Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation

Apart from the material/intentional divide on the question of ritual contagion, we should note a third kind of demarcation, which pertains to perceptions of social stigma. The shift in the meanings of the word “stigma” from its earliest definition as the external marks of either physical or social difference in classical Greek and Christian thought to its current usage to designate a spectrum of negative attributes of both physical and nonphysical kinds serves to show how much the body has historically been assimilated to varying grids of social symbolization (Goffman 1959). Social perceptions define the anomalous and the polluted within a differential structure of sociocultural relations. The key to these relations is that the perception of pollution and anomaly is part of a shifting set of socially designated meanings. Additionally, the social perception of what is designated as anomalous is often assimilated to questions of power, or at least to that of the values and practices that undergird social decorum. These values and practices themselves get translated into hierarchical notions of moral entitlement and help define varying understandings of exclusion and inclusion within social groups. In extreme contexts such as that of the Third Reich, the stigma attributed to physical and mental disorders was connected directly to the question of the right to life.

The prime place given to ritual and ritual impulses in Soyinka’s drama helps place the human body itself as the prime bearer of multiple ritual significations. However, what has not as yet been properly commented upon is that even as much of his work is centered on ritual, it is also the case that the ritual impulses get focalized in a particularly intense way upon the figure of the person with disabilities. The disabled character in Soyinka is often a cryptograph of the metaphysical and the anomalous. Outside of A Dance of the Forests, where the limping god Aroni and the terrifying esoteric Half-Child are to be read as direct spiritual challenges to the complacency of the human world, in the rest of his writing disabled characters within ordinary human interactions are never fully normalized. Rather, they retain a residue of liminality, whether this is liminality of metaphysical import, as in the case of Murano in The Road, or one that combines the metaphysical with more social psychological meanings, as we find in The Strong Breed, The Swamp Dwellers, and Madmen and Specialists.

Annemarie Heywood is right in pointing out that whether in his novels, poetry, or plays, Soyinka’s essentially dramatic gifts are geared more toward antimimeticism than to any form of naturalistic representation. This does not mean that he does not produce straightforwardly naturalistic works. The Jero plays, The Swamp Dwellers, The Strong Breed, and even to a degree The Lion and the Jewel are good examples of such mimetic and naturalistic writing that center on predictable character psychology and motivation and proceed through a linear mode of unfoldment. The same disposition is evident in his “factional” works such as Aké, Isara, and Ibadan, all of which are auto/biographical. The problems for staging character and setting in his antimimetic plays relate as much to the question of how to generate a persuasive authentic range of expression for the largely politico-ethical messages that we find in them as for the more difficult one of finding the exact dramaturgic medium by which to carry cryptic and elusive ritual meanings. As Heywood goes on to note, Soyinka’s antimimetic strand is marked by contrastive characterization and the tendency to frustrate any resolution to the conflicts that are set up in the action. The unfoldment of the action is supposed to compound the conflicts at various levels and to intensify the structural implications of misunderstandings between characters. Thus many of the plays, along with The Interpreters and Season of Anomie, end on an “intolerable open paradox,” with at best a dialectical balancing of the multifariously contending forces that have been exposed over the course of the action (Heywood 2001, 2–43).

