWsan (1999c), in which, as noted
above, he argues that a focus on the colonial, or even the postcolonial, detracts from
the pressing business of freedom and justice in present day Nigeria.
50 Case Studies
The metatheatrical dimension of this version of the drama Anti-
gone, then, aVords the vehicle for some of its trenchant criticisms of
both colonial and postcolonial oppression, but it also works to
imagine a way out. The struggle between these two dynamics is
evident in the important scene towards the end of the play between
Antigone and Tegonni. Antigone gives up the pretence of being just a
character alongside other characters and appears as ‘a metaphor.
From the past’, and Tegonni accuses her of being ‘a relic in the
memory of poets’ (p. 125). At the beginning of this scene the two
women are antagonists because, while Tegonni is determined to defy
the colonial power, even to the point of death, Antigone counsels
quiescence, and survival. She has, she claims (p. 126), given up the
practice of freedom, because:
I’ve learnt from history, and I have grown wise. Freedom is a myth. . . . Go and
look down the ages, my dear. Human beings throw oV their yokes, only for
themselves to turn into oppressors. They struggle valiantly for freedom, and in
the process acquire the terrible knowledge of how to deny it to others.
This history from which she has learnt has also, she claims, ‘contam-
inated’ her so that she is no longer the Antigone that Tegonni knows,
‘the hero men remember’ (p. 125). To this extent her discourse here is
consistent with her urgings to the soldiers, in that she appears as a
Wgure tamed by her knowledge of colonial and postcolonial history
into a refusal of resistance and an acceptance of the inevitable. As such,
Tegonni violently rejects her—‘Leave my story’—and proclaims her
devotion to the ‘undying faith’ of freedom (pp. 126–7). At this point
Antigone changes tack, announces that ‘I was testing you’ and joins
forces with Tegonni, sure that for all the tyrants who arise, ‘furious to
inscribe their nightmares and their horrors on the patient face of
history . . . as many times will others come up who will challenge
them and chase them away into oblivion’ (p. 127). The two women
jubilantly celebrate their solidarity and newfound determination.
One interpretation of this scene sees it as straightforwardly celebrat-
ing the courage of freedom Wghters throughout history, and thus as
shifting the play’s centre of gravity to a point where it can proclaim its
faith in an ultimate liberation. But when Antigone speaks of the way in
which freedom Wghters turn into oppressors, her arguments cannot
simply be dismissed, because she is describing the lived history of many
contemporary states.12 That she is adopting a pessimistic persona to
test Tegonni—that she is acting, in fact—does not mean that she is not
speaking the truth. The fact that she reveals her theatrical act also means
that it becomes possible to question at what other points she was acting,
and thus to query her integrity throughout. In this respect she is like
numerous other characters in dramas by OsoWsan who suddenly reveal
themselves to be quite diVerent from how they seemed, with alarming
consequences for the audience’s faith in its own perceptions.13 More-
over, when Antigone performs her volte-face and encourages Tegonni
to resist, the upshot of the scene is that Tegonni does indeed die,
replicating the plot of the Greek tragedy. The story is saved instead of
the woman. When Antigone claims that she has been ‘contaminated’,
she may in fact be correct; we have seen already that she speaks for the
inevitability of the Antigone-story with its freight of death, and perhaps
she has indeed been made into an oppressor by the weight of history.14
These questions about the signiWcance and indeed identity of the
Antigone-Wgure are central to this important scene, but are also
posed emphatically at the beginning and end of the play. Those
points in the play, Antigone’s arrival and her departure, are marked
as spectacular and mysterious, yet oVer a more positive answer to the
question of identity. She arrives, the stage directions tell us, in the
retinue of a goddess, on a beautiful boat (p. 17):15
12 See Wetmore (2002: 191). Wetmore comments on Antigone’s words here: ‘Anti-
gone oVers an explanation as to why cycles of oppression continue: once power is
achieved, it is always abused and then the freedom Wghters are more concerned about
holding on to power than about achieving true freedom. Power corrupts. In OsoWsan’s
view, this is a false argument, as the history of class struggle is not cyclical but linear.
Struggle is a process rooted in the idea of progress. Once the bonds of oppression are
truly broken for all, argues Marxism at its most basic, then they will not reform, they
will dissolve for ever.’ As will be clear, I think this account is over simpliWed. OsoWsan
himself has frequently noted the need for adaptation of basic Marxist notions; see, for
example: Awodiya (1993: 37).
13 On this feature of OsoWsan’s dramaturgy see, for example:Dunton (1992: 69 and
71); and Crow (2000: 48). Richards (1996: 4) comments on the use of ‘authorial
manipulation’ in early dramas.
14 We might note too that ‘contamination’ is the term used in the discourse of
textual criticism to describe what happens when the ideally direct line of reproduc-
tion between exemplar and subsequent copies is interrupted or otherwise spoilt.
15 It is not clear from these stage directions that Antigone is on the boat, but in a
later scene (p. 24) she descends from it, so that we must retrospectively realize where
she came from, and a production would presumably take this into account.
52 Case Studies
On a platform, the Water Goddess, Yemoja, in full, resplendent regalia, is
rowed in, in a much–decorated boat.
On the boat Yemoja, her boatmen, and her attendants, who include
Antigone and Antigone’s soldiers, are singing a song that is at Wrst
inaudible, and are perhaps not quite clear to the sight (p. 17):
. . . just a spectacle of dazzling colours and Xuid, synchronized movements,
all silent, as if observed through transparent glass.
Overall, the arrival partakes of the nature of a dream sequence. At the
end of the play, when the action is over and the principals are all
dead, the boat appears again in an epilogue (p. 141):
Lights come up on the boat of Yemoja, the Wgures frozen on it, as we saw
them last. Their song gradually becomes audible again, as the Wgures come
alive, rowing around the Goddess.
Antigone then approaches Tegonni, who has been killed in the
previous scene of riot, rouses her, and takes her on to the boat,
where they are welcomed:
There is immediate, visible joy on the boat, with perhaps a few crackers.
The women are further rewarded (p. 141):
Antigone and Tegonni kneel before the Goddess, and are each rewarded with
a crystal fan and a dazzling blue necklace.
The boat opens and closes the play, and thus invites us to speculate on
its signiWcance. I suggest that the boat makes Antigone less a Wgure of
colonial coercion and more a Wgure who upholds the independence
of African culture, rendering the colonizers almost irrelevant.
Wetmore (2002: 183), who is commenting on a performance
rather than on the published text, identiWes the boat as a slave ship,
and suggests that its movement across the stage recalls that of the
Middle Passage. While I cannot completely agree with this interpret-
ation, Antigone’s boat does ask to be situated in relation to the
various forms of mobility, forced or voluntary, that have character-
ized the colonial and postcolonial periods, and that include the
trajectory of the dramatist OsoWsan himself, who went from Nigeria
to Atlanta in order to direct the Wrst performance of Tegonni. At the
same time, however, the boat refuses to be conWned to the historical
dimension, and takes on a mythical or symbolic aspect. Whereas the
weight of history and the myth of freedom are opposed in the scene
between Antigone and Tegonni, the more positive connotations of
the ship try to coordinate the two. At the end, for instance, when
Antigone takes Tegonni on to the boat, the boat may be understood
as moving through space and time as a kind of spiritual haven for,
and commemoration of, all those who have resisted the many mani-
festations of tyranny, and have paid the price.
This mingling of the historical and the mythical means that,
although Antigone presumably comes from somewhere and leaves
for somewhere else, the image of the beautiful and uncanny boat
obscures her origins and destination. Part of the point, I suggest, is
that Antigone does not come by any colonial route; we are not
encouraged to imagine her as arriving from ancient Greece, or via
Britain, so her advent is attended by none of the anxiety that might
be generated if we were invited to think of her as a sign of the colonial
inheritance. Instead, her arrival by boat allows her to bypass this
inheritance completely. If Antigone resists being thought of as ‘colo-
nial’, then the fact that she arrives on the boat of the Yoruba water-
goddess invites us instead to think of her as African. At some level it
is clear indeed that she does not arrive at all; in the boat of an African
deity, she is already part of Africa.16 If we accept this reading, we can
see that one important aspect of the play’s postcolonial politics is this
oVer to erase Africa’s colonial history, by making Antigone into an
African and subsuming her colonial lineage within her African iden-
tity. That she is indeed part of an indigenous tradition is asserted by
the play’s title, or rather subtitle; ‘an’ African Antigone reminds us
that this drama can acknowledge the plural parentage of Brathwaite
and Fugard, as well as of Sophocles and Anouilh. Tegonni’s most
postcolonial gesture, perhaps, is to make the colonial disappear.
16 At one point in the play Antigone is described as black (p. 26), but in the longer
paper of which this is a version I show that she is not always or necessarily black. See
GoV and Simpson (2007).
3
Antigone and her African Sisters: West
African Versions of a Greek Original
James Gibbs
In The Blinkards, a play written by Kobina Sekyi and produced in

Cape Coast, once capital of the Gold Coast, in 1915,1 we encounter
members of the Cosmopolitan Club. We see them responding to an
invitation to ‘a nuptial ceremony’, where, it is announced: ‘the jol-
liWcation and refreshments . . . will be of Lucullian magniWcence’. The
groom at the forthcoming celebration is called ‘Alexander Archibald
Octavius Okadu’ and his bride’s father, from whom the invitation has
been received, glories in the name ‘Aldiborontiphoscophorino
Chrononhontonthologos Tsiba’ (p.94).2 In this scene Sekyi, who
had drunk deep at the Pierian Spring (he had a degree in Philosophy
from London University and had been called to the Bar), invited his
audience to laugh at the presumptuous, miseducated, misguided,
alienated creatures he paraded before them. Jaw-breaking Greek-
inXuenced names speak of a section of society rendered ridiculous
by a little learning.
This sad situation has prompted academic analysis as well as satire.
‘The Tragic InXuence of Shakespeare and the Greeks’ was the title of
a conference paper delivered at the University of Ife in 1975 by Ime
1 The following primary materials have been used in this paper and, where
necessary, are referred to by page numbers only. Brathwaite’s Odale’s Choice (1967);
Dove’s, A Woman in Jade ([1934] 2004); Fiawoo’s The Fifth Landing Stage: A Play in
Five Acts. (1943); OsoWsan’s Recent Outings. (1999a); Sekyi’s The Blinkards (1974).
2 Sekyi (1974: 94). Yirenkyi (1976: 30) oVers ‘brainless’ as a free translation of
‘Tsiba’.
Antigone and her African Sisters 55
Ikiddeh, and it was quoted with approval by Agovi (1990) in his
substantial account of theatre in colonial Ghana. Agovi enlisted
Ikiddeh’s support to assess how the British employed the theatre,
including the plays of Sophocles, as part of their colonial strategy.
The promotion of Greek drama was, Agovi argued, part of an ‘organ-
ized policy of cultural dissemination’ (Agovi: 1990 p.17), its purpose to
subvert and divert genuine cultural nationalist movements. The refer-
ence to the ‘tragic inXuence’ summed up the perception.
I am interested here in the way Ghanaians, and people working in
Ghana, have used one particular classical text, Antigone, to provide a
means of communication, self-examination, and helpful self-expres-
sion. The paper opens with a survey of the position of the Classics in
West Africa, and with a brief overview of European-inXuenced the-
atre. I then focus on the fortunes of Antigone in the country over a
seventy-year period from 1933.3 After considering responses to the
play at two schools, I will look at the way radical, progressive
dramatists from the Caribbean contributed to Ghanaian theatre-
goers’ experience of the Antigone story. Reference will be made to
Odale’s Choice by Kamau Brathwaite and to Antigone in Haiti by Felix
Morisseau-Leroy, and the text of the former will be examined in
some detail. Reference will then be made to Antigone in Twi, and to
English language adaptations of the play by Evans Nii Oma Hunter
and Victor Yankah. The implications are that, in Ghana, a play long
recognized and often discussed as a key text in world theatre, has
played a signiWcant role in the cultural, theatrical, and political
dialogue between Europe and Africa. The essay keeps in mind the
political dimension of the play and speculates about the impact of
this version during a period when it was ‘oV the boards’. I conclude
by insisting that the inXuence of the Greeks was far from ‘tragic’. In
fact, I put forward the contrary argument: that the truly liberated
post-colonial writer can use inherited material to powerful eVect. In
the absence of a Ghanaian text to illustrate this, reference is made in
the Wnal paragraphs to Femi OsoWsan’s Tegonni.4 That play is oVered
as an example of how a progressive writer has used the Antigone
3 For studies of adaptations of classical plays by West African writers, see: Owusu
(1983); and Wetmore (2002). Also Asgill (1980) and Talbert (1983).
4 Published text OsoWsan (1999a).
56 Case Studies
material with assurance and panache. OsoWsan employs Antigone as
part of a strategy to stimulate debate about pertinent themes without
denying local roots and without compromise.
As I proceed, it will become apparent that I reject both Ikiddeh’s
isolationist thesis and Agovi’s conspiracy theory. For Mr Tsiba,
encountered in the opening paragraph, the inXuence of the Greeks
may have been ‘tragic’, a colonial inXuence that lumbered him with
a name beyond naming. But, in her encounters with the Greek
tradition and pace the position taken by Ikiddeh and Agovi, OsoWsan’s
Tegonni Wnds much that is positive and sustaining. Like others before
her, including Brathwaite’s Odale, she draws strength from being
at the conXuence of ways of life; she delights in an awareness of
various traditions. She Wnds creative inspiration in the interaction
of diVerent cultures.
The ephemeral nature of productions and the absence of key texts
means that theatre history is often characterized by gaps, by conjec-
ture, and by surmise. This is certainly true in the case of Ghana, a
country that lacks a sustained tradition of ‘publications of record’
devoted to the arts, and in which the archival holdings covering
drama are inadequate. As a result, this paper marks just a stage in a
work in progress, and repeatedly prompts thought about the writing
of Ghana theatre history.
THEATRICAL BACKGROUND
The theatrical background to this examination includes the varied,

complex, changing, and continuing indigenous performance traditions
of West Africa. These are often linked with festivals, rituals, folk stories,
and rites of passage in which song and dance have major roles. Those
elements continue to inXuence some commercial, syncretic conventions
in the local theatrical tradition, notably that known as ‘Concert Party’.
Of the theatrical genres and styles imported from Europe, some have
been easily incorporated, while others have proved resistant to fusion,
adaptation, or relocation. During the thirties, when Ghanaian Concert
Party ‘trios’ were emerging, the following were among the forms
imported into Ghana and vying for attention: cantatas, pantomimes
(Aladdin and his Magic Lamp), morality plays (Everyman), biblical
dramas (Esther the Beautiful, The Good Samaritan), dramatized extracts
from novels by Dickens (The Trial of Mr Pickwick) and Hugo (The
Bishop’s Candlesticks), Shakespeare (Macbeth), Empire Day Parades,
pageants (The Armada, Britannia’s Court), smokers, mess-room enter-
tainments, comic operettas (The King of Sherwood) and, our concern
here, classical Greek drama. In subsequent decades, the inXuences
of courtroom drama (Witness for the Prosecution), Molière (Scapin),
melodrama (The Yorkshire Tragedy), (mediated) ‘Chinese’ theatre (Lady
Precious Stream), and Epic Theatre (Mother Courage), were among
those felt.5
During the twentieth century, local playwrights began to emerge
and it is intriguing to see to what imported material they responded.
Those in the popular Concert Party tradition worked through devising
pieces, but there were others who composed with pen on paper, and a
quick survey of their work is in order. In The Blinkards there are
elements of wit and of a Xexible structure that is, like the Fanti that
is often employed in this bi-lingual text, local in origin. Woman in Jade
(Dove 1934) makes concessions to local subject matter and includes
local characters, but the text engages with the conduct of expatriates
and holds a dialogue with British metropolitan attitudes. The Fifth
Landing-Stage (Fiawoo 1943) was composed and Wrst published in
Ewe, but it is clear from the preface that the author had waded through
prescriptive essays about the Unities and was writing with an acute
consciousness of neo-classical expectations. He did not allow himself
to be constrained by those and robustly confronted European assump-
tions about Africa and Africans on a variety of levels. The Third
Woman (Danquah 1943) made use of local folk material while engag-
ing in a debate with European historians and philosophers.
From this whirlwind tour of the available texts, it can be seen that
responses were characterized by variety, and that writers were some-
times concerned with fusing indigenous with imported elements.
There were some unproductive engagements but, in certain cases,
the imported took deep root in the African soil or was successfully
grafted on to a thriving local shoot. More than thirty years passed
after The Third Woman before the publication of Efua Sutherland’s
5 The list draws on material collected in Gibbs (2004).

58 Case Studies
Edufa signalled the emergence of a local play that incorporated a
profound response to a classical text, Alcestis. However, from the
1930s, Gold Coast-based or local translators and directors recognized
that Greek drama, particularly Antigone, had much to oVer because
of its power, the relevance of the themes, and its stylized convention.
T H E P O S I TI O N O F T H E C L A SS I C S I N
THE EDUCATION SYSTEM
The importance of Antigone in the Gold Coast/Ghana is apparent in

the available literature from 1931 (Agovi 1990:1). This relatively
early appearance is not surprising given the colonial experience of
the country, and one can oVer a number of reasons why Antigone
should have attracted the interest of schoolteachers. The Wrst is that
the play was recommended by the position it occupied as a key text in
Greek literature, as Wltered through the British educational system.
Indeed, in the background to all discussion about the importation of
Antigone into Ghana is a sense of the position of the Classics in the
history of world drama and of the education system exported from
Britain to her colonies.
From the end of the nineteenth century, respect for Greek and Latin,
and reverence for the books originally written in those languages, was
imported into West Africa along with British ideas about education.
Many indications of the position of the classical languages in Ghana
could be adduced. For the present, I will simply point to the fact that
Greek and Latin are listed as being on the syllabus for Mfantsipim
School, Cape Coast, when it opened in 1876. Two years later, the records
show that all twenty-eight pupils in the school took Greek and twelve
took Latin (Boahen 1996: 30–310). When, in 1881, John Mensah Sarbah
went from the school to what became Queen’s College, Taunton, it was
recorded in the register that he had done ‘Caesar, Books 1 and 2’.
For the handful who attended secondary schools in Ghana at this
time, the Classics provided an important part of their Western
education. Knowledge of ‘Caesar’ was essential in order to secure
access to British universities and the Inns of Court. For Sarbah, a
classical education opened doors so that he could, Wrst, matriculate
and, later, be called to the Bar. In order to prepare himself to return
to West Africa and take on the colonialists with their own most
potent weapon, the law, he had to ‘have the Latin’. The same was
true, a generation later, for Kobina Sekyi, whose play I quoted from
in the opening paragraph. As a pupil at Mfantsipim, Sekyi was
known for his love of all things English, and was immortalized in a
school photograph wearing a woollen suit. However, experiences in
London and his degree in philosophy led him to rethink his position
and he came to espouse an Ethiopianism that put things in their
place: woollen suits in cold climes, Greek names in Greece. His satire
in The Blinkards is well directed. There is no doubt that some
youthful West African scholars, possessing only a smattering of
Latin or Greek, made themselves ridiculous by their posturing. As a
nationalist, an intellectual, and a playwright, Sekyi exposed such
shallowness. Fortunately, his targets were prepared to laugh at them-
selves and the play that satirized the aVectations of the Cosmopolitan
Club of Cape Coast was staged by that very body.
Despite the satirical shafts launched by Sekyi in 1915, classical
studies remained near the heart of the education provided in West
Africa through to the middle of the last century. When the University
College of the Gold Coast (UCGC) was established at Legon (1948),
the Department of Classics was given an important place, its teaching
magniWcently supported by extensive holdings in what became the
Balme Library. John Leaning, who taught Classics there from 1971 to
1991, considered these must at one time have been better than those
of London University itself.6 Perhaps predictably, classically-trained
academics Wlled leadership roles in the early years of the University
College and in the country’s intellectual life. This distinguished
group included David Balme, the Wrst principal of the University
College, and L. H. Ofosu-Appiah, who took on the editorship of The
Encyclopedia Africana, a major research project.
A role for Latin was preserved even when political and cultural
pressures led to changes. In 1963, when the University College became
the independent University of Ghana, it was considered appropriate to
design a crest that drew on local conventions and to replace the
6 Leaning’s opinion was given in a conversation with Francis Agbodeka held in

London on 20 November 1995. It is quoted in Agbodeka (1998: 82).
60 Case Studies
inherited motto: Vigil Evocat Auroram [‘the watchful bird calls forth the
dawn’]. In his design for the new crest, Manwere Opoku incorporated
three ferns that stood for straightness, truthfulness, and integrity, and
an adinkra [sign] of locked rams’ horns, a symbol of strength and
growth. It was, however, considered appropriate to retain Latin for
the motto, and classicist Alex Kwapong, soon to become the Wrst
Ghanaian Vice-Chancellor of the University (1966–75), oVered: Integri
Procedamus, [moving forward with integrity] (Agbodeka 1998, 373–4).
ANTIGONE IN THE SCHOOLROOM AND

ON THE STAGE IN GHANA
In about 1930, the Reverand Charles Kingsley Williams, Assistant

Principal at the government-funded Achimota School situated on the
outskirts of Accra, prepared a verse translation into English of
Sophocles’ Antigone (for background, see C. K. Williams 1962).
This was given a rehearsed reading by the Accra Dramatic Society,
which had been set up by Mr and Mrs J. M. Winterbottom. Winter-
bottom (1934: 114) provided an account of the (Wnancial) success of
such readings and recorded that a double-bill consisting of Antigone
and a dramatization of ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ from Redgauntlet,
realized £18.
The idea of producing his version of Antigone with undergraduates
at Achimota College was close to the heart of Williams, and he had
Wrm ideas how the chorus could use local dance movements.7 In a
report about local performances submitted to a conference on ‘Native
Drama in Africa’ (1933), he wrote:
I am anxiously considering whether I could manage to train students to do a
version of Sophocles’ Antigone. My hope is that for the choruses it may be
possible to incorporate some of the rhythm movements of genuine Gold
Coast community dancing . . . it is very much alive still in the country and
can be more impressively beautiful than any description can suggest.
7 At this point Achimota College was preparing students ‘mainly for the External
Intermediate Examinations of the University of London in Arts, Science and Engineering,
and for the London external degree of BSc (engineering)’ (Agbodeka 1998: 5).
Williams was aware of ways in which the play lent itself to inter-
cultural exploration, and was decades ahead of his time as an ex-
patriate enthusiast for local ‘community dancing’. I do not think he
managed to get the production on the stage. This is a pity since it
sounds as if it would have been a creative bringing together of
traditions under a sympathetic guiding spirit.
Antigone was Wrst staged in the Gold Coast/Ghana by Adisadel
College. Originally known as The Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel Grammar School, and later as St Nicholas Grammar School,
Adisadel is now Wrmly lodged in the awareness of many Ghanaians as
yet another excellent Cape Coast school. Information about the
precise date of the production is contradictory and, for purposes of
dating, I have followed newspaper sources gathered by Agovi’s re-
searchers, rather than information from Amissah (1980), from the
Editor of Overseas Education (1934) or from the author of an on-line
historical sketch of Adisadel.8
A key Wgure in the development of Greek drama at Adisadel was
Stephen Richard Seaton Nicholas. Amissah (1980) notes that Nicholas
returned to the school in 1922 to teach Classics with an MA and DTh
earned at Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone. Nicholas introduced the
teaching of Greek, and in 1932 and 1933 he produced Antigone with (in
1933) the odes sung to ‘Dr Fox’s setting’.9 These productions are to be
seen as the result of a teacher’s determination to involve pupils
in appropriate major works on stage. The production of a classical
text became a fairly regular occurrence at the school for some years,
and, on occasions, the lines of the chorus were delivered in Greek.
It is not possible to know in detail what the audience made of these
productions. An Editorial Note, possibly by Winterbottom, in Over-
seas Education (1934: 116), recognized the relevance of the themes in
Antigone and is worth quoting:
We . . . were impressed by the response of actors and audience to the dramatic
situations based on the conXict between tribal law and individual conscience.
Their bearing on the problems of African tribal life was obviously appreciated.
8 Anon. ‘Adisadel College: A Historical Sketch’, http://members.tripod.com/tettey/

adishist.htm (last accessed 29/12/2005).
9 See Agovi (1990: 15); Musing Light (1933); Newell (2002); and Winterbottom
(1934: 116) http://members.tripod.com/tettey/adishist.htm (last accessed 29/12/2005).
62 Case Studies
A column by the reviewer Musing Light in The Gold Coast Spec-
tator for 19 August 1933 (quoted in Agovi 1990: 15) included the
following recognition of the historical and cultural signiWcance of the
production:
The Greeks were great players and very fond of the drama. The school’s
production is important because it gives us an opportunity—I believe for
the Wrst time—to see a Greek play. The production adds to the cultural
advancement of the country, and sets up a milestone. It will go down to
history, and my annual review will emphasize it.
According to Musing Light ‘the Wrst Antigone’ was well received by
the public. The reviewer continued (see Amissah 1980: 8–9):
By public request, there was a repeat performance before a full house at Cape
Coast. It was later staged at Sekondi, and then moved to Kumasi. The
theatrical scenery as well as the costume of the cast as well as their histrionics
contributed much to its success.
After recording that the Agamemnon was put on in 1936 and
Alcestis in 1944–45, Amissah (1980: 9) added:
It is interesting to note that in those plays, the narratives were in English but
the choruses were rendered in the original Greek.
The inclusion of choric speeches in Greek suggests that this was a
production characterized by respect for the original. Nicholas seems
to have been anxious to make good the claim that Cape Coast was
‘The Athens of West Africa’. One perhaps unforeseen outcome of the
Adisadel performance tradition was that it provided a vital encounter
for an alert young woman, Efua Morgue. Some years later, as Efua
Sutherland, she explored the overlap between one of the plays she saw
at Adisadel, Alcestis, and Ghanaian culture in composing Edufa.
During the 1950s, as political independence approached under the
charismatic leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, leading schools in Ghana
raided the Western canon for plays to which they could respond. The
enthusiasm for localization is reXected in reports of productions in the
magazine produced at Achimota School, where Shakespeare, much
more diYcult to adapt than Sophocles, provided staple fare for the
drama society. In 1952, Muriel Bentley directed Macbeth with African
drums, and with royal rank indicated by ceremonial umbrellas. Two
years later, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was put on with the mech-
anicals wearing African dress (see, for example: Sherwood and Bentley,
unpublished; and Ofosu-Amaah 1955).
In 1956, Antigone was produced at Mfantsipim. By that time, the
tendency towards localization, represented by Williams and Muriel
Bentley, and the spirit of cultural nationalism had grown. I have not
located any reviews of the production, but I note that the master in
charge of drama at the school, Joe de Graft, subsequently proved
himself a major adapter of Western classics, composing versions of
Hamlet (Hamile) and Macbeth (Mambo). He was soon to lead
Mfantsipim into a new phase of adventurous play selection with
the production of plays by West Africans, starting with Nigerians
James Ene Henshaw and Wole Soyinka. From there, he took the
logical step of putting on locally written plays, including his own
Sons and Daughters. Research leads remain to be followed up, but
I suspect that there may have been elements of adaptation in de Graft’s
1956 Antigone. In the same year, the Kumasi College of Technology,
later the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, put
on the play (see Dawes 1956). The fact that there were two productions
in one year may suggest that it had become Wrmly established in the
local repertoire with a reading that suggested it staged the colonial
encounter. At this time, as the nation looked towards independence
in March 1957, all the Creons were safely white.
B R AT H WA I T E ’ S V E R S I O N O F A N T I G O N E
The earliest adapted version of Antigone originating in Ghana and

available to me was prepared by an educational administrator, history
teacher, and poet from Barbados, Edward (now ‘Kamau’) Brathwaite.
In 1962, when his adaptation, entitled Odale’s Choice, was premièred at
Mfantsiman Secondary School, Saltpond, Brathwaite was approaching
the end of an important, extended sojourn in Ghana, during which he
had come to an awareness ‘of community, of cultural wholeness’.10 His
10 See ‘Brathwaite’ on Poetry International, http://www.poetryinternational.org/
cwolk/view/15909 (last accessed 29/12/2005). For quotations, see Markham (1989: 18).
Brown (1995: 8) has a reference to an eight year stay in Ghana.
64 Case Studies
version retains central elements from Sophocles, but he cut out what
might be described as the romantic dimension (sometimes seen
as resisting easy transplantation), simpliWed the issues of conduct,
and skilfully exploited opportunities for the incorporation of local
performance traditions.11
A ‘Production Note’ by ‘P.L.R.’ printed in the Evans 1967 edition
of the text resolutely combats tendencies to elaborate staging. This
stand was necessary because scenery and proscenium curtains had,
under the pervasive inXuence of naturalism in the European trad-
ition, come to be regarded as essential to the theatre. P.L.R. insisted,
at the cost of some historical distortion (‘in its day’ Antigone was
‘simply mounted’, p. 3), that Greek drama travelled light. By impli-
cation, it could leave behind buskins and masks, and appear in
ohenema [sandals and local cloth]. It could present hugely poignant
conXicts in a highly stylized, very accessible manner. Antigone was
also appropriate because the ‘conXict between tribal law and indi-
vidual conscience’ revolving around burial rites was so relevant.
The opening paragraph of P.L.R.’s Note comments on Brathwaite’s
version. We read (p. 3):
The story and tone of the play is that of Antigone . . . here it is modernized
(though to an indeWnite period) and made to apply to an African country,
but no country in particular. The theme is timeless: the deWance of tyranny,
a situation full of conXict and natural drama.
Despite the excellent advice on staging alluded to, and the recogni-
tion of the ‘timeless’ theme, P.L.R. moves rather on the surface in
these sentences. One point to be made is that Odale’s Choice carefully
oVers opportunities for establishing mood through performance
elements with which the pupils at Mfantsima would have been very
familiar. Scene 1 opens with a festival in progress, and with Odale in
the midst of dancers. Brathwaite does not include detailed stage
directions and does not specify a precise cultural context. He simply
indicates that Odale is: ‘carried away by the chanting and the drum-
ming’. These words hint at an atmosphere that the pupils, perhaps
with help from Ghanaian members of staV, would have been adept at
11 For important comment on the play see Hardwick (2003a: 103). For diYculties
with romantic plots, see Baker (1963: 77–82).
creating from their own observation and experience. SigniWcantly, as
if condensing a view of the development of drama, the dithyramb is
interrupted and the Wrst actor, Odale, moves out from the mass.
Later, when Odale tells Creon that she has responded to a higher law
than his in burying her brother, and he proclaims that she ‘must die’,
the chorus of women are summoned as mourners. They enter in
what Brathwaite describes as ‘a phalanx of supplication’ (p. 29), their
costumes instantly recognizable as mourning cloths. They quickly
establish an appropriate mood and register the emotional shifts for
the rest of the play. Thus, when Creon responds positively to their
request for forgiveness, their ‘wailing turns to a shout of joy’, they
dance to drums and gongs (p. 30). However, when Odale remains
determined to defy her uncle and he orders his soldiers to kill her, the
women begin a funeral dirge (p. 32). From these very general stage
directions, it is clear that Brathwaite requires the chorus to use
familiar conventions of voice and movement to provide context
and emotional colouring. His elimination of the romantic interest
from the inherited Greek material (Haemon does not appear) shifts
the emphasis of the play but the festival element provides new
interest and roots the play in a West African context. Brathwaite
negotiated his way as an adapter, to re-interpret or ‘re-read’ the
original. This is not to say that the adaptation is entirely successful.
P.L.R.’s suggestion that no particular country is evoked is challenged
by the names Brathwaite has used. ‘Odale’ itself is a Ga name and she
is also ‘Akwele’, which would indicate to Ga-speakers that she was a
twin. Appropriately for a Ga context, her (twin) sister, Leicho, is
sometimes called ‘Akwuokor’.
While recognizing Brathwaite’s considerable achievement in this
play, I think he underestimated the problems of adaptation that came
with setting the play in a country where there are both patrilineal and
matrilineal communities. There are several references to Creon as
Odale’s ‘uncle’ and yet no suggestion that to some members of his
audience this title would mean a very close relationship. In trad-
itional matrilineal societies uncles, in the restricted sense of ‘mothers’
brothers’, are responsible for their sisters’ children. In this context,
‘your uncle’ is in important respects ‘your father’. The language given
to the soldiers, however, does support P.L.R.’s contention about ‘no
country’ since it shifts from one kind of ‘pidgin’ to another. For
66 Case Studies
example, we encounter ‘to chop he’, when we might expect a West
African to say ‘to chop am’, and we meet a distinctive Caribbean
strain in ‘he cahn come back’. This sits particularly oddly with the
Ghanaian ejaculation ‘Cha!’ that I take to be a rendition of ‘Twea!’.
Brathwaite may have cultivated the confusion of diVerent popular
usages to work against too precise a location. If this is the case, the
pidgin becomes a reXection of the play’s origin: it is part of the
process by which a Caribbean poet assembled several voices while
discovering the accents in which he wished to speak.
The publication of Brathwaite’s text by Evans Brothers in its Plays
for African Schools series in 1967 (Brathwaite 1967) meant that an
inexpensive, simpliWed, acting and reading version of Antigone was
available in Ghana. I consider Brathwaite’s Caribbean origin, and his
radical position on issues of language and culture, hugely important
in the context of this examination of Antigone in Ghana. The fact that
he chose to make contact with ‘the Motherland’ through what had
become part of a shared classical heritage shows how fruitful Greek
drama can be in facilitating communication between returnees and
those who remained at home. The adaptation was part of a home-
coming for Brathwaite, and an important statement about how the
‘Black Atlantic’ communicated.
A N TI G O N E I N H A I T I I N G H A NA
The impact of Caribbean interpreters of Antigone in Ghana con-

tinued when Felix Morisseau-Leroy directed his version of the play.
Antigone in Haiti had been previously performed in Port au Prince
(1953) and at the Theatre of Nations (Paris, 1959). It had earned
Morriseau-Leroy, who was already well known as a poet, lawyer, civil
servant, and teacher in his native Haiti, a reputation as a committed
playwright of international stature. At odds with the repressive
regime of ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, Morriseau-Leroy was recruited by
Nkrumah’s government as National Organizer of Drama and Litera-
ture, and made a signiWcant contribution to the evolving national
theatre movement. He threw his weight behind Nkrumah’s ideas
about African Personality, African Socialism, and the use of the arts
in nation-building. He helped set up a fully professional company
‘run on socialist theory’ that promoted plays and Concert Party-
inXuenced performances celebrating the heroism of Ghanaian Work-
ers (Morriseau-Leroy 1965).12
In this context, the decision to put on Antigone in Haiti in Ghana
in 1963 appears at odds with the main thrust of his work. I have
located little on the production and that which I have found intrigues
rather than directly illuminates. It seems, however, that the transla-
tion (from French/Creole) into English (Ghanaian English) was by a
Mary Dorkonou (see Morriseau-Leroy 1994). It is surely revealing
that one journalist writing under the title ‘Antigone in Haiti ’ reXected
on political rather than aesthetic issues (‘Theatre Scribe’ The Ghan-
aian, January 1965). He hammered out:
. . . by socialism the Ghana artiste can work for the upliftment of the rich
cultural heritage of his ancestors which imperialism was bent on destroying,
our playwrights must this year make it a point to come out with plays
depicting our culture. . . . Plays exposing the vices of colonialism and plays
preaching the gospel of the New Africa—the ideology of Nkrumahism. . . .
Our producers for the radio, television and the theatre should now see to it
that they STAB IMPERIALISM TO DEATH.
This is an extraordinary outburst that indicates the pressures people
connected with the theatre were under during the mid-sixties. One
can guess at the political situation that prompted it.
I have found no record of productions of Antigone at this period,
when Nkrumah’s despotic tendencies were becoming clearly mani-
fest. Playwright-politician J. B. Danquah, who combined opposition
to colonialism with family ties to traditional oYce-holders, died in
detention. Antigone’s clear-cut political message, tolerated when
white Creons were in the Wring line, had, following the use of the
play to expose a black (Haitian) dictator, become a little too relevant.
In the Ghanaian theatre, rarely known for promoting dissident views,
the stakes were high, and I suspect that theatre groups were fearful of
putting it on. However, on 17 April 2004, a veteran of the Ghanaian
theatre, Evans Nii Oma Hunter, emailed me about Antigone as
follows:
12 The possibility that Morisseau-Leroy was in some way prompted to adapt

Antigone because of the example of Anouilh falls outside this paper.
68 Case Studies
. . . by the encouragement of Leroy, and others, it has been adapted to a
greater extent.
This I take to be a statement implying the possibility of indebtedness,
but I also enter the suggestion that any evidence of the inXuence was
delayed, coming to light after 24 February 1966, when Nkrumah, the
only too recognizable home-bred Creon, was toppled and began his
long exile.
M O R E P RO D U C T I O N S , T R A N S L AT I O N S ,
A N D A DA P TAT I O N S
I continue to pursue lines of enquiry about productions of Antigone in

the wake of the overthrow of Nkrumah and beyond, and I have
assembled a few details. In 1968, a Twi version of the play, ‘adapted’
by Alex A. Y. Kyerematen, was presented as part of the Seventh Annual
Festival of Arts held at the Cultural Centre in Kumasi, where it was
seen and described favourably by James Scott Kennedy (1973: 156–57).
It seems, from the tantalizing glimpses aVorded by Kennedy’s brief,
outsider’s account, that music, mime, and dance were incorporated
into the production, and that courtly elements were stressed. (Kennedy
did not speak Twi, ‘although’, as he wrote, he was ‘studying it’, and
must have been particularly open to the visual eVects.) He mused in a
characteristically vague and infuriating manner:
[I]t is possible that Antigone plays even better in Twi than many of the
English versions which I have seen. For after all the experience is connected
with the traditions and life-styles of African people. And the style is African,
which I imagine is similar to what the Greek people were doing in style at
Antigone’s moment of time.
Given the silence in his book about other productions of Antigone in
Ghana, I assume Kennedy, who taught at the School of Music and
Drama, Legon, in the late sixties, was referring to productions outside
the country. Kyerematen, incidentally, had been head prefect at Adisa-
del in 1936, the year in which Agamemnon was put on. His interest in
oVering Greek fare to Ghanaian palates through translation represents
a development of the scheme embarked on in the 1930s when
the choruses were spoken in Greek. The interest was shared by
L. H. Ofosu-Appiah, already encountered as a classical scholar, who
published his Twi translation of Antigone in 1976. Given the slow pace
at which Ghanaian publishers were operating at that time, it is possible
that the translation, part of a drive to promote major works of world
literature in Asante Twi, had been in existence for some time (see
Ricard 2004). I recognize the tremendous importance of this develop-
ment, for the ‘indigenization of Antigone’ but I am not equipped to
comment on it.
During December 1969, there was a production of Antigone, in
English, at St. Augustine’s College, Cape Coast, and another the
following year at Nungua Secondary School. While lecturing at the
University of Cape Coast at this period, Robert Fraser saw a produc-
tion of the Sophocles’ version in English and he subsequently dir-
ected pupils from Wesley Girls’ High School in Jean Anouilh’s
adaptation. In the foregoing discussion I have assumed that directors
were working with the Sophoclean original in various editions and
translations. The reference to the Anouilh version is of signiWcance
because of the model it provides, given the background against which
it was prepared. I think it can be assumed that copies of Anouilh’s
text were available to the curious with access to major bookshops and
libraries from the early 1960s. Fraser has provided the only evidence
I have encountered of a production in Ghana.13
During the early nineties, Victor Yankah, a lecturer at the Univer-
sity of Cape Coast, prepared a version that he entitled Dear Blood.
A production, directed by Efo Mawugbe, was scheduled for early in
the new millennium in the university’s auditorium. It was due to run
for two nights, but a power cut made the second performance
impossible. As 2005 came to a close, the playwright could not locate
a copy of his text! Hunter and his group Audience Awareness pre-
sented Antigone in Accra during 1986 and again in 1994. More
recently, in 2001, they did Hunter’s adaptation of the play, entitled
Little Princess Korkor. Once again, the text is not available but,
13 The Methuen edition with translation by Lewis Galantière, had been well
distributed from 1960. For an example of the Anouilh version being used to prompt
discussion about leadership, see the Africa Leadership Initiative website for a report
of a seminar held 9–15 March 2005 entitled The Promise of Leadership.
70 Case Studies
according to John Djisenu, in this volume, it was set in ‘a patriarchal
Ga indigenous society where concerns are raised about gender issues’.
On this occasion, the power supply was on the side of the performers:
the Wnal performance at the National Theatre, Accra, was recorded
and subsequently transmitted by Ghana Television. The Alliance
Francaise then supported a tour of the production to their centres
in the country.14
C ON C LU S I ON
Further research is needed and will undoubtedly bring to light

information about more productions and adaptations, perhaps
even about more translations. Even though theatre research in
Ghana is in its infancy, an underlying pattern may have begun to
emerge that is worth noting. In Ghana, initial contacts with the
Classics were made within the British-style educational system. In
putting Greek plays on the colonial stage, the Wrst forays were
inspired (at Adisadel in 1933) by Wdelity to the original that extended
to having parts of the production delivered in Greek. At the same
time, there was a movement towards adaptation and this grew
stronger as the decades passed. Some early work on classical texts
was done by sympathetic, sometimes radical, outsiders who recog-
nized that, when Xexibly handled, classical forms permitted eVective
communication with local audiences. In two instances important
contributions were made by artists who had been born into the
African diaspora. From the text by Brathwaite, it is clear that the
playwright recognized the possibility of reshaping the original so that
elements of music and dance could be used, and the dilemma facing
Antigone/Odale could be sharpened. Morisseau-Leroy, emerging
from a brutal dictatorship, must have appreciated the political di-
mension particularly acutely. Despite his proximity to the centre of
power in Accra, the production of his version may have drawn
attention to the existence of black dictators. In the Ghana of the
mid-sixties, as Nkrumah became increasingly tyrannical, some may
14 Hunter email 17 April 2004.

have regarded the play as particularly apt: I have seen no records that
anyone was brave enough to put it on. Antigone returned to favour at
the end of the decade, and translations and adaptations staged since
show the continuing relevance of its themes and form, as well as the
existence of a suYciently tolerant mood for directors to take up
the challenge of staging it. All this hints at the continuing creative
engagement of Ghanaian dramatists and directors with classical
drama, speciWcally Antigone.
In the context of a conference about post-colonialism, it can be
asserted that Antigone is a text through which the creative heirs to
diVerent traditions have been able to release ideas and spark per-
formances. Nigerian Femi OsoWsan’s conWdent handling of inherited
material in Tegonni (see GoV in this volume) shows how eVectively
the assured post-colonial playwright can make use of the Classics.
Material associated with the former colonial power can be comman-
deered and exploited: despite the pessimism of Ikiddeh and Agovi,
West African exposure to Greek drama was far from ‘tragic’. In many
ways, it was liberating.
4
Cross-Cultural Bonds Between Ancient
Greece and Africa: Implications for
Contemporary Staging Practices
John Djisenu
I N T RO DU C T IO N
Anyone familiar with the great ancient Greek dramas, written mostly
in the far-oV Wfth century (bce), cannot fail to appreciate their most
enduring and timeless essence, as well as their cross-cultural bonds
with Africa. Indeed, ancient Greek drama has become part of a
globalized culture, or what some scholars may refer to as a ‘cultural
universal’, because it addresses fundamental and intrinsic human
traits, desires, weaknesses, and strengths, as well as, sometimes, our
own fair share of excessive pride (hubris) and lack of exercise of
discretion and circumspection (blindness) in our contemporary
world. Let me dare add that maybe only our perception of God or
gods, and our kinds of buildings, machines, or technology, not to
mention food, costumes, dances, or movements, music and so on, may
have changed from those of the ancient Greeks. Largely, I think we
continue to function in the same way they did, as basically human.
So long as ancient Greek drama communicates to us and inspires
writers about their own mythologies, it will continue to serve as a
cultural universal in the sense that it addresses problems that are
shared by diVerent times, places, and cultures, and which have a
lasting signiWcance for people wherever it is read or performed. That
is why it is crucial to adopt contemporary staging practices to enable
Cross-Cultural Bonds Between Ancient Greece and Africa 73
ancient Greek dramas and Greek-inspired, as well as purely African,
mythological plays, to shed more light on current global problems
and concerns such as wars and their negative consequences, inWdelity
and family disloyalty, as well as issues of gender and international
political vengeance.
B ON D S A N D L E G AC I E S
Use of Myth in Drama and Society

For us in Africa, and Ghana in particular, there exists a number of
cross-cultural bonds that facilitate our ready acceptance and appre-
ciation of ancient Greek drama. One of these bonds is the existence
and use of myths in African societies. J. H. Nketia, a renowned
Ghanaian musicologist, clariWes the nature of myths for us when he
writes (Nketia 1999: 7):
They [Myths] bring the supernatural within the framework of human
experience by structuring gods along the lines human society is structured
and making them behave like humans, marrying and intermarrying and in
the process getting entangled in moral issues, upholding or breaking certain
codes of conduct, etc. Myths do dramatize human problems—moral, spir-
itual, psychological or political.
In Africa today, myths form the basis of some indigenous religions
and modes of worship. They also Wnd expression in creative mani-
festations such as drama, dance drama, music, dance, prose, and
poetry. They permeate history, oral literature, and traditions, and
bolster ethnic bonding and identities such as those among the Yor-
ubas of Nigeria, and Asantes of Ghana. Myth-making even continues
in our present times; take the case of post-colonial heads of states in
Africa, for instance, who constructed myths around themselves as
being all-wise, all-knowing, and immortal—the only choices of the
gods to lead their peoples throughout their lifetimes.
One of the ancient Greek legacies for us in Africa, and indeed the
whole world, is the sheer latitude enjoyed by Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides, and Aristophanes in re-working the existing stock of
74 Case Studies
myths of their times and spicing them with their own creative
perspectives.1 Contemporary mythological playwrights generally
tend to take cues from their ancient Greek counterparts to recreate
freely from existing myths in order to address current issues.
The creative use of myth by ancient Greek playwrights has inspired
some African writers to explore their own cultural histories, and pro-
vides a basic cross-cultural compatibility that allows the creative fusion
of African and Greek traditions. In Ghana, Michael Dei-Anang’s
Okomfo Anokye’s Golden Stool (1963) is a case in point. The play explores
the myth of the golden stool of Asantes. Commanded mysteriously
from the sky in 1697 by Okomfo Anokye, it embodies the souls of all
Asantes.2 In the play, we see the hegemony of the Denkyiras broken
when their king, Ntim Gyakari, is killed, and the golden stool being used
by King Osei Tutu as a symbol of ethnic bonding. Currently, the stool
still serves as the major unifying factor of all Asantes under the para-
mountcy of Asantehene, king of all Asante kings. For example, Martin
Owusu’s The Legend of Aku Sika (1999) is clearly an indictment of the
indigenous, as well as some sections of the contemporary urban, Ghan-
aian society for their negative attitude towards the physically challenged.
In Nigeria, myth was the creative source for pioneer dramatists like
Hubert Ogunde, Kola Ogunmola, and Duro Ladipo. Ladipo’s Oba
Koso, for example, was based on the Shango myth. This particular
Yoruba god of thunder and lightning has, lately, generated great interest
among Nigerian video producers. Femi OsoWsan also bases his play,
Many Colours Make the Thunder-King (1997),3 on the same mythical
Shango god. His other plays, Morountodun (1982) and Eshu and the
Vagabond Minstrels (1991), are similarly inspired by Yoruba mythology,
while his Nkrumah Ni! Africa Ni! (1994)4 has pan-Africanist concerns
but also captures for us an examination of the myths surrounding the
late Presidents Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Sekou Toure of Guinea;
as well as Amilcar Cabral, a nationalist of Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde
1 This point will dawn on anyone who may compare and contrast the treatment of
mythology in Aeschylus’ The Choephori [The Libation Bearers] with Sophocles’ and
Euripides’ Electra.
2 See Osei (1999: 151–60) for details of how this myth uniWes the Asantes of Ghana.
3 Premièred at the Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, in 1997; published text OsoWsan
(1999a).
4 Premièred at the National Theatre, Accra, in 1994 by Abibigromma, the Resident
Theatre Company of the University of Ghana, Legon; published text OsoWsan (1999b).
and Angola. J. P. Clark’s Ozidi (1966) and Song of a Goat (1964), Ola
Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame (1971), and Wole Soyinka’s The
Bacchae of Euripides (1973) have all been inspired by Greek mytho-
logical drama. These plays bring together linguistic and religious allu-
sion, movements or dance, mime, ritualistic elements, and other visual
impressions that contemporary staging invests with mythology.
Ola Rotimi’s play, The Gods Are Not To Blame (1971), is deliberately
paralleled with Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to highlight shared bonds in
oracular consultations, and the belief in the gods playing key roles in
determining the fate of children, even before they are born. There is
also the shared belief that, sometimes, human inventiveness cannot
overturn what the gods have determined. Fundamental to all these is
the point that one may not always be able to run away from one’s own
self, or identity, in spite of all the fatal consequences that may be
associated with it.
POLYTHEISM
The second cross-cultural bond that exists between ancient Greece

and Africa is polytheism.
The recurring features of myths and gods are known to be close
bedfellows in both African and ancient Greek cultures. As Arnott
puts it (1967: 39):
Religion played a vital part in Greek life and culture, and the Xowering of
that culture was inextricably interwoven with the worship of gods.
The gods tend to feature prominently in the myths and inXuence
human life. A certain hierarchical order characterizes the relationship
among gods. Each has speciWc prerogatives and may be worshipped
with ritualistic observances, such as oVerings of sacriWces and pour-
ing of libations, and may also be consulted as oracles.
Another striking feature of both cultures is variety of the objects of
religious observation. Both religious systems tolerate simultaneous
belief in a chief god, as well other multiple gods and spirits. Add-
itionally, African historical Wgures, such as kings, heroes, heroines,
war leaders, or even founders of settlements, may be deiWed. Natural
76 Case Studies
forces such as the earth, wind and Wre, as well as unusual trees,
mountains, and rivers may also be personiWed as objects of worship
in Africa. The Greek system similarly incorporated polytheistic elem-
ents within the local framework of religious practice.
What is particularly striking is the fact that some ancient Greek gods
functioned in ways similar to African deities. Consider the following
for a moment: Zeus and Shango—gods of thunder and lightning;
Apollo and Orunmila—gods of prophecy, with the most famous
oracles of Delphi and Ifa, respectively; Hermes and Esu—messengers
of the gods; Poseidon and Olokun or Malokun—gods of the sea. This
phenomenal list is long but you may have already noticed that all my
examples are drawn from Yoruba gods,5 mainly because they are very
well-streamlined, and have speciWc functions and prerogatives. This
may well explain why Nigerians dominate in the authorship of West
African mythological plays, including those modelled on Greek drama.
By sharp contrast, however, mythological Greek gods, unlike the
African deities, were non-moral and much less insistent on a moral
code for their worshippers (see Arnott 1967: 39–40, 60). It was held
that Greek gods shamelessly had carnal knowledge of mortal women
with whom they had oVspring. For instance, myth has it that Leda, the
wife of Tyndareus, was taken over by Zeus with whom she had twin
sisters, Helen and Clytemnestra. However, in a few instances, some of
them played roles of arbitration; as found, for example, in Aeschylus’
Eumenides 6 when the goddess Athena cast the deciding vote to exon-
erate Orestes from the charge of matricide. This was after their mother,
Clytemnestra, had plotted with Aegisthus, her lover and her husband’s
cousin, to kill her husband, Agammemnon, in Aeschylus’ Agammem-
non. Other examples exist where the gods punish instances of hubris,7
as can be seen in Sophocles’ Antigone,8 when Creon, the king, loses his
wife Eurydice and son Haemon as a result of his actions in disobeying
5 For further reading on Yoruba gods, see Omosade (1979: 21–57).

6 References to Agamemnon, The Choephori, and The Eumenides are to the Vellacott
([1959] 1986) translation.
7 Hubris was the reason why Agamemnon deWed convention and entered the
house by walking on a rich tapestry reserved exclusively for the gods, and one of
the reasons why Clytemnestra succeeded in murdering him. See Aeschylus’ Agamem-
non for the details, esp. ll.805–958.
8 References to Sophocles’ Antigone are to Watling’s translation ([1947] 1984).
the gods by denying burial to Polynices, thereby polluting their altars
with the carrion of the deceased. Another reason was that he had
reversed the natural order of doing things by burying Antigone whilst
she was still living, yet denying burial to Polynices who was dead.
INVOC ATION OF TH E GODS
This brings me to the third cross-cultural bond that has to do with

curses and fatalism. Indeed, wherever there is polytheism, there
abound beliefs in curses and fatalism with their attendant practices
of oracular consultations. In both African and ancient Greek cultures,
one notices the recurring practices of invocation of powers of gods that
have potent, disastrous consequences on the fates of adversaries.
However, a disparity exists between the two cultures in that
whereas, usually, ancient Greek curses were irreversibly potent, and
very often resulted in catastrophes, those of Africa could be annulled,
with no negative repercussions, by performing some speciWc rituals
to gods responsible for changing human destiny. It is generally held
in the traditional African setting that humankind’s fate is already
sealed by God, or gods, before entering the world, but it is also
known that certain gods, such as Orunmilla and Ogun (among the
Yorubas), and spirits are capable of changing human destinies.
The issue of reversibility of African curses is given adequate treat-
ment in Okoiti Omtatah’s character-titled play, Lwanda Magere
(1991).9 This is a Kenyan play that focuses on the mythical ethnic
struggles that used to exist between the Luo and the Lang’o peoples.
The Lang’o needed to know the secret behind the invincibility of the
Luo warlord, Lwanda Magere, if they were to throw oV their political
yoke. In order to achieve their aim, they went to every length to exploit
his tragic Xaw: his soft spot for very beautiful women. They succeeded
in tricking him into marrying their most beautiful princess, and that
resulted in his Wnal undoing!
Lwanda Magere’s newest wife, the gorgeous princess, swears by a
knife (p. 89) not to divulge the secret. This makes her come under an
9 The following page references are to Omtatah’s text (1991).

78 Case Studies
oath, or a curse, of death to be inXicted by knife or thunderbolt, if she
reveals the most guarded secret that her husband can only be killed
only when the shadow cast by his forehead is pierced on the ground.
Later, when she escapes to divulge the secret to her husband’s en-
emies, her own father performs the required rituals with sacriWces
(p. 90) in order to reverse the curse and to save her life. According to
the myth, her reversed fate makes the Lang’o turn the tables against
their former warlords, the Luo.
Owusu’s The Legend of Aku Sika10 is not, strictly speaking, a
Christianized text but it upholds the indigenous belief in fate sealed
by the Supreme Being (p. 5). Even though it does not introduce direct
reversal of a curse, one hears echoes of biblical issues of ‘Divine
Intervention’ or ‘Divine Grace’ (p. 7) that are to be accorded Aku
Sika, the physically challenged heroine of the play, in order to reverse
her fate from one ‘plagued by pain from infancy’ to one of ‘eternal
happiness’. Eventually, when her deformed left arm is restored,
glittering with gold bracelets, and she becomes the wife of the king,
it is divine intervention that has reversed her fate.
In Africa, the ability to reverse curses or fate is one major cultural
diVerence that tends to undermine complete empathy among Afri-
can audiences for Greek tragic characters who end up in disaster
simply because they are unable to reverse their curses.
THEATRE AND SPECTACLE
Apart from the commonalities of myths, polytheism, and curses, other

cross-cultural bonds exist. Consider the use of spectacle, where ancient
Greek dramas employ music, rhythm, dance or movements, and ritu-
alistic elements. You will Wnd that these features are comparable, and
indeed compatible, with the holistic theatre concept of Africa where
one Wnds an integrated approach to the use of music, dance, and
drama. Take also the stunning similarities that exist among some
basic costumes, such as the Doric chiton and some African tunics; or
the himation, the outer cloak often worn over the chiton, and some
indigenous rectangular cloths draped by both women and men.
10 The following page references are to Owusu’s text (1999).

Further, the communalistic nature of both the African and the
ancient Greek cultures makes it necessary to bridge the gap between
the audience and performers. While ancient Greek playwrights used
the chorus to fulWl this purpose, their African counterparts now resort
to the use of crowd scenes and some other devices for involving the
audiences to serve as a bridge with the people or the larger society.
IM PL IC AT IONS FOR C ONTEM PORA RY S TAGING
The cross-cultural bonds already discussed above have implications

for contemporary staging practices of both mythical Greek and
African plays. There is no need and, in fact, no justiWcation for rigidly
performing classical Greek plays, or those inspired by them, as well as
those purely based on African myths, in ways that limit them to their
referential contexts alone. If we did that, we would be needlessly
encapsulating the mythological dramas in strange worlds completely
alienated from our own experiences.
You will notice that there is the need to adopt contemporary staging
practices in order to make mythical plays relevant enough to serve as
useful commentaries on our present circumstances. This calls for re-
contextualization of mythical plays within a contemporary setting. One
way of achieving this is to re-invent the text. Soyinka’s The Bacchae of
Euripides (1973) takes pride of place in this regard in that, even though
a Greek Xavour wafts in the background of his play, what is generally
perceived is a mastery in the use of verse that decorates cross-cultural
elements, such as dances, songs, processions, libation-pouring, and
marriage ceremonies, whose ingredients are essentially African.
DANCE A ND MOV EME NT
Dance and movement are major elements in re contextualization; for

instance in Martha Graham’s groundbreaking production of Aes-
chylus’ Oresteia, which she re titled as Clytemnestra (1958). In this
production, she re created fragments of spoken language accompanied
80 Case Studies
by movements to help place her dance within given rhythms and
emotions (Chioles 1993; Yaari 2003). Her Western ballet choreography
indicates how an alternative usage of the body language of dance can
recontextualize staging. This applies to both mythical Greek and
African drama.
Similarly, Francis Nii Yartey, the choreographer of the National
Dance Company of Ghana, re-created a dance-drama, The Legend of
Okoryo (1991), based on the mythology of the political betrayal of the
Ga, an ethnic group of Accra and its environs. Okoryo, the legendary
lady, had come to ameliorate the plight of her people by availing them
of peace, freedom, love, unity, and spiritual blessings, but they rejected
these entire panaceas to their woes. Instead, her people demanded
material things for instant consumption, which she could not limit-
lessly produce. Consequently, she was painfully executed. This may be
a sad commentary on some African countries that have executed past
political leaders for Ximsy political and economic reasons.
The choreographer sheds further light in the programme notes for
the performance (Yartey 1991):
Among all the creatures that inhabit the planets, it is only the creatures of the
Earth that are found to be materialistic, wicked and greedy. They are the only
ones who build solely to destroy, who take but never give back; and the most
vulnerable.
This innovative Ghanaian mythical choreography succeeds in endowing
myth with a syncretism of indigenous and contemporary African dance
in which Yartey explores dynamism in the use of space, levels, and body
language. One also Wnds rare costumes and outsize, symbolic props,
such as the depiction of hatching of massive eggs on stage. With the
addition of a revolutionary combination of indigenous and electronic
sound production, the total eVect achieved with the performance is
one of squarely placing the myth amid a contemporary audience.
S OC I A L C O M M E N T
Recontextualization also implies investing myths with relevant and

current socio-cultural, political, and economic underpinnings, so
that the plays can mirror or symbolize present-day issues and realities.
Such investments are demonstrated in Evans Hunter’s production
Little Princess Korkor (2001),11 based on Sophocles’ Antigone. This
play is also set in the same patriarchal Ga indigenous society that, like
other traditional societies, generally tends to relegate women to the
background; in contrast to the fearlessly bold and resolute manner
with which Princess Korkor stands up to King Tackie Dzata in order
to bury his brother. The denial of burial to Prince Oblite revives
memories of some past political leaders of Ghana who were executed
without interment rites. It took the collective intervention of their
wives and other family members before the State took measures to
retrieve their mortal remains from mass graves for proper entomb-
ment rites to be accorded them under a new political dispensation.
Owusu’s The Legend of Aku Sika similarly explores myth simply as
a backdrop for viewing serious social issues, especially negative
attitudes and general insensitivity towards the physically challenged,
in some sections of African societies. The objection expressed by the
people towards the king’s desire to marry Aku Sika, in spite of her
deformed arm, is an insidious attitude that is found in most indi-
genous societies where the royalty are supposed to marry suitors
without any physical challenges. Besides, OsoWsan’s Morountodun,
based on the ancient myth of Moremi, mirrors the political landscape
of Nigeria with assurance of victory and hope, while Eshu and the
Vagabond Minstrels re-enacts a rite of fertility in which Orunmila, the
Yoruba god of knowledge and prophecy, addresses thematic concerns
commonly found in morality plays, such as love and compassion.
Omtatah’s, Lwanda Magere, could be misconstrued as a mere
rabble-rousing mythical play that seeks only to open wounds of
ethnic clashes between the Luo and the Lang’o of Kenya, but, in
fact, it confronts its audiences with the needless and mindless blood-
shed of those turbulent ancient times, and the need to resolve to
preserve the present-day camaraderie. Also noteworthy is Okurut’s
The Curse of the Sacred Cow (1994). This play captures the myth of a
sacred cow, Kajeru, which was to be given full interment rites like a
11 This play was co-produced with the Alliance Francaise of Accra in 2001, and was
subsequently telecast on Ghana Television in the same year. I have not been able to
locate a published text.
82 Case Studies
human being. Nyabwangu, one of Mutoro’s wives, leads a rebellion
against what she sees as ‘unreasonable’ rites to be accorded mere
massive beef that must be consumed not only for nourishment but
also wisdom and enlightenment. Although she fails to win the sup-
port of the most elderly wife, Ndiinga, she manages to sway the rest
of the family to her side because of a general mouth-watering desire
for meat. As a result of this brash deWance of the explicit instructions
of their husband Mutoro, who is away from home, their household is
totally submerged by a supernatural lake sent by the gods. Ntangaare
sheds further light on the relevance of Okurut’s play (2002: 60):
. . . evil image of woman is also central. . . . However, this play also criticizes
society for denying opportunities to women like Nyabwangu with leadership
potential. . . . Because of Nyabwangu’s evil the whole world becomes dis-
ordered . . .
The social focus of the ancient Greek play, Lysistrata, compares
well with Harrison and Simmons’ Aikin Mata (1996). Both plays
treat the theme of the undesirable social and political impacts of wars
on civil society, and the possibility of their abatement through
women’s sexual strike. The latter play, in particular, speaks through
Magajiya, its key woman, to urge all other women in Nigeria to
conspire against their husbands by ending all sexual activities in
order to end wars in Nigeria, and for that matter, Africa. This is an
indirect reference to civil wars in Nigeria and elsewhere on the
African continent. Clark’s Ozidi, Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers,
and Sophocles’ and Euripides’ versions of Electra may easily repre-
sent the military house-cleaning coups d’état and ethnic cleansing
that have characterized some African politics. Even Euripides’ Bac-
chae may very well typify the violent political vindictiveness that
caused the AFRC (Armed Forces Revolutionary Council) regime of
Ghana to execute three former Heads of State (see Hansen and
Collins 1980). Rotimi’s Oedipus-inspired play, The Gods Are Not To
Blame, sheds some light on the gods of the modern age, the so-called
superpowers. Some of them have contributed immensely to the
impoverishment of a number of Third-World countries, whose lead-
ers themselves are not completely blameless, since most of them have
made irresponsible choices of policies that have left their people in
social and economic doldrums.
TECHNOLOGY AND STAGING
Re-contextualization requires modernization and originality in the ap-

plication of stage technology and other stage resources, such as scenery or
sets, props, costumes, masks, and so on. Again, a case in point is Owusu’s
the Legend of Aku Sika. Take one stage direction for example (p. 4):
Sustained celestial music Wlls the atmosphere as the splendour and majesty
of heavenly architecture emerges from the clouds and Wre, in thunder and
lightning. The structure is a huge solid upper hemisphere occupying the
breadth and scope of the stage. A Xight of stairs lead up to an immaculately
crafted throne standing against the dome. . . . Then, Wnally as the celestial
music rises to a crescendo amidst intermittent thunder, the two halves of the
huge dome part. Through the misty opening, the Supreme Being enters.
For eVective creation of visual impressions necessary for staging the
above, which is only part of the prologue of the play, one requires
audio eVects generated by electronic means, as well as huge semi-
circular ediWces fashioned out with power machines needed for the
curvilinear dome or upper hemisphere. An ‘independent’ Xight of
steps, rolling on castors, has to be constructed in front of a dual dome
that can be parted mid-way to ensure that the change of scenery can
be accomplished in split seconds. The clouds and Wre each require a
separate special eVects projector, while the thunder and lightening
call for audio eVects backed by a dimmer equipped with Xashers. As
for the ‘misty opening’ of the dome, it is impossible without the use
of a fog or smoke machine.
Likewise, the death of the title character, Lwanda Magere, presents
scenic design challenges concerning his body petrifying into a huge
boulder (p. 109). One way of dealing with it is to fade out lights on
the character’s ‘corpse’ at, say, Upstage Centre (UC), after covering it
with a stage rock created with hard-texture fabric. The actor will then
sneak out just in time before cool lights fade in to reveal the petriWed
remains against a shadowy background, as the story-teller refers to it
(p. 109). In the case of staging challenges posed by The Curse of the
Sacred Cow, the ghost of Kajeru could be projected from backstage on
to a translucent backdrop or a Xat whenever the need arises. A greater
challenge may be posed by the submerged homestead. Contrary to
84 Case Studies
the director’s suggestion to use a painted backdrop, a better eVect
could be achieved by projecting a river, sea, or lake eVect on to a
cyclorama. This would require a riverbank ground-row-mounted in
front of the cyclorama to, eVectively, mask the base of the plants
sticking out of the lake. Also the riverbank might create a better
illusion for the two friends, Mwamba and Mutumo, who tragically
take their own lives by drowning at the end the play.
AUDIENCE AND ITS PARTICIPAT ION
One price to pay for excessive use of contemporary stage technology

in staging myth is to create hypnotic tensions in audiences and
mesmerize them with spectacular eVects. The audiences may be
held spellbound by the performance, sacriWcing their objective intel-
lectual involvement for mere emotional satisfaction. This is where
Africa leads the way in breaking hypnotic tensions through audience-
participatory techniques. For example, characters usually represent-
ing the larger society, such as the chorus, townspeople, or crowds,
may mix with the audiences to participate in line deliveries, singing,
or dancing. As already noted, these are done not only to re-context-
ualize the performances within the setting of the audiences but, more
importantly, also to ensure some objectivity on their part in critically
appreciating the productions instead of merely being completely
carried away by emotion.
C ON C LU S I ON
Cross-cultural bonds exist between Africa and ancient Greece that

have inspired some African playwrights to model their dramas on
Greek mythological plays. A number of African playwrights currently
fashion their own works from indigenous myths, using the perform-
ance technique of recontextualization as the fundamental method in
contemporary staging of mythology. This performance approach
rescues myth from being shrouded in historical antiquity and places
it within the contemporary realm, while, at the same time, making its
performance intelligible and relevant to our day and age.
At the dawn of the twenty-Wrst century, whether myths will survive
on the stage or not depends largely on the extent to which they are
suitably re-contextualized. EVective performances of creative myths
contribute to a signiWcant role for Africa in globalized culture.
5
The Curse of the Canon: Ola Rotimi’s
The Gods Are Not To Blame
Michael Simpson
In 1968, at the onset of the most traumatic phase of the civil war in
postcolonial Nigeria, Ola Rotimi staged a production of his new play
The Gods Are Not To Blame, which is, amongst other things, an
adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Although this play, like
virtually all of Rotimi’s dramas, is theatrical on a grand scale, it
possesses a considerable literary dimension insofar as it adapts the
highly literary source of a Greek tragedy and insofar as its very success
in the theatre transformed it, ironically, into a dramatic text studied in
classrooms across a good deal of Africa.1 It is on the play’s literary
status and its resulting relationship to the European canon that this
chapter will focus. After the exceedingly successful production of the
play at the Arcola Theatre in London during the summer of 2005,
some renewed discussion of its extra-theatrical dimension seems timely.2
Notwithstanding its enduring success, the play has attracted criticism,
and, indeed, several critics have taken Rotimi’s play at its word and
blamed the playwright himself for the drama’s supposed shortcomings.
1 I am grateful to James Gibbs for a conversation in which he vividly described
witnessing a production of Rotimi’s play in Ghana; I also thank Lorna Hardwick and
Carol Gillespie for their eVorts in bringing together the scholars who contributed to
‘Classics in PostColonial Worlds’, and for their assistance with this chapter. I am also
grateful to the anonymous readers for helpful suggestions.
2 Running from 8 June to 2 July 2005, this production was the work of the Tiata
Fahodzi company and enjoyed considerable critical success, as well as playing to full
houses. ‘Tiata Fahodzi’ is translated in the Programme Notes as ‘Theatre of the Emanci-
pated’. See, also, Hardwick’s discussion of the Arcola production in this volume, ch. 17.
The Curse of the Canon 87
These failings have been usefully summarized by Dunton (1992: 14–16):
Wrst, there is no strategy governing the languages in the play; second,
the Yoruba notion of Xexible destiny is at variance with the Greek
concept of absolute fate; third, the Wgure of the leader crowds out
other forms of agency; and, Wnally, the ethnic strife evident in the play
is not convincingly integrated into the plot. This essay will speak to all
of these strictures, but it will be especially concerned to contest the
proposition that Yoruba and Greek destinies are so incompatible that
the play is utterly vitiated by their co-presence. Although this particular
issue has all the contours of an old philosophical chestnut, it will devolve
onto the more pressing matter of the play’s account of its relationship to
the European canon, beginning with Oedipus the King. In dramatizing
this account by adapting Sophocles’ play, The Gods Are Not To Blame
qualiWes as an instance of what postcolonial theory calls ‘canonical
counter-discourse’, in which the terms of the canon are mobilized to
challenge the authority and the values that those terms normally articu-
late. A useful deWnition of canonical counter-discourse is provided in
Gilbert and Tompkins (1996: 15–19). My argument will be that the play
claims to be able to negotiate considerable latitude for itself within the
canon, even as the play’s postcolonial culture within Nigeria is indissol-
ubly infused with that colonial tradition. My argument, in fact, will go
one step further than thus regarding The Gods as mere canonical coun-
ter-discourse, and will assert that the play also furnishes a theoretical
account of its negotiated independence from the European canon.3
Yet this argument immediately poses a question. Why ever would
Oedipus the King, which is a play that dilates on the power of the past,
in the form of the curse of Oedipus, be adapted so that it might
articulate the postcolonial moment in Nigeria? The next question,
triggered by the Wrst, is: How might Oedipus the King, of all plays, be
so adapted?4 To answer the Wrst question will involve a crucial
adjustment, even contradiction, of the standard reading of The
Gods Are Not To Blame, whereby the gods in question are the colonial
powers, exonerated of historical responsibility for Nigeria’s civil
3 The present chapter is derived from a book in progress, which is co-written with
Barbara GoV (2007).
4 Budelmann (2005) situates Rotimi’s play in the context of a group of West
African adaptations of Greek tragedies and provides some useful reXections on the
group thus framed.
88 Case Studies
war after independence. Two inXuential interviews given by Rotimi
himself (Enekwe 1984; Lindfors 2002: 345–61) have been instrumen-
tal in establishing this reading, which is focused on the protagonist’s
declaration:
No, no! Do not the blame the Gods. Let no one blame the powers. My
people, learn from my fall. The powers would have failed if I did not let them
use me. They knew my weakness: the weakness of a man easily moved to the
defence of his tribe against others. (Rotim 1971: 71)
Although Rotimi’s voice is that of the playwright, it is only one voice,
and the play itself contains many others. An alternative reading of the
play, which I shall pursue, is that the very distinction between the
colonizing powers on the outside and the indigenous population
on the inside is, and was, just as untenable as the ethnic diVerences on
the inside of the civil war. There is even a sense in which this reading
subserves Rotimi’s reading better than the latter serves itself, since my
interpretation extends the dramatist’s argument at least as much as it
resists it. This resistance, moreover, might satisfy one of Rotimi’s
aims as an artist, stated in the same interview as his interpretation of
the play (Lindfors 1984: 65):
Well, I think a play. . . must aim at transcending the province of mere aesthetics.
FulWlment comes to the artist when he realizes his work [is] being seriously
discussed, deductions or lessons drawn, interpretations argued over, new mean-
ings adduced and rationalized.
The alternative to such exchange is allowing the dramatist, like a
father, to tyrannize over his Wlial creation. Since this creation can
only ever be partly his, I prefer to abet the rebellious son here.
The implication of my overall reading of the play with regard to the
issue of who causes the war, is that the drama may very well attribute
responsibility for the civil war to the inter-ethnic dissension within
Nigeria itself, but that it does so precisely by characterizing that dissen-
sion in terms of the trope of colonial conquest. So monstrous is this
inter-tribal strife that it seems to be modelled on, or otherwise resem-
bles, the racial subordination that characterizes colonialism itself.
Rotimi and his character Odewale, the equivalent of Oedipus, may be
correct in their exculpation of the colonial gods as strictly historical
causes of the war. This exculpation, however, is not extended to the
cultural causation behind the conXict, since the play itself is con-
strained by that massive cultural legacy to represent the war in terms
of colonialism itself, and to do so, furthermore, in a version of the
colonizer’s own text, Oedipus the King. This unXattering comparison
between the Nigerian civil war and colonial aggression is staged initially
in the scene in which Odewale kills the Old Man, as Oedipus kills Laius,
and I shall discuss this scene as the beginning of my attempt to argue
that the play is preoccupied with the cultural power of the colonizer, as
it persists beyond the demise of his political power.
Far from subscribing to the routine argument that colonialism
begets postcolonial strife in a historically hydraulic manner, this
chapter concurs with Rotimi’s own reading of the play, but then
dissents from that reading on the matter of how that strife is motiv-
ated, shaped, and represented by the powerful vestiges of colonial
culture, as those formerly colonized are shown associating them-
selves too intimately, even incestuously, with that culture. Played
out allegorically in The Gods Are Not To Blame, this latter argument
will be traced along the following lines. Seeking to expropriate
Odewale’s land and harvest, and deriding his accent, the Old Man
is evidently analogous to a colonizer. Despite his force of numbers,
however, the Old Man is killed by Odewale, and the allegorical
import of this outcome seems to be that disposing of the political
power of the colonizer is the easy part. The next development in the
plot, and in the historical allegory of colonization that I am correl-
ating with it, is much more fraught. In marrying Ojuola, Rotimi’s
equivalent of Jocasta, Odewale enters into an excessively intimate
relationship with what the colonizer leaves behind. That vestige,
in the terms of the allegory, can only be the culture that remains
after the colonizer and his political power have been neutralized.
Although the familiar trope of colonization as rape may stipulate that
Ojuola represents an indigenous nature ravished by the colonizer,
that ravishing also entails that this virgin natural territory has
been transformed into a version of the colonizer’s culture. Odewale
then comes into a dangerously close relationship with that culture,
precisely by playing Oedipus in all his canonical splendour.5
5 See, for example, Boehmer’s remarks (1995: 86–7) on the colonial feminization,
and violation, of the colonized subject and territory.
90 Case Studies
The allegorical implication of this intimate union between the
hero of national liberation and the vestigial cultural power of the
colonizer is that there can, in the moment of liberation, be no
comfortable regression to an essential pre-colonial identity. What
expresses this impossibility in the allegory is not only the fact of this
intimate transcultural union but also the fact that Odewale, the hero
of national liberation, is himself characterized as a miscegenated
product of the initial colonial relationship. He is, after all, a son of
the colonizer, as well as of the nature that the colonizer has trans-
formed into his own culture. So much is he, in fact, a product of
colonization that his procreation is the colonial encounter itself,
at least insofar as Rotimi’s adaptation of the myth of Oedipus and
his parentage can be construed as an allegory of colonization and
decolonization.
Yet The Gods Are Not To Blame seems to be much more than a mere
allegory or reXection of these historical processes, and this additional
dimension is represented speciWcally by the product of the intrusively
close relationship between Odewale and Ojuola. The literal issue of
this marriage are children even more miscegenated than Odewale
himself, but there is another product of this relationship between the
former colonial subject and the colonizer’s culture: it is the play itself,
which is similarly miscegenated. Far from being a mere report on, or
description of, cultural colonization, the drama is immanent in this
process. It is in the context of this reading that the play’s congeries of
African and Greek elements makes sense and, moreover, deXects the
criticism of the play as lacking in any strategy with regard to its
constituent languages. In place of any liberatingly harmonious hy-
bridity, which such a ‘strategy’ might imply, is a hybridity fraught
with contradiction.
THEORY VERSUS CURSE
In embodying African elements, in the form of Yoruba proverbs and

deities, and classical Greek elements in the contours of Oedipus the
King, The Gods Are Not To Blame is, in eVect, the intersection of at
least two cultural traditions. Now, why the European rather than the
African tradition is the main object of enquiry in this essay is because
it contains within itself a highly assertive account of the very phe-
nomenon of cultural transmission, of how all traditions, including
itself, are perpetuated. In virtue of being rewritten by psychoanalysis
as a model of how human beings are socially constructed within
systems of exchange, the plot of Oedipus the King serves to explain
how culture is transmitted from one generation to the next. By
showing how much the individual subject must sacriWce of itself to
the group, in order to be even constituted as a subject, this plot, in its
reinscription as ‘the Oedipus complex’, can explain how the group
reproduces itself across time. So, the plot of Oedipus the King, as
adapted in The Gods Are Not To Blame, is evidently a narrative of
immense authority. Not only is it the plot that the play, and the
protagonist, cannot avoid inheriting from colonial culture, it is also,
as modelled within colonial culture, a reXexive account of how all
traditions are conveyed through history. This explanatory power may
even explain why this plot is the one that is inherited by Rotimi’s play.
Since this plot, above all others, can explain all cultural transmission,
it thereby accounts for its own transmission as the one plot that here
represents the whole ediWce of European tradition which weighs on
The Gods Are Not To Blame.
There may also be another answer to the question posed earlier,
about why the plot of Oedipus the King, of all plots, should be
mobilized to articulate the postcolonial moment in Nigeria. This
answer bears more closely on both the play and the postcolonial reality
that it represents: the gods are indeed to blame, because colonization
involves a miscegenation which the plot of Oedipus the King allegor-
ically reveals as the precondition of a form of incest. Although misce-
genation presupposes an extreme exogamy, which ought logically
to preclude incest, colonial miscegenation issues into the extreme
endogamy of incest because there is simply no outside beyond the
colonial relation against which identity might now be deWned. By
insisting on an absolute separation between colonizers and colonized,
on the one hand, and a close proximity between them on the other,
colonial empire collapses in on itself, both logically and historically. It
overrides the very diVerences that it strives to institute, in the very act
of this attempted institution. After the colonial embrace, Oedipus’s
question ‘Who am I?’ is unanswerable by both sides, because each side
92 Case Studies
has changed the other in the process of cultural exchange.6 Exit
exogamy; enter incest, at least in the cultural realm. To the extent
that colonialism is ethnic conXict writ large, moreover, it proves that
such conXict is as logically fallacious as it is historically persistent.
Ethnic aggression means Wghting yourself.
The second question, about how Rotimi’s play varies its inherit-
ance, serves to qualify this answer by limiting the curse of colonial
history with a speciWc adaptation of the cultural precedent of the
colonizer. This adaptation is of the prophecy informing Odewale of
the patricide and incest that will overtake him (p. 60):
ODEWALE: . . . I went to a Priest of Ifa. I asked him: ‘Am I not who I am?’
VOICE: ‘You have a curse on you, son.’
ODEWALE: ‘What kind of curse, Old One?’
VOICE: ‘You cannot run away from it, the gods have willed that you
will kill your father, and then marry your mother!’
ODEWALE: ‘Me! Kill my own father and marry my own mother?’
VOICE: ‘It has been willed.’
ODEWALE: ‘What must I do then not to carry out this will of the gods?’
VOICE: ‘Nothing. To run away would be foolish. The snail may try, but
it cannot cast oV its shell. Just stay where you are. Stay where
you are . . . stay where you are . . .’
He does no such thing, of course, and there is a sense in which his
tragedy, like that of Oedipus, is precipitated by his inability to stay
put, by this moment of migration. If only Oedipus and Odewale had
stayed at home with their parents, none of this might have happened!
There is, however, a crucial diVerence between these two cases:
whereas the Sophoclean oracle of Apollo delivers only a bleak prog-
nosis, Rotimi’s oracle of Ifa provides both a prognosis and an im-
perative: ‘Just stay where you are’ (p. 60).7 What this combination
implies is that observance of the imperative might deXect the prog-
nosis, and this logical implication is indeed substantiated in the
details of the exchange. When Odewale asks about what he might
6 Hardwick (2004a) writes illuminatingly on related matters, and I diVer from her
argument about Greek drama ‘decolonizing the minds of both colonized and deco-
lonizers’ (p. 221) only in tracing in Rotimi’s play some of the limits on and conditions
of such decolonization as they are dramatized there.
7 Wetmore (2002: 116–18) engages circumspectly with this issue.
do to avert the future willed by the gods, the ‘voice’ replies: ‘Nothing.
To run away would be foolish.’ (p. 60). One way of glossing this
response would be, of course, to suppose that the ‘voice’ is advising
Odewale of the futility of any evasive action, since the future has been
programmed by an inexorable fate. To construe the oracle’s response
in this fashion, however, is to presuppose that there can be only one
version of fate, which then comes to correspond, in its narrow,
tyrannical nature, to this methodological presupposition that there
is just this one kind of destiny. One factor that might condition this
presupposition of there being just one fate, which is correspondingly
absolute in its realization, is the Greek notion of fate, suggested in
turn by the lineaments of Greek tragedy Wguring throughout Roti-
mi’s play.8 Odewale certainly credits this notion of fate, since he
promptly runs away, motivated ironically by the horriWc assumption
that what he Xees obviates that Xight since it will come to pass
anyway. In Xeeing, moreover, Odewale conforms to the trajectory
of Oedipus and thus expresses not only the ineluctable momentum
of Greek fate but also the whole canonical freight of Greek culture
within which that fate and its impact on Oedipus is portrayed.
Odewale’s compliance with the Oedipal paradigm both constitutes
and advertises this African play’s susceptibility to the European
canonical antecedent that is Oedipus the King.
Now, The Gods Are Not To Blame may be susceptible to the Euro-
pean canon, but it is not subject to it, as Odewale evidently is.
Precluding such abject subjection is the fact that there is another
means of glossing the oracle’s stipulations and, consequently, a whole
other version of fate on oVer in the play. When Odewale asks what he
might do to deXect his destiny, the oracle replies: ‘Nothing. To run
away would be foolish. . . . Stay where you are.’ (p. 60). Instead of being
understood as a foreclosing of evasive action, this pronouncement
might be construed as a demand for evasive inaction. To insist that
Odewale remain where he is, with his adoptive parents, is, in a sense, to
prescribe the very remedy for which he asks. This interpretation of the
oracle thus entails not only a model of fate as more Xexible than the
Greek version, already considered, but also the larger notion that there
8 The notion of fate in Oedipus the King is explicated, and complicated, in

