The Swamp Dweller

- Wole Soyinka

• Focuses on the struggles between the old and the new ways of life in Africa.

• Gives us a picture of the cohesion that existed between the individual and Southern Nigerian society.

• Conflict between tradition and modernity. • The play mirrors the socio-cultural pattern, the

pang and the sufferings of the swamp dwellers and underlines the need for absorbing new ideas.

• The struggle between human beings and unfavorable forces of nature is also captured in the play.

• The play presents the picture of modern Africa where the wind of change started blowing.

• Twins- myth• Swamp- where is the actual ‘swamp’?• Loss of self in the ‘Swamp’

• Image of swamp to characterize city• Swamp- natural disorder• the ground always sinking beneath one's feet,

leaving one literally and figuratively without a foothold, without a basis for action. The city is artificial disorder—ethical principle or structure replaced by the shifting contingencies, not of physical space, but of economy, and social morality undermined by impulse, by “the bestial human” by pride or envy or greed

• Structure of the village• Chaos- threatens the humanity

• Death of a twin- Awuchike• What type of death is it?• Natural or symbolic?

Tradition and modernity: A study of social change

Tradition

• Cultural, social, conventional• Nonwestern attitude/ culture• village- joint family, caste…• Established power and unofficial violence in

village• Village struggles to connect myth and actuality

Modernity

• Complex phenomenon• Encompasses various elements of the so-

called South African tradition or any tradition• A change in society• What type of change?• Is it all about accepting western ideas, culture

and forgetting the tradition of one’s own?• To shun the roots……?

Polar opposites

• Tradition and modernity is a linear theory of social change

• The terms do not involve displacement or conflict

• Modernity does not weaken the tradition• Tradition- a framework of nationhood• The concept of development in modernity

• The relation between tradition/modernity• Both are treated as polar opposites, or

binaries• Problem- tradition or modernity???• Kinship system v/s money relation• Traditional/ modern values: fostering or

encouraging corrupt behavior

• Tradition is taught by our elders• Modernity: a person’s thoughts about the

world• Corruption- not related with tradition or

modernity• Why people are against modernization?• Modernization has brought materialistic

values to the front seat and ethical and moral values have been relegated to the back seat…?

• In The Swamp Dwellers, Soyinka has presented good countryside and evil city. What do you think?

• The idea is represented in the characters of the two women characters Desala, unfaithful wife and Alu, the mother

• Makuri says, “There wasn't a woman anywhere more faithful than you, Alu; I never had a moment of worry in the whole of my life”

• Makuri begins to discuss the city: “It ruins them. The city ruins them. What do they seek there except money?

• Alu responds, “It was the swamp … He went the same way as my son” (87). The point is clear, even outside of Yoruba belief—the city is a swamp, a place of moral degradation, that “kills” those who go there.

• In the Yoruba context of beliefs and customs concerning twins, to say that he is dead is to suggest that his fate is worse, that he has undergone a transformation more thorough than that of physical demise. It is, in effect, a spiritual death—and, along with it, a broader, social death, a death of tradition.

• For Soyinka, “nothing rescues man (ancestral, living or unborn) from loss of self within this abyss but a titanic resolution of the will”

• Igwezu explains, “Awuchike is dead to you and to this house. Let us not raise his ghost”

• The Swamp-the city is the result of colonialism, capitalism, industrialization, the shift from tradition to “modernity.”

• Flood is not the only reason.• Makuri explains, “Not a grain was saved, not

one tuber in the soil … And what the flood left behind was poisoned by the oil in the swamp water”.

• Igwezu asks, “Is it of any earthly use to change one slough for another?”

• “the swamp will […] laugh at our endeavors” so that, whatever we may do, “the vapors” of the swamp “will still rise and corrupt the tassels of the corn” (110)—

• The use of the word “corrupt” is, of course, not accidental.

• enormous ecological and human waste due to greed

• Economy/ money is not the reason of corruption in the play

• In the opening scene, “a hut on stilts”; in the hut “is a barber's swivel chair” (81). This strange, part comic, part pathetic icon of modernity was a gift to Makuri from Igwezu, when he was in the city.

• Is it modernity or a change????????????

Myth• For Soyinka, there are three great deities of tragedy:

Ogun, god of Iron; Sango, god of lightning; and Obatala, the maker of human forms. Ogun is the great god who bridged chaos, who carved out (with an iron blade) a space for humanity and gods to meet. But in the end, he succumbed to chaos himself—murdering his own people in a drunken frenzy. Sango called down the forces of chaos on himself and ended his own life, abandoned by all and sunk into despair.

• Once, from wine, Obatala too fell into the abyss; in consequence, he shaped disabled men and women. Since their deformities resulted from his drunkenness, he pronounced the lame, the paralytic, the deaf and mute and blind, his sacred offspring. And he mourns throughout eternity for the suffering caused to them in that one error, that one moment when formless chaos impinged on the god of forms.