To read Soyinka’s work through the perspective of disability, however, is to be obliged to attend in meticulous detail to the ways in which disabled characters either manifestly represent ritual anomalies, or, in what amounts to a partial qualification of the ritual impulse, institute significant disjunctures to the established protocols of the social domains in which they appear. What emerges as aesthetic nervousness in this work is underscored by an apparently irresolvable paradox tied to the peculiar relationship that is established between ritual dispositions and the process for the production of subjectivity and agency, a process that is in the last instance political. It is also manifest in the depiction of what I shall describe as the systemic uncanny, the process by which the chaos of fraught sociopolitical processes are translated into the negative affects of anxiety, fear, and even horror in the consciousness of individuals. I want to suggest from a reading of The Strong Breed (1964) that the aesthetic nervousness in the play resides in the counterpoint between the processual institution of ritual authority and the manufacturing of docility and compromise that is its flipside. This is especially pertinent to the unstable and shifting discursive positions given to Ifada, the cognitively impaired character in the play. On the other hand, using Madmen and Specialists (1971) I want to suggest that the apparently subversive position given to the disabled mendicants is undermined by the fact that they also represent the failed synthesis of conflicting ideological standpoints in the play. The mendicants may be productively read as the synthesis of an interrupted dialectical movement. Madmen and Specialists is also significant in that it is a refraction of specific historical conditions, namely those to do with the Biafran conflict and its aftermath. This historical context is important for evaluating what the play says about a postwar Nigeria and the constitution of the systemic uncanny. The systemic uncanny is also to be seen in an attenuated form in The Strong Breed, but it is the later play that allows us to productively correlate the content and form of the dramatic action to the chaos of historical conditions. Even though the two plays are sharply contrasted in their respective mimetic and antimimetic structures and the relationships that they establish between disability, ritual impulses, and issues of subjectivity and agency, taken together they allow us to see the suggestive and critical place disability occupies within Soyinka’s work.

The Strong Breed shares a cluster of thematic features with other Soyinka plays in which a relationship is established between disability, ritual contagion, and the quest for privileged insight by the nondisabled characters. It is a play that appears on first encounter to be fairly straightforward in its naturalism and seems quite easy to explain. As in many other plays with a similar ritual thematic, it turns on the Ogun heroic ideal, with its full paraphernalia of transitional abyss, ritual danger, and the need for heroic sacrifice in bridging the abyss between the gods and man.¹ As scholars of his work have often noted, the precise location of the abyss differs from play to play. Thus, in The Road, what we might describe as the transitional abyss lies partly on the external fringes of the dramatic action and at the confluence between the living, the dead, and the yet unborn. In this schema, Murano, the limping and speech-impaired character who has been rescued by Professor from a bad motor accident, stands as the keeper of the gateway to esoteric secrets. At least that is how Professor views him in his quest for the Word. The Word itself appears to carry quasi-Christian connotations but is also aligned to traditional Yoruba sensibilities about the conjuncture that Murano presides over. Murano thus combines the notion of ritual danger with that of spiritual insight in his singular person. Simultaneously, however, the sense of the transitional abyss is dispersed within The Road as an effect of alienated urban consciousness. This is to be seen in the circumstances surrounding the thugs and unemployed layabouts who form the bulk of Professor’s reluctant group of followers. In their many conversations throughout the play about death on the roads of Nigeria and in their representation of the heroic ideal as inhering in the mastery of vehicles that traverse the asphalts of death, characters such as Say Tokyo Kid, Sampson, and Kotonu reveal a sense of the ritual abyss as intermeshed with the dispossessed conditions of their postcolonial urban identity.

In The Swamp Dwellers, on the other hand, Blindman comes south from the legendary northern clan of the blind bearing insights about the willpower required for conquering the infertility of the land of the swamp dwellers. His insights are of directly practical and instrumental value, so that when he offers himself as slave to Igwezu it is done in the hope of galvanizing the young man out of his feelings of anomie and into a disposition of self-mastery and decisive action. Here, even though there is an awed response to Blindman, the sense of contagion or ritual danger is not exclusively attached to his person. Rather, the determination of ritual danger becomes a political instrument controlled by Kadiye, the chief priest of the Snake of the Swamp, and is a means to his own self-aggrandizement and profit. That the period of interdiction against cultivating the swamplands is declared ended on the same day that Blindman arrives in the community of the swamp dwellers is not entirely insignificant. He seems to simultaneously mark the end of ritual pollution for the place he has come to visit as well as an inchoate sense of its manifestation within his own person. It is almost as if to suggest that he represents a ritual switchboard effect, on the one hand arriving just when the period of pollution is over, and, on the other, hinting at the fact that he bears in his being the nature and knowledge of ritual contagion. Blindman is discursively located in direct opposition to the implied aridity of ritual represented in the figure of Kadiye. Having walked a long way along the river from the blind community that had itself collapsed under the weight of disillusionment, Blindman represents a source of hardy Ogunian insights that might help transcend the limited purview of ritualized beliefs and practices encapsulated in Kadiye. The alliance between the disgruntled Igwezu, who challenges the authority of Kadiye, and Blindman is then that between the insightful Ogunian heroic outsider and the alienated proto-Ogunian insider.