Winnington-Ingram (1980: 150–78) and in Segal (2001: 53–70).
94 Case Studies
is more than one form of destiny. Just as the Greek version of an
absolute fate is associated with the presupposition that there is only
one kind of fate, so the more Xexible form of fate just canvassed is
correlated with the notion that there is more than one form of fate.
Whereas the more rigid destiny, to which Odewale subscribes, can
be readily identiWed as ‘Greek’, the less rigid destiny can be under-
stood as an element of Yoruba culture. What signiWes the speciWc
presence of Yoruba destiny here is the fact that Aberopo, the coun-
terpart of Creon, is despatched to the oracle of Ifa, not Apollo, and
the fact that reference is twice made to Ifa’s divine partner in Yoruba
prophecy. The partner is called ‘Esu’, and variants of this name are
invoked at the moment when Odewale takes his oath about detecting
the murderer of the previous king, and later when Baba Fakunle, the
counterpart of Tiresias, requires payment from Odewale of just ‘one
cowry for Esu the messenger of Ifa and Olodumare’ (p. 28).
Understanding what is at stake in the play’s mobilization of Yoruba
prophecy requires some acquaintance with the details of Ifa divin-
ation, and so I shall provide a quick sketch of them. As messenger of
the gods, Esu conveys their will to humankind.9 This will is articu-
lated Wrst, on behalf of all the gods, through the mediation of one
god, Ifa, who is eVectively their scribe, enabling them to communi-
cate with one another and with humankind. To communicate with
humans, however, a translation of Ifa’s transcriptions is required, and
it is Esu who mediates between Ifa and humanity. The human end of
this relay looks rather diVerent. To ascertain the will of the gods, the
Yoruba priest, or babalawo, places sixteen palm nuts on a divining
board and then re-orders them sixteen times. It is with the signs thus
conWgured that Ifa writes on to the divining board. The babalawo
then interprets these visual signs by translating them into an oral
poetry, and it is within this exercise that Esu performs his oYces by
directing the interpretation. Yet Esu does not simply decode Ifa’s
divine writing into a specialized human discourse in obsequious
fashion; he instead interprets Ifa’s writing actively, to the extent
that he is responsible for ultimately making it mean. How he does
so, furthermore, is by animating the writing with complex, equivocal
meanings that must be applied by the human suppliant to his or her
9 An ample and nuanced account of Esu can be found in Pelton (1980: 127–63).
own circumstances and that may thus be determined in that appli-
cation (see Bascom 1969: 69).10 The net result of the indeterminacy
within this relay, introduced particularly by Esu, is that Yoruba fate
is, within limits, negotiable, as the suppliant reinterprets it in the act
of applying it. Destiny and prophecy are thus highly contingent on
interpretation.11 Our second question, posed earlier, about how the
play varies its legacy, has now been answered.
It is this relay of interpretation in Ifa divination that Gates (1988)
has reconstructed as the basis of the ‘black vernacular’ in the United
States, modelling such reinterpretation as the working of a literary
canon in which aftercomers can improvize freely on their antecedents
without being obliged to murder or to commit incest with them.12 My
argument here is not that an African-American theory of African-
American culture, as identified by Gates, is fully at work in Rotimi’s
play. What I do propose, however, is that the play’s references to Esu
are the trace of a theory of interpretation that mediates the play’s larger
relationships to Oedipus the King and to the European canon which the
latter play signifies. Even as Odewale presupposes that there is only one
model of destiny and that this destiny is correspondingly monolithic
in its realization, the play invokes a more Xexible model, which he
misses because he has run amok in this Greek play and gone native,
over-investing in the European elements, until, of course, he realizes
that it could have been diVerent and that the European gods are,
therefore, not to blame. He did not necessarily have to go the way of
Oedipus. Had he not identiWed excessively with the Greek component
of his cultural identity, he might have been receptive to the Yoruba
alternative. Although Odewale may seem quite sensitive to the martial
aspect of Yoruba culture represented by Ogun, whose shrine stands at
10 In his extensive account of this divination, Bascom states that ‘The client Wnds his
own answer’ and, furthermore, calls the process ‘a projective technique, comparable to
the Rorschach Test’. (Bascom 1969:69)
11 Positing some signiWcant common factors across West African religions, the
ethnographer Fortes (1983:3) has deployed the Wgures of Oedipus and Job to
personify diVering, even opposed, notions of how the individual relates to the
cosmos: ‘The Oedipal principle is best summed up in the notion of Fate or Destiny,
the Jobian principle in that of Supernatural Justice’. Fortes concludes that ‘in West
African religions’ these principles ‘are not opposed but rather supplement each other’
(p. 40), as I propose is the case in The Gods Are Not To Blame.
12 See Gates (1988): pp. 23–43 on the role of Esu and pp. 44–88 on his extrapo-
lation of a theory of tradition.
96 Case Studies
the centre of the play, his most compelling Wxation, unbeknownst to
himself, is on an Hellenic model, and it is this model that blinds him to
the larger scope of his Yoruba identity and the other gods, such as Ifa
and Esu, that inform it. The fact that he is blind to his resemblance to,
and diVerence from, Oedipus, whom he does not appear to recognize
as an antecedent, is an added dramatic irony that Oedipus himself
does not have to bear. So intense was this dramatic irony in Tiata
Fahodzi’s production at the Arcola that the emerging uncertainty
about who is who, exposed by Odewale’s questioning, was played
quite farcically, until the massive gravity of the tragedy Wnally im-
pinged. One implication of this intensity is that colonial culture has a
way of crushing precisely those who do not know its secrets, with those
very secrets.
The play, meanwhile, has been aware at an earlier stage of the
contortions of its own cultural identity. It knows, before Odewale
does, that it is miscegenated, on the one hand, and yet a product of
incest, on the other, and this self-consciousness is legible in Odewale’s
exchange with the oracle. The importance of this exchange is pointed
metatheatrically by the fact that this dialogue is dramatized in The
Gods Are Not To Blame rather than merely reported, as it is in Oedipus
the King; rendering the Sophoclean report quite faithfully in its con-
tent, this scene is, at the same time, a formal departure from that
report.13 What this dramatized exchange in Rotimi’s play signiWes, in
the terms of the allegorical reading that I have been developing, with
particular reference to this passage, is that the play relates to the
European canon by two means. On the one hand, its relationship to
13 The main structural diVerences between Rotimi and Sophocles’ plays are three
scenes in the former play which show what the latter play only tells: the Wrst is a
substantial prologue, which supplies the back story of Odewale before he arrives at
Kutuje; the second is a dramatized ‘Xashback’ to Odewale’s killing of the Old Man;
and the third is a similar Xashback to Odewale’s encounter with the oracle. There are
also several diVerences in the plot, including the following: there is the substitution of
an invasion for Sophocles’ Sphinx; there is the replacement of Creon, who is Jocasta’s
brother, with Aderopo, who is, just like Odewale, the son of Ojuola and Adetusa;
Odewale adopts a baby girl into his family; and, at the end of the play, Odewale,
unlike Oedipus, takes leave of his community and his children. Cultural diVerences
include the replacement of Greek gods with Yoruba deities, and the intermittent use
of proverbs in The Gods. The present chapter focuses selectively on those diVerences
that engage with the issue of determinism and that thus serve to theorize the relations
of this play to the canon and other cultural traditions.
the canon is an Oedipal relationship that is already programmed
into the canon and which is expressed by the Greek fate that impresses
itself on the play, and especially on Odewale as he follows Oedipus’s
trajectory; on the other hand, the play relates to the canon by means of
a relationship that is not already dictated by the canon and which is
Wgured instead by the Yoruba model of destiny and its inherent
Xexibility. This destiny is certainly Xexible enough to stand outside
of the European canon and to provide a wholesale alternative to the
canon’s most powerful account of how it and all other cultural tradi-
tions are perpetuated. The power of the story of Oedipus, as Freud
recognized, is that it can be used to account for how cultures work.
Against the authority of this Greek story refracted through psycho-
analysis, The Gods Are Not To Blame poses not only another culture, of
Yoruba traditions, but also, and more importantly, another account of
how cultural traditions operate through time. Although the Oedipal
model of cultural transmission is very capacious, because psychoanaly-
sis predicates it on an ambivalence oscillating between the extremes
of murderous hatred and sexual passion, Rotimi’s play exposes this
totalizing model as only one totalizing model among others.
B EYO N D FA NO N ? R E C OG N I Z I NG A C H OI C E
Even as The Gods Are Not To Blame advertises both a European and an
African channel of communication between itself and European
culture, it is also linked to that culture by a very speciWc channel
that is, in a sense, both African and European. This hybridized
relationship is neither a full-scale tradition, like Yoruba culture or
the European literary canon themselves, nor is it a grand theory of
cultural transmission, such as Ifa divination or psychoanalysis: what
stands behind The Gods Are Not To Blame as a hybridized link between
itself and European culture is Frantz Fanon’s earlier argument that
the Oedipus complex is entirely a colonial export. On the basis of this
argument, Fanon’s work develops the Oedipus complex as a diag-
nostic critique of the traumatically impossible relationship that con-
stitutes the colonial subject. This critique is applied to the colonial
relationship most elaborately in Black Skin, White Masks [Peau Noire,
98 Case Studies
Masques Blancs] (Fanon 1967). Although this text is extremely well
known within postcolonial theory, to the extent that it is one of the
seminal texts of the discipline, there is a psychoanalytic pathologizing
of colonialism in another of Fanon’s works, which was well known
rather earlier and by a much larger audience. An English translation
of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth [Les Damnés de la Terre] was
Wrst published in 1963, four years before Black Skin, White Masks
received similar treatment. While there is much less psychoanalytic
apparatus evident in The Wretched of the Earth, the Oedipal para-
digm is still powerfully present in at least two passages. Fanon’s
conclusions in this text, about the Algerian revolution, were widely
applied to other struggles for national liberation across Africa, and,
indeed, one or two of them may be traced reverberating within The
Gods Are Not To Blame, especially in its Oedipal shadow.
Fanon’s largest critical argument in psychoanalytic terms is that
indigenous populations prior to European colonization were subject
to neither the Oedipus complex nor Oedipal neurosis and that
colonization not only reconstitutes such populations in an Oedipal
relationship with the colonizer but also arrests these colonial subjects
in that relationship, inasmuch as they are structurally obliged to love
and hate the colonizer. Rotimi’s play extends and modiWes Fanon’s
argument, Wrst by staging an African protagonist who acts out rather
than represses his desires and, second, by staging that protagonist for
an audience that had, because of its postcolonial status in independ-
ent Nigeria, emerged from the Oedipal triangle imposed by coloni-
alism. In the context of Fanon’s argument, which was widely
disseminated at this time, the Nigerian audience originally addressed
by The Gods Are Not To Blame can potentially identify itself as having
passed through the Oedipus complex to enjoy the same status as the
colonizer and, moreover, to be replicating the characteristic behav-
iour of that status within the civil war. Yet the play furnishes more
than the total trajectory from Oedipus himself through the Oedipus
complex and then out of the other side of it. By modelling another
culture, and especially the distinct account of cultural transmission
integral to it, the play asserts a degree of autonomy in relation to
colonial culture and the corresponding mode of cultural transmis-
sion that this culture prescribes. What is more, The Gods Are Not To
Blame, rather than merely asserting this autonomy, enacts and so
substantiates it, precisely by dramatizing both of the metacultural
theories to which it is heir, along with a relation of choice between
them.
Such choice, however, and the poles between which it could occur,
do not permit a transcendence of the colonial inheritance, since the
very terms in which the two models are framed oscillate between, and
hence within, the two cultures that they also theorize: like Oedipus,
Esu is a Wgure that is often located at the site of the crossroads, so that
this very trope of cultural intersection is represented as neither Greek
nor Yoruba, but both. Any choice here between models of cultural
transmission is real and necessary, but it cannot involve a choice
between the cultures themselves, which the play insists remain locked
in an incestuous embrace. Just how intimately embroiled they are in
the play is indicated by the dedication, which reads: ‘For my late
mother Oruene’. Rotimi’s later account of the cultural circumstances
of his family illuminates the wider signiWcance of this dedication
(Lindfors 2002: 348):
I grew up in an ethnically heterogeneous family. My dad hails from Yoruba-
land, my late mother hailed from Ijaw in the Rivers State. My mother was
not literate, so she spoke to us in Ijaw, and we responded in that medium or
occasionally in the Nigerian pidgin English which she also understood
soundly. My dad was educated, so he had the option of speaking either in
English or in Yoruba; he could speak no Ijaw.
Even though these cultures split the family, the family, in turn, joins up
these cultures. Emphasizing this cultural compression is the fact that
the dramatist gives to his mother an artifact that she could not have
understood, because of its English and Yoruba vocabularies. In doing
so, however, he also gives back to her something with which she is
intensely familiar, which is himself, in the form of his own dramatic
creation. Since what she could have understood and what she could
not have understood are not separable, either in her son or in his
work, the sheer compression of cultures is manifest; the intimate and
the remote are, as we have observed, intimately conjoined in the
postcolonial scene. The very fact, moreover, that the play is haunted
both by the Wgure of the dead mother, signiWcant in Yoruba ontology,
and by the dead father of the Oedipal paradigm, constitutes an intersec-
tion of cultures. What the dead mother signiWes in the Yoruba scheme is
100 Case Studies
the adulthood of her children.14 Such adult status in the cultural
realm is, however, somewhat constrained, as the play has demon-
strated by its own example. Although The Gods Are Not To Blame has
been able to negotiate a degree of independence from its cultural
forebears, unlike Odewale in his relationship to Oedipus, it has not
been able to choose its cultural parents or how they related to one
another before its own appearance to mediate between them.
So much for my more or less postcolonial reading of The Gods Are
Not To Blame, which has been undertaken as a supplement to the
more mechanically historical reading of the play as a critical diagno-
sis of the Nigerian civil war. While I have largely eschewed this
consensual interpretation, Wetmore (Wetmore 2002: 119 quoting
Banham 1990: 68) has exceeded it by arguing that the play transcends
and symbolically remedies the ethnic divisions associated with the
war.15 How the play is said to do so is by addressing its audience in
English, which is not only the colonizer’s language but also the
language that is used most commonly in Nigeria, across ethnic
diVerences. My focus, meanwhile, has been on the play’s awareness
of the cost entailed in this English address and hence on the play’s
inability to transcend the contradictions that give rise to it. What
Wgures that cost is the Hellenic aspect of the play as it cooperates with
the English address to invoke the curse of the canon.
Several strategic conclusions about postcolonial adaptations of
classical drama and literature might be inferred from, or conWrmed
by, my analysis of Rotimi’s play: Wrst, such adaptations may well be
conXicted in their hybridity, as Odewale is, rather than serenely
equilibrated; second, such conXict can enable a formal and cultural
self-consciousness, as witness in Rotimi’s play a dramatic irony
greater even than in Sophocles’ tragedy; third, this self-consciousness
is not necessarily suYcient to countervail the contradiction that
produces it, since The Gods Are Not To Blame does not elude its
Oedipal bind, even as it models an alternative to it; and, Wnally, the
14 See Ibitokun (1995: ix) for an account of the Yoruba belief that the death of the
mother signiWes the breaking of the umbilical chord and hence the Wnal passage of
the child into adulthood.
15 Wetmore is here developing Banham’s argument about Rotimi’s construction of
a ‘trans-Nigerian idiom’ from speciWcally theatrical resources. Wetmore extends this
idiom to Rotimi’s use of English.
relationship between adaptation and canon is not always fully pre-
programmed into the canon, since that African alternative subsists
beyond it. There is a silent sign at the close of the play bearing witness
to at least one cultural genealogy distinct from the Oedipal. While
Odewale’s natural unnatural children accompany him as he departs,
the baby girl that he adopted into his family in an earlier scene
remains behind, like a diVerent, postcolonial Antigone, exempt, by
her adoptive status, from the overly familiar family of Odewale and
Oedipus.16 Although the play cannot transcend its cultural contra-
dictions as it dramatizes them, the curse can at least be worked, and,
to that extent, even blessed.
16 Like Rotimi’s text, Tiata Fahodzi’s production made no reference or gesture at

the end to this baby. It is her very status as a ‘loose end’ that saves her and that implies
the possibility of a wider postcolonial redemption. Although not outside the play and
the traditions that it invokes, since there is no such outside after the colonial embrace,
she can exist and begin to grow within the silence of the play and the canon.
6
Post-Apartheid Electra: In the City of Paradise
Elke Steinmeyer
In 1998, four years after the Wrst free elections in South Africa, the Cape
Town producer (and actor) Mark Fleishman and his team put a new
adaptation of the Electra myth on the stage of the Hiddingh Hall
Theater on the Orange Street Campus of the University of Cape
Town, under the title In the City of Paradise.1 This is, to my knowledge,
the Wrst truly South African adaptation of the Electra myth, and it is set
against the backdrop of the immediately post-apartheid era in South
Africa, a period when the new democratic government tried to deal
with the legacy inherited from their apartheid predecessors. This tran-
sitional period from a former repressive political system to democracy
was a crucial one in South African history.
As with so many other countries worldwide, which were governed by
totalitarian systems,2 the apartheid era with its strict racial segregation
policy was also characterized by gross violations of human rights.
Sarkin (2004: 1) points out:
How a newly democratic society deals with its past is likely to have a major
inXuence on whether that society will achieve long-term peace and stability . . .
and:
. . . [e]stablishing a comprehensive account of the past is increasingly seen as
a vital element of a successful transition to democracy.
1 There is no published text of this adaptation. I would like to thank Professor

Fleishman for making the video of In the City of Paradise available to me, without
which I could not have undertaken this study.
2 Jeremy Sarkin (2004) gives details of nine countries that had to deal in the recent
past with a similar problematic transition
Post-Apartheid Electra 103
There are diVerent ways of addressing this issue, such as blanket
amnesty, criminal trials, or a truth commission, which do not neces-
sarily exclude each other. But since ‘no two countries are the same’,
there is no single model that can be applied; each country has to
decide for itself what seems to be the best way under the given
individual circumstances.
South Africa’s attempt to deal with these issues consisted in the
establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in
1995. It was supposed to provide a forum for former victims and
perpetrators of the apartheid regime to share their experiences and to
Wnd a way to go on with their lives. Sarkin (2004: 100)3 has observed:
It has allowed victims from all political persuasions to be given a platform to
testify to their suVerings and reclaim their dignity, while perpetrators had an
arena in which to declare their sins and be given amnesty in exchange for the
full truth. Thus, a process for a national catharsis was established.
This was not an easy task since, especially in the South African
context, the distinction between perpetrator and victim was often
blurred; that is, in some cases, one person could be a victim and
perpetrator at the same time (p. 82). Countless wounds from the past
needed to be healed; questions of vengeance, retribution, and the
possibility of forgiveness were hotly and controversially debated, as
can be seen from: ‘[a] 1997 survey of the view of the general South
African public [which] showed that the majority of South Africans
were opposed to the amnesty’ (p. 4). As we will see later, this
institution was not a solution for everybody to overcome the past
that haunted them, and responses were mixed (p. 8):
Some victims believed that there should not have been any amnesty. Others
maintained that there should have been a blanket amnesty, since the TRC
process reopened wounds, causing more pain and bitterness.
In the following essay, I am going to investigate how Fleishman
adapted the Electra myth for these speciWc circumstances: which
changes he undertook, which elements in his production illustrate
the post-colonial issues in South Africa with special emphasis on the
post-Apartheid period, and what innovations he introduced into
the reception of this myth.
3 All following page references refer to Sarkin (2004).
104 Case Studies
Mark Fleishman and his team of students have devised their own
version of the Electra myth by drawing on its ancient sources, in this
case the four Greek tragedies that deal with Electra, namely: Aes-
chylus’ Choephoroi; Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electra plays; and,
Wnally, Euripides’ Orestes. He developed the text for his production
together with his team and cast as a collaborative enterprise, which is
a typical characteristic of so-called ‘workshop theatre’. This theatrical
genre emerged in South Africa in the early 1970s and is in itself a
post-colonial phenomenon, since it was meant as an opposition to
the established, mainstream ‘white’ theatre world. In his article
‘Workshop theatre as oppositional form’ (1990: 89), Fleishman lists
the following eight characteristics that deWne workshop theatre:
1. It is made by a group of people together, as opposed to being
written by a single playwright in isolation.
2. It is made for performance and has more to do with life than with
literature. A workshop play cannot, therefore, be easily published,
as the text is not easily divorced from the performance. Any
published version of a workshop play is only a crystallization of
a process at one particular stage of that process.
3. It has a structural form that is unique and draws on traditional
oral form.
4. It has a particular performance style, generic to the South African
townships, which is non-naturalistic, physical, musical, and larger
than life.
5. It combines various performance forms such as music, narrative,
and dance within the context of a single performance.
6. It has more to do with the collective subject than with the indi-
vidual subject of Western drama.
7. It is an essentially urban form of cultural expression, rooted in the
urban experience of South Africa, and is overtly political in
nature.
8. It displays an ironic comic vision that is both regenerative in the
face of the essential tragedy of the South African situation, and
transformative in its ability to estrange power structures through
grotesque parody.
Fleishman’s production of In the City of Paradise, as we will see,
meets all of the above characteristics. I base these observations mainly
on the video, which was taped on 28 February 1998 during a perform-
ance of the play. With the help of the same video, and some excerpts
quoted in Margaret Mezzabotta’s article (2000), ‘Ancient Greek Drama
in the New South Africa’,4 I was able to reconstruct the text of the
actual performance on which I base this chapter, although I have
realized, after having watched the video, that the text is only one
part of the production and must not be isolated from the context of
silent scenes, gestures, body language, music, and dance. In another
article, ‘Physical Images in the South African Theatre’, Fleishman
(1997: 208) elaborates on the importance of the non-verbal elements
in the communication between the actors and the audience:
The physical image is multi-valent, ambiguous and complex. It leads to a
proliferation of meaning which demands an imaginative response from the
spectator. There are those that would argue that such open-ended images are
inappropriate for a country struggling to deal with the uncertainties of a
changing reality. They would have clarity, single meanings, a narrowing down
of options in a manner designed to appeal to the audience’s need for stability
and certainty of understanding. I would suggest this is a misguided opinion.
The theatre in our country has often been guilty of simplicity as much in its
condemnation as in its condonation of Apartheid. What we need now is the
opening up of alternatives and options, the promotion of dialogue in a
desperate attempt to avoid the replacement of one monologistic absolutism
with another. Physical images are essentially dialogical: a double-voiced play
of opposites. They are ambiguous, ambivalent, often opaque, but precisely
because they do not reduce to simple single meanings, they demand that the
audience be actively involved in making individual choices.
He says that (1997: 201):
. . . the body is not simply a vehicle for the embodiment of the text; it serves as
part of the text in its own right [ . . . ]. Text is created through improvisation, a
physical process in which gesture exists before and alongside words as an
independent sign system.
For him (1997: 209):
. . . the physical body [is a] metaphor for the social body we are in the
process of creating with its multilingual and multicultural characteristics.
4 There is also a printed version of Mezzabotta’s article (2000), but I use the electronic
version for the references in the text. For full details, see Mezzabotta in the bibliography.
106 Case Studies
I would like to go systematically through Fleishman’s eight char-
acteristics of workshop theatre and see how they manifest in his play.
Point 1 has been already mentioned: Mark Fleishman elaborated
together with his students, who are at the same time the members
of the cast, their individual version of the Electra myth. Point 2, the
fact that performance and text cannot be separated from each other,
becomes clear when one watches the video of the production. It
makes one realize how much one misses out by focusing exclusively
on the text. Point 3 deals with the inXuence of orality on the structure
of the play. The performance of an ancient rhapsode consists of the
interplay of text, music, presentation, and improvization; he ‘stitches
together’5 single episodes into one narrative. As we will discuss later,
Fleishman’s play consists of nine episodes (with subsections)
‘stitched together’ into one plot. Point 4 is the most diYcult to locate
in the play, but one can Wnd some characteristic features of South
African township life: for instance the portable public toilet in the
courtyard, where Orestes is hiding and where Aegisthus attacks and
possibly rapes him and where he is killed by Orestes in an act of self-
defence; or Cassandra who secretly sprays the name ‘Orestes’ like
graYti on the wall of the house in order to remind everybody of his
impending return; or the moment when the vigilantist mob itself
wants to stone Electra and Orestes to death after they have been
convicted of matricide. There is also a lighter insight into the daily
life of the black South African domestic worker when the Nurse
complains about the way Clytemnestra chases her around and that
she constantly has to hurry (episode 6). Point 5, the combination of
various performance forms, has been established already. Point 6, the
idea of collectiveness, is covered by the central question of the play,
the problem of justice, since this concerns the whole community and
not just an individual. The political element under point 7 becomes
dominant towards the end of the play, when the text links the action
of the play explicitly to the TRC. And lastly, the comic vision in point
8 is manifested in numerous grotesque scenes, with Electra living in a
refrigerator, with Agamemnon’s corpse having lain rotting for ten
years on a heap of garbage next to the rubbish bin in which Cassan-
dra is living, and with a feast at the end that is strongly reminiscent of
5 This is the etymology for the Greek word rhapsodos.

Aristophanes’ comedies. Fleishman (1997: 206) comments on the use
of the grotesque:
By refashioning and re-inventing the material body into extraordinary, often
grotesque forms, they subvert and parody aspects of the society and the world.
According to Fleishman (1990: 97–8) we can Wnd some of these
characteristics of workshop theatre already in earlier South African
theatre history. In 1957, Athol Fugard developed a similar method of
creating the text for a production by giving the actors the skeletal
structure of the plot, watching their improvizations and writing down
the Wnal text only afterwards. Furthermore, in 1959 the so-called
Union Artists, under the guidance of Gibson Kente, introduced ‘the
broad, physical acting style’ and ‘the episodic structure’ (p. 97), which
would later become so important for workshop theatre. And, lastly, the
Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), which arose around the same
time as the Workshop Theatre Movement: ‘emphasized that political
goals—the liberation of the black people—could be achieved through
cultural expression’ (p. 98). What distinguished the above groups from
the traditional theatre was the fact that their cast and directors con-
sisted of black people and that they catered mainly for black audiences.
The Wrst three groups to begin workshop theatre in South Africa were
Workshop ’71, the Serpent Players (who were to produce later Fugard’s
adaptation of the Antigone myth entitled The Island), and the Phoenix
Players. Similar developments in theatre history could be observed in
other countries as well, just to mention The Living Theatre in New
York / USA as one prominent example, which, albeit not an exclusively
black, but a predominantly white group: ‘has been known as the most
radical, uncompromising, and experimental group in American the-
atrical history’ (Tytell 1995: XI). Initiated by Judith Malina and Julian
Beck in 1946 as ‘an experimental, repertory company’ (p. 33), it would,
over the following decades, touch on political and social taboos, and
promote creative and sexual openness, including the use of drugs. It
also used ‘the free and easy spirit of spontaneous invention’ (p. 182),
while elaborating a new play, discussing extensively as a group the
‘meaning of each element’, and so reaching a ‘consensual spirit’ (p. 183)
in the group.
Fully to appreciate a workshop theatre production, one needs to bear
in mind the three following aspects, which Fleishman enumerates as
108 Case Studies
‘1. Production; 2. Structure; 3. Social process’ (p. 90). He subdivides the
Wrst one, Production, further into three phases: Observation, Impro-
vization, and Selection (p. 100). Observation (pp. 101–4) consists for
him in doing research on the topic of the play by contemplating other
people’s personal and daily experiences. Improvization takes place after
the producer has given the cast a rough structure of the plot, including
the beginning and ending. Finally, Selection is the process of Wltering
out of the above steps the Wnal version in a collaborative and demo-
cratic way. The Structure (pp. 104–8) of a workshop play is, in contrast
to the traditional sequentially-developed narrative, episodic, a term
often attributed to Berthold Brecht’s theatre, but which can be also
attributed to ‘the structure of a traditional oral folk-tale’ (p. 104), since
folk tales often consist of a sequence of episodes or mini-stories, which
are ‘stitched together’ by the narrator. Also the basic structure of many
workshop theatre plays consists of a sequence of actions or functions.
The third aspect, Social process (pp. 108–13) is described by Fleishman
as follows (p. 113):
These workshop plays do not document contemporary history, they do deal
with the past, but they do so in relation to the present and it is this
relationship which gives them their political function [ . . . ]. They identify
traditions which become a resource for present struggles.
If we look at the structure of In the City of Paradise, we can see that it
consists of a sequence of nine episodes, each subdivided into two or
three smaller sequences with interludes. The setting is a kitchen
equipped with a fridge, cupboards, two washbasins, and a waste
area—an allusion to the history of the house of Atreus, which includes
Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, slaughtering the children of his brother,
Thyestes, and serving them up as a meal; and also Thyestes’ curse after
sampling the food and realizing the awful crime. In Fleishman’s play,
the Xoor is made of black and white tiles like a chessboard. In the
background is a house with an open door leading into Clytemnestra’s
bedroom. In between there is a veranda and a sort of courtyard with a
portable toilet. The multi-racial cast consists of Cassandra (who is still
alive at the end), Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Electra, Orestes, the
Nurse (who acts also as the leader of the chorus), Aegisthus, Pylades
(whose role is played by a woman), Clytemnestra’s parents Tyndareus
and Leda, and a chorus of a crowd of people. The appearance of
Tyndareus has been taken over from Euripides’ Orestes, where Tyndar-
eus appears in a similar role as here. Between episode 1 and 2, ten years
have elapsed; in the meanwhile, Agamemnon has returned home and
has been murdered, and there are only two reminders of this crime left:
his corpse covered by newspapers on the rubbish heap, and the outlines
of the bodies of two people drawn with chalk on the Xoor of the veranda
like ‘the aftermath of a crime scene’ (Mezzabotta 2000)—strangely
enough, two instead of one, since Cassandra (in contrast to the ancient
sources) survives in this adaptation. The chorus perform the roles
of waiters, cleaners, and maids in the second episode, probably in
order to reinforce the kitchen aspect, and in the third and the last
episode they take the parts of the citizens of Argos, where the action
takes place.
A signiWcant diVerence between the ancient sources and Fleishman’s
modern adaptation consists in his omission of the gods and therefore
of religion as a whole. This is a phenomenon that can be observed also
in some other South African adaptations of ancient myths, where the
gods do not feature at all or play only a marginal role; for example, in
Mervyn McMurtry’s Electra, Athol Fugard’s The Island, or Guy Butler’s
Demea. Fleishman’s characters act on their own devices: they do not
defer their deeds to the gods or any divine order, but take full respon-
sibility themselves. In this regard, Fleishman is following the footsteps
of Euripides who had already minimized the role of the gods in the
plot of his Electra play and had transposed the action more strongly to
the human level. In many of Euripides’ plays, the gods have either
a negative role, as in Hippolytos (Roisman 1999: 151–52 and 156–57), a
marginal one, as in Iphigeneia in Aulis (Luschnig 1988: 119–25 and 54,
note 1), or a questionable one, as in Electra (Luschnig: 1995: 154 and
note 155),6 where Apollo is strongly criticized for his interference in
human matters by the demigod Castor in the Wnal deus-ex-machina
scene (Diggle 1981: l. 1246) and even more harshly by Orestes himself
in Orestes (Murray [1909] 1969: ll. 285–7; see also Grübe, 1968: 44 and
note 8). In Hecuba, there are no gods at all anymore (see Mossman
1999: 3 and 201).7 By leaving out the religious connotation of the
6 Grübe (1968: 41–42) considers ‘[t]hese plays ( . . . ) not primarily an attack upon
the god [i.e. Apollo]’, but ‘realistic presentations of men and women’ (p. 42).
7 For a general discussion about Euripides’ criticism of the gods see Decharme
1966: 43–73, especially 55–57.
110 Case Studies
question of justice, and reducing the motive for the acts of revenge to
purely personal emotions, Fleishman creates on the one hand a frigh-
tening scenario of how far human beings can be driven by hatred and
their desire for revenge; but on the other hand one might ask which
force can overcome these basic destructive instincts. We will come back
to this question later.
The most important character in the framework of my study is
Electra. She bears the traits of most of the earlier adaptations of
the Electra myth. She is Wlthy and smells; she is dressed in a Ximsy
top and dirty underpants. All this reminds us of her description in
Euripides’ Electra—the short hair and the need of a bath (Diggle
1981: ll. 150 and 1107–8)—for in both Euripides and Fleishman,
Clytemnestra reprimands her daughter for not having had a bath for
a long time. It also reminds us of her appearance in Hugo von
Hofmannsthal’s drama Elektra ([1903] 1979: 189, 222–3, 225) and
Gerhart Hauptmann’s tragedy Elektra ([1947] 1974: 889–90, 895,
901) as the third part of his Atridentetralogie : both emphasize that
she is Wlthy and neglects bodily hygiene. Fleishman’s Electra is neur-
otic; she acts like a psychopath, constantly trembling, suVering from
convulsions and uncontrolled movements, and is driven by violent
outbursts, when verbal arguments fail her, making her resemble her
father. She is full of hatred against Clytemnestra and Aegisthus; very
appropriately, her Wrst appearance is accompanied by the Gregorian
chant Dies Irae (Day of Anger).8 After Aegisthus’ death, she hovers
over his corpse and proclaims how much joy she got over the years
from hating him.
This scene reminds us of the moment in Euripides’ Electra when
Electra delivers a persiXage of a funeral oration for the dead
Aegisthus by gloating over him and speaking out all that has piled
up in her over the years (Diggle 1981: l. 907–56). As another simi-
larity with the Euripidean Wgure, she relentlessly pushes the weak and
reluctant Orestes to kill Clytemnestra against his will. Electra is very
emotional and not open to rational argument. She is possessed by her
idea of vengeance; she tells Orestes that she wants a ‘proper revenge’
and that it can be done only ‘her way’. She has idealized her father as
‘so true, so powerful, so beautiful’, although she hardly knew him and
8 I would like to thank Professor Bernhard Kytzler for this reference.

should have rather intimidating memories of him. The reason for her
adoration of him remains unclear. But one can understand Electra’s
hatred for her mother: Clytemnestra shows without any inhibition
the contempt she feels for Electra and her own superiority; she mocks
Electra’s virginity, she calls her ‘a disgrace to [her] family and [her]
position’ (episode 2), a ‘pathetic excuse for a woman’, and ‘the
daughter of [her] father’ (episode 7). In their debates, Clytemnestra
enjoys her triumph over the insecure and rather helpless Electra, who
cannot match her masterly and self-conWdent mother. The motif of
jealousy does not feature here, since Electra’s hatred does not even
vanish after she has found her own lover and has discovered sexuality
herself. But Fleishman introduces an interesting innovation: in con-
trast to most of the other versions, his Electra Wgure is able to
overcome the past and to start a new phase in her life. This new
beginning becomes clear when Orestes washes Electra’s hair and
Pylades afterwards bathes Electra’s legs and arms. Pylades also dresses
her in new clothes, actually in a man’s suit. During this cleansing
process, Electra discovers her feelings for Pylades and, while Orestes
is struggling in the courtyard with Aegisthus, she and Pylades make
love. Also, at the end of the play, after she has been given amnesty for
the matricide, Electra is able to rejoice and to join the feast whole-
heartedly. She is not troubled by any remorse or tormented by her
conscience; the amnesty has enabled her to close the past of her life
and to move on.
The basic storyline follows the traditional plot of the Electra myth.
The most interesting part, in my opinion, is the last episode, where
Fleishman adds quite a revolutionary new dimension by giving
Clytemnestra’s parents, Tyndareus and Leda, a prominent position
in the plot and so depicting the whole situation from a more under-
standable point of view, from Clytemnestra’s and her family’s side. To
put such an emphasis on the feelings of the victim’s parents is to my
knowledge unique in the reception of the Electra myth and allows the
audience to see Clytemnestra’s murder from another angle. The
representation of Tyndareus is closely based on his depiction in
Euripides’ play Orestes. As in Euripides (Murray [1909] 1969: ll.
496–503 and 538–9), Tyndareus reprimands Orestes for having
taken the law into his own hands: although it was not right for
Clytemnestra to have killed Agamemnon, she would have deserved
112 Case Studies
a proper trial. In contrast to Euripides, where Tyndareus is explicitly
going to encourage the citizens of Argos to stone Orestes and Electra
to death as punishment for the matricide (Murray [1909] 1969: ll.
612–14) and does not make allowance for any kind of mitigation,
Tyndareus here stops the mob from stoning Orestes and Electra, and
insists on a fair trial to be set up for the crime Orestes and Electra
have committed. In both versions he thinks that Electra has deserved
death even more because of her having inXuenced Orestes with her
intrigues (see Euripides, Orestes; Murray [1909] 1969: ll. 615–21) to
the point that the whole palace was burning with hatred. He believes
in ‘legal action’ and ‘justice’. In Fleishman, this trial takes place and
they are both found guilty of matricide—but worthy of amnesty.
Tyndareus, who has believed in a ‘just’ judgement and some sort of
punishment, is not able to accept this amnesty conferred on Orestes
and Electra; according to him: ‘this amnesty pollutes our law’ and the
fact that they can get away with murder and ‘walk free’ is a ‘travesty
of justice’. He feels that their own, the parents’, justice has been
violated, and ‘a parent’s right to recompense and retribution’ (Mez-
zabotta 2000 and the video) has been ignored. He and Leda leave the
stage full of bitterness. Orestes invites them to the Wnal feast and
makes a gesture of reconciliation, but his grandparents are not able to
be reconciled with him. Finally, Tyndareus even spits in Orestes’ face
in order to express his contempt. Clytemnestra’s parents cannot
come to terms with the amnesty and the fact that the murder of
their daughter remains unatoned for.
The confrontation between the interests of Tyndareus and Leda
on the one hand, and of Orestes and Electra on the other, is in many
ways typical of the situation which the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC) had to face in South Africa after the apartheid
era, with former perpetrators of apartheid crimes on the one side,
and former victims and their families on the other. On 26 July 1995
the OYce of the President issued the so-called ‘Promotion of
National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No. 34 of 1995’, upon
which the TRC was based. According to this act, the TRC consisted
of three committees: a Committee on Human Rights Violations; a
Committee on Amnesty; and a Committee on Reparation and
Rehabilitation. The purpose of the establishment of these commit-
tees was, among others:
. . . the granting of amnesty to persons who make full disclosure of all the
relevant facts relating to acts associated with a political objective committed
in the course of the conXicts of the past during the said period; aVording
victims an opportunity to relate the violations they suVered; the taking of
measures aimed at the granting of reparation to, and the rehabilitation and
the restoration of the human and civil dignity of, victims of violations of
human rights . . .
The term ‘victim’ was deWned as follows:
(a) persons who, individually or together with one or more persons,
suVered harm in the form of physical or mental injury, emo-
tional suVering, pecuniary loss or a substantial impairment of
human rights . . . ;
(b) persons . . . intervening to assist persons contemplated in para-
graph (a), who were in distress or to prevent victimization of
such persons; and
(c) such relatives or dependants of victims as may be prescribed.
Fleishman has adapted part of his text from the wording of this Act,
as can be seen from the messenger’s speech after the trial (Mezzabotta
2000:257):
However, we stand today upon an historic bridge
between a past of deep division and discord,
and a brighter future of peace and prosperity for all.
There is a need for understanding, not for vengeance,
for forgiveness not retaliation,
for humanity not for victimisation. . . .
They [the judges] decree, therefore, that amnesty shall be granted
in respects of acts, omissions and oVences
committed in the cause of the past,
where a full disclosure of the facts is made . . .
If we look at the original text from the Truth and Reconciliation Act,
we can see that the formulations are almost identical:
Since the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1993 (Act No. 200
of 1993), provides a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided
society characterised by strife, conXict, untold suVering and injustice, and a
future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful
co-existence for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, belief or
114 Case Studies
sex;. . . . And since the constitution states that there is a need for under-
standing but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retalia-
tion, a need for ubuntu but not for victimization;. . . . And since the
Constitution states that in order to advance such reconciliation and recon-
struction amnesty shall be granted in respect of acts, omissions and oVences
with political objectives committed in the course of the conXicts of the past; . . .
There were two major novelties in the South African TRC, which
diVered signiWcantly from former similar institutions: ‘it was the Wrst
to be given the power to grant amnesty—a power normally retained
by government’ (Sarkin, 2004: 3) and: ‘never before had an amnesty
process been linked to the providing of the truth about the events for
which amnesty was sought, nor were there previously so many
criteria that had to be met to obtain amnesty’ (p. 4). It was now
the tricky task of the TRC to balance ‘the goals of truth, justice and
reconciliation’ (p. 5). Tyndareus and Leda stand for those victims of
the apartheid era for whom the revelation of the truth about the past
does not oVer comfort or a way to Wnd consolation. This is a typical
reaction of victims to the Wndings of the TRC: also other victims in
similar situations—parents whose children were killed under the
banner of justice—reacted partially in the same way and partially
completely diVerently. The South African television channel SABC3
broadcast on 23 April 2004 a documentary about the TRC with four
famous cases, among them the stories of the American exchange
student, Amy Biehl, who was stabbed to death by four black males
(Mongesi Christopher Manqina, Mzikhona Eazi Nofemela,Vusumzi
Samuel Ntamo, Ntombeki Ambrose Peni) on 25 August 1993 in the
township Guguletu, and of the so-called ‘Guguletu 7’, named after
the same township in the Cape, where seven black teenagers were
killed by members of the South African Police Force (the police were
Wilhelm Riaan Bellingan, and Tikapela Johannes Mbelo). In both
cases, the perpetrators applied for amnesty. The amnesty was granted to
Amy Biehl’s murderers on 28 July 1998. The hearings (8 July 1997 for
Biehl; 17–20 November 1997 and 3–5 February 1998 for the Guguletu
7) were held in the presence of the parents (and some other family
members) of the victims. The reactions of the parents varied consider-
ably. The parents of Amy Biehl, obviously inXuenced by a strong
Christian belief, made it a point to accept the apologies and to meet
with the mothers of the murderers of their daughter, whom they even
embraced. They wanted to keep a positive relationship to South
Africa, because this country had meant so much to their daughter.
The mothers of the Guguletu 7 reacted diVerently. Some were able to
accept the remorse of the perpetrator, a black police oYcer, who
made a special request to meet with them and to ask for their
forgiveness. He addressed them as ‘mother’; one of them replied to
him as ‘son’. One of them said that she wanted to put an end to the
past and not live her whole life with the hatred. But another mother
said that she could never forgive him for what he had done. At the
end of the hearing, some embraced the police oYcer, but some
remained seated and made a deprecatory gesture. After the hearings,
the family members of the Guguletu 7 were given the opportunity to
ask questions themselves. I would like to quote two statements in this
context (Truth and Reconciliation Commission website).9 Mrs Konile,
the mother of Mr Zabonki Konile, said (on 19 November 1997):
I will never ever forgive Bellingan and my entire family does not want to
forgive Bellingan, because he says he was doing his job, that his job was to
kill people and I am through.
And Mr Mjobo, the brother of Zennith Mjobo, said (same date)
(Truth and Reconciliation Commission website):10
I do not see him [Bellingan] asking for forgiveness, because he keeps on
saying that he does not remember some of the things. . . . I do not see him
asking for amnesty, I think he has just come to destabilise the whole process
of amnesty. As a result, I will never ever forgive him. He has just come to
disturb us and destabilise the whole process.
These two statements illustrate the complexity of the question on
which the whole institution of the TRC was based. Were the appli-
cations for amnesty based on a genuine feeling of remorse and a
genuine desire to obtain forgiveness or were they just an attempt to
escape punishment? Which criteria could the commission apply in
order to Wnd this out, especially given the frequent linguistic diY-
culties and the problem of the translations? Could the hearings
provide satisfactory answers for the victims and the questions that
9 TRC website, speciWc page reference: http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/amntrans/cape-

town/capetown_belling3.htm (last accessed 26 October 2006).
10 Ibid.
116 Case Studies
tormented them? As we can see from the above, there is no single
answer, but a multitude of possible reactions depending on the
individual perpetrator and victim.
One aspect, which is of crucial importance for the TRC, is the
element of forgiveness and subsequent reconciliation. The pleading
for forgiveness (or its omission) is an essential part of all the amnesty
applications. Fleishman puts this aspect into question by leaving it out
of his dramatic conception, which is strange, but somehow makes sense
in the framework of a context where there is no place for religious belief
or faith as discussed earlier. Can forgiveness and reconciliation be at
all an issue in an atheistic world? In Fleishman’s play, there is no
forgiveness: not by Clytemnestra for Agamemnon; not by Electra for
Clytemnestra; not by Tyndareus and Leda for Electra and Orestes.
There is no remorse from the side of any of the perpetrators for their
crimes either; everybody tries to convince the others that his/her
actions were justiWed. There cannot be reconciliation without forgive-
ness and, as Nelson Mandela put it on 5 June 1995 on the tenth
anniversary of the above-mentioned ‘Cradock Four’: ‘There can be
no reconciliation without truth’ (Nicholson 2004: IX). In Fleishman,
amnesty is not linked to remorse or forgiveness; it is simply granted
because of the historic moment between a past to be overcome and a
future full of hope. One can only speculate why Fleishman omitted this
fundamental aspect. Maybe he wanted to show how fragile the newly
established reconciliation is, being based on scars that are too fresh.
This could be supported by a quotation from the messenger’s speech:
Our learned judges seek to reconcile all diVerences . . . to build anew our
fragile lives.
Maybe he wanted to show that the whole idea of reconciliation via
truth is only a utopia that can be achieved only in the ‘City of
Paradise’, but not in real life. Maybe he wanted to set an example
for those who are not able to forgive and to reconcile, and also for
those who actually never genuinely regretted their actions in the past
and just got away undeserved with the amnesty. Maybe he wanted to
make us aware of how tricky the question of amnesty is from the
point of view of the victims.
How much these questions preoccupied the South African minds
can be seen also in the South African Wlm Forgiveness, directed by Ian
Gabriel, which had its world première at the Durban International
Film Festival 2004.11 The scenario is in some ways similar to the case
of the Guguletu 7. A former South African Police oYcer, Tertius
Coetzee, comes to the town Paternoster on the Cape west coast in
order to obtain forgiveness from the family of a young black student,
Daniel Grootboom, he has killed during the struggle. He has been
given amnesty by the TRC, but now he seeks reconciliation on a
personal level. He is portrayed as a traumatized person, depending
on large quantities of medication. He has not come to terms with the
crime he committed. His Wrst encounter with the family—the par-
ents, sister, and younger brother—of Daniel is a disaster. They are
very hostile to him and want him to vanish, despite the presence of a
priest, who tries to mediate between them, especially with the sister
and brother, who plot revenge by calling three of Daniel’s old friends,
who are supposed to shoot Coetzee in the same way he killed Daniel.
In order to keep Coetzee in the town until their arrival they pretend
to want to hear about their brother’s death. After further conversa-
tions with devastating revelations, the family are Wnally led to the
point of slowly giving up their hatred and meeting for a joint prayer
at Daniel’s grave. At this moment, Daniel’s friends arrive, ready to kill
Coetzee. We learn that one of them was actually the traitor, who
falsely gave Daniel’s name to the police. It is this man who shoots
Coetzee dead next to Daniel’s grave. He tries to explain that he had
betrayed Daniel in order to save his own brother, who had been
arrested by the police, and who was Wnally sent back home with a
broken spine. The Wlm ends with a silent scene with the sister sitting
in the cemetery next to Coetzee’s corpse. It illustrates very impres-
sively: ‘the themes of redemption and freedom for a family ripped
apart by loss’ (WlmWnesse, 2004: 25) and shows how a family can Wnd
peace and close the door on a traumatic past. But it also gives us a
glimpse into the dark side of a time of struggle including betrayal,
torture, cruelty, permanent damage—facts that cannot be undone
and will remain a constant reminder of the atrocities of the past. The
character of Tertius is in sharp contrast to Fleishman’s Electra, who
does not need forgiveness or reconciliation on a personal level, that
11 Further information about this Wlm can be found at http://www.forgivenessthemovie.

com/ (last accessed 26 October 2006).
118 Case Studies
is, by her grandparents, but is satisWed by the oYcial decision of the
Committee.
Another important aspect omitted in the Fleishman production is
the fact that amnesty should be granted by the TRC for crimes
committed under the political objectives of the former government.
This is speciWcally emphasized by Sarkin (2004: 63):
. . . the essential requirements for the granting of amnesty were that the act,
omission or oVence must have been one with a political objective, committed
in the course of the conXicts of the past, and that the applicant for amnesty
made full disclosure of all relevant facts.
The term ‘political objective’ does not feature in the text of In the City
of Paradise; it has been replaced by ‘conXicts or causes from the past’.
So the amnesty granted to Electra and Orestes is given for a crime
committed without a political agenda, rather for a family-based cycle
of vengeance. Fleishman could have easily given his interpretation a
political connotation. By underplaying the political aspect, the ques-
tion of reconciliation gains a wider, unrestricted dimension; the
problem becomes more humanitarian and universal. But at the
same time it loses to a certain extent its link to the TRC and its
speciWc South African background.
Mark Fleishman tried to introduce an innovative aspect into the
ancient Electra myth by putting special emphasis on the situation of
Clytemnestra’s parents and their feelings. This enabled him to link
this speciWc myth to the main questions that were raised in the post-
apartheid period in South Africa, such as truth, amnesty, forgiveness,
and reconciliation, and to the institution that was meant to solve
them. Fleishman puts special emphasis on the two latter questions of
forgiveness and reconciliation, and shows that there is no perfect
solution, acceptable to everybody. He makes clear that the concept of
amnesty as devised by the TRC has two sides. His production
is a valuable contribution to showing the relevance of ancient
myths today. The question, however, whether truth is the way to
reconciliation, must remain open.
7
Sculpture at Heroes’ Acre, Harare,
Zimbabwe:1 Classical InXuences?
Jessie Maritz
THE MONUMENT
Against a hill some seven kilometres from the centre of Harare, on

the main Harare-Bulawayo road, lies the National Heroes’ Acre, an
area of 57 hectares set aside after Independence in 1980 to commem-
orate the heroes of the liberation struggle. The entrance is marked by
a monumental gateway, which, paradoxically, can be missed if one is
merely driving past. The pinnacle is a 40–metre tower from which
burns the Eternal Flame. Previously the responsibility of the Zim-
babwean National Army (with restricted entrance), it now falls under
the Ministry of National Museums and Monuments, and is, at the
time of writing (2006), open daily from 8 a.m. until 4.30 p.m.. From
the summit of the hill it aVords a panoramic view over surrounding
bush: to the east, the city centre with its high-rise buildings; to the
west, the sprawling high-density suburbs; to the south, the industrial
area; to the north, close by, is the National Sports Stadium, and
beyond that more suburbs. Three kilometres away is the Warren
Hills cemetery, now full, but almost new at Independence. A pragmatist
1 Zimbabwe is the English spelling of the Shona Dzimbahwe (alternative spelling

Dzimbabwe) meaning ‘walled grave’, ‘residence of the chief ’, ‘palace’ or ‘house of
stone’. It is now used for the name of the country as well as for the archaeological site
traditionally called Dzimbabwe, now known as Great Zimbabwe (see Garlake 1973;
Pikirayi 2001).
120 Case Studies
might say that the memorial is located here simply because the site
was open and available when needed. However, tradition has it that
the Chiefs of Harare, the rulers of the area in pre-colonial times, used
the hill as a lookout point and there are caves in the area that are
believed to have been used as burial places for the chiefs. Whether
intentionally or not, the function and character of the demarcated
space is reXected in its neighbours—a point that will be considered
below.
At the entrance there is a car park and Heroes’ Acre Gallery;2 and it
is planned to start building a war memorial museum in 2007. The
actual monument is more than a kilometre from the gate. An amphi-
theatre that can hold 5000 has been cut into the hill. This is used for
annual gatherings on public holidays, speciWcally Heroes’ Day, which
is celebrated on 11 August, as well as for public participation at
the burial of national heroes. From here one looks directly at the
central group of three monumental Wgures (a woman and two men,
all in military uniform) situated above the Tomb of the Unknown
Soldier,3 behind which are the steps leading up to the central tower
with its Eternal Flame. On either side is a free-standing wall with
bronze panels in relief that form the main subject of this paper.
A Zimbabwe Bird,4 the national emblem, is perched on the outer
end of each wall.
2 A Guide to Heroes’ Acre, issued by the Department of National Museums and

Monuments, and Wrst printed in July 1986, is available at the Gallery. It gives a brief
biography of individual heroes. See also Werbner (1998: 71–102). It gives insightful
discussion (on memory and anti-memory) of the change in burial patterns of the
fallen after World War I and how these function in nation building, particularly in
post-colonial countries. He concentrates on Zimbabwe, the diVerence in burial
between ‘chefs’ (a colloquial term used for politically and economically prominent
Wgures), who will receive marble gravestones, and ‘povo’ (from the Portuguese for
poor and in Zimbabwe refers to commoners or the grass-roots community), for
whom there is no visible recognition, and the reaction triggered by Heroes’ Acre.
Since this publication in 1998, the redistribution of land and devaluation of the
Zimbabwean dollar he mentions (pp. 80–2) has continued unabated until time of
writing (2006). His comments on the function of Heroes’ Acre are still valid.
3 The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, buried in Westminster Abbey in 1920 in
memory of soldiers unburied, or buried unknown, during the First World War
(1914–18), has led to similar monuments in many countries.
4 The eight grey-green soapstone birds found at Great Zimbabwe are unique to the
site, which was the centre for the Rozvi dynasties and is thought to have been
constructed from the twelth to the fourteenth century ce. Known as Zimbabwe
Sculpture at Heroes’ Acre, Harare, Zimbabwe 121
The walls are approximately 15 m long and 8 m high at the highest
point, sloping inwards. There is a base of polished black granite on
which the walls are built of red stone, shaped as bricks. The bronze relief
extends about halfway up the wall, meeting the ‘brickwork’ in a broken
line and leaving it visible in the top section. This means that the Wgures
depicted on the panels are well over life-size. Each side consists of three
panels, on one side of the wall only; the panels have to be ‘read’ from the
inside towards the Zimbabwe bird; when facing the Tomb of the
Unknown Soldier, one ‘reads’ from right to left on the left-hand wall,
and from left to right on the right-hand one. Together the panels depict
a continuous historical narrative of the ‘Second Chimurenga’,5 the
struggle against colonial rule for the attainment of political independ-
ence. This is shown in six stages, three on each wall, each section being
clearly marked oV by a break in the metal. The stages are:
1. The beginning of protests against the oppression by the colonial
rulers, epitomized by the police, from about 1919.
2. The formation of nationalist political parties and the politicizing
of the people, from 1957.
3. The beginning of the armed struggle and camps in neighbouring
countries, Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique, during the 1960s.
Birds, the sculptures are on average 355 mm in height and have been variously
interpreted as religious, dynastic, or totemic symbols. They do not obviously mirror
a speciWc species, though they have been called various names, usually a part of the
family of eagles, for example the Fish Eagle (Haliaëtus vocifer: ‘hungwe’ in Shona),
which is the totem of the Hungwe family group, and the Bateleur Eagle (Terathopius
ecuadatus: ‘chapungu’ in Shona). For diVerent descriptions and interpretations see
Garlake (1973: 119–21), Mufuka (1983: 6, 45–52), Pikirayi (2001: 135, 137). For a
more complete work see Matenga (1988). Today the Zimbabwe Bird is the symbol of
the country’s national cultural heritage, and the national emblem on the Xag and coat
of arms; Matenga gives a list of all the companies and associations using it in 1998.
5 Chimurenga is a word that translates from the Shona language as ‘struggle’ and
the concept is widely used to describe wars against oppression, especially colonialism.
Zimbabweans refer to three periods of chimurenga in their history. The Wrst chimur-
enga refers to the 1896–97 revolt of the indigenous peoples against occupation and
colonial rule by the British South Africa Company. The second chimurenga refers to
the guerrilla war which led, in 1980, to the end of white-minority rule in Rhodesia
and to the independence of Zimbabwe. The dates of when the second chimurenga
began are debated; some argue that it began with the battle at Chinoyi in 1966 whilst
others argue for 1972. The present (from about 2000 ce) is commonly referred to as
the third chimurenga, relating to the struggle with economic issues, including land
resettlement.
122 Case Studies
4. The armed struggle 1966–79.
5. Joy and jubilation at the ceaseWre 1980.
6. Independence—and the way forward. This includes the portrait
of Robert Mugabe, Prime Minister of the new state of Zimbabwe
and leader of the Patriotic Front.6
COMPARISON WITH CLASSICAL MONUMENTS
One aspect of Roman sculpture is portraiture (at times veristic) of

military and political ‘heroes’ like the emperor, memorial reliefs on
tombstones, and commemorative and honoriWc statues in the round
of ordinary people, a few recognisably African (Snowden 1976).
Another aspect is Roman historical and political relief, found on
monuments like the Ara Pacis (13–9 bce), the Arch of Titus in Rome
(81 ce) and that of Trajan at Beneventum (114 ce), and the Columns
of Trajan (113 ce) and of Marcus Aurelius (180 ce) in Rome, and
illustrations of these can be found in almost any book on Roman art.
Such narrative portrays characters who are recognizable by their
individual dress, in action with accompanying body language and
emotion, and sometimes in a setting that shows landscape and
perspective, not only linear perspective but also the Roman use of
bird’s-eye perspective, similar to that seen in the wall paintings at
Pompeii (Wheeler 1964: 119, Fig. 96). One well-known example is
the Emperor Augustus shown with colleagues and family, including
children, on the Ara Pacis (see: Hannestad 1988: 69 Fig. 47; Henig
1983:74, Fig. 55; Kleiner 1992: 90–9, Figs. 71–80; Strong 1976: 80–4).
From the time of Trajan, the Roman Emperor was depicted as
considerably larger than the people around him, in a hierarchy of
scale (Strong 1976: 318, Fig. 254; Hannestad 1988: 334, Fig. 203;
Kleiner 1992: 227, 421).
6 The Patriotic Front was formed from an alliance between ZANU (Zimbabwe
African Nationalist Union) and ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) agreed at
the Lancaster House conference on independence. The conference, held at Lancaster
House in London, opened on 10 September 1979 under the chairmanship of Lord
Carrington, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth AVairs in the British
Government, and concluded on 15 December 1979.
Technique and Material

There are two types of sculpture at the monument that are also found
in ancient sculpture, namely relief and sculpture in the round. The
material used for both is bronze, though the relief has been coloured
brown and the statues shining gold. They were hollowcast.
The depiction of the sack of Troy that Aeneas saw on the bronze
doors in Carthage was presumably in relief;7 one suspects that be-
tween those and the relief on the doors of Santa Sabina in the early
Wfth century ce there were many examples of narrative relief in
bronze that have not survived; any comparisons have to be made
with surviving reliefs in stone.
Narrative technique using an episodic format, like units in a comic
strip, was well known in art from the Hellenistic period onwards. The
Telephos frieze on the Great Altar at Pergamon, c.150 bce, is usually
considered the oldest example of this (Pollitt 1986: 198–200). It showed
the life of Telephos in continuous narrative against a ‘shifting but
uninterrupted background consisting of landscape scenes, shrines, bat-
tleWelds, ships, and architectural interiors.’ (ibid. p. 200). In form,
the panels on the Arch of Titus perhaps provide the closest parallel
for the panels on the wall at Heroes’ Acre, but the use of continuous
narrative is more like that on the Column of Trajan, with one obvious
diVerence, namely that of subjective perspective. The Roman relief
shows the colonizers’ triumph: the Zimbabwean one shows the
successful revolt of the colonized, without the opposing army.
Form
None of these Roman monuments, however, provides an original type
for the use of a free-standing wall, which is not part of a building or
some other structure, as the matrix for relief sculpture. Discussion of
form has to relate to other possible comparisons such as composition;
7 Virgil Aeneid I. 446–93 describes scenes from the battles between Greeks and
Trojans that Aeneas saw on the bronze doors of the new Temple of Juno that Dido was
building. He mentions many characters, hairstyles and clothing, action, background,
and even portraiture—Aeneas recognizes himself.
124 Case Studies
the depiction of anatomy, drapery, action, and emotion; landscape;
perspective; the use of attributes and symbols.
The Wrst panel (Fig. 7.1) shows on the left a woman wearing a
headscarf and with a baby on her back, facing the viewer’s right. She
is seated on the ground with her right leg bent under her and her left
knee up, Wghting oV a dog that has its front paws on her left knee and
is biting her left arm. It is held on a leash by a policeman on the right,
who leans forward. His features are European, he wears a policeman’s
uniform with a cap, short-sleeved shirt with epaulettes (with a stripe,
and the letters BSAP, that is British South African Police) on the
shoulder, shorts, and long socks, and he carries a gun. Behind him a
policeman with African features wears a helmet and raises his right
arm to strike. Behind him another head wearing a cap is just visible.
Behind the woman and the dog are six other Wgures, showing dejec-
tion; one is bent forward and appears handcuVed, one holds her head
in her hands. The foreground shows grass and prickly pear plants,
and in the background are trees and pitched roofs of houses.
Fig. 7.1 Oppression. Photograph: Jessie Maritz.

The second panel (Fig. 7.2) shows a man holding a book in his right
hand, holding his left hand up, and speaking to a group of people
sitting on logs, four on the right and two on the left, while two others
on the left walk away to the water and hills in the background. Four
tiny Wgures are in a boat crossing the river in the background.
In the third panel, there are ten people (male and female): two
men are standing conversing near the centre, holding a gun between
them; one man on the right is handing out guns to a woman and two
men who are coming towards him; two men and a woman are already
moving oV to the left, holding guns; one man is kneeling holding his
gun. In the centre of the panel is a low lying rough table on which lie
four guns. At the foot of the table on the ground is a pot and calabash
(an implement for scooping liquid out of the pot).
The fourth panel (Fig. 7.3) shows a man at the back on the right,
his arm in the air, looking back into the picture to call the others
forward. Two have guns, one in the centre is about to throw some
missile, while on the left a man carries a huge pack clasped to his
chest and the woman behind him carries a bath of clothing on her
Fig. 7.2 Politicizing. Photograph: Jessie Maritz

126 Case Studies
Fig. 7.3 Armed Struggle. Photograph: Jessie Maritz.
head. They represent the mujiba, those who assisted Wghters by

carrying arms, or by supplying the basic necessities.
The Wfth panel (Fig. 7.4) shows the ceaseWre, when people from
diVerent areas of Wghting gathered at central assembly points. Seven
people are shown: three men, two women and two children. One is a
toddler, held by its mother and waving. The other is about six,
embracing his mother who has returned from the war, with her
gun. Everybody moves to the right and the men at the back wave
guns above their heads.
The sixth and Wnal panel shows the celebration of Independence
and has the portrait of Robert Mugabe, behind the national Xag, in
front of which people surge forward.
Panel 1 (Fig. 7.1) provides many examples of features that are
repeated throughout the work. Composition is integrated; crossing
lines, linear perspective of roofs, and low relief of a face in the
extreme right background create depth of Weld. Anatomy is realistic,
though not veristic, and the relative scale of the Wgures is correct.
Action is portrayed by pose and gesture, such as raised Wsts or
Fig. 7.4 Ceasefire. Photograph: Jessie Maritz.
drooping shoulders, which may also suggest rank and status, as with
the woman on the ground, a policeman bending over her, his dog
straining at its leash. Given a modern weapon instead of a spear, the
Wfth-century bce Doryphoros (the well known statue of a ‘Spear-
bearer’ in classical Greek art) may still be recognized in the police-
man’s pose, and there are comparable Wgures in classical art for a
back view, a turning head, a fallen enemy, and the dog.8 In panels 3
and 4 (Fig. 7.2), with Wgures kneeling, striding, Wghting, and throw-
ing, one is reminded of the Great Altar at Pergamon (Hannestad
1988: 97–110), which may also provide examples for emotions
depicted by facial expression, such as the pain in panel 1 (Fig. 7.1);
there is excitement and jubilation in panel 5 (Fig. 7.4).
The clothes in each panel at Heroes’ Acre are important signiWers.
Dress is used to depict circumstance, status, and even the passing of time.
In panel 1 (Fig. 7.1) the diVerent uniforms of the black and the white
8 See, for example, Hannestad (1988: 164 Wgs. 104, 106). A similar dog was found
on a second century ce sarcophagus in Rome, Museo Nationale Romano 168186. See
also Joosten (2001).
128 Case Studies
policemen show the racial discrimination in the pre-Independence
police force, and both contrast with the simple dress and Xoral
headscarf of the woman. Shoes or bare feet indicate urban or rural
dwellers, respectively, when they meet. By panel 6 dress is more
sophisticated, representing the fashions of the early 1980s rather
than the 1950s. Patterns on the cloth of the women’s dresses are
incised or in higher relief. Women wear high-heeled shoes, earrings
and pendant, and are bare-headed, not wearing the headscarf of the
women in panel 1 (Fig. 7.1) or even panel 5 (Fig. 7.4). One man in
panel 6 wears worker’s overalls, one carries a book, another is dressed
more formally with jacket and tie, all ready for work in times of peace
in the new state. On Mugabe’s tie there is a Zimbabwe bird and
stripes, typical of those worn at the time. The ‘political’ uniform is a
suit and tie, compared to military uniforms. Only Mugabe wears a
suit (double-breasted) and spectacles. These became a trademark.9
There is no ‘heroic nudity’ as is found in classical Greek sculpture.
This use of diVerent clothing is reminiscent of Trajan’s Column,
which depicts diVerences in uniforms, national dress, and hairstyles;
for example, the Praetorian standard-bearers with their bear-head
helmets, the legionaries with shields and helmets, the auxiliaries, the
Moors with braided hair and wearing short tunics, riding bareback
and without bridles, the Germans half naked with wooden clubs, the
Dacians with catapults. It also uses pose and gestures—the Emperor
raising his right arm when addressing his troops, or the prisoners on
their knees in front of him (Hannestad 1988: 154–67)
Landscape sets the scene. Rectangular houses with corrugated
roofs appear in the background of panel 1 (Fig. 7.1) to suggest the
town, speciWcally the high-density townships, but in panel 2 (Fig. 7.2)
there are huts, and logs as seats, to indicate the rural setting; plants,
hills, and the balancing rocks, which are typical formations in many
parts of Zimbabwe, set the rural landscape in panel 3. As in Rome,
landscape not only sets the physical scene, but may be symbolic. The
conical tower of Great Zimbabwe in the background of panel 6
provides the vision and end of the struggle, the new nation Zim-
babwe. The couple who ‘turn their backs’ to the viewer to cross the
9 The President at the time, President Canaan Banana, often wore a mandarin-style
collar.
river are doing so metaphorically as well, leaving the country for
military training, as those in the boat are doing. Perspective may be
linear or bird’s-eye, as with the boat on the river in panel 2 (Fig. 7.2).
Symbolism is found in several places. In panel 2 (Fig. 7.2) the book
represents ideology and the politicizing of the masses; compare the
use of the book by philosophers or to indicate the law, in late Roman
and early Christian art, as for example on the Plotinus sarcophagus;
see Grabar (1967: 55, Fig. 50; 150, Fig. 131; 140, Fig. 144; 261, Fig. 290)
and Hannestad (1988: 299, Wg. 184). In panel 3, the pot and calabash
set the scene as rural and indigenous, but, more important, these are
traditionally containers used for the beer meant for the ancestors,
when beer is scooped from the pot with the calabash, and poured on
the ground for the ancestral spirits, and are therefore also symbolic.
On the panel, the pot and calabash are under a rough table on which
lie four guns. The unity of this design shows the unity of the villagers
(who provided provisions), the Wghters, and the ancestors, the pre-
sent with the past. It recalls the local proverb: ‘You can’t use a pot
without a calabash’. The Zimbabwe bird is another link to the past
and Great Zimbabwe (see note 4). In panel 5 (Fig. 7.4), the design on
the woman’s dress is heart-shaped. This symbol of love is taken to
suggest that, whatever the diVerences in tribe, background, or aYlia-
tion of those now meeting at assembly points, in the new state all
should live in harmony as brothers and sisters. The Xag, symbol of
the new nation, appears at the end (panel 6) as the climax of the
sculpture, just as the nation is the climax of the struggle.
The sculpture of the Ara Pacis in Augustan Rome, which combined
historical events with the mythological and symbolical, may provide
a parallel (see below).
Function
The monument can be seen as having more than one function.
1. Aesthetic. It is a major work of art in the city.
2. HonoriWc and commemorative. The historical narrative is obvi-
ously intended to commemorate the struggle for political independ-
ence. The whole complex was designed around sixty gravesites; this
130 Case Studies
is being expanded by a further hundred graves. At the time of
writing (2006) there are seventy tombstones,10 with portraits etched
on the polished back granite, giving the eVect of photos. There are
also photo exhibits in the Heroes’ Acre Gallery. In sculpture, the
three Wgures in the round are intended to honour all freedom
Wghters, both men and women. There is only one recognizable
portrait in the sculptural relief, that of Robert Mugabe.
3. Religious. There is also a religious element. According to African
traditional religion, the spirits of those who are not accorded
decent burial at home return as avenging spirits. Many Wghters
died far from home, and were not buried with proper rites. This
then is not just a memorial, but a substitute burial for such
Wghters, to propitiate their spirits.11 The site of the monument
on a hill near caves, the traditional burial places for the chiefs,
becomes relevant.
4. Didactic. The fact that Heroes’ Acre is now the responsibility of
National Museums and Monuments is an indication that it also
has a didactic function, to teach the younger generation, or
foreign visitors.
5. Political. There can be no doubt that the monument as originally
conceived also had an element of political propaganda. There are
not representatives of all the political parties or armies, even those
that comprised the liberation movements; there is a deWnite
indication of ideological teaching; there is a clear emphasis on a
single leader, the only portrait as against all the ‘type’ Wgures, who
is shown virtually as a culmination, at the end, about four times
larger than the other Wgures and in diVerent dress, the only one
wearing glasses. He does not interact with other characters or
address them, but, placed strategically above and beyond the
rest, he stares ahead into the future. At the time that the sculpture
was erected, Robert Mugabe was not President of Zimbabwe
(which he later became), but Prime Minister. The then President
(Canaan Banana 1980–87) does not feature at all, nor is he buried
10 There have been sixty-seven burials (some re-buried from elsewhere), one
cremation and two tombs for heroes who disappeared in action.
11 Note that the ‘graves’ were already laid out at the outset, waiting. Spacing of
used graves suggests that Heroes’ Acre was planned not only for the dead, but also for
speciWc future use.
there. The North Koreans built the monument because they were
political allies,12 not necessarily because they were the best artists.
Ironically, some authorities consider that out of the top ten stone
sculptors in the world today, half are Zimbabweans, whose work is
entirely diVerent, and yet is not featured.13
These are all categories of function that one may Wnd in classical
sculpture. One need only refer to the Ara Pacis. As an altar, it
obviously was a religious structure. According to Augustus himself
(Monumentum Ancyranum 12.2, Brunt and Moore, 1967; Hardy,
1923), the Senate decided that an altar to Pax Augusta should be
erected in honour of Augustus’ successful return from Gaul and
Spain, and that magistrates, priests, and Vestal Virgins should per-
form an annual sacriWce there. It was clearly honoriWc as well as
religious. It was commemorative, with historic reliefs on the long
sides showing, with portraits, the procession of oYcials, priests, and
the Imperial family, including Augustus, that took place on the day
that the altar was consecrated: 4 July 13 bce. The four reliefs on the
short sides were mythological and allegorical: one showed Aeneas
sacriWcing and one showed a personiWcation of Tellus (Earth) or
Italy. These had details of landscape in the background. The work
as a whole was part of a political programme, and intended to be
didactic. Similar functions can be seen in other Roman monuments.
It is possible, therefore, to see similarities between Heroes’ Acre
and the material, form, and function of classical sculpture. Although
the local culture in centuries past included monumental architecture
and some sculpture (the birds on stelae at Great Zimbabwe), and
12 There was a Communist/non-aligned trinity of allies in the struggle; the North

Koreans built Heroes’ Acre, the Chinese built the National Sports Stadium (1984),
and the Yugoslavs built the Conference Centre (1986).
13 For a discussion of the new movement in local stone sculpture, starting with the
workshops set up by the Wrst director of the National Gallery, Frank McEwan, in
1957, see Arnold (1981). McEwan encouraged artists to seek content in their own
culture; he provided space and materials, but did not teach. Mrs Pat Pearce started a
group at Inyanga, and Tom BlomeWeld at Tengenenga. These three groups were set up
by people of European descent, but the sculptors were Shona, or from neighbouring
areas like Malawi. Their art is not inXuenced by traditional Western art, although the
market for their work, in Western countries, is a very signiWcant factor. For further
developments see Winter-Irving (1991, 2001, 2004); Ponter, A. and L. (1992); Sultan
([1992] 1994); KileV, C. and M. (1996).
132 Case Studies
there were obviously sacred places (tombs, caves, rainmaking sites),
war memorials with monumental sculpture, speciWcally over-life-
size, hollow cast, bronze human Wgures, were not an indigenous
tradition.14 In 1980 the movement of modern Zimbabwean stone
sculpture, mentioned above, was still in its infancy. In any case,
this sculpture is quite diVerent: conceptual rather than perceptual
and historical. Previous sculpture in Rhodesia, like the statues of
Rhodes or the War Memorial for World War I, was very British; the
very idea of a tomb of an unknown soldier, a built-up amphitheatre,
or a monument with commemorative, honoriWc, political, large-scale
historical relief sculpture would seem to derive from a Western
tradition, stemming from Britain but ultimately from the Graeco-
Roman world. Unlike those monuments, which generally were often
situated in the city at sites that were visible to many people every day
(for example, Trajan’s Column in his forum), Heroes’ Acre, like a
cemetery, requires a special visit.
C O M PA RI S O N W I T H M OD E RN MO N UM E N T S
However, as mentioned above, Heroes’ Acre in Harare is actually the

work of North Koreans,15 in 1982, and one should be asking whether
the Zimbabwean monument is comparable to Korean ones. The
Mansudae Monument in Pyongyang, North Korea, is a huge monu-
ment built in front of the Revolutionary Museum in the city, unveiled
in 1972 (Springer 2003: 43). The backdrop is a mosaic of natural
stone on the museum wall, depicting the mountain that is the symbol
of the nation, from which everything starts. In the centre, at the top
14 Arnold (1981: 8, 12, Fig. 11) refers to two anthropomorphic soapstone Wgures,
one now in the British Museum and one in the Paul Tisham Collection in New York,
that are said to have come from Great Zimbabwe. She concludes (p. 32) that the
Zimbabwe Birds from Great Zimbabwe are an indication of a social, political, or
religious need for sculpture, but that this need was possibly atrophied or eliminated
after the social and political structure changed in the Wfteenth century ce, and that
the only carved forms known to have been produced in Mashonaland from then until
the 1950s were artefacts.
15 The Mansudae Overseas Project Group of Companies of the DPR of Korea
founded in 1959.
of a Xight of steps, is a 22 metre high statue of the Great Leader. On
either side is a wall of red stone, the colour of the Xag. The shape of
the wall, the stripes on it, and the star of the Xag, in relief at the top
of the wall, reinforce the symbolism of the wall as a Xag and,
ultimately, the nation. Over 300 colossal bronze Wgures around the
base depict the period when Koreans, who had been colonized by the
Japanese and had been through periods of oppression and then
politicizing, decided to Wght. Figures include a girl crying, women
struggling, people reading a pamphlet and printing a newspaper,
and then picking up arms for the struggle. The faces, with Korean
features, express a variety of emotions; the drapery ranges from
speciWc army uniforms to peasant dress; the poses, gestures, and
grouping bring the action to life. At the apex of the wall a standing
Wgure holds a gun.
The right hand wall shows the war, the post-war period, and the
socialist dream—the hopes and aspirations of the people. The Wgures
at the apex of this wall represent the ideological, technical, and
cultural aspects of the nation: a worker, a farmer holding a massive
sheaf of wheat, a soldier holding a burning torch, the intellectual
holding a book, the works of the Great Leader.
Even if one did not know, from other sources, who constructed the
Harare Heroes’ Acre, there could be no doubt of its similarity. The
Korean monument is very much bigger, of course, with many more
Wgures, in the round, not in relief. There is no writing on the walls at
Harare, whereas in Pyongyang it looms large. However, the form
(two walls Xanking a central statue) is the same: there is the same
sequence of events as those shown on the Harare monument; it is
also divided into the same six stages and many Wgures show similar
poses. There is the same combination of narrative, action, symbol-
ism, the conjunction yet distinction between peasants and soldiers,
the importance of the book for the ideological message, the same
symbolic movement of all Wgures in one direction, the same emphasis
on the Xag and on the leader. Both in form and in function the two
monuments are remarkably close. Whereas classical parallels may
seem far-fetched, given the 2000 years’ time diVerence, the close
relationship between the Korean and Zimbabwean monuments is
unmistakeable. In fact, on the original Harare monument the faces
had Korean features; the heads were later re-done to correct this.
134 Case Studies
The Mansudae monument is only one of several in North Korea.
The Victory Monument at Pochonpo, in the north, also takes the
form of a red wall shaped to represent a billowing Xag, again with
colossal bronze Wgures, which depict the struggle and liberation of
the nation, grouped on either side of the wall. The idea of an eternal
Xame, found in Harare, is also found in huge Torch Towers in North
Korea, at the Grand Monument on Lake Samji, for example, and the
Tower of the Juche Idea (unveiled in 1982), with three Wgures in front
of it reminiscent of those in Harare. There is also a Revolutionary
Martyrs Cemetery in Pyongyang, created in 1975 and expanded in
1985 (Springer 2003: 137–8). Again, there is a blood-red Xag carved
from granite. Each tomb has a plaque listing highlights of the decea-
sed’s career, and a bronze bust. In Harare there are not individual
busts, but engraved portraits have recently been added to the names
and dates of birth and death shown on each tombstone. What is
similar is that not all the heroes died in battle. In both Korea and
Zimbabwe the ‘Heroes’ Acre’ includes the spouse of the leader, and
prominent politicians who died after the armed struggle.
In Korea there is a tradition of sculpture going back some two
millennia,16 and in painting the tradition includes historical narra-
tive.17 However, the monuments mentioned above are not in this
traditional style. One need only look at the pagoda from the site of
Kyong-Ch’on-Sa temple (1348) (Kim 1963) or the painting of Kim
Hong-do (1760) (Griswold and Pott 1963) to realize that the present-
day works are very diVerent.
As in Zimbabwe, there was a movement of Western education in
Korea at the end of the nineteenth century. By 1903 about a hundred
primary schools had been established, many of them by the Presby-
terians and Methodists (Yoonmi 2000: 79). Scholarly circles and
academic societies were being established between 1905 and 1910
(ibid. p. 80). Social Darwinism was introduced and scholars called
16 A Handbook of Korea. Korean Overseas Culture and Information Service (1998:

518–25).
17 For murals in the tomb of King Michon (ANAK tomb no. 3) and a fourth-
century mural procession (10 m 2 m) on the wall of a corridor, with some 250
Wgures around the hero in a carriage in the centre, see Korean Fine Arts. Foreign
Languages Publishing House (1978: 32). Paintings of life of peasants show both
bird’s-eye perspective and the use of one Wgure on top of another.
for seventeenth century nationalism to be ‘reformed’. Textbooks
became more and more Western, as regards world history, geography,
and foreign language; Classics was not part of the curriculum but
drawing was. Since in about 1895 the United States, England, France,
Germany, and Russia were being treated in a positive way in the
curriculum, but China negatively, one may expect that Western art
was also being favoured above traditional Eastern art in Korean
schools at the time.
This has also been said about China, which like Korea was a
political ally of the liberation movements involved in the struggle
for an independent Zimbabwe. John Young gives the example of
contemporary Chinese, Zhang Yonghao, who believes that the devel-
opment of contemporary art is based on European art of the 1920s
and 1930s, because Chinese teachers had studied in the European
academies, especially in France (Young 1999: 18–20). They had been
exchange students at the time, before the doors to China closed, and
they brought back and practised what they had learned. In the 1950s,
after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Commun-
ists respected art and established Wne art academies all over China.
These academies included sculpture. One of the biggest achievements
of Chinese art history, according to Zhang Yonghao, was the import-
ation of Western art education into all of China’s major cities
by professors who had studied abroad and who created a system
based on the Western model which was most familiar to them.
He points out that since everything in China was uniWed from the
1950s to the end of 1970, art was less about personal aesthetics and
more about serving politics. It might be considered propaganda, yet
it contained sensibilities about life and experience of the people
in society, peasants, soldiers, hardship, and hard work. ‘We believed
in the spirit of the time’ (Young 1999: 19). The inXuence of ancient
China was prohibited until 1979; one artist is quoted as saying that
it was only after a 1979 conference that they began to explore
their own Eastern history combined with their Western training
(ibid. p. 22).
The monument to the People’s Heroes on Tiananmen Square in
Beijing, China, said to be the biggest monument in that country (not
counting the Wall), takes the form of a granite obelisk 14.7 m high.
This monument with eight white marble reliefs (2 m high), with
136 Case Studies
some 170 Wgures,18 shows the struggle of the Chinese people against
internal and external enemies from 1840 onward, and symbolizes the
respect they felt for their revolutionary martyrs. The later work in
North Korea and in Harare shows some similarities, with emphasis
on the people.
The resolution to erect the Tiananmen Square monument was
passed in 1949; construction lasted from 1952 to 1958. It is roughly
contemporaneous with the monuments of World War II.19 If one
looks only at monuments at Leningrad, Kiev, and Novorossiis, it is
clear that Wghting heroes and an undying Xame were themes in
Russia too, and it is clear that even though North Korea and Com-
munist China were politically cut oV from Western Europe, art links
may be seen running back through communist allies. It can probably
also be said of North Korea, as of China, that there were still
professors who had studied abroad, and who created a system
based on the Western model.
The most obvious example is perhaps the Arch of Triumph in
Pyongyang (Springer 2003: 86)20 commemorating the guerrilla wars
against Japan between 1925 and 1945. A single arch, like the Arch of
Titus, it includes roundels similar to those found on the triple arch of
Constantine (312–15 ce) in Rome. Triumphant Wgures bearing a Xag
are shown under a date, on each side of the arch, with a Wghting
Wgure in a roundel above. These, like the rosettes, are ‘borrowed’
18 See Hunt, Davies and Holledge ([1979] 1981: 56–7). The events on the monu-
ment to the People’s Heroes on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, are given as: (1)
the triumphant burning of opium by Lin Zexu in 1840; (2) the uprising at Jiutian
village which triggered the Taiping Rebellion in 1858; (3) the Wuchang Uprising in
1911, which signalled the end for the Manchu’s; (4) the rally held in Tiananmen
Square on 4 May 1919 to protest the Treaty of Versailles; (5) the 30 May movement
demonstration and the uprising of 1927 against Jiang Kaishek, (6) the war against
Japan 1937–45; (7) the crossing of the Yangste by the People’s Liberation Army to
liberate Nanking on 2 April 1949.
19 Monuments and memorials of World War II present a separate Weld of study.
The video A Debt of Honour of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission records
memorials ‘as carefully looked after as any cemetery’. The commission tends 145
cemeteries of those buried near battleWelds. There are 72,000 names of those whose
graves are unknown. Apart from the well known ‘unknown soldier’ in Westminster,
dating from 1920, in 1993 an unknown Australian was re-buried in Canberra, there
are Wve memorials with no names at Gallipoli, one for the South Africans at Delville
Wood, and several others, including some in east and south east Asia.
20 See Springer 2003: 86 n.25.
from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which was modelled on the Arch
of Titus in Rome. Like its predecessors, it carries a long inscription
over the central arch. In spite of its three tiered Korean-style roof, the
arch in Pyongyang is ultimately a descendant of classical Roman art.
The Korean War, the civil war between Communist North Korea
and Western-backed South Korea, lasted from 1950 until 1953. By
then 90 per cent of the buildings in the North Korean capital Pyong-
yang had been destroyed. It was re-planned and re-built by the
Soviets. Korean architects and urban planners trained in the Soviet
Union (ibid. p. 23) and one would expect Russian inXuence in other
art forms as well. South Korea was inXuenced directly by the West
from the 1950s onwards. Interestingly enough, a huge Independence
Hall to commemorate independence won from the Japanese (1910–45)
was being built between 1963 and 1987. Here too there is sculpture in
the round, which commemorates a period of growing resistance,
Wghting, and victory, culminating in the Xag, which symbolizes
independence. There is also the War Memorial, with relief on the
walls in front.
It is possible to see classical inXuences in the sculpture in Zim-
babwe, after British colonialism. Zimbabwean students do recognize
similarities between Roman sculpture and that at Heroes’ Acre,21 but
21 In some years, students at the University of Zimbabwe who are doing Classical
Studies are given an assignment to visit Heroes’ Acre, to describe the sculpture seen
there, and to comment on any similarities (including basic similarities such as
material, technique, form, and function) with the sculpture in their Classical Studies
syllabus. Since there is no classical (Greek or Roman) sculpture in local museums in
Zimbabwe, students cannot see original classical work. There is some sculpture from
the colonial period, for example, statues of colonialists like Jameson, now at the
archives, and increasingly there is indigenous Zimbabwean sculpture, such as the
monumental sculpture outside the National Gallery in Harare. There is an enormous
output of stone (and a few metal and wooden) sculptures for the tourist market, but
for most students sculpture is a new concept. For most of them a visit to Heroes’ Acre
is also a Wrst time experience, through which they can celebrate their country’s
history. The terminology used in class becomes clear as they recognize diVerent
forms and see diVerent materials used in present-day sculpture. They become
aware of possible functions of art when considering why the monument was erected.
They begin to look and then notice many other objects—not only sculpture—that
they had not noticed before. They compare, contrast, and question. If the question
‘What use is it to do Classical Studies?’ (which can justly be asked by students in their
position) has any answer, it must surely include the fact that the world in the twenty-
Wrst century, on all continents, is still in many ways inXuenced by the Graeco-Roman
world, even if indirectly. The study itself is another post-colonial phenomenon.
138 Case Studies
it must be admitted that any inXuence in this case must have come
via Korea. How it reached Korea could still oVer interesting research.
Even more interesting, however, is where else it has reached since.
The Mansudae Overseas Group of Companies, established in No-
vember 1959, has since then built real estate for Wfty-three projects in
thirty-eight countries. These include monuments in, among others,
Togo, Benin, Egypt, Somalia, Thailand, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Angola,
Gabon, Namibia, and the Congo. Several are to commemorate inde-
pendence, with statues of heroes and martyrs in similar poses, show-
ing similar expressions and holding weapons or Xags similar to the
ones at Heroes’ Acre in Harare.22
This is an area larger than Rome could ever have dreamed of. In
each country citizens will consider the monument in their country to
be their own. Although it does not form a continuum with their
ancient artistic traditions, nor come directly from the historical
imperial power that colonized them, it will form part of their future
national art heritage. In one sense the art seems international, since it
is similar across the world—but of course the monuments are similar;
they are the work of one company.
To what extent is this comparable to the situation in the Roman
world, where local ethnic art in diVerent parts of the Empire dis-
appeared in the face of large-scale oYcial projects, constructed by
artists from elsewhere who were possibly neither local nor Roman,
but who created something that has remained representative of both
for centuries? International, interdisciplinary, post-colonial—is there
anything new under the sun?
22 Source: Korean Embassy Panphlet (2002) Hierarchy and activities of the Mansudae
Overseas Project Group of Companies a pamphlet issued by the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea and obtained from the Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa.
Part II
Encounter and New Traditions

