Halima Sekula: The Emergence of a Female Playwright

By Isaac Attah Ogezi That there is a sharp decline in playwriting and dramatic productions in Nigeria in the last two decades is an obvious fact. In the words of the critic and writer, E. E. Sule of Impotent Heavens fame, “drama is the Cinderella of modern Nigerian literature”. In his introduction to Camouflage: Best of Contemporary Writing from Nigeria (2006) edited by Nduka Otiono and Odo Diego Okenyodo, Otiono writes: “Clearly, the least patronized genre is drama – there is only one playlet in this volume! And there have been years when ANA could not award its annual Drama prize because of paucity of quality entries”. Delivering the keynote address at the Playwriting Workshop organized by the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) in collaboration with the National Theatre and Centre for Black Africa Arts and Civilization (CBAAC) at the University of Lagos, Lagos, on March 31, 2006, Professor Femi Osofisan openly lamented the dearth of dramatic productions in recent times when he said: “Plays and playwrights are too obviously in short supply. At every literary competition that has been organized over the past two decades at least, it is this area of creativity that has been deficient and problematic, because very few play scripts are submitted, and even these few ones are mostly of indifferent quality. Whereas prose fiction shows a more or less robust growth, and poems are proliferating like water hyacinths, plays do not seem to inspire an equal devotion or enthusiasm among our writers. Mention Ahmed Yerima, Stella Oyedepo, Oguntokun, Julie Okoh, Chima Uto, and Irene Salami, and you exhaust the list.” The inclusion of Ahmed Yerima in the above list is a glaring subterfuge to widen the list because Yerima is not a playwright of this generation. On the contrary, he rightly belongs to the second generation of Nigerian playwrights such as Femi Osofisan, Bode Sowande, late Sonny Oti, Sam Ukala, Catherine Obianuju Acholonu, Kalu Uka, late Zulu Sofola, Iyorwuese Hagher, and Tess Akaeke Onwueme. His first work, Three Plays in Transition, was published in 1977, almost three decades ago, during his undergraduate days at University of Ibadan, Ibadan. The recent literary competition organized by ANA on the stage adaptations of Wole Soyinka’s works (excluding his published plays) to mark the 20th anniversary of Soyinka’s Nobel Prize for Literature, attracted a meagre output of sixteen entries at the expiration of the deadline on 30th May, 2006. What a shame! Throw such challenge to our poets and prose-writers, and you will count entries in tens of thousands. The issue becomes more worrisome in the area of female playwrights of this generation. Mention Stella Oyedepo, Julie Okoh, Tracie Chima Utoh, Irene Salami, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and you exhaust the list. Little wonder then that the emergence of a new female playwright like Halima Sekula in the depleted fray deserves to be greeted with pomp and pageantry. Halima Sekula debuts into the world of the stage with her first published play, Honour Among Thieves (2006). Before the print production of the play, the present writer was privileged to witness the stage performance of it by the Nasarawa State University Student Troupe on the 28th July, 2006 before an excited audience. The enthusiastic responses and praises showered on it were quite gratifying for a new playwright on the scene. The play opens with the two friends, Danjuma and Joe, celebrating their conquest over their innocent victims. Through the use of mime, they tell us how they operate as professional pickpockets. However, they pledge to be loyal to themselves to the end. Danjuma seals this promise when he says: “I would never do that to you, you are my partner and my friend, I would never steal from you. There is honour even among thieves. Apart from my wife Christiana, you are my only true friend. My trusted one. I trust you that is why I go hunting with you. (pp. 7 and 8). And what better way to put this honour to test than through a woman? In the next scene, we meet Danjuma’s wife, Christiana, and her friend Bridget. Through a skilful use of Brechtian alienation effect, mime and a flashback-within-a-flashback, Sekula tells us how Christiana was abused as a little child by Aunty Afiniki. While her age-mates were in school, she was busy hawking to feed the family of Aunty Afiniki. In the process, she met Danjuma and ran away to live in his house. But there is a snag to this otherwise blissful marriage – Danjuma is impotent! While infertility is the ruse Baroka, the Lion, uses to trap Sidi, the Jewel, in Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel, in Sekula’s play as in J. P. Clark’s verse play, Song of a Goat, it is the root source of conflict that culminates into a full-scale tragedy. The difference between J. P. Clark’s play and Sekula’s is that while in the former a wife (Ebiere) commits incest with her husband’s younger brother Tonye, in the latter, it is with the husband’s closest friend and partner in crime. Apart from the theme of infertility, Sekula draws the attention of her audience and readers to the plight of the girl-child and how women politicians who parade themselves as feminists use her as a front to launch their political careers. The greatest strength of any good play lies in the masterful use of dialogue and action or movement and not