The Strong Breed is distinctive in bringing together various threads that may be seen working separately in Soyinka’s other plays. Thus we have a direct link between the stranger and ritual anomaly in the persons of Eman and Ifada. The link between the stranger and such ritual anomaly is particularly exacerbated around the character of Ifada, the cognitively impaired child who is seized upon by the community as a reluctant sacrificial victim. Furthermore, in the play the transitional abyss is very clearly demarcated as one that for the continued well-being of the community needs to be bridged by a sacrificial carrier. The complication, however, is that the choice of ritual sacrifice raises a series of ethical complications regarding agency, intentionality, and the status of the disabled as a perceived signifier of metaphysical disorder. It also raises the issue of the production of docility, which, as we shall elaborate shortly, is ultimately an issue inextricable from the exercise of political power and ritual authority.

From The Strong Breed we also get the dramaturgical representation of ritual contagion that needs to be demarcated and policed for the wellbeing of the society. Certain Greek concepts are particularly pertinent to interpreting both this play and Madmen and Specialists. As Vernant (1980) and others have shown, the link between dirt and pollution was not at all straightforward in Greek thought. What was most pertinent were the links between disease construed as evil and evil conceptualized as disease. For these pairs to be fully grasped, however, several interlinked concepts were understood in their relationality within a wider totalized discourse of purity, purification, contagion, and danger. Thus even though the term katharsis, highly suggestive in discussions of dramatic theater from Aristotle onward, generally means cleansing, what is to be cleansed might include menstrual blood and pathogens in the body as well as disturbing emotions in the soul. To achieve katharsis, Greek healers turned to pharmaka. Pharmaka (singular pharmakon) could be used to denote medicinal drugs as well as poisons, a notion that is pertinent, as we shall see, to the status of the herbs that the old women gather in Madmen and Specialists. What the sick hoped to be cured of was sometimes called pathos (as in pathology), but the term could include anything that happened to you or that you underwent or suffered. Pathe were not necessarily negative phenomena, ailments that had to be removed. The word is often translated as affection or feeling. Thus in Euripides’ Hippolytus, Phaedra’s pathos is manifested as emotional madness.

Significantly, however, the pharmakon need not be identified as something to be ingested. Thus spells or charms recited over a patient were also pharmaka. Pharmakos, on the other hand, was used to denote the scapegoat figure driven out of the community to bear off its pollution. The pharmakos was itself intensely negatively charged with associations of disease, death, and evil, while also bringing welfare to the community when it was driven out. It was thus viewed both positively and negatively. The many examples from Greek literature, including Oedipus, Philoctetes, Hippolytus, Ajax, and Heracles, give a good sense of the imaginative parameters of these terms and concepts.² The significant thing to be noted about all these terms, however, is that they formed a nexus of interrelated concepts, a semiotic of the sacred and its opposite, as it were. And because within the conceptual domain of ritual action all the concepts were intricately tied to one another, the representation of ritual pollution itself became multilayered and often even contradictory. This paradoxical situation is best conveyed by the term “sacred horror,” which Durkheim (1912) used to designate the generic ambivalence of the idea of the sacred, especially in its automatic collocation with notions of contagion. As we shall see, the intricate multilayering of ideas of the sacred/polluted and the paradoxes inherent in them are pertinent to a reading of The Strong Breed.