8
Perspectives on Post-Colonialism in South
Africa: the Voortrekker Monument’s
Classical Heritage
Richard Evans
The name Pretoria may possibly mislead a classicist unaware of

the city’s history. Pretoria, originally ‘Pretoria Philadelphia’ or the
‘Brotherhood of Pretorius’ (1854) took its name from the prominent
Voortrekker (Afrikaans pioneer) leader Andries Wilhelmus Jacobus
Pretorius (1798–1853). It is quite conceivable that his name may have
been derived from something like: praetor, praetorius, or praetorium,
all good Latin words; and this association has been exploited to lend
dignity to Pretoria’s role as administrative capital of South Africa in
its various guises.1 The connection was plainly uppermost in the
mind of the person who coined the city’s motto ‘Praestantia Praeva-
leat Pretoria’ [May Pretoria excel in excellence] on its coat of arms
(Evans 2001: 121). The inXuence of the classical tradition appears
reinforced. The link may be, at best tenuous, at worst spurious, but
1 ‘Brotherhood of Pretoria’ was a congregation established in 1854, the city was

proclaimed in the next. In 1860 Pretoria had already become the capital of the ZAR—
Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (Andrews and Ploeger 1989: 6), however, at the time of
publication there is some uncertainty about the city’s future name. Tshwane has been
proposed as an alternative on the basis that the area had already possessed this name,
although the authenticity of the argument has been vigorously contested. The process
of changing Afrikaans names of towns and provinces began in 1994, but there has
been a recent acceleration. The Transvaal province was dismembered into Gauteng,
Limpopo, Mpumalanga, and North-West, while the town of Pietersburg has been
renamed Polokwane.
142 Encounter and New Traditions
both the language and the civilizations of Greece and Rome are well
represented in the city’s art, architecture, and its urban topography.
As a whole, Pretoria possesses a remarkably high incidence of
classical names in its suburbs—Arcadia, Akasia, Constantia, Elysium;
its streets—Aquila, Cicero, Gladiator, Hercules, Titus, Vespasian; its
buildings—Civitas, Didacta, Eureka, Munitoria, Presidia, Unitas (for
a consolidated list, see Evans 2001: 119–20). Undoubtedly, however,
the two most conspicuous architectural and historical landmarks of
the city, which, moreover, display particular classical inXuences, are
its Union Buildings and ‘Voortrekker Monument’. While the latter is
the main focus of the discussion here, and in particular the frieze,
which adorns the interior main Xoor, it will prove useful to set the
scene with some note taken of the former, and the various strands
that link them spatially, temporally, and ideologically.
Herbert Baker (1862–1946) was the architect of a structure in-
tended to house the administration of the ‘Union of South Africa’.2 It
was begun in 1910, when a dedicatory plaque was erected to the new
King-Emperor George V, coinciding with the declaration of the
union that ushered in a governmental system with a parliament in
Cape Town and an administration in Pretoria on 31 May of that
year.3 This saw completion, in 1912, on the southerly facing slope of
the hill called Meintjieskop, on the north-eastern edge of the centre
of the city, which it overlooks like an acropolis. The total cost of the
Union Buildings was £1,660,640, which included construction and
landscaping of the ridge, at the time a fabulous sum (Andrews and
Ploeger 1989),4 but also an indication of the resources available to
oYcially-sanctioned building ventures. Its conception also excellently
2 Baker spent a number of years in South Africa where he designed, in Cape Town,
Groote Schur, home of Cecil Rhodes and for many years oYcial residence of the
prime minister of the Union. Baker said of Rhodes: ‘He had the building ambition of
a Pericles or a Hadrian’. Baker also designed the main railway station in Pretoria, and
also found time for a private house in Troye Street, Muckleneuk, one of Pretoria’s
oldest suburbs. However, he is probably best remembered for his design of the
London Stock Exchange and South Africa House in Trafalgar Square and, with
Edwin Lutyens, the civic centre of New Delhi.
3 The highest court of the judicial system was located in Bloemfontein, capital of
the then province of the Orange Free State. 31 May has since been a public holiday,
‘Republic Day’.
4 See between pp. 34 and pp. 35 with a contemporary photograph of the con-
struction phase.
Perspectives on Post-Colonialism in South Africa 143
reXects the imagery of imperialism and the ideology that under-
pinned it.
Drawing an analogy with the Roman Empire, Baker quoted his
friend William Marris (Irving 1981:278):
Only Rome in her greatest days did what England has been doing, as a
matter of course, for one hundred years!
Baker felt that architects, with their allied artists and craftsmen, had an
opportunity ‘to immortalize through their arts’ the law and order
which British administration had ‘produced out of chaos’. Like Alex-
ander the Great or the Romans, the British might put ‘their own
impress on the art which they had Wrst absorbed’ (Irving 1981: 278).
A mixture of Italianate Renaissance and Greco–Roman styles, the
main plan consisted of two rectangular blocks end-to-end (now the
oYces of the State President and the Foreign Minister), 275 m in
total length, joined, as if with outstretched arms, by a semi-circular
stoa.5 The ends of the stoa are accentuated by twin towers, each of
which is topped by a cupola supported on columns. The piazza
created by the semi-circular stoa is Wlled with terraces to give the
impression of seating, much like that to be found in a Greek theatre,
although the altitude of the seating is sacriWced to accommodate an
orchestra and scene at the front. At either end of the blocks are
buttresses topped by a hexastyle double-colonnade. In the centre of
each building the columnal and semi-circular main doorway bears
more than a passing resemblance to the reconstruction of the Shrine
of Vesta in the Roman Forum. The inspiration was largely from
Baker’s own travels in the Mediterranean along with the obvious
desire to recreate the ‘glory that was Greece’ and ‘the grandeur that
was Rome’.6
5 The stoa was to represent the new unity of the two main language groups of
English and Afrikaans, the four buttresses perhaps represented the four original
provinces: Cape, Natal, Transvaal, and Orange Free State.
6 Edgar Allen Poe, To Helen, in Mabbott (1969: 165–66). See also Irving 1981: 279:
‘Baker later wrote, a vision came to him of two great buildings connected by a semi-
circular colonnade overlooking an open theatre of place of democratic assembly’. It is
both ironic and poignant that it was only on 31 May 1994, over eighty years later, that
this place of assembly celebrated a democratically elected government. An equestrian
statue, another typically Roman honour, of Louis Botha, the Union’s Wrst prime
minister, stands in the gardens below the piazza.
Whereas the Union Buildings were meant to illustrate Pretoria’s
position as a capital city within the greater framework of the British
empire, the Voortrekker Monument represents another sort of ideol-
ogy and raft of aspirations (Fig. 8.1). And, although it might be
assumed that a conscious attempt would have been made to distance
this structure from one closely related to a, by then perceived by
some, foreign power’s imperial past, yet it is precisely those common
classical elements that remain a major feature. The foundation stone
of the Monument was laid on 16 December 1938, a century after the
victory of the Voortrekkers over the Zulu people at the Battle of
Blood River, and was intended to commemorate the pioneers who
emigrated from the Cape and later Natal to settle in the Transvaal.7
The Monument was oYcially inaugurated exactly eleven years later
Fig. 8.1 Enclosure of the Voortrekker Monument. Photograph: Richard Evans.
7 16 December, midsummer in the southern hemisphere, ‘Die Slag van Bloed Rivier,’
also popularly known as ‘Dingane’s Day,’ became the ‘Day of the Vow’ a public holiday
still celebrated as the ‘Day of Reconciliation’. The Dutch settlers emigrated from the
coast to escape from British rule. Work by an Italian construction company, A. Cosani,
had actually begun on the site earlier in the year (Pretorius 2003).
in 1949 when 400,000 attended the festivities, many in period dress,
where a speech delivered in English was booed, and a speech deliv-
ered by former prime minister Jan Smuts was allowed only in his
capacity as a private citizen (Smuts 1952: 522; Lacour-Gayet 1977:
278). No oYcial pronouncements were scheduled, although the
Monument had been state-funded to the tune of R719, 202
(£350,000 at 1949 exchange values).
The cost was a fraction of that of the Union Buildings and, while
the scale is considerably smaller, startling similarities in, for example,
position and elevation are immediately noticeable. The Monument
was planned to top the hillside adjacent to the Scanskop fort,8 with a
view towards the centre of the city from the south, hence the north-
facing aspect—the Voortrekker Monument and Union Buildings face
each other diagonally across the city from south-west to north-east.
For the Monument itself, the architect chosen by the commission-
ing Central Volks Monuments Committee was Gerard Moerdijk
(1890–1958), and the design of the outside enclosure was assigned
to E. C. Pienaar and A. C. Bouman. It was plainly intended that the
monument should be the centrepiece of quite an elaborate complex,
and was not intended as an isolated trophy or commemoration, as
are many urban cenotaphs or national monuments. One such single
tower monument that may have inXuenced Moredijk is the ‘Her-
manndenkmal’ near Detmold, which celebrates nineteenth-century
German uniWcation. This tower received its name ‘Hermann’ from
Arminius, chief of the Germanic Cherusci, of whom Tacitus writes
(Annals 2.88; my translation):9
He was without doubt the liberator of Germany, and he provoked the rule of the
Romans not when it was in its beginning like other kings and leaders but when it
was most Xourishing. He stalemated battles and was not defeated in war.
Moerdijk was an established architect who had studied in Europe and
was familiar with the classical tradition, but also born in South Africa
8 Scanskop and Klapperkop forts guard the southerly approach to the city above
the Fountains Valley through which runs the Apies River.
9 For Arminius’ career between 14 and 19 ce, see Tacitus Annals: 1.55–68, 2.9–21,
2.44–6. He was the architect of the great Roman defeat at the Teutoberg Wald in 9 ce
where P. Quinctilius Varus was killed with three legions, Tacitus Annals: 1. 60–1, and
where the Hermann monument now stands.
and evidently much aVected by the local Xora and fauna, and with
native cultures. A central tower dominating an enclosure, in appear-
ance points to an Hellenistic connection, such as the Mausoleum at
Halicarnassus. The Mausoleum stood to a height of approximately
43 m, and the Voortrekker Monument is 40 m high. The recreation
of the Mausoleum by C. R. Cockerell (between 1847 and 1856) has a
squat tower topped with a pyramid reached by a grand stairway and
surrounded by a terrace, with an enclosure or precinct below. This is
the recreation most often produced today (see Smith 1900a: 73–4,
plate XIV; Grigson 1992: 25). The Voortrekker Monument is also
squat, also reached by a grand stairway, more impressive than the one
assumed for the Mausoleum, and is surrounded on each side by a
terrace, all above the enclosure. The tower is 40 m2 at its base, the
basement containing a cenotaph is 34:5 m2 , and the main chamber
on the ground Xoor is 25 m2 . Stairs, and now a lift, allow entry to an
upper terrace at the base of an interior dome. The height of the tower
equals its base; and this is a further important pointer to classical
inXuences, in this case the Pantheon at Rome.
Much is made of the ‘hole in the roof ’ of the Voortrekker Monu-
ment, which allows sunlight to strike the cenotaph, and its words:
‘Ons vir jou, Suid Afrika’ [‘We for thee, South Africa’], in the base-
ment on 16 December each year. The idea was not, however, novel,
for the architect of Hadrian’s restoration of Agrippa’s Pantheon in the
Campus Martius in Rome had created a dome for the temple that
culminated in a 9m aperture. Although the ‘hole’ in this instance was
part of the technique used to prevent the dome’s collapse, it also
allows sunlight today to shine on the central areas of the interior.10
The association with the Pantheon does not end there, for it is the
remarkable mathematical precision of the Roman construction that
is reproduced in the Voortrekker Monument. As noted earlier, the
dimensions of the Monument are 40 40 40 m and this is topped
inside with a second dome, the one surmounting the other, both with
holes. However, the spot where the sunlight falls on 16 December is
not only directly below the holes in the centre of the dome, but if the
10 Reconstructions of the Pantheon often illustrate the top of the dome with an
‘umbrella’ over the aperture to prevent rainfall entering the building. Today that is
not a feature and perhaps never was. Moerdijk could easily have been inXuenced by
what he saw rather than any ideas relating to a reconstruction.
line of the dome is extended down, it would lie at the bottom of a
circle within the square box of the building. This is exactly the same
as in Rome’s Pantheon. It is unlikely indeed that this exceptional
architectural feature was reproduced by chance.
By comparison with the sophisticated ideas put into practice for the
overall structure, the entrance is simple and tiny, highly reminiscent of
any chapel door, and perhaps not in good proportion to the whole
building. Yet this simplicity is exactly what there is at, for example, the
chapel at the base of Trajan’s Column, which contained the ashes of the
Emperor and his wife Plotina (Lepper and Frere 1988: plate II). Was
Moerdijk reminded of this when he designed the Monument’s en-
trance? But here, he also draws away from the classic to an African
context: the head of buValo is dramatically carved above the doorway—
is this visual euphemism for protection—and it is also framed by
four reliefs of black wildebeest, two each side of the balustrade of
the stairway.11 Directly below the buValo head, and centred between
the four wildebeest, is a statue in bronze of a Voortrekker woman and
two children by the local artist Anton Von Wouw (1862–1945), cast
by R. Vignali, another Italian company established in Pretoria.12
At the four corners of the terrace are statues of the Voortrekker
leaders, Retief, Pretorius, Potgieter, and another representing all pion-
eers. Reconstructions of most Greco-Roman religious and public sites
illustrate a preponderance of statuary; and clearly this may have been a
further instance of an attempt to introduce continuity with antiquity.
The tower’s external appearance is also inXuenced by native forms,
but also something rather older in conception. The local red sandstone
has been worked to give the appearance of wood at the terrace level,
and below, and a brick texture on the tower itself. The four massive
windows are elongated arches, each divided into Wve vertical sections
all of which have a lattice motif in front of yellow glass. The summit
has a stepped feature containing the upper terrace with eight small
buttresses on each side. The overall eVect is not unlike the ziggurats of
ancient Mesopotamia, built in mud-brick; a biblical association is not
improbable, given the visual religious messages inside.
11 Neither the buValo nor the black wildebeest are found on ancient coinage,
though many African animals are represented: elephant, rhinoceros, crocodile.
12 Pretorius (2003). The statue is rather more than four metres tall and is 2.5
tonnes in weight.
It is possible that the Monument’s enclosure is derived from
similar stone walls found in the Great Zimbabwe ruins, and although
the circular design is common to farmsteads, and even larger com-
munal living areas among African tribes, it was also a logical use of
the wagons for defence by the pioneers. However, it is also worth
bearing in mind that the very Wrst illustration on the scroll of Trajan’s
Column is a single-turreted fort with a circular palisade (Lepper and
Frere 1988: plate IV, 2 and 3; Rossi 1971: 131). This kraal, laager, or
outspan was never intended as a place of refuge, except perhaps for
Afrikaner sensibilities; nonetheless, the 313 metre long wall does
present the appearance of fortiWcation. The tower needs protection
and this is accentuated by sixty-four wagons carved in relief on the
2.7 metre-high wall, representing both the means of transportation
into the interior of the continent and also protection against attack.
SigniWcantly, the Voortrekkers had a laager of sixty four wagons at
Blood River in 1838. North-east of the Monument’s enclosure, a
Greek theatre was excavated out of the north-east facing hillside
with an orchestra and seating for approximately twenty thousand.
This again mirrors the ‘theatre’ between the two wings of the Union
Buildings on Meintjieskop, some distance across the valley. It is as if
those responsible for the construction of the Voortrekker Monument
were keenly aware that a democratic element must be included for
the people for whom this was to be, and still remains, a focus.
The interior of the Monument’s Hall of Heroes culminating in its
domed ceiling has a patterned marble Xoor (the marble transported
from Marble Hall in what is now Limpopo Province), likened to the
ripples formed when a stone is thrown into the waters of a lake. The
centre of the Hall’s Xoor is an open space, from which an onlooker
may gaze down onto the cenotaph in the basement and up to the
double holes in the ceiling. The wall between the Xoor and windows
contains a frieze in marble imported from Italy. This is the raison
d’être of the tower: a monument to house a monument, just as
Trajan’s Forum housed Trajan’s Column; and the parallel does not
end there.
The internal frieze, at 92 m in length and 2.3 m in width, the
largest of its sort in the world, cost R120,000, which was more than
one-sixth the total cost of the monument. From the beginning of the
scheme, the frieze was obviously to have a pre-eminent place. While
Moerdijk was the senior architect in charge of the overall project,
four sculptors were assigned the task of executing, or rather design-
ing, the work for the frieze. This fact also has parallels for the
architect of Trajan’s Forum, the Syrian Apollodorus of Damascus
who, like Moerdijk, had a supervisory capacity when it came to the
actual details of, in his case, the reliefs on the column. The sculptors
for the Voortrekker frieze were Peter KirchoV, Frikkie Kruger, Laur-
ika Postma, and Hennie Potgieter, who made clay and plaster models
of the themes and episodes they had agreed on for their storyline.
The actual work was undertaken by Wfty stonemasons in Florence at
the studio of Romano Romanelli (1882–1968). The models were
made between 1942 and 1946, but the frieze was cut between the
end of 1947 and the end of 1948 in time to ship the three hundred
and sixty tonnes of Quercetta marble out to Pretoria in time for
erection before the unveiling ceremony. The carving, supervised by
Potgieter and Postma, was in low relief following the style found on,
for example, the Parthenon.13
The frieze consists of twenty seven panels, which tell the events of
the pioneers’ groet trek between 1835 and 1852. As a piece of histor-
ical story-telling it again owes a great deal to the contents of the scroll
on Trajan’s Column and its history of the two Dacian Wars (101–2
and 105–6 ce). Its length is obviously considerable shorter than the
two hundred and twenty three metres and one hundred and Wfty
scenes on the column of Trajan, and the action is less extended and
less detailed, although the width is more than double that of the
scroll at one metre. The Parthenon frieze is just 160 m long with a
height of 1 m (Neils 2001: 33).14 Moreover, a point often missed
between modern and ancient work on marble is that the Voortrekker
frieze was meant to be plain and unadorned, whereas the bas-reliefs
on the Parthenon were painted (Neils 2001: 88–93),15 and further
13 See Alma-Tadema’s Pheidias and the Frieze of the Parthenon for a nineteenth century
recreation of the erection and its Wrst viewing in situ by Pericles, (Barrow 2001: 42–3).
The low relief of the Parthenon was not more than 5.6 cm above the marble base (Neils
2001: 33). Apparently eight panels were unWnished at the unveiling ceremony in 1949.
14 The area of marble available for working is actually not dissimilar,
Voortrekker ¼ 211:6 m2 ; Trajan’s Column ¼ 223 m2 ; Parthenon frieze 160 m2 .
15 The simplicity was presumably intended for the strongly religious community
of the time, but Alma-Tadema’s reconstruction with its bright colouration was not far
oV the mark.
Table 8.1. The order of the frieze: from the entrance then left to right around the
four walls of the Hall of Heroes
1. The Voortrekkers leaving the Cape Colony in 1835.*
2. British settlers present a bible to the Voortrekker leader Jacobus Uys.
3. Louis Trichardt in the Soutpansberg.
4. Trichardt’s arrival in Lorenço Marques/Maputo.
5. Ndebele attack on the Voortrekkers at Vegkop in 1836.
6. Piet Retief is sworn in as governor of the Voortrekkers.
7. Battle against the Ndebele at eGabeni/Kapain in 1837.*
8. Negotiations with the Rolong chief Moroka.*
9. Retief reports on his negotiations with Dingane.*
10. Debora Retief paints her father’s name on a rock.*
11. Crossing the Drakensberg mountains to Natal.
12. Retief and Dingane sign the treaty.
13. The murder of Retief and his men.
14. Zulu attack on the laagers at Bloukrans.
15. The women warn the laagers against the Zulu.*
16. Dirkie Uys protects his father.
17. Marthinus Oostuizen rushes to the aid of a besieged laager.
18. The women spur the men on to persevere.
19. Arrival of the new leader Andries Pretorius.
20. Making the vow.
21. The battle of Blood River on 16 December 1838.
22. The Church of the Vow is built.*
23. The women till the Welds and defend the laagers while the men are out on commando.
24. Mpande becomes king of the Zulus.*
25. Dingane is murdered by the Swazi in 1840.
26. The Voortrekkers leave Natal after the British occupation in 1843.
27. Sand River Convention in 1852. Britain recognises the independence of the Transvaal.
* ¼ panels discussed in this paper.
embellished by metalwork Wxtures for details such as weaponry, as

also occurred on Trajan’s Column. Warfare is the primary subject of
Trajan’s Column, and although there are episodes of a warlike nature
on the Voortrekker frieze, its processional and community themes
make it as strongly related to the activities on the Parthenon frieze. A
brief examination of a selection of the frieze’s panels will be suYcient
to note classical and more speciWc inXuences.
Panel one has clear ancient parallels in its theme of the settlers leaving
the Cape of Good Hope; Trajan’s Column, for instance, has the army
setting out from its camp to cross a pontoon bridge over the Danube
(Rossi 1971: 133).16 However, in perhaps a curious departure from
16 Similarly, a frieze shows Domitian leaving for his wars against the Chatti in
about 82 ce, and a column dedicated to Antoninus Pius also has a departure scene.
tradition,17 three of the designers, Potgieter, KirchoV, and Kruger,
placed their own images on this initial tableau. This illustrates wagons
of the Voortrekkers drawn by oxen, with herds of cattle in the back-
ground, a Xock of sheep in the foreground, an armed pioneer on
horseback, and various male and female Wgures tending the animals,
or in readiness for the march. A particular attention to detail is evident,
again faithfully adhering to ancient precedent, with all the parapher-
nalia needed for a long and uncertain journey, including farming
implements and provisions, some in a sack, a teapot, a hot iron, a
guitar, the men in hats, the women in bonnets. All this activity is set
against the backdrop of the Cape Mountains, familiar by their Xat tops.
The Wnal scene of the scroll on Trajan’s Column has many of the same
details (Rossi: 1971: 212; Lepper and Frere 1988: plate CXIII lower).
Panel seven has the Wrst portrayal of the Ndebele, enemies who were
defeated by the Voortrekkers, and as a result migrated north into what
is now southern Zimbabwe. Battle scenes are a regular feature of
ancient bas-reliefs, and a third of the Voortrekker frieze is devoted
such events. The mode of Wghting may have changed in that the
pioneers used guns to Wght oV their attackers, but many of the postures
remain familiar.18 It is also worth noting some inventiveness in that the
Ndebele are pictured riding oV the cattle of the Voortrekkers, who
pursue them on horseback, all adding to the confusion of the scene.
Panel eight shows the outcome of the previous scene, where the
Rolong tribe and their king Moroka are thanked for their assistance
in the defeat of the Ndebele. The pioneers’ horses appear in this panel
17 Although there are busts of Pheidias and Apollodorus, we cannot tell if they are
present on their best-remembered works. Apollodorus did, however, portray histor-
ical Wgures of the Column, not least Trajan (Lepper and Frere 1988: plates IX, XI,
XIII, XIV, XVII, XX–XXI, XXVI–XXVII), and his heir Hadrian, and several of the
emperor’s closest political allies (plates XLIX, LXXVII, LXXVIII), and his arch-enemy
Decebalus, the Dacian king (plate CVI). Pheidias, portraying a contemporary Athen-
ian festival, may have used models known to the community. The ara pacis Augustae
[Altar of the Augustan Peace] dated to about 12 bce not only portrays Augustus and
his closest ally Agrippa but also many of his family members, most of whom have
been identiWed.
18 On one of the Parthenon metopes, carved in higher relief than the frieze, the
mythical battle between Lapiths, a Thessalian tribe, and Centaurs is portrayed. Note
the outstretched arm of the rider on this panel and that of the Centaur, and the
expression of pain on the faces of the Ndebele and the Lapith. The Lapiths fought
with the drunken Centaurs at the marriage banquet of their king Pirithoüs.
too. The role and importance of the horse is clear enough, featuring
on ten of the twenty seven scenes. In fact, animals as a whole are
prominent: cattle on Wve panels, dogs on three, sheep on one. The
horses quite obviously have to do with movement and the journey,
the domesticated animals with the agricultural pursuit of the set-
tlers—a sack of grain is present on the Wrst panel, while dogs are both
companions and have a function around the farm.19
From animal to human proWles, on panel nine one of the leaders of
the pioneers’ reports back about negotiations with the Zulu king
Dingane. Also depicted in the outspanning are domestic chores: rope
making, hunting (rabbit/hare?), repairs to shoes, and sewing. Female
Wgures are not uncommon on ancient reliefs, such as the Parthenon
frieze, while busts, such as those of Livia, with quite severe hairstyles
may well have inXuenced the sculptors. The male Wgures here are
rather static and, while lacking the vitality of Wgures on Roman
frescos or mosaics, they are similar in attitude to some of the riders
on the Parthenon.
Moerdijk’s ultimate goal was to deliver a monument for all time,
recording what was essentially a bitter and diYcult venture and,
therefore, it was probably felt that frivolity would be out of place.
Still, panel ten is devoted to the portrayal of a lighter moment, but also
to a particular date. On 12 November 1837 Piet Retief, one of the
leading Wgures of the groet trek, celebrated his birthday, and to com-
memorate this occasion, his daughter Debora carved his name on a
rock at Kerkenberg in the Orange Free State. The panel also provides
a contrast with its lack of activity compared to the conXict and scenes
of hardship, which mostly Wll the frieze. The portrayal of youthful
Wgures on marble has another parallel in the Parthenon frieze.20
19 Horses and their riders feature prominently on the Parthenon frieze, and only
the east side has no equestrian activity. Cavalry are commonly portrayed on Trajan’s
Column (Lepper and Frere 1988: plates XXXVI, XL, XLIV–XLV). The suovetaurilia,
in which a bull, a sheep and a pig were sacriWced, is also portrayed (plates IX–X,
XXXVIII). Cattle and sheep and pigs appear elsewhere (plates LXII, LXXVI, CXIII).
Dogs have been portrayed in ancient art since early times; see, for example, the tomb
of the Merehi (Smith 1900b: plate XIII). Note that neither cats nor domesticated fowl
appear on the Voortrekker, but see, for example, the Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia
(cats), and Travignoli (chicken) (Modona 1954: 100–1 and 108).
20 Youth is a pervasive theme on the Parthenon frieze, according to (Neils 2001:
200–1), although children as such are not carved here. Youthful Wgures are probably
nos. 35 (East), most of the riders on the south frieze, notably no. 70, and the riders on
Panel Wfteen is of particular interest in that while it may have
modern parallels, it has no ancient equivalent. The Zulus were
about to attack the settlers, led by Gerrit Maritz, at Bloukrans,
when they received a warning and so were able to mount a defence
and avoid disaster. There are many scenes of horses and riders in
ancient frieze work, but none has such a prominent role given to a
woman. She was Theresa Viglione, an Italian trader (and another
Italian link with the Monument), who happened to be nearby and
risked her own life to save the Voortrekkers. This was much the same
sort of message as that carried by Paul Revere when he rode from
Boston to Lexington and Lincoln on 18 April 1775.21 This may not be
an instance of bringing good news from Ghent to Aix,22 but the
imagery is identical, and was probably in the sculptors’ minds,
especially with both these messages being associated with liberty
from oppression.
In panel twenty-two there is the sole representation of a building
under construction, the Church of the Vow in Pietermaritzburg.
Moerdijk makes a late appearance on this particular panel. Again,
some planning clearly went into this design and its meaning. Con-
struction of forts and bridges are common themes on Trajan’s Col-
umn,23 but quite clearly this panel towards the end of the
Voortrekker frieze was intended to show that the journey was nearly
completed. And the architect’s presence is a further doublet in that it
celebrates his own monument to the pioneers. Once again we may
observe the skill behind an idea, which projected the possession of a
monument within a monument for all time.
the north and west friezes. However, children certainly appear on the ara pacis
Augustae, another possible further inXuential frieze for the Voortrekker sculptors.
21 Paul Revere (1735–1818) brought news of British mobilization against the New
England colony of Massachusetts and is celebrated in Longfellow’s poem The Mid-
night Ride of Paul Revere (1863).
22 R. Browning (1844); see Woolford and Karlin (1991: 239): ‘‘There is no histor-
ical foundation for the poem, ‘merely [a] general impression of the characteristic
warfare and besieging which abounds in the Annals of Flanders’. Aix is besieged and
about to surrender, and the ‘good news’ that unexpected help is on its way is brought
from Ghent . .’.
23 See, for example, the start of the scroll where the legions cross a pontoon bridge
over the Danube and later constructions in Dacia (Lepper and Frere 1988: plates VII,
XI–XV, XXX, XXXIX, XLII).
The climax of the frieze is both peaceful and bloody. Dingane, the
Zulu king, was expelled and replaced by Mpande, portrayed on panel
twenty-four standing on a rock with Andries Pretorius and saluted by
the Voortrekkers. This is not unlike the scene of Trajan giving gifts,
portrayed on his triumphal arch at Beneventum or on the column
(Lepper and Frere 1988: plate XXXIV). The portrayal of Pretorius
full-face departs from the normal use of proWles but also emphasizes
a change. Panel twenty-Wve pictures the murder of Dingane, the
supreme enemy of the settlers, by the Swazi in 1840. His death is
reminiscent of the suicide of Decebalus, king of the Dacians, pictured
nearly at the end of the scroll of Trajan’s Column. The Wnal panel
shows the signing of the treaty in which the British recognized an
independent settler state in the Transvaal. The return of peace is also
the all-embracing message of the top of the scroll of Trajan’s Column.
The Voortrekker Monument was once Wrmly established in
the minds of those involved in the liberation struggle, and among
white liberals, as an expression of the ideology of apartheid, and with
more than a little Fascist symbolism thrown in for good measure. The
discussion here has shown that the symbolic components of the
Voortrekker Monument were not obviously, if at all, inspired by
extremist political movements, which emerged in Europe in the
1920s, but by far older artistic and, arguably, far more pristine, cre-
dentials. Because of this classical heritage the monument deserves to be
regarded as a place of considerable importance in twentieth-century
sculptural and architectural trends. This was not a building conceived
by supporters of some fringe element but by an ethnic group seeking
to proclaim its unique identity, descendants of Greco-Roman culture
yet living in sub-Saharan Africa. The South African artists of the
Voortrekker Monument were fully at home with classical art and
architecture from which they drew inspiration. The cutters of the frieze
were Italians living in the immediate aftermath of the Second World
War and, while they may have been supervised and have worked from
models,24 this was not a time when Fascist forms would have either
been tolerated or deemed politically or artistically relevant.
24 I am not aware of any source that mentions the whereabouts of the models and
casts, whether they remained in Italy or whether they were shipped back in 1949. This
may be a project worth following up.
For many years this monument was neglected through the isol-
ation of South Africa in the international community. Even those
with an emotional tie have been either indiVerent to its existence or
have found the structure an embarrassment. It is only in recent years,
following the declaration of the Voortrekker as a World Heritage
Site,25 and the increasingly easy accessibility of the country, that it has
become better known and appreciated. Unlike Pretoria’s Union
Buildings, the Voortrekker is not an attractive building from a dis-
tance, but the thought and planning of its exterior structure and
interior design was every bit as complex as those of its illustrious
neighbour. The Union Buildings display British imperial architecture
at its apex, designed by one of its greatest exponents; the Voortrekker
Monument exhibits a post-colonial energy in the drive for self-
expression by the descendants of white settlers in that region of
Africa. And it was the envisaged centennial celebration of the groot
trek, which provided the impetus for this burst of artistic endeavour.
Together, these structures dominate the city’s skyline almost as if a
double acropolis: the one British-inspired, the other Afrikaner. They
can be viewed as the architects’ conceptions of what should be
portrayed as imperial and counter-imperial ediWces, and so in a
post-colonial environment they might be regarded as redundant
expressions of past ideologies. Far from it, both Union Buildings
and Monument have become integral to the vibrant culture of
today’s South Africa. Herbert Baker’s choice of Meintjieskop was
inspired precisely by his own experience of Greek and Roman sites,
especially those in Greece and Sicily, which gave him the idea of
buildings on a high place joined together by a theatre. He was also
imbued with a belief that the British empire had inherited all the best
of Roman imperialism and Greek democracy. Moerdijk wanted a
monument in just as impressive a spot, hence the site at Scanskop,
within sight of the former colonial power’s administrative home. But
he too was as inXuenced by the classical heritage, examples of which
he had seen or was aware of, primarily the Parthenon, Trajan’s
Column, and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. It is possible that
25 As a result government funding has clearly been increased. Facilities at the site
have been upgraded, and management of the Voortrekker Monument better geared
for the, evidently, wide range and increasing number of visitors. The future of the
monument in the new South Africa seems assured.
what was intended to be a celebration of the diYculties of establish-
ing a free settler community in South Africa with purely local
reference points became irresistibly drawn to more ancient sources.
The design of the tower, precinct, or enclosure, the interior and the
dome, the frieze and its contents, and even the creation of the
Greek theatre on the hillside, all have ancient precedents. That Greek
theatre faces Greek theatre across Pretoria, situated in or close to its
most signiWcant buildings, deserves a Wnal comment. It is indeed
ironic that a country so long denied democracy should, in a post-
colonial epoch, not only have gained the liberty for which this
concept stands, but should possess a capital city in whose buildings
Greek and Roman art and architecture Wgure so prominently.
9
Imperial ReXections: the Post-Colonial
Verse-Novel as Post-Epic1
Katharine Burkitt
‘In Walcott’s epic poem, Omeros (1990), the relationship between history
and mythology is at once mutually constitutive and radically nullifying. One
may not, in other words, simply choose between the opposed meanings of
history and mythology in the poem, as the logic underwriting one mode of
representation always implies the logic underwriting the other.’
(Williams 2001: 277)
Ted Williams draws attention to the ideological paradox at the core
of epic representation as he explores Derek Walcott’s engagement
with the form in Omeros. Williams highlights the problematic rela-
tion between history and mythology, and demonstrates that within
the conceptual space of Walcott’s text, this apparently polarized
relationship is rendered ambiguous, as it is ‘at once mutually consti-
tutive and radically nullifying’. In line with Williams, I regard Wal-
cott’s Omeros as a mindful engagement with epic form,2 and
1 My thanks go to the organizers of the Classics in a Post-Colonial World conference

for allowing me to present this paper and providing a supportive environment, which
remained challenging and stimulating, and acknowledge the contributions of other
conference attendees. I thank the anonymous referees for their constructive comments,
and the editors for their support during the preparation of this publication.
2 Epic has been theorized repeatedly since Aristotle’s Poetics; this mirrors the way
in which the form has been appropriated and adapted by generations of poets.
Recently epic has been considered in line with the following broad deWnition (Pre-
minger et al. 1993: 361): ‘An epic is a long narrative poem that treats a single heroic
Wgure or a group of such Wgures and concerns an historical event, such as war or
conquest, or an heroic quest or some other signiWcant mythic or legendary achievement
therefore inherently concerned with the political associations of
history and mythology. Walcott’s text is self-aware as it straddles
the conXated boundaries of post-colonial history and mythology in
St. Lucia, and as such, I posit it as post-epic: a notion that is implicit
in the way in which Omeros modiWes epic and its relation to history
and mythology. It is also preoccupied with the underlying concerns
of epic, including travel, war, and home, but harnesses epic context to
correspond to its late-twentieth-century St. Lucian perspective.
Whilst Williams characterizes Omeros unproblematically as an
‘epic poem’, Walcott resists this categorization (Walcott 1997: 231):
I did not plan this book so it would be a template of the Homeric original
because that would be an absurdity. If you consider for instance, the massive
parallel that Joyce’s Ulysses constitutes—the exact overlay, moment by mo-
ment, between Ulysses and the Odyssey, in which everything in Homer is
echoed by the Irish experience—that’s on a scale no artist today with any
sensibility would attempt because then you would be doing a third version of
the Odyssey via Joyce.
Although related to the ‘Homeric original’, Walcott discredits the
notion that Omeros is a straightforward engagement with epic or a
repetition of the form. He draws attention to the intertexual nature
of epic genealogy and complicates the relationship between his text
and Homer’s epic by alluding to Joyce’s Ulysses. This move highlights
the recurrent nature of epic and positions Walcott’s text in a tradition
of modiWed epics; as ‘Homer is echoed by the Irish experience’, so
Homer and Joyce resound in his St. Lucian world. When coupled
with other intertextual references, the heteroglot narratives, the nov-
elistic format, and the quotidian drama of Walcott’s text, Omeros
resists categorization as an epic, although the resonance of the form
is always evident. It is therefore more suited to being considered
as verse-novel, or at least a forerunner to that form, which has
that its central to the traditions or belief of its culture.’ This is a necessarily brief outline
and further to it, it is a form that has developed cumulatively; therefore, the links
between epics are necessarily blurry, complex and both ideological and structural.
Merchant (1971) charts this history and might be read in conjunction with various
contemporaneous theories, collected in Draper (1990), to establish the social roles of
epic works. This paper responds to the theorization of epic primarily by Bakhtin
(1981). This is a modernist critique of epic which seeks to set it in dialogue with the
polyglot novel whilst epic is perceived as unitary.
Imperial ReXections 159
burgeoned since Omeros’ publication in 1990. In the context of my
argument, the generic ambivalence of the verse-novel supports the
notion of a post-epic text, because it is self-conscious in its engage-
ment with the modern novel, as well as the older tradition of
narrative poetry, epitomized in epic. It is therefore an exploration
of the limitations of form and a harking-back to its literary geneal-
ogy. To explore this more fully, I shall refer to Bernardine Evaristo’s
The Emperor’s Babe: A Novel, published in 2001, as well as Omeros.
Evaristo’s text identiWes itself as a novel from the outset, but is
constructed as a series of couplets, and follows Omeros in its explor-
ation of the intertwined nature of history and mythology as narra-
tives. Whilst Walcott’s inXuence on The Emperor’s Babe is clear, it is a
very diVerent text. It is set in Roman Londinium and charts the
progress of the teenager, Zuleika, whose relationship with her
Roman husband is complicated by her immigrant status; thus draw-
ing attention to notions of time, empire, and nationality. These texts
do not stand alone and unclassiWable, but can be loosely categorized
with Evaristo’s Lara, published in 1997, Dorothy Porter’s The Mon-
key’s Mask (1997), Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune (1998), Anne Carson’s
Autobiography of Red (1999), Fred D’ Aguair’s Bloodlines (2000),
amongst others3. These works can be classed as post-epic, as they
operate in the convention of epic whilst also questioning its role in
the contemporary world. These post-epic verse-novels provide a self-
reXexive space that is aware of their contentious engagement with
postmodernism and post-colonialism, and are paradoxical and self-
reXexive, as they highlight their own ambivalences and contradic-
tions in order to critique the purported objectivity of epic history
and mythology.
Walcott’s Omeros and Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe can be read as
post-epics, as they draw attention to their uncanny generic aYliations,
whilst also suggesting themselves as a contemporary manifestation of
epic. They locate themselves ambivalently on the cusps of genres: the
poem, the novel, and the epic, which complicates that aYliation even
further. As such, they interrogate their relationship with epic, whilst
3 There are a number of verse-novels which are not strictly post-colonial, but are
formally aYliated to the texts mentioned. These include: Raine (1994), Maxwell
(2000), and Leithauser (2002).
engaging with epic form and content, and are consciously located at a
tangent to that tradition. Therefore, Evaristo and Walcott’s verse-novels
question and restructure the epics that have shaped them from a post-
colonial perspective, presenting a reciprocal vision of their contempor-
ary worlds. In order to explore this theory more fully, and in line with
Williams’ reading of Omeros, I will discuss these post-epics as reworked
versions of classical epic and investigate the complex engagement with
history and mythology, which is inherent in the form. This will com-
pare the paradoxical aYliation of these post-epics, which are polyglot
post-colonial verse-novels, to the structure of epic as it is perceived as
monolithic, most notably by theorists such as Bakhtin and Auerbach. It
is therefore crucial to bear in mind that the post-epic is a response to
their speciWcally modernist interpretation of epic, as well as a direct
engagement with the genre. I will then go on to consider The Emperor’s
Babe in terms of Neil Lazarus’ post-colonial materialist critique of
Theodor Adorno’s notion of ‘Hating Tradition Properly’ and draw
attention to the way in which Evaristo’s text is set within the recogniz-
able genre in order to undermine it. As it exceeds and subverts the
ideology of its forerunner, I will consider whether the post-epic, with its
fragmented and self-reXexive relation to epic, is the only possibility for
manifestations of epic in the contemporary post-colonial world.
Post-epic texts are part of a genealogy of epic that dates back to
classical Greece, a lineage that has guaranteed epic its position as a
stalwart of Western literature. Whilst this has ensured it maintains an
elevated position in relation to more modern genres, like the novel, it
has also led to approaches to epic that are fundamentally prejudiced
and based upon critical responses to the perceived characteristics of
the genre, rather than on the texts themselves. Bakhtin, writing in the
early twentieth century, engages with epic in this way. He sets the
distinguishing features of the ‘completed’ epic formation, which
establishes itself as a ‘heirarchically organized, organic whole’ (Bakh-
tin 1981: 4), against his project on the dialogic, heteroglot novel. So,
epic becomes a pre-ordained and conservative embodiment of na-
tional history (Bakhtin 1981: 13):
The world of the epic is the national heroic past: it is a world of ‘beginnings’
and ‘peak times’ in the national history, a world of fathers and of founders of
families, a world of ‘Wrsts’ and ‘bests’.
For Bakhtin, this ‘world of ‘‘Wrsts’’ and ‘‘bests’’ ’ is anterior, objective
and unitary; not only is epic an historical form, it also concerns a
particular history and documents the mythology of the founding of
nations. Bakhtin’s notion of a ‘national heroic past’ is conceptually
comparable to Williams’ analysis of Omeros as an epic that demon-
strates history and mythology as inherently interdependent. (Williams
2001); however, in contrast to Williams’ reading, for Bakhtin, epic is an
outdated and inherently imperial form of Western mythology, which
makes it wholly unsuitable to convey the ambivalent subject matter of
post-colonial writing. In a similar vein, Auerbach (1953: 3) suggests:
‘the epic is not just inherited from the past, but also dominated by it’. In
these terms epic is infused with national history and can be held up as
an unquestionable representation of that discourse. This interpret-
ation of epic suggests it as a spectacular narrative that projects a notion
of ideological coherence and magnitude, and masks the diVerence
between discourses of history and mythology by appending a cultural
verisimilitude to epic representation. Post-epic texts function to
deconstruct this spectacle of epic; as interactive, fragmentary and
elliptical, they are, paradoxically, always in contest with, whilst shaded
by, the Wxed and self-ratifying shadow of Bakhtin’s epic, which struggles
to maintain its incontestability.
The approach to classical epic in Omeros inXuences the post-epic
nature of the post-colonial verse-novels that follow in its wake, whilst
also raising questions about genre and categorical deWnition. As
such, mainly due to this generic ambivalence and Walcott’s unwill-
ingness to classify his text unequivocally, the tradition of epic in
Omeros has invited considerable comment. It has been understood
as a ‘disavowal’of epic (Davis 1997b, 322), a ‘creolised’ version of
epic tradition and form’ (Roberts 2003: 273), or an ‘ambivalent
mock-heroic’ form (Thieme 1999: 152). These interpretations insist
upon the upholding of the ‘other’ nature of Omeros, and posit the
text as a space for discursive interaction. Similarly, readings of
Omeros that establish its epic nature, either suggest it as a modiWed
form of epic, a work which ‘supplements and reshapes’ epic heritage
(Dougherty 1997: 355), or as text that forces re-evaluation of the way
in which epic has been read as a monologic form (Farrell 1997). So,
in terms of Omeros, epic is an unavoidable but contentious label, as
the text sits uneasily within the narrative and ideological coherence,
which some readings of the form demand. Walcott draws attention to
the uneasy relationship between his text and epic:
There’s a pivotal section that says: Why make an epic of two Wshermen
quarrelling in a rum shop? Why do you have to make this so grand that you
turn it into Hector and Achilles talking about Helen of Troy? Why do you
need that? Why can’t you just be two Wshermen quarrelling in a rum shop?
Why do you have to make it sublime? Why do you have to make it heroic?
Why do you have to make an epic out of it?
(Walcott 1997: 233)
Walcott foregrounds the self-reXexivity of his narrative and suggests it
as a space that is at once epic and anti-epic, as he problematizes the
suitability of the form to convey contemporary post-colonial experi-
ence. In the same interview, he calls Omeros a ‘long poem’ (ibid. p. 229)
and in so doing de-politicizes the generic structure, acknowledging the
debt to Homeric formation, but denying any epic proportion to his
text as history and mythology are replaced by ‘two Wshermen quarrel-
ling in a rum shop’. Omeros is, therefore, inherently concerned with
navigating the borders of Western literary genre, and involved in both
self-critique and analysis of the form. This self-reXexive examination
of form and ideology lends itself particularly well to post-colonial
writers. As the post-epic provides a space to explore the scope of
epic narrative, it both interrogates the representation of history and
mythology, and reveals its imperialist reputation as stereotype, under-
taking an analysis of both the adaptable potential of epic form and the
way in which it has been interpreted.
Therefore, a re-imagining of epic for the contemporary post-colonial
world is at the core of Walcott’s Omeros. His representation of epic
complicates Bakhtin’s ‘completed’ genre as the text is self-reXexive and
vacillating. In this way, Robert Crawford reads Omeros as a representa-
tion of postmodern poetics in an epic framework (Crawford 1990/91: 9):
Walcott’s epic narrative of a postmodern age is aware not so much of an
older, unitary concept of history as of a postmodern plurality of histories.
[ . . . ] History, like narrative and like Literature is seen as something remade,
each time with diVerent inclusions and exclusions.
Crawford’s review of Omeros fuses the postmodern and post-colonial
preoccupations of the text with its epic structure and suggests
Omeros as an epic space, within which history, mythology, narrative,
and literature are convergent and can be explored. But in Walcott’s
epic, the discourses are self-aware, correlated, and shifting, and as
such, it is a structure that is unstable and always evolving. Walcott’s
text revises its epic status: he engages with its recurring motifs and
geographical dimensions, but interrogates the legitimacy of an epic
standpoint. In Omeros, Walcott (1990: VLI. ii. 207) acknowledges his
paradoxical ‘reversible world’: at once introverted and extroverted,
peripheral and central, anti-epic and epic, set up to dismantle nar-
rative authority from the Xuctuating borders of ideology, genre, and
tradition. From early on, Omeros maintains a tangential position to
classical epic, as Walcott sets his poem within that tradition, whilst
communicating its speciWcally St. Lucian scope:
I said, ‘Omeros,’
and O was the conch-shell’s invocation, mer was
both mother and sea in our Antillean patois,
os, a grey bone and the white surf as it crashes
and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore. (Walcott 1990 II. iii. 14)
Walcott represents the local aspect of his poem, placing it Wrmly
outside the essentially Western, Homeric, epic tradition, although
the Greek aYliations are always in proximity. Joseph Farrell highlights
this dual etymology which characterizes ‘Omeros’ (Farrell 1997: 264):
The Greek word is ‘derived’ from elements of the French Creole dialect
spoken, not written, on the islands and from the natural sounds of the
Caribbean environment.
Therefore the epics suggested in the title, and recalled throughout
Omeros, are distanced in favour of Walcott’s indigenous narrative.
However, the preoccupations foregrounded in this passage mirror
the concerns of epic: history and mythology, genealogy and heritage,
the sea and the sailor are all manifest as uncanny representations of
Western epic features. This ambivalent positioning between epic and
indigenous tradition is the driving force behind Walcott’s verse-novel.
It is used throughout to complicate the politics of the historical,
mythological, and narrative ellipses, which Walcott presents in the
complexities of his world-view. Walcott’s text is a narrative tapestry,
an allegory for the conXation of history, mythology, geography, sexual
politics, cultural and personal heritage, and the modern human con-
dition, with epic as its framework. Whilst the subversive ideologies
draw attention to the structure of Omeros throughout the text, they
Wnd their momentum in the negotiation and negation from within of
the impenetrable spectacle of Bakhtinian epic.
The Emperor’s Babe follows Omeros in claiming an uncanny and
unsettling space within the framework of the classical epic. Evaristo
establishes a position of equality within the hierarchy of epic poetry
for the diasporic, British, female poet. By ironically setting her novel
in Roman Londinium, Evaristo’s text demonstrates a long history of
inter-racial relationships, and the concomitant interactions of op-
pression and subversion, which is historically embedded in inter-
national culture. The text is written in an up-to-date street language,
ensuring its contemporary relevance, and draws parallels between the
role of women and settler communities in the Roman and the
modern world. The poet’s critique of epic operates in a binary
relation to her own dialogic textual construct. Evaristo engages
with epic narrative structure to grant voice, consciousness, and
agency, if limited, to the woman; and Zuleika can initially articulate
her own position only from within the boundaries of classical myth:
I passed out.
Pluto came for me that night,
and each time I woke up, it was my Wrst night
in the Kingdom of the Dead.
(Evaristo 2001: 29)
Zuleika invokes the mythology of Roman epic to illustrate her plight.
At this point she can only express herself in terms of the masculine
narrative structures with which she is familiar. Hers is not an au-
tonomously constructed poetic voice: she articulates her insurgence
in the words of her oppressor, or at least the history of mythology,
which has been utilized to represent an overbearing version of mas-
culinity in Western culture. Whilst she is unable to escape the threat
of oppression in her diction, by adopting that language for her own
purposes, Zuleika enacts a double subversion: articulating her
own wedding night repulsion, in her husband’s terms. Despite her
struggles to locate her own political and poetic voice throughout The
Emperor’s Babe, Zuleika repeatedly undermines from within the
language of oppressive masculinity. She utilizes the structure and
lexis of canonical epic and myth to problematize the prejudices with
which the form is greeted, and complicates conventional notions of
its boundaries and the subjects who have legitimate access to it.
Neil Lazarus’ post-colonial re-reading of Theodor Adorno’s
Minima Moralia can be used to contextualize this approach to
epic. In ‘Hating Tradition Properly’, Lazarus utilizes the Adornoian
principle that ‘one must have tradition in oneself, to hate it prop-
erly’ (Lazarus 1999a: 9). This notion is suggestive: it highlights the
potential for subversion within, even, a forcibly imposed tradition.
It implies that indoctrination is dependent on internalization,
understanding, and mimicry, all of which provide the tools to
operate subversively within that recognizable context. Lazarus is
aware of the potentially élitist and Eurocentric undertones in Ador-
no’s work; however, his reading of Adorno’s theory provides a
cogent perspective upon the post-epic representation of classical
epic in the post-colonial world. As he states, if we can concur with
Adorno, that modernity is the ‘modern tradition’, and implicated in
the construction of its historical and mythological narratives, the
only possibility for post-colonial subversion must come from
within that structure:
For those opposed to bourgeois class domination, it is necessary, on Adorno’s
reading, to think with modernity against modernity. For no other kind of
thinking possesses the capacity to drive the historically actualised globality
of the existing social order beyond its own ideological limits.
(ibid. p. 13)
This argument redresses the location of post-colonial writers who are
politically contentious as they combine their indigenous intellectual
status with the utilization of ‘high’ modern theory. Lazarus (ibid.
p. 15) lists a number of contemporary post-colonial intellectuals in
this category, including Walcott, and suggests theirs is a ‘simultan-
eous commitment to the ‘‘philosophical discourse of modernity’’ and
to its urgent critique’. This is symptomatic of the shifting borders
of post-colonialism and postmodernism that characterize contem-
porary society; it is a marginalized and paradoxical position which
is inevitably compromised, as Walcott recognizes in ‘A Far Cry from
Africa’:
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken oYcer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
(Walcott 1992a: 18)
Despite his unease about his own status, Walcott presents the dual
relation to Europe and Africa as inherent within his indigenous
culture and tradition. Thus, the adaptation of epic in Omeros is a
contingent, naturalized representation of St. Lucian post-colonial
life, not a textual contrivance, and the text is positioned as an
intrinsic point of generic and cultural conXation. As Burian (1997:
360) suggests:
Walcott does not abandon the language and literary culture of the European
tradition, [ . . . ] but he supplements, deconstructs and remakes them with
particularly Caribbean sounds, sights and smells—above all with a sense of
the lived life of his islanders.
‘Hating tradition properly’ might also be construed as contentious
on a number of levels: Lazarus appears to close down the political
potential of the margins, and accept the notion of a ‘historically
actualised globality’, which is in itself questionable from subject
positions ‘outside’ Western modernity. However, Walcott’s poetry
works to subvert Western narrative structure with his indigenous
poetics, whilst maintaining a position of ambivalence as he alludes to
both, but aligns his text with neither.
Therefore, post-epic texts, in line with Lazarus’s interpretation of
Adorno, locate their political impetus in the re-vision of Western
literary tradition. The conceptual force of the form is derived from
the poets’ propulsion of epic structure, mythology and its generic
principles ‘beyond its own ideological limits’. Evaristo’s protagonist
goes on ironically to articulate the paradoxical relation between
adoption of form and ideological subversion in her reaction to the
role of poetry and the epic poet provided by her male teacher:
He made me read Homer’s Iliad,
Which I found bloody tedious, quite frankly.
...
And then he made me learn Virgil’s Aeneid
oV by heart for my Roman History class.
It’s all about the founding of Rome. And it’s
Oh, only twelve books long. Contemporary
‘cos it’s oh, only over two hundred years old.
You should hear him go on about Virgil,
Noster maximus poeta, about how
the Aeneid will still be a classic text
in two millennia from now. As if.
Says all the notable poets were men, except
for some butch dyke who lived with a bunch
of lipstick lesbians on an island in Greece,
but she was really a minor poet and did
I know what asclepiad meant? Or trochee?
Or spondee? Or dactyl? Or cretic? No?
Oh, surprise, surprise! Well, when I did, then
I could give him backchat, and anyway
I’d never write good poetry because what did
I know about war, death, the gods
and the founding of countries?
(Evaristo 2001: 83)
This passage oVers a clear critique of the role of the education system,
particularly the classics in education, and the elevated position of the
epic sub-genre. The texts and poets that are considered classic by
Theodorus are foregrounded and shown to construct national iden-
tity through epic and its mythology, as Zuleika learns Virgil’s Aeneid
for her ‘Roman History class’. She highlights the inappropriateness of
this approach to learning and the construction of her identity, yet,
whilst the tone of the piece is overtly dismissive, there is an under-
lying irony that the poet has chosen a carefully constructed compos-
ition with a resonance of classical epic to express anti-epic concerns.
Thus, the tradition of epic ideology, as read by Theodorus, Zuleika’s
teacher, or theorists like Bakhtin and Auerbach, rather than just the
form itself, is revealed as constraining and predetermined. Evaristo
self-reXexively utilizes, yet critiques, an epic structure in order to
vocalize a political agenda of race, gender, and literary hierarchy.
Therefore, The Emperor’s Babe is in a paradoxical location that
epitomizes ‘hating tradition properly’: at once colluding with, whilst
subverting, classical epic structure. Evaristo, like Walcott, exploits her
text’s post-epic position; as its dual aYliation to post-colonial polit-
ics and Western literary tradition determines that, it is from this
innate but compromised position that insurgence is best articulated.
The notion of ‘hating tradition properly’ supports readings of
Omeros and The Emperor’s Babe as post-epic texts. Both works adopt
epic form as a device to demonstrate the restrictions of the perceived
‘completed’ genre, which can only present cliché and unchallengeable
conservative ideology. Moreover, they demonstrate these restricted
readings as ideological rather than structural, and both texts eventually
present a re-imagined form of epic. Accordingly, Walcott and Evar-
isto’s works are post-epic: texts that are philosophically and structur-
ally unsteady and that both reXect and dissemble classical epic, or at
least modernist interpretations of it. Furthermore, in the contempor-
ary verse-novel form, the poets are not merely engaging with a trad-
ition of narrative poetry that can be seen to have begun with epic, but
capitalizing on its generic ambivalence. It is in this context of other-
ness, set against canonical notions of epic that the conXation of post-
colonialism and postmodernism is foregrounded against a paradoxical
engagement with history and myth. Derek Walcott recognizes this in
his 1992 Nobel lecture, as he describes his engagement with St. John
Perse’s epic Anabasis (Walcott 1992b: 27):
A boy with weak eyes skims a Xat stone across the Xat water of an Aegean inlet,
and that ordinary action with the scything elbow contains the skipping lines of
the Iliad and the Odyssey, and another child aims a bamboo arrow at a village
festival, another hears the rustling march of the cabbage palms in a Caribbean
sunrise, and from that sound with its fragments of tribal myth the compact
expedition of [Perse’s] epic is launched, centuries and archipelagos apart.4
4 Walcott’s Nobel Lecture is a discussion of Saint-John Perse’s Anabasis, which
foregrounds the history of epic in the Caribbean. It is signiWcant that he has identiWed
Perse’s work, as a representation of this fusion: Perse was born in the Antilles to
French plantation owner parents; he wrote Anabasis after a long residence in China.
T. S. Eliot translated the epic into English in 1924 and Perse won the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1960. Walcott draws attention to Perse as his forerunner, and highlights
the hybridity of epic form and the diversity of indigenous history that informs it.
Walcott foregrounds epic as a form that is inevitably intertextual and
adaptable, he highlights the historical nature of the form and the
similarity of human experience that has fed into various engage-
ments with it. These engagements are diverse and multifarious, and
Walcott uses Anabasis to draw attention to the parallels and refrac-
tions that have become recognizable and recurrent aspects of the
form, including local detail, comparative histories, and cultural ref-
erences, mythologies and engagement with formal traditions. There-
fore, epic is deWned recursively by its post-epic oVspring, as it is
presented as a form that can be utilized in a number of instances to
represent diverse versions of identity. This fractured and unformed
epic is set in direct contrast to Bakhtin’s ‘completed’ genre and has a
new take on familiar concerns, in this way reiterating the conXuence
of the ‘two meanings’, which Williams (2001: 284) identiWes in
Omeros. The post-epic, therefore, encourages engagement with clas-
sical epic, whilst also operating subversively in relation to Bakhtin’s
interpretation of that structure, thereby, as Williams suggests, repeat-
edly frustrating the binary logic which has been perceived to charac-
terize the form (ibid. p. 285):
The yoking together of opposed meanings in the text, therefore, may be
achieved only as the result of an interested disavowal of the binary logic
which gave each discourse its particular meaning in the Wrst place.
This form of epic is a conscious polyglot that denies polarization and
categorization, and implies the re-visionary nature of the form. In
contrast to Bakhtin’s thought, and just as Walcott articulates epic
narrative as benign and inclusive, productive and universally applic-
able, modiWed epic becomes a viable mode of representation in the
contemporary world. This is a present-day, post-colonial, epic per-
spective that is projected from the classical into the contemporary,
global, post-epic world
10
A Divided Child, or Derek Walcott’s
Post-Colonial Philology
Cashman Kerr Prince
Derek Walcott’s career attracts the academic notice of scholars interested

in English, post-colonial, and classical literatures; Walcott’s œuvre
seems to invite interdisciplinary interest. Engaging scholarship from
these perspectives, I argue for a more nuanced understanding of
Walcott’s intertextual usages of classical literatures and situate his
poetic praxis in a post-colonial context. While I will refer to various
works by Walcott, the primary focus will be on the Wrst section of Cul
de Sac Valley a lyric poem from Walcott’s 1987 collection, The
Arkansas Testament, and on his 1973 book-length autobiographical
poem, Another Life.1
The Arkansas Testament is divided into two sections, ‘Here’, and
‘Elsewhere’; Cul de Sac Valley is the second poem in the section
1 In addition to the speciWc debts acknowledged in this chapter, my entire reading
is deeply inXuenced by the remarks of Zetzel. I thank the participants of the Classics
in Post-Colonial Worlds conference for their stimulating contributions; the Arts
Research Board at McMaster University, which made it possible for me to attend
the conference; Nasrin Rahimieh for her support; and Indira Karamcheti for Wrst
encouraging me to work on Walcott. Voor Meisje, als altijd.
All citations to Another Life appear parenthetically in the text using the format:
[part number]. [chapter number]. [section number, where appropriate]; [page
number]. The chapters are numbered consecutively throughout the work; the refer-
ence by part number is for the beneWt of tracing themes or development in the poem
as a whole. I cite Another Life from its original edition; the full text is reprinted in
Collected Poems 1948–1984, 141–294. The latter edition reproduces the page layout of
the original; references to Another Life in that edition may be found by adding 142 to
the page numbers I cite.
A Divided Child 171
‘Here’, and also the second poem of this collection. From other titles
in this section, such as Saint Lucia’s First Communion and Gros-Ilet,
we infer that ‘Here’ refers to the Caribbean, if not Walcott’s native
Saint Lucia. This is not mere autobiographical fallacy; the landscape
described in Cul de Sac Valley supports such a reading.2 However, the
unwary reader encountering ‘Here’ after the title The Arkansas Tes-
tament, might expect ‘Here’ to refer to the United States, since
Arkansas is both a North American Indian tribe and a state’s name.
A quick reference to the table of contents reveals that the title poem
closes the second section, ‘Elsewhere’, and also the collection as a
whole. As Edward Baugh observes (Baugh 1991: 126):
In the reality of the poems, the relationship between ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’ is
more complex than the simple opposition of the two terms would suggest.
Thus there is one reversal, one hermeneutic about-face, between the
opening of the collection and the opening of this poem; this man-
oeuvre, achieved by the ordering of the collection, is not without
meaning. Baugh holds that (ibid. p. 126):
with Walcott, ‘here’ has increasingly become a place to which one returns, a
place one has to reclaim repeatedly in an eVort made more and more
precarious and compulsive as the gulf of memory widens.
This spatial dislocation or ambiguity is one of the many tensions
which Walcott spans, and to which we shall return later in this chapter.
The seven-page lyric poem, Cul de Sac Valley consists of four
sections, each written in quatrains of verses three to Wve words
long. The form of the poem is the theme of the opening quatrain:
A panel of sunrise / on a hillside shop / gave these stanzas / their stilted shape.
This statement of form, a complete sentence in one quatrain, gives way
to an eight-quatrain long sentence concerned with poetics—a condi-
tional sentence followed by an indicative statement. The apodosis
opens:
If my craft is blest; / if this hand is as / accurate, as honest / as their carpenter’s . . .
2 The length of line and the form of stanzas derives from the landscape: ‘A panel of
sunrise / on a hillside shop’ (vv. 1–2. That this is a Caribbean hillside is guaranteed by
the towns named in vv. 163–64: ‘. . . Forestière, / Orléans, Fond St. Jacques’.
The speaker of the poem compares ‘my craft’ (v. 5) and ‘this hand’
(v. 6)—the writing hand, and, metonymically, the writing itself—with
the craft, the hand (and, metonymically, the handiwork) of ‘their car-
penter’ (v. 8).3 The apodosis Xows into the protasis, beginning in the
third stanza:
every frame, intent / on its angles, would / echo this settlement / of unpainted
wood . . .
The English subjunctive would tells us the comparison is not valid. In
grammatical terms, this is a present contrafactual condition; the pre-
sent scenario, of a poetic craft equal to the craft of the builder of
the hillside shop, is unrealized. The speaking poet is found wanting in
the face of the ‘unpainted wood’ (v. 12) of the ‘settlement’ (v. 11). The
settlement’s carpenter wins out. Nevertheless the contrafactual condi-
tion remains in the poem, so each reader can know the poet thinks the
carpenter more accurate, more honest. Whether this conditional
should be read as a literal comparison or as a disingenuous piece of
poetic rhetoric must remain unanswered for some lines yet.
While the carpenter’s skills may be better than the poet’s, the
speaker repeats the metaphor of poet as carpenter. The protasis
continues:
as consonants scroll
oV my shaving plane
in the fragrant Creole
of their native grain;
from a trestle bench
they’d curl at my foot,
C’s, R’s, with a French
or West African root
from a dialect throng-
3 Since ‘their’ is plural in number, there are two possible referents: ‘this settlement’
(v. 11), a singular noun referring to the collectivity of the buildings that comprise the
settlement; or, ‘hand’ (v. 6), a noun used in the singular, then referred to in the plural
(a pair of hands sharing the same body, the same maker). The carpenter is then either
a builder (a literal carpenter) or a deity (a metaphorical carpenter), respectively.
I prefer the former reading, which is in keeping with the corporeality of the imagery
in this section of Cul de Sac Valley even though the poetic grammar demands a reader
read on for another three lines before Wnding the referent of ‘their’ (v. 8) in the
‘settlement’ (v. 11).
A Divided Child 173
ing, its leaves unread
yet light on the tongue
of their native road;
(vv. 13–24)
The speaking poet is now a carpenter who uses ‘my shaving plane’
(v. 14), labouring to make ‘every frame, intent / on its angles’ (vv. 9–
10); the carpenter planes wood to create structures, the poet shaves oV
consonants to create the structure of a poem. (The image of whittling
down language is hardly surprising in a poem of such short verses, where
each unnecessary word must be shaved away; this image admirably
captures the poet’s process of revision, and resonates with many writers.)
Both the carpenter and the poet, then, engage in an act of poiesis, in its
radical, Greek sense. The English word poetry, and its cognates, comes
from the Greek poiéo (Øø), signifying ‘I make, I create’; the Greek
poı́ema (Æ), root of our English poem, signiWes ‘a thing made; a
work of art; a poem’. The polysemous resonances of the Greek termin-
ology subtend this Wrst section of Cul de Sac Valley. Both poet and
carpenter are crafting poiémata: literally, both are making objects; the
speciWc object which each makes is, in its own right, a poı́ema.
Just as stray wood is scrolled away, yielding a frame intent on its
angles, so too are stray letters scrolled away from the poem. Since
wood-shavings resemble the piece of wood from which they were
planed, we know that the speaking poet hypothesizes a work of art
crafted ‘in the fragrant Creole / of their native grain’. Being planed to
craft the very poem we are reading (a perhaps not unlikely conceit) the
word is heavily planed indeed, producing such a compact poem of
short verses (iambic trimeters, in fact). The poet’s material, ‘a dialect
throng- / ing, its leaves unread / yet light on the tongue / of their native
road’ is an oral language, with the thronging dialect recalling
the multiplicity of Caribbean patois or a similar linguistic scenario
replete with Creole languages. The leaves of this dialect are unread
but frequently spoken; the negative expression of this orality (unread /
yet) reminds the readers they are reading this poem which has oral
roots. The ‘leaves unread’ continues the ambiguity between poet and
carpenter, recalling the leaves of trees stripped when it becomes wood
or building material, and also the leaves of poems, as in Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass or the Latin pagina, which is ‘leaf’, ‘writing surface’, and
‘written text’ (Lewis and Short 1969).4 Yet this idyllic portrait of
eVortlessly rendering oral language into written verse is the culmin-
ation of the present contrafactual condition; the enjambment of
‘throng- / ing’ carries the reader to the semicolon at the end of the
sixth stanza and the culmination of the portrait of what might be.
Instead, this poet must work. The seventh stanza begins with the
adversative conjunction ‘but’, bursting (as it were) the preceding
idyll. Unlike the carpenter, the speaking poet faces rebellious wood:
but drawing towards
my pegged-out twine
with bevelled boards
of unpainted pine,
like muttering shale,
exhaling trees refresh
memory with their smell:
bois canot, bois campêche,
hissing: What you wish
from us will never be,
your words is English,
is a diVerent tree.
(vv. 25–36)5
4 For Whitman, the interplay between material support and poem runs throughout
Leaves of Grass. Consider ‘Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand’ (from the
1891–92 edition of Leaves, ‘Calamus’ section), which oVers one succinct example of this
juxtaposition: the poetic voice speaks to the reader: ‘But these leaves conning you con
at peril, / For these leaves and me you will not understand, . . .’ (p. 271); so, too,
‘Scented Herbage of My Breast’ from the same section and edition: ‘Scented herbage of
my breast, / Leaves from you I glean, I write, to be perused best afterwards, / Tomb-
leaves, body-leaves growing up above me above death, / . . . / Every year shall you bloom
again, out from where you retired you shall emerge again . . .’ (p. 268). From the earlier,
1855, edition of Leaves of Grass, the preface (especially 5–7) and part of what becomes
‘Song of Myself’ (31: ‘A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full
hands; . . . Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, . . .’) express a similar commingling of
nature and the materiality of the written book of poetry. See Nathanson (1992: 65–7
and passim for a study of Whitman’s juxtaposition of body, nature, and writing.
Walcott plays with this classical convention, referring to ‘some novel’s leaves’ (III.15.i;
96) and again: ‘All of the epics are blown away with the leaves, / blown with the careful
calculations on brown paper; / these were the only epics: the leaves’ (IV.22.1; 142).
More elaborately, he uses the phrase ‘turning pages of the sea’ (16.1; 104); once more
nature and literature combine, but now in a new way.
5 This passage has parallels in Another Life: ‘I watched the vowels curl from the
tongue of the carpenter’s plane, / resinous, fragrant / labials of our forests, / over the
A Divided Child 175
No matter how many French or West African consonants are shaved
away, the very odour of the wood reminds the poet he is not crafting
a poem of English wood. No yew trees here. Rather these trees, the
bois canot, bois campêche, signify their Caribbean roots by their
aroma, by their similarity to ‘muttering shale’.6 Additionally, on a
linguistic level, these trees mark their distance from the Queen’s
English by the numeric disparity between the subject ‘words’ and
the verb ‘is’ in vv. 35–6.
What, precisely, is this ‘muttering shale’? The metaphor highlights
the rustling of the leaves as wind blows through trees; the words
‘muttering shale’ can be read as imitating the sound of this rustling,
much more vividly than does the ‘hissing’ in v. 33. The trees exhale
and hiss; the wind wafting the ‘smell’ of v. 31 is absent. Rather, the
trees themselves exhale, personifying the trees. Shale is deWned as,
dialectically, ‘loose ore’, or ‘an argillaceous Wssile rock’.7 Literally this
makes no sense; however, the sounds of the words ‘muttering shale’
imitate the sound of a wind setting the leaves in motion and the
staccato sound (note the double t in muttering) of leaves—especially
dry leaves in autumn—hitting against one another. Onomatopoeia,
but also a red herring: ‘muttering shale’ recalls ‘murmuring shoals’.
The latter expression both recalls the aural similarity of babbling
brooks to rustling leaves and also situates the bois canot and bois
campêche in an island context. Just as the leaves rustle, so too do the
ocean’s waves whoosh: the ‘muttering shale’ of v. 29 encapsulates the
metapoetic tension, which is the subject of this Wrst section of Cul de
Sac Valley. Walcott’s leaves of poetry come from Caribbean (colo-
nial), not European (imperial centre), trees, and, as they declaim,
they will never be the Queen’s English; like the muttering shale,
Walcott’s English will always be a language made anew. Walcott’s
language like ‘muttering shale’, is an innovative language striving to
express the non-traditional experiences of colonialism within the
tradition of English language poetry.
plain wood / the back crouched, / the vine-muscled wrist, / like a man rowing, /
sweat-Xeck on blond cedar. / Disgruntled Dominic.’ (II.12; 74); ‘Dominic, from
whose plane vowels were shorn / odorous as forest, . . .’ (IV.20.iv; 135).
6 I hope the reader will forgive my alteration of Walcott’s metaphor into a simile.
7 OED 2 (s.v. shale, sb:1 and sb:2 ).
Is this innovation without precedent? Consider two poetic ex-
amples, one Greek and one Latin, which can be read as antecedents
to Walcott’s imagery and use of language. The Wrst is from Theocri-
tus, Idyll 1:
± Ø łØŁæØ
Æ ŒÆd ± ı, ÆNº , Æ,
± d ÆE ÆªÆE
Ø, º
ÆØ, ±f b ŒÆd

ıæ
·
[Sweet is the whispered music of yonder pinetree by the springs, goatherd,
and sweet too thy piping, . . . ]
(Gow 1952 vol. 1: 4–5)
For Theocritus, as for Walcott, the trees speak; Walcott takes this
poetic image one step further with his ‘muttering shale’.8 The ono-
matopoetic eVects attest to the disciplined mastery of Walcott’s
technique, even as the imagery recalls classical literature; this is not
a servile imitation, however, but the invocation of a conceit from
classical poetry in order to create it anew with speaking stones. At the
same time, Walcott has his trees tell us a story—the wood being
planed in Cul de Sac Valley recounts Walcott’s engagement with the
English language. Recall Catullus 4, where the story is told is by the
ship:
Phasellus ille, quem uidetis, hospites, ait fuisse nauium celerrimus, . . .
(Fordyce 1961)
[That skiV, whom you see, friends, says it was the swiftest of ships, . . . ]
(author’s translation)
Catullus places the narrative of the poem in the mouth, as it were, of
a boastful sailing vessel. For Walcott, the wood, which is now the raw
material for his craft, recalls, metonymically, the trees that once they
were: bois canot, bois campêche. This parallels the move in Catullus 4,
where the boat recalls the forest it once was (v. 10 V., especially with
the comata silua in v.11).9 Walcott makes a poem, then, about the
making of a poem; Creole vowels may be recalcitrant, but they are
8 There are Homeric echoes in Walcott, too; the sound-image of the ººØ