mere themes alone. According to Charles R. Larson, “…. The dramatist Wole Soyinka, becomes famous among his own people (including those who cannot read) because a playwright need only depend upon the sounds of his words and his listener’s ears, while the writer of fiction must depend upon the printed page.” Sekula deserves to be commended for her brilliant use of dialogue. On page 12, she puts the following words into the mouth of her character Bridget: That is the great moment every man seems to wait for. To be told by a woman that the often watered garden has sprouted fruit, that his back did not ache in vain This is as ribald as Soyinka’s Sadiku in The Lion and the Jewel, when she celebrates the victory of women over men, thus: …It is you who run giddy while we stand still and watch, and draw your frail thread from you, slowly, till nothing is left but a runty old stick. I scotched Okiki, Sadiku’s unopened treasure-house demanded sacrifice, and Okiki came with his rusted key. Like a snake he came at me, like a rag he went back, a limp rag, smeared in shame…” (p. 32) On page 14, Sekula makes her characters Christiana and Bridget engage in the following lewd dialogue: BRIDGET: Are you saying…? Is Danjuma a mere horse in the photograph? Strong, glossy appearing ready to mount but…But…. CHRISTIANA: But quiet. But unmoving night after night, day after day loving me with words, with presents not once no, not a single time has Danjuma loved me with his manhood. The way your husband does I suppose. Also, the use of Hausa words such as “shege daniska” (p.4), “shegiya” (p. 17), “kai!” (p. 17) and a few others adds some local colour to the dialogue, thus fixing the locale of the story in a nameless northern city of Nigeria. Writing on the need for playwrights to fashion their own kind of English to reflect the socio-economic realities of their environments, Martin Esslin, a world-renowned critic of the Theatre of the Absurd, says: In that case there might be very strong arguments, for their concentrating on a realistic treatment of life of English-speaking Africans. This would enable them (the playwrights) to use an actual language, or different shades and idioms as spoken by different strata of that particular – and surely immensely important – segment of their society…. The playwrights concerned are faced with the task of evolving a new, truly African brand of English which will eventually be able to embody the emotions, customs and daily life of the people concerned as efficiently and beautifully as West Indian English expresses the character of the people who use it in daily life as well as in literature. The only problem a reader or critic will encounter with Sekula’s play is that it defies dramatic categorization. It is neither a comedy nor a tragedy nor a tragi-comedy. In fact, it is an indeterminate play. Similarly, Danjuma’s amateurish revenge on his friend Joe lacks the emotional intensity of Shakespeare’s Othello when he is tricked into believing that his wife Desdemona had an affair with Cassio. The ending of her play is more predictable and melodramatic than realistic, in consequence, robbing the work of the necessary pathos of a great tragedy. One can almost quote the entire comments of Martin Esslin on Clark’s Song of a Goat as also relevant to Sekula’s play. Esslin observes, and rightly to, that: I found Song of a Goat not quite convincing. The motivation of the tragedy, which is simply the husband’s inability to engender a child, is far too simple and unoriginal to support the weight of full-scale tragedy across the generations. Moreover, the wife’s seduction of the husband’s younger brother is also, at least for my admittedly quite differently conditioned feelings, far too clumsily straightforward. Instead of primeval tragedy (of which the second part of the diptych [The Masquerade] undoubtedly has the atmosphere) we are, in this crucial first part, merely left with a rather predictable incident from the pages of any popular newspaper. In a word, the ending of the instant work is as predictable as the films in our Nollywood industry. So long as our playwrights refuse to be original like our filmmakers, they deserve to lose their audience to the home-video industry, for a bad film is by far better than a bad play. At least in a bad film, the viewer can be treated to beautiful scenery, posh cars, soul-stirring soundtracks, and palatial houses, but do the playwrights have such resources in the stage? No. His two basic resources are the listener’s ears (dialogue) and a very good story. Also, there are a few typographical and grammatical errors such as “she stress ‘a’” (p. 12), “a podium in the front face the arranged chairs” (p. 20), “Her majestic excellence Chief…” (p. 20), “her stiff headgear extend…” (p. 21), “all these while I have “ (p. 41), “ he will loose his manhood” (p. 43), “jumps up as if beaten by an ant” (p. 45), “no a home” (p.50), “he lounges at her” (p. 51) and “He stares at her …then matches out” (p. 51). Be that at it may, this play marks the first cutting of Sekula’s teeth as a playwright and not yet her magnum opus. Playwriting is still like a virgin terrain in our literary landscape that needs to be explored. And the modern playwright who seeks to carve a niche for himself, must not tread the path of threadbare stories of our home-video industry. He must be very experimental in form and content if he must be relevant in an age of Nollywood.