At the most basic level, the play is about a town’s quest for a sacrificial carrier, a pharmakos to mark their end-of-year festival. Among the elements of this festival are the displays of mummers and egugun masquerades, both of which are supposed to denote the connection between the world of the living and that of the spirits. Also, there is the requirement for the sacrificial carrier to undergo a period of “preparation” as part of the ritual passage. Part of the cleansing ritual involves the sacrificial carrier being taken to each compound to have him beaten up and thoroughly abused, a direct mimetic enactment of the bearing of the ills and negative feelings of the community. The frenetic activities that are enjoined within the framework of annual cleansing also mean that the sense of contagion has to be driven away through some form of mass participation, thus signaling a joining together of the townspeople within a ritual of communal katharsis. Because most denizens of the town know what is entailed by this, there is great reluctance to offer themselves as sacrificial carriers. Thus we are told that over the years the practice has been to choose sojourners among them to be the pharmakos.

In the play, the sense of liminal danger is felt everywhere; yet it also gets focalized in two distinctive ways, both of which come together to generate a form of contrastive signification of the sacred/polluted. The first avenue for this focalization is in the characters of Ifada and Eman. When the play opens, there is no clear indication that they are liminal characters, except in the sense that as strangers in the community they are already potentially marked in this way. However, there is an incremental accentuation of their liminal status to the point of there being no doubt that they are indeed mutually defining figures of contagion. The second set of liminal figures consists of the diseased Girl, who self-identifies as being permanently in a phase of ritual contamination, and the village community, which as a collective entity has entered a sphere of liminal danger by virtue of its end-of-year festival. A strong link is then established between ritual contagion and evil, on the one hand, and between disease and ritual contagion, on the other. However, the relationship between the two sets of figures is that between those that claim to themselves the exclusive power to nominate others as ritually anomalous (the Girl, the village community) and those that are so named and then have to decide whether to acquiesce or resist such a nomination (Ifada, Eman). In other words, ritual (de)nomination is also entangled with questions of subjecthood and power.

To add another layer to the question of nomination and agency, each of the nondisabled characters involved in the ritual passage—the Girl, the community-as-collective, and indeed Eman—self-identify at various points as carrying some form of ritual contagion. Eman starts off resisting such a self-identification, but when he reluctantly agrees to become a ritual carrier he appropriates this as an inescapable part of his destiny. It is only Ifada, the cognitively impaired child, for whom this is never a self-identified choice at any point in the action, but is solely an imposition or external projection upon his being. And yet, because of the way the play opens on a note of domesticity and ordinariness, with references to Sunma’s intense anxiety regarding Ifada’s place among them, Ifada’s assigned status as the bearer of contagion is rendered almost natural, as opposed to being a forced imposition. The process of naturalization takes place before the rude violence of his seizure by the chief priest and his cohorts. At a very basic level, the play suggests that Ifada is “naturally” contaminated, and yet, at another, it makes us recoil from the ultimate implication of that naturalization, that is, that he could be seized upon violently and against his will as a sacrificial carrier by the sheer fact of his disability. But why this odd paradox? Why this peculiar and contradictory movement of transposition around the figure of the disabled person?

The affirmation of Ifada’s “natural” contaminated status contrasts sharply with the slow disclosure of Eman’s own status as a descendant of a long family line of sacrificial carriers in his home village. After he has agreed to take Ifada’s place as carrier, his past is disclosed via a series of flashbacks in which, in the midst of the unfolding action of the chase presented on stage, there are pauses for him to step back into the memory of childhood conversations with his father, his tutor, and Omae, his deceased bride. The interweaving of his past and his present through the flashbacks serves to show how much he is a product of that past and completely entangled with it. Critically, however, in both the past and the present Eman is shown to exercise choice and agency, something that ultimately defines him as an ethical being rather than someone who mindlessly acquiesces in the dictates of communal verities. This is what emerges out of the conversation he has with his father about the task of the “strong breed.” For him this means nothing once the affective links with his community have been effectively severed on the death of Omae during childbirth. Eman no longer feels connected enough to his community to follow in the footsteps of his father and become its official sacrificial carrier. However, because he comes from a line that has historically exercised the vocation of sacrificial carrier, it is also implied that he is not entirely free of potential ritual contagion, irrespective of his own views on the matter. Thus even in his case a subtle discourse of the “natural” sub-tends his identity and ultimately circumscribes his exercise of agency.