ŁÆº
Æ recurs in Omeros.
9 Edition Fordyce (1961).
A Divided Child 177
disciplined ‘in accurate iambics’.10 So, too, wood is planed into
houses.
The poet of Cul de Sac Valley is a craftsman, a builder. Even this
conception of poetry has a classical antecedent. Nagy (1979: 300) has
found traces of this Indo-European notional tradition in the etymology
of the name of Homer.11 While the etymology may not be known to
Walcott, we can assume the poetry of Pindar is. Recall Pythian 3.113–14:
K Kø Œ ºÆ H, Œ xfi Æ
fid –æ
Æ, [from famed
words, such as carpenters—wise men (poets) / fashion].12 The con-
text makes it clear that Homer is one of the poet-carpenters Pindar
has in mind.13 For Pindar it is a compliment to refer to Homer as a
builder or craftsman, even if those of us schooled in Plato consider
such a banausic comparison shocking. Likewise for Walcott there is
no shame in foregrounding the crafter of poetry; in Cul de Sac Valley
the narrative voice of the poet expresses a wish to have a craft as blest
as that of the carpenter’s.14
10 I borrow this line from Prelude, a poem appearing in the 1948 collection 25
Poems, which now stands at the head of Collected Poems 1948–1984 (Walcott 1986).
The context of this verse is: ‘And my life, too early of course for the profound
cigarette, / The turned doorhandle, the knife turning / In the bowels of the hours,
must not be made public / Until I have learnt to suVer / In accurate iambics’. See also
the comments of Brown (1991: 17).
11 ‘I conclude, then, that the root *ar- in Hómeros traditionally denotes the
activity of a poet as well as that of a carpenter, and this semantic bivalence corres-
ponds neatly with the Indo-European tradition of comparing music/poetry with
carpentry, by way of the root tek(s)-.’
12 Text from Snell et al. 1980.
13 Consider too the usage of the verb ›æ Ø (Liddell and Scott 1968) ‘I. imitate
Homer, use Homeric phrases. II. act scenes from Homer; III. indulge unnatural lust
(with an intentional equivoque; Ach. Tat. 8.9’. In imitating Homer, weren’t the
ancient Greeks adapting his Creole (poetic dialect, an artiWcial Ionic) wood to Wt
their own structures?
14 The word ‘carpenter’ here may refer only to a craftsman, so invokes solely the
classical poetic antecedents adumbrated above, or there may also be a Christian
resonance, and the carpenter in question is Jesus, proxy for the god who provides
the sunshine. In Empson’s terms, both signiWcations are equally present; as he
writes (Empson 1989: 15–16): ‘the immediate context of the use of the word now
in view may also be felt to ‘‘imply’’ the extra meaning, and indeed will commonly
support the habit of giving the word this Implication by providing another example
of it. . . . People make words do what seems to be needed, and whether one of the
normal uses of a word carries a given Implication is a question of fact, however hard
to decide.’
At this point one might question the validity of my reading, and
especially the intertextual moments adduced above.15 As Walcott
himself writes: ‘Exegesis, exegesis, writers / giving their own sons
homework’ (IV.22.iii; 145). After all, what is to stop me from adducing
manifold intertextual moments? And do I know if Walcott intended to
allude to these passages from Theocritus or Catullus or Pindar? Do
I know if Walcott read these texts in their original languages or in
translations? (Does it matter?) Contemplating Césaire and Perse,
Walcott asked, in his 1970 essay ‘The Muse of History’,16 about the
relations between these two writers (Walcott 1998: 50–1):
I do not know if one poet is indebted to the other, but whatever the
bibliographical truth is, one acknowledges not an exchange of inXuences,
not imitation, but the tidal advance of the metropolitan language, of its
empire, if you like, which carries simultaneously, fed by such strong colonial
tributaries, poets of such diVerent beliefs as Rimbaud, Char, Claudel, Perse,
and Césaire.
In the remainder of this chapter I want to shift my focus away from a
close textual reading of Cul de Sac Valley and toward such metapoetic
questions as these, including their foregrounding in Another Life. In
his 1970 essay, ‘Meanings’, Walcott oVers autobiographical remarks
together with a critical narrative of his involvement in theatre,
especially the Trinidad Theatre Workshop; the two histories merge
because, as he writes: ‘it is almost death to the spirit to try to survive
as an artist under colonial conditions, which haven’t really changed
with our independent governments.’ (Reprinted in Hamner 1993:
45–50). This spectre of death was particularly pronounced for the
young Walcott, whose family life was shadowed by the spectre of his
dead father, invoked at the opening of this essay. At the same time,
Walcot watched friends succumb to these spiritual deaths: in Another
Life he writes about the death of Harry Simmons, the breaking of the
spirit of Gregorias, as well as his own crise d’artiste.17 Walcott escaped
this spiritual death, thanks in part to literature, at least as it is received
15 Hinds (1998: 21–5) discusses the diVerence between ‘allusion’ and ‘intertext-
uality’, as well as the stakes in our choice of name.
16 ‘The Muse of History’ reprinted in What the Twilight Says: Essays (Walcott 1998:
36–64).
17 Another Life (IV.19–21; 127–40) discusses Simmons and Gregorias; Walcott’s
own crise is the subject of IV.18; 119–16.
A Divided Child 179
and inXected by West Indian experience (Walcott in Hamner [1993]
1997: 50):
We love rhetoric, and this has created a style, a panache about life that is
particularly ours. Our most tragic folk songs and our most self-critical
calypsos have a driving, life-asserting force. Combine that in our literature
with a long experience of classical forms and you’re bound to have something
exhilarating. I’ve never consciously gone after this in my plays, nor do we go
after this kind of folk-exuberance deliberately in my theatre company. But in
the best actors in the company you can see this astounding fusion ignite their
style, this combination of classic discipline inherited through the language,
with a strength of physical expression that comes from the folk music.
It’s probably the same in Nigeria with Wole Soyinka’s Company. It’s the
greatest bequest the Empire made. Those who sneer at what they call an awe
of tradition forget how old the West Indian experience is. I think that
precisely because of their limitations our early education must have ranked
with the Wnest in the world. The grounding was rigid—Latin, Greek, and the
essential masterpieces, but there was this elation of discovery. Shakespeare,
Marlowe, Horace, Vergil—these writers weren’t jaded but immediate
experiences. The atmosphere was competitive, creative.
It was cruel, but it created our literature.
The cruelty of an imperial education may be a lamentable fact, yet it
is also a potential for creativity, as Walcott notes. He even embeds
elements of this colonial education in his poetry, making poetry of
the process whereby Walcott himself was educated to be a proper
colonial subject. Consider this example, one among many, from
Another Life (II.11.i; 69):18
Cramming halfheartedly for the Scholarship,
I looked up from my red-jacketed Williamson’s
History of the British Empire, towards
the barracks’ plumed, imperial hillsides
where cannon-bursts of bamboo sprayed the ridge,
riding to Khartoum, Rorke’s Drift,
through dervishes of dust,
behind the chevroned jalousies
I butchered fellaheen, thuggees, Mamelukes, wogs.
18 For details concerning Walcott’s education, see King (2000: 24–6). According to
King, Walcott studied Latin but not Greek: ‘On Barbados he would have learned
Greek’ (p. 26). For a fuller account of the role of Classics in Caribbean education, see
Greenwood 2005, 2007.
Walcott’s education, as in his half-hearted studying depicted here, is
focused on the British Empire; as a colonial subject Walcott sides with
the British not the ‘fellaheen, thuggees, Mamelukes, wogs’, even as he
undercuts his own identiWcation with the British by his use of the verb
‘butchered’. Certainly Walcott (both narrative voice and poet) escaped
these literal deaths of colonial subjects narrated here, as well as the spectre
of spiritual, artistic death—a telling and crucial aspect of the colonial
condition, certainly on the level of social or personal history—but the
cruelty of this education is part of the price.19 Rather than express
outrage at this cruelty in excoriating prose, Walcott oVers restrained
commentary in his poetry; it is to this commentary that we now turn.
Using rhetorical subtlety and some of that same ‘classical discip-
line inherited through the language’ that he praises in company
actors, Walcott presents scenes of imperial instruction in Another
Life. Here at the outposts of empire,20 we see schoolmaster and boys
engaged in the pedagogical project: ‘ ‘‘Boy! Who was Ajax?’’ the voice
of the schoolmaster asks’ (I.3; 16). That question prompts a recount-
ing of Walcott’s personal mythology; the balance of I.3 is structured
as an abecedary where Ajax cedes to Berthilia (compared to Cassan-
dra), next Choiseul (‘surly chauVeur from Clauzel’s garage, / [who]
bangs Troy’s gate shut!’ [1.3; 17]). The cast of characters includes:
‘Gaga / the town’s transvestite, housemaid’s darling,/ . . . most Greek of
all, the love that hath no name’ (I.3; 18–9); ‘Helen? / Janie, the town’s
one clear-complexioned whore’ (I.3; 19); ‘Kyrie! kyrie! twitter / a
choir of surpliced blackbirds in the pews’ (I.3; 19; culminating in
‘Zandoli, / nicknamed The Lizard, / rodent-exterminator’, I.3; 22).
This mythology is not exclusively classical: ‘These dead, these dere-
licts, / that alphabet of the emaciated, / they were the stars of my
mythology’ (I.3; 22), as Walcott summarizes at the end of this chapter.
As the verses just quoted show, classical past and Caribbean past
19 See Bhabha (1994: 213–14) on the psychic anxiety which marks the post-colonial
condition, as well as Fanon (1963: 35–95, especially p. 58). For a Wctional portrayal of
this diYculty, see Dangarembga (1998). Consider too these lines from Another Life
which express the fear of another sort of spiritual death: ‘Baron, ship-chandler,
merchant, water-clerk, / the Wction of their own lives claimed each one’ (I.6.iii; 39).
20 Walcott’s description: ‘Broken, decrepit port / for some rum-eyed romantic, /
his empire’s secret rusting in a sea-chest’ (I.6.ii; 36) seems not inappropriate. This
marks, in fact, one of the beauties of Another Life: a polyphony of competing attitudes
and ideas are amalgamated into a polysemous narrative.
A Divided Child 181
combine.21 Rather than using Greek mythology to elevate Caribbean
characters (the position of Ismond 2001:11), Walcott calls all myths
into question and amalgamates them in his revision of history. In fact,
this combinatory mythology begins even before the schoolmaster’s
voice is heard at the start of this abecedary: ‘The black lamplighter
with Demeter’s torch / ignites the iron trees above the shacks. / Boy!
Who was Ajax?’.22 Sometimes this combination of Classical mythology
and Caribbean reality is consciously playful, as with the name Gregor-
ias; at the end of Another Life (IV.23.14; 151–52), Walcott writes:
But, ah Gregorias / I christened you with that Greek name because / it echoes
the blest thunders of the surf, / because you painted our Wrst, primitive
frescoes, / because it sounds explosive, / a black Greek’s!
It is this amalgam of mythologies that animates Walcott’s poetic
practice. These citations are a perfect illustration of Walcott’s view
of myths in Caribbean culture, expressed in a 1977 interview:23
What appears to be the most old-fashioned aspect of Third World writing,
or to West Indian writing in particular, is really its most powerful aspect: the
tribe is being told a story that comes from the memory of that tribe.
Here, the memory of the tribe includes the Caribbean reality as well as
the imperial education which they received. Elsewhere, he writes about
his inculcation into the realm of English literature (Walcott 1998: 62):24
I knew, from childhood, that I wanted to become a poet, and like any
colonial child I was taught English literature as my natural inheritance.
Forget the snow and the daVodils. They were real, more real than the heat
and the oleander, perhaps, because they lived on the page, in imagination,
and therefore in memory. There is a memory of imagination in literature
which has nothing to do with actual experience, which is, in fact, another
life, and that experience of the imagination will continue to make actual the
21 Baugh and Nepaulsingh (2004: 236–44) adumbrate these references, classical

and Caribbean, noting (p. 236): ‘The playful challenge to the reader in this chapter is
to decipher how each association was made between St. Lucian and Greek lore. As St.
Lucians reminded the editors in 2003, the names and nicknames for St. Lucians in
this chapter are real, not Wctional.’ Rather than deciphering the conjoined associ-
ations, I am interested in how the collocation of classical past and Caribbean present
interrogate both mythological systems even as Walcott uses these other, fused,
mythological constellations to mirror post-colonial reality in a new poetics.
22 This quotation concludes I.3.i; 16 (only the last verse of which I cited previously).
23 The interview was with Sharon Ciccarelli; the quotation is at Baer (ed. 1996: 44).
24 See also the discussion at Hardwick (2002: 240).
quest of a medieval knight or the bulk of a white whale, because of the power
of a shared imagination.
The schoolmaster’s stern tones give rise to a creative revision of the
academic subject. Walcott returns to this point, this pedantic interjec-
tion, in I.5 (which bears as epigraph the Vergilian tag):25
‘Boy! Name the great harbours of the world!’
‘Sydney! Sir.’
‘San Fransceesco!’
‘Naples, Sah!’
‘And what about Castries?’
‘Sah, Castries ees a coaling station and
der twenty-seventh best harba in der world!’
‘In eet the entire Breetesh Navy can be heeden!’
‘What is the motto of Saint Lucia, boy?’
‘Statio haud maleWda carinis.’
‘Sir!’
‘Sir!’
‘And what does that mean?’
‘Sir, a safe anchorage for sheeps!’
(I.5; 29–30)
This is an education in geography designed to reify the hierarchy
of cultural values which places Castries, Saint Lucia twenty-seventh;
the value of this harbor is that it can hide the entire British Navy. At
the same time that this scene presents one instance of the cruelty
Walcott mentions in ‘Meanings’, the seriousness is undercut by the
transcription of dialect and the ‘sheeps’ taking anchorage.26 The
cruelty revealed, the sophisticated wit brings us back from the preci-
pice of anger: ‘High on the Morne, / Xowers medalled the gravestones
of the Inniskillings, / too late’ (I.5; 30). The narrative poem, like the
waves of the ever-present ocean, continues come what tempests may.
25 The Latin tag reverses Aeneas’ description of Tenedos once Troy has fallen
(Virgil, Aeneid II.21–3): ‘Est in conspectu Tenedos, notissima fama / insula, diues
opum Priami dum regna manebant, / nunc tantum sinus et statio male Wda cari-
nis: . . .’ (Mynors 1969). [‘There is before the eyes Tenedos, an island most known to
fame, rich in goods while the states of Priam stood, now just a bay and a harbor
scarcely safe for ships: . . . ‘] (author’s translation).
26 Baugh notes a similar ‘sophisticated play of wit, mimicking a French pronun-
ciation of ‘‘this’’ ‘ in ‘The French are very good at these / sort of thing’ (‘Vers de
Société ’ from The Arkansas Testament); Baugh (1991:125).
A Divided Child 183
One makes the best of the situation, much as Vergil’s assessment of
Tenedos is turned on its head.
Walcott’s poetics is an instantiation of post-colonial philology, as
signalled in the title of this essay. Philology as we know it, or New
Philology as it is also known, traces its beginnings back to the work
undertaken while in India by Sir William Jones from 1785 to 1792
(see AarsleV 1967: 121–39; Dowling 1994: 70–7).27 This is the model
and the historical origin for philology as practiced by scholars in the
last two centuries. Some elements of Jones’s understanding of philology
go back to at least the time of Erasmus;28 the diVerent objective is what
marks the newness of this philology. The new philology seeks not the
originary Divine Word, but that Ursprache, proto-Indo-European,
27 Dowling discusses the connections between Balliol College, Oxford (thanks to
Jowett’s revision of the Greats curriculum) and the running of the British Empire. As
Jones ([1771] 1969) writes in the preface to his Grammar of the Persian Language
(pp. xii–xiii):
‘A variety of causes, which need not be mentioned here, gave the English nation a most
extensive power in that kingdom: our India company began to take under their protection
the princes of that country, by whose protection they gained their Wrst settlement; a
number of important aVairs were to be transacted in peace and war between nations
equally jealous of one another, who had not the common instrument of conveying their
sentiments; the servants of the company received letters which they could not read, and
were ambitious of gaining titles of which they could not comprehend the meaning; it was
found highly dangerous to employ the natives as interpreters, upon whose Wdelity they
could not depend; and it was at last discovered that they must apply themselves to the
study of the Persian language, in which all the letters from the Indian princes were
written. . . . The languages of Asia will now, perhaps, be studied with uncommon ardour;
they are known to be useful, and will soon be found instructive and entertaining; the
valuable manuscripts that enrich our public libraries will be in a few years elegantly
printed; the manners and sentiments of the eastern nations will be perfectly known; and
the limits of our knowledge will be no less extended than the bounds of our empire.’
I have quoted this passage at length since it narrates a history of Western motives for
knowledge of the East, scripts the knowledge of Persian into this regime of knowledge,
and explicitly demonstrates that Persian is here viewed only as a tool whose pedagogical
value (entertaining though it might be) lies precisely in its ability to support the bounds
of the British empire. Cronin (2000: 39) quotes from this document to underscore the
‘eVectiveness of the translator as imperial subject (informer/informant)’.
28 AarsleV (1967: 124) writes: ‘The origin of Jones’s method [which he called
‘philology’] is no doubt to be found in part in the careful and precise Greek and
Latin scholarship, which he had learned from Robert Sumner at Harrow; but it has its
foundation also in Jones’s own systematic and critical bent of mind.’ Jones himself
(vii) connects his philological enterprise to ‘the models of taste and elegance’ of the
learned men of Ptolemaic Egypt; thus the history of philology—both Jones’s new and
the ‘old’ of Alexandrian scholars during the Hellenistic period—is enmeshed with the
history of imperialisms. This connection, I argue, is not lost on Walcott.
foundation of the Indo-European family of languages. In the quest
for this linguistic original, the modern discipline of historical
linguistics came into being. The scholarly enterprise of philology
thus is founded upon the institution of the British Empire; it is this
geopolitical order which took Sir William Jones to India and brought
him into contact with Sanskrit, thereby granting him the opportunity
to see the connections between classical Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and
other Indo-European languages. Thus, we can consider the academic
discipline of philology as a colonial enterprise; the two are deeply
imbricated and may well be inseparable.29 Since philology is linked to
the rule of empire, what then is post-colonial philology? This,
I submit, is the process of linguistic creation, that we have already
observed in Walcott’s poetry. Language is created anew; this is not
the search for linguistic origins or historical connections between
languages. Rather, this is the process of creating new language and
new connections between languages. Consider this further example,
discussing the characters of Captain Foquarde and his wife in
Another Life (I.5.ii; 31):
. . . I’d hear the Captain’s Wife, / sobbing, denying. / Next day her golden face
seemed shrunken, / then, when he ulysseed, she bloomed again, / the bat-
swift transients returned, / so many, perhaps they quartered in the eaves.
To ulyssee is not a canonical verb listed in the dictionary, yet we know
what it means here. Walcott’s Caribbean present is observed through
the scrim of classical literature—and indeed classicizing French lit-
erature; we have here not odysseed but ulysseed. The French resonance
is reinforced a few pages later: ‘Heureux lui qui comme Ulysse, / ou
Capitaine Foquarde’ (I.6.iv; 39). Classical and French literatures
(among many traditions) provide Walcott with antecedents and
inspiration, both poetic and linguistic.
In tandem with his attention to the formal discipline of poetry,
Walcott exhibits a certain freedom of invention in his choice of
language. In creating new words or meanings for words, Walcott
29 See Cronin (2000: 33–4) for an analysis of knowledge as power in the imperial
context; Cronin goes on to discuss (p. 39) William Jones as a translator working
within an imperial context. See also Trivedi in this volume. Note that this imbrication
is not exclusively an attitude of the past.
A Divided Child 185
draws on the traditions of world literature in a rich admixture.30 This
is, as the trees in Cul de Sac Valley pronounce, a sign of Creolity. Even
as Walcott works to craft poems in English, he enriches the English
language he receives. The trees may express the self-abnegation,
which is part of the process of colonization, but Walcott resists this
process and enlarges the realm of Caribbean aesthetics, the concept
of the Universal (which is typically marked white, European, male,
and imperial), and the nobility of English language poetry. 31 Walcott
enacts the Creolity, which Bernabé, Chamoiseau and ConWant (1993:
26) demand be praised:
La Créolité est l’agrégat interactionnel ou transactionnel, des éléments culturels
caraı̈bes, européens, africains, asiatiques, et levantins, que le joug de l’Histoire a
réunis sur le même sol. . . . Notre créolité est donc née de ce formidable ‘migan’
que l’on a eu trop vite fait de réduire à son seul aspect linguistique ou à un
seul des termes de sa composition. Notre personnalité culturelle porte tout à la
fois les stigmates de cet univers et les témoignages de sa négation. Nous nous
sommes forgés dans l’acceptation et le refus, donc dans le questionnement
permanent, en toute familiarité avec les ambiguı̈tés les plus complexes, hors
de toutes réductions, de toute pureté, de tout appauvrissement.
[Creolity is the aggregation of interactions or transactions, of Caribbean,
European, African, Asian, and Levantine cultural elements which the yoke of
History has brought together in the same land. . . . Our Creolity is thus born
of this wonderful ‘migan’, which is far too quickly reduced to only its
linguistic aspect or one of its constituent elements. Our cultural personality
bears at the same time the stigmata of this universe and the witness of its
negation. We ourselves are forged in the acceptance and the refusal, the state
30 We Wnd a similar remark about the range of reference of Creolity in Bernabé

et al. (1993: 48): ‘le domaine [de la créolité] c’est le language. Son appétit: toutes les
langues du monde.’
31 Thus, Walcott’s practice is similar to the observation of Bernabé, Chamoiseau,
and ConWant. While these three authors rail against value-laden hierarchies and the
dynamics of cultural delimitation, Walcott addresses the problem in his poetry,
oVering an implicit resolution or reversal of this paradigm at the same time as he
broaches the subject. This does not mean he is free of polemic; see ‘Muse’ (pp. 38–9)
and the discussion at Hardwick (2002: 237–8); the distinguishing feature is that
Walcott does not limit himself to polemic or to anger. He distances himself from
‘all the syntactical apologists of the Third World / explaining why their artists die, / by
their own hands, magicians of the New Vision. / Screaming the same shit’ (IV.19;
127). Instead he takes as his goal a new art and the culture to support it; as he puts it:
‘Who want a new art, / and their artists dying in the old way’ (IV.19; 128). So he is not
bound by this history, even as he acknowledges it.
of permanent questioning, completely familiar with the most complex
ambiguities, removed from all reductions, all purity, all impoverishment.]
The process of forging a cultural personality in the face of complex
ambiguities, polyglot polysemy, and the twin poles of acceptance and
negation is the principle theme of Walcott’s Another Life. The same
process is thematized in Cul de Sac Valley: a Creole heritage, fre-
quently denied and infrequently accepted, gives rise to an enriched
language of English poetry and an expression of the ‘moi profond’
which ‘la rivière de notre créolité alluviale’ [the river of our Xuvial
Creolity] creates and reiWes. As Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and ConWant
(1993: 43) argue:
Notre première richesse, à nous écrivains créoles, est de posséder plusieurs
langues: le créole, français, anglais, portugais, espagnol, etc. Il s’agit main-
tenant d’accepter ce bilinguisme potentiel et de sortir des usages contraints
que nous en avons. De ce terreau, faire lever sa parole. De ces langues bâtir
notre language.
[Our primary wealth as creole writers is the possession of several languages:
Creole, French, English, Portuguese, Spanish, etc.. Now we must accept this
potential bilingualism and move beyond the constrained styles we have.
From this land, raise our speech. From these languages, build our language.]
As Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and ConWant (1993: 48) argue, this Creolity
is a polyglot richness with liberatory potential:
. . . c’est surtout rompre l’ordre coutumier de ces langues, renverser leurs
signiWcations établies. C’est cette rupture qui permettra d’ampliWer l’audi-
ence d’une connaissance littéraire de nous-mêmes.
[ . . . it means especially to rupture the customary order of languages, to
reverse their established signiWcations. This rupture allows us to expand the
audience’s literary awareness of ourselves.]
Breaking the customary order of languages, reversing the accepted
signiWcations, marks a Creole writer’s liberation from the hegemony
of one language or culture, from the tyranny of a masterful imperial
culture. Is it any wonder, then, that traces of Walcott’s voracious
appetite for the literatures of the world erupt in his poetry? The
A Divided Child 187
wealth of inXuences, only a few of which I have discussed in this
chapter, are an integral aspect of Walcott’s poetics even as they
become, in turn, subject of metapoetic pronouncements in the self-
same poems.
Accepting the relations between Walcott’s texts and their wealth of
antecedents, how are we to theorize their inXuence? One prominent
theory is Harold Bloom’s ‘Anxiety of InXuence’. For Bloom, the history
of literature, speciWcally poetry, can be described as the Freudian
Oedipal complex writ on a larger scale. As he writes in the preface to
the second edition of A Map of Misreading (Bloom 2003: 12):
‘Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the
living organism than reception of stimuli’ is a Wne reminder in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, a book whose true subject is inXuence.
Imitation of a poet’s predecessor-fathers gives way to rejection and
strong misreadings. For Bloom, Walcott does not count as a ‘strong
poet’, or one successful in protecting himself against the stimuli of
predecessor-poets; further, to explain Walcott’s poetics in such a
fashion misses the point of his post-colonial hybridization (see also
the discussion in Terada 1992: 43–81). It is true that Walcott writes out
of the tension so succinctly expressed in his 1962 lyric poem A Far Cry
from Africa: ‘. . . how choose / Between this Africa and the English
tongue I love?’ (Walcott 1986: 18). The answer is to mediate between
the two. Alan Shapiro comes closer to pinpointing this phenomenon
than does Bloom; he describes Walcott (Shapiro 1986: 38):32
As a West Indian . . . writing in English, with Africa and England in his
blood . . . Walcott is inescapably the victim and the beneWciary of the colonial
society in which he was reared. He is a kind of a Caribbean Orestes . . . unable
to satisfy his allegiance to one side of his nature without at the same time
betraying the other.
Like Orestes, Walcott is caught in the intersection of two equally valid
yet contradictory cultural imperatives. Like Orestes, Apollo comes to
the rescue; here it is not the God of Prophecy who assists this Carib-
bean Orestes, but the God of Poetry. Not only has Walcott embodied
the discipline of his classical education, he has also incorporated the
32 Hardwick (1996: 13) refers to Walcott himself likening ‘the experience of a poet
rejected by his own society to the suVering of Philoctetes’.
accuracy of English iambics, the history of world literatures in fact, to
create a new, synthetic and organic, Creole poetics.
This use of Creolity or hybridization as a core element of his
poetics places Walcott Wrmly within Caribbean discourses and prac-
tices. The meanings of ‘hybridity’ within post-colonial contexts are
much discussed; the importance of this concept cannot be over-
stated. As Wolf writes (Wolf 2000: 142):
Hybrid identities and the multiplicity of cultural borders are permanent
features of contemporary societies. They call for a state of knowledge and a
state of consciousness that can withstand the pressure of constantly being
called into question.
Within speciWcally post-colonial contexts, hybridity is a means to resist
the colonial powers and frequently involves issues of doubling (if not
of double consciousness). Wolf (ibid. pp. 131–35) reviews some of the
vast scholarship on hybridity. In her reading of Bakhtin, Wolf writes:33
. . . hybridity describes the process of the authorial unmasking of another’s
speech through a language that is ‘double-accented’ and ‘double-styled’; this
idea is picked up and elaborated by Homi Bhabha, who holds that ‘the
colonial encounter is . . . embedded a priori in power relations, and requires
constant awareness of the limits and possibilities of representation. . . .
Cultural diVerence is no longer seen as the source of conXict, but as the
eVect of discriminatory practices; the production of cultural diVerentiation
becomes a sign of authority.’
Since the production of knowledge is tied to the imperial project, the
act of hybridization refuses the imperial project of precise delineation
as it creates an amalgamation of cultures, languages, world views.34
As he writes in Another Life (II.11; 72):
I am all, I am one / who feels as he falls with the thousand [runners who will
break on loud sand / at Thermopylae] now his tendons harden / and the
wind-god, Hourucan, combing his hair . . .
33 Wolf (2000: 134), redacting Bhabha. See also Hardwick (2002: 240), on one of
the ‘deWning feature[s] of post-colonial literatures [being] awareness of and resist-
ance to continuing colonialist attitudes’.
34 Terada (1992: 13–8) discusses how Walcott ‘viviWes conventional cartographical
abstractions’. Cronin (2000: 33–52) especially pp. 33–8) discusses the Ordnance
Survey Project in Ireland and the construction of imperial archives; this is another
example of the imperial production of knowledge.
A Divided Child 189
The wealth of multiple cultures and languages are material for
Walcott’s work.35
Walcott oVers clues to his own poetic praxis when he discusses the
New World poets and their Adamic Covenant of naming in ‘The
Muse of History’. As an epigraph to part two of Another Life (II; 47),
Walcott excerpts Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps, describing ‘Adam’s
task of giving things their names’. Walcott describes this covenant
thus (Walcott 1998: 37–8):
The great poets of the New World, from Whitman to Neruda, reject this sense
of history. Their vision of man in the New World is Adamic. In their exuber-
ance he is still capable of enormous wonder. Yet he has paid his accounts to
Greece and Rome and walks in a world without monuments and ruins . . . Fact
evaporates into myth. This is not the jaded cynicism which sees nothing new
under the sun, it is an elation which sees everything as renewed.
Rather than a return to a lost, wholly innocent and positive paradise,
this renaming is an exuberant and creative act in the face of the
multiple valences and complexities of the New World; renaming
expresses the historical horrors deWning the New World and moves
beyond ‘the phonetic pain, the groan of suVering, the curse of
revenge.’ (Walcott, ibid. pp. 39–9).36 Despite Walcott’s claim at the
end of Another Life: ‘We were blest with a virginal, unpainted world /
with Adam’s task of giving things their names, . . .’ (IV.23; 152), the
world is not virginal; the cruel history recounted before we come to
this passage aVects our reading of these penultimate lines.37 Aware of,
35 Butler (1993: 31–32) discusses material and its connection to women, starting
from Plato, but does not address speciWcally the use of material in post-colonial
contexts. While Walcott’s poetry is gendered, post-colonial philology need not be
gendered inherently as male.
36 These horrors of history are part of what nature tells; see Another Life (III.22;
143). As Morrison (1999: 257) writes, in speciWc reference to Omeros and Walcott’s
use of Golden Age imagery: ‘Although he rejects the idea of St. Lucia as a paradise, he
has found heroes in the people of his homeland—not heroes who display valour on
the Weld of battle—but men and women who bravely face the challenges of the sea
and the tragedies of life. The world of Omeros contains suVering, but there is also the
possibility of cathartic resolution and a transcendent heroism.’
37 The Old World is not innocent of history, either; the history of twentieth century
Europe makes that point abundantly clear. In the Old World, however—at least as
I understand Walcott’s logic—there is the possibility to believe in actions having been
undertaken for some ‘greater good’ (such as the Empire), or of being inherently and
innately—dare one say ‘naturally’?—included in the category of the Universal. But the
and responding to, the literary antecedents and indeed the newly-
liberated Classics, Walcott—himself a New World poet in the vein of
Neruda and Whitman—partakes in the elation of new perceptions
and connections. This world is virginal in that it provides the raw
material from which Walcott crafts his poetics (cruelty and all). From
this impetus he Wghts against those forces which would see him still,
see him dead.38 The epigraph by André Malraux (from his Psychology
of Art) to section one (‘The Divided Child’) of Another Life, conjures
precisely those forces. Narrating an encounter between the painters
Cimabue and Giotto, Malraux observes (p. 1):
What makes the artist is the circumstance that in his youth he was more
deeply moved by the sight of works of art than by that of the things which
they portray.
Yet, as Breslin notes, Walcott observing works of art (visual, but also
literary) and comparing them to the reality he inhabits, encounters
‘disparities of race and culture [which] exacerbate the inherent split
between body and representation’ (Breslin 2001: 164, but see 163–71
more generally). The basis for Walcott’s Wght against such forces is
his exuberant love aVair with language: ‘It is the language which is
the empire, and great poets are not its vassals but its princes.’
(Walcott 1998: 51). A prince himself of the empire of language,
which he traces in the poetry of others, Walcott rules over his English
with a benevolent, a generous, hand. English as the language of his
poetry was not an intuitive or easy choice for Walcott; it is this, his
own non-innocent engagement, and indeed active questioning, of
the heritage of his second (not Wrst) language, which motivates
Walcott’s post-colonial philology. He does not seek a return to a
reiWed unity in his lifelong engagement with literature, but a means
to navigate the divisions inserted into his post-colonial reality by the
imperial educational system (and its language, English) which
very fact of being a post-colonial subject forecloses this possibility. See Ismond, (2001:
9–10) for a succinct overview of the freighted question of history in a Caribbean context.
38 Another Life (IV.18.iii; 122–3): ‘how many would prefer to this poem / to see you
drunken in a gutter, / and to catch in the corner of their workrooms / the uncertiWed
odour of your death?’ I take these lines to be addressed by the narrative voice to the
poet-narrator, with perhaps also a secondary, embedded, address to the narrator’s
‘master’.
A Divided Child 191
marked, deWned, created, and reiWed him—as subject and as poet.
Walcott does not succumb to the cleavages inherent in the ‘nervous
condition’ of colonialism,39 rather, his poetics bridge the chasm of
fragmentation—here rendered as less of a gaping maw than a pool of
polysemous inspiration.
39 I borrow the title from Dangarembga (1988) and allude to the work of Fanon
(1963) and Bhabha (1994); this division or separation of lived, colonial reality from
the reiWed and aYrmed imperial reality (in this instance the diVerence between the
British reality valorized by literature and studied at school versus the Caribbean
reality of life on St. Lucia) creates psychic anxiety within the colonial subject. Walcott
implies the state of the colonial subject—in this instance, of his younger self—is one
we might label ‘schizophrenic’: the psychological subject is cut oV (separated, div-
ided—as in Walcott’s Divided Child ) from him or herself, and lived reality is devalued
in the face of the imperially-centered and -sanctioned reality.
11
Arriving Backwards: the Return of The
Odyssey in the English-Speaking Caribbean
Emily Greenwood
On long voyages I take Greeks as my best companions.

(Froude 1888: 321)
I N T RO DU C T IO N
My aim in this chapter is to explore readings and counter-readings of

Homer’s The Odyssey in the modern Caribbean, in terms of what the
Guyanese writer Wilson Harris has referred to as the ‘epic stratagems
available to Caribbean man in the dilemmas of history which sur-
round him’ (Harris 1999: 156). Starting with J. A. Froude’s meta-
phorical appropriation of Ulysses/Odysseus in The English in the
West Indies (Froude [1887] 1888), I examine how writers have turned
this colonial reading of The Odyssey around in the modern Carib-
bean. I attempt to identify key tropes that deWne readings of the epic
in a Caribbean context and to relate these readings to a speciWc ‘New
World’ model of classical reception.
F RO U D E ’ S U LYS S E S
In a travel account that has provoked a counter-tradition of classical

receptions in the English-speaking Caribbean, the Victorian scholar
Froude chose the metaphor of ‘the bow of Ulysses’ to deWne the state
Arriving Backwards 193
of Britain’s relationship with her Caribbean colonies in the late
1880s.1 In fact, the metaphor does duty for a series of relationships.
In the Wrst instance, ‘Ulysses’ is England, out at sea due to the liberal
government of Gladstone that had already begun to entertain the
prospect of ‘home rule’, for some of England’s colonies. To Froude’s
way of thinking, England as Ulysses had absented itself from its duty,
leaving its colonies—like Ithaca and Penelope—to be ravaged by
suitors (Froude [1887] 1888: 14; see also 315):
The bow of Ulysses is unstrung. The worms have not eaten into the horn or
the moths injured the string, but the owner of the house is away and the
suitors of Penelope Britannia consume her substance, rivals one of another,
each caring only for himself, but with a common heart in evil. They cannot
string the bow. Only the true lord and master can string it, and in due time
he comes, and the cord is stretched once more upon the notch, singing to the
touch of the Wnger with the sharp note of the swallow; and the arrows Xy to
their mark in the breasts of the pretenders, while Pallas Athene looks on
approving from her coign of vantage.
Although Froude’s chief targets were Gladstone and his supporters,
his choice of metaphor also hints at the ideal manhood of the English
statesman as a man of action who is Wt to govern and to string
Ulysses’ bow, unlike the colonial subjects in the Caribbean whom
Froude regarded as unWt for self-government. Lastly, there is also a
sense in which Froude, whose account of the West Indies is the
outcome of a ‘voyage of discovery’ in the region, is himself a Ulysses
Wgure, appalled at the state that his house is in and determined to
restore England’s Empire to its rightful order. In the Caribbean,
criticism of this work, the idea of Froude trying ‘to pass himself oV
as the Ulysses of the Empire’, Wrst occurs in Nicholas Darnell Davis’s
work, ‘Mr. Froude’s Negrophobia, or Don Quixote as a Cook’s
Tourist’, published in British Guiana in 1888.2 J. J. Thomas, the
Caribbean school master and scholar, who published a rebuttal of
Froude’s work in 1889, also points out the motif of Froude as
Ulysses.3 Froude’s self-fashioning as Ulysses is reminiscent of what
1 Froude undertook the voyage on which this account is based in 1887, setting sail
from England in December 1886.
2 I have not seen Davis’s work and have relied on the references in Smith (2002:
esp. 155).
3 Thomas ([1889] 1969: 63); see Greenwood (2005: 79) for comment.
Pratt refers to as the ‘heroics of discovery’ in Victorian travel narra-
tives (Pratt 1992: 201–4). This latter aspect of Froude’s Ulysses/
Odysseus can be traced back to the post-Homeric tradition of Ulysses
as a ‘frontier-man’ who voyages to the ends of the earth to establish
the limits of knowledge and to reclaim his identity (Hartog 2001:
especially 3–39); in Froude’s case, the voyage is a quest to reclaim
English masculinity and imperial authority.
Aside from the conspicuous metaphor of the bow of Odysseus in
the title, Froude’s engagement with the Odyssey is minimal. I cite just
one Odyssean motif, to illustrate the loose and incidental nature of
such allusions in Froude’s work. In chapter 8, Froude recounts that,
before leaving Trinidad, he had an audience with Charles Warner—
an elderly member of a longstanding British West Indian family in
Trinidad—who forecasts the dismal future of colonial government in
the Caribbean, endorsing Froude’s thesis. SigniWcantly, Froude de-
scribes Warner as a Tiresias Wgure, as though this audience were
Froude’s katabasis (Froude 1888: 84–5):
His eyes still gleamed with the light of an untouched intelligence. All else of
him seemed dead [ . . . ]. He spoke like some ancient seer, whose eyes looked
beyond the present time and the present world, and saw politics and
progress and the wild whirlwind of change as the play of atoms dancing to
and fro in the sunbeams of eternity [ . . . ]. A month later I head that Charles
Warner was dead. To have seen and spoken with such a man was worth a
voyage round the globe.
More signiWcant than Froude’s pretensions to being a latter-day
Odysseus, is the fact that he travels with The Odyssey in his head
and sees Caribbean territory through the visor of Greek literature. At
one point we Wnd Froude dispensing advice on colonial government,
based on a prescription that a committee of Parian advisors allegedly
made for good government in Miletus—a prescription recounted by
Herodotus’ Histories 5.28–9 (Froude 1888: 79). Commenting on his
reading of Plato’s Republic during the return voyage, Froude writes
‘on long voyages I take Greeks as my best companions’ (ibid. p. 321).4
Froude’s statement about his choice of reading calls to mind Gikandi’s
phrase the ‘pre-texts of empire’—texts on which the mythology of
4 Froude also quotes Euripides and Aeschylus on the same page.

empire was based (Gikandi 1996: 102); Froude’s reading of ‘the classics’
preWgures his experience of the people and landscape of the Caribbean.
Froude’s prepossessing projection of The Odyssey onto the Carib-
bean had the unwitting eVect of making the reinterpretation, or
counter-interpretation, of this myth a vital part of the creative imagin-
ation of Anglophone Caribbean literature and art in the twentieth
century. The reception of The Odyssey in Anglophone literature in the
modern Caribbean is an example of a text that was expropriated by
colonial writers to underwrite empire, and has subsequently been
revisited and rewritten to undermine empire and to rewrite (percep-
tions of) the region’s history. As such, it runs parallel to other texts
that have shaped both colonial and anti-colonial images of the
Caribbean—most obviously Shakespeare’s Tempest.5
In the colonial period, writers such as Froude were inXuenced by,
and contributed to, what Pratt has referred to as ‘the overdetermined
history of imperial meaning-making’ (Pratt 1992: 4). Overdetermin-
ation is also a feature of the inventive mythologies of the post-imperial
Caribbean, with artists and writers able to pluck from the history and
myths of diverse traditions (European, African, Indian, Amerindian).
In fact, for all that Wgures such as Odysseus appear in the modern
literature of the Caribbean, their appearance has been altered sign-
iWcantly by the circuitous routes that they have travelled through a
literary map. Indeed, The Odyssey itself has been Wltered through many
diVerent contexts, most notably via Virgil, Dante, and modernist
authors such as T. S. Eilot and James Joyce. In addition, the Wgure of
Odysseus has also been subject to interference from other traditions,
ranging from the Christ of the gospels to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
N O S TO S : A R R I V I N G B AC K WA R D S
Colonial discourse—speciWcally the sub-branch of travel writing—is

riven with what anthropologists have termed ‘temporal inequality’:
to travel into the unknown world is to travel backwards in time and
5 See Lamming’s analysis of the signiWcance of The Tempest for the modern Carib-
bean ([1960] 1992: esp. 95–117); for comment see Nixon (1987), and Hulme (2000).
to regress in terms of civilization.6 Consequently, encounters with the
New World, which is ‘new’ because unfamiliar to the Old-World
traveller, often had recourse to the very old world, using co-ordinates
from classical or biblical texts to map out the new territory in the
imagination (Hulme 1992: 3). Froude’s description of the leisured
life on the average Antillean homestead, where the soil brings forth
fruit in abundance, untoiled, blends the prelapsarian world of gen-
esis, golden-age mythology, and the description of the Cyclopes’
island in The Odyssey 9.106–11:
In the Antilles generally, Barbadoes being the only exception, Negro families
have each their cabin, their garden ground, their grazing for a cow. They live
surrounded by most of the fruits that grew in Adam’s paradise—oranges and
plantains, bread-fruit, and cocoa-nuts, though not apples. Their yams and
cassava grow without eVort, for the soil is easily worked and inexhaustibly
fertile. The curse is taken oV from nature and, like Adam again, they are
under the covenant of ignorance
(Froude 1888: 42–3).7
In response, Caribbean engagements with Greek and Roman classics
are characterized by knowing tricks with time that play on the gulf
between their newness and the antiquity of Greece and Rome. The
most common way in which this gulf has been bridged is by denying
the temporal, historical distance, and asserting simultaneity in its
place. The classic articulation of this position is Walcott’s essay ‘The
Muse of History’ Wrst published in 1974 (Walcott 1998: 36–64),
which substitutes ‘history as myth’ in place of ‘history as time’
(ibid. p. 37). As critics have observed, the transcendence or rejection
of history is itself a historical move, insofar as it originates in speciWc,
historically located intellectual movements.8 In this case, myth is
used as a stratagem to counter the historical inequality between
Old World and New World, where the very nomenclature signals a
denial of history in the case of the latter.
Against this backdrop, Harris oVers an engagement with the
classical past that poses an original and dynamic model of classical
6 Fabian (1983: 31); McClintock (1994: 254); Youngs (1997: 4).
7 The relevant passage in The Odyssey is Book 9 ll. 106–11.
8 On the rejection of history as itself an historical phenomenon, see Cooper (2005:
402) and passim. For the inXuence of Modernism on the rejection of history in
Caribbean Wction, see Gikandi (1992: 8–9).
reception. In place of passive receiving or returns to the past, Harris
promotes a radical artistic imagination in which the past is unWn-
ished, and still to be completed in the future. In an essay entitled
‘Quetzalcoatl and the Smoking Mirror: ReXections on Originality
and Tradition’, Harris counters the perception of epic ‘. . . as some-
thing that belongs to the past and is now a museum-text to be
imitated in the theatre or in performances of virtuosity’ with the
idea of ‘arrival in an architecture of space that is original to our age.’
(Harris 1999:187)9
The obscure notion of ‘arrival in an architecture of space’ is glossed
in another essay, ‘History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and
Guianas’ (ibid. pp. 152–66), where Harris writes that ‘the journey
across the Atlantic for the forbears of West Indian man involved a
new kind of space’ and connects this space with the architecture of
limbo, which he visualizes as a multi-dimensional gateway where
cross-cultural traditions meet. He elaborates (Harris 1999: 187):
To arrive in a tradition that appears to have died is complex renewal and
revisionary momentum sprung from originality and the activation of prim-
ordial resources within a living language. We arrive backwards even as we
voyage forwards. This is the phenomenon of simultaneity in the imagination
of times past and future . . .
This counter-intuitive idea of ‘arriving in a tradition’ or ‘arriving
backwards’ entails a subtle reordering of the ethnographic move-
ment, where journeys to diVerent lands are regressive journeys back
in time. Instead, past traditions—including but not limited to clas-
sical mythology—are seen as unWnished and carry over into the
future. Harris indicates that this does not mean that the future is
the same as the past, but rather that the two are continuous (Harris
1999: 257–8). This idea is explained in the essay ‘The UnWnished
Genesis of the Imagination’, where Harris, discussing Sophocles’
Antigone, proposes that an ‘invisible text’ runs parallel to the ‘visible
text’ of the play and ‘secretes a corridor into the future’ (Harris 1999:
249), when elements of the play will be treated with diVerent insights.
9 This theory (rejecting the formal appropriation of the past as a passive object, in
favour of a ‘numinous arrival’ in tradition) is repeated in similar terms in the essay
‘Creoleness: The Crossroads of a Civilization’; Harris (1999: 243).
Harris’s idiosyncratic method of reordering literature and cultural
traditions spatially, rather than temporally, means that there is no
tension between tradition and originality, since the two exist in the
same space. It is not a case of ‘returning’ to The Odyssey, which would
be an impossibility, but of arriving in a new space, via an original
route, where one recognizes or encounters elements of The Odyssey
and other myths. In its New World context, this ancient Greek text
serves as a ‘contact zone’, where diVerent cultures of interpretation
can meet. Pratt coined this phrase, in the context of colonial dis-
course theory, to denote ‘the spatial and temporal copresence of
subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunct-
ures’ (Pratt 1992: 6–7). Frequently the term applies to textual spaces
and can be extended to cover readings and counter-readings on
either side of colonialism, from Froude reading The Odyssey in
1887, to Harris, Walcott, and others reading The Odyssey—and
Froude’ s odyssey—in the twentieth-century Caribbean.
RE TUR N IN G THE ODYSSEY ( WA LCOT T )
Already in Homeric epic, Odysseus is an accommodating Wgure with a

wide range of signiWcation. We see this in the very Wrst line of The
Odyssey, where the adjective polutropos is ambiguous and can signify
both his versatility (‘of many turns’, ‘ingenious’) and his wandering
(‘much roaming/travelling’). Heubeck et al. (1988: ad loc.) emphasize
the sense of versatility in polutropos, arguing that Odysseus’ travels
were a result of accident and that, in the opening line of the poem, it
would be appropriate to refer to a trait that is characteristic of the hero,
rather than a trait that is an accident of circumstance. This explanation
seems unduly schematic and the decision to rule out the suggestion of
wandering in polutropos is questionable, given that wandering—
whether voluntary or not—deWnes Odysseus’ situation in the Wrst
half of the poem. Stanford rightly preserves the ambiguity in this
adjective with his neat translation ‘the man of many moves’ (Stanford
1974: ad loc.).
This ambiguity is exploited by Walcott in his reWguring of both the
character of Odysseus and The Odyssey, which return a very diVerent
Odysseus. In Walcott, Odysseus’ ‘many moves’ evoke the forced mi-
grations and uprooting that led to the modern settlement of the
Caribbean, and the legacies of exile and alienation that resulted.
However, the ‘many moves’ are also reminiscent of the resourcefulness
celebrated in Caribbean folklore, derived from Wgures such as Anansi
in African folklore, or Br’er Rabbit and Tar Baby.10 Furthermore,
several critics have observed the importance of Odysseus for Walcott’s
‘writing of the self’.11 As poet, Walcott embodies the dual signiWcation
of Odysseus polutropos: the geography of his career is certainly one of
many moves, and his handling of the myth, turning it through many
diVerent traditions simultaneously, also suggests ‘many moves’. Cor-
respondingly, Walcott’s Homer is envisaged as ‘that old wave-wan-
derer’ in poem 34 of Midsummer (Walcott 1984: 47). In the later
works, Omeros (1990) and The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1993),
Homer’s migratory identity and versatility are evident in the alterna-
tive bardic personae Seven Seas and Billy Blue, who are modelled on
the West African Griot and the African-American blues singer, respect-
ively.12 Even the ‘Homer’ Wgure, Omeros, does not conform to the
traditional image of a Western Homer, frozen in a marble bust.13
Commenting on the signiWcance of Robinson Crusoe as a mythical
archetype in The Castaway and Other Poems, Walcott explained to an
audience at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine,
Trinidad, that his Crusoe:14
. . . [i]s not the Crusoe you recognize. I have compared him to Proteus, that
Mythological Wgure who changes shapes according to what we need him to
be [ . . . ]. My Crusoe, then, is Adam, Christopher Columbus, God, a mis-
sionary, a beachcomber, and his interpreter, Daniel Defoe.
10 On the former, see Burnett (2000: 303–4), who discusses the character of Anansi
as one of the inXuences for Walcott’s characterization of Odysseus in The Odyssey: a
Stage Version. For Br’er Rabbit and Tar Baby, see Walcott ‘Meanings’ (1970) repr. in
Hamner ed. ([1993] 1997: 45–50, at 49).
11 Baugh (1997: 316–17); Burnett (2000: 119–20); and Dougherty (2001: 19 and 78).
12 See Burnett (2000: 168–70) on ‘the other Homer’ in Walcott, and Hardwick
(2004a: 231) on cultural Xuidity in Walcott’s stage Odyssey.
13 See Hamner (1997: 34). The ‘traditional’ image of Homer is articulated by the
narrator in Book 1 (1.II.iii, 14–15), but is corrected through the course of the poem
(see especially chapters LVI–LVII, 279–88).
14 Walcott ‘The Figure of Crusoe’; this talk was originally delivered in 1965, and
has been edited and published in Hamner ed. ([1993] 1997: 33–40, at 35).
Both Walcott’s Homer and Odysseus are similarly free-form. In her
review of Omeros for the New York Times, Lefkowitz identiWed
Walcott’s Homer as ‘a Protean Wgure, inWnitely knowledgeable but
elusive, constantly changing shape’.15 For his part, Walcott has iden-
tiWed this free-form choice as characteristic of art in the ‘New World’
(Walcott 1997: 243).
Walcott has often commented on the paradox of the ‘amnesiac mem-
ory’ of the New World and has spoken of the act of erasure as the beginning
of art in the Caribbean. However, this erasure and amnesia prove fully
compatible with remembering the past through epic mythologies from
other worlds. In this context, Maes-Jelinek uses the perceptive phrase
‘Ulyssean palimpsest’ to describe Harris’s metamorphosis of Homeric
characters in The Carnival Trilogy (Maes-Jelinek 1995: 47). In Walcott’s
poetry, the constant (re)turn to erasure also proves to be a refreshing take
on one of The Odyssey’s most famous tropes. Or, to put it more precisely, a
new spin on one of the smartest tropoi of polutropos Odysseus: his punning
self-naming on the island of Polyphemus the Cyclops, where he declares
his identity as ‘no-one’ (Homer The Odyssey 9.366–67):
No-one is my name; my father and mother call me no-one and so do all of
the others who are my friends.’
In what follows, I explore Walcott’s fresh use of Homer in terms of
Harris’s conception of the ‘epic stratagems available to Caribbean
man in the dilemmas of history which surround him’ (see introduc-
tion to this chapter).
One of the most explicit reXections on naming in Omeros is the
sequence where Achille, guided by a god in the form of a swift, travels
back through time, recrossing the Middle Passage, to encounter his
father in Africa (Omeros 3.XXV–XXVIII. 133–52). Hardwick has
examined how this sequence of the poem evokes the katabasis of
‘classical’ epic,16 and has subsequently suggested that the failure of
recognition may also serve as ‘a metaphor for the deracination of
15 Lefkowitz ‘Bringing Him Back Alive’ in Hamner ([1993] 1997: 400–3, at 400).
See also Breslin (2001: 268) on Walcott’s ‘protean’, metamorphosizing Homer; and
Callahan (2003: 49 and 60) on the ‘protean’ quality of the metres in Omeros, which
Walcott shifts repeatedly.
16 Hardwick (2000: 105–8, and 2002: 242–44). See also Callahan (2003: 85–6) on
‘descent-like’ passages in Omeros.
texts’ (Hardwick, 2007a).17 When asked the meaning of his name,
Achille replies:
Well, I too have forgotten.
Everything was forgotten. You also. I do not know.
The deaf sea has changed around every name that you gave
us; trees, men, we yearn for a sound that is missing.
(Omeros 3.XXV.III, 137)
We can compare Achille’s statement to that of the ‘nameless’ narrator
in the early poem ‘Origins’, who claims ‘I remember nothing’ (Wal-
cott 1992a: 11–6, at 11).18 Afolabe is distressed at the notion of a
name without meaning (‘a name means something’). He explains
that if a name has no meaning (means nothing) then its referent
must be nothing, too:
Unless the sound means nothing. Then you would be nothing.
Did they think you were nothing in that other kingdom?
(Omeros 3.XXV.III, 137)
For Breslin this linguistic impasse poses ‘an untenable choice’: either
the narrator has to resort to Homeric epic in order to assign meaning
to the name Achille, which would be to overwrite Achille’s African
ancestry, or else ‘accept a severance of language from meaning as a
consequence of diasporic estrangement’, which would tell against the
epic allusions and Homeric etymologies (Breslin 2001: 267). How-
ever, in this particular sequence, the fact that Achille’s name means
‘nothing’ resonates Homer, even while the signiWcance of the Hom-
eric Achilles is forgotten. The perplexing idea of a name that means
nothing takes the reader back to Book 9 of The Odyssey and the ruse
with which Odysseus outwits Polyphemus. In the context of the latter
poem, the countercultural absurdity of a name that means ‘nobody’,
and the Cyclops’ lack of culture and civilization in not recognizing
this, is cued by a remark by the Phaeacian king Alkinoös as he
17 Hardwick’s suggestion of deracination poses an interesting supplement to

Breslin’s analysis of this passage as a meditation on the collapse of signiWcation as a
consequence of diasporic migration during the course of which names come adrift
from their meanings (Breslin 2001: 266).
18 ‘Origins’ was Wrst published in Selected Poems (1964).
requests Odysseus to declare his name and his origins (Homer Od.
8.550–4):19
Tell me the name [onoma] by which your mother and father called you in
that place, [ . . . ]. No one among the peoples, neither base man nor noble, is
altogether nameless [anônumos], once he has born, but always his parents as
soon as they bring him forth put upon him a name.
We might object that, in Homer, the incident where Odysseus
strategically assumes the name of ‘Nobody’ is one of the crafty
stratagems [doloi] for which he has told us he is famous (the opposite
of nameless) at The Odyssey 9.19–20. This is voluntary anonymity in
the service of self-promoting fame. However, the Odyssey with which
Walcott engages is a fragmentary Odyssey, which has arrived in the
New World in bits and pieces. Appropriation of a single detail does not
necessarily activate the broader narrative context; consequently there
are many diVerent—sometimes contradictory—Odysseuses in Wal-
cott’s oeuvre, and Odysseus can appear as both cultural hero and as
estranged wanderer. This metamorphic approach to Homer/Odys-
seus is shared by Harris, who has argued that ‘it is no longer possible
for him [Odysseus] to arrive in New World El Dorados [ . . . ] as a
single man. He has become plural’ (Harris 1992: 91; for discussion,
see Maes-Jelinek 1995: 55 and passim). Although nothingness has
very speciWc connotations in the context of Caribbean history, Wal-
cott’s echoing of Odysseus’ namelessness is ‘like’ Odysseus, insofar as
it serves as a literary strategy/stratagem on the part of the narrator to
secure the fame of St. Lucia and St. Lucians, like Achille and Hector.20
The trope of the Caribbean as a blank space containing nothing
but the landscape has been a constant theme in Walcott’s poetry and
prose, as has the valorization of this ‘nothing’. However, the far-
reaching signiWcance of this theme only emerges fully in the long
poem Another Life ([1973] 2004),21 which is also the Wrst poem in
which Walcott plays with sustained Homeric allusions. Towards the
19 The Odyssey references are to Lattimore 1991.
20 For the idea of the narrator’s stratagems in Omeros, see 6. LIV. ii (271), referring
to the diVering approaches adopted by Major Plunkett and the narrator in writing
Helen’s history: ‘Except we had used two opposing stratagems/ in praise of her and
the island’.
21 All references to Another Life refer to the annotated edition, edited by Baugh
and Nepaulsingh (Walcott 2004).
end of the poem a child—Walcott’s son Peter—hears the Caribbean’s
history in the howl of a shell (Walcott 2004: 143, l.3386), and ‘hears
nothing, hears everything/that the historian cannot hear’ (ibid.
ll.3387–88). Faced with the accumulated histories of conquest and
enslavement, Walcott proposes beginning again, ‘from what we have
always known, nothing’ (ibid. p. 144, l.3430), repeated again in lines
3339–40, ‘nothing, then nothing,/and then nothing’ (ibid. p. 145). In
this counter-historical scenario ‘nothing’ is, paradoxically, a positive
object of knowledge that frees the Caribbean subject from the master
narrative of colonial history. In fact, Afolabe’s question, ‘Did they
think you were nothing in that other kingdom’, pointedly alludes to
the colonial nulliWcation of cultural identity in the Caribbean. The
repetitive focus on ‘nothing’ answers a colonial refrain, present in
Froude and taken up by V. S. Naipaul, that ‘nothing has ever been
created in the Caribbean’.22 In an essay ‘The Caribbean: Culture or
Mimicry?’ published in 1974, shortly after the publication of Another
Life, Walcott theorized that: ‘Nothing will always be created in the
West Indies, for quite a long time, because what will come out of
there is like nothing one has ever seen before’ (Hamner [1993] 1997:
51–7, at 54).23
Walcott has used the Odysseus-nobody trope elsewhere in his
oeuvre; Breslin remarks that: ‘in many of his works the indeterminate
nature of an Odyssean ‘‘nobody’’ becomes a source of strength, a
way of eluding deWnitions imposed by others’ (Breslin 2001: 2; see
ibid. 1–2 for an excellent overview of the ‘nobody’ trope in Walcott).
The most famous incidence of this trope occurs in the poem
22 The relevant passage comes from Froude’s The English in the West Indies:
‘There has been romance, but it has been the romance of pirates and outlaws.
[ . . . ]. There has been no saint in the West Indies since Las Casas, no hero unless
philonegro enthusiasm can make one out of Toussaint. There are no people there in
the true sense of the word, [ . . . ].’ (Froude 1888: 306) Naipaul chose this passage from
Froude as the epigraph to his Caribbean travel account The Middle Passage (Naipaul
[1962] 2001). Picking up on this well-worn trope, Walcott used this passage for the
epigraph to the poem ‘Air’, Wrst published in 1969 in the collection The Gulf and Other
Poems, (repub. in Walcott 1992a: 113–14; for discussion see Terada 1992: 161–3). The
last line of this poem is ‘there is too much nothing here’. Poem I of Midsummer also
echoes this theme: ‘there’s that island known/ to the traveller Trollope, and the fellow
traveller Froude,/for making nothing. Not even a people.’ (Walcott 1984: 11).
23 See Terada’s comment on Walcott’s inversion of Naipaul: ‘Walcott makes
‘‘nothing’’ positive, a persistence rather than an absence’ (1992: 79).
‘The Schooner Flight’ (The Star-Apple Kingdom, 1979) where the
narrator, Shabine, confronts the reader with his Creole ancestry,
asserting: ‘I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,/and either I’m
nobody, or I’m a nation’ (Walcott 1992a: 346). Peter Burian points out
that in Shabine’s rhetorical question: ‘Who knows/who his grandfather
is, much less his name?’ (ibid .p. 353), there is also a parallel with
Telemachus’ words to Athena in Book 1 of the Odyssey: ‘No man has
yet known who his father is’ (Od. 1.216; Burian 1997: 366).
As the poem progresses, Shabine’s nationhood is revealed as that
of the imagination: ‘I had no nation now but the imagination’
(Walcott 1992a: 350). In History’s eyes, Shabine is a nobody: ‘I met
History once, but he ain’t recognize me’ (ibid.), but through a
complex web of allusion this non-recognition is aligned with Odys-
seus’ situation in The Odyssey—the strategic obscurity that secures
his successful return. Burnett glosses the verb ‘recognize’ in the
phrase ‘he ain’t recognize me’ as ‘choose to acknowledge’ (Burnett
2000: 85). However, given the signiWcance of sight and ways of seeing
in Walcott’s work, as well as the broader motif of the imperial gaze in
the colonial and postcolonial literature of the Caribbean, it is im-
portant to preserve the visual connotations of the verb ‘recognize’.
Hardwick has argued convincingly that there is a sophisticated
postcolonial poetics and politics of Homeric recognition in the work
of Walcott, Harris, and Bearden (Hardwick, 2007a). In his estranging
engagement with Homer, Walcott challenges readers to a play of
recognition. Like Odysseus, who goes unrecognized on his return
and whom Athena at Wrst prevents from recognizing his home
(Odyssey 13.187–94), the Wgure of Odysseus returned in Walcott’s
work has undergone radical changes. While Omeros and the more
overtly Homeric, The Odyssey: A Stage Version are not quite ‘like
nothing one has ever seen before’ (Hamner [1993] 1997: 54), any
traces of recognition are fraught with diYculty and ambiguity. Wal-
cott also involves himself in this play of recognition, since in Omeros
the narrator has diYculty recognizing the apparition of the meta-
morphic Homer Wgure (Omeros/Seven Seas), initially confusing the
bard’s bust with a coconut shell (7.LVI.I. 279–81).
The very pronouncement of erasure and of beginning again ex
nihilo turns out to be rooted in one of Odysseus’ most notorious
strategies, hence asserting the presence and absence of Homer at the
same time. This evocation of Odysseus, the nobody, suggests a New
World reading of the epic, in which the protagonist—transported
away from home against his will—resorts to obscurity in order to
reach home and, in many senses, begins again. Rather than ambiva-
lence and tension, Walcott opens up a reciprocal exchange with
Homeric epic. In the same way that, by the end of Omeros, Homer
belongs to Walcott and to the Caribbean, similarly the Caribbean also
belongs to Homer, as island-poet, who is included in the Creole
aesthetic. Commenting on Walcott’s tendency to emphasize the
universal potential of Caribbean hybridity, and Wnding analogies
between the Caribbean archipelago and other archipelagos—most
notably the Aegean—Dash cites the passage in ‘The Schooner Flight’
where Shabine: states ‘this earth is one/island in archipelagoes of
stars’ (Walcott 1992a: 361). He concludes that (Dash 1996: 51):
Walcott checks the tendency to create a Creole essentialism which would
turn the Caribbean into a centre of exemplary creolity. The ultimate aim of
Walcott’s imaginative enterprise is the dissolution of categories like centre
and periphery, classic and modern, sameness and otherness.
Foley has warned against the uncritical use of ‘epic’ as a homoge-
neous generic form to order and categorize what are, in reality,
heterogeneous forms of long narrative. To do so, he argues, runs the
risk of ‘unintentionally colonizing [other cultures’] verbal art’ (John
Foley 2004: 173). For this very reason, much Walcott criticism has
contested the use of the term ‘epic’ in relation to Omeros.24 However,
the ‘international epic’ that Foley advocates has come about, in part,
through colonization in reverse: reading back from the rich cultural
diversity of long narrative poems in the modern world to Homeric
epic. Alternatively, we might see this as the ‘decolonization’ of Hom-
eric epic, via a process similar to that which Hardwick has suggested in
modern receptions of Greek drama (Hardwick 2004a: 42). Walcott’s
creolizing version of this ‘colonization in reverse’ is non-proprietary
and distinctly anti-colonial, locating all poetry as it does in an empire
of art (see, for example, Walcott 1998: 51 on language as empire, and
24 For discussion of this debate and for an analysis of Walcott’s ‘congruity’ with
epic that takes into account shifting deWnitions of epic as an expansive, assimila-
tionary genre, see Hofmeister (1996, passim, but esp. pp. 536–46). See also Hamner
(1997: 8–32), and Breslin (2001: 242–45).
the line ‘art obeys its own order’ in ‘The Hotel Normandie Pool’
(Walcott 1992a: 444).
SEEING DOUBLE AND THE REVERSIBLE GAZE
This play on recognition, in which Old World forms are scarcely

recognizable, responds to the trope in colonial travel literature where
the colonial tourist or travel writer—the ‘seeing man’ as Pratt has
called him—has his gaze disappointed by a landscape that does not
correspond to the expectations created by ‘Old World’ names (Pratt
1992: 7). For instance, describing a visit to the Botanical Gardens in
Port of Spain, Trinidad, Froude lists the ways in which the local Xora
is ‘anomalous’ (Froude 1888: 61):
They had Old World names with characters wholly diVerent: cedars which
were not conifers, almonds which were no relations to peaches, and gum
trees as unlike eucalypti as one tree can be unlike another. Again, you saw
forms which you seemed to recognise till some unexpected anomaly startled
you out of your mistake.
From the ‘reverse’ New World perspective, the same Old World
names are found to be equally disappointing. As Walcott has written
in the essay ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’, ‘a century
looked at a landscape furious with vegetation in the wrong light and
with the wrong eye’ (Walcott 1998: 75).
In response to colonial travel accounts, such as that of Froude,
cultural critics have pointed out that the baZed gaze of the traveller
was returned or reciprocated by the object of the gaze, leading to
conXicting perspectives on the same scene.25 Unfortunately, very few
native impressions of colonial travellers survive; when they do, we are
often reliant on the traveller’s account of how the natives perceive
him (and, less often, her). However, the gaze is reciprocated belatedly
in twentieth-century Wction and critical prose, where Caribbean
authors supplement the Old World perspective with a New World
‘way of seeing’. The clearest exponent of this view is the Bajan novelist
25 See Pratt (1992: ch. 1; Youngs 1997: 7; Smith 2002: 128).

George Lamming, who has written about the growth of the Carib-
bean novel in the context of travel writing (Lamming 1992: 37–8):
We have had travel books, some of them excellent, like Patrick Leigh
Fermor’s Traveller’s Tree. We have had the social and economic treatises.
The anthropologists have done some exercises there. We have had Govern-
ment White papers as well as the Black diaries of Governor’s wives. But these
worked like old-fashioned cameras, catching what they can—which wasn’t
very much—as best they could, which couldn’t be very good, since they
never got the camera near enough. As it should be, the novelist was the Wrst
to relate the West Indian experience from the inside. He was the Wrst to chart
the West Indian memory as far back as he could go.
Correspondingly, evoking the genres of travel writing and Weld re-
ports, Lamming frames his essays as ‘a report on one man’s way of
seeing’ (ibid. p. 13, repeated on p. 56). Similarly, in the essay ‘What
the Twilight Says’, Wrst published in 1970, Walcott comments on the
need for Caribbean artists to establish distance and diVerence from
the literature of the Old World through looking for themselves
(Walcott 1998: 9):
. . . only our own painful, strenuous looking, the learning of looking, could
Wnd meaning in the life around us, only our own strenuous hearing, the
hearing of our hearing, could make sense of the sounds we made.
The challenges presented by the gaze are manifest in Froude’s ac-
count, in which classical referents are used to mark out and describe
what he sees. Froude Xuctuates between a cautious empirical approach,
according to which what he thinks is informed by what he sees, and an
assumptive approach, where what he sees is informed by what he thinks
and what he has read. The Wrst approach is evident in the conclusion of
his account of his visit to Barbados, where he comments on the novelty
of the sights and his experience of them and rejects the representational
accuracy of books (Froude 1888: 41; see also 55):
For the moment my mind was Wlled suYciently with new impressions. One
reads books about places, but the images which they create are always unlike the
real object. All that I had seen was absolutely new and unexpected. I was glad of
an opportunity to readjust the information which I had brought with me.
Froude (ibid. p. 113) declares his motivation to visit Haiti to see
things for himself, wary of prejudicial accounts and stating that: ‘[he]
would not take with [him] a mind already made up, and I was not
given to credulity’. However, this cautionary approach is jettisoned
elsewhere, where Froude is content not to see for himself, and to rely
instead on the accounts of others—for instance in the case of the
black, pitch lake in Trinidad (ibid. 1888: 64):
I had no doubt that it existed, for the testimony was unimpeachable. Indeed
I was shown an actual specimen of the crystallised pitch itself. I could believe
without seeing and without undertaking a tedious journey.
Elsewhere, Froude bases the authority of his account on the authority
of his informants, claiming privileged access to the governing classes
of the islands: from Government House in Barbados (Froude 1888:
92), and from the Colonial Secretary in Jamaica (ibid. p. 177).
In spite of Froude’s attempt to be seen to be observing strict
ethnographic protocols, he frequently resorts to comparisons that
substitute alien and, typically, Greco-Roman models for the Carib-
bean objects of his gaze. Gazing out from a balcony in Barbados,
Froude compares the local women with ‘the old Greek and Etruscan
women’ (1888: 38):
Like the old Greek and Etruscan women, they are trained from childhood to
carry heavy weights on their heads. They are thus perfectly upright, and
plant their feet Wrmly and naturally on the ground. They might serve for
sculptor’s models, and are well aware of it.
There are many points of interest here: Wrstly, the apparent naturalness of
comparing women from ancient civilizations with these Bajan women
who inhabit the same age as Froude. Secondly, Froude’s implicit famil-
iarity with the women of ancient Greece and Italy is in keeping with his
epic credentials as a traveller in the tradition of Ulysses. Thirdly, he sees
the scene as a work of art; here the medium is sculpture, but elsewhere it
is watercolour painting or engraving. Froude’s gaze translates into an
impressionistic image that the reader of The English in the Caribbean can
take away from his work, enabling them to ‘see’ what he has seen.
Froude’s descriptions recall Lamming’s criticism that colonial travellers
‘never got the camera near enough’ (Lamming 1992: 37–8).
Although Froude’s way of seeing has been eclipsed comprehensively
in modern Caribbean writing, the problem of the writer’s metaphor-
ical camera still persists, and authors and critics are conscious of the
fact that modern Caribbean literature is complicit in ‘framing’ Carib-
bean society. In one of the Wrst modern Caribbean novels—C. L. R.
James’ novel Minty Alley (1936)—the narrator, Haynes, is a voyeur on
his own society, literally spying on the people around him and report-
ing on their behaviour as though an outsider. Haynes is a well-
educated Trinidadian, who is alienated from the lower class Trinidad-
ians, who are the objects of his gaze and narrative. James’s situation of
his narrator on the outside looking in has been interpreted as a
reXection of the writer, artist, thinker from the Caribbean people—
the internal exile that Carew describes (Carew 1998). In his essay ‘The
Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’, Walcott catches himself in the act
of framing the Trinidadian village of Felicity with nostalgic, historical
evocations (in this case, evocations of India), he refers to himself
Wltering the scene, ‘Looking around slowly as a camera would’ and
remarks that he ‘wanted to make a Wlm that would be a long-drawn
sigh over Felicity’ (Walcott 1998: 68).
The play of recognition and resemblances in Omeros, in which the
narrator transposes Homeric phantoms in St. Lucia, elicits a self-
correcting discourse that informs the reader that this is all in the
imagination. However, this mythological imagination is no less im-
portant than the ‘real’ island characters who occupy the poem’s
foreground,26 since it constitutes a source of counter-knowledge to
the imperial imaginary of colonial literature about the Caribbean,
which used classical mythology as its/an exclusive possession and
aVected colonial rule.
C ON C LU S I ON
In the context of Caribbean and African rewritings of The Tempest in

the late Wfties and early seventies (crucial periods for regional Inde-
pendence movements in Africa and the Caribbean), Nixon described
the play as . . . ‘a Trojan horse, whereby cultures banned from the
26 ‘Real’ in inverted commas because, as Terada has pointed out (1992: 184–5), the
‘real-life’ St. Lucia of Omeros is an artistic creation, made to look more ‘real’ through
the juxtaposition of Homeric mythology.
citadel of ‘universal’ Western values could win entry and assail those
global pretensions from within’, adding that writers could use this
Trojan horse both as a means of ‘getting in’, or ‘getting out’ of the
citadel (Nixon 1987:578).
As Odysseus’ most famous stratagem at Troy (Homer Od. 8.492–
515), the ‘Trojan’ horse is also an excellent metaphor for the uses of
Odysseus and The Odyssey in the Caribbean receptions that I have
discussed in this chapter. Although, like the Trojan horse, Odysseus is
an instantly recognizable Homeric icon, his appearance in New
World contexts is not what it seems and demands closer inspection,
if not a new way of seeing. In the process we learn to look at Homer’s
The Odyssey diVerently, recognizing that the epic is as versatile and
well travelled as its protagonist. These journeys change Homer and,
like the voyage to the New World, there is no going back.27
27 See Dougherty (2001: 83–92) on The Odyssey and New World discourse.
12
‘If You are a Woman’: Theatrical
Womanizing in Sophocles’ Antigone and
Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona’s The Island
Rush Rehm
It strikes me as central to any consideration of Classics in a post-colonial

(and in many respects a continually colonial) context, to consider
the complicated issue of the representation of women and female
characters, and their uses (if I may be allowed this shorthand term)
on the stage. As any student of Greek tragedy knows, female per-
formers (as far as we can tell) never appeared in a dramatic presen-
tation at the theatre of Dionysus. Males played female characters and
choruses, and classicists and scholars interested in issues of gender
and gender construction have investigated this phenomenon with
imagination and fervour. Without pretending to be comprehensive
or nuanced, let me summarize six views on the subject that operate in
relevant discussions:
1. All theatre uses conventions of representation, even theatres where
women ‘play themselves’, so one must be wary of misreading or
over-interpreting a more general theatrical phenomenon.1
2. Although the convention of all-male performers suggests social
and historical realities—the second class status of women in Wfth-
century Athens, the view that women should not expose themselves
1 One might apply this caveat to theatrical forms and periods as diVerent from one
another as Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Carolean public theatre and classical Japanese
Kabuki and Noh theatre. More generally, see Rehm (1992: 43–74).
to the public gaze of the crowd, and deeper rooted misogyny—the
extraordinary fact remains, as Steiner (1984: 237) concludes in his
magisterial Antigones, that Greek tragedy presents ‘in speech and
action a constellation of women matchless for their truth and
variousness’.
3. Given traditional Greek associations of women with rites of tran-
sition—menarche, marriage, death ritual, and childbirth—and
their relative freedom to express emotion, female characters in
tragedy ‘allow’ for the exploration of emotional extremity that
would not seem possible among male characters. Given strictures
on male expressivity in the ancient world, a hero in myth sheds
blood with near impunity, but only rarely sheds tears. Male
performers served as the purveyors of those expanded expressive
possibilities, in the culturally safe heterotopos2 of the theatre. (See,
among others, Rehm 2002: 19, 236–9, 268–9.)
4. Male performers playing females in Greek tragedy and comedy
participate directly in a cultural process of ‘creating the Other’,
which contributes to a dynamic of misogyny, although ‘playing
the Other’ may occasionally complicate that dynamic by opening
up an alternative understanding of that ‘other’ (Zeitlin 1996).
5. Male performers of female roles are part and parcel of a system of
male dominance, oVering the equivalent of drag shows written by
men for a male audience, which has its estimation of females and
female behaviour, and its stereotypical fears of the same, conWrmed.
Such a theatre has predictable and ‘culturally desirable’ conse-
quences, validating female inferiority and strengthening male dom-
inance, in a closed system of male cultural production (see, for
example, Cantarella 1987, and Case 1985).
6. Males playing females in the ancient world provide one (artistic)
example of a more fundamental reality, namely that all gender is
constructed, via a series of ‘performances’ that can be read and
deciphered given suYcient intellectual and cultural awareness,
reXecting the fact that gender diVerences have little or no com-
pelling ontological or biological basis in reality. We might cat-
egorize this view as ‘performance and performativity über alles’. In
2 Literally ‘diVerent place’, suggesting a place (relatively) free from normal

constraints of culture, society, politics.
‘If You are a Woman’ 213
the immortal words of drag queen RuPaul: ‘Everyone is born
naked; after that it is ALL drag’. Or in the more intellectually
respectable terms of Judith Butler: ‘What kind of gender perform-
ance will enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in
a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and
desire?’ (see Fleischer 2000).
In my work on Greek tragedy, I adopt the Wrst three views, am
somewhat persuaded by the fourth, Wnd the Wfth needlessly reduc-
tive, and feel about the last a little like the joke about the man facing
the maWa deconstructionist, who makes him an oVer he can’t under-
stand. My resistance to the performance model—which in the area of
performance studies has been applied to just about everything—
explains why I have subtitled my contribution ‘Theatrical Woman-
izing’ and not the more contemporary-sounding ‘Performing the
Woman’ or some such, as what follows skirts any claim about gender
as something performed per se.3 Rather, I will focus on the way that
Antigone and The Island use the theatre to explore female characters
(via male performers), to ‘womanize’ male characters, to demon-
strate solidarity within gender boundaries, and to extend that soli-
darity beyond them—all aspects of the struggle against political
oppression, colonial or otherwise.
Let us turn to the scene in Antigone when Haimon makes his Wrst
entrance. His opening words declare his love and respect for his father,
the sine qua non of his identity: æ,
NØ· [Father, I am yours],
(l. 635; also ll. 701–4, 741, 749).4 ReXected in his name, Haimon begins
with ties of blood, linking him to his natal family, ties that prompt him
to confront his father and try to persuade him to change political
course. Haimon speaks not on behalf of his Wancée Antigone, but on
behalf of Creon, urging him to show Xexibility and remain responsive
to the citizens over whom he rules. Accused by his father of siding with
women: fi B ªıÆØŒd
ıÆ E [This one, it seems, Wghts on the side of
the woman] (l. 740), Haimon responds: Y æ ªıc
·
F ªaæ s
æŒÆØ· [If you are a woman; it is for you, in fact, that I show
familial concern] (l. 741). I will return to this startling hypothetical, ‘If
3 For further discussion of the problems with performance studies, see the introduction
in Rehm (2003).
4 I follow Sophocles’ text as edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones ([1994] 1998).
you are a woman’ below. At this juncture, however, I would like to
consider the term æŒÆØ, with its root ŒB invoking a complex
of meanings including ‘care for’, ‘grief over’, ‘funeral’, and ‘connection
by marriage’. Via the related Œ [guardian or protector], the word
also suggests the relationship that, in fact, obtains between Creon and
his niece Antigone. The familial concern that Haimon shows for
his father suggests an array of related issues, including guardianship,
marriage, and funeral obligations. If not literally a woman, Creon is
nonetheless tied to women by a set of relationships that cannot be
ignored or denied without tragic consequences, as the play makes clear.
As Haimon points out, who better than a loyal son to report what
the citizens are saying amongst themselves? And what they are saying
is worth repeating:
I can hear these murmurs in the dark,
how the city laments for this girl:
‘No woman’, they say, ‘ever merited her doom less,
dying so shamefully for the most glorious of actions.
For she, when her own brother had fallen
in bloody combat, would not leave him unburied
to be devoured by Xesh eating dogs and birds.
Doesn’t she deserve the highest honor?’
This is the speech that spreads [through the city] in secret.
(ll. 692–700)
Creon expresses utter disdain for Haimon’s report and for his
advice, revealing paternal contempt for the urgings of youth, a
tyrannical conception of state power (l’état, c’est moi), (ll. 734–39),
and a deep-seated misogyny.5 Indeed, Creon manifests that combin-
ation of fear of and disdain for women that, as noted earlier,
some critics associate with Greek tragedy across the board. In his
initial response to Haimon, for example, Creon implores him
(ll. 648–52):
Do not, my son, dethrone your reason / for the sake of pleasure with a
woman. Know that / this clasping embrace soon grows cold / with an evil
woman sharing your bed and home.
5 For an account of Creon that relates his point of view to more contemporary
political trends, see Rehm (2006).
Creon concludes the same speech (ll. 677–80):
We must support the cause of order, / and never in any way be defeated by
a woman. / If we must fall from power, let it be from a man; / that way we
would not be called weaker than a woman.
Later, in reaction to Haimon’s arguments, Creon responds more ag-
gressively: t ØÆæe qŁ ŒÆd ªıÆØŒe o
æ [What polluted con-
duct, to follow after a woman] (l. 746), and 10 lines later: ªıÆØŒe
J º ıÆ, c Œ Øºº [You’re just the slave of a woman, don’t try
to fool me] (l.756). Only after this onslaught does Haimon ‘abandon’
his father, rushing oV the stage, eventually to join Antigone in death.
If Creon is slow to understand the ways in which he might be a
woman, or be deWned via his relationships to women, he is all too
swift to accuse his son for being too much like a woman, living under
their thrall. But what about the actual female characters in the play,
those more fully ‘womanized’? As critics have increasingly come to
understand, Antigone’s rebellion is rooted in traditional notions of
the woman’s role in death ritual, especially as regards her brother
(see, particularly, Helene Foley 1996). In this Antigone appears
traditional and even conventional, and yet her courageous stance
against Creon marks her as an anomaly, a singularity, at least at the
outset of the play. Given this obvious tension, it hardly surprises that
judgements about the character of Antigone vary.
Some dismiss her as an egotist with a martyr complex, a sister with
no feelings for her own sister, a young woman whose behaviour is so
far removed from Wfth-century norms as to appear alien and monst-
rous to the original Athenian audience (see: Ostwald 1986: 156–57;
Sourvinou-Inwood 1989). Others admire Antigone, but think that if
she had been ‘nicer’, Creon might have proven more Xexible, a
reading that my undergraduates (the beneWciaries of speech codes
and sensitivity training) sometimes argue—as if Creon responds
to reason and persuasion. His scene with Haimon oVers no such
prospect. On the contrary, Creon does not resemble a tree that bends
so as not to break, nor is he like the captain who reefs his sails in the
storm: examples that Haimon brings up, to no avail. Other scholars
view Antigone as a symbol of democratic resistance, supporting
Whitman’s (1951) underappreciated view that Antigone is a model
citizen. Whitman’s stance reXects the period of McCarthyism during
which he wrote Sophocles: A Study in Heroic Humanism;6 a time, like
the Wrst decade of the twenty-Wrst century, in which Americans were
afraid to stand up to state power for fear of being branded a com-
munist, a traitor, or, in current parlance, an unpatriotic terrorist
sympathizer. Finally, there are those whose admiration for Antigone
leaves the secular realm, Wnding in her a holy character, a martyr, a
saintly heroine (Jebb [1900] 2004: xxvii–xxxv).
Within that broad range, most agree that Antigone is far from
exemplifying Bernard Knox’s famous ‘heroic temper’, that quality of
unchanging conviction and single-minded purpose purportedly
found in Sophoclean protagonists (Knox 1964). Antigone seems a
far more complex, or at least multi-faceted, character, one who
changes over the course of the play, as death (and the recognition
of what that means) draws near. In her Wnal scene, for example,
Antigone abandons the full generality of the unwritten law of the
gods to which she refers earlier, a law that requires burial rites for
the dead, presumably each and every one of them. Before she leaves the
stage for the last time, Antigone states that she would defy Creon’s
edict only for her brother, not for her husband or her children, if she
had had them, as they could at least nominally be replaced with new
ones.7 And as we soon discover, Antigone ends her solitary conWne-
ment by committing suicide, a desperate act in the grim and utterly
un-heroic environment of her cave/tomb. If not exactly the epitome of
the heroic temper, Antigone shows many sides, perhaps—as the great
Sophoclean scholar Karl Reinhardt suggests—in order to ‘invest
her life with human fullness’ in contrast to Creon, who ‘ends as the
personiWcation of nothingness’ (Reinhardt [1947] 1979: 93).
Let us turn to Antigone’s sister Ismene, who begins as a dramatic foil,
much as Chrysothemis in Sophocles’ Electra. Although sympathetic to
her sister’s cause, Ismene is initially unwilling to act against the powers
that be, accepting the realities of political and patriarchal control.
However, after Antigone’s arrest, Creon summons Ismene from the
palace (ll. 526–30), accusing her of ‘lurking in the house like a snake’, of
‘having a share in this burial’ along with Antigone (ll. 531–35), a charge
Ismene chooses not to deny in the presence of her sister:
6 See also: Hamilton (1991); Lane and Lane (1986); Rehm (2006).
7 On this apparent turn-around, see Foley (1996); also Murnaghan (1986) and
Neuberg (1990).
Iºº K ŒÆŒE E
E
FŒ ÆN
ÆØ
ºı KÆı c F Łı Øı
[In your time of trouble I am not ashamed/to make myself a fellow voyager
in your suVering].
(ll. 540–1)
Ismene’s change of heart arises from Creon’s sense that she must be
a co-conspirator in Antigone’s plan, something the audience knows
from the opening scene to be false. Although Antigone rejects her
sister’s belated solidarity—their exchange (ll. 536–60) resembles the
prologue in reverse—Ismene’s willingness to accept responsibility for
the act anticipates the growing support for Antigone’s deWance
indicated later in the play.
Ismene not only chooses—albeit belatedly—to stand with Anti-
gone in defying Creon’s edict forbidding Polyneices’ burial, but she
also protests on behalf of her sister’s marriage to Haimon, a union
that Creon wilfully destroys:
Ismene: Will you kill the bride of your own son?
Creon: There are other furrows for him to plow.
Ismene: But that would not suit him or her.
Creon: I loathe evil wives for my son.
Ismene: Oh dearest Haimon, how your father dishonors you.
Creon: You grieve me too much, you and this marriage of yours.
(ll. 568–73)
Ismene’s last stand on stage presents a double challenge to Creon’s
authority, as ruler of the polis and as patriarch of his family. In a
sense, Ismene in her last scene uniWes the values represented separ-
ately by Antigone and Haimon (once he joins Antigone in the cave);
namely loyalty to the natal and to the nuptial family, two strands of
Greek female experience that Creon fails to honor.
Ismene’s return to the conWnes of the house (her eVective dismissal
from the play after line 581) does not discredit her awakened sense of
resistance. Although ‘locked away’ in the oikos, Ismene’s virtual
presence behind the façade suggests that resistance to Creon’s edict
has spread to the inner sanctum, where it Wnds its symbolic voice in
another female character—played, quite possibly, by the same
(Ismene) actor—namely, Creon’s wife Eurydice.8
8 For actor divisions, see Rehm (2006: 210, n.30).
The suicide of Eurydice at the household altar of Zeus herkeios oVers
the culminating image of Creon’s failure to understand Haimon’s
hypothetical, ‘yes, I side with women, if you are a woman’. On hearing
the news of her son’s death, Eurydice withdraws silently into the
recesses of the house only to re-emerge with a vengeance. Announcing
her death to Creon, the Messenger emphasizes Eurydice’s maternal role
as the F Æ øæ ŒæF [all-mother of this dead young man]
(l.1282), referring to the corpse of Haimon, which Creon has brought
back from the cave. Balancing his body is Eurydice’s corpse: ‘there to
behold; it is no longer hidden indoors’ (l.1293), as the Messenger
proclaims. Draped over the altar revealed on the ekkuklêma (a ‘roll
out machine’, which allowed the exposure, through the centre door, of
indoor scenes in the ancient Greek theatre), the dead Eurydice pollutes
the heart of Creon’s home, in response to his part in Haimon’s suicide.
In the Messenger’s description of her act, we learn of another son,
whose death Eurydice also blames on Creon: ŒøŒ
Æ
Æ . . . ªÆæø
Œ e º [lamenting . . . the empty bed of Megareus] (ll. 1302–3). The
‘all-mother’ Eurydice refers to her elder boy who, in other versions of the
myth, was sacriWced to ensure Thebes’ victory over the Argive invaders
led by Polyneices.9 The language describing Eurydice’s grief pointedly
recalls that of Antigone at the sight of Polyneices’ corpse (ll. 423–5):10
shrieking out a lament [IÆŒøŒ Ø] . . . / like a bird who sees her empty
[Œ B] nest, / the bed [º] orphaned of her nestlings.
Sophocles’ conveys the female resistance to Creon—if I can call it
that—from both Antigone and Eurydice in terms of maternal grief,
a Wnal aspect of the traditional female world that Creon ignores or
undervalues.
9 Previously unmentioned in the text, Megareus (ll. 1302–05) was sacriWced to

