Announcing my play: Waiting for Savon (2009)

Writers,

May I have the great honour to announce the release of my play: Waiting for Savon from Hybun Publications International. Many hands went into bringing this work to perfection. Great friends like E. E. Sule who not only contributed a blurb (as below)but suggested a better ending, I am grateful. Uche Peter Umez who read the draft of the play and also contributed a great blurb (as below), Ojinmah Umelo, for the third blurb. Poet-novelist Maiwada, for the cover concept. All Hybun men such as my dear brother Diego, for the beautiful innovations and typesetting, Sylvester Ukut for the eye-catching cover design. Most importantly, my publishers, Hybun, for the patience in bearing a playwright's endless demands to bring out a perfect work. This play is good enough to bear the Hybun logo. To all these great guys, please send your addresses for copies. Also, Henry of National Life, Ben Ubiri and Umaisha are to send me their postal addresses for copies.

BLURBS:

“Waiting for Savon is one long rollercoaster of hilarity. Brilliantly crafted, as stinging as it is a forewarning in its thrust. Timely, telling, a farce that pokes fun at our rich diversity and our asinine refusal ‘to be true to ourselves.’ Ogezi has striven to remind us of our misadventure( s) as a nation, albeit subtly mocking our self-induced impotency to chart an all-embracing equitable path. The whole play argues that redemption is within and amongst us and not outside our reach. Until we rise above ethnic chauvinism nationhood would remain as elusive as the wait for a saviour.”

- Uche Peter Umez, author of Dark Through the Delta (2004)

“This is a fantastic demonstration of imaginative power … It is enthralling.”

- Umelo Ojinmah, author of The Pact (2006)

“The dramaturgy is impressive. Language and research are commendable.”

- E. E. Sule, author of What the Sea Told Me (2009)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Isaac Attah Ogezi is a legal practitioner, poet, playwright, short story writer and literary essayist. He is published in Drumvoices Revue, USA (2006), Prosopisia, Vol. 1, No.1, India (2008),www.fictiono ntheweb.com, www.authorme. com and several other national and international anthologies, online journals and dailies. His adaptation of Soyinka’s The Interpreters under the title: The Misfits won a 3rd prize position at the 2006 ANA International Colloquium to mark the 20th Anniversary of Soyinka’s Nobel Prize. Also, his adaptation of Achebe’s Arrow of God under the title: Ezeulu came first at the 2008 ANA International Colloquium to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. A fellow of UNPFA/Nollywood Scriptwriting and British Council Radiophonics programmes, he currently practises law at Keffi, Nasarawa State.

Cover Photograph by:
New Dimension Studio, Keffi
Cover Concept by Ahmed Maiwada
Cover Design by Sylvester Ukut.

FROM THE PLAYWRIGHT:

“… the play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”

– William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)

No country baffles the international community to a state of inertia like the contraption called Nigeria. As the most populous black nation in the world, she is endowed with both natural and human resources yet toddles behind other nations of the world like the man-child in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are not yet Born. She is in the forefront of Third World countries caught in the quagmire of cyclic movement reminiscent of the revolution of the earth around its orbit. There seem to be no marked changes or growth in the polity or the economy except the usual bumper harvest of corruption, ethnic militias, political assassinations, plane crashes and several indices of underdevelopment. Indeed, the current happenings in our body-politic is like the replay of the events that took place during the First Republic, as superbly captured in Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People. The question now is: what is the role of the writer in this season of
anomie? Is he a self-seeking entertainer aloof to the socio-political climate of his time? Can he still regurgitate half-digested theories such as art for art’s sake in the face of an impending doom that threatens his very existence? Or is his art so sacred and pure that he must remain an apolitical animal until the end of his life?

During the pre-colonial African society, the role of the griots, which the modern-day writer occupies, was akin to that of a prophet, a priest, a seer and a marabout. The society looked up to him for direction. If there is a consensus that literature is the soul of every nation, then what is the role of a writer if not a man of action, the voice of the voiceless? Achebe and Ngugi are two classic examples of why the writers must not shy away from the politics of his times. A few months after the publication of his A Man of the People in 1966, the military struck. The ending of the novel was so prophetic that some politicians suspected that Achebe must have had a hand in the coup that overthrew the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa government. In an interview in 1970, Achebe had this to say as regards the role of the contemporary writer:

“Right now my interest is in politics or rather my interest in the novel is
politics. A Man of the People wasn’t a flash in the pan. This is the begin-
ning of a phase for me in which I intend to take a hard look at what we
in Africa are making of independence – but using Nigeria which I know
best … It is clear to me that an African creative writer who tries to avoid
the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up
being completely irrelevant – like that absurd man in the proverb who
leaves his burning house to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames … What
is the place of the writer in this movement? I suggest that his place is
right in the thick of it – if possible, at the head of it”.

When asked further if he considered himself a protest writer, Achebe retorted thus: “Well, according to my own opinion of protest, I am a protest writer. Restraint – well, that’s my style, you see”. After A Man of the People, Achebe followed it up with an equally politically charged, Booker Award-shortlisted Anthills of the Savannah in 1986. Similarly, before the environmentalist- cum-writer, Ken Saro Wiwa was hanged by the military junta in 1995, he delivered what could well pass for the raison de’tre of his mission as a writer. He said:

“Literature in a critical situation such as Nigeria’s cannot be divorced from politics. Indeed, literature must serve society by steeping itself in politics, by intervention, and writers must not merely write to amuse or to take a bemused, critical look at society. They must play an interventionist role … The writer must be l’homme engage: the intellectual man of action”.

It must be conceded from the outset that literature cannot shoot a gun nor depose a corrupt, totalitarian government, yet there is no gainsaying the fact that it is the most potent weapon above all other forms of art. When Sharia was introduced in some parts of the North in 1999, there were a lot of vitriolic attacks from the press all to no avail. The press cannot take the place of literature as it obviously lacks the necessary wherewithal of capturing human experience that is inherent in the latter. In his book, The Revolution of Hope (New York: Harper Row, 1969), Erich Fromm posited and rightly too that:

“Poetry, music and other forms of art are by far the best-suited media for
describing human experience because they are precise and avoid the
abstraction and vagueness of worn-out coins which are taken for
adequate representations of human experience”.

This is what I sought to do in this play. The way things are going on in our beloved country is really absurd, to say the least, and the best way to capture this absurdity is to have recourse to the theatre of the absurd as popularized by the great Irish playwright, Samuel Beckett. This is the theatre of our misbegotten era where, according to a fellow writer, Ali Omachi, “the moon walks on its head”. In a season of anomie like this, it is the writer’s sacred duty to sound a note of warning. Whether I have succeeded in this mission, it is best left for history to judge.

- Isaac Attah Ogezi
Keffi, September, 2009.