As noted earlier, the play opens on a domestic setting, with Sunma and Eman preparing to close their clinic for the evening. Eman is a teacher and a healer, and Sunma is his wife. It is the same night of the end-of-year festival, and one filled with untold danger. The danger is not relayed directly, but is registered as a vague but persistent sense of anxiety on the part of Sunma. She keeps insisting that they, or at least Eman, leave on the last lorry (the sounds of whose engine we hear in the background), to spend the evening at another location. To her exasperation, Eman will have none of it and nonchalantly dismisses her anxious requests. We are later to discover that this inchoate sense of anxiety was not entirely misplaced: as daughter of Jeroge, the chief priest, she knows fully well that Eman might be targeted as sacrificial carrier. However, we do not know any of this with certainty until much later in the action. Over the course of their argument, Sunma spots Ifada crouching underneath their window; he bears a basket of fruit he has brought for Eman. He has been trying all along to catch Eman’s attention. Her reaction to the sight of Ifada is surprisingly violent:

Two things seem to be playing out here, neither of which serves to explain Sunma’s startling reaction to the disabled child. On the one hand, she insists that he is a lazy good-for-nothing child on whom Eman is wasting precious time. On the other hand, there is the sense of revulsion, the feeling that he is somehow contaminated and indeed contaminating. The reference to him as a “crawling insect” captures this sense of revulsion. It also suggests that he is perceived as only partly human. It is worth repeating, however, that these reactions to Ifada are being registered prior to his being chosen as a sacrificial carrier for the community. He is being identified as contaminated as such and by virtue of his being disabled, and not merely because Sunma has an inchoate sense of his liminal status.

Curiously enough, the idea of Ifada’s contaminated status is further reinforced from a completely different source shortly after the argument we have just seen. Ifada is nominated as a sacrificial carrier by the Girl, who is herself considered as contaminated because of her incurable disease. The Girl first comes to Eman’s house to get a piece of clothing for her effigy, an object she pretends is a sacrificial carrier that will take away her unnamed disease. An overarching idea of ritual contagion is immediately foregrounded in and around her person. Eman is about to lend her his buba (a loose-fitting neck blouse) to put on her effigy:

In the immediate context of this segment of the action, the notion of contagion is distributed equally between the Girl (as one who bears an incurable disease), Ifada (as one who carries an incurable cognitive disability), and the effigy (as stand-in for the ritual carrier). What this tripartite scheme of contagion signifies is the absolute transferability of the ritual contagion and the speed at which it can be metonymically displaced from one entity to another. Seeing this, it is obvious then that in lending the Girl his buba Eman enters into the symbolic circulation of contagion. It is a small step from this symbolic circulation to his decision to take the place of Ifada as sacrificial carrier in actuality. Eman’s destiny as descendant of familial sacrificial carriers seems inescapable and is prepared for both by the nature of the choices he exercises and by the semiotics of the sacred and the profane as they circulate among the characters.