save the city from the Argive invaders, a subject dramatized in Euripides’ Phoenissae,
where he is called Menoeceus (‘Stay at Home’?); see Jebb (2004: l. 1303). After cursing
Creon as ‘childkiller’ ( fiH ÆØŒ fiø) (l. 1305) of both her sons, Eurydice imitates
their modes of death, stabbing herself with a sword like Haimon and dying like a
sacriWcial victim at the altar like Megareus.
10 For other parallels between Antigone and Eurydice, see Segal (1995: 126–27).
Developing the mother-bird imagery, Katz (1994: 81–103), claims that Antigone has
‘precipitated herself into a premature and surrogate maternity,’ her challenge to
Creon ‘not so much a refusal of male authority as . . . an assertion of maternal rights’,
with Polyneices functioning as her surrogate son (pp. 93–4).
As the play closes, Creon’s twisted eVort to seal oV Polyneices’
corpse from the earth and the living Antigone from the sun has
spread to his own home, which he now calls ‘the implacable harbor
of Hades’ (l. 1284). Like his son, when he reaches the cave and
confronts his dead bride-to-be, Creon arrives home to Wnd his
partner slain by her own hand, his oikos robbed of its future. Creon
at the end also resembles Antigone on her way to prison: ‘desolate of
loved ones, ill fated, / still living I go to the grave-dug world of the
dead’ (ll. 919–20). Creon sees himself as a man bereft of what ties him
to life, a man ‘who exists no more than no one’ (l.1325). To return to
Haimon’s hypothetical ‘if you are a woman’, the play suggests that
Creon’s failure to accept that proposition, at least symbolically, leads
to his becoming a living corpse.
Turning from Sophocles’ play to Athol Fugard, John Kani, and
Winston Ntshona’s The Island, we move to the realization of a com-
parable theatrical womanizing in the context of apartheid South
Africa. One of the miracles of this short, brilliant play is how it uses
Sophocles’ prototype so appropriately, and yet so surprisingly.11
Winston, one of the two prisoners whose experience and dialogue
constitutes the play, states the issue succinctly:
. . . this Antigone is a bloody . . . what you call it . . . legend! A Greek one at
that. Bloody thing never even happened. Not even history! Look, brother,
I got no time for bullshit. Fuck legends. Me? . . . I live my life here! I know
why I’m here, and it is history, not legends. I had my chat with a magistrate
at Cradock and now I’m here. Your Antigone is a child’s play, man.12
Within the greater struggle against South-African apartheid that has
led John and Winston to their imprisonment on Robben Island, we
are asked to take seriously the seemingly trivial problem of convincing
Winston to perform the play for the upcoming prison concert and, in
particular, to play the role of Antigone. But, as I will argue, these two
struggles—at least so far as the play is concerned—prove inextricable.13
11 For the way the play reworks Sophocles’ original, see: Durbach (1984); Foster
(1982: esp. 208–17); McKay (1989); Wertheim (2000: 88–99); Wetmore (2002: 194–203).
12 All quotations of the play are from Fugard et al. (1976).
13 My understanding of the play has been inXuenced by the powerful and moving
performance I attended by the University of California, Davis, in March 2006,
produced by the Department of Theatre and Dance, directed by Peter Lichtenfels,
and starring Dahlak Brathwaite as John, and James Marchbanks as Winston, part of
Dragging his feet from the start, Winston can not (or will not)
remember his lines, nor can he keep straight the basic four-part plot of
the Trial of Antigone (Winston appears as a kind of Ismene Wgure at the
start). Using legal terms that would speak to the prisoners on Robben
Island, John outlines the Brechtian gestus for the play: (1) the State
represented by Creon lays charges against Antigone; (2) Antigone
pleads guilty; (3) she then pleads in mitigation of her sentence; and
(4) the play ends with the ‘State Summary, Sentence, and Farewell
Words’. Through patient instruction and rehearsal, John apparently
overcomes Winston’s reluctance and gains his cooperation.
John’s Antigone-like commitment to the performance of the Trial
of Antigone is manifest in many ways, most movingly in a bit of
business indicated in the stage directions: He pulls out three or four
rusty nails from a secret pocket in his trousers. We realize that John has
risked punishment or worse by smuggling nails out of the quarry or
the prison yard. He has not done so to make a weapon against
Hodoshe, the sadistic prison guard whose presence the two men
continually evoke. Nor has he saved them so they might serve as a
Shawshank Redemption-like tool to eVect a slow and meticulous
escape. Nor does he hope to fashion the nails into something prac-
tical, like the scrap of steel that Ivan Denisovich picks up while laying
bricks at the labour site, thinking that if he can get it by the friskers he
might grind it down to repair his boots, one of many memorable
details in Solzhenitsyn’s great prison novel. No, John runs the risk in
order to complete a necklace that Winston will wear as Antigone in
the prison concert. Assembling it with string, John measures out the
pattern: ‘Three Wngers, one nail . . . three Wngers, one nail . . .’.14 Later
the conference ‘Sophoclean Drama and its Continuing Cultural Impact’, organized by
Seth Schein. I earlier had seen the revival of the original production of The Island
(directed by Athol Fugard, with John Kani and Winston Ntshona) at The Old Vic in
2001. For all the nostalgia and thanksgiving at viewing the play with its original cast
in a post-apartheid world (Kani and Ntshona originated the parts of John and
Winston in 1973), the performances of the younger actors at Davis had an energy
and desperation that made the Davis production more compelling, perhaps because
their youth gave a stronger sense of the lost potential that lay ahead. For a discussion
of the play’s inception and various early manifestations, see Fugard (1983: 192,
208–9, 212), and Gray (1982, 7, 9–12, 190–97).
14 John presumably has run a similar risk to procure the jam-tin lid and twine he
uses to fashion Creon’s pendent, which he conceals in his bedroll (p. 53).
in the scene he says: ‘Nearly Wnished! Look at it! Three Wngers’, and,
as if in a Sophoclean hemistich, Winston completes the line ‘One
nail’ (pp. 50–1).
This example of restored union between the two men, a recovered
singleness of purpose, is one of many in the play. It seems at this
juncture that the performance will come to fruition, that Winston
will Wnd his feet in the part, and The Trial of Antigone will take its
place in the prison concert, along with cell 42’s performance of the
Zulu War Dance, whose rehearsal singing John and Winston hear
echoing down the cell block. But at the next rehearsal (the beginning
of Scene Two), a diVerent sound almost brings down the curtain.
When Winston appears as Antigone wearing a wig and false breasts,
John cannot contain his laughter. Winston refuses to participate any
further in this play-acting, only agreeing to rejoin the performance
after slamming the wig and false breasts into John’s hands: ‘take these
titties and play Antigone. I’m going to play Creon. Do you under-
stand what I’m saying? Take your two titties . . . I’ll have my balls and
play Creon’ (p. 61). Winston would rather play the villain of the
piece, as long as he’s male, than risk being laughed at in the role of
a female, with his manhood insulted and degraded.
Before delving deeper into the source of Winston’s humiliation, his
fear of ‘becoming a woman’, let us look brieXy at the other represen-
tations of women in the play. Looking for their lapie (washrag), John
insists that Winston had it last, prompting his friend to protest: ‘Haai,
man! You got no wife here. Look for the rag yourself’ (p. 50). In this
Odd Couple moment, Winston is quick to suspect and forcefully reject
any hint that he may be playing a woman’s domestic role. In a quite
diVerent vein, John later recalls the performance of Antigone they saw
years before in New Brighton, at St. Stephen’s Hall: ‘Shit, those were
the days! . . . Nomhle played Antigone. A bastard of a lady that one, but
a beautiful bitch. Can’t get her out of my mind tonight’ (p. 54). As one
might expect in a world of men without women—a brute reality of
prison, political or otherwise—the prospect of sex with the opposite
sex arises, one might say, naturally. Perhaps it is signiWcant that John
‘goes there’ while he is remembering a theatrical performance, and one
of Antigone no less. In his memory, a woman as a Wgure of political
resistance merges with the female actress playing the role, who arouses
his sexual desire.
The dream of women returns with greater force in the games of
imaginary escape that the two men create to pass the time. The night
before, Winston ‘took them’ to the bioscope (cinema) by recreating
Fastest Gun in the West, like Murphy in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest, who keeps the World Series game alive after Nurse
Ratched switches oV the television. Now his turn, John converts an
empty mug into a telephone and begins an imaginary conversation
with The Shop, their old drinking haunt in Port Elizabeth. Eventually
he speaks to their pal Sky, bringing Winston into the story: ‘Hey,
Winston is asking how are the punkies [prostitutes] doing? You
bloody lover boy! Leave something for us, man’ (p. 57).
Given the proximity of The Shop to their homes, John asks Sky to
visit their wives; Wrst Winston’s and then his own wife, Princess. The
message: one more day at Robben Island, everything’s OK. But why
doesn’t she write? How are the kids, especially his daughter Monde?
How are his father and mother? We get a view of the worlds the two
men have lost: sexual, domestic, marital, paternal, Wlial. But it is
interesting that these worlds emerge through the memory of a
performance (Antigone, staged years before), and then via a game
of imagination. In her paper ‘Antigone under Apartheid’, the Dutch
scholar Astrid Van Weyenberg discusses the various metatheatrical
aspects of The Island, which ‘foreground the relationship between the
real and the Wctive’ in the play.15 To her valuable analysis I would add
that—perhaps unsurprisingly—the various games of escape invented
by John and Winston carry with them not simply the image
of freedom from conWnement at Robben Island, but also as yet
undetected areas where the need for liberation remains.
Let us return to the rehearsal that begins Scene Two and look again
at John’s reaction to Winston’s appearance as Antigone. After break-
ing out with laughter, he bangs on the wall, announcing to the next
cell: ‘Hey, Norman. Norman! Come this side, man. I got it here.
Poes!’ The stage directions indicate that John circles ‘her’ admiringly,
he fondles her breasts, he walks arm in arm with her down Main
Street. . . . He climaxes everything by dropping his trousers, and then
exclaims: ‘Speedy Gonzales! Here I come!’ With that, Winston tears
15 Astrid Van Weyenberg, ‘Antigone under Apartheid’, unpublished essay, presented

at the Migratory Aesthetics workshop held at Leeds University, January 2006.
oV his costume, storms over to the water bucket and starts to wash
himself. The look, smell, prurience, and disrepute of being taken for
an actress/whore must be wiped away: ‘And in case you want to know
why’, Winston explains, ‘I’m a man, not a bloody woman./ . . . I am
not doing your Antigone! I would rather run the whole day for
Hodoshe. At least I know where I stand with him. All he wants to
do is make me a ‘boy’, . . . not a bloody woman’ (pp. 59–60).
At this moment, Winston’s fragile sense of his own status focuses
on gender, and he clings to the remnants of his self-image by insisting
on his masculinity, debased as it is under apartheid and all the more
so in prison, where his power is minimal. Just such clear divisions
of status and hierarchy are what apartheid introduced into the law
of South Africa, but in terms of race: Whites, Indians, Coloureds
(or mixed), Blacks, clearly deWned, in that order. Both John’s and
Winston’s reactions to imaginary women suggest that within each of
these categories, there exists another, implicit hierarchy, male then
female. In this declension, a black man—a ‘boy’—is near the bottom,
but not as low as a black woman. So, Winston says, give me Hodoshe
rather than this Antigone nonsense.
In addition to the laughter, Winston fears that the role might stick
(hence his washing it oV) (p. 60):
Every time I run to the quarry . . . ‘Nyah . . . nyah . . . Here comes Antigone! . . .
Help the poor lady!’ Well, you can go to hell with your Antigone.
What self-respecting male would want to be stuck with this hyper-
inferior status? Winston’s concern reXects the reality of prison life
(certainly in the Unites States, and I would imagine at Robben
Island), which encourages the sexual domination of men by other
men. Although the play never makes this possibility explicit, we catch
a hint of its potential when the scene is interrupted, as if out of the
blue (p. 62):
The two men break apart suddenly, drop their trousers, and stand facing the
wall with arms outstretched. Hodoshe calls John.
Naked with their asses facing toward the oppressor, these men’s
sexual vulnerability to their ‘superiors’ could not be plainer.
After John leaves at Hodoshe’s order, Winston continues his prot-
estations, stomping on the wig (p. 63):
Shit, man! If he [John] wants a woman in the cell he must send for his wife,
and I don’t give a damn how he does it. I didn’t walk with those men and
burn my bloody passbook in front of that police station, and have a
magistrate send me here for life so that he can dress me up like a woman
and make a bloody fool of me.
John’s earlier arguments—invented, one feels, on the spot—have
failed to work. He tried to persuade Winston that the theatre has
diVerent rules, that he was preparing Winston for a boisterous
reaction from the audience, that he was helping him overcome
stage fright. Finally, John puts on the Antigone costume himself
and asks Winston to laugh at him. Although he tries to accommo-
date, Winston cannot sustain his derision. ‘Why did you stop?’ John
asks. ‘Must I tell you why? Is it because behind all this rubbish is me,
and you know it is me. You think those bastards out there won’t
know it is you? Yes, they’ll laugh. But who cares about that as long as
they laugh in the beginning and listen at the end. That’s all we want
them to do . . . listen at the end’ (pp. 61–2).
At this point, Winston is in no mood to listen. However, he has no
choice once John returns from his interview with Hodoshe and
announces that he’ll be free in three months, and oV Robben Island
in two. The penultimate scene explores how this new reality threatens
the long-standing relationship between the two men, Winston takes
over most of the dialogue, inventing a new ‘game’ to pass the time—
imagining what John will do once he’s free and back home:
Winston: You’ll tell them about this place, John, about Hodoshe,
about the quarry, and about your good friend Winston,
who you left behind. But you still won’t be happy, hey.
Because you’ll need a fuck. A really wild one!
John: Stop it, Winston!
Winston [relentless]: And that is why at ten o’clock that night you’ll
slip out through the back door and make your way to Sky’s
place. . . . They’ll Wll you up with booze. They’ll look after
you. They know what it is like inside. They’ll Wx you up with
a woman . . .
John: NO!
Winston: Set you up with her in a comfortable joint, and then leave
you alone. You’ll watch her, watch her take her clothes oV,
you’ll take your pants oV, get near her, feel her, feel it. . . . Ja,
you’ll feel it. It will be wet . . .
John: WINSTON!
Winston: Wet poes, John And you’ll fuck it wild!
After a long silence indicated in the stage directions, John continues:
John: Winston? What’s happening? Why are you punishing me?
Winston [quietly]: You stink, John. You stink of beer, of company, of
poes, of freedom. Your freedom stinks, John.
John: No, Winston!
Winston: Yes! Don’t deny it. Three months time, at the hour, you’ll be
wiping beer oV your face, your hands on your balls, and poes
waiting for you. You will laugh, you will drink, you will fuck
and forget.
(pp. 70–71)
Throughout the play, Winston and John face the threat of mutual
division and hatred, as Hodoshe uses the tried and true technique of
the powerful: divide and conquer. Recall the diabolical forced labour
mimed at the play’s outset, which the two inmates later describe. One
prisoner Wlls a hole with sand after the other has dug it out, and this
daisy chain of back-breaking, Sisyphean work continues all day,
pointless, futile, and divisive. John and Winston admit hating each
other at the time, but they rise above the guards’ eVort to set them
apart, realizing that mutual hatred between cellmates and compat-
riots is precisely what Hodoshe wants. John’s impending release,
however, presents a greater challenge, for the prospect of select or
partial freedom threatens their solidarity more than anything else
Hodoshe could do.16 In what might be an oblique reference to
Sophocles’ original, Winston talks about what lies in store for him
16 Recall Winston and John’s description after their trial, waiting to start the long
trip towards Robben Island:
Winston: . . . when they lined us up for the vans . . .
John: And married us!
They lock left and right hands together to suggest handcuVs (p. 65).
With John free, the ‘marriage’ threatens to end in divorce. By taking on the role of
Antigone, Winston reconWrms his commitment to the cause, even as he acknowledges
his individual isolation, with no prospect of release, like the heroine with whom he
comes to identify.
after John leaves: a life sentence with no release, ever. He reminds
John of another lifer, old Harry, whom they see every day when they
work in the yard chiselling blocks: ‘Look into his eyes, John. Look at
his hands. They’ve changed him. They’ve turned him into stone’
(p. 71). We think of Antigone walled up in her cave, and also of
Niobe, evoked by Antigone in her kommos (ll. 823–33). But Winston
isn’t worried about petrifaction leading to suicide, or to endless
weeping like a spring down a cliV face. He fears the living death of
the spirit, turning him into a man like old Harry ‘who’s forgotten
everything . . . why he’s here, where he comes from’.
It is this prospect, I think, that prompts Winston to forget about
the shame and humiliation of false breasts and hair, and a makeshift
skirt and a necklace. He becomes proud to play the role of a legend-
ary woman in an old Greek play. To remember why you are here and
where you come from, at least on this island, requires Winston to
enter another persona, because that person’s story mirrors his own.
John may leave, but the stories of those who struggle, who have
struggled, who have come before, who live in legend, keep one
company. This is how one can recall oneself to oneself, as a means
of survival and resistance. Winston may have begun the play as a kind
of Ismene, draggling his feet at the prospect of performing the play,
but he eventually grows fully into the part of Antigone.
Of course, most of us—mutatis mutandis, and in our own way—
resemble the liberated John of Winston’s imagination, drinking our
beer, taking our pleasure, enjoying our version of good times and wet
poes, forgetting the world of the many who remain imprisoned,
subjugated, dominated, oppressed, locked away out of sight and
out of mind. In The Island, the nameless and forgotten are recalled
to us via an eVort at theatrical solidarity, and one that leads us back
to the real world. Antigone’s story, John and Winston’s story, and
their intersection at Robben Island represent a cry for solidarity in
the Wght against injustice and illegitimate power. And it is the power
of Sophocles’ Antigone, recaptured in Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona’s
The Island, that this call to solidarity arises from a female Wgure—
who, in the social, historical, and political contexts which gave rise to
each play, represented an apparently ‘inferior’ being.
Of course, we could read Haimon’s ‘if you are a woman’ in its most
obvious sense, with the implication: ‘but of course you’re not, Creon,
so don’t worry about my siding with women. That’s as impossible as
your being one!’. The parallel in The Island might be John’s insistence
that he remains fully himself beneath Antigone’s costume, with the
unstated implication, ‘Don’t be a fool, Winston, you’re unchanged
and unaVected by playing this legendary female’. But, as I have
argued, the theatrical womanizing of these plays challenges that set
of clear distinctions. It is only by taking on the mantle of the
oppressed—in the context of these two dramas, ‘becoming a
woman’—that resistance takes hold, that the struggle for liberation
can sustain itself. We see this in the way resistance to Creon’s edict
spreads through Thebes, from Antigone to Ismene, to Haimon, to
Eurydice, to the city at large. We see it in the powerful image near the
end of The Island, when Winston speaks as Antigone:
Brothers and Sisters of the Land! I go now on my last journey . . . to my grave,
my everlasting prison, condemned alive to solitary death.
Of course he speaks for himself as well, and it is no radical change of
persona when he removes his wig and confronts the audience as
Winston, yet still using Antigone-like language (p. 77):
Gods of our Fathers! My land! My Home! . . . I go now to my living death,
because I honoured those things to which honour belongs.
Winston and the play have entered a Sophoclean world where political
resistance and theatrical womanizing are inextricably linked, where the
struggle against political tyranny must go down to a stratum that
appears weaker, more vulnerable, more easily dominated, in order to
Wnd the strength of its convictions, and the strength to sustain them.
13
Finding a Post-Colonial Voice for Antigone:
Seamus Heaney’s Burial at Thebes
Stephen E. Wilmer
Today post-colonialism has become an endangered topic of academic

inquiry. The US House of Representatives recently debated a bill
threatening academic programmes that incorporated post-colonial
theory. In a speech to Congress in June 2003, Stanley Kurtz argued:
The ruling intellectual paradigm in academic area studies (especially Middle
Eastern Studies) is called ‘post-colonial theory’. . . . The core premise of
post-colonial theory is that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge
of foreign languages and cultures at the service of American power.
In his speech to the House Subcommittee on Select Education, Kurtz
(2003) urged the Congress to pass a measure that would divert funds
out of programmes using post-colonial theory and into language
programmes in the Defense Language Institute:1
The Defense Language Institute would then be in a position to fund schol-
arships for college graduates to do advanced language training, leading to
full time jobs in our defense and intelligence agencies. Under the umbrella of
the Defense Language Institute, students with a desire to serve their country
would have no fear of retaliation or ostracism from professors who view
cooperation with the American government as immoral.
1 The full text of Stanley Kurtz’ testimony before the Subcommittee on Select
Education, Committee on Education and the Workforce, US House of Representa-
tives on 19 June 2003, is available at: http://edworkforce.house.gov/hearings/108th/
sed/titlevi61903/kurtz.htm (last accessed 16 January 2006).
Finding a Post-Colonial Voice for Antigone 229
So, who said the cold war and McCarthyism are dead? They have just
changed into diVerent forms. For the cold war, read the ‘war on
terror’; for the House Un-American Activities Committee, read the
Department of Homeland Security,2 and for communism, read ter-
rorism, or in this case its apparent bedfellow, post-colonialism.
At the risk of incurring the wrath of the US Defense Department
and gaining the attention of government detectives under the recent
USA Patriot Act,3 I want to take issue with Kurtz’s notion that post-
colonialism focuses on America. Britain is an equally valid focus. In
this chapter I will discuss the recent production at the Abbey Theatre
in Dublin of Seamus Heaney’s version of Burial at Thebes, both in
terms of its anti-American but also its anti-British representation.
I intend to show that in his attempt to make Antigone resonate for a
modern Irish audience, Heaney uses language evoking current events
concerning the US invasion of Iraq, as well as historical events
relating to British colonial policies in Ireland. Textually and subtex-
tually, the American Government’s aggressive policies in the Middle
East echo the British Government’s legacy in Northern Ireland, and
mark Heaney’s adaptation as a post-colonial work. At the same time
I want to employ a somewhat more measured, analytic, and scholarly
deWnition of post-colonialism that has been proposed by Loomba
(1998: 12), viz. the ‘contestation of colonial domination and the
2 The House Un-American Activities Committee was created in 1938 to inquire

into subversive activities in the USA. By the late 1940s, HUAC was gaining consid-
erable publicity because of its inquiries into Communist activities in Hollywood.
Many prominent theatre and Wlm personnel were threatened with contempt of
Congress and prison if they refused to inform on the activities of their peers. Senator
Joseph McCarthy exploited the fear of being labelled as a Communist in his Senate
inquiries by threatening to expose people employed by the government. The Depart-
ment of Homeland Security was established following the 11 September 2001 attacks
on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. The new Department is designed to
prevent terrorist attacks on the USA and improve internal security.
3 This act, which was introduced hurriedly after the September 11 attacks, allows
the US Government to infringe the civil liberties of ordinary citizens on suspicion of
their support for terrorist organizations. Thus, for example, the Government now has
the right to inspect the library records of individuals to Wnd out what books they have
been reading. In 2003 the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Government for
infringement of the US constitution, challenging ‘the constitutionality of Section 215
of the USA Patriot Act, which vastly expands the power of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation to obtain records and other ‘tangible things’ of people not suspected
of criminal activity’ Bohn (2003).
legacies of colonialism’. Likewise, Hulme argues that post-colonialism
‘refers to a process of disengagement from the whole colonial
syndrome, which takes many forms and is probably inescapable for
all those whose worlds have been marked by that set of phenomena’.4
Needless to say, Ireland is a country that has been marked by
colonialism and is in an ongoing process of disengagement from it.
Northern Ireland is still arguably a colony of Britain. However, post-
colonialism is not an approach that is necessarily deWned by political
structures, but more by political attitudes. As Kiberd (1995: 6) argues:
. . . post-colonial writing does not begin only when the occupier withdraws:
rather it is initiated at that very moment when a native writer formulates
a text committed to cultural resistance.
Seamus Heaney’s Burial at Thebes bears witness to the indelible
marks of colonialism and oppression, and to the process of disen-
gagement from it. In a personal statement about writing the adapta-
tion for the centennial year of the opening of the Irish National
Theatre (known as the Abbey Theatre5), Heaney indicates that
George Bush and his war on terror provided an immediate justiWca-
tion for staging Antigone, but that the British treatment of Irish
people in Ireland over the centuries helped him Wnd a voice for
Antigone as well as a moral context for her stance. In thinking
about the struggle between Antigone and Creon over who owns the
body of Polyneices and who can have access to it, Heaney remem-
bered the situation of Francis Hughes, his 25 year old neighbour in
Northern Ireland who died in 1981 after being on hunger strike for
sixty-nine days.6 His body was in the custody of the Royal Ulster
Constabulary, but his family and friends wanted to pay their last
4 Quoted in Loomba (1998: 18–19).

5 The Irish National Theatre Society was established in 1903 and moved into the
Abbey Theatre in 1904. The Abbey receives the largest share of Irish Arts Council
subsidy for theatre, and acts as a cultural Xagship for the nation, touring abroad and
attracting foreign tourists at home, particularly in the summer months. The 2004
centennial of the opening of the Abbey Theatre was a major cultural event, and Ben
Barnes, the Abbey’s artistic director, approached Seamus Heaney, a Nobel Prize-
winning poet resident in Dublin, to provide a play to mark the occasion.
6 Heaney discussed this memory in his question and answer session with the
Abbey Theatre audience on 27 April 2004. The death of a hunger-striker was also
evoked in Heaney’s, The Cure at Troy, in the line: ‘A hunger-striker’s father / Stands in
the graveyard dumb’ (1990: 77).
respects and to bury it. The battle over his body was emotionally
heated, setting the hunger-striker’s family against the state, and reXe-
cted the division between the regulations of the state authorities on the
one hand and the personal needs of the family to observe the traditional
rites on the other. For this and other reasons Heaney decided to
emphasize the word ‘burial’ in changing the title of Antigone to the
Burial at Thebes. The play for him is primarily about the need to pay
respect to the dead, and burial is the traditional Irish (as well as Greek)
way of doing so (see, for example, Macintosh 1994: 30–7).7
As in ancient Greek society,8 the traditional Irish way of paying
respect to the dead is the custom of keening or lamenting, usually
performed by women at a wake. Thus it was that Heaney used one of
the most beautiful poems in the Irish language, Eibhlin Dubh Ni
Chonaill’s eighteenth century Caoineadh Airt Uı́ Laoghaire [Lament
for Art O’Leary], as a model for Antigone. Eibhlin’s husband Art
O’Leary had refused to sell his fast horse to Abraham Morris, the
High SheriV of Cork. Morris tried to pressure him, and so O’Leary
challenged him to a duel. Morris then declared that O’Leary was an
outlaw and had his men shoot O’Leary, leaving him on the road to
die. Eibhlin Ni Chonaill immediately composed a poem as a lament
or keen to his memory that evokes both her love for her husband and
her sense of loss, as well as her anger at the state authorities.
In Heaney’s view (Heaney 2005: 172):
As the poem proceeds, this cadence of lamentation heightens and gathers, an
indeXectible outpouring of rage and grief. It is the voice of woman as
mourner and woman as avenging fury, a woman Werce in her devotion to
a beloved whom she eventually Wnds lying beside a little furze bush, dead
without the last rites.
That the poem was written in Irish by a woman mourning her
husband, who had been killed by the English and left to rot, evokes
a strong anti-colonial sentiment.
7 The importance that the ancient Greeks gave to observing proper respect for the
dead is particularly illustrated in Achilles’ observation of traditional funeral rites for
Patroklos in the Iliad, Book 23 (by contrast with his shameful treatment of Hector).
For a discussion of the desecration of the deceased, see Sophocles Antigone (ed. Mark
GriYth 1999: 30).
8 For a discussion of the ancient Greek ritual of lamentation, see Alexiou (1974) and
Holst-Warhaft (1992). See also Oakley (2004: ch. 6); and Hardwick (1993: 147–62).
Ni Chonaill’s poem polarizes the Irish against the English, espe-
cially in seeking revenge for her husband’s death:
The English bowed
To the ground before you,
Out of no love for you,
Out of their fear . . .
Grief on you, Morris!
Heart’s blood and bowel’s blood!
May your eyes go blind
And your knees be broken!
You killed my darling
And no man in Ireland
Will Wre the shot at you!
(A Lament of Art O’Leary, tr. O’Connor 1940)
The poem written in a plain and direct language, with intimate
references to her home environment and to her life with her husband
and their children, possesses an urgency about it as it progresses (like
Electra’s lament in the Choephoroi)9 from a eulogy for the dead man
to a call for justice and revenge. Heaney recollected this poem as he
was trying to Wnd a voice for Antigone (Heaney 2005: 172):
In a Xash I saw refracted in Eibhlı́n Dubh the Wgure of the stricken Antigone,
and heard in the three-beat line of her keen the note that Antigone might
9 In her opening speech of the Choephoroi, Electra says: ‘Supreme herald of the
realm above and the realm below, O Hermes of the nether world, come to my aid,
summon to me the spirits beneath the earth to hear my prayers, spirits that watch over
my father’s house, and Earth herself, who gives birth to all things, and having nurtured
them receives their increase in turn. And meanwhile, as I pour these lustral oVerings to
the dead, I invoke my father: Have pity both on me and on dear Orestes! How shall we
rule our own house? For now we are bartered away like vagrants by her who bore us, by
her who in exchange got as her mate Aegisthus, who was her accomplice in your
murder. As for me, I am no better than a slave, Orestes is an outcast from his
inheritance, while they in their insolence revel openly in the winnings of your toil.
But that Orestes may come home with good fortune I pray to you, father: Oh, hearken
to me! And as for myself, grant that I may prove far more circumspect than my mother
and more reverent in deed. I utter these prayers on our behalf, but I ask that your
avenger appear to our foes, father, and that your killers may be killed in just retribution.
So I interrupt my prayer for good to oVer them this prayer for evil. But be a bearer of
blessings for us to the upper world, with the help of the gods and Earth and Justice
crowned with victory. Such are my prayers, and over them I pour out these libations. It
is right for you to crown them with lamentations, raising your voices in a chant for the
dead.’ (ll. 123–150, tr. Herbert Weir Smyth, [1926] 1957)
strike at the start of the proposed translation. There was no distinction at
that moment between the excitement I felt at the discovery of the trimeter as
the right metre for the opening and the analogies I could sense between the
predicaments of a sister aVronted by a tyrant in Thebes and a wife bereft by
English soldiery in Carriganimma in County Cork.
Thus Heaney assigned a trimeter verse structure to Antigone lines
as she calls for respect for her dead brother and immediately takes
action in spite of the state decree:
Ismene, quick, come here!
What’s to become of us?
Why are we always the ones?
(The Burial at Thebes 2004: 1)
By contrast Heaney used a four-beat rhythm for the chorus who
speak in a much more Xorid style. Heaney characterized this as: ‘the
four-beat, Old English alliterative line, the line of the veteran Anglo-
Saxons, gnomic and grim, but capable also of a certain clangour and
glamour’ (Heaney 2005: 173). Thus Heaney viewed Antigone as an
impatient, plain-speaking Irish woman and the chorus as well-
spoken but dispassionate English gentlemen, who reXect on the
situation but are not anxious to get involved.10 The language that
they use is carefully phrased and reXective, and the metre is more
drawn-out and slower by comparison with the anxious urgency of
Antigone. The four-beat rhythm, according to Heaney, ‘was an echo
of the metre that Anglo-Saxon poets used for their grim old pagan
wisdom and their new Christian hymns of praise, and it therefore
seemed right for a Chorus whose function involves both the utter-
ance of proverbial wisdom and the invocation of gods’ (Heaney
2004). The chorus opens with:
Glory be to brightness, to the gleaming sun,
Shining guardian of our seven gates.
Burn away the darkness, dawn on Thebes,
Dazzle the city you have saved from destruction.
(p. 8)
10 When Creon urges them to act as ‘agents of the law’, the chorus responds:
‘Younger men would be better for that job’ (p. 11).
So for Heaney the chorus was a kind of passive English voice reXecting
on life and current circumstances. At the same time this English voice
can appear threatening at times, such as in the ‘wonders’ chorus where
they warn against anyone taking action against the state:
But let him once
Overstep what the city allows,
Tramp down right or treat the law
Wilfully, as his own word,
Then let this wonder of the world remember:
He’ll have put himself beyond the pale.
(p. 17)
The phrase ‘beyond the pale’ is used several times in the play and
contains speciWc resonance for an Irish audience, where the pale
represented the area within English jurisdiction in Ireland, and
beyond the pale was a wild and unaccountable area where anything
might happen. In that phrase one can hear echoes of Art O’Leary and
the grim justice that was meted out to him.
By contrast with the urgency of the three-beat line of Antigone and
the more reXective four-beat line of the chorus, Heaney used iambic
pentameter11 for Creon as the voice of authority: ‘to honour patriots
in life and death.’ (p. 11) Creon establishes his authority over the
citizen chorus, declares the importance of civic over family duty, and
extols the value of strong leadership:
Worst is the man who has all the good advice
And then, because his nerve fails, fails to act
In accordance with it, as a leader should.
And equally to blame
Is anyone who puts the personal
11 Heaney’s use of various rhythms to diVerentiate character also reXects the

variety of rhythmic patterns in the original Greek that, according to GriYth (1999:
13, n.47), tends to be ignored in most translations, reducing the script ‘to a formless
monotone’. GriYth notes the diVerent use of language by the various characters in
the original Greek, with Antigone using simpler language than Ismene and a staccato
delivery, which is ‘more particular, personal, and direct’, while ‘Kreon’s rigid and
controlling temperament is represented throughout by the harsh imagery of his
language . . . and by his disrespectful habit of referring to people in the third person,
even when they are present . . . or, when he does address them directly, of doing so in
a crudely imperious manner’ (p. 20; see also pp. 36–7).
Above the overall thing, puts friend
Or family Wrst . . .
For the patriot,
Personal loyalty always must give way
To patriotic duty.
(p. 10)
Creon stresses the need for unity and loyalty to the cause:
Solidarity, friends,
Is what we need. The whole crew must close ranks.
The safety of our state depends upon it.
Our trust. Our friendships. Our security.
(p. 10)
In this passage, Heaney uses the aggressive dictatorial policies of
Creon not only as a metaphor for British colonial attitudes in Ireland
but also for American imperialism. Creon’s language starts to resem-
ble the rhetoric of George Bush in his war on terror. By emphasizing
such words as ‘patriot’, ‘patriotic duty’, ‘patriots in life and death’, as
well as ‘safety’ and ‘security’, Creon’s phraseology calls to mind the
post-9/11 climate of fear, loyalty (to the government), and vengeful-
ness, which was encouraged by the US president through the adop-
tion of the USA Patriot Act, the creation of the Department
of Homeland Security and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.12
Moreover, there is an underlying parallel between Creon’s treat-
ment of Polyneices and Bush’s denial of human rights in the inter-
rogation and imprisonment of anyone labelled as a ‘terrorist’. Creon
decrees:
12 One can see the evocation of Bush’s rhetoric more clearly by comparing this
passage with the Jebb (2006) translation, which Heaney used as a basis for his own
work: ‘For if anyone who directs the entire city does not cling to the best and wisest
plans, but because of some fear keeps his lips locked, then, in my judgment, he is and
has long been the most cowardly traitor. And if any man thinks a friend more
important than his fatherland, that man, I say, is of no account. Zeus, god who sees
all things always, be my witness—I would not be silent if I saw ruin, instead of safety,
marching upon the citizens. Nor would I ever make a man who is hostile to my
country a friend to myself, because I know this, that our country is the ship that bears
us safe, and that only when we sail her on a straight course can we make true friends.
Such are the rules by which I strengthen this city.’(Jebb 1900: ll. 177–92)
Never to grant traitors and subversives
Equal footing with loyal citizens.
(p. 10)
And with regard to Polyneices:
He is forbidden
Any ceremonial whatsoever.
No keening, no interment, no observance
Of any of the rites.
(p. 11)
The phrase ‘no observance of any of the rites’ in the performance of
the play echoed the denial of human rights and dignity to Iraqi and
other prisoners. At the time, the US military was being accused of
torturing prisoners, denying them access to lawyers, and justifying
such treatment because of the exceptional conditions engendered
by terrorism. (For a discussion of the US media’s justiWcation for
torturing prisoners, see Žižek 2002: 102–3.) Like George Bush, who
denied the applicability of the Geneva convention (relating to
prisoners of war) to those detained in Guantanamo Bay and Af-
ghanistan, Creon regards Polyneices as undeserving of human
rights.13 Teiresias later warns him in words that anticipated the
rising backlash in Iraq against the US military torture of prisoners
in Abu Ghraib prison:
. . . enemy cities [will] rise to avenge each corpse
You left dishonoured.
(p. 46)
Justifying the comparison between Creon and Bush, Heaney has
written (Heaney 2005: 170):
Early in 2003 we were watching a leader, a Creon Wgure if ever there was
one, a law-and-order bossman trying to boss the nations of the world into
uncritical agreement with his edicts in much the same way as Creon tries to
boss the Chorus of compliant Thebans into conformity with his.
13 Fleischer (2003); see also Žižek (2004). In his article, Žižek quotes Rumsfeld as
saying that the Geneva Convention is ‘out of date’.
Heaney regarded his version of the ‘wonders chorus’ as a ‘sort of
open letter’ to George Bush:
Let him once . . .
Tramp down right or treat the law
Wilfully, as his own word,
Then let this wonder of the world remember . . .
When he comes begging we will turn our backs.
(p. 17)
Like Bush, who boasted of the Taliban, ‘We’ll smoke ‘em out’,14 Creon
in Heaney’s version says of potential saboteurs: ‘I’ll Xush ‘em out’
(p. 3). And, virtually quoting Bush’s speech at a news conference in
2001, where he declared to coalition partners:15
You’re either with us or against us in the Wght against terror,
Creon warns:
Whoever isn’t for us
Is against us in this case.
(p. 3)
Again, Haimon’s line to Creon: ‘I ask you: reconsider. Nobody, /
Nobody can be sure they’re always right’ (p. 31) echoed Bush’s
behaviour in never admitting he was wrong, which he joked about
with the press on 5 May 2004, the day before he Wnally apologized to
the Iraqis for the abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison. When the chorus
suggest that Haimon might have a point, Creon answers: ‘Do my
orders come from Thebes and from the people?’(p. 33). Creon’s
refusal to listen to popular criticism evoked memories of Bush and
Blair not listening to the huge demonstrations in London and Dublin
against the war,16 as well as foreshadowing Donald Rumsfeld’s
14 ‘Bush: ‘‘We’re Smoking them out’’’, CNN, 26 November 2001: http://archives.
cnn.com/2001/US/11/26/gen.war.against.terror/ (accessed 13 January 2006).
15 ‘You are either with us or against us’, CNN, 6 November 2001: http://archives.
cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/gen.attack.on.terror/ (accessed 13 January 2006). In the
same speech, Bush threatened other countries with unspeciWed consequences for
failing to comply with America’s wishes for them to join in the coalition to invade
Afghanistan: ‘Over time it’s going to be important for nations to know they will be
held accountable for inactivity’.
16 The demonstration in Dublin on 15 February 2003 was one of the largest-ever
protest demonstrations (with about 100,000 people). The demonstrators in London
announcement, to the applause of US soldiers in Iraq on 13 May
2004, that he was no longer listening to media criticism: ‘I’ve stopped
reading newspapers’ (McCarthy 2004).
Another aspect of Heaney’s translation is the emphasis on money
as a corrupting force. As in the original play by Sophocles, Creon
accuses the guard and Teiresias of acting for Wnancial motives.17 This
theme hints at one of the legacies of colonialism in Ireland: the
neocolonial dependence on Britain and America, not only militarily
but also economically.18 One aspect of the reliance on foreign trade is
the currying of favour with British and American Governments for
economic investment in Ireland. As a result the Irish Government has
been continually tongue-tied when it comes to criticizing British and
American Governmental policies. Emblematic of this is the use of
Shannon airport as a strategic site for the transportation of arms and
personnel to the Middle East.19 Ireland makes a pretence of political
neutrality but has been dragged in as an accessory to the war on
terror. The Irish economy beneWts from the added income in landing
fees (and other generated income) from American military traYc
through Shannon airport. Thus, the reference in the play to the
power of money to corrupt has echoes in the Wnancial dependence
of Ireland on its bigger neighbours. It was a surprise and an embar-
rassment to the Irish Government when the imminent invasion of
Iraq generated one of the largest demonstrations in Dublin’s history,
and the Irish Prime Minister was mocked for trying to straddle the
fence (see, for example, O’Toole 2003).
on the same day were variously estimated at one and two million people (see Anderson
and Burke-Kennedy 2003 and ‘Thousands stage Iraq demo’, 27 September, BBC Website:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3143062.stm (accessed 13 January 2006)).
17 This dramaturgical device is also used by Sophocles in Oedipus Rex where
Oedipus accuses Teiresias in a similar manner (ll. 388–90). For a discussion of the
tragic hero alienating himself from his friends and advisors, see Knox (1966: 32–4).
18 According to the Irish Times: ‘Ireland is the second-most exposed European
country to the North American market, deriving 32.5 per cent of total revenues from
North America, behind the Netherlands at 41.8 per cent’ O’Cleary: (2004). The
references to bribery in the play would also have called to mind for the audience
the many current Dublin tribunals investigating domestic political corruption.
19 In an article in the Irish Times, Paul Cullen estimated the income from the US
military traYc through Shannon at 30 million euro. A further issue is whether the
Irish Government has allowed the CIA to route suspected terrorists through Shannon
to unknown destinations for interrogation and torture; see Cullen (2005).
While the language of Seamus Heaney’s translation is strongly
rooted in post-colonial and anti-imperial discourse, the production
of the play at the Abbey presented a diVerent agenda. In Ireland, the
Wgure of Antigone can evoke the memory of Bernadette Devlin
during the civil rights marches in Derry at the end of the 1960s.
Such was the eVect of Conall Morrison’s version of Antigone that
toured Ireland in 2003,20 especially as he cast an actress with a Derry
accent to play Antigone, juxtaposed with a very English-accented
Creon. Given the Heaney text, this might have been a likely choice.
However, rather than dressing Creon as Bush, the chorus as English
gentlemen (perhaps toeing the American line, like Blair, while pro-
viding some minor criticism), and casting Antigone as a Derry-
accented colleen, the director’s choice of Ruth Negga as Antigone
seemed striking. Rather than a pale-faced Irish lass, Negga looked
more Mediterranean and sounded more English than most of the
cast. Creon was dressed in a white suit and red sash somewhat
reminiscent of a Latin American dictator. Furthermore, the chorus
were dressed in beige suits and felt hats that seemed more European
than English. The only presentational connection with the war in
Iraq appeared in the set, which depicted a concrete fortress with a
rope net, which hinted at a kind of prison area underneath, and
sandy soil on the forestage.
In a sense, the choice of Lorraine Pintal, a Quebecoise, to direct the
play made a diVerent kind of post-colonial statement. The Abbey in its
centenary year was combining a retrospective of its repertory over the
last century with an outward-looking welcome to Europe and abroad.
Many of the productions at the National Theatre in 2004 were coming
from the new countries of the EU: Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, and so
on. Similarly, directors from abroad, such as Lorraine Pintal from
Quebec and Lázló Marton from Hungary, were presenting a diVerent
aesthetic from that to which the Abbey Theatre had been accustomed.21
In a sense, this production season was saying that Ireland was part of
20 Storytellers Theatre Company produced Antigone in a version by Conall Mor-
rison, which toured to Cork and Dublin in February and March 2003; see Causey
(2003) for a review of the production.
21 The Abbey Theatre has been regarded as a literary theatre placing heavy
emphasis on textual accuracy in production and staging Irish plays with elegant
dialogue, and presenting notions of national identity through peasant, historical, and
mythological characterization. The European and Canadian directors came from a
Europe and part of the wider theatrical world. As opposed to oVering a
programme that continually accented national identity, the centennial
year’s season was suggesting that Ireland was regarding itself as part of a
global community, rather than in a stultifying relationship with the old
British oppressor. Pintal’s production created an international perspec-
tive on stage where the costume, set, and sound design referred to no
particular country.
The references in the text to geopolitics were to some extent
upstaged in production by gender politics, which also features in
Heaney’s, as well as the original, text. In the opening sequence, Anti-
gone danced with Haimon and, subverting the ballroom dance where
the male leads, she took charge and left him abandoned. As a woman
of action and no regrets, Antigone forcefully challenged Creon’s
authority in the performance, such that his fear for his status rang true:
Have I to be
The woman of the house and take her orders?
(p. 22)
And later:
No woman here is going to be allowed
To walk all over us. Otherwise, as men
We’ll be disgraced.
(p. 31)
By contrast with Antigone, Eurydice, who has only a few lines in the
play, provided a silent presence throughout many scenes with Creon
(like a dutiful Laura Bush supporting her husband and not stealing
the limelight), until she rather lamely exited, snuYng out candles in
anticipation of her suicide.
At the same time, the emphasis on gender politics in the produc-
tion served as an analogy for the geopolitical relationships in the text.
This is quite a common trope in post-colonial discourse. As Williams
and Chrisman (1993: 18) have argued:
For some theorists and critics, colonial, imperial and indeed post-colonial or
national discourses are largely allegories of gender contests.
more visual and physical tradition of theatre in which the director often takes more
liberty with the text.
Thus, Ireland has often been posited as the feminine Other in
relation to the aggressive male British Empire, and so, in a romantic
nationalist interpretation, Antigone still can represent oppressed
Ireland Wghting for her rights, regardless of whether she looks Irish
or speaks with a Derry accent. Antigone as Ireland (or the nationalist
community in Northern Ireland) is clearly given the morally superior
position, justifying action against the colonial oppressor, whether
it involves acts of civil disobedience, hunger-strikes, or even more
violent acts. With regard to Creon’s edict, Antigone says:
I chose to disregard it . . .
If I had to live and suVer in the knowledge
That Polyneices was lying above ground
Insulted and deWled, that would be worse
Than having to suVer any doom of yours.
(p. 21)
And later:
I never did a nobler thing than bury
My brother Polyneices . . .
There’s no shame in burying a brother.
(p. 23)
Moreover, Haimon argues that the people support Antigone:
As far as they’re concerned,
She should be honoured—a woman who rebelled!
(p. 31)
Seamus Heaney, who moved from Northern Ireland to Dublin in
the 1970s during the height of the ‘troubles’, has often drawn atten-
tion in his poetry to his personal experience of the oppressive nature
of the British military presence in Northern Ireland.22 However, he
22 For example, in ‘The Toome Road’ ([1979] 1998b), the poet observes:
One morning early I met armoured cars
In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres,
All camouXaged with broken alder branches,
And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets.
How long were they approaching down my roads
As if they owned them?
says that he regretted the speciWc allusions to Northern Irish politics
in The Cure at Troy, his earlier adaptation of Philoctetes. He felt that
the references to a ‘police widow’ and ‘hunger-strikers’ in that ver-
sion reduced the eVectiveness of the play.23 In this second version of a
Greek tragedy, Heaney hoped to create a more universal message.24
Perhaps he succeeded,25 but the legacy of the British colonial past (as
well as the American imperial present) is still very much in evidence,
both in his memory and in his metre. Applying Hulme’s deWnition of
post-colonialism, one could conclude that Heaney may be involved
in a ‘process of disengagement from the whole colonial syndrome’,
but the process is a slow one, as that colonial syndrome ‘is probably
inescapable for all those whose worlds have been marked by that
set of phenomena’ (Loomba 1998: 18–19). Moreover, the American
Government has arguably adopted the mantle of the British Empire
(where the sun never sets) to engage in a perpetual war against terror,
so that ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ and US ‘vital interests’ may reign
everywhere in the world.26 Thus, Heaney’s version reXects that
Ireland’s emergence from under one empire seems only to have led
to its subservience to another.
23 Heaney mentioned this to my students in a classroom discussion in 1995; see

Wilmer (1998: 207).
24 Question and answer session with the Abbey Theatre audience, 27 April 2004.
25 The production received very mixed reviews, largely because of the direc-
tion rather than the adaptation. Meaney (2004), for example, criticized the direction
heavily concluding: ‘Antigone will, of course, survive this production, especially in
Heaney’s new version which has taken Sophocles’ dense, concentrated poetry and
decanted it into a beautifully transparent contemporary idiom.’ Heaney’s adaptation
received better reviews when it was revived in a production directed by Lucy Pitman-
Wallace at the Nottingham Playhouse in 2005, which depoliticized the setting and
costumes but retained the force of the text; see Dunnett (2005).
26 For a discussion of America’s policy of ‘perpetual war’, see Laxer (2005: 329).
Laxer argues: ‘We live in an age of the US Empire, which aggressively asserts its own
right to unilateral action, while demanding that the sovereignty of every other
political community be breached’ (p. 317).
Part III
Challenging Theory: Framing

Further Questions
14
‘The Same Kind of Smile?’ About the
‘Use and Abuse’1 of Theory in Constructing
the Classical Tradition
Freddy Decreus
T H E P O S T- G E N E R AT I O N VE R S US
GOOD OLD HUMANISM
In present-day cultural and intellectual discussions, we are constantly

reminded of the pervading existence of some post-feelings. What this
tricky preWx does is to tell us that people have realized from the
beginning of the century on (or more speciWcally, from the Parisian
May revolution of 1968) that something is over and that there has
emerged a deWnite gap between the times of former ideals (history
and knowledge as they used to be) and an era that came afterwards,
see Hall’s well-documented interpretation of the year 1969 (2004:1–
46). During these decades, Western history clearly went through an
important transitional period and a series of fundamental transform-
ations obliged us to re-examine our traditional habits of thinking,
1 In Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche ([1874: part II] 1998) discussed ‘The Use and
Abuse of History for Life’. This work has always fascinated me, and especially the idea
that (historical) discourses, in order to be valuable, should really be of actual
relevance for our concrete experiences and sensitivities (‘we need it for life and
action, not for a comfortable turning away from life and action’). Transferring it to
the domain of Classics, this statement means that the main discussions about our
disciplines really should concern life and the general public, not the maintenance of
the Academy as such. This reference may also be seen as a compliment to the
organizers of the colloquium, who stimulated us to actualize and to deWne our
profession of classical philologists as broadly as possible.
246 Challenging Theory: Framing Further Questions
talking, and writing. This post-feeling has not always signiWed a
radical new departure or a revolutionary new start; rather, it has
often implied a sharpened awareness of former ideological and
intellectual positions.2 In this period of transition, a great number
of Welds of human experience, and hence sciences, were concerned,
which made this process of change look neither an historical nor a
philosophical ‘accident’: indeed, for centuries, human sciences both
used and questioned principles belonging to the Cartesian process of
cognition, both favoured and criticized traditional techniques of
colonizing the mind, and privileged them as cornerstones of ration-
ality and scientiWc behaviour. Still modernity, starting in the Age of
Enlightenment, discovered a world that could be described in em-
pirical, objective, and rational terms, but, at the same time, from
Cézanne, Mahler, and Mallarmé on, it was fascinated by the explo-
sion of light, sounds, and words.
One of the latest searches for this ultimate proof of rational
thinking, twentieth century structuralism, stressing the systematic
interference of phenomena and wanting to detect fundamental prin-
ciples or invariants,3 made people believe in a new scientiWc object-
ivity and stimulated the quest for underlying structures of the mind
that could account for the human condition in general. However,
from the sixties on, its role was taken over by a post-structuralism
that rejected all totalizing and foundational processes (Young 2004).
Signifying systems were no longer considered stable and unambigu-
ous representations of a world that could be known in a direct way,
isomorphic with human thought. Notions that had always been
considered ‘natural’ (like history, humanism, tradition, freedom,
patriarchy, etc.) turned out to be speciWc constructions of the (West-
ern) mind; they were in fact ‘cultural’. In the wake of Roland Barthes, a
great number of intellectuals transferred this idea of doxa (the ‘voice’
2 Fokkema (1986: 82): ‘The world view of Postmodernism is the product of a long
process of secularization and dehumanisation’. For a diVerent interpretation of
modernity, see Max Weber ([1905] 2003) (modernity starting with the Age of
Enlightenment, and leading to both the disenchantment and rationalization of the
world), and Lyotard (1983) (a postmodern plea for radical plurality). See also the
reply from Habermas (1980) and the application of the Habermas-Lyotard discussion
to Classics in Rocco (1997).
3 Cf. Saussure’s language, Propp’s fairy tale motives, Troubetzkoy’s phonemes,
Lévi-Strauss’ mythemes, Barthes’ gustemes, etc.
‘The Same Kind of Smile?’ 247
of nature, or public opinion, and the social consensus it enhances) to
diVerent cultural representations in order to ‘de-doxify’ them, to ‘de-
naturalize’ them (see Barthes [1975] 1977 and Hutcheon 1989). In
fact, what had to be analysed was diVerent versions of the way that
reason has been functioning in diVerent political and ideological
contexts. Hence the attempts made by Michel Foucault (1973; 1977)
to delineate ‘discursive practices’, ways that revealed the historical
functioning of knowledge and power, an exercise that allowed him to
discover an ‘archaeology of knowledge’. It became obvious that a
culture never was made up by ultimate or innate explications, but
rather by patterns of discourse shaping both our everyday life and our
scientiWc behaviour. Developments in the philosophy of science were
less dramatic and spectacular, yet, even so, from Thomas Kuhn (1962)
on, a view of science rooted in post-empiricism began to show that
even the most ‘normal’ practice of (exact) ‘science’ is also to be
situated within a whole framework of sociological and historical
(r)evolutions, and has to be considered ‘paradigmatic’.4
In the eyes of many, positions like these lead us into a post-
humanist abyss. Indeed, Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan made us forget
that we are all characterized by a stable Self, by operations that are
largely based upon order, rationality, and free will; in short, it became
apparent that we were not, as human beings, completely in control of
ourselves. In the end, the concept of metaphysical man as deWned by
Enlightenment and idealist philosophy, leading as it did to the
assumption of an autonomous individual, governed by a sovereign
mind that was the source of all processes of meaning and value, had
to be abandoned (Schechner 1982). It was replaced by the notion of
the ‘subject’, created through constant interaction, dialectic integration
of Otherness, and changing cultural practices. In a post-structural
sense, deWning a person in terms of humanistic values never was
meant to rest upon the support of transcendent and universal truths.
Hence, humanism has been analysed by contemporary studies in
4 For the notion of progressive and regressive research programmes determining

scientiWc development, see: Lakatos and Musgrave (1970). For the idea that in general,
in science, ‘anything goes’, see Paul Feyerabend (1975). His outline for the development
of science is: ‘Science is an essentially anarchistic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is
more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order
alternatives’ (p. 17).
terms of the changing contexts of its deWnition. It has therefore mainly
been diVerentiated in terms of romantic, idealizing, liberal, and so-
cialist constructions; that is to say, it has been placed as so many local
and historical versions of humanism versus anti-humanism, thus
exposing, in the wake of Nietzsche, ‘the illusory or fraudulent preten-
sions of much nineteenth-century humanism’ (Davies 1997: 36). That
is why a post-structuralist subject deWnitely had to acknowledge the
big Other that existed—outside us—before we were born, and that
turned us into Strangers to Ourselves (Kristeva 1991), characterized by
a post-essentialist desire.
Research like this can also be captured in terms of a series of
successive ‘deaths’: indeed, most of the new methodologies implied
the death of forms of essentialism, and also of the existence of an
independent reality beyond language, such as God, the patriarchal
order, the Self, consciousness . . . After the death of God, prophesied
by Nietzsche in 1882, came the death of Man (Foucault 1966), the
death of the author (Barthes [1984] 1968), followed later by the
death of (traditional) history (White 1973), the death of character
(Fuchs 1996), and even by the death of (representational) theatre
(Lehmann 1999); see also Baudrillard (1992). Since post-structural-
ism was particularly interested in the way that subjects constantly
produce and reproduce meaningful stories and symbolizing systems,
this practice has also been considered post-metaphysical. Already in
1957, Roland Barthes (Mythologies) studied the way that French
bourgeois society created images of itself, generating a whole system
of ‘myths’ replete with bourgeois ideology.
Post-modernism attacked the idea that contemporary societies are
still organized by means of grand narratives. This attitude signalled a
lack of conWdence regarding the stories (Progress, Emancipation,
Liberalism, Socialism, etc.) a culture imagined about its own func-
tioning. Contrary to Old Historicists, who considered texts to be
transparent windows through which one could detect the past in a
direct way, New Historicists studied the whole realm of culturally
connected contexts and speciWc discourses governing the actual
insertion of the human into the temporal and the local. (For an
application, see Decreus 2004a: 237–61). Post-essentialist of course is
their denial that history, conceived as a whole, must have a meaning
(see White 1973 and Greenblatt 1980).
Put in the most general way, post-colonialism continues the philo-
sophic and ideological assumptions shared by most of these POST-
movements and applies them to the political, economic, and cultural
practices that characterize a politics of resistance and reaction to
colonialism. It raises the question of the role and functioning of
Western theory, language, formation of texts, and discourse and can
be seen as a part of recent attempts in Western critical theory to
deconstruct traditional cultural ideas that have been taken as natural
or normal. In a more concrete way, it investigates the use of binary
thinking, universal models, teleological structures, and essentialist
positions. From the very start, post-colonialism has analysed the ideo-
logical and cultural impact of Western colonialism on other civilizations
and national origins, but, as such, it cannot yet be considered a uniWed
and well-deWned discipline. It is a heterogeneous collection of decon-
structive practices that study processes of diVerence and diversity, and
scrutinize our use of binary ways of organizing our daily percept-
ions, such as the West versus the Rest, totalizing history versus local
histories, self/other, us/others, mind/body, white/non-white, oppressor/
oppressed. In the wake of post-structuralism, it sees reality as being
much more fragmented, diverse and culture-speciWc than did trad-
itional humanism.5 It pays more attention to speciWc histories, to the
local establishment and re-establishment of value and meaning, and to
the way that physicality has been used to express Self and Other.
C L A SS I C S A N D E S SE NT I A L I S M
Every statement about ‘classics in a post-colonial setting’ has to be

situated in the above mentioned epistemological and philosophical
climate, which, at Wrst sight, might give the idea of a very hybrid and
inXationary Weld of theory and practice, but which, nevertheless, is
built upon a variation of a number of common themes. Although
discussions like these have been fundamental in the actual practice of
5 See the hot discussions between Schechner, Brook, Pavis and Bharucha about the
intercultural staging of The Mahabharata, in Pavis ([1990] 1992: 183–216 and 1996),
Bharucha ([1990]1993: 68–87).
all of the humanities over the last century, generally, they have not
been the major concern of classicists. Most of the latter think that
they are not touched by (critical) theory and that ‘Classics’ does not
have to prove its credentials at all, a long lasting Western tradition
being proof enough to motivate the high standards of its value and
survival, compare with Decreus (ed. 2002). ‘Theory’ even became one of
the most dangerous and polluting notions in a number of contem-
porary discussions in the Weld of classics, the profession of ‘theoret-
ician’ being a main term of abuse, amounting almost to a synonym
for ‘anti-Western’ (Hanson and Heath 1998: 96). Current interpret-
ations of the responsibility for having ‘killed Homer’ set oV from
clearly essentialist positions: indeed, some classicists pretend to know
what invariable ‘Greek wisdom’ is, how one can turn it into a corpus
of moralistic sentences, and make a claim on fundamental values that
have remained the same throughout history and have resulted in the
‘free West’. A pronounced essentialism invites some to say that
we must acknowledge ‘our unchanging Western center’ and respect
‘the blueprint’ [the Greeks provided] ‘for an ordered and humane
society that could transcend time and space’, really ‘a foundation’,
since ‘human nature is constant over time and place’ (Hanson and
Heath 1998: 93–100, 40).6 Reductive statements like these score well
in contemporary American neoconservative camps, from the highly
selective reading of Greek mythology in William Bennett’s Book of
Virtues. A Treasury of Moral Stories (1993) and his Moral Compass to
it (1995), to the highly selective interpretation of Western history in
Donald Kagan (1995), and a ‘cartoon version of ancient Greece’,
presenting ‘a simplistic, ahistorical view of human nature’ (duBois
2001: 25). Back-to-basics, an ideological programme promoted dur-
ing the Reagan Government (1981–89), and patronized by the same
William Bennett, former Secretary of Education, even succeeded in
selling a national bestseller, ‘Cultural Literacy’, which emphasized the
importance of ‘5000 essential names, phrases, dates, and concepts’
6 Bassi (1998: 247): ‘Within scholarly disciplines and practices, the ancient past is
constructed out of the desire for universal essences embodied in a universal subject.
Whether we view the Greek theater through the lens of Aristophanes’ comic wit,
Freud’s Oedipal dream, or the history of Classical scholarship, all the lenses attest to
the force of that desire.’
(Hirsch 1987) and restoring traditional visions on the ‘canon’ (Allan
Bloom 1987; see also Harold Bloom 1994).7
DiVerent forms of closure, a more contemporary term for essen-
tialism, were at the heart of what Don Fowler (2000: 5) considers to
be a caricature of classics:
‘Closure’ in all its senses has often been seen as a distinguishing character-
istic of classicism. The classic work is a rounded organic whole, simplex et
unum [‘simple and unique’]: it ends in resolution, ‘all passion spent’.
Antiquity is a closed system, providing a canon of texts whose perfection
is beyond time: criticism of those texts is an eternal return, the rediscovery of
the timeless verities that they contain. The Classical Tradition is a golden
chain which enables us to ‘take our journey back’, as Edwin Muir puts it.
And at the end of all our journeying are those same everlasting Forms of
Beauty that have always been there and always will be. No one, of course, has
ever really believed this nonsense.
Essentialist and Eurocentric is the positivistic and ultimately roman-
tic idea of one continent, one history, one culture, one homeland,
which eliminated Africa and Asia from our history books, which
restricted the possibility of studying comparative philosophy and
religion on an academic level,8 and cut back the Dionysian heritage
till Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. Purity, in a racial and
mythic sense, has a long history of fetishizing and idolizing ancient
Greece as the only origin of Western civilization.9 Ernest Renan’s
Prayer on the Acropolis ([1883] 1956) led him to invent ‘le miracle
7 Hirsch (1987) and Bloom (1987) dealt with the idea that the masterpieces of our
cultures should be studied, once again, by an élite and not be disturbed by the ideals
of the Parisian May Revolution, which pleaded for social commitment and a system-
atic critical distrust. For a systematic review of all critical reactions on Hirsch, see
Barbara Hernstein Smith (1990: 75–94). See also the reaction of Paul Lauter (1991),
who argues that Hirsch’s list was no less than a political and ideological programme.
Harold Bloom (1994) studied twenty-six writers, ‘with a certain nostalgia’, knowing
very well that ‘things have however fallen apart, the center has not held, and mere
anarchy is in the process of being unleashed upon what used to be called ‘‘the learned
world’’ ’ (p. 1).
8 Finkelberg and Stroumsa (2003: 2): ‘Odd as it may appear, there seems to have
been no comparative study of canon’.
9 Concerning Bernal’s claims to replace the ‘Aryan Model’ by the ‘(Revized)
Ancient Model’ and his ideas about racism in eighteenth century (esp.) German
thoughts, see: Palter (1996: 349–402).
grec’, a second miracle next to one from Judaism, but the recognition
of those two cultural wonders never prevented him or his fellow
researchers (in the same paradigm) from purifying Christianity from
its Semitic aspects.
Nowadays, culture is no longer considered a homogeneous, reli-
able and knowable set of Eurocentric values, ‘the best that has been
known and said’ (Arnold [1873] 1914). On the contrary, it is inter-
preted in terms of conXict, diVerence and hybridity,10 and leads to
deWnitions of culture as ‘a declaration of war’ and ‘a battleground’
(Hamacher 1997: 286, 291), or as a ‘clash of civilizations’ (Hunting-
ton 1996), as ‘colonial’ by nature (Belsey 2002: 64).11 This change of
perspectives may imply that ‘our’ culture is in crisis, that our Western
culture is ‘getting tired’, as Pavis said ([1990] 1992: 13) and that the
barbarians are already at the gates (Skinner 1989, especially 208–9).
More speciWcally in terms of an interpretation of Classics, this leads
to a literature of ‘writing back’, of ‘responding to critics’, ‘revisiting’,
and using the magic power of notions like ‘heresy’, ‘demise’,
‘bonWre’, ‘abuse’.12 For classicists, it is indeed an ‘epistemic shift’
when ‘Greekness’ is deWned today as a permanent cultural battleWeld,
‘shaking the foundations’ and challenging periods of discontinuity
when Greek civilization was not important. Greekness (and ‘Classics’)
is not something that permanently ‘is’, but that is always ‘becoming’:
it changes and can be forgotten, it is based upon an interdisciplinary
(and no longer purely literary) approach, and is part of a more
general problem of understanding cultural identity and globalisation
(Goldhill 2002: 1–13). This is the moment when it becomes possible
also to recognize a ‘classical moment’ in other cultures, ‘across
languages and cultures to see whether some of its eVects and pre-
suppositions are similar, or whether the case of Wfth-century Athens
10 Bourdieu (1979), de Certeau (1988); Said (1993); Huntington (1996); de Vries

and Weber (eds. 1997); Gilroy (2000); Nancy (2000).
11 Discussing Jacques Derrida’s ([1996] 1998) Monolingualism of the Other: ‘Cul-
ture is always ‘‘colonial’’, in that it imposes itself by its power to name the world and
to instil rules of conduct. No one inhabits a culture by nature. As a matter of
deWnition, no culture comes naturally. We are all exiles’. See consequently, the battles
of translating languages and worldviews (Hardwick, 2000: 9–22).
12 Lefkowitz and Rogers (1996); Hanson and Heath (1998); Berlinerblau (1999);
Wyke and Biddiss (1999); Moore (2001); Hanson et al. (2001).
was singular in its dominance over Western European culture’
(Holst-Warhaft and McCann 1999: ix–xi).13
T H E TR AG I C A N D UN I V E RS A L I S M
Recently, a number of intriguing questions have been asked about

(Greek) tragedy and its place in an epistemological discussion about
universals. Is tragedy a typical product of the Western imagination?
Since tragedy, in four or Wve waves, kept on (re)appearing in Western
history, one has to accept that the tragic experience is really constitutive
of the Western perception of life. And if tragedy so dominantly and
necessarily characterizes the West and only the West, can it be anything
more, in colonial and post-colonial stagings, than a borrowing from the
Western homeland, a peripheric and hybrid construction, bound pro-
foundly to disturb local visions on man, his language and imagination?
The most famous statement about the kind of cultural position
occupied by Western tragedy, has been made by George Steiner
(1961: 3–4), and repeated ever since:
All men are aware of tragedy in life. But tragedy as a form of drama is not
universal. Oriental art knows violence, grief, and the stroke of natural or
contrived disaster; the Japanese theatre is full of ferocity and ceremonial
death. But that representation of personal suVering and heroism which we
call tragic drama is distinctive of the western tradition. . . . Tragedy is alien to
the Judaic sense of the world.
In this fragment, Steiner diVerentiates three notions which, for the
sake of the discussion, have to be considered apart: tragic events
occurring in real-life time (something lamentable); tragedy as a form
of drama, to be studied as a literary, logocentric, and generic com-
position; and the tragic as a philosophical (ontological, existential,
13 ‘The idea of a ‘‘classical moment’’ is something that begs, in this age, to be

undone. It reeks of elitism, of Wxed canons, of the romantic worship of an idealized
past. ‘‘Classical’’ is doomed by its relation to ‘‘class’’, ‘‘moment’’, by its temporal and
cultural claim to uniqueness. In an age perhaps unparalleled in its willingness to
question its own bases of legitimacy, its prejudices, and its canons, the idea of a single
‘‘classical moment’’ that deWned our culture was bound to come under scrutiny.’
(Holst-Warhaft and McCann 1999:ix–xi)
religious) dimension of life (Eagleton 2003: 9).14 William Storm
(1998: 28–33; also compare with Most 2000: 18–32), in a more
reWned form of this theory (hardly mentioned by classicists), pro-
posed to discriminate between tragedy, the tragic, the Dionysian, and
tragic vision. Tragedy, in the West, he said, is ‘among the most
ephemeral of all artistic phenomena’, since it has Xourished in only
four historical epochs (hence the ‘desultory quality of its appear-
ances’). By contrast, the condition of the tragic: ‘is not bound by any
such historical frameworks. . . . The tragic, when understood purely
as an ontological situation—as distinct from its select manifestations
in art—is timeless. It is eternal to precisely the extent that mortal
beings live and continue to be aware, not only of their own mortality
but of the divisive forces that inevitably separate being from all that is
held as valuable’ (compare with Poole 1987: 2–3). The ‘Dionysian’
then, being intimately related to the tragic, is its more active and
aggressive side, which in dramatic productions leads to sparagmos.
Finally, tragic vision can be deWned as: ‘the degree to which such a
condition is felt by a particular society, or the extent to which it
demands aesthetic expression’, a speciWc need to express a tragic
world view by speciWc writers, cultures and periods. These four
categories must allow us to discuss the main issues pertaining to
the (post)-colonial study of tragedy.15
Tragedy is a Western generic and literary creation, which has
mainly been studied from a Eurocentric and literary perspective,
and has mostly been analysed as an immanent structure. It has
been functioning as a quarry for elementary building materials
pertaining to character, action, and plot, but has remained ultimately
a house of words, inhabited for rationalistic (and not pragmatic, or
context-based) reasons. This is a logical consequence of the restricted
design of Aristotelian Poetics, which treated tragedy as a form of
poetry, not philosophy (Most 2000: 15–35).
14 ‘Like comedy, it can refer at once to works of art, real-life events and world-
views or structures of feeling’ (Eagleton 2003:9).
15 The history of Western tragedy, the nature of the tragic as a generative source of
art and philosophy and the speciWc vision, world view, or ‘sense of life’ (Unamuno) it
generates, have been aVecting classical studies only in a marginal way. Classicists are
also poorly represented in recent books like Tragedy (Drakakis and Liebler 1998),
‘Tragik’. Von Oidipus bis Faust (Boehm 2001), or Sweet Violence. The Idea of the Tragic
(Eagleton 2003).
As an expression of logos, of Western logos, tragedy has been
ordering thoughts and themes in terms of a ‘realistic theatre’, based
on a textual bedrock and performed in an illusionary, mimetic way,
ending its historical career in (neo)classicist times (after Racine,
according to Steiner 1961). Mieke Kolk (2003: 68–76) has studied
the ‘westernness of the western model’ of tragedy, and more speciW-
cally, the ‘ideological structure of story, plot, telos and perspective’.
Referring to Lotman’s analyses of the origin of plot, she has pointed
at the becoming of ‘the hero that does or undoes norms and values of
the artistic texts reXecting the cultural context’ and which has been
criticized in feminist and cultural studies (see also Lehmann 1999).
In her words:
The predominance of the white/male subject and the overall question: who
is allowed to speak, to come into existence, to plead with us and win our
sympathies have been topics of discussion in intercultural debates and in
avant-gardistic artistic processes, striving for multiform perspectives and
diVerent speaking-positions in their texts.
In the same way, Paglia ([1990] 1991: 7), analysing tragedy as: ‘a male
paradigm of rise and fall, a graph in which dramatic and sexual
climax are in shadowy analogy’, has asked attention for ‘climax [as]
another western invention’, since ‘traditional eastern stories are pic-
aresque, horizontal chains of incident’, having ‘little suspense or
sense of an ending’. Marianne McDonald (1992: 56, 210), in her
interpretation of Tadashi Suzuki’s theatrical style, has conWrmed
these diVerences:
There are no tenses in Japanese, as we know them, and no such thing as
causality, in the Western sense. . . . And ‘unlike Barthes’s—and Aristotle’s—
model, the shosetsu (sc. the artistic medium) rejects the interpretive begin-
ning, middle, and end.
She has explicitly called this perpetual longing ‘for clearcut beginnings,
development, and endings’ an example of the ‘culturally imperialist’
criticism that ‘Edward Said dealt with so brilliantly in his book Orien-
talism’. After the collapse of Aristotelian and Brechtian poetics, both of
which deWned tragedy in terms of: ‘its unitary language, . . . unity in the
story-line, its utopian ending and its diVerent perspectives well organ-
ized under the authorial mastermind’(Kolk 2003: 73), (post)modern
theatre/tragedy refused to accept any longer the mimetic relationship
between representation and referent, and ended in a postmodern
‘landscape’ of association and fragmentation, in which all the formal
building stones gradually lost their old meaning and function (see
Poschmann 1997; Lehmann 1999; Decreus 2004b: 11–35). However,
the extinction of neoclassicist and realistic/mimetic forms of tragedy
never implied the death of tragic experience as such (Aylen 1964;
Domenach 1967; Omesco 1978; MaVesoli 2000). Just as Greek epic
(especially The Iliad ) and poetry, long before the arrival of Wfth-century
Athenian tragedy, already expressed so many tragic themes, contem-
porary society transferred the tragic feeling to other artistic Welds.
However, in the intercultural atmosphere of the last centuries, thematic
and formal aspects of Greek tragedy have also become cherished
examples for non-Western artists (Hardwick 2000; Hall 2004: 1–46).
Its form and content have been copied, translated, transferred, adapted
in an incredible variety of ways, illustrating the political, social, and
existential situation of the new homelands, stressing the universal
importance of their cultural heritage, but also using Greek tragedy as
a favourite ‘arena for the articulation of anti-colonialist ideas’ (Hard-
wick 2004a: 219).
The tragic experience (never an Aristotelian concern) addresses
the functioning of human ‘selfhood’ and the permanent threat of
those rending and separating forces that might invade it. In the eyes
of Storm (1998: 1, 71), it is Dionysus, as the ‘render of men’, who:
. . . becomes the representation of a sparagmos that may have a spiritual or
psychological manifestation as well as a corporeal one, and it is this rending
that has always been central to the experience of selfhood in tragic drama.
Whereas the protagonist is typically involved in a struggle toward selfhood,
the Dionysian, or ‘tragic’ antagonism stands forever in the way of such a
realization. A tragic paradigm may in this sense be formulated as an Oedi-
pus-Dionysus dialectic: the will toward cohesive identity (‘I will know who
I am’) antagonized by the inescapable sentence to sparagmos.
Interesting for post-colonial reasons is the question where this tragic
feeling found its origins. Steiner (1996: 535–6) called tragedy the
‘dramatic representation, enactment, or generation of a highly spe-
ciWc world-view’. This world-view is ‘summarized in the adage pre-
served among the elegies ascribed to Theognis, but certainly older,
and present also in Middle Eastern sacred texts: ‘‘It is best not to be
born, next best to die young’’ ’. However, like most Western intellec-
tuals, he refrains from taking the next step and does not investigate
non-Western predecessors such as The Epic of Gilgamesh (last redac-
tion around 1200 ce, texts covering more than 1000 years). Andrew
George (1999: xxxii–xxxvi), author of its recent English translation,
has warned us to read the story of the ruler of Uruk, the absolute
favourite of Rainer Maria Rilke’s, neither as a myth nor as a religious
poem. He points to the Assyriologist William L. Morgan, who has:
. . . recently expounded Gilgamesh’s story as a tale of the human world,
characterized by an ‘insistence on human values’ and an ‘acceptance of
human limitations’. This observation led him to describe the epic as ‘a
document of ancient humanism’, and indeed, even for the ancients, the
story of Gilgamesh was more about what it is to be a man than what it is
to serve the gods. As the beginning and end of the epic make clear, Gilga-
mesh is celebrated more for his human achievement than for his relationship
with the divine.
Referring to Thorkild Jakobsen, who once described the epic as a
‘story of learning to face reality, a story of growing up’, Andrew
George summarizes the story of Gilgamesh as follows: the king:
. . . begins as an immature youth, capable of anything and accepting no
check; eventually he comes to accept the power and reality of Death, and
thus he reaches reXective maturity.
But, what is more:
. . . in charting the hero’s progress, the poet reXects profoundly on youth and
age, on triumph and despair, on men and gods, on life and death. It is
signiWcant that his concern is not just Gilgamesh’s glorious deeds but also
the suVering and misery that beset his hero as he pursues his hopeless quest.
And therefore:
. . . the message of the Gilgamesh epic is the vanity of the hero’s quest:
pursuit of immortality is folly, the proper duty of man is to accept the
mortal life that is his lot and enjoy it to the full.
Although the author does not explicitly use ‘tragic’ vocabulary, one
must recognize that this story, the most important Oriental forerun-
ner of Achilles’ tragic behaviour in The Iliad (West 1997), shows all
the symptoms of later Greek tragic experience. In fact, what Morgan
has been describing, is one of the Wrst accounts of the tragic feeling as
such. It therefore comes as no surprise that F. M. Th. De Liagre Böhl
(1971), in his article on Gilgamesh in the Reallexikon der Assyriologie
(III, 364), plainly considers The Epic of Gilgamesh as a forerunner of
Greek tragic poetry (see Janssen 2004: 323).
Its origins may be Mesopotamian but intercultural investigation
on the tragic experience proves that this hypothesis about life and
death, selfhood and identity, is far from being a universal answer.
A quick glance at Buddhist or Taoist conceptions reveals totally
diVerent basic attitudes. As has been proposed many times, the tragic
situation Wrst sets itself up against nature and then dramatizes ‘its
own inevitable fall as a human universal, which it is not’ (see Paglia
([1990]1991): 6–7; compare with Decreus 2003: 61–82). Chirpaz
(1998: 108) noticed that Greek tragedy Wrst creates a position of
being torn apart, in order to add later on a moment of reconciliation,
‘par un autre détour’ (‘by another detour’). In doing so, he says,
tragedy, from the very start, introduces a major distortion between
man and world, and between man and himself.
Greek tragedy only arrives at wisdom and illumination, after
having postulated and enlarged an existential ‘gap’ between man
and nature, life and death, being and becoming. Hence a generalized
Western sensibility to the extreme fragility, speciWcity and unique-
ness of the human person, accompanied by feelings of culpability,
fear of death and personal loss. Apparently, the Wrst mythopoetic
processes responsible for the creation of cosmogony, theogony and
anthropogony generated totally diVerent imaginations in the East
and the West, inviting Western minds to privilege the exploration of
rationalism (understanding an objective world), Buddhist minds to
look for a mystic kernel (experiencing a mystic authenticity and
meditating on the presence of the numinous), and Taoist minds to
explore the internal yin-yang dynamism of Tao (adapting oneself to
the cosmos, practising non-transcendental processes of ‘doing nothing’,
wu-wei). In those three diVerent world views, trying to get to know
yourself resulted in foregrounding processes of ‘Being’, ‘Not-Being’, and
‘Becoming’, respectively, and in creating three fundamentally diVerent
ontological and epistemological constructions of identity. The Western
imagination clearly supported the idea that objects and persons can be
entirely understood, since this world is considered intelligible and
(rational) interpretation is believed to lead to the discovery of truth.16
Nature, with all its gifts and riches, is mainly regarded as a source which
has to be reorganized and must obey human needs.
Lately, one of the most famous Japanese directors, Tadashi Suzuki,
staging his Oedipus Rex in 2000, said (Suzuki, in Karasmanis 2000:
57–9):
Noh focuses on the vanity of human passions seen under the vision of
eternity, whereas Greek tragedy stresses the indefatigable power of the
human spirit in Wghting against Fate. Even though the Wght is destined
to be lost, Greek heroes overwhelm us with their will to know the whole
truth about their failure. Rather than indulging in reminiscences, they dare
to look the present misfortune in the face and act to enlarge their aware-
ness of the predicament. Oedipus is the representative case: with all the
sinister premonitions, he pursues his own past sins like the severest of
prosecutors.17
This totally diVerent attitude towards the Wnal order of things is the
reason why, in his staging of Greek tragedy, Suzuki refrains from
showing the last awful sequences (Sophocles’ Oedipus), softens the
Wnal outcome of things, while explicitly drawing lots of circles on the
stage (Euripides’ Bacchae, Clytemnestra;), and leads his productions
often enough to an open-ended conclusion. In his opinion, catharsis
mainly creates the occasion for new calamities and, therefore, the
cycle of life and death is the only absolute certitude people have; this
is also the reason why, at the end of many plays, ghosts and spirits
return to evoke the everlasting revenge of death (The Trojan Women,
Clytemnestra). Commenting on his Düsseldorf production of Oedi-
pus (2002), Suzuki used the Buddhist terminology of the unfathom-
able and inscrutable depths of the ocean to illustrate the hopeless
eVorts of the Greek hero (Suzuki 2002: 92):
16 Libbrecht (1995–2002). See the diYculties a Western mind has in understand-