• Identification of Alu with the Yoruba earth goddess Edan—for she conceived the twins when sunk into the earth, and the twins share its colour.

• The Beggar is blind, one of “the afflicted of the gods” towards whom all are “under the strict injunction of hospitality” (89)—that is because, with his disability, he is beloved of Obatala, linked with him in a special bond.

• But the tie with the maker of forms goes further. “Obatala” means “lord of the white cloth,” for that is Obatala's distinguishing mark.

• Other gods are preceded by a drummer, announcing them, singing their praise names, glorifying them—like the Kadiye. But the humble and always penitent Obatala refuses such pomp. He is known only by his perfectly white clothing.

• So too the Beggar: “He wears a long, tubular gown, white, which comes below his calf” (88). And the Beggar too is scrupulously penitent, worrying over the purity of his blessings and over the alms he has accepted (91)—like the sins of Obatala, minor crimes in the larger scheme of things. Indeed, Obatala forever eschews palm wine because of his errors in making, which resulted from inebriation—a point stressed by Soyinka. The Beggar too, alone among those in the play, refuses liquor

• Obatala is known for two great acts. In the beginning, the earth was covered with water and swamp. All the gods ignored the marshy earth, but Obatala went to the supreme god, Olorun (also called Olodumare), and volunteered to drain the marsh and make solid land that could support life.

• Olorun agreed, and Obatala descended from heaven and made land. But there were as yet no people to live there. So Obatala took up his second great task. He reached into the wet clay and shaped the human form, into which Olorun breathed life.

• The Beggar focuses on the “miles” of swamp before the sea, where, as Makuri warns him, “you'll not find a human soul” (89), and he wishes, like Obatala, to “redeem […] the swamp […] to drain the filth away and make the land yield” (92).

• He is prevented only because Makuri and the Kadiye, deviating from the principles of Olorun himself.

• Moreover, like Obatala, the maker of forms from clay, the Beggar wishes “to knead [the soil] between my fingers” (89), to take “this soil […] to scoop it up in [his] hands […] cleaving ridges under the flood and making little balls of mud” for sheltering seeds (111). At one point, the Beggar even goes so far as to identify the soil formed by his hands with new human life, saying, “I shall […] work the land. […] I feel I can make it yield in my hands like an obedient child”

• Igwezu- Ogun• He is the only one in the play to hold a blade,

and that immediately links him with the god of war, of weapons, and of iron.

• Obatala is presented as a friend of the impetuous god/king Sango. And thus the devotion of the Beggar to Igwezu might suggest a connection between Igwezu and the god of lightning.

• Sango was a great and powerful king. But—perhaps through his own pride and cruelty, perhaps through the fickleness of his people, and of all people; in any case, because of some intrusion of chaos into ethical and social order—he was abandoned by the people, denounced by the chiefs.

• He was dethroned and replaced in the kingship by his brother.

• He fled from the city to the countryside. But even his wife abandoned him. In the end, he was left alone with one loyal slave. He told the slave to wait, that he would return, and wandered off into the forest. After a time, the slave sought him out and found that Sango had hanged himself.

• The slave returned to the city and bore testimony to what had happened.

• When Igwezu walks off, the Beggar explains that he will fulfill the function of Sango's one loyal companion: “I shall be here to give account”

Beckettian dramatic features

• Isolated, hopeless, helpless characters• Futility/ meaninglessness of life• Disillusionment• Characters going into their individual world• Absence of God

• Characters presented without much history – driven to locate themselves in the world with reference to geography. But the world in which they live has no overall structure, it is a dreadful place in which every moment is like the next… Lacking an assured past, the tramps can have no clear sense of their own future…They are waiting without hope for a deliverance from a being in whom they do not really believe.

• Absurdity of human condition against the background• Absurdity of human existence• Un-native play

• Human life presents constant problems and contradictions

• The individual and the society in continual need of salvation for itself.

• Representation of inexplicable and hazardous universe in which man finds himself.

• Beggar, Awuchike and Igwezu - ready to submit- determined to survive against all odds.

The question of salvation

• The Swamps Dwellers should continue to depend on the Serpent for salvation in spite of the interminable calamities that confront them or not?

• Should man continue to grope through an absurd existence with blind hope for divine salvation or should he seek other ways of saving himself?

• Igwezu - an ideal son of the SWAMPS. • Loyal to tradition he has performed all the

necessary rites required by the deity to ensure a good harvest and a happy life with his wife.

• Mishaps in the city, in the Swamp and in his own life, in everybody’s life…

• Impotence of this god gradually creeps into his awareness

• Igwezu: I’m afraid I have had my turn already. I lost everything, my savings, even my standing as a man. I went into debt.

• “I came back with hope, with consolation in my heart. I came back with assurance of one who has lives his land and tilled it faithfully.”

• “the beans and the corn had made an everlasting pottage with the mud.”

• Makuri: It is the will of the god.