Eman’s Christ-like self-sacrifice in taking the place of Ifada serves to conceal another process that his standing in for the boy hints at in the play, and that is the relation between the production of docility and the threatened subversion of power. For the process of identifying and securing a pharmakos to take place properly, the community in the play requires a docile subject. As we have already seen, in the rituals enjoined for cleansing the community a sacrificial carrier is required to whom (violent) things can be done. It is important in this regard that as much as possible the townspeople get a subject that is not only culturally an outsider (and therefore that might be ignorant of the ritual mores of the community), but one that is prepared to absorb the ritual violence “willingly,” as the chief priest ominously puts it at one point. What is clear, however, is that no ordinary human agent would be thus willing. Given that Ifada’s disability has marked him off as contaminated in the minds of individual characters ahead of his identification as official ritual carrier, there is the suggestion that, irrespective of his own agential position, he is situated within a sacred semiotic as one who will always occupy the position of a subject to whom things occur rather than as a trigger of action himself. This is so despite the fact that his running away from the chief priest causes a commotion in the community and prompts an epiphanic crisis for Eman. In prompting Eman’s ethical epiphany, Ifada has only succeeded in instigating the process that would produce Eman in his turn as the docile subject of his own particular lineage of sacrificial carriers. He is fated to be thus and the self-examination that he undergoes is only so as to deliver him more securely into the acceptance of his ritual role. In other words, the ritual processes of problematic (de)nomination and of the natural election of the pharmakos are represented in such a way as to obscure the true political nature of such processes. Rather, they suggest that a docile subject emerges organically from them. In this way the play seems on the surface to be about agency and the choice of destinies while discursively displaying a robustly conservative attitude to the structural location of the disabled character.³ (We should pause to recall the pertinence of the categories of disability as null set and/or moral test and of disability as epiphany that we outlined in chapter 2).

The combination in Ifada’s characterization of a discourse of docility and the possibility of epiphany for the nondisabled makes his role similar to that of Murano in The Road. Murano’s presence is much more curtailed than Ifada’s since he is referred to tangentially in the action and appears properly only at the end of the play. However, what makes the two of them similar is that Murano is also a docile subject. In his case, he becomes what the crazy Professor interprets him to be, while at the same time signaling the conjuncture between the real world and that of the ancestors. But Murano’s signaling of this other world is not done consciously, at least not by himself. It is because he is the bearer of all the signs of disabled anomalousness, such as having a limp and being speech impaired, that he becomes the ritual gateway to threnodic secrets in a play that is partly about Ogunian rites. Thus, like Ifada, Murano is the bearer of excessive metaphysical signification and one to whom things occur by virtue of his location within the discursive economy of the text. And like Blindman in The Swamp Dwellers, Ifada also performs a discursive switchboard effect. He becomes the focal point for the radiation of different dimensions of ritual disquiet in the action. The manner in which the disquiet gets expressed through people like Sunma suggests that there is something systemically unsettling within the culture at large, but which gets articulated in the form of an inchoate sense of disorder around the disabled character. The play is insistent that we be left in no doubt about Ifada’s contaminated and unsettling status. He is taken to breach the commonplace of everyday life by the very virtue of his disability. Because this is a play governed by a ritual thematic, his disability is automatically assimilated to a metaphysical understanding and interpreted as producing anomalousness as such. This then serves to obscure the disability, since it is never allowed to stand for itself but is made an object of metaphysical interpretative excess from the very beginning.

Even though the temptation to settle on an exclusive ritual interpretation of the play is strong (and in many respects would be quite satisfactory), I want to suggest that the disquiet that Ifada’s disability causes be read in terms of the systemic uncanny. In brief, the systemic uncanny is the translation of an inchoate sense of disorder into a negative affect that is then lodged in the human consciousness and expressed in the forms of anxiety, unease, and, in extreme cases, abject fear. I shall elaborate more fully on this concept in the next section with regard to Madmen and Specialists, a play that allows us to see the concept in operation at a more complex level. Both plays are central parts of Soyinka’s continual creative reflections on the nature and character of systemic disorders and the effects that these have on the production of subject positions for the disabled within an inherently confusing political realm.