ing and staging a buddhist ‘koan’, an exercise and meditation in going beyond
apparent oppositions (cf. ‘The sound of one hand clapping’, staged by Jan Fabre,
Ballet of Frankfurt, 1993 ); cf. Suzuki, Fromm, and De Martino (1960). For the use of
Orientalism in Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, see: Mulrooney (2002 especially
chapter 2).
17 See also Suzuki, in Storch, 2002: 89–96; in general, Carruthers and Yasunari,
2004: 124–79.
History is an ocean of memories. Normally we only see its surface. But,
sometimes, terrible facts rise up from the depths of the ocean and show us
what caused the suVerings of our deceased ancestors and what they fought
against. It tells us that the fundamental problems have yet to be solved and
must not be forgotten, that we must constantly be aware of their existence
and that we must go on Wghting.
That is why Marianne McDonald, writing on his productions, says
(McDonald 1992: 44):
In Suzuki’s presentations, one is continuously aware of the eternal, and
of the powerlessness of the individual to Wght cosmic forces. There is a
sense of futility that makes the suVerings even more pathetic than in
Euripides.
Or, talking about the same productions (McDonald 2002: 154):
Time is perceived in cycles rather than in Wxed and discrete periods. The
Xuidity of the Zen world predominates, and what is required of us is
the freedom and abandon of a ‘mind of a Wsh’ as it swims in water to appre-
ciate fully Suzuki’s reality.
Therefore, in his 2002 version of Oedipus, Suzuki called Oedipus’
internal struggles ‘conXicts which can never be resolved’ and visual-
ized them by drafting lots of scenic circles that Oedipus had to follow
(Suzuki 2002: 96):
The circle stands for a permanent, unchanging obsession of the heart,
worrying away constantly at the problem. In traditional Japanese theatre,
circular movements are called ‘insane dance’ and represent madness. If an
animal has something wrong with it, physically or ‘mentally’, it will always
move in circles.
No wonder that the idea of karma also determines the Buddhist
interpretation of Oedipus’ fate, or, in the words of one of Dave Wil-
liams’s students in Taiwan, when questioned about the ending of this
tragedy: ‘The reason that Oedipus has such a bad fate is that perhaps he
had done too many bad things in his last life’ (Williams 1999: 217).
Answers like these make it clear that tragic vision is a factor of
stark diVerentiation between as many diVerent answers to the tragic
experience as such. Often enough, in the West, philosophy has been
in the act of deploring the limited nature of the condition humaine,
interpreting life, from the very start as an irreparable loss (Orr 1981;
Desmond 1995), as an absurd proposal (Sartre, Beckett). On the
other hand, others have welcomed the tragic as a sane and brave
attitude towards life (Nietzsche, Camus). In regular Christian, Is-
lamic, or Marxist interpretations, the tragic is an impossible and
unwelcome guest, since in those three ‘grand narratives’ the world
is conceived as a place where, at the end, no unresolved problems
should remain. In Christianity, from the outset, a fundamental
kind of reconciliation between God and Man has been planned,
leaving Man enough freedom to cope with God’s soteriological
intentions.
For that reason, really tragic tragedies are non-compatible with
any plan of salvation or any vision of an ordered life. It was not by
accident that the Bacchae was totally unknown to Dave Williams’s
Taiwanese students (Williams 1999: 214):
The Chinese are well-known for their preference for stability, as attested
to by the dominance of Confucianism for over two millennia; it is quite
possible that the sight of an authority-Wgure such as Pentheus being
utterly destroyed by an outside deity might simply be, in the Foucauldian
sense, unthinkable, whereas Oedipus himself brings about his own de-
struction while achieving spiritual insight as a result. Moreover, the
gender hierarchy in Chinese culture remains heavily biased in favor of
males; for example, even today many companies will Xatly refuse to do
business with a woman from another company, no matter how qualiWed.
The powerful, violent, and successful maenads might simply arouse so
much masculine anxiety that the Taiwanese frame of reference cannot
acknowledge them.
Eastern visions of life in general are not interested in representing the
consequences of a stubborn search for knowledge, or in questioning
the limitations of the Self. The (world) views of Western authors,
dramas, societies, and historical periods, over the course of 2500
years, have been reXecting all possible aspects of the tragic vision,
not in a continuous Xow, but in a series of shifting moments. A tragic
vision imposes itself: ‘in any society which has fallen from prosperity,
losing not only the material reality but the psychological sense of
well-being’ (Brereton 1968: 61). In the history of the West, tragic
visions only appeared in a limited number of historical periods and
each time represented answers to major challenges. In this way, the
tragic was constitutive of the formation of Western identity, an
uninvited but important guest in major political transitional periods,
always present to illustrate the extreme demise of a given cultural set,
since, as phrased by Boullart (2004: 265): ‘tragic action reveals the
Wniteness of our problem-solving capabilities. It makes their limits
explicit and, by doing so, transgresses them’.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Has the study of English literature ever been harmed by the intro-
duction of ‘theory’? Is Shakespeare, ‘our contemporary’, less popular
today, because of Greenblatt’s New Historicism, Foucault’s Archae-
ology of Knowing, Lyotard’s Postmodernism? The history of Classics
has always been both the history of its interpretations, of ‘doxiWed’
readings, and of historical conXicts, hybrid forms of discussions,
which, Wnally, have been questions about an ever-changing Western
‘cultural identity’. Today we smile upon the naı̈vety of Renan’s out-
burst on the Akropolis, upon Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn, Winck-
elmann’s ‘noble simplicity and silent greatness’ and Alma Tadema’s
Victorian Greeks, but a present-day exploration of the relationship
between Classics and post-colonialism just demands the same kind
of smile. The history of ‘Classics’, or of ‘Greekness’, never has been a
totalizing and foundational process which, once and for all, in an
unambiguous and direct way, determined the value and meaning of
an ancient civilization. Despite many attempts to prove the opposite,
Classics is not a grand narrative that regulates a universal truth
embodied in a universal subject. On the contrary, it has always
been totally dependent on a distance between worlds, it has always
been living in and thanks to a gap, uniting and separating contem-
porary and distant societies. Therefore, post-colonialism can be a
very healthy exercise in a general politics of resistance, since it
deWnitely makes us aware of the frames (or Kuhnian paradigms) we
are currently working in. It is an intellectual exercise that challenges
us to open our minds and that asks questions about the way we have
been mentally colonized and determined by a generalized Hegelian
attitude which invited us to do universal statements only based upon
limited empirical knowledge. Nothing of our own ideas of the past is
natural or un-mediated; on the contrary, it is cultural and it depends
on varying paradigms. Current investigation into Classics is leaving
behind historicist models for semiotic ones, old historicism for new
historicism, thematics for pragmatics, text for context (Segal 1999:
4–5). In fact, the present-day agenda on deconstruction and the
whole juggling with the post-terminology continues the discussion
started up in the seventeenth century about the value of the classical
model (including classical ways of structuring the mind) in the light
of progress and a new interpretation of modernity. The ‘Battle of the
Books’ concerned the question of the validity of the ancient models
(both science and art) in the development of new visions of society
and history. Ever since, Classics had to leave the cyclical idea of
Wguring as a model in a never-ending series of Renaissances and
Humanisms, and had to explore, from Romanticism on, new ways
of being inserted in general deWnitions of histor(icit)y and national-
ity (does history as such have a meaning, a telos?; how many home-
lands are there?), and of intercultural identity (whose humanism?
whose history? history as a Western myth? histories instead of His-
story, Her stories instead of His-story) (Lauter 1991: 256–71). At the
dawn of the twenty-Wrst century, Europe, homeland of ‘Greekness’,
has Wnally learned to ask some questions concerning aspects of the
Other and of Otherness, about blind spots, hidden agendas, and the
stranger in ourselves; and is no longer ashamed to confess ‘the end of
cultural nostalgia’. However, seen from an historical point of view,
this angle of incidence means only one of the many historical changes
in terms of ‘discursive practices’ we adopted regarding antiquity
(Bassi 1998).18 It might stimulate us to complement the internal
Western vision we developed of ourselves and of Classics (too often
relying upon essentialism and universalism), with an external one: an
18 Bassi speciWes that ‘the theatre and its critical discourses in ancient Greece—
and, by extension, in the European canon—are forms of a cultural nostalgia’. This
concerns a ‘model of cultural production, born from a desire to resurrect an idealized
and ever receding past and the masculine subject who occupies and sanctions that
past’ (Bassi 1998: 245).
appreciation coming from abroad, from intercultural and post-
colonial perspectives. This might amount to a beautiful exercise in
informing us of our place in history and culture, undertaken by the
colonial Other, who is looking at us often enough as the psychoana-
lytic and repressed Other.
15
From the Peloponnesian War to
the Iraq War: a Post-Liberal Reading
of Greek Tragedy
Michiel Leezenberg
TRAGEDY A ND TH E P OST- 9/11 WO RLD
The assaults on 11 September 2001 not only destroyed the lives of

thousands of civilians, they also shook a widely held liberal view of a
stable and coherent political and economical world-order based on
international and other law.1 They also dealt a serious blow to
humanist hopes that all humans, as humans, share broadly similar
moral priorities; and, once more, reinforced alternative perceptions
of the world as irreducibly conXictual and carved up into irreconcil-
ably antagonistic civilizational blocs. What it brought home to many,
in other words, was the irreducible presence of, or potential for,
violent conXict. The subsequent American-led wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq have served only to strengthen antagonisms between, in
particular, America and the Arab-Islamic world.
1 In a coordinated action, several civilian airplanes were hijacked and crashed into
the World Trade Center in New York and into the Pentagon, the main building of the
American Defence ministry, in Washington. Both WTC towers subsequently col-
lapsed, crushing almost 3000 people under the rubble. A fourth airplane, allegedly
intended to hit the White House, was also hijacked, but crashed in Pennsylvania. The
assaults were not claimed by any group, but soon appeared to be the work of the
Islamist al-Qa’ida network headed by Usama bin Laden. In October, an American-led
coalition invaded Afghanistan to crush al-Qa’ida bases and personnel there, and to
oust the Taliban regime that harboured the network.
It may well be that these developments mark a historical rupture
comparable to the 1989 collapse of the Communist Bloc in Eastern
Europe; but regardless of whether they mark a new phase in the
postcolonial constellation or a return to classical colonializing imperi-
alism, they pose new empirical, conceptual, and even normative chal-
lenges to postcolonial scholarship in the humanities. It would be
presumptuous, perhaps even tasteless, to suggest that the study of
classical literatures can help us understand such dramatic contemporary
events. But, conversely, I think it is fair to say that reXection on post-9/11
developments may reshape our ways of reading the Classics, and, by
extension, our idea of humanistic culture more generally.
Such contextualizations are relatively widespread among military
historians. Earlier studies, like Donald Kagan’s multi-volume account
of the Peloponnesian War (now summarized in Kagan 2003) impli-
citly or explicitly compared the Peloponnesian War to the great wars
of the twentieth century, and the cold-war confrontation between
capitalist America and the communist Soviet Union. More recently,
in A War Like No Other, Victor Hanson (2005) contrasted the strat-
egies and leadership of the Peloponnesian War with those of Ameri-
can war eVorts in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.2 Somewhat less
intensively studied, however, is the fact that the Peloponnesian War
also provided the backdrop for much of the cultural production of
Wfth century Athens—in particular tragedy—and the implications of
this fact for modern-day readings.
Liberal and humanist sensibilities may perceive pervasive armed
conXict as a temporary interruption of civil life; but it is the depressing
normality in much of the contemporary world, as it was in the ancient
world. It should be kept in mind that most of the surviving tragedies
by Sophocles and Euripides were originally written and performed
against the background of the Peloponnesian War; indeed, the last
plays of both, Oedipus at Colonus and Bacchae, respectively, virtually
coincided with the Wnal defeat of Athens in 404 bce. Both had also
witnessed (and in part been involved in) violent conXict even within
2 Ironically, Hanson’s account of the often brutally self-righteous Athenian attempts

at exporting democracy may provide an unwitting commentary on his vocal support of
the 2003 Iraq war; for but one of his numerous statements, see Hanson (2003).
From the Peloponnesian War to the Iraq War 267
the city, in particular the aristocratic coup of 411 bce.3 Below, I will try
to tease out some of the political implications, for antiquity and for the
present, of the fact that the Greek tragedians do not so much take sides
in contemporary or mythical conXicts, as expose the irreducible and
inevitable character of—possibly violent—moral and political di-
lemmas. In doing so, I will largely restrict myself to Sophocles’ plays,
and especially to the Oedipus at Colonus (henceforth OC).4
Just as there is a genuine dilemma between two equally defensible
but mutually incompatible conceptions of justice, guilt, and respon-
sibility in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, and especially its conclusion, the
Eumenides,5 so there was a genuine moral dilemma surrounding
the 2003 Iraq war. It was perfectly clear in advance that the three
main justiWcations for the war oVered by the Bush administration6
(Iraq’s alleged possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD);
its alleged links with the al-Qa’ida network; and its allegedly imme-
diate danger to the West) were at best inconclusive.7 It was equally
easy to criticize American unilateralism and pre-emptive war from
the high principles of international law. Especially in German-
language media, Kant’s famous absolute prohibition against oVensive
wars—based on the absolute principle of state sovereignty—was
quoted time and again. In the United States, the opponents of the
Iraq War (as earlier of the war against Afghanistan) were small in
number and could hardly make themselves heard in the mainstream
3 Famously, Sophocles is reported to have approved of forming a council of four
hundred, which went on to establish a short-lived tyrannical rule; when asked whether
his anti-democratic vote was not a wicked action, he replied, according to Aristotle:
‘yes, for there was nothing better to be done’ (Rhetoric, III.18.6). About Euripides’
involvement in local politics, nothing is known with any reasonable degree of certainty.
4 Translations from Sophocles are based on Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s recent Loeb
edition, and modiWed where I have deemed it necessary (Lloyd-Jones [1994]1998).
Other translations are my own.
5 Apollo constrains Orestes to take revenge for the death of his father; the Furies,
by contrast, persecute him for slaying his mother. ConXicting arguments are pre-
sented as to whether he should, or even could, have acted otherwise; whether he is
legally guilty, ritually clean, and even whether he has killed a relative at all (ll. 657–60).
In the face of such dilemmas, the human jury fails to reach a verdict, and a decision in
Orestes’ favour is reached only by Athena’s divine intervention.
6 The most famous statement of the American case for war is probably the 5
February, 2003 UN Security Council speech by the then Secretary of State, Colin
Powell (for a transcript see Powell 2003).
7 Before the start of the war, I argued in public the second point, the only one for
which I can claim a more substantive specialist knowledge (see American Enterprise
Institute for Policy Research 2003).
media;8 in Europe, however, opposition to the war was widespread,
risk-free, and, on occasion, almost smug.
The dilemma that such criticisms missed, however, was that inter-
national law has failed miserably in protecting the Iraqi people since
at least the 1980s, and did not show any signs of oVering them more
protection under an enduring regime of Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi
regime had come to power by illegitimate means, had itself started
two oVensive wars (against Kuwait and Iran, respectively), and its
crimes against its own population and against neighboring countries
(not to mention countless immigrant workers from Egypt and the
Sudan) included war crimes, crimes against humanity, and, demon-
strably, genocide.9 All the noble principles of international law had
failed to protect the Iraqi population, as did virtually all the main
actors on the international stage: the diVerent bodies of the UN, the
US and its NATO allies, and the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc
allies. Probably a very substantial part of the Iraqi population, and
certainly the vast majority of Iraq’s Kurds, actually favoured a foreign
military intervention to oust Saddam’s regime, without, for that
reason, necessarily trusting American intentions.10 Lame appeals to
international law in the face of the 2003 American-led war, therefore,
were at best naı̈ve, and at worst reXected an obsession with American
power, rather than any genuine concern for the suVering of the Iraqi
people. The latter-day Kantian, Habermas (2003), acknowledges this
fact, but does not appear to think it of any consequence.
8 Thus, even famous commentators like Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and Gore
Vidal had diYculties airing their views on the main American channels, and in part
had to resort to alternative internet sites and foreign publishers.
9 The March 1988 chemical attack against Halabja, in which the Iraqi regime
gassed over 5000 Kurds, is well known. Less well known, however, is the fact that this
attack was but a sideshow of a much larger, much more systematic campaign of
extermination, the so-called Anfal operations, in which the Baath regime murdered
up to 100,000 Iraqi civilians and destroyed over 1000 Iraqi villages. For a meticulous
account, see Human Rights Watch 1995. For a scholarly account of Saddam Hussein’s
rise to power, see Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett ([1987] 1991).
10 Thus, the Wrst Iraqi voices able to speak freely following the fall of Baghdad
publicly castigated their fellow Arabs for their support of Saddam’s dictatorial regime
(Lynch 2005: ch. 3); likewise, in a debate among six Iraqi exiles on the Open
Democracy website (not exactly a pro-Bush forum), all were highly critical of the
conduct of the occupation, but not a single participant unambiguously condemned
the American-led war as such (see ‘Iraq in the Balance’, Open Democracy 2004).
One speciWcally humanist way of criticizing the American war
eVort is to assimilate it to a classical tragedy in which rulers bring
disaster upon themselves and their countries by their folly. Such
assimilations, however, should be resisted, for political, literary, as
well as methodological reasons. First, depictions of George Bush as a
Creon or Pentheus who brings disaster to himself, his family, and his
country, by refusing to heed good advice, are as misleading as they
are tasteless. In general, the comparison with such classical models
confers on contemporary rulers an aura of aesthetic and moral
grandeur that they do not necessarily possess or deserve: unlike the
tragic rulers, for example, their policy decisions do not generally
plunge their own families into misery. Worse, such comparisons
come perilously close to the ways in which Iraqi government propa-
ganda tried to glorify Saddam as a hero comparable in stature to
Gilgamesh, Nebuchadnezzar, or Saladin.
Second, alluding to contemporary persons and events is a technique
not of classical tragedy, but of old comedy. Tragedy has been persua-
sively argued to raise radical questions about life in the Wfth-century
Athenian polis;11 but remarkably, it does not do so by simply suggesting
a juxtaposition of Wctional characters and real persons. On the contrary,
barring such signiWcant exceptions as the Eumenides and the Persians,
the extant tragedies are remarkably reluctant to discuss people and
events of their own time.12 It is rather in Aristophanic comedy that we
Wnd allusions to contemporary events and politicians, at times with an
astonishing frankness. Try and imagine the Bush administration and
the collective Pentagon chiefs of staV being present at a theatre per-
formance where their war eVorts are being savagely ridiculed in front of
the electorate; but this is precisely what Aristophanes did in the midst
of the Peloponnesian War, apparently causing a good deal less contro-
versy than did Michael Moore in 2003.13
11 The most inXuential argument for such a political reading is probably Vernant
and Vidal-Naquet (1986), which argues that Wfth century tragedy expresses the
ambiguous status of central ‘political’ or polis-related notions like those of justice
[dikè], the law, and the family.
12 The story of how Phrynichus was Wned 1000 drachmas in 492 bce for moving
his audience to tears with his staging of The Capture of Miletus and ‘reminding them
of their own evils’ (Herodotus, 6.21) is too well known to need extensive discussion
here. Fear of Wnes or prosecution, however, was probably but one among various
reasons for locating tragedy in a mythical past rather than in the political present.
13 Aristophanes ridiculed the Athenian general Cleon on several occasions, notably
Acharnians and Knights. American Wlm-maker Michael Moore caused enormous uproar
Third, by simply projecting notions and characters directly from
Greek tragedy onto the present, one risks losing from sight the
historic speciWcity of that very particular genre of literature. The Greek
city was vastly diVerent from the modern state, and classical
Greek subjectivity likewise diVered signiWcantly from modern sens-
ibilities: Athenian radical democracy was participatory rather than
representative, and based on the majority vote rather than the rule of
law, let alone a constitution; likewise, in Wfth-century Greece, there
was no uniWed concept of man as a bearer of inalienable rights or of
the will as the driving force of human actions.14 For better or for
worse, the whole of the postcolonial world has been shaped not only
by relations of (post-) colonial political and economic power, but
also by concepts (like those of culture, civilization, tradition), spheres
(the state as distinct from civil society, the public as opposed to the
private, the religious as opposed to the secular), and institutions (the
apparatus of government, state-based schools and universities, hos-
pitals, and so on) that are distinctly modern.15 Importantly, these
were not simply unilaterally copied from, or imposed by, the West,
but articulated and developed in a highly asymmetric interaction
between colonial and quasi-colonial rulers and ruled, in which both
sides were shaped and reshaped. The interactive dimension of this,
however, is only gradually starting to get the attention it deserves
(compare Van der Veer 2001; Bayly 2004).
For these reasons, one should be cautious with one obvious, and
relatively uninteresting, postcolonial approach to Greek tragedies,
namely to read them against the background of Athenian empire.
Pace Rehm (2003) and others, the Athenian empire [arkhè] bears
only the vaguest of family resemblances to modern English and
American imperialism. For more detailed discussion of the similarities
by speaking out against the impending Iraq war in his acceptance speech at the 2003
Oscar award ceremonies; his subsequent movie, Fahrenheit 911, used various satirical
means to criticize the Bush administration’s policies in the wake of the 9/11 assaults.
14 See also Vernant, ‘Ébauches de la volonté dans la tragédie grecque,’ in Vernant
and Vidal-Naquet (1986: ch. 3).
15 Thus, it has been persuasively argued that, for example, both the nationalist
movement in colonial India and Arab nationalism and Islamism in the decolonizing
Middle East have much more in common with modern European (and, more
speciWcally, German romantic) notions than with any local pre-modern Hindu or
Muslim ‘traditions’ or ‘cultures’ (Chatterjee 1986; al-Azmeh 1995).
and contrasts between the Athenian arkhè and modern imperialism,
see for example Balot (2001). Another fashionable thematic from
which to read tragedy is that of exile, which admittedly informs
most, if not all, of the extant plays. Here, one risks reducing tragedy
to the politically urgent but dramatically unexciting message that
asylum seekers are human beings deserving of compassion and
hospitality, not to mention elementary rights.16
Another universalizing strategy seems equally misguided: human-
ist readings abstract away from such allegedly local and contingent
factors as the society and politics of Wfth-century Athens, and instead
focus on the allegedly more universal matters of the human psyche
and the family. The Wrst author approaching such a position was, of
course, Aristotle, who treated tragedy as a private literary genre
producing individual emotional eVects, rather than as a political
ritual performed at the City Dionysia.17 There is no good reason,
however, to believe that public matters of law and justice, govern-
ment and power, and war and peace, should be any less timeless or
universal than individual emotions, or private matters of the family.
Conversely, matters of human psychology and subjectivity are as
historically variable and contingent as are liberal presumptions of
individuals as subjects of law and as bearers of inalienable rights.
Against such universalizing humanist and liberal readings, the
centrality of the political—in the generic sense of matters concerning
the polis—in tragedy can, and probably should, be emphasized;
but precisely what does this political component amount to? Two
extreme answers can be discarded straight away. On the one hand,
one should not analyse tragedy as just ‘ideology’; that is, as Athenian
self-aYrmation or self-congratulation as, for example, Zeitlin ([1986]
16 The theme of modern-day asylum seekers informed, among others, Wole
Soyinka’s Oyedipo in Kolhoni (no known published text), Wrst staged in Delphi,
Greece, in July 2002, which transferred Oedipus in Colonus to a group of Afghan
refugees oV the Australian coast; and Peter Sellars’ June 2004 Amsterdam staging of
Euripides’ Children of Heracles, employing genuine young asylum seekers as the
chorus, in an otherwise breathtakingly static performance.
17 A recent statement of this claim is Hall (1996: 305): ‘Aristotle’s Poetics has
certainly played no insigniWcant part in obscuring precisely those local, historical,
and ideological speciWcities of which its other contemporaries were so aware. . . . In a
transhistorical and apolitical sense, it has made [the tragic corpus] accessible to
‘‘everyman’’, precisely because its reader is encouraged to assess tragedy in complete
dissociation from civic concepts’ (emph. in original).
1990) at times seems to be doing; the ambiguous, disturbing, and
disrupting overtones in tragedy do not Wt in well with such views.18
Conversely, authors like Rehm (2003) attempt to read Greek tragedy
as a form of ‘radical theatre’; that is, as raising fundamental and
potentially politically dangerous questions, as much about their own
world as about ours. Rehm thus construes tragedy as presenting a
timeless message on the corrupting eVects of power, and especially
presenting power politics from the perspective of its victims; that is,
as challenging the dominant Athenian ideology (Rehm 2003: 92). But
this approach likewise risks stripping tragedy of all its ambiguity
and unsettling power, by reducing it to a more unambiguously opp-
ositional counter-ideology. The Greek tragic poets were neither
opposition intellectuals nor anti-war activists.
This is not to say, of course, that readings focusing on the political
aspects of Greek tragedy are undesirable or inevitably anachronistic;
but it does suggest that there is room for another kind of politicized
reading of Greek tragedy, which may be labelled ‘post-liberal’ or ‘anti-
humanist’, in so far as it is alive to the centrality of power, politics, and
conXict, while resisting any such obvious political contextualizations
or even anachronisms. Instead, the reading suggested below focuses on
the politics of the one thing all tragic protagonists do: speaking.
LIBERAL AND NON-LIBERAL APPROACHES

TO P OL I T IC S A N D L A N G UAGE
Liberal political theory is founded on the two notions of the rights

and autonomy of the individual and the rule of law.19 It links these
two in the concept of a social contract, especially as embodied in a
constitution stating the citizens’ basic rights and duties. The idea of a
social contract, that is, of civil society as the end of conXict, is one of
18 Compare notably, Vernant ‘Tensions et ambiguities dans la tragédie grecque’ in

Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1986 vol. 1: ch. 2).
19 One could also rephrase the Wrst notion in humanistic terms, as taking indi-
vidual human freedom as both the foundation and telos of social and political action.
For an overview of the various social contract theories around, see, for example,
Boucher and Kelly (1994: esp. 1–34).
the great master thoughts, if not foundational myths, of liberalism:
famously, Kant argued that as it appears in Hobbes, Locke, and
Rousseau, the social contract is not a historical description of the
origin of political society from a pre-social war of all against all, but a
Wction of sorts: it is the rational criterion of a just polity. See Boucher
and Kelly (1994: 8) for a summary; and for more detailed discussion,
Howard Williams’ chapter on Kant in the same volume.
Communitarian criticism of the liberal-contractarian assumption of
autonomous individuals as conceptually and normatively prior to, and
separated from, society soon emerged: thus, Hegel, in his Philosophy
of Right ([1896] 1942), not only criticized the social-contract theorists’
assumption of autonomous agency, but also distinguished the contract-
ual relation, which he dismissed as arbitrary and subjective, from what
he saw as the objective moral necessity of the state.20 But his position
is still as teleological as liberal ones, in so far as it involves freedom and
a resolution of conXict as the end or telos of history; moreover, and
of particular relevance in this context, he tends to portray the Greek
polis as still a harmonious community of shared norms and values (in
a highly romantic view that does not square particularly well with his
own remarks on Greek tragedy elsewhere). Likewise, later Hegel-
inspired communitarian critics of liberalism tend to depict human
communities (as did Hegel with states) as more homogeneous, harmo-
nious, traditional, and unchanging than they are.21
More recently, the liberal distinction between civil or political
society and a conXictual state of nature has been challenged by
two otherwise radically opposed thinkers. On the one hand, the
conservative legal theorist Carl Schmitt ([1930] 1996) argues that
the distinction between friend and enemy is the criterion of the
political, just as the distinction between good and bad is the criterion
20 See especially Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Hegel [1896] 1942 para. 75). Twentieth
century communitarians like the philosophers Alisdair MacIntyre (1981) and Charles
Taylor (Rosa and Laitinen 2002) likewise emphasize the Hegelian point that the
individual is shaped by and in a community, rather than wholly isolated and
autonomous as supposed by liberal theories.
21 Thus, Taylor explains the September 11 assaults as resulting from an overly
strong adherence to (Islamic) tradition and a refusal to reinterpret that tradition so as
to enable for a peaceful coexistence (Rosa and Laitinen 2002); it would be more
appropriate, though, to emphasize that these assaults are wholly without precedent in
the Islamic tradition, regarding style, scale, and deliberate targeting of civilians.
of the ethical, and that between beautiful and ugly the criterion of the
aesthetical. This distinction, he continues, should not be thought of
as an unchanging essence or deWnition; neither should it be conXated
with, for example, moral distinctions between good and evil. On this
view, the establishment of a social contract marks not the birth but
the end of political society; hence, Schmitt evaluates the liberal
neutralization of conXict as a depoliticization, that is, as a denial of
the political. This conception is extremely one-sided, even formalist,
in so far as it does away with all substantial questions of power and
government, let alone social and economical ideology. But, whatever
the validity and moral implications of Schmitt’s argument, the point
that there is no politics without antagonism is surely thought-
provoking, even if Greek tragedies, and Sophocles’ plays in particular,
assume the distinction between friends (philoi) and enemies (echthroi)
less as a criterion of the political, than as an articulation of a much
more general moral attitude in aVairs of the polis, individual contacts
with foreigners, and so on; see also Blundell (1989).
Starting from a radically diVerent political attitude, Foucault ([1997]
2003) comes to conclusions remarkably similar to Schmitt’s. Basing
himself on historical analyses of developments in medieval and Renais-
sance France, he forcefully criticizes the idea of civil society as marking
the end of conXict, as it is suggested by the social contract tradition
starting with Hobbes. In his view, the establishment of the rule of law
marks less a voluntary agreement and cessation of hostilities by both
sides than a—temporary—victory of, and imposition of norms and
rules by, one side in a conXict (Foucault [1997] 2003: ch. 5). Instead of
resolving all violent conXicts and establishing a peaceful community of
shared norms and values, he argues, the rise of political society merely
marks the emergence of new strategies in old conXicts; the underlying
antagonisms remain. In other words, reverting Clausewitz’s famous
dictum, Foucault ([1997] 2003: ch. 7) conceives of politics as the
pursuit of war by other means. Anti-liberal analyses like Schmitt’s
and Foucault’s have not only gained a new currency following the
9/11 attacks; they also provide us with new and fruitful perspectives
from which to approach Greek tragedy, as I will argue shortly.
Finally, the social contract is not only a cornerstone of liberal
political theory; it also appears to be a root assumption of many
modern theories of language; see also Leezenberg (2002). The notion
of a langue, or language system, as a social fact, in the Durkheimian
sense of an inherently consensual collective representation that is
oriented towards social integration, was introduced by the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure;22 but the idea that a language system
is a shared common good serving both individual self-interest and
mutual beneWt is much more widespread. It appears, in fact, to be
considered such a self-evident starting point in virtually all ap-
proaches in contemporary theoretical linguistics that it is hardly
ever made explicit.23 Once teased out, however, it loses much of its
self-evidence. We may raise new questions, and get new answers, by
systematically looking for conXict and power asymmetries in lan-
guage; this holds in particular for the language used in tragedy (see
Leezenberg 2005 for a more detailed argument along these lines).
ANCIENT GREEK TRAGEDY AS A

P O S T- L I B E R A L G E N R E
Unlike modern liberal doctrines, classical tragedy presumes no social

contract either at the level of society or in its language. SuperWcially, this
might seem a trivial point: after all, the very set-up and plot structure of
tragedy as a dramatic genre would seem germane to an agonistic and
conXict-ridden, rather than a consensual, view of language. The non-
choral and non-narrative parts of tragedy often involve heated argu-
ment or agôn, which often descends into an exchange of conXicting, if
not violent, one-liners or stichomythia; and the chorus often raises a
dissenting voice, wishing to be heard—at times in vain. But all this need
not yet contradict a social contract view of language; after all, liberal
polities obviously do not preclude debate and diVerence of opinion
either. The reasons for the Greek non-contractual view of society and
22 Saussure’s introductory chapters (chapter III on how to characterize langue) are
formulated in extremely Durkheimian terms of social facts, principles of classiWcation,
and collective representations that are exterior to the individual; on p. 31, he explicitly
states that it existed only by virtue of a kind of contract between the members of a
community.
23 Cf. Leezenberg (2002) for more discussion and references; it should be noted that
such assumptions are rather less widespread in sociolinguistics and anthropological
linguistics.
communication go much further, however. First, social, civil, or cul-
tural life is not opposed to an alleged state of nature involving a war of
all against all. There was no Greek, or even Athenian, civil ‘society’, as
distinct from an Athenian state, or as based on a social contract that
sacriWced individual freedoms in exchange for social peace, order, and
security.24 Rather, social or cultural life was itself characterized by
various forms and kinds of conXict: between gods and men, between
cities, within the city, within the family, and even within the self. The
central notion here is that of stasis, a term with a broad spectrum of
meanings ranging from ‘political faction’ to ‘civil war’. The perception
that stasis was an undesirable but inevitable, indeed almost ‘natural’,
feature of life in the polis, appears to have been almost commonsensical
in Wfth-century Athens. The word does not occur all that often in the
plays of Sophocles; but the idea, and even the reality, of conXict are
pervasive in his work.25
Second, in more strictly legal terms, classical Athens can hardly be
considered a constitutional democracy. That is, there was little or
nothing like the liberal sense of the rights of the individual, or even
the sovereignty of the state, as an absolute corner-stone, whether or not
enshrined in a basic law or constitution: neither the ‘state’ nor the
individual was strictly conceptually separated or autonomous from the
body of politically active citizens. A simple decision of the majority in
court or in the assembly could decide on questions of war or peace for
the city, or exile or citizenship, and even life or death for an individual.
Despite the eVorts of lawmakers like Solon, the Athenians had no
concept of law as codiWed, universal, and based on precedent (see de
Romilly 1971 and Dover 1974: ch. VI). More than that, in tragedy, law
24 There does not appear to be any widespread sense of Athenian society being based
on a social contract prior to Plato’s Crito (de Romilly 1971: ch. VI); and, even there, it is
the laws themselves that are introduced as speaking characters, who, moreover, repre-
sent themselves not only as contract partners but also as parents. According to Boucher
and Kelly (1994: 2–4), contra Gough (1957: ch. 2), sophists like Antiphon and Hippias
hardly qualify as contractarians, because they do not attempt to ground legitimate
authority in consent, but ridicule the conventional basis of law and morality.
25 Following Findley and, indirectly, Van Loenen, Vidal-Naquet argues for the
centrality of stasis to classical Greek literature in general: ‘Oedipe entre deux cites’, in
Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1986, vol. 2: 179); JuVras (1988) makes an extended case
for seeing (fear of) stasis as a main concern and indeed driving force of action in
Antigone, Ajax, and Oedipus in Colonus. Foucault (2001a) analyses Oedipus the King as
centered around a struggle for power and Oedipus’ fear of losing that power to a rival.
and justice appear to have a very ambiguous, and indeed contested,
status. ConXicting views on substantial points of guilt, punishment,
and justice, and on procedural matters of how justice should be
administered, appear in both Eumenides and Antigone, to mention
but the most famous examples. Should it be gods, kings, or citizens
who decide what counts as just punishment, or as the rules of a fair
trial? And if there is no agreement, how should such matters be settled?
Liberal political theory appears bound to postulate a consensus at
some level, whether about substantial norms and values or about
procedural rules ensuring fairness. Fifth-century Athenian political
thought, by contrast, appears to view human societies as complexes
of antagonistic forces, which only temporarily and with great eVort
have been laid to rest, and which can relapse into violent confronta-
tion at any time. In this respect, it appears closer to Schmitt’s and
Foucault’s analyses than to modern liberal thought.
It is but a small step from acknowledging the essentially contested
character of concepts like justice, law, kinship, and so on, to arguing
that justice itself is inherently and irreducibly conXictual; this is the
step taken in Hampshire’s provocatively entitled Justice is ConXict
(2000).26 The sense of conXict in Greek tragedy, however, goes
beyond even such claims: Hampshire merely argues that no universal
agreement on substantial ethical and juridical questions will ever be
reached, and that one should therefore ensure the procedural means
for all positions to get a fair hearing; but in Greek tragedy, even such
procedures for resolving conXicts and hearing the diVerent sides
appear ad hoc: and are seldom seen as balanced. Even divine author-
ity in arbitration and elsewhere is often unjust or unfair, or at least
criticized for being so.27 That is, securing the right to a fair hearing is
precisely a problem; the rule of law is not an end to conXict, but
merely the predominance of one side in a conXict.
26 The allusion is, of course, to Heraclitus, fr. 80 (Diels / Kranz 1952): eidenai
khrèn . . . dikèn.
27 Witness, among others, the disproportionate punishment meted out to Pentheus
by Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae, which is criticized by Pentheus’ father Cadmus
(Bacchae: v. 1348); likewise, Sophocles has Athena drive Ajax, the hero of the eponym-
ous play, to insanity and ultimately suicide, merely for his boastful, if true, claim that he
can Wght without any divine support. In Eumenides, Athena’s vote is accepted in
advance as decisive by the Furies, but still leads to anger when actually cast.
Finally, tragedy displays no view of language as a social contract. It
involves no notion of language as a consensual social fact in Dur-
kheim’s sense, or structure in Saussure’s sense. More generally, in
classical Athens, languages were not seen as ordered structures but as
collections of words to be used for various purposes. Languages are
not necessarily seen as shared systems either: the pervasive tragic
confrontations about what is just, or whether or not a speciWc person
is guilty or polluted, are also debates about the precise meanings of
words like dikè [justice], aitia [guilt], or miasma [pollution].
Sophocles’ tragedies in particular involve an extremely complex
imagery (if such it is) of language, words, and speaking. Thus, the
Oedipus in Colonus is shot through with expressions like logos, epos,
legein, and so on; intriguingly, the word polis also occurs more often
in this play than in any other of Sophocles’ surviving works. At times,
words are seen as opposed to actions, especially when idle talk is
contrasted with deeds (ll. 382–83); but there is also a perception that
the use of words itself may be a form of action. Thus, the aged
Oedipus complains that one single utterance could have decided
whether or not he went into exile:
ı
ØŒæF æØ ıª
Ø ø
[for want of a small word I went into exile]
(OC: ll. 443–44)
That is, Oedipus and others display an awareness of the performative
power that language, or perhaps its users, may have; see Leezenberg
(2004); there is a clear perception that the uttering of speciWc words
may conjure up the very realities named by those words. Thus, the
chorus in OC does not dare to call the Furies by their own name, but
instead refers to them as the ‘kindly ones’ or ‘those we dare not name’
(ll. 128–29).28 Further, language is not thought of as a means for
mutual understanding, let alone cooperative communicative action;
rather, words are seen as instruments or weapons, potentially even
deadly ones. Thus, the aged Oedipus knows well that words may be the
weapons of the weak: powerless as he is, he realizes that his words,
28 For more detailed discussion of the performative and often conXictual character
of language in tragedy, (see Leezenberg 2004; 2005). See also Butler (2000), which,
however, spends rather more time on discussing Lacan and Hegel than on tracing the
richness of performative language in the Antigone.
and even his silences, may have far-reaching consequences for others.
When his son Polyneices comes to him as a suppliant, Oedipus at
Wrst refuses to speak to him at all (ll. 1177–78; 1271–72), and when
the latter asks for his father’s blessing in reconquering Thebes form
his brother, Oedipus retorts by violently cursing him (ll. 1372–96).
It should be emphasized that this belief in the power of words is by
no means simply a primitive belief in magic; that is, it does not rest on
a mere confusion between the natural, the social, and the supernatural
spheres. The exact delimitation of these spheres, and the hero’s ambigu-
ous position in between them, is precisely what is being radically ques-
tioned in tragedy. According to Vernant’s famous characterization, tragic
action presupposes that the human and the divine spheres are dist-
inct enough to be at odds with each other, but at the same time requires
them to appear inseparable (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1986: 72).
This perception of both the city and language as being ruled
by conXict rather than contract diVers from some of the more inXuen-
tial politicized readings of tragedy. Thus, Vernant and Vidal-Naquet
(1986: 180), basing himself on Zeitlin’s ([1986] 1990) argument,
construes tragedy as expatriating conXict from Athens. He sees tragedy
as presenting politics, and especially political conXict, as a central part
of life in Thebes, but not as a feature of Athenian civil life. Noting the
exception of the Eumenides, he argues for a quasi-structuralist oppos-
ition between Athens as a city of law and Thebes as a city of stasis. Such
a self-congratulating view of Athens as a city free of stasis and injustice
may indeed emerge in some plays, notably those of Euripides; but it is
demonstrably not there, or only ambiguously there, in the two plays
explicitly dealing with questions of justice in Athens: Aeschylus’ Eume-
nides and Sophocles’ Oedipus in Colonus, respectively. In Eumenides,
the conXict between the Furies and Apollo is not really resolved by
rational or deliberative means (after all, the human jury is evenly
divided over the guilty-not guilty verdict), but by the outright bribery
of the Furies: Athena promises them eternal gifts and favours from the
Athenians (ll. 867–69). She does so not merely to establish justice but
also to protect the Furies’ honour (timè):

Ø ªæ
Ø B
ªÆæfiø Ł ØÆØ ØŒÆø e A Øøfi
[A great and lasting heritage awaits you here; thus honour is assured and
justice satisWed]
(Eumenides: ll. 890–91, tr. Vellacott, 1956)
Thus, even in that most Athenian of tragedies, conXict is not solved
but shelved. Likewise, in Oedipus in Colonus, in many ways a comple-
ment to the Eumenides, there are too many dissonant noises for it to
qualify as a smug piece of Athenian self-praise: it expresses a constant
fear of the Furies erupting on the stage again. For one thing, the
nightingales repeatedly referred to in the praise of Athens (ll. 668–
719) are birds of mourning, a fact which has led some observers to
conclude that in this ode, Sophocles was not boasting of Athenian
glories but in fact lamenting the impending, and by then virtually
inevitable, downfall of his native city. (For this argument, see McDevitt
1972.) Further, it is explicitly denied that Theseus’ Athens is a dem-
ocracy (ll. 66–7), and the king’s behaviour makes it clear that it is his
individual words and decisions, rather than consensus or consultation
of the people, that determines the city’s policies. Thus, he actually
overrules the Athenian chorus’ initial desire for Oedipus to be chased
out of the city. The relevant question here is not, however, whether
Sophocles agreed with Theseus on this point, that is, whether he was a
conservative monarchist or a democrat, but rather how he describes
people as acquiring and maintaining the authority to speak and to
make their words actually do things. To another respect in which
Sophoclean Athens is not liberal-democratic, I will turn later.
SuperWcially, the conXict-oriented character of a post-liberal read-
ing of the kind presented here might look Hegelian, involving a
dialectical development of a conXict and its resolution, but it should
be kept strictly distinguished from it. Hegel’s inXuential readings
argue that plays like Antigone and Oedipus in Colonus not only
involve an initial clash or conXict but also an eventual synthesis,
resolution, or reconciliation. Thus, Hegel famously analyses Oedi-
pus’ heroization at the end of OC as a quasi-Christian redemption
after a long life of undeserved suVering (Vorlesungen über die Ästhe-
tik, III.551, Hegel 1986). On closer inspection, however, it turns out
that none of the underlying conXicts is resolved by this beatiWcation,
nor even that Oedipus is in the end reconciled with his own past or
future: on the contrary, he explicitly states that his wrath will never
abate, but that even when dead and buried, his dead body will drink
the blood of his fellow Thebans:29
29 For a more detailed argument against the Hegelian reading of OC, see Bernard
(2001).
¥ e ıø ŒÆd Œ Œæı Œı łıæ ÆP H Ł æe ÆrÆ ÆØ,
[Then shall my dead body, sleeping and buried, cold as it is, drink their
warm blood,]
(OC: ll. 621–22)
Perhaps one may generalize this point that not even death necessarily
marks a conclusion or Wnal reconciliation. Thus, on the approach
defended here, conXict is treated as irreducible and ultimately irre-
concilable. War and stasis may not be normative ideals, but they are
inevitable factual realities in relations between and within cities.
T H E S C A N DA LO US VO I C E S O F T R AG E DY
A Wnal way in which language and politics meet in tragedy is in the

question of the limits of what can be said in public. In Athenian
public life, there certainly were limits to free speech; but both on the
Pnyx and in the theatre (and especially on the comic stage), they
could be pushed very far indeed. No matter how badly or unjustly
the gods may behave in the tragedies we know of, none of the tragic
poets was ever seriously in danger of being prosecuted for impiety
[asebeia]. On the contrary, Sophocles, who has diVerent divini-
ties strike down such noble characters as Heracles, the young
king Oedipus, and Ajax, for no particularly good reasons, even had
a reputation for piety. Reading his tragedies, one occasionally
wonders why.
It seems that in classical Athens, the limits to what could be said
were societal and political, rather than religious in nature. For ex-
ample, using foul language in public was not legally prohibited, but
generally held to be unbecoming for a free and honourable man; but
even these rather unclear limits are systematically extended and
indeed challenged in both tragedy and comedy, which thus claim
or presuppose a speciWc kind of theatrical free speech or parrhèsia
(see Halliwell 1991). This is not the place to discuss whether and how
far the classical Athenian spaces for debate and decision-making, like
the Agora and the Pnyx, were anything like the liberal public sphere
that rose and declined in nineteenth-century Germany; see Habermas
([1962] 1989);30 but relevant here is the observation by Butler (2004:
126–27) that, in general, such a public sphere is partly constituted by
what cannot be said, not only by excluding persons but also by
diVerent ways of censoring claims. Now what is crucial to tragedy
is the ambiguous delimitation, and systematic contestation, of this
‘public sphere’, and thereby of what can legitimately be said. To
employ Hampshire’s distinction, tragedy often involves the contest-
ation of not only the substance but also the very procedures of justice
as fairness. This contestation is primarily done by what one may call
‘scandalous voices’: voices that are not normally allowed to speak,
let alone speak out in public, and saying things that rulers do not
normally want to hear. Quite generally, tragedy carries nothing like a
presumption of the right to free speech; in particular, children are
not expected to disagree with their parents, regardless of the circum-
stances. Thus, when Haemon speaks up against Creon in the Anti-
gone, he realizes that he is violating expected patterns of behaviour
and has to ask for special permission to do so:
Kªg ‹ø
f c ºª Ø OæŁø ); h ¼ ıÆ KØ
Ø ºª Ø·
[I could never say, and may I never know how to say, that what you say is
wrong:]
(Antigone: ll. 685–86)
Likewise, when Sophocles’ Electra starts reproaching her mother
Clytaemnestra for Agamemnon’s murder, the latter’s reaction is
merely to castigate such insolence; and indeed Electra herself admits
that she feels shame for thus speaking up against her own mother at
all (Electra: ll. 616–18). In a sense, Antigone is the exception that
proves this rule; she precisely arrogates to herself the right to speak
like a male citizen, and indeed like an equal to the king, which is what
makes her so disturbing and indeed unacceptable to Creon. In
classical Athens, women, minors, slaves, and exiles could not take
the right to speak in public for granted, and this situation is clearly
reXected in tragedy.
30 Habermas makes the debatable claim that the bourgeois concept of a public sphere,
involving discussion of cultural and political questions by educated private individuals
regardless of rank, actually originated in ancient Greece (para. 1); likewise, his suggestion
that the eighteenth-century German theatre provided a surrogate public sphere (para. 2)
would be worth exploring in, and contrasting with, ancient Greek drama.
At times, even the spatial location in which a voice may legitim-
ately be raised is quite explicitly circumscribed. The chorus in OC,
when Wrst encountering Oedipus at the Furies’ sacred grove, refuse
even to speak with him until he leaves the sacred ground on which he
has trespassed (ll. 166–69). Once he has done that, they promise to
protect him; but when they discover that he is the parricide and
incestuous exile Oedipus, they no longer consider themselves bound
by this promise, and try to chase him away for fear of pollution.
Conversely, Polyneices can secure the right to be heard by his father
only by sitting down at the statue of Poseidon and thus claiming the
status of a suppliant (ll. 1156–62; 1285–88).
But tragedy not only includes both male and female minors
publicly criticizing relatives in power as in Sophocles’ Electra and
Antigone. Other scandalous voices that demand to be heard are those
of persons who are polluted by crimes that are considered so horrible
that these actions themselves should not even be spoken of. When
Oedipus is reminded of his past crimes by the chorus at Colonus, his
reaction shows that he considers the very mention of his actions as an
act of violence:
þØ; ŁÆ b IŒ Ø;
[Woe, it is death to hear such things,]
(OC: l. 529)
Numerous tragedies in fact involve characters guilty of, or people
speaking on behalf of those guilty of, crimes or transgressions for
which male citizens would have been stripped of their right to speak
in public in Wfth-century Athens: incest (for example, in Oedipus the
King and Hippolytus); the slaughter of one’s own closest relatives
(Oresteia, Electra, Seven Against Thebes, Medea); cursing and betraying
one’s own fatherland (Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus). The latter point
was a particularly sensitive one: in the Athens of the Peloponnesian
War and Alcibiades’ treason, Antigone’s claims regarding the burial of
a traitor were in all likelihood considered just as scandalous and
unacceptable by many as the self-justiWcations of a religiously motiv-
ated suicide terrorist would be today.31 A legal-religious prohibition
31 One should avoid falling into an anachronistic trap by pushing this analogy too
far, though, because of the abovementioned historicity of categories like those of
state, law, and indeed, terrorism.
against burying parricides in their native soil even appears elsewhere in
Sophocles’ own plays; thus, in the OC, Ismene states that her father
Oedipus may not be buried in Thebes (l. 407), a point not contested by
Antigone on that occasion. Likewise, Creon argues that Oedipus is
polluted and driven by anger [thumos], and that his words therefore
carry no moral or political weight (ll. 944–52). In short, the very fact
that the polluted and enraged exile Oedipus can speak up at all is
something of a scandal, or—from his point of view—a miracle.
It is not just the persons speaking, however, but also what they say,
that may cause scandal. Creon literally says that he cannot bear to
hear the thought that the gods might care for the corpse of a traitor,
and hence that Antigone might be right:
ºª Ø ªaæ PŒ I Œ a ÆÆ ºªø æØÆ Y
Ø F F ŒæF æØ:
[What you say is intolerable, that the gods are concerned for this corpse!]
(Antigone: ll. 282–83)
One need not assume that Demosthenes’ famous later quotation
from Antigone (ll. 175–90) in his speech Against Aeschines, showing
clear approval of Creon’s demand for loyalty to one’s native city
(Demosthenes 19.247), was typical for a classical Athenian audience,
in order to appreciate that her point is not as self-evidently valid as
believed by many a modern reader. Many read Creon’s words as a
Wrst indication of his fatal blindness to other points of view; but if
Demosthenes’ speech is anything to go by, it is a reaction that at least
part of the audience would Wnd reasonable. The point of Antigone is,
of course, that as intolerable as Antigone’s words might be, they make
a point that is at least as valid as Creon’s.
Likewise, many of the words spoken by Oedipus at Colonus are
scandalous, if not appalling: his is not only a voice of religious pollution
but also one of political treason. His angry denunciation of his relative
Creon, his horrendous cursing of both his sons, and his transfer of
loyalty in war from Thebes to Athens are not merely acts of aggression
against his family, but amount to a betrayal of his native city. The
disturbing power of Sophocles’ Wnal play may well lie precisely in its
allowing this terrible voice to speak without any obvious condemnation.
Scandalous voices are irreducibly conXictual, if not confrontational;
but they are democratic. By calling attention to them, a post-liberal
reading may provide some new light on postcolonial approaches to the
Classics, as it attempts to steer clear of both the increasingly self-
righteous reassertion of Western liberal values and increasingly des-
perate Third-Worldist anti-imperialist rhetoric, and seeks to explicate
forms of discursive and other power articulated in them. Greek tra-
gedy grants a hearing to voices otherwise excluded as female, under
age, polluted, or insane, and thus involves a temporary and Wctional
extension of the right to free speech that is normally restricted to male
citizens (see Hall 1997: 126). Greek tragedy, so to say, is more radically
democratic even than Athenian radical democracy.
Thus, the scandalous voices in tragedy are reminiscent of, but not
identical to, the thematic of parrhèsia or ‘fearless speaking’ of the truth
in the face of the king, studied by Foucault (2001b), or the subaltern
voices theorized by Spivak (1988): they often, but by no means neces-
sarily, are the voices of the weak, the powerless, and the victimized
speaking against power.32 They need not speak the truth or anything
more than a partial or partisan truth. Instead, they test the limits of
what we can say at all and, more precisely, what we can say in public.
Conversely, they should be distinguished from the occasionally vio-
lently confrontational rhetoric of modern-day populist or xenophobic
politicians; from racist, sexist, or ethnic jokes; and from other forms
of ‘hate speech’. Tragedy, with its scandalous voices, questions rather
than aYrms; it does not voice political propaganda or counter-propa-
ganda but raises doubts and problems; and, most of all, it does not seek
to polarize but to bring together, even in the midst of war.
32 Foucault distinguishes ‘monarchic’ parrhèsia, which involves asking to speak

the truth to a king without risking harm to oneself (such as is done by the herdsman
in Euripides’ Bacchae: ll. 668–71), from ‘democratic’ parrhèsia among equals such as
on the classical Athenian agora). He slightly over-emphasizes the aspect of truth-
telling; thus, Polyneices requests the right to a hearing, not with the aim of speaking
the truth but of getting Oedipus’ support in the conXict with Eteocles. For more
recent scholarship on parrhèsia in Greek tragedy and comedy, see the papers by
Halliwell, McClure, Roisman, and Sommerstein in Sluiter and Rosen (2004).
16
Western Classics, Indian Classics:
Postcolonial Contestations
Harish Trivedi
Classics and the postcolonial would seem to be strange bedfellows.

Classics are nothing if not pre-modern, and to speak of them in these
post-al times as classics is necessarily to have to pick up the gauntlet
of aYrming that they are indeed originary, foundational and even
‘essential’ texts—such as postmodernism would not admit any text
or thing to be. Anyhow, both postmodernism and postcolonialism
stand at the opposite end of the chronological spectrum from the
classics, in being quite as new and current as the classics are old and
hallowed. Postcolonial discourse, in particular, comprises probably
the most widely transformative global experience of modern times,
concerned as it is in common critical view with, not only the period
since decolonization, but equally the period of colonization.1
The major postcolonial issues to address in this context would,
therefore, obviously be just how the classics inspired, shaped, and
aided and abetted or, alternatively, moderated, reWned, and ‘civilized’
the whole colonial enterprise. Would the experience of colonization
have been the same without the classics? How far were the classics
ideologically, instrumentally, or ornamentally deployed in the im-
perialist cause, and used to validate it? Did the classics, as beacon
lights of Western civilization, also disseminate certain values which
1 For a formulation and controversion of the view that the colonial and the
postcolonial exist in a seamless continuity, see, respectively, Ashcroft et al. (1989)
and Trivedi (1996).
Western Classics, Indian Classics 287
could, on the other hand, be appropriated and exploited by the
colonized as a tool of resistance against colonial rule? And how do
the classics now live on in the postcolonial consciousness and sens-
ibilities of the former colonizers, as well as the colonized, while still
serving their function as timeless texts?
W H O S E C L A SS I C S?
Before one begins to address any of these questions, there is, however,
another larger and overriding question to ask: just which classics and
whose classics are we talking about here? There would appear to be an
unqualiWed assumption, at least in anglophone discourse, that when
we talk of the classics, the only classics are Western classics, and that it
is their impact on the colonizer, as well as the colonized, that is all there
is to study. But it may be no less important to focus instead on
indigenous non-Western classics, to see how they were deployed by
the colonized peoples to contest the literary, cultural, and ideological
space with Western classics, and how well or ill these indigenous
classics have withstood the colonial onset and hegemony of Western
classics, to persist into the postcolonial times and to continue to serve
as foundational texts of the newly independent nations.
In this context, India as a colony is probably a singular exception.
It is a curious and remarkable fact that, though the ‘classics’, that is,
the canon of Greek and Latin texts that traditionally constituted the
core of a gentleman’s education in Europe—were also included in the
school and college syllabi introduced by the British in their colonies
all over the globe, from Australia to Canada, and from Africa to the
Caribbean, no Greek or Latin texts were ever taught in India, not
even in the most élite government or missionary institutions. This is,
on the face of it, so improbable a fact that in a recent American novel
(1999) entitled Love in a Dead Language (which is centred on the
classic Sanskrit text, the Kamasutra), the author Lee Siegel could not
even imagine it. In this novel, an Indian student who has gone out to
do a PhD in Sanskrit at a university in the USA (and there is of course
rich but plausible postcolonial irony in such academic contraXow) is
said by the novelist, who is himself a professor of Sanskrit and knows
his India very well in most other respects, to have learnt Latin at
St. Stephen’s College in Delhi. But Latin (or for that matter Greek)
was never taught, even in this exceptionally highly anglicized insti-
tution, which is the oldest college in Delhi (having been founded at
the high noon of the British Empire in 1880 by a group of English
missionaries called the Cambridge Brotherhood) and which is still
sometimes accused of being one of the most ‘élitist’ centres of higher
education in India.2
The fact that Western classics were not taught in India, in either
school or college, becomes especially signiWcant in the light of the
long history of the evolution of colonial education. In this respect
too, as in some others, India was the jewel in the crown, where the
British Wrst envisioned and devised a policy of colonial education to
promote the kind of hegemony, which has been called by Viswa-
nathan (1989) a ‘mask of conquest’, a policy that became a model for
spreading colonial education elsewhere and which served in fact as a
laboratory for experiments that were later adopted in the home
country itself. English literature, for example, was taught as a uni-
versity subject Wrst in India and only subsequently in England, after a
time-lag of about half a century. This contrasts with the case in the
White settler colonies such as, initially, Ireland and the USA, and
subsequently Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which both the
colonizers and the colonized, not always readily distinguishable one
from the other, regarded in many respects as home from home, and
where the same pattern of education prevailed as in Britain. On the
other hand, in Africa, where no written indigenous classics were to be
found and where ‘the richness and ubiquity of oral narrative tradi-
tions’ and their performative aesthetics proved diYcult to convey in
‘bald translation’, a study of the Western classics could be inserted
into the colonial education system as supplying a local lack (see
Furniss 2000: 127–8).
India was thus uniquely exempted from being obliged to read the
Western classics for reasons that seem to be nowhere clearly and
directly articulated by the British. It could be argued, perhaps, that
2 (Siegel 1999). My own counter-assertion derives from personal knowledge, from

my having taught at St. Stephen’s College from 1969 to 1984, having edited the
college centenary volume St. Stephen’s in Our Times (1980), and having contributed
both the Wrst and the last pieces to The Fiction of St. Stephen’s (Bhattacharjca and
Chatterjee (ed.) (2000): pp 3–7 and 207–24).
the most likely reason for such diVerent treatment of India in this
respect was that, unlike any of the other colonies, whether White or
Black, India had classics of its own, which had been ‘discovered’ and
acknowledged by Britain well before it had, eVectively, conquered
India and was in a position to promulgate its own educational and
cultural policy. It was through the now much-maligned ‘Orientalism’,
that is, the study and translation of the older Indian texts by the
British, which began in the 1770s, that not only Britain but also the
rest of the Western world realized that India had a tradition of
ancient literary works (unlike, for example, the tradition of orature
in Africa), which were recognizably ‘classics’ in the Western sense,
were fully comparable with Western classics, and were written in
Sanskrit, a language that was fully the match of Latin and Greek.
The making of the Orientalist canon through translations into Eng-
lish, mainly from Sanskrit, from the 1770s and throughout the
nineteenth century, may have been determined to a considerable
extent by pragmatic imperialist considerations (as Edward Said has
inXuentially argued). But it was in many notable instances also
sustained by a spirit of disinterested inquiry, engaged with local
literary works so old and esoteric that they could not possibly further
any utilitarian British design, and was thus often (in a phrase that
seems to have become almost obsolete) a labour of love (see Said
[1978] 1985 and Trivedi 2006).
One of the Wrst Britishers in India to learn Sanskrit and to begin
translating from it was Sir William Jones (to be acclaimed as ‘Orien-
tal’ Jones), who had earlier distinguished himself as a classical scholar
at Oxford. Though he is now often tarred with the broad brush of
complicity with the British imperialist enterprise in India, some of
the statements Jones made in that Wrst Xush of Orientalist discover-
ies, still sound stunning in their comparative liberality and open-
mindedness. The Sanskrit language, he declared in a discourse deliv-
ered in 1786 (Jones [1807] 1999), was: ‘of wonderful structure,
more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and
more exquisitely reWned than either’; he also recalled that: ‘[W]e
are told by the Grecian writers, that the Indians were the wisest
of nations’ (Jones [1807] 1999).3 He was the Wrst to translate a
3 Emphases in the original. For a fairly comprehensive recent discussion of Jones’s
‘orientalist’ achievement, including a defence of Jones against Said, see Holes (2005).
major literary text from Sanskrit into English in 1789 (after the scrip-
tural Bhagavadgita had been translated by Charles Wilkins in 1785): the
play Abhijnanashakuntalam by the epic poet and dramatist Kalidasa,
fourth century ce. In his ‘Preface’ to the translation, while expressing
some reservations about certain features of the play, such as it com-
prising seven acts which could, he suggested, be collapsed into Wve,
Jones paid Kalidasa what may be regarded as the ultimate compliment
it is possible to pay any writer, especially by a Britisher, by calling him
‘the Shakespeare of India’ (Jones [1789] 1999: 205 and 203).
Altogether, the Western discovery of Indian classical literature,
both religious and secular, caused such shock and wonder in Europe
in the late eighteenth century that Schwab (1984) and Clarke (1997),
in the titles of their studies of this Oriental impact and inXuence,
described it, respectively, in terms of a new Renaissance or a new
Enlightenment, probably the two most deeply transformative devel-
opments in the Western world.
In India itself, such unstinted acclaim by orientalist scholars of
the literary excellence of Sanskrit literature fed substantially into the
tide of cultural nationalism that had begun to surge by the end of
the nineteenth century, as a means of resistance to British rule. After the
British had won a succession of military victories in India at the turn
of the eighteenth century, including most notably the triumph over
Tipoo Sultan in 1799 and the battle of Delhi in 1803, and after they
had quelled the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 with such a heavy punitive hand as
to eliminate forever after the possibility of another military revolt
against them, this comparison between Kalidasa and Shakespeare was
to be appropriated by Indian cultural nationalists. It was on the
strength of the orientalist dissemination and valorization of Indian
literary classics that many Indians felt enabled to claim a cultural
seniority and even superiority over the ruling British; it was some-
times pointed out, for example, that as Kalidasa had preceded Sha-
kespeare by more than one thousand years, it would perhaps be more
Wtting to call Shakespeare the Kalidasa of England! It was argued,
more generally, that the British anyhow had no classics of their own,
excepting the Greek and the Latin, which were even half as old or
great as the Indian classics, that even Shakespeare was not philo-
sophical or profound enough for Indian taste, and, therefore, the
British could hardly claim to justify their occupation and rule of
India on the high moral ground that they were there to ‘civilize’ the
Indians; see, for example, Shahani (1932) and Dutt (1923); for a
discussion of both, see Trivedi (1995a).
C L A SS I C A L C OLO NI A L I S M
However, as Metcalf (1995: 39) has noted: ‘[T]he British were never-
theless determined always to mark out the Raj as a moral, ‘‘civilized’’
and civilizing régime’. In order to be able to do so, British adminis-
trators and ideologues had either to Xy in the face of their own
‘discoveries’ of the Indian classics or, alternatively, to shift ground.
With regard to a country colonized by the British some time before
they colonized India, John Milton (quoted in Cronin 1996: 52) had
spoken of the ‘most absurd and savage Customes’ of the Irish and
‘their true Barbarisme and obdurate wilfulnesse’, so as to be able to
justify the ‘civilizing Conquest’ of Ireland by the British. Now in
India, Lord Macaulay, faced with the vast body of Indian learning,
some of which had already been made available in English translation
by his compatriots, chose to dismiss it all through a sweeping com-
parison with Europe: ‘a single shelf of a good European library [is]
worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’ (Macaulay
[1835] 1972: 241). And this despite the incidental personal circum-
stance that, however well-versed he might have been in classical
European literature, he knew by his own admission hardly anything
of the literatures of the East.
At the same time, Macaulay turned round to open another front in
the battle to justify British rule in India, when he projected the view
that English language and literature would serve as the new classics of
India. This was not merely a matter of substituting one set of classics
for another; it was, more ambitiously, to cast the British imperial
project in India in the mould of the Roman Empire. SigniWcantly,
Macaulay had gone out to India to serve from 1834 to 1838 as the
Member for Law in the Council of the Governor-General Lord
Bentinck, and it was his primary oYcial task to impose on India
‘the rule of law’ as deriving in the West from the Roman model. The
Indians had in common British view, existed in a state of violent
lawlessness until the British arrived and through their own (decisively
violent) intervention established peace; what came to be called Pax
Britannica (celebrated in the title of James Morris’s (1979) three
volume popular history of British rule in India), was clearly modelled,
of course, on Pax Romana. The notoriously corrupt and thoroughly
unprincipled commercial adventurism and naked greed that marked
the early history of the East India Company from its establishment in
the year 1600 up to the chicanery and the immoral practices of
Robert Clive and Warren Hastings in the late eighteenth century
(as exposed subsequently in the impeachment proceedings in British
parliament of the latter, for example), could later be sanitized and
sanctiWed through the British claim to occupy the high moral ground
of ‘civilizing’ India, along familiar and hallowed Roman lines. It
was through self-Xattering comparisons with the Holy Roman Em-
pire that the British in India developed a sense of holiness of their
own colonizing ‘mission’, famously formulated by Kipling as ‘the
white man’s burden’ laid on the white man’s shoulders by Provi-
dence, no less.
Increasingly in postcolonial discourse, Macaulay is seen as a
Wgure more important than almost any British Governor General
or Viceroy of India on the strength of an oYcial document of some
5000 words: his ‘Minute on Indian Education’, which he submitted
on 2 February 1835 to the Governor General Lord Bentinck. In it he
argued successfully for a reversal of policy through which an annual
subsidy of 100,000 rupees, so far granted to native institutions
of indigenous learning for ‘encouraging the study of Arabic and
Sanscrit’, was to be withdrawn and henceforth used instead to pro-
mote English education among the natives, who could then serve as
interpreters or mediators between the British rulers and the countless
millions who had now been brought under British rule. These inter-
preters were not merely to be taught the English language but, in
Macaulay’s scheme of things, to be so thoroughly hybridized as to
become cultural clones; they were to be ‘a class of persons, Indian in
blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in
intellect’ (Macaulay [1835] 1972: 249). Macaulay’s project may be
said to have succeeded probably beyond his own greatest expect-
ations, for it is just such an anglicized or, more generally speaking,
Westernized class of persons that Wrst collaborated with the British in
India and then, after independence, came to succeed the British as
the ruling class. Indeed, since current postcolonial discourse seems to
be constituted exclusively in English and even the most self-avowedly
radical and resistant postcolonial theorists and critics from India
write in English as a rule, and hardly ever in any of the Indian
languages, they too—in a deep historical irony—must be counted
among Macaulay’s great-grandchildren.
While advocating that a select class of natives should learn English
and acquire Western knowledge, Macaulay seems to have had con-
stantly at the back of his mind a classical pattern of education. In fact,
whenever he mentions English, we can clearly hear echoes of Greek
and Latin. This double classical–colonial perspective is deployed by
Macaulay as a constant underlying strategy to justify the introduc-
tion of English in India; he advances in favour of teaching English all
the familiar arguments trotted out in favour of teaching Greek and
Latin, except that in places, he claims even more for English as being
the modern culmination of the ancient classical languages (ibid.
pp. 241–2):
It [English] stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West. It
abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece
has bequeathed to us. . . . Whoever knows that language, has ready access to
all the vast intellectual wealth, which all the wisest nations of the earth have
created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations.
A key point of reference in these reXections, inevitably, had to be the
Renaissance, when modern Europe reclaimed its lost classical heri-
tage, and Macaulay fully exploits a parallel he institutes here between
Europe in the Wfteenth century and India in the nineteenth (ibid.
p. 243):
I refer [to] the great revival of letters among the Western nations at the close
of the Wfteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century. At that time almost
everything that was worth reading was contained in the writings of the
ancient Greeks and Romans. Had our ancestors acted as the Committee of
Public Instruction [in India] has hitherto acted; had they neglected the
language of Cicero and Tacitus; had they conWned their attention to the
old dialects of our own island; had they printed nothing and taught nothing
at the universities but Chronicles in Anglo-Saxon, and Romances in
Norman-French, would England have been what she now is?
This grand Xight of rhetoric culminates in the clearest identiWcation
that Macaulay makes between the classics and English in the entire
‘Minute’ (ibid.):4
What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham,
our tongue is to the people of India. The literature of England is now more
valuable than that of classical antiquity.
The classics are used by Macaulay here to confer similar value on
English, and at the same time pronounced to be inferior to English
whenever it suits his purpose to say so. This unwitting paradox is
staged yet again when, answering the objection that no Indian could
‘attain more than a smattering of English’ because it was so diVerent
and diYcult, Macaulay (p. 249) says: ‘Nobody, I suppose, will con-
tend that English is so diYcult to a Hindoo as Greek to an English-
man’. This comparison deWes all logic and seems to be based on
nothing more, presumably, than painful childhood memories of
having an alien language thrust upon one for, surely, the gap between
Greek and English is far narrower, in view of the extensive etymo-
logical and cultural connections between the two languages, than it
could ever be between say Hindi or Bengali on the one hand and
English on the other. Macaulay’s assertion may be irrational, but
perhaps for that very reason is deeply symptomatic of the fact that
the very temper and template that vitally shaped the British colonial
perception of India were inherently classical.
In particular, a persistent overlaying of the Roman Empire over
British rule in India served to validate the latter, as well as to
aggrandize and glorify it. The culmination of this process of classical
legitimization, through which not only the frame but the very fabric
of British rule in India was self-consciously modelled after the
Roman Empire, came in 1876 when Queen Victoria was proclaimed
the Empress of India. Thus, ironically, she was raised a notch further
above, not only the masses of India but also the numerous erstwhile
4 It is interesting to Wnd that, within the next two decades, this classical comparison
had been accepted and internalized by at least one of the more impressionable or
sycophantic of the Indian students to be trained under Macaulay’s new system of English
education. ‘The English are to us what the Romans were to the English’, wrote Nabinch-
under Dass, student at Hooghly College, Calcutta, in an essay predictably included in
the British Parliamentary Papers 1852–53. Quoted in Viswanathan (1989: 139).
kings of the various parts of India, now demoted by the British to be
called merely ‘princes’ and ‘nawabs’. Many of them still held their
customary rights and privileges under the umbrella of British para-
mountcy and, as the Prime Minister of the day, Disraeli, acknow-
ledged, apparently without any sense of irony, they continued to
‘occupy thrones which were Wlled by their ancestors when England
was a Roman province’ (quoted in Metcalf 1995: 61).
The constant evocation of the Roman comparison thus added a
halo to the materialist, pragmatic and ‘improving’ functions of the
satraps of the British Raj, as acutely felt for example by the Collector
(that is, the head of the district), Hopkins—probably one of the most
thoughtful and reXective British characters ever created in all the
literature of the Raj, in the Booker Prize winning novel The Siege of
Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell (Farrell 1973: 37):
But Hopkins had gone further. Not only had he returned to India [from long
leave in England] full of ideas about hygiene, crop rotation and drainage, he
had devoted a substantial part of his fortune to bringing out to India
examples of European art and science in the belief that he was doing as
once the Romans had done in Britain.
Among the ‘statues, paintings and machines’ that Hopkins has
brought to India are metal busts of the major British authors, the
new classics of Macaulay. But presently, the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 breaks
out, and when the besieged English community at Krishnapur runs
out of ammunition to Wre back at the Indian mutineers, the same
Hopkins orders that these cultural icons should be used as cannon
balls instead. In this brute transition from canon to cannon, the
electrometal heads, Wred as missiles, achieve widely varying results.
While the curly haired head of Keats Xies oV ‘very erratically indeed’,
the head of Shakespeare proves the most lethal of all (ibid. p. 335):
. . . it had scythed its way through a whole astonished platoon of sepoys
advancing in single Wle through the jungle. The Collector suspected that the
Bard’s success in this respect might have a great deal to do with the ballistic
advantages stemming from his baldness.
Apparently, before the British civilized their Indian subjects with
culture, they had Wrst to subdue them with sheer Wre-power, and
when it came to the crunch, classics could kill.
I N D I A N C L A S SI C S
While Greek and Latin may not have been taught in India, even
though they were taught in perhaps all the other colonies (including
neighbouring Sri Lanka),5 the one classical language and literature
that was actually taught in the Indian universities set up by the
British on the Western model was Sanskrit (with some universities
also teaching Arabic and/or Persian on a smaller scale, as part of
the British policy to institute a strategic political parity between the
Hindus and the Muslims). Though oYcial British subsidy for the
teaching of these classical languages in the traditional indigenous way
in the pathshalas and the madrassas had been cut oV after Macaulay’s
peremptory intervention (he had threatened to resign if his recom-
mendations were not accepted), the British perhaps could not visu-
alize a university in India in which some classical literature or the
other was not taught, as it always had been in the British universities.
In contrast, the modern Indian languages were not taught in any
Indian university until about 1920, the same time more or less when
English as a university subject Wnally began to be taught at Oxford
and Cambridge.
5 The singular exception of India in this regard is further underlined by the fact
that even in the neighbouring (post)colony Sri Lanka, the Western classics have been
taught in Greek and Latin in school at both Ordinary and Advanced levels, as well as
in college, even well after independence. However, as Rajiva Wijesinha (who read
Latin till A level in Sri Lanka and then went on to take a BA degree in the Classics and
a DPhil from Oxford) remarks, very few students in Sri Lanka choose to study Latin,
which is now threatened with abolition, whereas a new subject called ‘Greek and
Roman Civilization’, introduced in the 1960s and requiring study of classical litera-
ture and society in English, remains a popular option with students where it is oVered
at some of the more élite schools and at two of the universities (personal commu-
nication, 24 October 2004). Ashley Halpe, senior Professor of English in Sri Lanka,
points out that following the academic reform of the universities in Sri Lanka in 1973,
what were called simply ‘Classics’ before have begun to be called ‘Western Classics’, as
the Departments of Classics at the only two universities to have them, Peradeniya and
Kelaniya, have since also included Sanskrit (personal communication, 27 and 29
October 2004). The vital diVerence, thus, between India and Sri Lanka in this regard
seems to have been that, in India, the Sanskrit classics had a strong indigenous claim,
which they did not in the largely Buddhist Sri Lanka, where the study of Pali was
subsumed within Buddhist Studies as Pali has little secular literature.
The British adoption of Sanskrit as an academic discipline in India
may have been facilitated by the fact that it had been a classically (and
safely?) dead language for about six to eight centuries already. But the
persistence of Sanskrit in its classical role, both directly and indir-
ectly, has probably been far more potent in India than was the case
with Greek and Latin in the West. Of the eighteen ‘national’ lan-
guages of India recognized by the country’s constitution, for ex-
ample, the vast majority have derived directly and substantially
from Sanskrit, and the four languages that belong to another linguis-
tic family, the Dravidian, have also, right since their origin, been
extensively Sanskritic in terms of their vocabulary, especially in the
higher, literary registers. In all these languages, the great Sanskrit
classics, the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, were recreated,
some time broadly between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries,
and these reborn classics have in turn assumed the status of the
greatest classics in each of these modern languages.
More importantly, Sanskrit has been the bedrock of the cultural
mainstream that has Xowed through India continuously for the last
four thousand years or more. It may, like old Greek and Latin, be a
dead language, but the religion and culture of which it was, from the
start, the vehicle, are far from dead or supplanted, even now. Unlike
the Greek gods, the Sanskrit/Hindu gods are still the gods wor-
shipped by a vast proportion of the population of India, and unlike
in Persia, the older civilization has not been wiped out beyond living
trace and been replaced by another younger and radically diVerent
civilization. Like Persia, India too was conquered by the Muslims but
even after six centuries of continuous and extensive Muslim rule,
from the end of the twelfth century to the beginning of the nine-
teenth, India did not become predominantly Muslim, nor could 150
years of subsequent British rule turn it into a Christian country. (The
proportion of Muslims in India was never higher than approximately
25 per cent in the 1940s, which after Partition and the creation of
Pakistan in 1947 dropped to about 13 per cent. The proportion of
Christians in India is as high now as it has ever been, at a little over 3
per cent, while Hindus comprise 82 per cent of the population.) India
may, in Naipaul’s (1979) eponymous phrase, be a (repeatedly)
wounded civilization, but it is not a civilization transformed cultur-
ally out of recognition or riven right down the middle.
Thus, the oldest Indian classics have had a continuous presence in
the land ever since they began to be composed, from approximately
1000 bce onwards. Not only are our classics our own classics (unlike
in England or America where they come from foreign lands in
foreign languages), they are still our classics in a living sense. One
way to demonstrate the live charge that Indian classics have con-
tinued to carry, may perhaps be to cite one or two emblematic cases
of their eVective deployment against political authority during both
the colonial and the postcolonial periods.
Of the literary works banned by the British Government in India, one
of the most celebrated was Kichaka-vadha [The Slaying of Kichak]
(1907) by the Marathi playwright Krishnaji Prabhakar Khadilkar. The
plot and the characters in this play were taken straight from the Maha-
bharata, and overlaid with a political allegory, in which the heroine was
identiWable with subjugated India, the eponymous villain who
attempted to rape the heroine with the particularly despised viceroy of
the day, Lord Curzon, and the hero Bhima, who slew the villain and
saved the heroine’s honour, with Bal Gangadhar Tilak, leader of the
militant or ‘extremist’ section of the nationalist Congress Party. Of
the nine other Marathi plays banned around the same time as
Kichaka-vadha, two others had similarly deployed other episodes from
the Mahabharata, apparently as part of the (eventually infructuous)
artistic strategy that, while the insider audience would grasp the political
import, the British Government would be none the wiser. In order to
have the full intended impact, this procedure assumed, of course, that
the audiences would be fully alive to each turn and nuance of the original
classical story, as Rakesh Solomon explains (Solomon 1994: 327):6
The dramatists . . . utilized such subjects because the audience was intimately
familiar with these . . . mythical plots and personalities and was thus alert to
their accumulated meanings, associations, and resonances. Such coded
sources facilitated subtle, indirect, and surreptitious communication.
It was as if a shared knowledge of Indian classics (and of Indian
history, in the case of some other oVending plays) could be turned
into a secret weapon of resistance against the British rulers.
6 Cf. V. B. Deshpande ‘The public clearly understood all the intended equations
[in Kichaka-Vadh]’ (Banhatti and Joglekar 1998: 118).
In postcolonial times, the Indian classics have continued to be an
equally rich mine of plots and situations, which could be used for
political opposition, and though the allegory now hardly needs to be
(or indeed can be) covert, artistic ingenuity lies in being able to
institute acute and startling parallels between the classical past and
the urgent present. For example, in Dharmavir Bharati’s (2004)
Hindi verse-play Andha Yug [The Age of the Blind], written in
1955, not only is the old patriarch Dhritarashtra blind, as in the
Mahabharata, but so metaphorically are most of the other characters
around him, thus representing what many readers saw as the con-
fused and directionless condition of the Indian nation in the Wrst
decade of independence. In fact, the Hindi critic Ramsvarup Cha-
turvedi (1994: 283–4) went so far as to say of the contemporary
relevance of this play:
At the level of the narrative, the original plot of the Mahabharata is here very
closely allied with its contemporary resonances. It may even seem at times
that the epic war, the mahabharata, is actually being played out only now,
and that what the [original] Mahabharata by Vyasa described was merely an
imaginary sketch of it.
The seemingly compulsive urge to retell Indian classics in a topically
relevant way perhaps Wnds its simplest and least persuasive expres-
sion in Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989), so called to
echo, somewhat unconvincingly, the very title the Mahabharata
(which could literally be construed as ‘great India’); it narrates
under a thin veneer of the epic the events of the politically turbulent
period in the 1970s and the 1980s when Indira Gandhi was prime
minister.
While it may seem remarkable that the Mahabharata has over the
last one hundred years been put to such diverse political uses, these
topical and allegorical retellings constitute only a partial index of its
continued popularity in the nation. Perhaps a truer mark of a classic
is to be re-read and re-performed, even when there is no ostensible or
intended connection between it and the present, apparently for its
own sake and without any ulterior motive. Thus, at about the same
time that Khadilkar’s politically subversive version of the Slaying of
Kichaka was being banned in Marathi, other dramatic versions of the
same episode were written in other Indian languages without any
contemporary import, such as Kichaka-vadham (1891) and Kichaka-
vilacam (1897) (Das 1991: 117, 273, 281, 282). The most remarkable
instances, however, of a surge of renewed dissemination of the Indian
classics occurred in the late 1980s and the early 1990s when Wrst the
Ramayana and then the Mahabharata were turned into television
versions broadcast serially in weekly parts for over a year, each on
Sunday mornings (not because that is the so called God-spot, as in
the television schedules of some Christian countries, but because that
is the weekly holiday when everyone would be home to watch it). The
wide popularity of both these productions was so stunning as to take
by surprise all concerned, and the ratings achieved, and consistently
sustained, by both the epics in their new versions have not been even
remotely matched by any other broadcast on Indian television.
This was partly because of the circumstance referred to above, that
though the two great Sanskrit epics are not the Hindu ‘Book’, as the
Bible or the Koran is for Christians or Muslims (and how could two
very diVerent books be The Book, in any case), they still enjoy scriptural
status for a considerable section of the population. Thus, if the classics
live on in India in a way that they perhaps do not in the West, it is partly
because there is considerably more of living—and sometimes positively
kicking and screaming!—religion in India than in the West. But this
correlation between the Indian classics and the Indian scriptures can be
easily exaggerated or distorted, especially in anglophone discourse,
where the very deWnitions of the religious and the secular are radically
diVerent and therefore not quite applicable to the Sanskrit epics. Thus,
the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are often compared, in terms of
their oral composition and literary merit, with The Iliad and The
Odyssey, without any religious considerations entering such a discus-
sion. In any case, even in the most strictly secular and enlightened of
intellectual and creative spheres in India, the foundational Indian
classics continue to provide an inexhaustible topic of celebration as
well as interrogation. For example, at the Golden Jubilee celebrations of
the Sahitya Akademi (the Indian National Academy of Literature) in
2004, the theme of the show-piece three-day international conference
was a single text: the Mahabharata.7
7 ‘Mahabharata: Text, Contexts, Readings,’ international conference held by the
Sahitya Akademi at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, 27–29 March 2004.
Yet another criterion by which to judge the afterlife of classics may
be to see how large a space they occupy as a subject of study in the
modern and secular domain of school or university. In this regard, the
changing fortunes of both Western and Indian classics in the various
syllabi of the Department of English of the University of Delhi (where
I have myself taught since 1969) may provide a singular case study of
the conXicting postcolonial impulses. In 1975, in a comprehensive
revision of the BA (Honours) syllabus, it was successfully argued by
a section of the English faculty (which then numbered about 700 and
even now numbers over 600) that in order to acquire a proper
understanding of ‘English’, namely, British literature (which is all
that was to be taught, with the token exception of two authors:
Hemingway and Naipaul), our students needed to study some selected
Western classical texts and accordingly, a compulsory course was
introduced comprising The Odyssey, Antigone, Lysistrata, selections
from The Republic (all in English translation, of course) and The
Book of Job from the Authorized Version of the Bible. This was at a
time when Commonwealth literature already existed as a new alterna-
tive to more and more of the same old canonical British literature, and
Indian writing in English was already being studied in British univer-
sities such as Leeds and in several American universities.
Meenakshi Mukherjee, then a voiceless young lecturer in the
University of Delhi but now probably the doyenne of postcolonial
critics in India, has ironically recounted how this ‘radical change’,
introduced ‘with much fanfare’, struck her as only partially progres-
sive, if not actually retrograde (Mukherjee 2003: 39):
I taught Homer with much enjoyment and gusto, but I occasionally did
wonder why I could not teach sections of the Mahabharata in English
translation side by side, to place the genre called [the] epic in a global
context . . . a senior colleague explain[ed] to me patiently that our business
[was] to study English literature; and that the [Western classics were]
important only to the extent that they [were] part of the heritage that
[had] shaped literature in Britain. Vyasa [did] not come into the picture.
It has often been noted that the spread of the English language, and of
Westernization generally, has paradoxically increased in India since
independence rather than diminishing, so that the old comprador
class that succeeded the British could conserve and continue to enjoy
its old privileges, and this academic change seemed to be a literary and
academic manifestation of it, especially at a university where a large
proportion of the senior faculty had been trained at Oxbridge.
Anyhow, by the time the next round of revision of the BA (Honours)
syllabus was eVected, which was not until a quarter of a century later, in
1999, there was a large enough number of young college teachers of
English in Delhi who were postcolonially sensitized to oppose and seek
to mitigate, if not entirely to countermand, this reactionary step
(though Mukherjee herself had meanwhile moved on to other younger
and more innovative universities). As a result, the new ‘Classical
Literature’ course now comprises, not only The Iliad, Medea, and
Lysistrata but also a 60 page selection from the Mahabharata, and the
play Abhijnanashakuntalam (also known as Sacontala or Shakuntala)
by Kalidasa, so that the rubric ‘classical’ embraces equally Western and
Indian classics. Even this was, for some of us, a compromise, but so
is the postcolonial condition in most of its aspects in many newly
independent societies.8
In the long and colonially chequered history of India, classics have
thus played a continually vital and varied role. The Indian classics
were obviously not thought of as ‘classics’ in the modern Western
sense by the Indian readers, until Western scholars ‘discovered’ them
and acknowledged them to be classics, nor did they perform a
function comparable with that performed in the West by the Western
classics. One crucial diVerence in this regard has been that, while the
Western classics themselves have embodied a particular Greco-Roman
set of religious and social beliefs and cultural practices, their post-
Renaissance readers have adhered to quite another, predominantly
Christian, set, so that the Western classics have been in a sense merely
8 This account is based on personal knowledge. I happened to be the Head of the
Department of English of the University of Delhi (1997–2000) and also chair of
the syllabus committee (1997–98) when these revisions were adopted and imple-
mented. For my personal (and yet only partially fulWlled!) agenda in the matter, see
Trivedi (1995b), in which I plead, inter alia, for the study of any one classical
literature in that classical language as one of the Wve necessary elements of a literary
syllabus, for the reasons that: ‘the very literariness of literature depends on its ability
to evoke what lies behind and around it by way of resonance and association, through
allusion and tradition . . . to read a classical literature in a classical language is to
deepen our conception of literature and to become aware of its eternality (or, if we
prefer it, of many of the conventions and continuities which determine the modes of
production of modern literature)’(p. 212).
academic classics. (Incidentally, there is no obvious word in the
Indian languages, including Sanskrit, which may serve as a transla-
tion for the English ‘classic’; the very concept seems alien and
imported.)9 In India, on the other hand, the Sanskrit classics, even
when read in their avatars in the modern Indian languages, have
continued to be living classics.
CLASSICS AND THE GLOBAL-POSTCOLONIAL
To sum up, the exceptional fact of colonial India being altogether

exempted from reading the Western classics in Greek or Latin is to
be accounted for on two diVerent grounds: the Wrst, that the British
themselves acknowledged that India had classics of its own, which then
continued to be taught in Sanskrit even under the Westernizing
Macaulayan educational dispensation; and the second, that works of
English literature instead were sought to be projected in India as the
new colonial classics, while the Raj itself was more and more self-
consciously moulded and validated in the image of the Holy Roman
Empire. The Indian classics, meanwhile, were by nationalist Indians
Xung in the face of the British imperialists to refute their claim that
they were ruling India so as to civilize the country; some of the Indian
classics were, indeed, mobilized through political adaptations as a
strategy of political protest and resistance to such a seditious extent
that these newly rewritten classical texts were banned by the British
Government. The otherwise hugely transformative period of British
rule and hegemony thus could not rupture the potency of the indi-
genous classics, especially when deployed as a vital instrument
of political and cultural expression; a radical tradition that has con-
tinued unimpaired into postcolonial times. At the same time, classics
9 The standard English–Hindi dictionary oVers for ‘classic’ Hindi words that mean:
‘1. excellent, ideal; 2. long acclaimed’, as well as the imitative neologism ‘klassikal’; while
for the noun it says: ‘1. books to take pride in’ and ‘2. established writer/artist’; see
Angreji-Hindi Kosh: An English-Hindi Dictionary by Bulcke ([1968] 1991:110). On the
other hand, a Hindi–English dictionary contains the headword ‘klassiki’, and explains
that it is derived from the English ‘classical’ and means in English ‘classical’; see The
Oxford Hindi–English Dictionary, McGregor (ed.) ([1993] 1998: 221).
have continued to be reread for their own sake and recently also have
been widely disseminated through the electronic visual media.
However, there now appears to be a new twist in this long tale of the
(after)life of the indigenous classics in India. While they may have
survived the colonial period undiminished and unsubdued, the Indian
classics seem to be in some danger of being eroded and forgotten in the
ever-strengthening postcolonial trend of further Westernization, as well
as an increasing preference for ‘fast’, user-friendly and bite-sized objects
of consumption in our new global village. The Indian poet and translator
A. K. Ramanujan once observed: ‘In India and in Southeast Asia, no one
ever reads the Ramayana or the Mahabharata for the Wrst time. The
stories are there, ‘‘always already’’ ’ (Ramanujan 1999: 158).10 Perhaps
unwittingly, however, this remark also conWrmed the truth of the old
witticism that a classic was a book one had always meant to read but had
not yet got round to reading. Certainly, in contemporary India, the fact
of the matter seems to be that not many Indians are reading the
Ramayana or the Mahabharata for the second time either, though it is
not clear whether because of some complex slow-release postcolonial
eVect of colonial rule or whether simply in step with the devaluation and
diminution of the place of classics globally, in the East as well as the West.
This constitutes a huge postcolonial irony, especially as the Wrst
Xush of the Orientalist discovery of the Indian classics in the eight-
eenth century had seemed to have in the West, as Schwab (1984: 11)
put it: ‘an eVect equal to that produced in the Wfteenth century by the
arrival of Greek manuscripts’, and the early French orientalist Anque-
til Duperron had even gone so far as to recommend, as Clarke (1997:
57) recounts: ‘that the Indian classics should be treated and studied
[in the West] on par with those of Greek and Rome’. Such a contest-
ation of classics Western and Indian at the cusp of the pre-colonial
and colonial periods seems now to be merely a dim memory of a lost
historical moment in an increasingly less literate global culture.
10 What Ramanujan says of the Indian Classics may, on the face of it, seem to be
universally true of all classics, as indicated in the very Wrst of the fourteen deWnitions of
the Classic oVered by Italo Calvino: ‘The classics are those books about which you usually
hear people saying, ‘‘I’m re-reading . . .’’ never ‘‘I’m reading . . .’’ ’. However, this is not
because people ‘know’ their Classics without actually having read them (as Ramanujan
implies), but rather represents, as Calvino puts it: ‘a small act of hypocrisy on the part of
people ashamed to admit they have not read a famous book’ (Calvino: 2000: 3).
17
Shades of Multi-Lingualism and
Multi-Vocalism in Modern Performances of
Greek Tragedy in Post-Colonial Contexts
Lorna Hardwick
This discussion takes as its focal point the impact of multi-lingual

practices in recent productions of translations and adaptations of
Greek tragedy and their implications for post-colonial practice and
theory. I shall conWne the discussion to examples drawn from con-
texts that are recognizably anglophone, in that either much or most
of the text is spoken in English or the target audience is signiWcantly
or predominantly anglophone. This will allow a certain amount of
comparison of the contributing linguistic and cultural strands. It will
also recognize the ambivalent status of English as a language for the
translation of Greek and Latin texts into modern contexts in which
English has come to be associated with colonial domination, includ-
ing the suppression of other languages.
The Wrst point to be made is that the English language itself
actually has a mixed colonial history. The territory now known as
England was dominated by Romans for four hundred years, followed
by Vikings, Germanic tribes, and Normans. The ‘English’ language
developed as a result of the impact of invasions; for centuries it was a
subaltern language, third in order behind Latin and Norman French;
it was subsequently spread and modiWed by various colonial activ-
ities. This has a confusing and sometimes ironic history. For instance,
The Statute of Kilkenny (1366) ordained that ‘every Englishman
[sc. in Ireland] do use the English language’. The document itself
was written in Norman French; the context was the prevention of the
‘irishing’ of English immigrants (see Crowley 2000: 1–17). An uneasy
association between colonialism and classical culture was created by
the use of the English language as the medium of colonial education
during the British Empire (and subsequently) and as the medium for
translation of the Greek and Latin texts, which were associated with
cultural superiority in the Western European tradition.1 Yet classical
texts, whether accessed in the original or in translation, have been the
medium of resistance to colonial domination and have had a cultur-
ally and sometimes politically interventionist role in the struggle
against colonial, nationalist, or ethnic oppression.2 This is partly a
case of ‘the empire writing back’ to de-appropriate, recast, and re-
contextualize texts that were not in any case ‘English’, or ‘British’, in
origin. There are, too, signiWcant distinctions between ‘English’ as a
marker of languages and ‘English’ as an inaccurate synonym for
British colonialism or cultural politics. Moreover, the association of
the English language with interventionist productions of Greek plays
has also been generated by the formal and thematic aspects of the
ancient plays themselves. Raymond Williams’ comment that in the-
atre, form is ‘inherently multivocal’, points to the way in which
theatre can liberate from linguistic domination as well as from
authorial authority (Williams 1994: 287; discussed in Rehm 2002:
244). In the case of comedy, the plays embodied a speciWcally demo-
cratic convention of free speech against contemporary politics and
politicians, and in the case of tragedy, they gave a voice, especially in
the convention of the Chorus and the Messenger Speech, to the
oppressed, marginalized, and under-privileged. Greek drama pro-
vided this alongside its other strands of xenophobia, patriarchy, and
imperialism; both sides of the coin can be mined for cultural authority
(and have been).3
There is also a sense in which the ancient languages themselves still
exert a quasi-colonial aura of power and authority, giving a subaltern
status to any language of translation, including English. This has
perhaps facilitated engagement with classical texts by modern writers
1 For detailed discussion of a range of examples of the history and varieties of

