By Anote Ajeluorou
Like his colleagues and friends the late Chinua Achebe
(There Was A Country: A Personal History
of Biafra; 2013) and Wole Soyinka (Alapata
Apppata; 2013), JP Clark (the founding father trio of Nigerian literature,
with Christopher Okigbo long lost in the Nigerian Civil War that ended in 1970,
as fourth member) continues to write even at old age. This was evident last
December, when he turned 80, with his two new plays, The Hiss and The Two Sisters,
staged at University of Lagos to mark his 80th birthday.
And so
Clark’s biographer, Prof. Femi Osofisan’s The Okinba Players staged Clark’s two
plays, aptly tagged ‘JP Clark: Two Twilight Plays’, with Osofisan directing and
Dr. Tunde Awosanmi assisting him. The Two
Sisters focus on how the goings-on in the smallest unit of society, the
home, has far-reaching implications for the larger community.
Far from being
tired or retired, Clark, Soyinka and Achebe (until the latter’s death last
year) continue to write. But while Soyinka has continued with the usual overt
political engagement for which he has remained most vocal in his recent play (Alapata Apata), Clark’s a bit inward-looking,
although the play The Two Sisters has
the survival of a community as its concern, a community with orderliness
somewhat disrupted by the wilful act or non-act of a foreign wife to one of its
men. Achebe, of course, stirred the soul of a slumbering nation to wakefulness
with his valedictory book, There Was A
Country.
At the height
of the pathos in this play is sexual behaviour and how it could turn the tide
for the worse at both personal and communal levels. Clark is concerned that even
in marriage setting, sex is such a potent tool, and that when wrongly wielded
it could cause serious damage both to the home and the entire community. When
withheld from the other partner, as Clark shows in The Two Sisters, sex could serve a disastrous end and that wives
especially should beware how they use it to thwart a man’s will.
The play is
rendered in the classic tradition of narrator(s) addressing the audience as
part and parcel of the play in situating the incidents and characters in specific
time and space, just as the actors merge with the audience to give it a
familiar feeling and thereby sucking the audience into the intricate web of the
plot.
Two sisters,
Ebikedobamo (Adebisi Adeleke) and Brakare (Bimbo Benson), both married, have
the souls of identical twin sisters with their hearts beating almost in unison,
as they intuitively know what each other is going through even as far apart as
they live. And so in a language replete with sexual innuendos, Clark traces
first the lives of Ebikedobamo and her husband Omobo (Victor Onuka) in bed on a
night when Omobo seems most libidinous and does not seem to be having enough of
his wife, who is nursing their son, Akara. Ebikedobamo is further distracted by
a premonition about her sister Brakare, whom she intuitively feels all is not
well with in a faraway town where she is married.
Omobo is all
frustration, as her wife’s concern for her sister compounds his sexual longing;
she insists on travelling by canoe as is usual with riverine people to see her
sister if only to assure herself that she is all right. This means Omobo would
have to deal with his sexual hunger in the face of an absentee wife for as long
it took her to visit her sister and return. Cornered as he is, he grudgingly
lets her go:
(In a bedroom at Azagbene in the Niger Delta
some centuries back, husband and wife are in bed)
Omobo: Where
are you, Ebikedobamo?
Ebikedobamo:
Right by your side, father of Araka, my son. Why do you ask?
Omobo: I
somehow feel you are somewhere else, far away, and not here now with me.
Ebikedobamo:
Nonsense. Here, feel me all over. I’m lying right here besides you, and you
know that. My dear husband, always wanting to be reassured like a baby.
Omobo: Are you
really sure you are here by my side, Ebi? I felt a deep sense of descent as you
slipped away from under me.
Ebikedobamo:
Why, my husband, why do you say such a thing? You know it cannot always be the
same every time. There are high tides, and there are low ones.
Omobo: I
missed that coming cry of yours, more like a song, calling for your man and the
Almighty, in alternation, as if you are taking one for the other who, at the
same time, you are crying to for help as we come together only to go again…
Meanwhile, a
drama all its own is playing out with Brakare and her husband Kunbowei (Stephen
Taiwo Joseph). Brakare is a strong-willed woman who loves to dictate how much
of her wifely duty she performs for her husband. She is not one for the taking
at the will of a husband, whenever he wants her. She believes sex should be
mutual even in marriage, and the woman’s consent or mood is key in being part of
the sexual encounter, a notion that is at variance with what Kunbowei, man of
the house, knows is true of traditional duty of the wife. Tradition requires
that a man should always have his way with his wife or wives except when they are
heavy or during early days of nursing or during her monthly flow.
For a man to
be denied sex by his wife on grounds of not being in the mood or some such
frivolous reason is scandalous for the typical Africana man like Kunbowei in
Clark’s play, especially when the man carries a turgid, bursting phallus as
Kunbowei does on this fateful night and ready to empty it into his wife’s receptacle!
But this is not Kunbowei’s night of enchanted magic, as his pestle is being
wilfully denied its right to pound at its own mortar. Not even the strong-willed
could endure such effrontery from the wife he married with his own money. So,
Kunbowei goes away a pathetic man and does the unthinkable – hangs himself! But
is it to spite his wife, just as there’s a suggestion that Kunbowei has other
wives to whom he could easily have taken his quivering desire?
This is the
point in which Ebikedobamo arrives to meet her sister Brakare grieving over the
death of her husband. This enrages the clan and even the gods, and anger is
directed at Brakare for ‘killing’ her husband with her strange act of denial. On
the face of it, it pitches two communities against each other: Brakare’s
community must find appropriate appeasement otherwise the drums of war would
sound from Kunbowei’s and heads would roll to assuage a wife’s wilful act of
‘murder’. Brakare oscillates between grief and defiance over accusations of
murder; she would not be intimidated even if her act or non-act would bring two
communities into deadly collision. She insists her denial should not have led
her husband to commit suicide.
Eventually,
the community pronounces a verdict of not guilty on her! She is free to marry
into Kunbowei’s family or else leave in peace to her town.
Clark’s The Two Sisters is both a study in
uncommon filial relation between two sisters, who instead of being in bitter
rivalry that could lead to tragic consequences, are in fact soul mates who
rally each other in times of distress, with the death of Kunbowei serving to
bring them even stronger together. On the other hand, although Clark condemns
Kunbowei’s suicide, he nonetheless cautions on the inflaming nature of sex in marriage. However,
why Clark, at the twilight of his life and career as writer, should engage in
such volatile subject as sex and its ruination nature is hard to conjecture,
but suffice it to say that he has presented one of man’s most intriguing aspects
of man and we must take him seriously.
Also, the
sensible manner in which Kunbowei’s community handles the matter of his suicide
to avert bringing a war to its doorsteps is also instructive. Again, readers
and those fortunate to see The Two
Sisters on stage were treated to the ‘riverine lore’ to which Clark is
besoughted; it’s what has formed his poetic and dramatic ouevre in over 50
years of lush creative engagement. It’s a testament of a master once again at
his very best dramatic performance, a reward to his teeming fans as well as his
acolytes wherever they may be.
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