The irenic Clark – A tribute
J. P. Clark- Bekederemo, or simply J. P. Clark, is justly celebrated as a poet, playwright and scholar whose distinctions persist in his piquant and ingenious use of his IjawUrhobo culture of story- telling and mythmaking to portray the human predicament of people struggling with forces outside of their control. His works are a canvas of the richness of African traditional societies, the disruptive and demeaning effects of colonialism, and the continuing impoverishment of the people and the land by the unjust and corrupt apparati of the Nigerian state. In his poetry, exceptionally, Clark achieves international prominence in the accessible lyricism of his language, and the engaging socio- symbolic and romanticised worlds that he recreates. At times, Clark’s works are direct commentaries on contemporary politics and history in Nigeria or across Africa, as in his drama All for Oil ( 2009) and poetry, Mandela and Other Poems ( 1988). At other times, they are layered nuances of his philosophy and vision for a better world, for instance, as we find in The Wives’ Revolt ( 1991) and Casualties: Poems 1966– 68 ( 1970). Apart from this universal appreciation, however, critical reception of Clark’s works, matterof- factly, his dramas, is either weighted down by excessively referencing their themes and craft in Aristotelian terms or delimiting them as narrow and probably unstageable interpretive perspectives on the tragic impulses and farcical circumstances of his leading characters. Invaluable as these views might be, they miss, perhaps, the significant irony that Clark’s dramas present: in Clark’s plays it is not the playwright- poet that is in focus but the lived experiences of his characters, stretching from the creeks of the Niger Delta to the bustling streets of Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital.
This irony, the lived experiences of Clark’s characters, particularly frames the dramatic narratives in Clark’s trilogy, The Bikoroa Plays. In the first play, The Boat, the personal animus between Biowa and Bradide is grossly inflated to serve as a device enabling us to see how the brothers’ open warfare is inevitably tied up in the community’s norms of the privileges of wealth contra the privileges of birth. As their coastal community gets sucked into the emerging capitalism engendered by colonialism and the establishment of trading ports, rustic Bikoroa rouses enthusiastically to embrace wealth as the ultimate symbol of power, and the deference to age must now accommodate this new effect.
The Clarkean tragedy of fratricide that ensues is an inflection point for Bikoroans to choose either the Whiteman’s world or retreat from it into the walls of their traditional worldviews. Evidently, Biowa is guilty of killing his brother but his murder
ous act is ostensibly informed by the communal norm that encourages and invests primacy in the first- born.
In a twist of fate, the fratricide implies that two competing norms have clashed – the primacy of the first- born and the irreducible need for justice. The community is caught in the horns of a dilemma - their land remains under a curse until the murder is expiated. When Biowa is tried by the Bikoroans, found guilty and drowned, ironically justice prevails but it only loads the land with a further debt – the ghosts of Biowa and Bradide must ritually be “called home” for the family and the land to escape a repeat of the tragedy.
The community is unaware, but The Boat THE IRENIC CLARK – A Tribute by Kemi Atanda ILORI Page 2 of 4 purely ends in a sort of limbo for the family and the land, a limbo in which peace is merely a stalemate, not a victory for the family or the community. We leave the theatre sensing conflict may have ended but peace has barely been fostered. As such, the communal celebration to drown the community’s grief in dance and drink at the end of play is ironically merely precipitate, even if suggestive of the community’s ultimate ethical consensus. This consensus faces its stiffest challenge in The Return Home, the second play in the Bikoroa trilogy. Tensions flare up again in a predictably Clarkean mode: the gulf between communal expectations and the individualised miniaturisation of communal norms. Fregene and Egberibo, the sons of Biowa and Bradide, are feuding over the disparity in their social status. Fregene is a successful sculptor, Egberibo is an indigent layabout. Their schisms end in a violent and nearly tragic contest that rouses Bikoroa into a rush for expiatory rites to recall the ghosts of the boys’ fathers to forestall any tragic consequences. In the trio of rituals, the aspirations of Fregene and Egberibo are communalised and set as goals for the cleansing of the land. In “Ablutions”, the fratricidal dead are cleansed and restored to their family and clan. In the “ladder” the community is absolved of complicity in the fratricide, it was an act of fate.
The third ritual, consisting of “Heirlooms” and “Repose”, costume the cousins in their fathers’ apparels, evoking a restoration of their rights to the estates of their fathers. The rituals are designed to underscore the reach for communal harmony and coalition and the integration of individual motivations in communal ends. A sort of peace returns to Bikoroa again although, ironically, the Bikoroans have not dealt with the causative factors of the perennial threats of tragedy assailing their community.
There is a constant postponement of a root and branch reform of their communal ethos despite the apparent argument that it has become inadequate for enabling a different and perhaps better outcome for Bikoroans. Such an outcome appears to have been left too late as events in the third play, Full Circle, reveal. Ojoboro and Kari, the grandsons of Bradide are the new pair