English and extensive bibliography, see Talib (2002).
2 See Rehm in this volume and Hardwick (2000: esp. ch.4).
3 For detailed analysis and bibliography, see Hall (1997).
Shades of Multi-Lingualism 307
who are speakers of English alongside other languages.4 Furthermore,
the multi-lingualism in performance that I shall discuss is by no means
unique to obviously post-colonial contexts of production. It also has
other histories as a theatrical device, both to signal the linguistic and
cultural distance between ancient and modern, and to show how the
ancient plays relate to diverse modern situations and cultures.5 Of
course these aspects are also relevant to post-colonial situations but
they are not solely determined by them. So, in framing the discussion,
I recognize that the issues cross the theory and practice of translation
of the texts, of subsequent or concurrent translation to the stage, of
performance histories and traditions, as well as of post-colonial per-
spectives. My examples also raise questions about the varieties of
English that are used, as well as about the juxtaposition of English
with other languages and I shall consider the interfaces within lan-
guages as well as between them.6 The emphasis will be on the practice of
writers and theatre directors, and on the extent to which they contend
with, and to some extent outXank, the problems of post-colonial angst
prioritized by theorists and critics, whose resulting theories are some-
times considered to replicate colonial systems of cultural domination
rather than to subvert them (Azim 2001).
A document that raises crucial issues for this type of investigation
is Femi OsoWsan’s 1999 discussion of the battles of identity within
which post-colonial scholarship has situated African playwrights
(OsoWsan 1999c). OsoWsan began by examining the view that the
main characteristic of work by (black) African and by Asian writers is
their demonstration of the value of their cultural past and the
recovery and proclamation of their autonomous identity. This view
assumes that contemporary writers will follow the pattern set by
what OsoWsan calls ‘our Negritude predecessors’ in their struggle
4 A contrasting position, though not developed through engagement with classical

texts, is that of the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who chose to reject English in
order to write in his mother tongue Gikuyu and thus avoid risking the reinscription
of colonial domination—‘literary enslavement to European languages’ (see Ngugi wa
Thiong’o 1986; 1997: 53).
5 For example, the multi-linguistic strategies developed by Andrei Serban in
successive melanges of Greek plays, see Macintosh (1997: 319–20).
6 McRae and Findlay (2000: 34–8) is an informative general introduction that also
raises the question of the relationship between English and Scots. For Caribbean/
English/Creole relationships, see Greenwood in this volume.
against being written out of history and culture. OsoWsan calls this
the ‘grand myth of Absence’. He claims that what has come to be
called ‘postcolonialist discourse’ is primarily based on lament about
the erasure of identity. This claim makes his discussion applicable
to a variety of post-colonial contexts.
OsoWsan argued that such a model of the cultural process, what-
ever its justiWcation in the past, should not shape analysis of con-
temporary literature. There are two reasons for this. The Wrst is that
such a focus diverts attention from more important issues in the
present, especially the global domination by late capitalism, which
actually makes the poor and marginalized even less ‘visible’ (OsoWsan
1999c: 1). By implication, Western-dominated post-colonial theory
then becomes complicit with the forces it claims to subvert. OsoW-
san’s second main objection is that deWning identity-struggles in
terms of post-colonial theory does not provide an accurate represen-
tation of the particular battles of identity that are relevant to
contemporary culture and writing in Africa. In this respect, he
attacked the assumption in much post-colonial discourse that the
focal point of cultural resistance is still deWned by its relationship to
the (European) colonial centres of power. He also distinguished
between diVerent sites of African culture and politics, and focused
on the urgency of their current problems.
These arguments, he wrote, have implications for how we ‘read’
such well known positions as Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s rejection of colo-
nially inherited languages. OsoWsan interprets this rejection not as an
end in itself but rather as a necessary measure in the process of creating
‘an egalitarian society on the continent’ (OsoWsan 1999c: 3). Similarly,
OsoWsan cites Efua Sutherland’s fusion of Western and traditional
African theatre as a means of discovering meaningful and access-
ible African theatrical forms. Thus, OsoWsan advocates the development
of forms of cultural orientation in Africa that recognize origins,
roots, and the scars created by colonization, and yet also develop its
own originality and conWdence. He regards the ‘wound of invisibility’
as the greatest impediment to this because it leads to a quasi-colonial
impulse to imitate the popular culture of the West.
Precisely how the ‘wound of invisibility’ is perceived and how it is
overcome is, I think, a deWning feature of the engagement of African
writers with Greek and Roman material. Naı̈ve mimicry is quickly
exposed as laughable (see Gibbs in this volume). Simple appropriation
of Greek plays, for instance, might appear to acknowledge that they
continue to represent the ‘Western’ values and culture, which previ-
ously appropriated them. Yet seizure of the texts away from domin-
ation by Western writers and critics can be a step in the development of
an autonomous African/Greek dialogue, while exchange and hybridity
in poetic and theatrical forms and language might enable a cultural
present and future that acknowledges the impact of diVerent ‘pasts’
without being constrained by any one of them.
OsoWsan has worked through these problems both in his critical
writing and in his theatre practice. In his article ‘The Revolution as
Muse’ he referred to the way in which, under state oppression
(whether colonial or indigenous), a ‘recourse to ruse’ is essential to
drama. The dissenting artist can confront, expose, and overthrow
terror through the gifts of ‘metaphor, parody and parable, masking
and mimicry’ (OsoWsan 1998: 11). To achieve this in the 1970s in
Nigeria, his own practice focused on low-resource ensemble work
that depended on the versatility of the actors and collaboration
among the players and with the audiences. His work with students
(both as actors and audiences) was designed to transform the per-
spectives of future leaders and empower them—‘to help transcend
our tragic cycle’ (OsoWsan 1998: 33). Although it aimed to break
down the ‘gap’ between actors and audiences, OsoWsan’s approach
was nevertheless, to some degree, élitist in its aims. In contrast is the
theatre work with rural communities developed by the South African
playwright and novelist Zakes Mda, who, drawing on the approaches
of Boal and Freiere, regards the practitioner as a catalyst in the raising
of consciousness among the disadvantaged.7
Moreover, OsoWsan’s aim to ‘mobilize the educated class’ was not
merely a question of working in his own country. To become inter-
nationally inXuential, a playwright must attract commissions from
overseas, and that means the West (in the sense of Europe and the
US, as well as the West of Africa). The dramatist’s response to the
commissioning of Women of Owu OsoWsan’s version (published text
2006) of Euripides’ Women of Troy, thus combines the aims of
7 This follows the principles of Paulo Freiere and is described in Mda (1993).
Mda’s novels are palimpsestic in their approach to the interplay of cultures. For an
insightful study of the resonances for classical texts, see Steinmeyer (2003).
re-examining the culture and history of West Africa with gaining
international recognition for African theatre. It also involves the
interplay of European and African theatrical traditions in order to
transform consciousness internationally (see Budelmann and GoV in
this volume). The role of Greek tragedy in this process is therefore
complex, not merely a counter-appropriation from the Western
canon, but also a seizure of an opportunity to work with African
theatrical conventions of song, dance, movement and lament in a
commission that would also maximize the international proWle of
the dramatist.
OsoWsan’s analysis also diVerentiates carefully between three cat-
egories of African literature that contribute to its visibility. The Wrst is
works written and published in the diaspora (‘Africans living in
exile’). The second is works written by Africans, wherever they
might live, either in response to their experience of Europe and
America (an experience that he says probably includes racism), or
as the result of commissions for performance in the West. The third
category is works written by those living and working in Africa.
These are also mainly published in Africa and focus on contemporary
socio-political disjunctions and/or the human relationships involved
in these (OsoWsan 1999c: 5). He thinks that it is both arrogant and
inaccurate to assume that all these categories of writing have the
same concerns with culture clash between African and European
or with the other problems that are the focus of post-colonial
discourse. The issues of identity, cultural politics, and, by extension,
dramaturgy, characterization, and language, are diVerent for theatre
written and staged in Africa and for Africans.8 OsoWsan identiWes
post-colonial concerns as ‘a return to the past, to the trenches of
Negritude’, whereas what he calls ‘our identity crisis in Africa’ is
concerned with problems of ‘creating national identities out of our
disparate ethnic communities’ and ‘creating committed, responsible,
patriotic and compassionate individuals out of our civil population’
(OsoWsan 1999c: 6).
In the rest of this essay I shall consider some non-African examples
of how the translation and performance of Greek plays has reXected
the priorities set out by OsoWsan—creation of an autonomous cultural
8 See also Djisenu in this volume on the importance of recontextualization.

identity; replacing absence by presence; invisibility by visibility; trans-
forming the consciousness of actors and spectators; exploiting the
potential of ‘ruse’.9 I shall also suggest that the implications are as
important for post-colonizing societies as for those that were colon-
ized. To tighten the analysis in comparing what is inevitably sometimes
disparate material, I shall focus on the holistic relationships between
multi-lingualism and other aspects of performance, and will begin
with a case-study of an example of a multi-lingual workshop perform-
ance in Britain.
Aeschylus’ Agamemnon was staged by Foursight Theatre in Wolver-
hampton, England in February 2004, directed by Dorinda Hulton.10
The production raised important issues about the nature of language
communities and their interaction, as well as about the relationship
between the verbal play-text and the semiotics of staging. The example
also demonstrates the range of ‘contexts’ from which multi-lingual
theatre practice springs and in the light of which its hermeneutic
implications become Xuid. I shall therefore discuss the production in
some detail, taking it as a paradigm for the kind of documentation
needed before more general judgements can be made.
The play was performed by professional actors preceded by four
weeks of workshop/rehearsal. It was staged in a community centre in
a culturally and ethnically diverse area of the West Midlands of
England. The English translation used was a close translation by
Philip de May (2003). This was part of a series that speciWcally
aimed to make available translations that were both accurate in
terms of the ancient Greek and speakable in terms of the norms of
modern English:
9 For the importance of the theatre workshop and multi-lingual practice in South
Africa, see Steinmeyer in this volume, Mezzabotta (2000) and van Zyl Smit (2007).
10 Foursight is a theatre group based in the West Midlands and touring nationally.
It develops much of its own work and from its inception had a particular focus on
gender issues. From 2001 to 2004 it presented three Greek plays in English transla-
tion, Medea (2001), Agamemnon (2004), and Hecuba (2004). I am grateful to the
artistic director, Naomi Cooke, and members of the company for facilitating this
research. The director of Agamemnon, Dr Dorinda Hulton, kindly recorded an in-
depth interview and gave me access to her Rehearsal Notes. Since preparing this
chapter, three interactive DVDs of Foursight’s Greek productions have been pub-
lished. Both the Medea and Agamemnon DVDs contain a video record of the
performance, together with Hulton’s extensive notes linked to the audio-visual
material (Hulton: 2006).
The aim of the series is to enable students to approach classical plays
with conWdence and understanding: to discover the play within the text.
The translations are new. Many recent versions of Greek tragedy have
been produced by poets and playwrights who do not work from the
original Greek. The translators of this series aim to bring readers, actors,
and directors as close as possible to the playwrights’ actual words and
intentions: to create translations that are faithful to the original in
content and tone; and that are speakable, with all the immediacy of modern
English.11
De May’s translation from the Greek followed the source text closely.
However, the staged production departed from the translation in
three important respects, two of which also involved departure from
the Aeschylus ante-text. Firstly, the director decided to end the action
before the appearance of Aegisthus. This occurs in line 1549 of de
May’s Aeschylus translation. Aegisthus’ exchange with the Chorus
dominates the exodos [closing sequence] and puts the case that the
killing of Agamemnon is just recompense for the killing of Thyestes’
children by Agamemnon’s father. However, the director wanted to
streamline both the action and the arguments (Hulton 2004):12
Because time is tight and it is such a monumental play, we thought it wise to
only attempt selected sections. In relation to this I thought it would be
interesting and provocative for our audiences if we ended the play early,
before Aegisthus’ entrance, thereby focussing on Clytemnestra’s motivation
for murder and the sacriWce of Iphigeneia.
Secondly, the production changed the composition of the Chorus
from the Elders of Argos (‘Old Men of Argos’ in de May’s translation)
and instead played the Chorus as ‘made up of those who were left at
home whilst the Argive armies went to war’ (Hulton 2004). This
stretched the notion of ‘those left at home’ to include a range of
groups aVected by the war and the Chorus’ lines were divided up to
reXect this. The decision regarding the Chorus was derived from
the main production concept, which centred round the themes of
‘home’ and ‘war’.
11 John Harrison and Judith AZeck, Preface to the series, reproduced in de May
(2003: vi).
12 Director’s Notes, section 1 ‘The Approach’, circulated to the cast prior to rehearsals.
The third departure from de May’s translation was that the cast did
not speak all their lines in English. The use of a variety of languages
to represent the experiences of those caught up in the eVects of
war aimed to show that the cast—whether in the Chorus or through
other characters—would represent diverse cultural projections of
‘home’. So some of the characters spoke occasional lines or small
sections of text in other languages. For example, the Watchman in
the Aeschylus and de May texts became the Watchgirl and was played
with a Jamaican accent. She sang in patois. Other members of the cast
translated lines from the de May translation into their ‘home’
languages—Spanish, Turkish, and Gujerati.13 The extension of
those aVected by the war from ‘Elders’ to include all kinds of subal-
terns was also linked with emphasis on the suVering and awareness of
children. The Watchgirl cradled a puppet that represented the ghost
of Iphigeneia as a white child of about 7 or 8 years of age. The puppet
wore a saVron robe that trailed down as her sacriWce by Agamemnon
was related in the parodos [entry Ode of the Chorus]. The ‘watchful’
expression of the puppet resonated with the body language of the
Watchgirl who cradled her and she also appeared as a ghost in
Episode V (lines 1314–548 in the de May translation). In choosing
to represent Iphigeneia with a puppet, the aim was to depersonalize
her as a character and to extend her referentiality from the daughter
of Agamemnon to: ‘all young children who have been sacriWced
in the name of a principle perceived to be of higher value than the
life of a child’ (Hulton 2004).14
The use of puppetry was also extended to give an additional
dimension to the Wgure of Cassandra. She was represented both as
a character played by an actress and also as a puppet signifying the
disembodied self of the child-woman. The Cassandra puppet was
slightly smaller than life-size, a black child-woman with braided hair
and brightly patterned dress. The face of the puppet had a mask-like
quality, alluding to the conventions of ancient Greek theatre. This,
13 The slipperiness of the term ‘home’ language is shown by the need for help from
the British Asian actor’s grandfather for the translation into Gujerati.
14 The use of puppets is a feature of the Foursight Company’s approach to staging.
In their Medea, also directed by Hulton, puppets were used as Medea’s children. In
their Hecuba, directed by Naomi Cooke, a life-size puppet was used for the body of
Polydorus.
combined with the impact of the actress, who later emerged from
under the puppet’s veil as the speaking Cassandra, signalled the
combination of object/victim and prophesying subject represented
in Aeschylus’ play.
The enactment of the production concept was shaped by the acting
space. The play was performed traverse in a studio theatre, with the
audience on two sides of a long narrow rectangle. At each end were
altars, surrounded by objects. One end represented ‘war’, the other
‘home’. This provided another dimension both to the problematic
nostos of Agamemnon and to the constructions of ‘home’ in the
memories of the displaced and the children of diaspora.15 The open
space between the two ends of the acting space provided a place for
encounter, conXict, and resolution. The traverse also allowed the
movement of the Chorus to take place in the space between the
polarities of ‘war’ and ‘home’. This was especially resonant, given
the diversity in gender, age, ethnicity, and social status represented in
the Chorus. The cast were actively involved in the design and creation
of the set. The Director’s preparatory Notes emphasized the collab-
orative approach (Hulton 2004):
The idea is to create a space/place that in spite of or even because of its
diversity, represents ‘home’ to us as a group. It will also represent a connec-
tion between our own personal ideas of ‘home’ and the theme of ‘home’
within the play. . . . For this altar, please could you each bring to the start of
rehearsals, a small collection . . . that represent the idea of ‘home’ for you as
an individual . . . by deWnition perhaps among these objects there is some-
thing that represents a person or a quality that you would risk your life in
order to protect.
The perceptions of ‘war’ expressed round the altar at the other end of
the traverse acting space were also collaborative (Hulton 2004):
At the other end, against two screens, will be a ‘war’ altar, which we will create
collectively in the second two weeks. The idea with this altar is to create a
space/place that represents our own perceptions of ‘war’ as it is experienced in
our contemporary global society. It will also represent a connection between
these perceptions and the theme of ‘war’ as it is explored in the play by
Aeschylus: the suVering on both sides caused by war, the mass-killing, the
15 I have discussed the relationship between nostos and diaspora politics in modern
productions of tragedy, in Hardwick (2006a).
sacriWce of children, the justiWcation, or not, for the reasons the war was
started in the Wrst place, the destruction of property and so on . . . for this altar,
please could you each bring as many newspaper cuttings and photographs as
possible that connect with the theme of ‘war’. These cuttings will be arranged
by us on to the two screens.
The ‘war altar’ also featured a video screen that showed live images at
key points of the action; for instance, in order to create an association
between a media news item and Agamemnon’s speech on his return
from Troy, when the ‘war zone’ provided him with a platform and
microphone to show how he was still operating in that sphere even
though he had notionally returned ‘home’.16 The semiotics of the
staging also extended into the tapestry scene in which in Aeschylus’
play, Agamemnon is persuaded by Clytemnestra to enter the house by
treading on the purple cloths that represent the riches of the house. In
the Wolverhampton production, this was represented by a cloth made
from contemporary images of children who have suVered in war. This
was perhaps also a metatheatrical allusion to the sequence in Katie
Mitchell’s production of The Home Guard, Part 1 of Ted Hughes’
version of The Oresteia, staged at the Royal National Theatre in
London in 1999. In that production, Agamemnon entered the house
not by walking on valuable tapestries but by trampling a collage of
little girls’ dresses, stained blood-red in memory of his destruction of
his own child and of others (see Hardwick 2005b and Walton 2005).
Thus through exploitation of the collaborative workshop ap-
proach, the words, costume, images, and performance space all
reXected the individual backgrounds and experiences of members
of the cast, and also testiWed to their perceptions of how the play
might resonate for twenty Wrst century audiences. However, the
context of the source text and performance in the Wfth century bce
was also respected (Hulton 2004):
Conceptually, we want to bring the text alive for a contemporary audience . . .
but we don’t want to go too far in pursuit of relevancy when clearly there
are values in the play that don’t translate into the twenty-Wrst century . . . we
are hoping to collectively create a mixture of visual signs for our audiences—
without tying the production down exclusively to any speciWc period or place.
16 The visual sequences were created by the video artist Jonathan Tritton.
The overall eVect was to put the audience in the place of those caught
up in something that was both familiar and strange, a war and its
aftermath, in which they sometimes directly understood the words
and sometimes watched as cultural strangers, sometimes grasping
meaning communicated through movement and gesture rather than
words. And, of course, diVerent members of the audience under-
stood diVerent languages and movements. There can have been few
who were Xuent in all, yet the total experience was also part of the
changing dynamics of culture in contemporary Britain. Thus, the
production developed the potential of the workshop both as an
oppositional form, in its representation of the eVects of violence
and oppression on the powerless, and also as an integrative form, in
its collaborative use of the words, movement, and material signs of
cultures in ways that gave a voice to the historically disempowered,
and to the creators of new forms of artistic and social expression in
post-colonial Britain (see Fleishman 1990: 88–118; and Steinmeyer in
this volume).
The value of Greek drama in the processes of creating new senses
of community in Britain was also explored in the Citizens Cultural
Diversity project in Glasgow in 2004. This included a version of the
Oresteia, called House of Murders, staged at the Citizens’ Theatre in
Glasgow in September 2004, directed by Peter Arnott. In this pro-
duction the (amateur) actors were drawn from a variety of nation-
alities, including asylum-seekers, wishing to make their home in
Scotland. The production celebrated the potential of theatre to
enable people to use the cultural forms at their disposal in order to
develop multi-faceted identities that make the intercultural become
intra-cultural. The intra-cultural recognizes repressed traditions and
attempts to situate them better in relation both to their origins and to
their transformative power (see Pavis 1996). In this sense the Wol-
verhampton Agamemnon involved both the cast and the audiences as
participants in a patchwork of cultures in transition. The verbal and
semiotic multi-vocalism of the production reXected diversity within
communities rather than between them.17
17 See also OsoWsan (1999c) for examples of experiments in Nigeria and Minne-
sota in which actors used the variety of languages that were naturally spoken by the
cast. In both contexts the multi-lingualism reXected diversity within communities.
Hulton’s Agamemnon was designed as workshop theatre for a
community arts project in an area that exempliWed the eventual
eVects exerted in Britain by colonialism and the diasporas it created.
However, there are other examples of multi-lingualism in recent
productions of Greek plays that suggest further insights. In his
discussion of OsoWsan’s play, Women of Owu, Felix Budelmann
pointed out speciWc aspects in which OsoWsan diverged from Euripi-
des’ Women of Troy. These included a signiWcant change to the
opening sequence, so that the women of the Chorus were given
prominence in dialogue with a god; the importance of the ritual
lament at the end; and the variations in the placing of the choral
songs, accompanied by the use of the Yoruba language (see Budel-
mann in this volume and the Appendix to the published text, OsoW-
san 2006: 68–78). The importance given to the Chorus or Chorus
Wgure, the cultural centrality of the lament, and the metatheatrical
implications of placing not one but two modern languages in dia-
logue with the Greek ante-text, are also crucial to the impact of the
2005 performance in Britain of Ola Rotimi’s play The Gods Are Not
To Blame, based on Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos and directed by
Femi Elufowoju for Tiata Fahodze.18
This production of the play at the Arcola Theatre in Hackney
represented a particular moment in the ongoing reception of the
Sophocles play and of Rotimi’s now canonical version. It also marked
a particular moment at the intersection of several post-colonial
histories. It exempliWed the open-ended possibilities of each new
translation and staging, and suggested ways in which both temporal
and cultural barriers between sources and receptions can be bridged.
Changes in the meanings of words over time have frequently been
considered as impediments to the transfer of meaning, while the
diVerence between words as words, and words used in a dramatic
context, adds another layer both of richness and of possible obfus-
cation (see, respectively, Steiner [1975] 1992, and Walton 2006). In
production interviews, the British-African director Femi Elufowoju
told of the intense impression made on him by The Gods Are Not To
Blame, when in 1975 as a boy of eleven he saw it performed in a
18 For discussion of Rotimi’s play, see Simpson in this volume, and for a compar-
able study of the cultural and linguistic interactions in Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of
Euripides: A Communion Rite, see Macintosh (2007).
reconstructed Greek theatre at a university campus in Ife, western
Nigeria. He spoke of the experience as ‘my baptism into African
theatre tradition’ and when he was preparing the 2005 production
he revisited Nigeria to consult the original cast, especially about the
rhythms of the movements that go with the songs but are not
indicated in the text (Cripps 2005).
By 2005, the impact of the Biafran War was fading. This conXict
had shaped the response of earlier audiences but early twenty-Wrst
century audiences were more inclined to Wnd allusions to contem-
porary problems, especially in the context of the ‘Make Poverty
History’ campaign that was in the news headlines at the time. The
early scene, in which the Oedipus-Wgure, Odewale, advises the villa-
gers on their responsibility to take action to Wght disease among the
children, drew an audible response from the multi-racial audience.19
Most important of all in this combination of Greek, African, and
British theatrical elements, was the use of lament, especially as sung
in Yoruba by the Antigone-Wgure after the blinding of Odewale. This
marked a change in register in a way that is diYcult to communicate
in the more emotionally and ritually constrained English language.
The lament also marked a re-Africanization of the performance of
Rotimi’s play. It marked the ability of the African tradition to bring
out possibilities latent in the ancient text but not inscribed by the
ancient author at precisely that point. This is analogous to OsoWsan’s
variations on Euripides in Women of Owu, in which the role of the
Chorus in ritual lamentation was enhanced. This kind of variation
bypasses the shortcomings of the English language and its associated
theatrical traditions in a way that accords both with the ancient text
and with African theatre. In Rotimi’s published text of 1971, the
scene at the end of the play, in which the blinded Odewale leaves with
his children, has a stage direction: [They start on their journey, passing
through a mass of Katuje townspeople who kneel or crouch in Wnal
deference to the man whose tragedy is also their tragedy. Soft Choral
dirge] (Rotimi 1971: 72).20 The 2005 production expanded on this
stage direction and embedded the ritual lament in the production.
This added the Yoruba lament register to the Yoruba songs of the
19 Documented from the performance of 11 June 2005.

20 In the Sophocles text (ed. and tr. Lloyd-Jones ([1994] 1998), the lines of the
Chorus in the exodos are at 1524–30.
Towncrier and Townsmen earlier in the play.21 The stress on the
authentic voice in which the cultural memory is constructed reson-
ates also with Ojuola’s storytelling to the children, where it provided
an immediate contrast in language to register with the aggressive
‘public address’ mode of the Royal Bard.22 Elufowoju’s approach thus
made a linguistic addition to a canonical text (Rotimi’s) that both
reaYrmed the distinctive contribution of African culture and theatre
conventions to elucidating the ancient text and enabled the play to
communicate more strongly to its modern audience. The post-colonial
conversations in this play were, in this production, brought back to a
site in a country that had imposed colonial regimes on the West of
Africa. Yet the genesis and practice of the production and its recep-
tion by its audiences also showed that Britain itself is now a post-
colonial country, a site for changes in cultural identities of both
colonizers and colonized.
The aesthetic success of the production testiWed to the success of
the ‘braiding’ of Greek and African theatre also represented through
the contribution of the English and the Yoruba languages. ‘Braiding’
has been discussed by the Caribbean novelist and critic Wilson Harris
in his address to the British Braids conference in 2001 as a means of
intertwining strands that should not be artiWcially separated (Harris
2001: 260):
. . . ‘braids’ is a term which seems to me to be crying out for cross-cultur-
ality—not multi-culturality but cross-culturality, which is quite diVerent . . . it
also cries out urgently for us to begin to approach art and Wction diVerently
from how we have been conditioned to receive them.
At the same conference, Harris spoke of ‘moving through wounds
into timelessness’ (p.274) as a way of understanding the arts in
history, and the metaphor has special application to post-colonial
history (see, for example, Ramazani 1997, as well as OsoWsan, supra).
In the next and last section of this chapter, I want to look at two
rather diVerent examples of the ‘braiding’ of language in recent sta-
gings of Greek plays. The Wrst is the use of diVerent registers of Irish–
English in versions of Sophocles’ Antigone.23 The second examines the
21 Act 1 Scene 1 (Rotimi 1971: 17–8).
22 Act 2 Scene 3 (Rotimi 1971: 36).
23 For discussion of reasons for the prevalence of Sophocles’ plays in post-colonial
contexts, see Hardwick (2006b).
same play in a less obviously post-colonial intra-cultural context in
England. Taken together, these suggest that polysystemic development
within a language, as exempliWed by diVerent aspects of ‘braiding’, can
also shed light on post-colonial practice and theory.
The post-colonial and neocolonial contexts within which Seamus
Heaney developed his The Burial at Thebes (2004) from Sophocles’
Antigone have been discussed by Stephen Wilmer in this volume. Here,
I want to focus only on how Heaney used and developed a language
with a strong colonial history, English, in a way that both recognized its
force in Irish culture and also embedded Irish tonal and lexical
qualities in the text of a play that was in its turn a ‘translation’ or
version of a classical text.24 Heaney is sensitive to the strands—from
Anglo-Saxon and Latin through Irish to Ulster-Scots—that have con-
tributed to the development of Hiberno-English, and has acknow-
ledged their presence and the cultural and ideological decisions that
have sometimes shaped their use (see Heaney 1999: xxx). Because
Ireland is unique among colonized countries in having a classical
tradition that pre-dates colonial activity and that was associated at an
early stage with European and Irish culture rather than English, the
classicizing elements in the English language may not necessarily be
perceived as inevitably colonial in resonance. It is, however, true that
English became the language of the public domain, and of politics and
much intellectual authority, including dominance as a target language
for translators, and therefore a site for contest and exchange between
markers of culture and politics.25 So, the English that increasingly
became the ‘literary vernacular’ in the late nineteenth century was
Hiberno-English, stimulated by the desire of translators to implant the
Irish idioms of their mother tongue into English. Michael Cronin (1996:
135–36) has described this as ‘a transition from translation as an act of
exegesis to translation as an agent of aesthetic and political renewal’.
This could also serve as a comment on Heaney’s ‘translations’ of Greek
24 Of course, this is not peculiar to Burial but is also a feature of Heaney’s (1990) The
Cure at Troy, a version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and of his poetic diction in general as well
as of other Irish writers using classical material such as Tom Paulin and Michael Longley.
25 See Cronin (1996: ch.3). For persistence of Latin in rural areas into the
nineteenth century, see ibid. p. 120. For the Irish classical tradition, see Stanford
(1976), Hardwick (2000: ch. 5), and Arkins (2005: esp. ch.1)
plays, in which literary traditions in English, Hiberno-English and Irish
come together on the site of Greek theatre and its conventions.
However, the pursuit of a ‘braided’ diction in Irish writing has
been ideologically and aesthetically problematic. The Irish poet and
leader of the 1916 Rising, Patrick Pearse, attacked the cultural
nationalism of the Irish National Theatre project as a betrayal of
the Irish language and culture (Pearse [1899] 2000: 188–9):26
Here we have the Anglo-Irish heresy springing up in a new form, the ‘Irish’
Literary Theatre. . . . Let us strangle it at its birth. Against Mr Yeats person-
ally we have nothing to object. He is a mere English poet of the third or
fourth rank, and as such he is harmless. But when he attempts to run an
‘Irish’ Literary theatre it is time for him to be crushed.
Linguistic conXict in Ireland has been emblematic of cultural and
ideological Wssures (Crowley 2005: ch.7). The lack of a theatrical
tradition for the Irish language was a serious obstacle to the devel-
opment of nationalist theatre and Yeats admitted his sense of guilt at
the dominance of his English-language heritage (Lee 1995: 166–70).
In his general introduction to The Field Day Anthology of Irish
Writing, Seamus Deane commented that:
It is in the two languages of Ireland that the history of power and power-
lessness is most deeply inscribed. Latin and Norman French have a historical
importance which is recorded here, but it is in Irish and English that the
experience of conXict is most memorably registered. . . . Yet it must also be
remembered that since the eighteenth century, the English-speaking Irish
have been engaged in a long struggle to possess the Irish language and
culture, partly as a means of redeWning themselves as other than English,
partly as a way of Wnding in culture a reconciliation of those forces and
interests that remain steadfastly opposed in politics. (Deane 1991: xxiv)
The persistence of ambivalent attitudes towards the cultural and ideo-
logical impact of the Abbey Theatre is shown in the history of disturb-
ances that accompanied performances of plays that were thought
to challenge central aspects of nationalist cultural ‘mythology’—for
example, in the initial reception of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the
Western World in 1907 and of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars
26 For recuperation of Yeats as a post-colonial writer, see Said ([1988] 2001: 291–313).
in 1926.27 It is perhaps signiWcant that, in 2004, Heaney chose not to
link his treatment of Creon’s attitudes in the Antigone with the civil war
in 1920s Ireland and the production concept itself further distanced the
play from a speciWcally Irish context, substituting a pseudo-Latin
American setting.28
Heaney’s approach to language has sometimes been described as a
Middle Voice. In his poem ‘Making Strange’, the Middle Voice is a
cunning intervention that tells the poet ‘Be adept and be dialect’.29 In
Heaney’s adaptations from Sophocles, his use of local forms or
idioms not only subverts the political authority of ‘public’ language
but also encodes commentary and critical insights on the resonances
of the Sophoclean context for modern audiences. For example, in the
sequences involving the Guard in The Burial at Thebes, Heaney plays
with another register of language, broadening the social scope of the
play and, like Sophocles, intruding a diVerent perspective from that
of the ruling élite who have Wgured so far. There is a particular
contrast with the formal public speeches of Creon who has just
rhetorically elided family relationship and the sanctioning of his
own position (Heaney 2004: 9):
Two brothers badged red with each other’s blood
And I, as next of kin to those dead and doomed
I’m next in line. The throne has come to me.
The Guard speaks in prose: ‘Sir, I wouldn’t exactly say I was panting to get
here’ and his idiom is colloquial: ‘I was over a barrel’ (ibid. p. 12). Heaney
also makes the idiom that of Irish/English ‘Somebody’s after attending to
it, right’ (ibid. p. 13). The Guard’s language becomes plainer and pene-
tratingly direct. He also becomes an observer/commentator drawing on
his knowledge of the land to remark on the absence of tracks: ‘No rut
27 For the details, see Morash (2002: ch. 4 and 5).
28 See Wilmer in this volume for discussion of the disjunction between Heaney’s text
and the production style. It is signiWcant, however, that a subsequent production at the
Nottingham Playhouse in 2005, directed by Lucy Pitman-Wallace, presented the Heaney
text in a setting that was neutral in terms of time, place and design and which emphasized
the role of Greek theatrical conventions, such as the Chorus. This proved to be aesthet-
ically eVective since the production concept related to a strand that was already present in
the language and structure of the play, rather than introducing a new one.
29 Heaney (1984: 32–3); discussed in O’Donoghue (1994: 21–4). See also Heaney
(1988: 123 and 143) for his application of the term to aspects of the work of Robert
Lowell and WH Auden.
marks from a wheel/Nothing but the land, the old hard scrabble’.30 There
is a humorous side to the scene but this is not just a comic interlude.
In the course of the scene the Guard moves from the appearance of
a working class stereotype (perhaps even with parodic elements of a
‘stage Irishman’) to being an authentic voice for truth: ‘Your conscience is
what’s doing the disturbing’; ‘the judge/has misjudged everything’ (ibid.
pp. 15, 16).
The sequence with the Guard is followed by the Choral Ode on
Man.31 Heaney’s rewriting of the material Wrst created by Sophocles
emphasizes the aspects that ancient Greek and modern Irish con-
sciousness might have in common, including traditions of agriculture
and religious observance. He also transplants into an Irish context the
contrasts between city life as a site for politics and the rural environ-
ment as a site for discovery of truth. Heaney’s reference to ‘beyond the
pale’ alludes to the area in and around Dublin that was from the times
of Henry ll associated with colonial domination and with the suprem-
acy of urban civic administration and society over the rural hinterland.
So the sequence not only picks up the Sophoclean contrast between
the laws of the city-state and the persistence of traditional values and
practices, it also metaphorically relates the situation in Thebes to that
of the colonially dominated Ireland of the past.
Then let this wonder of the world remember:
He’ll have put himself beyond the pale.
When he comes begging we will turn our backs.
(Heaney 2004: 17)
Comparison of Heaney’s reworking of Sophocles with the scholarly
translations on which he drew shows how closely he kept to the sense
of Sophocles, including the almost literal tracing of the agricultural
references. He also infuses the Guard’s speeches, and therefore the
whole encounter with Creon, with a subaltern voice that both ‘plays
to the gallery’ of the audience’s expectations and yet also emerges
from this partial ‘ruse’ to assume a voice of moral authority in the
Guard’s searing comment on Creon’s conscience.
30 Heaney’s rendering here both reXects the close observation of rural practice
characteristic of his poetry as a whole and also follows closely the translation of Antigone
by Richard Jebb ([1900] 2004). Heaney also uses the translation by Lloyd-Jones ([1994]
1998), see Battersby (2004), quoted and discussed in Hardwick (2006c: 204–15).
31 Sophocles ll. 332–83 and in Heaney (2004) pp. 16–7.
The sequences with the Guard are also key elements in other Irish
versions of the Antigone. For example, Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act
(1985), has the Guard using the vernacular and speech rhythms of
the North ‘we were all dead scared after the sleggin’ you’d given
me . . . soft and pobby he was, and he smelt rotten’; this brings out
the striking contrast with the public ‘Stormont’ rhetoric of Creon’s
address (Paulin 1985: 23–5).32 Thus, in Irish translations and ver-
sions of Greek plays the ‘braiding’ of language in the distinctive
Irish–English developed in the Irish literary tradition is also accom-
panied by an ‘unbraiding’ that distinguishes between the vernaculars
and registers that together make up the totality of the text. In Heaney,
the ‘adept’ and the ‘dialect’ work together. The braiding within the
text as a whole holds and marks the cultural and political tensions
that underlie the development of varieties of English in the colonial
and post-colonial contexts.
However, this inter-relationship between sense of place, vernacu-
lar, and cultural politics also occurs in less obviously post-colonial
situations. In his version of the Antigone, which was almost contem-
porary with Heaney’s, Blake Morrison related the Guard’s idiom and
outlook to the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales of England. Like
Heaney’s, Morrison’s text was created especially for the theatre. It was
commissioned for performance by the company Northern Broad-
sides, directed by Barrie Rutter. In his introduction to the published
text, Morrison discussed the aims of Northern Broadsides to:
. . . take the classics into communities and parts of the country which theatre
doesn’t always reach. That sense of mission has left its mark on these two texts [sc.
Oedipus and Antigone]. Zeus and Dionysus are present but so are the landscapes
of the Yorkshire Dales and through the lines of blank verse, and the lyrics of the
Chorus, there’s the music of a rough-tongued northern vernacular. Occasionally
I depart from Sophocles (in beginning Antigone with the choric victory celebra-
tions, for instance), because the performance seemed to demand it. But I’ve tried
to honour the spirit of the original, in a language really spoken by men (sic).
(Morrison 2003: introduction 4–5)33
32 For a list of modern Irish translations and versions of Greek plays, including
those in the Irish language, see McDonald and Walton (2002).
33 In a contribution to the Introduction, the director Rutter commented: ‘the
tactile sensuality of bringing to life the in-built performability that the ancient poets
crammed their texts with is one of the great pleasures of theatrical life’.
Morrison’s version is a colloquial text and, in comparison with
Heaney, he moved further away from the Sophocles, partly to
round out the sense of place and partly to add a rough-and-ready
edge to the Wgure of the Guard. In response to Creon’s question,
‘Who’d dare to break my law?’ Morrison’s Guard responds:
How would I know? It’s not like they left a spade
with their name on it. The ground’s so rock-hard
you can’t sink a shovel or pickaxe in,
and if a cart were used it left no wheel-ruts . . .
As for us lot, we were stunned—we thought
the body had gone at Wrst until we spied
a mound of white Xesh, sprinkled with dirt, like a new potato lying in the
earth.
We poked about to see how it had got there: had a gun dog buried it like a
bone?
(Morrison 2003: 75)
Both Heaney’s and Morrison’s responses to Sophocles are examples
of creative ‘translations’. They mediate Sophocles via the intervening
translations, which they have used directly or which have shaped their
conception of the Greek play. They also mediate Sophocles through
the language of their own literary traditions. One eVect is to create
new works in some respects distant from both source and target
languages. Another eVect is a pragmatic emphasis on the target
language and culture as a means of communicating to the assumed
audiences the purposes for which the translation was made. The
Morrison version provides a more overtly regional English counter-
part to Heaney’s strategy. Heaney braids together in the play as a
whole particular lexical and idiomatic strands that reXect the diver-
sity in the linguistic history of the language in which he writes, and
also shows how those strands can scrape against one another. Morri-
son’s approach in some respects maps the north/south cultural
faultlines in England, an approach also developed by Tony Harrison,
both in his poetry as a whole and in his classical work.34 Yet Morri-
son’s approach, in addition to its socio-political and even class-based
emphasis, can also be aligned with a post-colonial phenomenon in
34 For example in his Wlm-poem Prometheus which reconxtualizes the myth in a

coal-mining society in Yorkshire (Harrison 1998).
English culture which, in the aftermath of loss of empire, has refo-
cused on ‘home’ territory. Heaney himself commented on this in a
1976 lecture ‘Englands of the Mind’ in which he suggested that an
almost defensive celebration of ‘home’ was not only a characteristic
of poets regarded as working in colonial contexts (such as Yeats and
MacDiarmid) but was also beginning to be found in the strong
strands of regionalism or nationalism in the post-imperial poetry
of writers as diverse as Larkin, Harrison, and Hughes.35
This suggestion points to an aspect of the relationship between
classical texts and post-colonial literature and drama that merits
further research. At one end of the spectrum the reinscription of
classical material in the modern texts could simply point to a nos-
talgic reappropriation of Greek and Roman culture to turn the clock
back to a lost ‘ideal’ of an unproblematic literary tradition in English,
whether ‘regional’ or ‘national’. At the other end of the spectrum the
reinscription might involve a democratic, even subaltern, seizure of
the classical material from its domination by the political and cul-
tural establishment, and an infusion of energy from the margins into
literary writing in English, analogous to that coming from literatures
from countries of the former empire. The most interesting examples
on the spectrum involve reversals of expectation. A prime example
occurred in the Scottish dramatists’ response to Greek tragedy com-
missioned and performed in Glasgow in 2000 to mark the re-opening
of the Scottish Parliament after a gap of nearly three hundred years.
David Greig’s Oedipus, set in India under the setting sun of the
British Raj showed Oedipus and Creon battling for supremacy in
Scottish idiom and accents that reminded the audiences that Scots
were active makers and administrators of the British Empire as well
as a people who had lost their own parliament to Westminster.36
The diversity of the examples of ‘braiding’ that I have discussed
demonstrates that multi-lingualism and multi-vocalism in modern
35 Quoted and discussed in Armitage and Crawford (1998: xxiv). For discussion of
Hughes’ use of classical material, see Rees (2008); for the relationship between
ancient texts and creative practices in modern poetry and drama, see Harrison
(2008).
36 For discussion of the idiom and imagery of Greig’s play and of its diverse
colonial contexts, see Hardwick (2004b); for further aspects of inter and intra-
lingualism in Scottish contexts, see Burke (2003), Hardwick (2003b: 1–12), McLure
(2004), and Neill (2004).
rewritings of Greek plays can take complex forms, taking place
within languages as well as between them. While it may well spring
from the senses of ‘wound’ that Femi OsoWsan and Wilson Harris
identiWed, the practice certainly does not lead to a ‘universal’ out-
come in the sense that ‘universal’ implies transcendence. As a prac-
tice, braiding does, however, construct new commonalities of
experience and understanding and promote double, or even mul-
tiple, consciousness of power relations and the cultural potential of
the subaltern. Indeed, the diVerent examples suggest that the process
is ongoing, that the strands involved in the braiding sometimes still
chafe against one another, and are meant to do so, but that the
existence and energy of the braids themselves testify to creativity
that may reach out and beyond the origins of the individual strands.
The examples of multi-lingualism that were discussed in the Wrst
half of this chapter might perhaps be designated as ‘inter-lingual
braiding’. The examples discussed in the second half suggest that
intra-lingual braiding can also arise, expecially from post-colonial
contexts that have long histories that include inter-lingual braiding.
The artistic contexts from which the multi-lingual examples were
taken indicate the importance of workshop theatre. This can bring
out the latent possibilities in the language and theatrical conventions
of the classical plays for audiences that contain both anglophones
and speakers of other languages. The examples suggest that prag-
matic models of translation are useful as a Wrst stage in the docu-
mentation and analysis both of the translation of words to the page
and of the non-verbal semiotics involved in the further translation to
the stage. They show that the recent history of translation and
performance of Greek plays in post-colonial contexts is also import-
ant in performing wider social, political, and cultural functions, in
ascribing and circulating meanings that are continually reworked,
reinterpreted and re-evaluated.37 This process both disrupts histor-
ical and cultural continuity in meaning and values, and also keeps the
ancient texts open as sites for literary, theatrical, and political contest,
refashioning and reXection. It also inscribes a diVerent kind of historical
37 Venuti (2008) includes this type of process in his third, or axiological, order of
translation, in which a chain of signiWers accumulates meaning and value through its
circulation.
pattern in which the ancient text and the processes of interpretation
and evaluation associated with it are re-contextualized and the
resulting work in its turn accrues multiple meanings and resonances
that enable it to interact with a range of further contexts and literary
and theatrical traditions. Multi-lingualism in stage productions, both
inter-lingual and intra-lingual, is playing an important role in acti-
vating these developments and in redeWning both the classical texts
and the concept of the post-colonial.
18
The Empire Never Ended1
Ika Willis
In the dream he again was a child, searching dusty used-book

stores for rare old science Wction magazines. . . . He had looked
through countless tattered issues, stacks upon stacks, for the
priceless serial entitled ‘The Empire Never Ended’. If he could
Wnd it and read it he would know everything.2
(Dick 2002)
This chapter is an attempt to mark out a terrain for future research,3
indicating some possible areas for theoretical enquiry at the inter-
section of classics and post-colonial thinking, and gesturing towards
some of the theoretical work already done on which classical scholars
1 This chapter was originally presented as a paper during the conference ‘Classics
in Post-Colonial Worlds’ given by the Open University’s Reception of Classical Texts
Research Project in collaboration with The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian
Studies, in May 2004. It was researched during the course of, and is closely related to,
my doctoral research, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board
(AHRB), whom I thank. I am also very grateful to my anonymous reviewer and to
Duncan Kennedy, both of whom made helpful and generous comments on drafts of
this piece. Any errors or Xaws remaining are entirely my responsibility.
2 As Duncan Kennedy pointed out to me, the connection between endless Empire
and ‘knowing everything’ is also Roman: see, for example, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura
[‘On the Nature of the Universe’] 1.72–9 (Bailey 1947), where Epicurus’ enquiries into
the nature of the universe are described in language suited to the activities of a Roman
general (he is called a victor, p. 75) and/or surveyor: ‘in mind and thought he surveyed’
(peragravit, a technical term) ‘immeasurable Everything’ (omne immensum, p. 74). The
language of imperial military activity here mediates between the universe as immeas-
urable and Roman techniques of measuring/knowing. I discuss this further in note 8.
3 In my doctoral dissertation (‘Discors Machina: Rome and the Teletechnology of
History’, University of Leeds, 2004) I have followed up some of the possible conse-
quences of the problematic set out here.
can build. I begin by sketching out the conceptual pattern according
to which the Roman Empire is deployed as a metaphor or analogy for
contemporary global sovereignty, insofar as the latter is understood
in terms either of cultural continuity or of control over information
technology, and I show how this pattern corresponds to one of the
ways in which imperial sovereignty was conceptualized in Latin
literary writing in the second and Wrst centuries bce.4 Since ‘Empire’
thus connects political sovereignty, cultural continuity, and informa-
tion technology, I go on to indicate how this connection has begun to
be thought about in the work of Jacques Derrida.
I then propose Empire as a ‘transtemporal’ Wgure linking the con-
temporary and the Roman Imperial moments of global sovereignty
according to the interrelation of political/military and telecommuni-
cations technologies; I include an extract from Philip K Dick’s novel
Valis, from which the title of this chapter is taken and which provides a
useful set of metaphors for thinking about the temporality and tech-
nical speciWcity of Empire, and I conclude by suggesting that post-
colonialism should be considered in terms of a postal network.
‘Empire’s rule’, write Hardt and Negri in their bestselling 2000
book, Empire, ‘has no limits’. They expand on this (p. xiv):5
[First,] the concept of Empire posits a regime that eVectively encompasses
the spatial totality, or really that rules over the entire ‘civilized’ world. . . .
Second, the concept of Empire presents itself not as a historical regime
originating in conquest, but rather as an order that eVectively suspends
history and thereby Wxes the existing state of aVairs for eternity.
Hardt and Negri’s Empire is, then, unbounded in both space and
time, as though Jupiter’s prophecy in the Wrst book of the Aeneid had,
in truth, been fulWlled:
4 As Duncan Kennedy pointed out to me, in following the convention that
redesignates the Christian system of dating as the ‘Common Era’, I am here reinscrib-
ing the universalizing and naturalizing gesture of Empire; the term ‘common’ covers
over the speciWc imperial, colonial and/or religious practices which imposed this
global system of measurement and notation.
5 Rome is explicitly positioned as the origin and the model of this concept of
Empire. Hardt and Negri begin their ‘genealogy of the concept’ by saying that it
‘comes down to us through a long, primarily European tradition, which goes back at
least to ancient Rome’ (p. 10) and conclude a brief overview and deWnition of
contemporary Empire by saying: ‘These characteristics . . . were precisely those that
deWned ancient Rome’ (p. 20).
The Empire Never Ended 331
His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono: imperium sine Wne dedi.
[I place no boundaries in time and space for them; I have granted them
empire without limit.]6
(Aeneid: ll. 278–79)
Or, in the words of the cosmological exegesis constructed by Horse-
lover Fat, the narrator of Dick’s novel Valis after his psychotic
breakdown: ‘The Empire never ended’ (Dick 2001: 53 and passim).
Widely separated in their temporal and generic contexts—a twenty-Wrst
century work of political analysis, a twentieth-century science-Wction
novel/autobiography, and a Wrst century bce epic poem—these three
versions all deWne the particularity of ‘Empire’ as a regime without
end in time or in space, being thus somehow outside or prior to time
and space; moreover, all three specify that this Empire is Roman (for
the Romanness of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, see note 5). In this
chapter I explore what function Rome performs in conceptualizing
the spatial and cultural forms of (global) sovereignty.
Horselover Fat’s formulation, ‘the Empire never ended’, insists on
the literal (material-political) survival of the Roman Empire into the
late twentieth century; but Horselover Fat is a character in a science-
Wction novel,7 and insane to boot. Yet more reputable thinkers, too,
assert the survival of the Roman Empire. T. S. Eliot (1957: 130), for
example, writes ‘We are all, so far as we inherit the civilization of
Europe, still citizens of the Roman Empire’, and goes on to say that
‘Time has not yet proved Virgil wrong when he wrote . . . imperium
sine Wne [Empire without end]’. Catharine Edwards’ (1999: 4) intro-
duction to her collection of essays on reception, Roman Presences,
claims that ‘Rome’s empire continues to be irresistible’.
What is at stake in such an assertion? What claim is being made
when continuity of cultural transmission or literary survival is said to
be contingent upon the continued existence of the Roman Empire—
that is, upon the continuing irresistibility of Rome’s political sover-
eignty? There is a slippage here from European culture to Roman
Empire as if the two were synonymous or mutually deWning; as if the
6 This and all subsequent translations from Latin in this chapter are my own.
7 Each of these elements—‘psychotic’ speaker, ‘science-Wction’ (not obeying the
observable material realities of its contemporary real-world setting), ‘novel’ (work of
Wction)—marks a further distance between the formulation’s bald assertion of truth-
value and its performative context.
continuing legibility of Latin literature,8 the process of transmission
of European civilization or culture, were necessarily dependent upon
readers being politically part of the Empire, citizens of the Roman
Empire. This would mean that Roman literary texts (and the civil-
ization of Europe, insofar as it has been shaped by those texts and the
conceptual systems on which they rely and which they transmit) are
legible in the present day only to the extent that their readers/
receivers take up a position created and maintained by the Roman
Empire. Acceding to the conditions of legibility of Roman texts is
tantamount to accepting citizenship in the Roman Empire, in Eliot’s
terms, or to failing to resist the Empire, in Edwards’.9
Of course, as the very existence of the term ‘cultural imperialism’
suggests, the idea that cultural transmission is an important element
in the material-political process of imperial domination is familiar
both to scholars working in what we might provisionally call the Weld
of post-colonial studies10 and to classicists. The insight dates from at
least the Wrst century ce: in the Agricola (circa 98 ce), Tacitus writes
of the adoption of Roman dress and customs that ‘this was called
‘‘civilization’’ [humanitas] among those who had no experience of it,
when it was a part of their enslavement’.11
8 In this chapter I restrict my focus to literary transmission and survival. The
endlessness of the Roman Empire is not only a literary phenomenon, however: this
has been shown by, for example, Trevor Murphy’s (2004) illuminatingly-subtitled
Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopaedia. Rather, endless
empire was also deeply implicated in the ways in which Rome conceptualized
knowledge more generally: as Horselover Fat puts it in the passage I have chosen as
my epigraph, the possibility of ‘know[ing] everything’ is dependent upon the end-
lessness of Empire—or at least upon the continuing availability and legibility of the
text which asserts that ‘the Empire never ended’.
9 ‘Failing to resist’ the Empire entails being subjected to it in the double meaning
of that term: being dominated by it at the same time as being made a [reading]
subject through it.
10 I use the term ‘post-colonial’ with reference to the terms set by the title of the
conference at which the Wrst version of this paper was delivered, but I use it provision-
ally; that is, with reservations as to its usefulness. I hope that the redeployment of the
‘post’ in terms of Bennington’s ‘postal politics’ at the end of this chapter both illustrates
and addresses my concern about the ways in which the notion of the post-colonial may
be used to consign Empire to the past and thus to construct a reassuring historical
distance between ourselves and colonialism, including ongoing colonial or neocolonial
practices. See, for example, Shohat (1992: 99), who criticizes the term’s ‘ahistorical and
universalizing deployments, and its potentially dehistoricizing implications’.
11 See, of course, Agricola 21.3 (Ogilvie and Richmond 1967): ‘inde etiam habitus
nostri honor et frequens toga; paulatim discessum ad delenimenta vitiorum, porticus et
But the slippage between European culture to Roman Empire with
which I am concerned here seems to go further than that. In fact, in this
chapter I will argue that it is precisely through this slippage between the
appropriation of time and space by Empire and by networks of cultural
transmission that Empire presents itself as endless in space and time. It
is through this equivocation that Empire can, in Hardt and Negri’s
terms, identify ‘spatial totality’ with ‘the entire ‘‘civilized’’ world’ and
hence present itself as endless in space and time—that is, in a space and
time produced by networks of imperial/textual transmission.
The idea that the endless space/time of Empire is related to the
space/time of textual transmission can, in fact, itself be traced in
certain Roman literary models of imperialism and literary survival.
In certain moments of the Roman literary presentation of imperial-
ism, a model of Empire can be perceived in which Roman sovereignty
extends along channels opened by Roman military conquest and/or
by literature as an oral transmission network which constructs his-
torical and cultural continuity.12
In the closing lines of the Metamorphoses, for example, Ovid
imagines Roman political power and the Weld of reception of his
poetry to be coextensive in time and space:
quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris,
ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama,
siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam.
[Wherever Roman power lays open the conquered earths, I shall be read on
the mouth of the people, and through every age, in fame, if poets’ fore-
tellings have any truth, I shall live.]
(Metamorphoses: 15.877–79)13
balinea et conviviorum elegantiam. idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabantur, cum

pars servitutis esset’ [‘whence also [came] a high valuation of our [Roman] dress and a
fashion for the toga; little by little a going-over to the temptations of vice: arcade-
walking and bath-houses and elegant dining. This was called civilization among those
who had no experience of it, when it was a part of their enslavement’.] The passage is
well known, and I cite it in order to be able to move on more quickly to the main part
of my argument, rather than to provide any fresh insight into the Agricola passage itself.
12 The complexity of this relation is perhaps brought to light in a new way in the
present moment, with its ever closer relations between information technology and
military activity—see, for example, Virilio ([1991] 2002). In this chapter I argue that
one of the things that the Wgure of Empire is called upon to do today is to enable us to
think about this intertwining of cultural transmission and global sovereignty, which
seems to be speciWcally Roman.
13 I use Tarrant’s (2004) text.
Here Ovid is deWning a political-oral apparatus of literary transmis-
sion. He claims that the potential spatial extent of the oral transmission
of his poetry is limited only by the geopolitical limit of Roman
military conquest (Romana potentia, Roman power;14 domitis terris,
conquered earths), and its temporal extent limited only by the
reliability of poets’ speech (siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, if
poets’ foretellings have any truth). It is not simply the case here
that Roman military conquest opens and maintains the channels of
transmission for literary texts: rather, in these lines we can trace a
model of the interrelation of poetic speech and political power in the
imperial production of space, time and history, where the continued
existence of Roman power both guarantees and is guaranteed by the
truth-value of Latin poetic utterance. This model operates in such a
way as to disrupt any possibility of a stable distinction between
sovereignty as an apparatus of transmission and literature as the
content transmitted.
In his epitaph, preserved by Cicero, the early Latin poet Ennius
also imagines his survival after death in an oral medium:
Aspicite, o cives! senis Enni imaginis formam:
Hic vestrum panxit maxima facta patrum.
Nemo me lacrimis decoret nec funera Xetu
Faxit. Cur? Volito vivos per ora virum.
[Behold, citizens, the shape of old Ennius’s statue: he revealed the great
deeds of your fathers. Let no-one deck me with tears or make me a funeral
with weeping. Why? I Xy, living, through the mouths of men.]
(Tusculanae Disputationes: 1.15.34)15
Bloomer (1997: 27) performs a convincing reading of this epitaph,
writing that in it Ennius ‘represent[s] the Roman as coterminous with
Latin speech’. Ennius imagines the ora virum—the oral medium of
poetic survival—as extending over the same space, mapping the same
14 Ovid uses the term potentia, rather than imperium, for Roman ‘power’ here; the
word designates to a type of power that is not necessarily determined politically or
militarily (as opposed, for example, to potestas). However, as I show below, the
extension of Roman political power is also conceived as interrelated with the extent
of transmissibility of Latin literature; consequently, I do not think that potentia in the
Ovid lines needs to be strictly diVerentiated from potestas and imperium.
15 I use Dougan’s (1905) text.
territory, as the boundary of Rome. Again, as in Ovid’s sphragis,16 it is
not simply the case that Roman military/political power determines the
space over which Latin culture may then spread. Rather, Ennius claims
that the poet too, as a transmitter of Latinity, inaugurates and main-
tains the coterminous space(s) of ‘the Roman’ and of ‘Latin speech’.
Ennius stakes a claim for the poet not only as the user or transmitter
of an already-constituted national language—a Latinity determined
by, and freighted with, Roman sovereignty—but as the shaper and
creator of a national literary language. It is through this poetic lan-
guage that ‘citizens’ become acquainted with ‘the great deeds of [their]
fathers’. That is, it is through the oral transmission of literature that the
historical continuity of the state—its temporal extension—is accom-
plished, and that citizens are able to take up their position in Rome.17
It is in this sense that, in Bloomer’s words, Ennius’ epitaph ‘present[s]
the poet as founder of Latin’ (Bloomer 1997: 26):18 indeed, the poet
founds the medium in which Rome extends itself. Literature is here
making a claim to be the medium of Romanness.19
16 sphragis: a Greek word meaning ‘seal’, and used to refer to a self-contained
passage at the end of a poem which ‘signs’ the work, directly addressing the reader in
the author’s own voice and referring to the circumstances of the work’s composition.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses ends with such a passage (15.871–79).
17 Cicero makes a similar claim about the necessity of an informational dimension to
citizenship in a celebrated passage of the Academica (1. 3), where he says to Varro: ‘nam
nos in nostra urbe peregrinantis errantisque tamquam hospites tui libri quasi domum
deduxerunt ut possemus aliquando qui et ubi essemus agnoscere’ [‘for we were wandering
and straying in our city like foreigners: your books, so to speak, led us home so that we
might in time recognize who and where we were’] (Rackham 1933). Varro’s books allow
Roman citizens to position themselves within Rome in a more-than-geographical sense.
18 I adopt Bloomer’s term ‘founder of Latin’ because it accurately indicates the
strength of the claim being made for poetry’s actively political dimension.
19 This is not the only context in which literature appears to be the medium of
Romanness, and in which this is put in terms of a foundation or refoundation. In fact,
literary and political foundation and refoundation are intertwined in the Roman
Empire, as can be seen from Suetonius’ account of how Octavian came to take the
name ‘Augustus’. Suetonius writes: ‘Finally he took on the cognomen Augustus . . . by a
motion of Munatius Plancus who, when certain people had proposed that he should be
called Romulus as if he too was a founder of the city, prevailed upon them that rather he
should be called Augustus, not only a new but also a greater cognomen, since sacred
places and those in which something has been consecrated by augury are called
august . . . as also Ennius teaches, writing: after illustrious Rome was founded by august
augury ’ (Carter1982, ‘Vita Divi Augusti’ 7.2 ). That is, the name ‘Augustus’ was chosen
speciWcally because of its literary allusions; Augustus names himself not after the city’s
public name, Romulus/Rome, but after its trace in Latin literature, after the literary
dimension of Romanness.
As I have argued, sovereignty is not simply the vehicle that trans-
mits literature as content: but neither is the converse true—that is,
literature is not simply the vehicle of sovereignty. Ennius’ epitaph sets
up a dual relation between poet and citizen, so that the poem is
transmitted on both a sovereign and a poetic network—or rather, as
I argued for Ovid’s sphragis, on an oral-political apparatus that
inaugurates a Roman imperial space where sovereignty and literary
transmission are mutually implicated. Firstly, Ennius interpellates
the readers of his epitaph as cives [citizens] (in Bloomer’s words, he
addresses the ‘Latin speech community’, Bloomer 1997: 27): he thus
positions the reading of his poetry within the community of Roman
citizens, suggesting that his existence as poet is fully identiWable with
his existence as citizen.20 He goes on, however, implicitly to identify
himself with his own literary works, distinguishing his poetic sur-
vival from his citizen existence: he claims that he survives through
the mouths of men (volito vivos per ora virum, [I Xy living through the
mouths of men]), and asks that no funeral rites should be observed
for him as citizen. Thus, he claims that literary transmission through
the mouths of men inscribes him himself into the historical continu-
ity of Rome—just as his revelation of ‘the deeds of your fathers’
inscribes the citizens into historical continuity—and implicitly op-
poses this literary medium of survival to the traditional funerary
practices whereby Roman aristocrats were inscribed into historical
continuity.21 That is, Ennius now claims that he survives—virtually,
spectrally, textually—entirely as a poet, through this oral transmission
within the community of Roman citizens/Latin-speakers. In this way
he equivocates between poet and citizen, using each to deWne and
guarantee the other, and constructs a model of imperial space and time
as a sovereign transmission network.
Roman literary presentations of imperialism involve a self-reXective
relationship to systems of telecommunication: the transmission of
20 Ennius himself was not born a Roman citizen and Latin would not have been his
Wrst language. See Dalby (1998: 7–8) for a discussion of writing literature in Latin as
an alternative mode of access to the political construction and maintenance of Rome
for people who were not born into aristocratic families.
21 Bloomer glosses funera Xetu as a reference to aristocratic funeral ritual: Ennius’
refusal of such rites thus distinguishes him from the aristocratic citizenry of Rome,
and proposes oral-literary transmission as a non-genealogical mode of inscription
into Roman history.
information across space and time. So literary models of the Roman
Empire represent it as a sovereign transmission network. Sovereignty is
conceptualized as extending in space and time by means of a technical
apparatus that enables the transmission of information along channels
or paths determined by speciWc material, technical, linguistic, and con-
ceptual constraints. This technical apparatus is the network of male,
citizen voices, which Ennius (ora virum) and Ovid (ore populi) represent
as the medium of both literary survival and Roman sovereignty.22
In her book on the uses of Latin in Europe from the sixteenth to
the twentieth centuries (suggestively subtitled The Empire of a Sign),
Françoise Waquet traces the ways in which this technical apparatus
survived materially through the institutional production of male,
Latin-speaking mouths by European schools and churches, often in
the name of a universal ‘humanity’, which in practice recalls the use
of the term humanitas in Agricola 21.3 (cited above). She calls her
project a ‘cultural history of Latin’ and ‘a record of the presence of
Latin in the modern West’, and she works by taking Latin as a
‘historiographic object’ (Waquet 2001: 3, 1), exploring the uses to
which Latin was put. My purpose here diVers from Waquet’s in that
my ‘object’ is not Latin in itself and/or in its historiographic dimen-
sions: as Waquet makes clear, the Latin language itself has been put to
non-normative, non-communicative, and, at times, non-Latin
uses.23 Rather, I am here seeking to account for the continuing
Romanness/imperialism of Latin literature and culture, for the con-
struction of a sovereign transmission network, which is not reducible
to historical-linguistic continuity.
Above, I designated this transmission network as a ‘technical
apparatus’ in order to make visible the way in which its speciWc
22 This representation is not in itself neutral. As Starr has shown in his essay (1991:
337–43), the ora virum or ore populi (‘mouths of men’, ‘mouth of the people’) on
which Ovid’s and Ennius’ works were transmitted were as likely to be the mouths of
slave men as those of Roman citizens. The fantasy of a citizen transmission network
eVaces the labour of slaves and other non-citizens in the maintenance of this network,
just as Empire—as Hardt and Negri argue in the Wrst passage cited in this chapter—
eVaces the historical violences of conquest.
23 See ch. 4, ‘A Familiar World’, 100–7, especially the Wrst section ‘Latin and the
Faithful: Taming the Unintelligible’, 101–9, on the ways in which non-Latin-speakers
nevertheless interpreted Latin words—sometimes as homophonic vernacular
words—and put them to use, sometimes as magical and/or musical signiWers.
characteristics—including material and technical characteristics,
such as the material existence of male, Latin-speaking mouths—
determine not only the mode in which information is transmitted
(who has access to the apparatus?) but also the content that can be
transmitted, to the point where the distinction between content and
transmitter is brought into question. This provokes us to rethink the
relationship between sovereignty, literature, and transmission net-
works. In both Ovid’s sphragis and Ennius’ epitaph, the vocal net-
work is brought into play in opposition to the physical/material limit
of bodily death, and functions to signify a potentially boundless Weld
of transmission. But what kind of endlessness is being produced here?
This is a crucial political question if we take seriously the tendency of
Empire to present itself as endless, and its answer must take account
of the way in which the ‘endless’ Weld of imperial transmission is
constituted through the speciWc characteristics of the sovereign
transmission network.
A Wgure of Empire inextricably linked to telecommunications
systems can thus be used to link the material–political–cultural
imperialism of ancient Rome with contemporary understandings
of global sovereignty as materially conditioned—enabled and
constrained—by the speciWc capabilities of contemporary technologies
of information storage, retrieval, and transmission. In fact, as I will
show, the Wgure of the Roman Empire is indeed being taken up at the
moment precisely as a way of thinking about global sovereignty and
information transmission. In the rest of this chapter, I seek to explore
what is at stake in the use of ‘Empire’ to make such an anachronistic—
or, as I will later call it, ‘transtemporal’—connection.24
Some theoretical work has begun on the relationship between
sovereignty and information transmission, which potentially can illu-
minate the usefulness of this Wgure of Empire; the work follows, in
particular, Derrida’s The Post Card. This book is itself a relay station
between Of Grammatology, in which Derrida considers ‘political
24 This chapter was originally written before the publication of Miriam Leonard’s
Athens in Paris (2005), and consequently I have not been able to engage here with this
important book in any depth. Here I would just like to note the relevance to my
argument of her insistence that the reception of the classical past is an act of political
engagement in the present: my engagement with ‘Roman telecommunications sys-
tems’ is precisely intended to be a contribution to a rethinking of contemporary
modes of sovereignty.
spacing’ in terms of the ‘spacing’ that opens the possibility of language
(that is, communication across space), and Archive Fever, in which
Derrida considers the problem—crucial to sovereignty—of the ‘bor-
der’, of inside/outside, through the politicized Wgure of the archive.
In his essay ‘Postal politics and the institution of the nation’,
GeoVrey Bennington (1990: 121), admitting that ‘it is tempting to
try and approach the question of nation directly, by aiming for its
centre or its origin’, warns that ‘the approach to the nation implies
borders, policing, suspicion and crossing (or refusal of entry)—try to
enter a country at the centre (by Xying in, say), and the border is still
there to be crossed, the frontier shifted from periphery to centre’. The
nation—that is, the spatial extension of sovereignty, its inscription in
terrestrial space—constitutes itself through the practices by which it
determines its edges. In this it conforms to the structure of the
‘archive’, as this Wgure has been proposed by Derrida (1996: 8) in
Archive Fever: ‘Where does the outside commence? This question is
the question of the archive. There are undoubtedly no others.’
Derrida gives a preliminary etymology of the term ‘archive’ on the
Wrst page of Archive Fever, as follows (ibid. p. 1):
Arkhe . . . names at once the commencement and the commandment. This
name apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle according
to nature or history, there where things commence—physical, historical or
ontological principle—but also the principle according to the law, there
where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are
exercised, in this place from which order is given—nomological principle.
In a brief discussion of the etymology of ‘archive’ from the Greek
arkheion [the house of the archives], Derrida describes the archive as
being ‘at the intersection of the topological and the nomological’
(ibid. p. 3) and writes of the archons that (ibid. p. 2):
. . . they are Wrst of all the documents’ guardians. They do not only ensure
the physical security of what is deposited. . . . They are also accorded the
hermeneutic right and competence.
The archive—or what Derrida calls ‘the archontic function’ associated
with the archive—thus associates a spatial disposition of information,
its material survival, and the conditions of its transmissibility or avail-
ability, with a ‘hermeneutic competence’. As such, the Wgure of the
archive allows us to account simultaneously for geopolitical and tele-
communicative space, or for the articulation of the two spaces, since the
archive is the spatial disposition that links reading—information trans-
mission—with sovereignty. Moreover, the archive is constituted by a
determined technological apparatus of reading, writing and sending.25
The Wgure of the archive therefore articulates the world as surface of
inscription with the literary-sovereign paths of transmission through
space and time. The archive allows us to make, with Bennington, a
subtle but important shift in the understanding of political space: the
nation’s frontiers are not necessarily isomorphic with the boundary
drawn on a map, particularly when the speciWcity of technologies of
movement across boundaries (‘by Xying in, say’) is taken into account.
Rather, the space of the political is opened and structured, in the Wrst
instance, according to an ‘archival’ structure: the technically and histor-
ically conditioned organization of telecommunication networks, where
a telecommunication network is understood as the set of material and
technical constraints on the transmission and availability of information
through and in space and time (Bennington 1990: 124–8).26
The metaphor of the Roman Empire in particular as a telecom-
munications network is familiar.27 In her ‘Introduction’ to Roman
25 See Derrida (1996: 15–17), on how, for example, ‘psychoanalysis would not
have been what it was (any more than so many other things) if email, for example,
had existed [in Freud’s lifetime]’ (p. 17).
26 See, in particular, his citations of Vaillé (p. 124): ‘As an institution indispensable
to social life, the post, whose utility is manifest from the beginning of civilisation,
must have appeared along with the constitution of that life’; and Montesquieu
(p. 125): ‘It is the invention of the post which has produced politics’. The link between
post/telecommunications and sovereignty could also be thought via The Post Card,
where Derrida writes, for example (1987: 71): ‘Every time that it is a question of
courrier . . . there is police, royal police—and a basilica, a royal house . . . or a temple, a
religious metropolis. All of it, if possible, in the service of the king who disposes of the
courrier, the seals, of the emissaries as well as of the addressees, his subjects’. The
connection is not, moreover, conWned to political theory, postal history or decon-
struction: Kevin Costner’s 1997 movie The Postman demonstrates how a nation is
founded by and consists in its postal system.
27 It is not just a metaphor, of course. See, for example, Siegert (1994: 311) on ‘the
postcard structure of the imperium’. He argues that ‘The empire exists . . . only by
means of its postal system’ (p. 305) and that ‘the demise of the Roman archival and
postal systems represented the end of the panoramic moment, where the empire was
solitary and never-ending’ (p. 317). If, then, as I am arguing, the Roman archival and
postal systems still survive in some form, then the end of the never-ending empire
may indeed never have come.
Presences, Edwards writes that Shelley ‘credits Rome merely as a
means of spreading Greek civilization’,28 as if Rome were an eYcient
channel of transmission for information from Greece, being itself
without cultural content; and, as she argues in the same piece, the
Roman empire was also understood as an eYcient global delivery
system for Christianity. As in the proverb ‘all roads lead to Rome’,
‘Rome’ names the political-bureaucratic apparatus that builds the
roads and lays the ‘telephone cables’ in the Wrst place, before any
content can be transmitted. Of course, as I have been arguing
throughout this chapter so far, systems of information transmission
cannot, in fact, be neutral with respect to their content: Empire
might be fantasized as pure instrumentality, in which information
passes intact from sender to receiver through neutral space, but it is
Empire as telecommunications system that produces that space and
designates it ‘neutral’ in the Wrst place, although it is in fact highly
determined. ‘Transmitting’ cultural ‘content’ involves a complex set
of operations, which produce the eVect of continuity between the
sending and the receiving position; which determine what will count
as transmittable ‘content’; and which lay down a set of protocols for
legibility at each end. The telecommunications system of Empire—
its roads and telephone cables—functions according to the haunted,
troubling telephonicity of Ronell’s Telephone Book: it is a system of
divided origins and insecurely diVerentiated self/other relations,
where self and other are simultaneously diVerentiated and connected
by their positions on the telephone network (Ronnell 1989).
I use the analogy between Roman roads and telephone cables ad-
visedly, since the Wgure of the (Roman) Empire is frequently called
upon to conceptualize the link between contemporary globalized tele-
communications networks and the new forms of imperialism that
result from this new virtualized geopolitical environment. For example,
Hardt and Negri (2000: 298) quote ‘an adviser to the Federal Commu-
nications Commission, Peter Cowhey’ as saying that ‘the construction
of the new information infrastructure . . . provides the conditions and
terms of global production and government just as road construction
did for the Roman Empire’. Virilio analyses informational politics
along similar lines, and with the same analogy (Virilio 1997: 82):
28 In his preface to Hellas, cited in Edwards (1999: 4).

Indeed, if geopolitics once required Roman roads or terrestrial motorways,
the metropolitics that is taking place will essentially require electronic
information highways and satellite networks capable of achieving unity of
time for a telecommunications system that is now universal.
Empire would thus be endless in space and time (as they are trad-
itionally conceived) because it no longer operates in geopolitical space/
time, but in the virtualized space and time of telecommunications,
whose speed is limited not by any considerations of the material
geopolitical landscape, but only by the ‘limit-speed’ of light.29
The analogy drawn by Cowhey and Virilio—and there are many
other examples—between contemporary globalized/virtualized sov-
ereignty and Roman imperial sovereignty connects, but also diVer-
entiates, the present and the past. The structure of comparison
requires that the two entities being compared should be discrete
and diVerentiable: ‘Roman roads’ must be a known quantity in
order for the analogy or the metaphor successfully to deWne their
comparandum. That is, metropolitics/information transmission
must be not Roman roads in order to be like Roman roads. The
idea that contemporary sovereignty functions now in virtual space
through telecommunications networks just as Roman sovereignty
functioned then on the surface of the earth through its road network
means that Roman sovereignty must be diVerent from contemporary
sovereignty.
However, the situation complicates itself. According to the struc-
ture I have just sketched out, the Roman Empire survives to be
available as a Wgure for contemporary sovereignty (among other
things) precisely through being a telecommunications network,
29 See Virilio’s Open Sky on the ‘dromological shift’ operated by the widespread
availability of light-speed technology (for example p.13: ‘Since the turn of the
century, the absolute limit of the speed of light has lit up, so to speak, both space
and time. . . . It is the constant nature of light’s limit-speed that conditions the
perception of duration and of the world’s expanse as phenomena’ [bold in original]).
Communication in a medium that allows information to travel at light-speed is said
by Virilio here to have been developed only in the twentieth century; however, it is
recorded in texts earlier than Roman, as Eric Prenowitz pointed out to me in a
discussion of the famous beacon speech in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. See Clytemnes-
tra’s conversation with the chorus, Agamemnon ll. 264–316, with the repeated insist-
ence on the speed of communication (for example at ll. 278–80 when the Chorus ask
‘What messenger could arrive here with such speed?’ in response to Clytemnestra’s
insistence that Troy has only just fallen).
through the element of cultural transmission that, according to its
own logic, is part of its political domination. This complicates the
idea that the relation between Rome and contemporary imperialism
is simply ‘metaphor’. If we are dependent on the metaphor of Rome
as metaphor to be able to model contemporary imperialism, then we
cannot securely rely on the diVerentiation that underlies and enables
metaphoricity: that Rome is not contemporary imperialism, it is only
being compared to it. Imperial sovereignty could not be thought
(could not exist?) without the Wgure of Rome as a support. But
Empire is precisely a Wgure for support, metaphoricity (carrying-
over), and telecommunications.30 What the notion of Rome as a
telecommunications network does, then—like any communications
network—is, precisely, to disrupt the idea that the two periods in
communication are two discrete entities that can be securely diVer-
entiated. Furthermore, the idea put forward here of communication
through (or across) time rather than distance—or perhaps time as
distance—has important consequences for the ways in which we can
think about imperialism, survival, and temporality.
I opened this chapter by saying that it was as if Jupiter’s prophecy
had been fulWlled:31 am I now claiming, like Horselover Fat, that the
Empire really—materially, politically, historically—never ended? For
if Empire is deWned not in terms of the existence of a political entity
whose boundaries are inscribed in terrestrial space, but in terms of
the channels of information transmission that it inaugurates and
maintains, then the survival and legibility of Roman texts—the
30 In fact, the metaphor of Empire as telecommunication network here works in a

similar way to the phrase ‘father of logos’ as Derrida (1981: 80–1) analyses it: ‘It is
precisely logos that enables us to perceive and investigate something like paternity. If
there were a simple metaphor in the expression ‘‘father of logos,’’ the Wrst word, which
seemed the more familiar, would nevertheless receive more meaning from the second
than it would transmit to it’. See also, for a discussion of the ‘metaphor’ of the post,
Derrida (1987: esp. 64–6), for example: ‘If . . . I think the postal . . . on the basis of the
destinal of Being . . . then the post is no longer a simple metaphor, and is even . . . the
site of all transferences and all correspondences’ (p. 65).
31 This fulWlment of the prophecy does not only consist in Hardt and Negri’s
analysis: I am not arguing for an analogy between a determinate form of sovereignty
as analysed in Empire and a determinate form of sovereignty as extant in the Roman
Empire. The question of the survival of Empire is complicated by the fact that
‘Empire’ is—implicitly or explicitly—one of our primary conceptual tools for think-
ing survival in the Wrst place.
Roman archive—would indeed entail the continued political
domination of the Roman Empire.
By using the Dick quotation, ‘The Empire never ended’, I want to
draw attention to the outrageousness, the counterfactual dimension, of
the claim that the Roman Empire survives. The way that the claim is
made in Valis, however, in accordance with the generic requirements of
the science-Wction novel, makes explicit the hidden teletechnological
dimension of our understanding of the continuity of culture, and
explicitly models the imperial production of space and time through
these transmission networks. Dick uses a technological anachronism
in order to produce this model of Empire’s sovereignty/information
transmission, claiming that Empire operates through hologrammatic
technology and/or satellite transmission of information.
The third person protagonist of Valis, Horselover Fat, who both is
and is not the Wrst person narrator of the novel, Philip K Dick,
experienced a divine revelation or psychotic breakdown in 1974.
The book deals with his attempts to explain the theological and
cosmological background to his vision, in which Fat saw two time
periods or two ‘worlds’ superimposed on one another (California
in 1974 and ancient Rome). Dick explains (2002: 54) that during
his vision, Fat:
. . . had discerned within the superimposition a Gestalt shared by both
space-time continua, their common element: a Black Iron Prison. This is
what the dream referred to as ‘the Empire’. . . . Everyone dwelt in it without
realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world. . . . Once, in a cheap
science Wction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black
Iron Prison but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past
(ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and
superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me A River over
that, you got the Empire, the Black Iron Prison, as the super or trans-
temporal constant.
Fat uses the name ‘Empire’ (elsewhere in the novel it is speciWed as
the Roman Empire, for example, ibid. p. 70: ‘The Romans, the
Empire . . .’) for the ‘super- or trans-temporal constant’, the Gestalt,
which brings together the present, ancient Rome, and the future. The
superimposition of the three time periods brings them into the same
space, collapsing the distance between them: it is the transtemporal
Empire, the ‘common element’ of the diVerent space-time continua,
which enables this communication—in the physical/spatial sense32—
between diVerent time periods. This is why the superimposition of
time periods is itself a trope of Empire:33 Empire here represents the
medium of transmission, which determines what appears to us to be
linear chronological time and terrestrial/astronomical space. It is the
medium in which time happens, the element within which we
are able to superimpose two diVerent time systems—that is, to
bring them into the same space, to place them in communication.
Further, in the cosmology of Valis, the Roman Empire is the appar-
atus which produces the space and time of ‘our world’, which, we are
told, is a hologrammatic projection (‘our universe is a hologram’).34 In
fact, however (2002: 258, Tractates Cryptica Scriptura no.14):
The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three-dimen-
sional and not in space and time. The information fed to us we hypostatize
into the phenomenal world.
It is the Empire, then, which mediates the information that, in fact,
makes up the universe, translating it into the hologram that is the
entirety of the universe as we experience it existing in space and time.
That is, the Empire is the telecommunications technology that makes
the informational space of the universe coextensive with the geopol-
itical. In Valis, history and terrestrial space are only an eVect of the
hologrammatic transmissions of the Roman Empire: the teletechno-
logical apparatus is literally prior to the geopolitical spatiality/tem-
porality in which it operates. To return to Bloomer’s (1997)
32 For the relationship between physical/spatial and semantic/linguistic commu-
nication, see Derrida (1978: 307–8): ‘To the semantic Weld of the word communica-
tion belongs the fact that it also designates nonsemantic movements. Here at least
provisional recourse to ordinary language and to the equivocalities of natural lan-
guage teaches us that one may, for example, communicate a movement or that a
tremor, a shock, a displacement of force can be communicated, that is, propagated,
transmitted. . . . Nevertheless, we will not say that this nonsemiotic sense of the word
communication such as it is at work in ordinary language, in one or several of the
so-called natural languages, constitutes the proper or primitive meaning, and that
consequently the semantic, semiotic, or linguistic meaning corresponds to a deriv-
ation, an extension or a reduction, a metaphoric displacement.’
33 Kennedy (1999) gives some examples of this trope (including, of course, the
canonical passage in Aeneid 8 [beginning at line 337], where Aeneas walks through
the landscape that will become the centre of imperial Rome) in a diVerent context.
34 Dick (2001: 258, Tractates Cryptica Scriptura no. 10).
formulation, the Empire makes ‘the Roman coterminous with Latin
speech’; in Ovid’s terms, it is the apparatus which guarantees the co-
extensivity of the Latin-poetic information transmission network
with the space opened/conquered by Roman imperial power.
The Empire in Valis functions, then, very like the form of imperial
sovereignty called ‘Empire’ described in the quotations from Hardt
and Negri (and Eliot/Virgil) with which I began this chapter. The
endlessness of Empire, from which we began, consists in its univer-
salizing function (‘it rules over the entire ‘‘civilized’’ world . . . presents
itself . . . as an order that eVectively suspends history and thereby Wxes
the existing state of aVairs for eternity’). In Valis, this is literalized:
the Empire produces the universe. The transtemporal constant that
Dick/Fat describes in my Wrst citation from Valis (above) corres-
ponds to the paths of cultural transmission that allow Roman texts
still to be legible in the present to us, citizens of the Empire that
we are. In Valis, these paths of transmission are literalized as this
hologrammatic transposition of information, which precedes and
produces the phenomenal world: this imperialism produces a world
such that it can be ruled imperially.
In his essay on place, Rome, Empire, and history, Kennedy (1999:
26) notes that there is a mode of ‘historicization of the Roman
empire’ that ‘seeks to make it synonymous with history itself ’
(see also Siegert 1994: 303, on Rome as ‘an empire synonymous
with history itself ’). Valis does precisely this; the disappearance of
the apparatus into the landscape is also a characteristic of telecom-
munications technologies. In fact, Bennington (1990), in his discus-
sion of postal politics, identiWes this as the point where the political
and the postal correspond: the aim of both is to eVace themselves,
disappearing into the natural. He writes (Bennington 1990: 128):
The post wants the letter to arrive at its . . . ‘brilliant end’: this end is the
death of the postman and the end of the post. As postal network, all politics
wants politics to end. The arrival of the letter should erase its delivery. The
end of politics is the end of politics. All this would have to be inscribed more
generally in a notion of nature as a postal network, in which, as Montesquieu
says . . . ‘toutes les creatures . . . s’entretiennent par une correspondance
qu’on ne saurait assez admirer’ [‘all creatures communicate by means of a
correspondence which one does not know how to admire enough’]. For a
whole Enlightenment, what is admirable in this natural correspondence is
that it is ruled by inXexible and necessary laws; the end of politics would be
to be absorbed into a simulacrum of this natural and necessary network.35
In Valis, the political Empire is indeed ‘absorbed into a simulacrum
of the natural’. Empire becomes the condition of possibility of phys-
ical space and historical time; and thereby, fully naturalized, it dis-
appears as an entity within physical space and historical time, so that
the ‘transtemporal constant’ appears to be nothing more than time
itself, rather than a complex apparatus which produces temporality
according to a particular teletechnological or archival structure.
My reading of Valis suggests—and this is the hypothesis that I took
up from Edwards and Eliot at the beginning of this chapter—that
Empire is the condition of possibility of (the legibility of) the world
as we inhabit it. If this is the case, what ‘outside’ of Empire could be
possible; that is, how could the Empire end? In Valis, the locus of
resistance to the Empire is the eponymous satellite (the Vast Auto-
mated Living Intelligence System), which functions as an ‘unscram-
bler’, in the terms which one of the characters uses to explain Fat’s
vision to him (Dick 2002: 205):
You were given a set-ground discriminating unscrambler, you realize. We
normally can’t distinguish set from ground; VALIS has to Wre the unscrambler
at you . . . so you could see . . . the false work that’s blended with the real world.
VALIS, that is, retranslates the universe back into information and,
by guaranteeing a distinction between set and ground, signal and
noise, ‘false work’ and ‘real world’, makes the universe legible accord-
ing to a ‘hermeneutic competence’, which is authorized on other
grounds than the Empire.
We, however, do not have such a deus ex machina (or rather, as it
appears in Valis, machine-from-the-god). This is not simply because
the correct hermeneutic technique has not yet been developed by which
we could determine the diVerence between the false world of Empire
and the real world of information. The impossibility of the existence of
VALIS—a set of hermeneutic tools that would come from outside
Empire and be entirely without implication in its political/teletechno-
logical apparatus—is an inescapable result of the structure of the
35 This desire for (totality and hence for) ending can also be seen in the imperial
structure of Roman knowledge to which I have alluded above (notes 2 and 8).
archive as I described it above; for the archive is the mutual dependence
of the spatial disposition of information and a hermeneutic compe-
tence. That is, an archival understanding of sovereignty complicates
our understanding of the relation between cultural continuity and the
spatial extension of political power. It is for this reason that I suggest
that the endless Empire in Valis provides an excellent Wgure for the
problem with which I started. If ‘the universe is information’, as Fat
asserts; if, in other words, sovereignty takes place in the space of
telecommunications; and if the Roman Empire is the teletechnical
apparatus that translates that information into the ‘natural’, phenom-
enal, spatio-temporal world, which is in truth only an eVect of Roman
transmissions, what resistance could be possible?
And so Empire continues to be, in Edwards’ words, irresistible. In
fact, ‘Empire’ seems now to designate the irresistible State that Derrida
conjures for a moment: ‘Imagine a city, a State in which identity cards
were post cards. No more possible resistance’ (Derrida 1987: 37).
The Roman Empire is the State in which identity cards are post
cards, and this is why it is irresistible. Its irresistibility, which is
closely connected to its endlessness, its limitlessness in time and
space, derives from this speciWc organization of the relation between
cultural transmission and political domination. As Eliot (1957) said,
we become citizens of the Roman Empire through our position in the
continuous transmission of European civilization: our Roman iden-
tity cards must, therefore, be post cards. They do not bind us to a
speciWc name or identity, to a bounded existence in material time
and space. It is not in this that our citizenship consists; rather, they
position us within a postal system, a system of information technol-
ogy or cultural transmission, and it is for this reason that subjection
to the conditions of legibility of European culture entails a subjection
to Rome’s irresistible Empire.36
In which case, should we perhaps be thinking, not in terms of
post-colonialism, but in terms of a postal colonialism, one which
produces and maintains itself precisely through the post by which we
seek to distance it in time and space?37
36 Although perhaps we are Xattering ourselves when we think we are ‘citizens’: see
note 19.
37 For a similar move in relation to post-structuralism, see Bennington (1990:
124): ‘I shall insist on another network, or translation, of ‘‘post’’.’
19
Another Architecture
David Richards
Inside the National Museum in Lagos, the exhibits testify to Nigeria’s

extraordinary cultural diversity in displays of artefacts ranging from the
northern Sahel and desert peoples to those from the Niger delta and
near-equatorial southern forests. The dimly lit labyrinth of glass fronted
ethnographic displays winds through the building in a familiar fashion,
reminiscent of the colonial regime’s passion for antiquities in an outpost
of empire, where previously there had been little regard for ‘artefacts’,
which were simply discarded once they had served their purpose: food
for termites. Yet the Wnal and most recent gallery adds an ironic com-
mentary on the museum’s triumphant message of e pluribus unum, a
single nation from so much diVerence. ‘The Government of Yesterday
and Today’ gallery displays exhibits reXecting Nigeria’s postcolonial
civilian and military governments imaginatively, if not a little startlingly,
arranged around the bullet-riddled Mercedes in which President Mur-
tala Mohammed was assassinated in 1973. Outside, the museum stands
in the centre of Lagos, on Lagos Island, between modern high-rise oYces
and apartments, close to government buildings, not far from the marina
and a sports stadium often used for political rallies, surrounded by the
chaotic road system which has rendered the city barely able to function.
It stands amidst the noise and brutalism of modernity, and, just as its
antiquated displays open onto a gallery of quite spectacular contempor-
ary violence, the museum seems to evoke a clash of worlds, which have
little correspondence or sympathy. Faded and deteriorating, the mu-
seum seems an anachronistic trace of a half-forgotten desire to remem-
ber a deep past in a dysfunctional present.
350 Challenging Theroy: Framing Further Questions
I am, of course, trying to draw an (admittedly crude) analogy; that
classics could be seen to stand in a similar space in postcolonial
modernity to the museum’s site in modern Lagos. After all, did not
Postcolonialism arise in opposition, and is it not habitually antag-
onistic, to classics and all such colonial archives? It debates the
meaning of ‘historylessness’, and has little time for the remembrance
of profound time. Viewed from this particular vantage point, there-
fore, neither classics in postcolonial knowledge, nor the museum in
Onikan, seems to Wt its surroundings and each appears to be radically
out of place. Ludicrous monuments to the irrelevant past, or sinister
reminders of colonial epistemes, they are built in a diVerent, out-
moded architectural style. Yet there is another point of view of
another architecture, which is more accommodating to both the
classical and the postcolonial, but to see this postcolonial-classical
ediWce, it is necessary to take a short, postcolonial detour.
Edward Said, in his early work Beginnings, characterized a familiar
form of narrative sequence: stories ‘of constantly experienced mo-
ments’ where ‘relationships [are] linked together by familial analogy’,
both in their internal structure and in their external connections to a
history of similar narratives (Said 1998: 76). These comparable stories
appear as repeated beginnings from an ancient source, reaching back-
wards, down through time, and deeper into an origin where all begin-
nings cease. They seem to evoke a continuum, which is also a repetition:
a series of reprises of an ancient master narrative, which, returning
through time to their present manifestation, beat to a rhythm of
diVerent but similar events, each containing an analogical trace of
that which came before. Said evoked the metaphor of ‘family resem-
blances’ related in dynastic sequence to an ancient original, but such a
model is not without a certain architectural quality also, since narra-
tives of repeated beginnings are structures erected on the foundations
of speciWc places. An extreme example of this narrative chain of
repeated beginnings might be conjured in the apocryphal legends of
Golgotha. According to tradition, Golgotha means ‘skull’ in Aramaic
because the skull of Adam was found there. Adam was created in the
exact same place as the Annunciation of the Virgin, and his body was
buried beneath Golgotha immediately below the spot where the Holy
Cross was raised and Christ was cruciWed: Christ’s blood redeeming
Adam’s bones. The Cross was made from the Tree of Knowledge of
Another Architecture 351
Good and Evil, and stood where Abraham prepared an altar on which
to sacriWce Isaac, at the centre of the Earth and at the point around
which the Sun, planets, and stars all turn (Fraser 1977: 176; Halbwachs
1992: 216–17).
Said’s narratives of repeated beginnings are constructed from an
original blueprint of ‘natural(ized), unifying discourses’ of the na-
tion, the people, the ‘folk’, and the ‘embedded myths of a culture’s
particularity’ (Bhabha 1994: 172). Although Said’s book is a product
of the pre-postcolonial-theory phase of his writings, postcolonialism
is nonetheless latent in, and intrinsic to, his argument, as he subjects
the ‘temporal and transitive’ series of repeated beginnings to a dis-
tinctly postcolonial turn. What happens when the narrative is played
according to diVerent, opposite, rules? Instead of the ‘temporal and
transitive’ series it is ‘intransitive and conceptual’, where ‘instead of a
source we have the intentional beginning, instead of a story a con-
struction’, where ‘complementarity and adjacency’ characterize ‘dis-
continuous concepts’. This alternative model is ‘a bristling paradox in
the modern mind’ (Said 1998: 66, 77): to break the narrative, to step
‘out of the frame of the existing order’ of the past, and to ‘rupture the
continuity of time, opening it up to new cognitive and sensory
experiences’ (Buck-Morss 2000: 49). Instead of the ancient sequence,
the inWnite chain, there is a ‘landscape of echoes and ambivalent
boundaries’, ‘furrowed horizons’, and new conditions for the ‘practice
of history and narrative’ (Bhabha 1994: 189, 105).
The postcolonial-classical ediWce cannot be built on narrative foun-
dations of continuity of repeated beginnings, which bring us from the
classical to the postcolonial in transitive sequence. Rather, Said’s ‘para-
doxical’/dialectical other narrative enables the conception of, in Grei-
mas’s term, a ‘temporal uncoupling’ (Fabian 1983: 78) whereby present
models are situated in the past, and vice versa; the ancient and the
contemporary are fused together in productive contradiction, a ‘tem-
poral illusion’, in which the ancient past and the postcolonial present
bleed into each other until it becomes diYcult to distinguish between
times and places, the living and the dead. It is this postcolonial-classical
imaginary, already loosed from its moorings, this gap in the narratives of
time and space, where another architecture is possible. In a comparable
manner, and with similar intentions, Gayatri Spivak evoked catachresis,
a Wgure from classical rhetoric: the misapplication of words, concepts,
and forms: ‘a concept-metaphor without an adequate referent’, ‘revers-
ing, displacing, and seizing the apparatus of value-coding’, ‘pervert[ing]
its embedded context’ (Bhabha 1994: 183; Spivak 1987). Catachresis
describes postcolonial praxis as the wilful disregard of decorum: mixing
metaphors, making inappropriate conjunctions, switching codes to fore-
ground the productive ‘friction’ of worlds which collide. Bhabha, like
Said and Spivak, has the postcolonial founding a ‘social imaginary’—
a repository of cultural artefacts, images, and inscriptions through
and by which social life is both represented and constituted—on the
‘articulation of diVerential, even disjunctive moments of history and
culture’, where ‘unifying discourse(s)’, ‘those embedded myths of
culture’s particularity, cannot be readily referenced’. Postcolonial
space and time are, according to Bhabha: ‘interstitial’, ‘in-between
the claims of the past and the needs of the future’ and, to extrapolate
from this, ‘the contingent and the liminal become the times and the
spaces’ for the encounter between classical and postcolonial (Bhabha
1994: 176, 172, 219, 179). To follow Said, Spivak, and Bhabha is to
envision a postcolonial-classical architecture of consciously evoked
inappropriate likenesses, incommensurable and conditional, and
therefore perfectly and appropriately ‘like’ the postcolonial place(s)
of articulation. In these contexts then, classics in postcolonial worlds
is neither sinister nor ludicrous, nor is it irrelevant, and the National
Museum in Lagos is, its mixed messages taken all together (native
artefacts, bullet-riddled car, all jostling for space in that place,
marooned on a traYc island in the chaotic postcolonial city), a
potent instance of ‘another architecture’ and possibly the most
important building in Lagos. Nigerian history and literature are
extraordinarily rich in such locations; ‘referential illusions’ in places
and texts, which oVer unique insights into the social imaginaries of
the postcolonial classical and the Nigerian nation: the polis, the
ethnos, the nation.
Femi OsoWsan’s 2004 play The Women of Owu (published text
2006), which has already been discussed in this volume, engages
with Euripides’ response to Homer, of course, but the dislocation
of The Trojan Women to nineteenth century West Africa creates a
catachresis, an interstitial place and time. The Women of Owu is set
at a signiWcant moment in Yoruba history, before the foundation of
the Nigerian colony, before the idea of the nation, as the powerful
city-states, having risen, begin to fall. Just as Euripides’ play, after the
event, can be relocated in the ‘transitive and temporal’ narrative of
Virgilian imperial epic, so too OsoWsan’s play is ‘in-between the
claims of the past and the needs of the future’ (Bhabha 1994: 219),
situated at the crossing of multiple, competing narratives and myths
embedded in the mind of the audience.
Owu’s extinction occurred after a prolonged period of intense pol-
itical unrest and civil war in South West Nigeria. By the 1830s, Fulani
raids into Yoruba lands destabilized and eventually caused the collapse
of the Oyo Empire, and Wnally the destruction of the city of Old Oyo
itself. Refugees escaped to the south where the Atlantic slave trade had
made a greater impact on the city-states and caused them ‘to turn on
themselves to meet the demand for slaves’ (Awe et al. 1967: 13). The city
of Ife enlisted the Oyo refugees to Wght alongside their Ijebu allies in
their slave war against the city-state of Owu and, with their victory, the
disintegration of the southern part of Yorubaland began as, one after
another, the Egba Yoruba towns and cities were destroyed. The motley
remnants of the wars—refugees from destroyed cities, warlords and
their followers from the allied armies of Ife and Ijebu, the Oyo mi-
grants—descended on a still-habitable Egba village, Ibadan, where they
made a permanent camp. Ibadan grew at a phemonenal rate until in a
relatively short time its power eclipsed, not only the newly founded city
of New Oyo to which it was nominally subject, but also Ife and all the
other longstanding Ijebu and Egba kingdoms. All the while, of course,
the British kept a watchful eye on developments, looking for the
opportunity to impose the pax britannica on the warring states (Awe
et al. 1967: 11–27; see also Johnson 1921).
Kings and heroes, descendants of the gods and rulers of great
cities, engage in perpetual warfare, destroy cities and eradicate all
traces of their existence. The few survivors not killed or forced into
slavery Xee the carnage and seek sanctuary in the wilderness, where
they create a new city, which will be more powerful, and a new
identity, which will be more pervasive, than that which has been
destroyed. Is this Bronze Age Europe, or nineteenth-century Africa?
Mycenae, Troy, and Rome, or Ife, Owu, and Ibadan? Is this the founda-
tional myth of civilization or a squalid colonial war? Temporal,
transitive, dynastic, or intransitive, adjacent, discontinuous? These
diVerences mark the diVerence, and makes classics in postcolonial
worlds a site of productive incongruity: a ‘bristling paradox’ (Said
1998: 77). OsoWsan’s mapping of the historical narrative of the Owu
War, the collapse of the Oyo Empire, and the rise of Ibadan on to the
Homeric/Virgilian narrative of the Trojan War and the founding of
Rome signals an event in Nigeria of contingent, comparable signiW-
cance: the advent of colonial modernity. But another kind of narrative,
or rather narratives, lie behind the historical, which are concerned with
how the Yoruba conceive of their mythical, archaic past, their social
self-construction, and the impact of modernity. Myths of the polis, of
the ethnos, and of the nation: narratives which are further linked to the
image of the classical Greek city-state.
Comparisons between the pre-colonial Yoruba kingdoms and the
Greek polis arise from the beginning of the colonial period. Frobe-
nius, writing in 1913 about the Yoruba ur-city, Ife, refers to an ideal
plan of the Yoruba city, which perfectly reXects Yoruba cosmology
and mythical authority in architecture and the organisation of urban
spaces. According to these myths, Ife was the site where the high god
Oduduwa descended to earth and gathered the chief gods around
him in conclave, arranging them in a circle radiating outwards from
his presence. From this Frobenius (1913) claims that it:
. . . is perfectly clear that the famous hill . . . in the centre of Ife was in ancient
days the ‘navel’ of the Yoruba idea of the universe. The descendants of the
sixteen gods must have had their abiding places in the old sixteen divinations
of the compass, while the centre was occupied by the [oba’s] palace, which
was regarded as the umbilicus of the world. (Cited Krapf-Askari 1969: p.40.)
All subsequent city states were created in imitation of the sacred by a
form of apostolic succession from the original ideal model of Ife.
Anywhere not so founded was simply not regarded as a city in any
meaningful sense.
Frobenius’s account of the ideal and sacred nature of the trad-
itional Yoruba city was supplemented, during the period up to and
after Independence in 1960, by a remarkable Xowering of African
urban studies,1 which was little short of revolutionary in proposing
new models for investigating and theorizing colonial and postcolonial
1 See, for example, Balandier (1955), Busia (1950), Cappelle (1947), Forde (1964),
Guilbot (1950), Lerner and Schramm (1967), Mitchell (1966), and Schwab (1965 and
1970).
social formations. Yet, while debating new urban phenomena, these
writings nonetheless repeatedly returned to the comparison of the
Yoruba city state with the Greek polis.2 Writing in 1969, the anthro-
pologist, Eva Krapf-Askari explored the key Yoruba term ara ilu:
which refers to those who are by birthright members of an ilu:
. . . the name given both to nucleated settlements and to the advisory execu-
tive council of chiefs which, in conjunction with the sacred king or oba,
constituted the government of each settlement (Krapf-Askari 1969: p.25).
Like the Greek polis, Yoruba towns: ‘extended into the farmlands
beyond, which were cultivated by people who also regarded them-
selves as ara ilu’, so ‘conceptually, the city was not distinguished from
its farming hinterland and the whole complex was seen as a unit,
radiating out from a core consisting of the oba and council’. Thus, in
traditional Yoruba political thought each clustered settlement is the
residential expression of the political unity of a wider and more
extensive State which is in turn expressed in the morphology of the
city itself (Krapf-Askari 1969: p.27).
The traditional town plan was deliberate:
. . . with the Oba’s palace as the converging focus of all interests; each road
passed through a quarter under a quarter-chief, and all the quarters, as well
as the compounds of their chiefs, looked towards the palace (Krapf-Askari
1969: p.39).
The plan of a Yoruba town:
. . . resembled a wheel: the Oba’s palace being the hub, the town walls the
rim, and the spokes a series of roads radiating out from the palace and
linking the town to other centres. Beyond the walls lie the farm plots
merging imperceptibly with the Welds of the next town (Krapf-Askari
1969: p.39).
This form of town plan derives from the socio-political structure of
each Yoruba kingdom and: ‘imposes on Yoruba towns a more or less
identical morphology’ (Krapf-Askari 1969: p.39).
The myth of the ancient and divine structure of the Yoruba city as
polis lay somewhere near the centre of Yoruba cultural identity as it was
2 See Balandier (ibid.), Barbour and Prothero (1961), Busia (ibid.), Capelle
(ibid.), Forde (ibid.), Guilbot (ibid.), Kuper (1965) and Miner (1967).
conceived and articulated by cultural nationalists at Independence and
beyond. In many respects it spoke of an exceptional African, speciW-
cally Yoruba, cultural achievement, which nonetheless reXected many
Weberian and Durkheimian notions of the ancient Greek city con-
trasted to the city of modernity (Durkheim 1984; Weber 1958). It was
another kind of architecture—an aesthetic, cultural, and political
architecture, as well as a built environment—of small face-to-face
integrated communities pitted against London, Paris, Berlin, the colo-
nizers’ anonymous ‘de-cultured’ cities. The myth of the polis seemed,
therefore, to yield an alternative model of the state, which was sanc-
tioned by divine intervention and the power of antiquity. This model
comprised the multiple sacred centres of traditional cities from
which authority radiated to the exterior borders of their neighbours’
territories, with each unique piece of the mosaic being an identical
replica of the original sacred model: a temporal and transitive
series expressing the embedded myths of a culture’s particularity in
architectural form.
OsoWsan’s play about the obliteration of Owu—by another polis
with the same narrative-mythical genealogy—carries resonances be-
yond the merely Euripidean. The treatment of the myth of the
Yoruba polis by Nigerian artists and writers was ambivalent and
contradictory, combining aesthetic reverence with political revulsion.
Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) is set in the
city of Oyo during the Second World War. Based on a historical
event, the drama recounts the fate of Elesin Oba, the horseman of the
AlaWn—the oba or ritual king—of Oyo, whose duty it was to commit
ritual suicide on the death of his master in order to accompany the
king to the world of the ancestors. In the prelude to the rituals, which
should end in his death, Elesin’s lengthy monologues build a vivid
description of the traditional Yoruba polis exempliWed by the city of
Oyo, as Elesin calls into presence a procession of Yoruba social
types—kings, warriors, farmers, priests, courtesans, hunters, gods,
and animals—to create an image of social cohesion and complete-
ness. But Soyinka’s dramatic setting for Elesin’s evocation of the myth
of the polis is both surprising and of key signiWcance. With the death
of the AlaWn, Elesin is the most important surviving member of the
traditional authority system and, until his suicide at least, he em-
bodies the State. Yet Soyinka locates Elesin’s revelations not, as
Yoruba tradition and state morphology would dictate, in the palace,
‘the converging focus of all interests’, but in the market, or rather at a
point between the market and the palace. In most traditional Yoruba
towns, the main market is located in front of the palace, and Oyo is
no exception. The market and the palace are, thus, both spatially and
ritually related to each other as an expression of the relationships
between sacred authority and profane existence: between the gover-
nors and the governed, male aristocrats and female traders. Markets,
as Krapf-Askari relates:
. . . had a widely recognized ritual importance: a common feature of Yoruba
town markets is a shrine housing a laterite pillar over which cult oYcials
daily pour palm oil on behalf of the whole town. This pillar betokens the
presence of the orisa Esu or Elegba, the mischievous trickster deity of the
Yoruba pantheon (Krapf-Askari 1969: p.47).
Esu, unlike the other orisas of the founding myth of the Yoruba polis,
is associated with no ‘particular descent group, is specially connected
with crossroads and markets, with all commercial transactions, with
quarrels and trouble, as well as with uncertainty in general’. (Ibid.)
The traditional ilu functioned by drawing together in a single sacred
centre the political, economic, ritual, and geographical range and
focus of the state. But by locating his drama in this ‘interstitial’,
liminal space, Soyinka depicts the uncertain fate of the ancient polis
as—to adopt Frobenius’s image of the city as the physical embodi-
ment of the divinations of the compass—metaphorically turning,
precariously, on Esu’s pillar. Esu’s place in traditional Yoruba society
lay outside the dominant relationships of space and power within the
city, whereby location was indelibly associated with the authority of
familial relationships and descent. The location of the dramatic
action in the shadow of Esu’s pillar therefore underlines the theme
of contested genealogies, which will end in Elesin’s tragic failure to
submit to his fate and join the AlaWn in the world of the ancestors,
thus sending the world of the Oyo polis ‘tumbling in the void of
strangers’ (Soyinka 1975: 69).
In many respects, it is the destruction of the Yoruba—Greek polis
as a model of the Nigerian state that Soyinka’s and OsoWsan’s plays
dramatize. While the polis held a conservative aesthetic appeal as an
ancient trace of lost cultural identities, its introspective focus upon
the divine king and his cult auxiliaries as the centre of all existence,
was also seen as an unworkable model of the postcolonial nation.
But the myth and model of the ancient polis is crucial to an under-
standing of the role modernity plays in the social imaginary of the
emerging state of Nigeria. If the comparison of the Owu wars, with
their classical counterparts, was followed through to its logical con-
clusion, then the ‘New Troy’, Nigeria’s ‘Rome’, could be found in
Ibadan. Ibadan’s distinctiveness, its diVerence from the traditional
polis, is expressed in its own, unique, foundation myths, according to
which Ibadan was founded by act of divination, not by the direct act
of divine intervention through the sacred authority of an oba des-
cended from Oduduwa. At its foundation, so the myth tells, a
babalawo, or priest-diviner, sprinkled a powder used in divination,
which had been invested with the power of the odu, a sacred verse, on
the shells of 200 snails, which he then scattered in several directions.
The oracle proclaimed that the town would be as wide as the extent
to which the snails crept. The snails, we are told, travelled far and
wide in all directions, hence the ever-expanding size of Ibadan
(Idowu 1967: 235–6). In many respects, the myth marks Ibadan’s
absolute diVerence from the traditional Yoruba polis: where the
foundation myths of Ife and Oyo emphasize the centrality of the
palace complex as the ritual, political, and economic nucleus, Iba-
dan’s narrative emphasizes, not convergence, but spreading, multiple
divergences. The myth perfectly reXects Ibadan’s origins as Ibadan
grew to become the largest of all Yoruba settlements, but one which
never had an Oba, and therefore no centralizing focus, and is thus, by
deWnition, not a city at all. Because of its emergence out of the
remnants of Old Oyo, Ibadan owed allegiance to the AlaWn of Oyo,
but for most of its history this observance was honoured more in the
breach. In Ibadan, the emancipation from tradition, and from
the British colonial policy of indirect rule through traditional
authority, allowed the development of a relatively free, ‘interstitial’
zone outside the orbit of direct interference from both traditional
and colonial authority. As a consequence, it was in Ibadan, the largest
city in Africa at Independence, but not a city at all in a traditional sense,
that Nigeria and Africa experienced their greatest and most immediate
engagement with modernity. Ibadan’s relative ‘. . . openness’ enabled
the city’s populace to connect with a range of technology transfers,
transnational social and economic networks, and a dynamic popular
culture of consumption. It also enabled a remarkable group of artists
and writers to engage with alternative models of the city as projections
of the emerging postcolonial state of Nigeria. It was the cultural
nationalist artists and writers of Ibadan—Soyinka, Achebe, Okigbo,
Clark, the sculptors and painters of Mbari, and many others3—who
contributed to new ethnic and political identities within the postcolonial
state, and, as Achebe famously wrote, helped their ‘society regain belief
in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self
abasement’ (Achebe 1975: p.45).
But it could also be argued that the cultural nationalists replaced the
myth of the polis with myths of the ethnos, and in so doing, as
Mahmood Mamdani has argued in a diVerent context, merely:
. . . reproduced the legacy of colonialism by continuing to divide the population
ethnically, [ . . . ] making cultural identity the basis of political identity (Mam-
dani 2001: p.25).
The colonial state is replicated in its absence because the myth of the
ethnos is uncritically reproduced as authentic tradition but now in a
state where the population, very much larger than the traditional
polis, comprises multiple ethnicities all claiming rights as ‘indigenous’
subjects. As Mamdani has it: ‘we turned the colonial world upside
down, but we did not change it. As a result, the native sat on the top of
the political world designed by the settler’. He goes on to comment
ruefully, that this kind of colonially crafted ethnic authority model of
the state ‘had two big African homes in the colonial period. One was
Nigeria; the other was [Apartheid] South Africa’ (Mamdani 2001: 26)
The classical (with its foundational ideas of the polis, the state, its
destruction and its recreation) and the postcolonial (with its op-
positional struggle for cultural and ethnic identity in the individual
and the state) converge in the repetition of epic, cosmological, tragic
narratives. Where would one seek another, a truly other, architecture?
Of all the Wrst-generation, postcolonial, Nigerian writers (the
‘Ibadan boys’ as Obiola Irele calls them) (Na’Allah 2005), only
Christopher Okigbo had a classical education. An Igbo by birth, he
was the product of the British colonial education system; studying
3 See, for example: Achebe (1975), Clark (1966 and 1977), Okigbo (1971) and
Soyinka (1976).
classics at the University of Ibadan, he later taught Latin at a grammar
school, became a librarian at Nsukka University, and joined Cam-
bridge University Press. His Wrst published poem was an imitation of
Virgil and he was profoundly inXuenced by traditional Igbo, mod-
ernist, and classical poetry. It was these latter allegiances that led to
Okigbo’s contemporary reputation being eclipsed. In a sometimes
ferocious debate, the critics Jemie, Madubuike, and Chinweizu de-
nounced Okigbo as a traitor to African traditions, who wrote in an
apolitical, élitist style, which was inaccessible, incomprehensible, and
irrelevant to the majority of African people. They advocated a return
to the traditional oral poetry of pre-colonial Africa, and to them,
Okigbo was ‘an obscurantist ‘‘poets’ poet’’’ whose loyalties lay, not
with traditional African orality, but with European modernism and
classicism (Chinweizu and Madubuike 1980: p.193). The Troika (as
Jemie, Madubuike, and Chinweizu came to be known) contributed to
an important and necessary debate on the nature of postcolonial
African identity, yet their prescription for a decolonization of African
culture, which was to purge it of all colonial contamination, paid
scant regard to the complexity of Okigbo’s relationship with both
modernism and classicism. Far from being an apolitical voice of
neocolonialism, Okigbo articulated an oppositional poetics of
subtle engagements and critiques.
On the eve of the Nigerian Civil War, Okigbo, added an ‘Intro-
duction’ to his collection of poems, Labyrinths (Okigbo 1971: xiv):
Labyrinths is thus a fable of man’s perennial quest for fulWlment. (The title
may suggest Minos’ legendary palace at Cnossus, but the double headed axe
is as much a symbol of sovereignty in traditional Ibo society as in Crete.
Besides, the long and tortuous passage to the shrine of the ‘long juju’ of the
Aro Ibos may, perhaps, best be described as a labyrinth.)
Okigbo’s reference to the ‘Aro Ibos’ refers to Arochukwu, a powerful
confederation of three ethnic groups, which predominated in south-
eastern Nigeria from about 1690 until its destruction during the early
period of British colonization. The State held sway through the ‘long
juju’, an oracle that combined religious and judicial functions, the
main purpose of which was to ensure peace between the diVerent
groups, and to mitigate and arbitrate inter-ethnic conXict. For
Okigbo, the labyrinth of Arochukwu was an earlier predecessor of
the twentieth century Nigerian confederacy, but whereas Arochukwu
endured for more than two centuries as a successful synthesis of
ethnicities welded into a sovereign entity, Nigeria was convulsed by
civil and ethnic strife in less than half a decade of independence. Few
Nigerian readers of the time could have missed the irony of Okigbo’s
allusion as he awakens the historical memory of another lost ‘sover-
eignty’, the Arochukwu confederacy, just as the Nigerian confederacy
was on the verge of self destruction.4
But Okigbo looks not only to Arochukwu to supply him with a
political critique of contemporary Nigeria, but also to Knossos.
Okigbo, as a classicist, knew well Sir Arthur Evans’s works on the
excavation of the palace complex of King Minos at Knossos. This can
be seen from his care in identifying correctly the palace itself with the
labyrinth, and not as two separate constructions, which had been
Evans’s major discovery, and the etymology of the word labyrinth as
being derived from labrys, the two-headed axe and symbol of the
Minoan state (Evans 1921). This passage, like the labrys, is at least
double-edged. Evans’s work transformed the modernist perception of
the ancient world in a way that was more radical even than the
excavations at Hisarlik and Mycenae in the previous century.5 Evans
uncovered a place unlike any other; ‘the palace’s unlit, convoluted
passages and stairways leading nowhere’, revealed a kind of Greek
architecture unlike any known before (Florman 2000: 142). This was
no shining acropolis, nor was it the image of the ancient past as a
Golden Age founded upon the Athenian myth of progress, according
to which, Theseus, by entering the labyrinth and killing the Minotaur:
. . . sever[ed] all ties to both the dark, archaic world represented by Crete and
the human bestiality incarnated in the monster.
(ibid.)
The hero brought about a revolution in the history of civilization: an
irrevocable turning away from the Labyrinth towards the Acropolis.
But Evans had uncovered an architecture of a diVerent kind. Knossos
was dark, introvert, irrational. For European modernists, particularly
4 I have written elsewhere about the Igbo historical contexts of Okigibo’s evoca-
tion of the labyrinth (Richards 2000). In this chapter I refer to the archaic Greek side
of the question. On Arochukwu see Nwauwa (1995: 353–64).
5 See Schliemann (1875 and 1878) and Richards (2001).
the dissident surrealists Bataille, Leiris, Masson, and Caillois, who
enthusiastically embraced the image of the ancient past, which the
Minoan labyrinth symbolized, it was (to borrow the title of Denis
Hollier’s book on Bataille) an architecture that was ‘against architec-
ture’.6 The archaic world appeared to modernists in the shape of
Knossos as the very model of the subconscious in architectural form.
Okigbo also saw the labyrinth of Igbo state history through the
prism of Evans’s Knossos and, in a similar way as the dissident
surrealists, as a return of the repressed: dark, introvert, irrational.
Arochukwu as Knossos was also another symbol of dissent from the
victor’s myths of progress; here British rather than Athenian, but the
labyrinth was also an Igbo (Arochukwu), alternative architecture to
the ethnically-determined Nigerian confederation. But yet another,
much darker, and contradictory labyrinth occupies the same space.
In the section of the collected poems entitled ‘Initiations’ Okigbo
refers to the practice of branding slaves to signify ownership:
SCAR OF the cruciWx
over the breast,
by red blade inXicted
by red-hot blade,
on right breast witnesseth
mystery which I, initiate,
received newly naked
upon waters of the genesis.
(Okigbo 1971: p.6)
His evocation of Christian imagery has been correctly interpreted as a
critique of missionary activity in Africa, but the poem is not so clear-cut
in its anti-imperialism. Arochukwu was also implicated in the enslave-
ment of her own people and, as the state began to decay, the sacred
functions of the oracle were replaced by a violent trade in human Xesh,
and those not killed by the priests were sold into slavery. There are
more shapes than just the cruciWx in this labyrinth, and the patterns
burned into the Xesh assume ever more elaborate conWgurations: ‘At
conXuence, of planes, the angle: / man loses man, loses vision . . .’
(Okigbo 1971: p.6)as an extraordinary geometry of human-architectural
6 See Hollier (1992) for a stimulating account of Bataille’s interest in Knossos and
other ‘labyrinthine’ structures in architecture and the unconscious.
shapes Xoods out of the poem, building another kind of labyrinth. If
Arochukwu was for Okigbo both a political and historical model of
the state, and a counter to the imperialist myths of progress, it was
also, in the same space and at the same time, the dark labyrinth of
subjection, violence, and death, a bodily architecture ‘against archi-
tecture’—a sharp, angular geometry of pain. For Okigbo, as for the
dissident surrealists, the labyrinth, at the very least, is a place where
contradictions multiply. Good juju, bad juju, there is no way out of the
labyrinth: the children of the high god are also the slaves of the oracle;
heroes of the resistance to imperial rule are still bound by their own
history of subjections. As Okigbo writes: ‘We carry in our worlds that
Xourish / Our worlds that have failed’ (Okigbo 1971: p.41).
If we seek ‘another architecture’ for the postcolonial classical,
neither the ‘Ionian white and gold’7 (Eliot 1922), the polis, nor the
ethnos, then Okigbo’s labyrinth brings us closer to the ‘productive
incongruity’ and ‘bristling paradox’, which Said championed, over
the ‘familial analogies’ and transitive series, which constitute the
embedded myths of empire, nation, and ethnicity. The labyrinth
has a brutal, angular, and unaccommodating architecture: paradox-
ical but open to new experiences, Wlled with troubling echoes, dis-
placed and catachrestic spaces, and temporal uncouplings; it is a
social imaginary located in gaps in the narratives of time and space.
The labyrinth is (to borrow again from Hollier) the ‘locus of an
event’, an ‘explosion of aVective potential’ (Hollier 1992: p. 30), which
radiates outward in multiple conXicting directions. For Okigbo, the
classical and the postcolonial meet in the labyrinth to challenge the
ediWce of historical progress, denying the ‘Athenian’ victory. Through
this accumulation of images, which contain references, which con-
tain cross-references to allusions, there is not a building towards a
telos, but a compulsion to sustain indeWnitely, permanently if pos-
sible, that state which exists before the image succumbs to a ‘temporal
and transitive’ grand narrative or dynastic sequence. It is another
architecture.
7 The phrase is from TS Eliot’s ‘The Fire Sermon’, part 3 of The Waste Land, line 265.
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Index
Abbey Theatre, Dublin 9, 229, 230, 321–2 Antigone in Haiti (Morrisseau-

Abhijnanashakuntalam 290, 302 Leroy) 55, 66–7, 70
Abraham 351 Antigone (Sophocles) 1, 5–6, 76–7, 277,
Adam 350 282, 283, 284
Adisadel College, Ghana 61–2 Anouihl adaptation 1, 6, 41, 53, 69
Adorno, Theodore, Minima ‘braiding’ of Irish–English languages
Moralia 160, 165 in 319–26
Aeneid (Virgil) 3, 167, 330 and Brathwaite’s Odale’s Choice 6, 41,
Aeschylus 73 53, 55, 56, 63–6, 70
Agamemnon 62, 76, 311–16, 317 and Fugard’s The Island 8–9, 41, 109,
Choephoroi 104 213, 219–27
Eumenides 76, 269, 277, 279, 280 and Ghana theatre 55, 60–2, 63–71
The Libation Bearers 82 and the Ghanian education
Oresteia 79–80, 267, 315, 316 system 58–60
Afghanistan, war in 265, 266, 267 and Heaney’s Burial at
Africa Thebes 229–42, 320–3, 325
cross-cultural bonds with ancient in India 301
Greece 72–85 and OsoWsan’s Tegonni 5–6, 16, 24,
see also Ghana; Nigeria; South Africa 38, 40–53, 55–6, 71
African drama theatrical womanizing in 213–19,
adaptations of classical drama 40–1 226
braiding of Greek and African 319–29 Apollodorus of Damascus 149
and Tegonni: An African Antigone Archive Fever (Derrida) 339–40
(OsoWsan) Arcola Theatre, London 86, 96, 317–19
and The Gods Are Not To Blame Aristophanes 73
(Rotimi) 6–7, 28, 75, 82, 86–101, Aristotle
317–19 Poetics 254
and Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 27–8, and tragedy 271
31–2, 34–5 Arnott, Peter 75, 316
African playwrights, and postcolonial Arochukwu 360–1, 362–3
scholarship 307–10 The Athenian Sun in an African Sky
Agamemnon (Aeschylus) 62, 76 (Wetmore) 16
Hulton production 311–16, 317 Athens
Agovi, KoW E. 55, 56, 61, 71 classical Athens and post-
Aikin Mata (Harrison and Simmons) 82 liberalism 275–7, 281–2
Alcestis 58, 62 Wfth-century Athens and European
Alexander the Great 143 culture 252–3
Anabasis (St-John Perse) 168–9 Parthenon 149–50, 152, 155
Andha Yug (Bharati) 299 audiences
Another Life (Walcott) 170, 179–83, and stage technology 84
184–6, 188–90, 202–4 and Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 22,
Anouihl, Jean, adaptation of Antigone 1, 30–1, 34–5
6, 41, 53, 69 Autobiography of Red (Carson) 159
412 Index
Bacchae (Euripides) 82, 259, 261, 266 Buddhism, and tragedy 258, 260
The Bacchae of Euripides (Soyinka) 75 Budelmann, Felix 317
Baker, Herbert 142–3, 155 Burial at Thebes 9, 16, 229–42, 320–3, 325
Bakhtin, M. 160–1, 162, 167, 169, 188 Burian, P. 166, 204
Balme, David 59 Bush, George 230, 235, 236, 237, 239,
Barthes, Roland 246–7 267, 269
Mythologies 248 Bush, Laura 240
Barton, john 27 Butler, Guy, Demea 109
Baugh, Edward 171 Butler, Judith 213
BCM (Black Consciousness
Movement) 107 Cabral, Amilcar 74–5
Beckett, Samuel 261 Cambridge Brotherhood 288
Beck, Julian 107 Camus, A. 261
Beginnings (Said) 350–1 canonical counter-discourse 87
Bennett, William, Book of Virtues: A Caoineadh Airt Uı́ Laoghaire (Lament
Treasury of Moral Stories 250 for Art O’Leary) (Ni
Bennington, GeoVrey, ‘Postal Chonaill) 231–2
politics and the institution Caribbean colonies, and Homer’s
of the nation’ 339, 340, Odyssey 192–210
346–7 Caribbean writers 8–9
Bentinck, Lord 291, 292 post-epic texts 157–69
Bentley, Muriel 62, 63 Carpentier, Alejo, The Lost Steps 189
Bernabé, J. 185, 186 Carson, Anne, Autobiography of Red 159
Bhabha, H.K. 352 catachresis 351–2
Bhabha, Homi 3 Chamoiseau, P. 185, 186
Bhagavadgita 290 Charturvedi, Ramsvarup 299
Bharati, Dharmavir, Andha Yug 299 China, Tiananmen Square People’s
Biehl, Amy 114–15 Heroes monument 7, 135–6
Birmingham Conference on Classics in Chipping Norton theatre, and Women of
PostColonial Worlds (2004) 1, 4 Owu 15, 22, 31
Black Consciousness Movement Chirpaz, François 258
(BCM) 107 Choephoroi (Aeschylus) 104
Blair, Tony 237, 239 Christianity, and tragedy 261
The Blinkards (Sekyi) 54, 57, 59 Citizen’s Theatre, Glasgow, House of
Bloodlines (D’Aguair) 159 Murders 316
Bloomer, W.M. 334, 335, 345–6 civil society
Bloom, Harold, ‘Anxiety of and ancient Greece 276
InXuence’ 187 and social contract theory 272–4
Böhl, F.M. De Liagre 258 Clarke, John J. 304
Boullart, Karl 262 Clark, J.P.
Bouman, A.C. 145 Ozidi 75, 82
braiding, of Greek and African Song of a Goat 75
theatre 319–28 classical monuments, and Heroes’ Acre
Brathwaite, Kamau 53 (Zimbabwe) 122–32
Odale’s Choice 6, 41, 53, 55, 56, classics
63–6, 70 and colonialism 286–7
Brecht, Berthold 41, 108 and essentialism 249–53
Breslin, P. 201, 203 in the Ghanain education
British Braids conference 319 system 58–60, 70
Index 413
and India 287–91 D’Aguair, Fred, Bloodlines 159
theory and the classical dance, in mythical Greek and African
tradition 245–64 plays 79–80
and Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 35–8 Danquah, J.B. 67
classics/classical, use of the terms 4 The Third Woman 47
Classics and Colonialism (GoV ) 36 Dante 195
Clive, Robert 292 Davis, Nicholas Darnell, ‘Mr Froude’s
Clytemnestra (Euripides) 259, 260 Negrophobia, or Don Quixote as a
Clytemnestra (Graham) 79–80 Cook’s Tourist’ 193
Cockerell, C.R. 146 Deane, Seamus, The Field Day Anthology
Cold War 266 of Irish Writing 321
Collective Artistes 16 Dear Blood (Yanhah) 69
and Indian texts 291–5 Death and the King’s Horseman
colonialism (Soyinka) 356–7
and African adaptations of classical Decebalus, king of the Dacians 154
drama 40, 41 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe 195
and the classics 286–7 Dei-Anang, Michael, Okomfo Anokye’s
and Heaney’s Burial at Thebes 230–1, Golden Stool 74
235, 238–9, 242 De May, Philip, English translation of
and OsoWsan’s Tegonni: An African Agamemnon 311–13
Antigone 41–2, 43–53 Derrida, Jacques 330
and Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Archive Fever 339–40
Blame 87–90 Of Grammatology 338–9
communality, in OsoWsan’s Women of The Post Card 338–9
Owu 18, 21–2 Devlin, Bernadette 239
communitarian critics of liberalism 273 Dick, Philip K., Valis 329, 330, 331,
ConWant, R. 185, 186 343–5, 347–8
conXict, in Greek tragedy 279–80 Dingane, Zulu king 154
‘continual’ colonialism 4 Dionysus 256
Cowhey, Peter 341, 342 discursive practices 247, 263
Crawford, Robert 162–3 Djisenu, John 70
critical theory 250 Dorkonou, Mary 67
Cul de Sac Valley (Walcott) 170–8, Doryphoros statue 127
185, 186 Dove, Mabel, Woman in Jade 57
cultural hybridity, and Women of Owu Dublin Abbey Theatre 9, 229, 230, 321–2
(OsoWsan) 29–35 Dunton, C. 87
cultural imperialism 1 Duperron, Anquetil 304
and the Roman Empire 332 Durban International Film Festival
Cultural Literacy (Hirsch) 250–1 (2004) 117
cultural nationalism, and Indian Durkheim, E. 278
texts 290 Duvalier, ‘Papa Doc’ 66
cultural politics, and Greek drama 2–3
cultural universals 72–3 Eastern Europe 266
The Cure at Troy (Heaney) 242 East India Company 292
curses, in ancient Greece and education
Africa 77–8 Ghana 58–60, 70
The Curse of the Sacred Cow India 287–8, 293, 294, 296,
(Okurat) 81–2, 83–4 301–2, 303
Curzon, Lord 298 Korea 134–5
414 Index
Edufa (Sutherland) 57–8 Evaristo, Bernardine
Edwards, Catharine, Roman Lara 159
Presences 331, 340–1, 347 The Emperor’s Babe 8, 159–60, 164–8
Electra (Euripdes) 82, 104, 109, 110–12
Electra (McMurtry) 109 Fahodze, Tiata 317
Electra myth, In the City of Paradise 102, Fanon, Franz 3, 6–7
104, 106–7, 110–12, 118 Peau Noire, Masques Blanc 97–8
Electra (Sophocles) 82, 104, 216, 283 The Wretched of the Earth 98
Elektra (von Hofmannsthal) 110–12 Farrell, Joseph 163
Eliot, T.S. 195, 331, 347, 348 fatalism, in ancient Greece and
Elufowoju, Femi 317–18 Africa 77–8
The Emperor’s Babe (Evaristo) 8, Fellows of the Africa Leadership
159–60, 164–8 Initiative 1
Empire (Hardt and Negri) 330, 331, Fiawoo, F. Kwsai, The Fifth Landing-
333, 341 Stage 57
Encyclopaedia Africana 59 Fleishman, Mark
English language 10 In the City of Paradise 102–18
‘braiding’ of Irish–English in ‘Physical Images in the South African
Antigone 319–26 Theatre’ 105
and classical texts 305–7, 311–13 on workshop theatre 104, 106, 107–8
and Walcott’s poetry 176–7, 190–1 Foley, Helene 24
English literature, in Walcott’s Forgiveness (South African Wlm) 116–18
poetry 181–2 Foucault, Michel 247, 262, 274, 277, 285
Enlightenment 246, 247 Foursight Theatre, Wolverhampton,
Ennius, Latin poet 334–5, 336, 337, 338 production of Aeschylus’
Epic of Gilgamesh 257–8 Agamemnon 311–16, 317
epic representation, in Walcott’s Fowler, Don 251
Omeros 157–8 Fraser, Robert 69
Eshu and the Vagabond Minstrels freedom myth, in OsoWsan’s Tegonni: An
(OsoWsan) 74, 81 African Antigone 50–53
essentialism 248 French literature, in Walcott’s
classics and 249–53 poetry 184
Eumenides (Aeschylus) 76, 269, 277, Frobenius, L. 354
279, 280 Froude, J.A., The English in the West
Euripides 73, 109 Indies 8, 192–5, 196, 198, 206,
Bacchae 82, 259, 261, 266 207–9
Clytemnestra 259, 260 Fugard, Athol 53, 107
Electra 82, 104, 109, 110–12 The Island 2, 8–9, 41, 107, 109,
Hecuba 109 213, 219–27
Hippolytos 109, 283
Iphigeneia in Aulis 109 Gabriel, Ian 116–17
Orestes 109, 111 Gandhi, Indira 299
Trojan Women 5, 15, 17, 19, 23, 25–6, Gates, H.L. 95
27, 32, 34, 259, 309, 352, 353 gender
Eurocentric culture 251–2 and Heaney’s Burial at Thebes 240–1
and tragedy 254 theatrical womanising 211–27
European culture, and the Roman in Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 18,
Empire 331–3 22–5, 32
Evans, Sir Arthur 361–2 George, Andrew 257
Index 415
Ghana 82 Habermas, J. 268, 281–2
classics in the education Haiti, Morrisseau-Leroy’s Antigone
system 58–60, 70 in Haiti 55, 66–7, 70
myth and drama in 74 Halicarnassus, Mausoleum at 146,
theatre 6, 55, 56–8, 60–8, 70–1 155
Gilagamesh 9 Hall, Edward 27
Gilroy, Paul 3 Hall, Peter 27
Gladstone, W.S. 193 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 63
Glasgow Hampshire, Stuart 282
Citizen’s Theatre 316 Justice is ConXict 277
Oedipus performance (2000) 326 Hanson, Victor, A War Like No
global sovereignty, and the Roman Other 266
Empire 330–48 Hardt, M. 330, 331, 333, 341, 346
The Gods Are Not To Blame Hardwick, L. 2, 200–1
(Rotimi) 6–7, 28, 75, 82, 100, ‘decolonizing Classics’ 16
317–19 Harrison, T. 82, 325
Gold Coast see Ghana Harris, Wilson 8, 192, 196–8, 202,
The Gold Coast Spectator 62 204, 319
Golgotha legends 350–1 ‘History, Fable and Myth in the
Gow, Andrew S.F. 176 Caribbean and Guianas’ 197
Graft, Joe de, Sons and Daughters 63 ‘The UnWnished Genesis of the
Graham, Martha Imagination’ 197
Clytemnestra 79–80 Hastings, Warren 292
and the post–9/11 world 267, 270–1 Heaney, Seamus
Greek Burial at Thebes 9, 16, 229–42,
and education in India 287, 288, 293, 320–3, 325
294, 296, 303 The Cure at Troy 242
translation of classical texts into ‘Englands of the Mind’ 326
English 306, 311–13 Hecuba (Euripides) 109
Greek drama 4 Hegel, G., Philosophy of Right 273
and African culture 40, 55, 72–85 Henshaw, James Ene 63
and cultural politics 2–3 Hermanndenkmal monument,
gender in 211–13 Detmold 145
and Ghanian theatre 55, 57 Herodotus, Histories 194
and Women of Owu Heroes’ Acre (Zimbabwe) 7, 119–38
(OsoWsan) 29–35, 39 and China 135–6
Greek mythology, and comparison with classical
essentialism 250–1 monuments 122–32
Greek polis, and the Yoruba traditional functions 129–32
city 354–9 and North Korea 130, 132–5,
Greek tragedy 137, 138
multi-lingualism/multi-vocalism in panels 121–2, 123–9
modern performances 305–28 site of 119–20
and the post 9/11 world 265–72 technique and material 123
as a post-liberal genre 275–81 Hiberno–English 320–1
scandelous voices in 281–5 Hippolytos (Euripides) 109, 283
and universalism 253–62 Hirsch, E.D., Cultural Literacy 250–1
Greenblatt, Stephen 262 history, in Walcott’s Omeros 157–8
‘Guguletu 7’ (South Africa) 114, 115 Hobbes, T. 273, 274
416 Index
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, Irish dramatists, and Greek drama 9, 16
Elektra 110–12 The Island (Fugard) 2, 8–9, 41, 109, 213
Holy Roman Empire 292, 303 theatrical performativity in 219–27
Homer 177, 352
Iliad 256, 257–8, 300, 302 Jakobsen, Thorkild 257
Odyssey 8, 192–210, 300, 301 James, C.L.R. 8
Hughes, Francis 230–1 Minty Alley 209
Hughes, Ted, version of The Jesus Christ 350–1
Oresteia 315 Jones, Sir William 184, 289–90
Hulme, P. 230, 242 Joyce, James 195
Hulton, Dorinda, production of Ulysses 158
Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 311–16, justice, in Greek tragedy 276–7
317
humanism 9, 247–8, 263 Kagan, D. 266
Hunter, Evans Nii Oma 55, 67–8, 69 Kalidasa 290
Little Princess Korkor 69–70, 81 Kamasutra 287
hybridity Kani, John 219
and Walcott’s poetry 188–9 Kant, I. 273
and Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 29–35 Keats, John, Ode to a Grecian Urn 262
Kennedy, D.F. 346
Ibadan, and Women of Owu 15 Kennedy, James Scott 68
Ikiddeh, Ime 56, 71 Kente, Gibson 107
‘The Tragic InXuence of Shakespeare Kerr Prince, Cashman 8
and the Greeks’ 54–5 Kesey, Ken 222
Iliad (Homer) 256, 257–8, 300, 302 Kiberd, D. 230
In the City of Paradise Kickaka–vadha 298
(Fleishman) 102–18 Kilkenny, Statute of 305–6
India 10, 286–304 Kipling, Rudyard 292
British rule in 291–5, 298 KirchoV, Peter 149, 151
classical texts 4, 10, 289–90, 296–304 Knossos labyrinth 361–2
education 287–8, 293, 294, 296, Knox, Bernard 216
301–2, 303 Kolk, Mieke 255
languages 297 Korea 137–8
and Western classics 287–9, 304 Western education in 134–5
Indian ‘Mutiny’ (1857) 290, 295 see also North Korea
international law, and the Iraq Korean public sculpture 7
war 267–8 Korean War 137
Iphigeneia in Aulis (Euripides) 109 Krapf-Askari, Eva 355, 357
Iraq war 9, 265, 266, 267–9 Kristeva, J., Strangers to Ourselves 248
and Heaney’s Burial at Thebes 229, Kruger, Frikkie 149, 151
235–8 Kuhn, Thomas 247
and Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 19, 32 Kurtz, Stanley 228
Ireland Kwapong, Alex 60
‘braiding’ of Irish–English in Kyerematen, Alex A.Y. 68
Antigone 319–26
and Heaney’s Burial at labyrinths 360–3
Thebes 229–30, 230–1, 238–40, Lacan, J. 247
241–2 Ladipo, Duro, Oba Koso 74
Irele, Obiola 359–63 Lamming, George 207
Index 417
Landau, Tina 27 Mansudae Monument (North
language Korea) 132–4
and Greek tragedy 278–85 Many Colours Make the Thunder-King
as a social contract 274–5 (OsoWsan) 74
Lapido, Duru, Oba-Koso 28 Maritz, Gerrit 153
Lara (Evaristo) 159 Maritz, Jessie 7
Latin Marton, Lázló 239
and education in India 287, 288, 293, material culture 7–8
296, 303 matrilineal societies 65
and the Roman Empire 337 Mawugbe, Efo 69
translation of classical texts into Mda, Zakes 309
English 306 Mee, Charles 27
law, in Greek tragedy 276–7 metatheatricality, and OsoWsan’s
Lazarus, Neil, ‘Hating Tradition Tegonni: An African Antigone 42–3,
Properly’ 160, 165 45–6, 48–50
Leaning, John 59 Metcalf, Thomas 291
Lefkowitz, M. 200 Mezzabotta, Margaret, ‘Ancient Greek
The Legend of Aku Sika (Owusu) 74, 78, Drama in the New South
81, 83 Africa’ 105
The Legend of Okoyo (Yartley) 80 Midnight Hotel (OsoWsan) 24
Leroy, Morisseau, Antigone 6 A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Libation Bearers (Aeschylus) 82 (Shakespeare) 63
liberalism Midsummer (Walcott) 199
Greek tragedy as a post-liberal Mike, Chuck, and Women of Owu 15,
genre 275–81 16–17, 19, 21, 24, 25–6, 27–8, 31,
and social contract theory 272–5 35
Little Princess Korkor (Hunter) 69–70, Minty Alley (James) 209
81 Mitchell, Katie, production of The Home
Living Theatre, New York 107 Guard 315
London theatres modernity 246
Arcola 86, 96, 317–19 Moerdijk, Gerard 145–6, 149, 152, 153,
Oval House 15, 22 155
Lwanda Magere (Omtatah) 77–8, 81 Mohammed, Murtala 349
Lyotard, J.-F. 262 The Monkey’s Mask (Porter) 159
Lysistrata 82, 301, 302 Moore, Michael 269
Morgan, William L. 257
Macaulay, Thomas Babington 291–4, Morgue, Efua (later Sutherland) 62
296 Morountodun (OsoWsan) 24, 74, 81
Macbeth (Shakespeare) 62 Morris, Abraham 231
McDonald, Marianne 255, 260 Morris, James 292
McGuinness, Frank 3 Morrison, Blake, adaptation of
McMurtry, Mervyn, Electra 109 Antigone 324–6
Maes-Jelinek, Hena 200 Morrison, Conal, adaptation of
Mahabharata 297, 298, 299–300, Antigone 239
302, 304 Morrisseau-Leroy, Felix, Antigone in
Malina, Judith 107 Haiti 55, 66–7, 70
Malraux, André 190 Morris, William 143
Mamdani, Mahmood 359 Mugabe, Robert 126, 128, 130
Mandela, Nelson 116 Mukherjee, Meenakshi 301
418 Index
multi-lingualism/multi-vocalism, in North Korea
modern performances of Greek Arch of Triumph, Pyongyang 146–7
tragedy 305–28 and Heroes’ Acre (Zimbabwe) 130,
Murray, Les, Fredy Neptune 159 132–5, 136, 137, 138
Mythologies (Barthes) 248 Mansudae Monument 132–4
mythology Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetery,
in African/Greek drama and Pyongyang 134
society 73–5, 81, 84–5 Torch Towers 134
Golgotha legends 350–1 Ntangaare, Mercy 82
in Walcott’s Omeros 157–8 Ntshona, Winston 219
Nagy, Gregory 177 Oba Koso (Lapido) 28, 74

Naipaul, V.S. 203 O’Casey, Sean, The Plough and the
Nazi Germany, and Sophocles’ Stars 321–2
Antigone 1, 2 Odale’s Choice (Brathwaite) 6, 41, 53,
Negga, Ruth 239 55, 56, 63–6, 70
Negri, A. 330, 331, 333, 341, 346 Ode to a Grecian Urn (Keats) 262
neocolonialism, and OsoWsan’s Tegonni: Odyssey (Homer) 8, 192–210, 300, 301
An African Antigone 42 Oedipus in Colonus (Sophocles) 266,
New Historicism 248, 262 267, 278–81, 283, 284
New Philology 183–4 Oedipus complex 97–8, 187
New York Living Theatre 107 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 75, 86, 87, 89,
Ngugi wa Thiong’o 308 90, 91–3, 95, 96, 259, 283
Ni Chonaill, Eibhlin Dubh, Caoineadh Oedipus (Suzuki production) 259
Airt Uı́ Laoghaire (Lament for Art Oedipus Tyrannos (Sophocles) 6, 317
O’Leary) 231–2 Of Grammatology (Derrida) 338–9
Nietzsche, F. 248, 261 Ofosu-Appiah, L.H. 59, 69
The Birth of Tragedy 251 Ogunde, Hubert 74
Nigeria Ogunmola, Kola 74
Arochukwu 360–1, 362–3 Okigbo, Christopher 11, 359–63
Ibadan 358–9 ‘Initiations’ 362
myth and drama in 74 Labyrinths 360
National Museum, Lagos 349–50, Okomfo Anokye’s Golden Stool (Dei-
352 Anang) 74
and OsoWsan’s Tegonni: An African Okurat, M.K., The Curse of the Sacred
Antigone 41 Cow 81–2, 83–4
and OsoWsan’s Women of Owu 31–2 O’Leary, Art 231, 234
and Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Omeros (Walcott) 8, 157–8, 159–60,
Blame 86, 87–8, 91, 98, 100 161–4, 166, 168, 169, 200–1, 204,
see also Yoruba history and culture 205, 209
Nixon, R. 209–10 Omtatah, Okoiti, Lwanda Magere 77–8,
Nketia, J.H. 73 81
Nkrumah, Kwame 62, 66–7, 68, 70–1, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 222
74 Opuku, Manwere 60
Nkrumah Ni!Africa Ni! (OsoWsan) 74 Oresteia (Aeschylus) 79–80, 267, 315,
Northern Broadsides 324 316
Northern Ireland, and Heaney’s Burial Orestes (Euripides) 109, 111
at Thebes 229–30, 230–1, 239, Orientalism 289
241–2 Orientalism (Said) 255
Index 419
OsoWsan, Femi 327 politics
Eshu and the Vagabond Minstrels 74, and Greek tragedy 278–85
81 liberal 272–5
Many Colours Make the Thunder- polytheism, in ancient Greece and
King 74 Africa 75–7
Midnight Hotel 24 Pompeii, wall paintings at 122
Morountodun 24, 74, 81 Porter, Dorothy, The Monkey’s
Nkrumah Ni!Africa Ni! 74 Mask 159
on post-colonialism and African The Post Card (Derrida) 338–9
playwrights 307–10 post-colonialism/postcolonialism
‘The Revolution as Muse’ 309 and OsoWsan’s Tegonni: An African
Tegonni: An African Antigone 5–6, 16, Antigone 41–2, 43–53
24, 38, 40–53, 55–6, 71 theory and the classical tradition 249,
Yungba Yungba and the Dance 262–3
Contest 24 post-colonial/postcolonial
see also Women of Owu (OsoWsan) concepts 9
the Other 263–4 use of the terms 3–4
and gender in Greek drama 212 post-colonial/postcolonial studies 1–2
and Ireland 241 and OsoWsan’s Women of Owu 35–9
Oval House Theatre, London, and in the United States 228–9
OsoWsan’s Women of Owu 15, 22 post-empiricism 247
Overseas Education 61 Postma, Laurika 149
Ovid 333–4, 335, 336, 337, 338, 346 postmoderism 9, 159, 165, 248, 286
Owusu, Martin, The Legend of Aku and tragedy 255–6, 262
Sika 74, 78, 81, 83 post-structuralism 246, 247, 248, 249
Ozidi (Clarke) 75, 82 Potgieter, Hennie 149, 151
Pratt, M.L. 194, 195, 198
Paglia, Camille 255 Prayer on the Acropolis (Renan) 251–2,
Paulin, Tom, The Riot Act 324 262
Pavis, P. 252 Pretorius, Andries 141, 147, 154
Pearse, Patrick 321 public sphere, in classical Athens 281–2
Peloponnesian War 266–7, 269, 283 puppetry, in the Hulton production of
performativity Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 313–14
and gender 212–13
and language 278 Ramanujan, A.K. 304
Pergamon Ramayana 297, 300, 304
Great Altar 127 Rehm, R. 4, 272
Telephos frieze 123 Reinhardt, Karl 216
Perse, St-John, Anabasis 168–9 religion, polytheism in ancient Greece
philology, and Walcott’s poetics 183 and Africa 75–7
Philosophy of Right (Hegel) 273 Renaissance, and India 290, 293
Phoenix Players 107 Renan, Ernest, Prayer on the
Pienaar, E.C. 145 Acropolis 251–2, 262
Pintal, Lorraine 239 Republic (Plato) 301
Plato, Republic 301 responsibility, in OsoWsan’s Women of
Plays for African Schools 66 Owu 20–1
Poetics (Aristotle) 254 Retief, Piet 152
political propaganda, and Heroes’ Acre Revere, Paul 153
(Zimbabwe) 130–1 Rilke, R.M. 257
420 Index
Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 195 Macbeth 62
Romanelli, Romano 149 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 63
Roman Empire Tempest 195, 209–10
and British colonialism 143 Shelley, P.B. 341
and British rule in India 291–2, Siegel, Lee, Love in a Dead
294–5 Language 287–8
and global sovereignty 339–48 Simmons, Harry 178
imperial sovereignty 10–11 Simmons, J. 82
Roman epic, and Evaristo’s The slavery, in OsoWsan’s Women of
Emperor’s Babe 164–5 Owu 18–19, 24
Roman monuments Smuts, Jan 145
Agrippa’s Pantheon 146–7 social comment, in African and Greek
Arch of Titus 122, 123 drama 80–2
Forum 143 social contract theory 272–5
Trajan’s Column 122, 123, 147, 149, and ancient Greece 275–6
150, 151, 153, 154, 155 Solomon, Rakesh 298
Triple Arch of Constantine 136 Solon 276
Roman Presences (Edwards) 331, 340–1 Song of a Goat (Clarke) 75
Romanticism 263 Sons and Daughters (de Graft) 63
Rome, ancient 4 Sophocles 73, 274, 276
Ronell, A. 341 Electra 82, 104, 216, 283
Rotimi, Ola 16 Oedipus in Colonus 266, 267, 278–81,
The Gods Are Not To Blame 6–7, 28, 283, 284
75, 82, 86–101, 317–19 Oedipus Rex 75, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91–3,
Rumsfeld, Donald 237–8 95, 96, 259, 283
Rutter, Barrie 324 Oedipus Tyrannos 6, 317
see also Antigone (Sophocles)
Saddam Hussein 19, 268, 269 South Africa 102–18
Said, Edward 3, 289, 352, 363 apartheid 8, 41, 112, 154, 219, 359
Beginnings 350–1 and Fugard’s The Island 2
Orientalism 255 Pretoria Union Buildings 7–8, 142–4,
Sanskrit language and literature 4, 10, 145, 148, 155
289–90, 296–300, 303, 304 Truth and Reconciliation
Sarbah, John Mensah 58–9 Commission (TRC) 7, 103, 112–16
Sarkin, J. 102, 103, 118 Voortrekker Monument 7–8, 143,
Sartre, Jean-Paul 261 144–56
Les Troyennes 26 workshop theatre 7, 104–5, 106,
Saussure, Ferdinand de 275, 278 107–8
scandalous voices, in Greek Soviet Union 267, 268
tragedy 281–5 Soyinka, Wole 16, 28, 63
Schmitt, Carl 273–4, 277 The Bacchae of Euripides 75, 79
Schwab, R. 304 Death and the King’s
science, and post-empiricism 247 Horseman 356–7
Sekyi, Kobina 59 spectacle, in African and ancient Greek
The Blinkards 54, 57, 59 cultures 78–9
Serpent Players 107 Spivak, Gayatri 3, 285, 351–2
Shakespeare, William 27, 33, 57, 62 staging practices, mythical Greek and
Hamlet 63 African plays 79–84
and Indian classics 290 Steiner, George 212, 253, 256–7
Index 421
Storm, William 254, 256 and the post 9/11 world 265, 267–9
structuralism 246 and postcolonial studies 228–9
Sutherland, Efua 308 universalism, and Greek
Edufa 57–8, 62 tragedy 253–62
Suzuki, Tadashi, production of
Oedipus 259 Valis (Dick) 329, 330, 331, 343–5, 347–8
Synge, J.M., The Playboy of the Western Vernant, J.-P. 279
World 321 Victoria, Queen 294–5
Vidal-Naquet, P. 279
Tacitus 332 Vietnam War 25, 266
Annals 145 Viglione, Theresa 153
Tadema, Alma 262 Vignali, R. 147
Taiwanese students, and the Virgil 195
Bacchae 261 Aeneid 3, 167, 330
Tantalus (Barton, Hall and Hall) 27 Virilio, P. 341–2
Taoism, and tragedy 258–9 Viswanathan, G. 288
technology, and staging 83–4 Voortrekker Monument (South
Tegonni: An African Antigone Africa) 7–8, 143, 144–56
(OsoWsan) 5–6, 16, 24, 38, 40–53, architects 145
55–6, 71 enclosure 144, 148
telecommunication systems, and the ‘hole in the roof’ 146–7
Roman Empire 336–48 inaugration 144–5
The Tempest (Shakespeare) 195, 209–10 internal frieze 148–52
terrorism, tragedy and the post 9/11 size 146
world 265–72 as a World Heritage Site 155
Tharoor, Shashi, The Great Indian
Novel 299 Walcott, Derek 8, 168–9, 170–91,
Theocritus, Idyll 176 198–206
Thiong’o, Ngugi wa 3 Another Life 170, 179–83, 184–6,
The Third Woman (Danquah) 47 188–90, 202–4
Thomas, J.J. 193 ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic
Toure, Sekou 74 Memory’ 206, 209
tragedy see Greek tragedy The Arkansas Testament 170
travel writing, and the The Carribean: Culture or
Caribbean 192–6, 206–9 Mimicry? 203
Triple Arch of Constantine 136 The Castaway and Other Poems 199
The Trojan Women: A Love Story (Mee Cul de Sac Valley 170–8, 185, 186
and Landau) 27 ‘A Far Cry from Africa’ 165–6, 187
Trojan Women (Euripides) 5, 15, 17, Gros-Ilet 171
19, 23, 25–6, 27, 32, 34, 309, 352, ‘The Hotel Normandie Pool’ 206
353 ‘Meanings’ 182
Midsummer 199
Ulysses (Joyce) 158 ‘The Muse of History’ 178, 186–8,
United States 9 196
and essentialism 250–1 The Odyssey: A Stage Version 199, 204
and Heaney’s Burial at Thebes 229, Omeros 8, 157–8, 159–60, 161–4,
230, 235–8, 242 166, 168, 169, 200–1, 204, 209
Living Theatre, New York 107 ‘Origins’ 201
McCarthyism 9, 215–16 Saint Lucia’s First Communion 171
422 Index
Walcott, Derek (cont.) Woman in Jade (Mabel) 57
‘The Schooner Flight’ 204, 205 women see gender
‘What the Twilight Says’ 207 Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 5,
Waquet, F. 337 15–39, 309–10, 317, 318,
war 352–4, 356
in the Hulton production of and Euripides’ Trojan Women
Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 314–15 5, 15, 17, 19, 23, 25–6,
Nigerian civil war 87–9, 98, 100, 353, 27, 32, 34
360 form and tone 18, 25–9
in Women of Owu (OsoWsan) 18–21, gender in 18, 22–5, 32
26 productions 15
A War Like No Other (Hanson) 266 and war 18–21, 26
Warner, Charles 194 workshop theatre
Wetmore, Kevin J. 51, 52, 100 Hulton’s Agamemnon as 317
The Athenian Sun in an African in South Africa 7, 104–5, 106,
Sky 16 107–8
Black Dionysius 16 Wouw, Anton Von 147
Weyenberg, Astrid Van, ‘Antigone under
Apartheid’ 222 Yankah, Victor 55
Whitman, Cedric H., Sophocles: A Study Dear Blood 69
in Heroic Humanism 215–16 Yartley, Francis Nii, The Legend of
Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass 173–4 Okoyo 80
Wilkins, Charles 290 Yeats, W.B. 321, 326
Williams, D. 260, 261 Yoruba history and culture 352–4
Williams, Raymond 306 destiny 87, 94–6
Williams, Reverend Charles and the Greek polis 354–9
Kingsley 60–1 mythology 74
Williams, T. 157, 158, 169 Yungba Yungba and the Dance Contest
Wilmer, Stephen 320 (OsoWsan) 24
Wolf, M. 188
Wolverhampton, Foursight Theatre Zeitlin, Froma 271–2, 279
production of Aeschylus’ Zimbabwe see Heroes’ Acre
Agamemnon 311–16, 317 (Zimbabwe)

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES

This volume grew out of a conference, Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds,

PART I: CASE STUDIES

PART II: ENCOUNTER AND NEW TRADITIONS

Cover picture: Mo Sesay, Golda John and Nick Oshikanlu in Ola

Felix Budelmann is Lecturer in Classical Studies at the Open Uni-

In March 2005 the Fellows of the Africa Leadership Initiative

1 Summarized in the report ‘The Promise of Leadership’ (Africa Leadership

This chapter is devoted to Women of Owu, a new adaptation of

WAR, SLAVERY, AND RESPONSIBILITY

Women of Owu is a play about the suVerings imposed by war. Its

9 In particular: OsoWsan (2001) 153–73. On OsoWsan general concern with present-

11 Of all OsoWsan plays, Marantoudoun (published text, OsoWsan 1982) is prob-

As pointed out above, Women of Owu follows the plot structure of

13 For an English translation of Les Troyennes, see Sartre (1969: 291–347).

16 Arcola Theatre London, directed by Femi Elufowoju, July 2005.

G R E E C E, AFR IC A, AND THE UK

The subtitle OsoWsan has given his play, An African Re-reading of

29 A similar point, in a diVerent tone, is made by Trivedi (1999: 269) in response to

30 The complexities of the need for speciWcity in postcolonial criticism are

Adaptations of classical drama by writers of African descent are

11 The ‘Programme Notes’ to Tegonni similarly target the horrors of contemporary

In The Blinkards, a play written by Kobina Sekyi and produced in

The theatrical background to this examination includes the varied,

5 The list draws on material collected in Gibbs (2004).

The importance of Antigone in the Gold Coast/Ghana is apparent in

6 Leaning’s opinion was given in a conversation with Francis Agbodeka held in

ANTIGONE IN THE SCHOOLROOM AND

In about 1930, the Reverand Charles Kingsley Williams, Assistant

8 Anon. ‘Adisadel College: A Historical Sketch’, http://members.tripod.com/tettey/

The earliest adapted version of Antigone originating in Ghana and

The impact of Caribbean interpreters of Antigone in Ghana con-

12 The possibility that Morisseau-Leroy was in some way prompted to adapt

I continue to pursue lines of enquiry about productions of Antigone in

Further research is needed and will undoubtedly bring to light

14 Hunter email 17 April 2004.

Use of Myth in Drama and Society

The second cross-cultural bond that exists between ancient Greece

5 For further reading on Yoruba gods, see Omosade (1979: 21–57).

INVOC ATION OF TH E GODS

This brings me to the third cross-cultural bond that has to do with

9 The following page references are to Omtatah’s text (1991).

THEATRE AND SPECTACLE

Apart from the commonalities of myths, polytheism, and curses, other

10 The following page references are to Owusu’s text (1999).

IM PL IC AT IONS FOR C ONTEM PORA RY S TAGING

The cross-cultural bonds already discussed above have implications

DANCE A ND MOV EME NT

Dance and movement are major elements in re contextualization; for

Recontextualization also implies investing myths with relevant and

TECHNOLOGY AND STAGING

Re-contextualization requires modernization and originality in the ap-

AUDIENCE AND ITS PARTICIPAT ION

One price to pay for excessive use of contemporary stage technology

Cross-cultural bonds exist between Africa and ancient Greece that

THEORY VERSUS CURSE

In embodying African elements, in the form of Yoruba proverbs and

8 The notion of fate in Oedipus the King is explicated, and complicated, in

16 Like Rotimi’s text, Tiata Fahodzi’s production made no reference or gesture at

1 There is no published text of this adaptation. I would like to thank Professor