Scholars of Nigerian literature generally agree that the Biafra War (1967– 1970) marked an epochal moment not just for interrogating the parameters of the Nigerian nation-state but also for the ways in which it might be represented in literature (Ezeigbo 1991; Obafemi 1992). In a brilliant 1983 essay, Chidi Amuta illustrates how Nigerian postwar writings revealed a decidedly different generic temperament from all that had been published prior to the war. Whereas earlier fiction had been marked by the conventions of animist realism and an ethnic consciousness (exemplified by the accentuated place given to spirits, ghomids, and suchlike in the work of Fagunwa and Tutuola), a nationally conscious realism motivated by the desire to highlight the effect of the colonial encounter on the viability of local traditions (Achebe) and, finally, by the progressive literary excoriation of the political elites (Achebe, Soyinka, Ekwensi), postwar Nigerian writing was marked by the quest for a strongly ethical framework by which to propound an urgent new vision for the endangered nation. For Amuta, this phase of Nigerian writing raised in a much sharper way than hitherto the problematic question of the relationship between specific historical details and their aestheticization in literature and art, with various writers struggling to reflect upon the Biafra experience in their work without completely surrendering the ontological status of the aesthetic domain. This was done with various degrees of success. In another essay, this time devoted specifically to Soyinka’s postwar writing, Amuta argues that the war marked an important turning point in Soyinka’s essentially idealistic and mythopoetic artistic temperament. Soyinka, he suggests, now adopts more of a “secular posture,” attempting to “reconcile the horror of personal indignation and moral anguish with the communal responsibility of the committed artist” (Amuta 1986, 52). This is shown in the changed emphasis of work such as The Man Died, A Shuttle in the Crypt, and Madmen and Specialists, all of which came shortly after his incarceration from 1969 through 1971.

Amuta’s suggestions on the twists and turns in Nigerian writing are generally apposite and insightful, but his remarks on Soyinka’s work are slightly less to the point. For what is also evident in works such as Madmen and Specialists is that Soyinka does not so much depart from the essential ritual emphases of his earlier work as that the representation of ritual as organically deriving from a coherent context, whether real or imagined, is no longer considered possible. This is, however, not a theme entirely new to his work. An inkling of this is already to be found in The Road. We also find that he returns to a more secure affirmation of the links between politics and a mythopoetical mode of interpretation in his collection of essays Myth, Literature, and the African World, in Death and the King’s Horseman, and in his adaptation of The Bacchae of Euripides, all from 1975. As I shall try to show, Madmen and Specialists occupies a special place in his oeuvre, in that it is the first time he confronts the full implications of personal and national dismemberment that he had been elaborating in a piecemeal fashion in earlier work.

Madmen and Specialists is the only play of his to securely place a group of disabled characters as central protagonists. Second, it is the only play, perhaps alongside The Road, in which the enigmatic open-endedness we find at the end is made fully integral and incrementally repeated as part of the dramatic action itself. The disabled mendicants exert a determining hold on the open-endedness of the action via a structure of interruptions. Often through songs, but sometimes also by way of tangential departures from the dialogue, they serve to render open-endedness endemic at the microlevel of the plot. The mendicants are choric arbiters (Heywood’s term), but in ways that far supersede what is usually attributable to the choric function deriving from Greek and classical models. To understand the special status of the mendicants, we have to bear in mind their resemblance to choric arbiters in other plays by Soyinka, and, more importantly, to the degree to which they are cryptically situated at a conjuncture of the political and the metaphysical. And yet, contrary to Amuta’s methodological focus on the play as providing direct correlatives to the historical situation from which it derives, I want to suggest that its impulses are so convoluted that it ends up both invoking the context of the war and completely obliterating it as a meaningful referent. In fact, the war is left securely in the background to the dramatized events and is not invoked specifically by name. Rather, it provides the occasion for a secularized allegory about the effect of mindless violence on the constitution of human subjectivity. It is also a play about biopower and the control of human bodies as such. In this regard the foregrounding of the disabled mendicants becomes even more important for understanding the play’s variable and contradictory meanings.

The similarities of the disabled mendicants to other choric groups in Soyinka’s theater are noteworthy. Parallels may be drawn between them and the Reformed Aweri Fraternity of Kongi’s Harvest. Like the RAF, the mendicants provide humor, pantomime, nervous laughter, and satiric choric commentary, and like them they feed us with important information about the historical background to the action. The disabled mendicants differ from the members of the RAF, however, in that they provide what might be described as a neurotic center to the action, something that they manifest by the manner in which they bear their impairments and also through their various interruptions of the action. Even though at the beginning they are subjected to pejorative remarks from both Si Bero and Dr. Bero, it becomes increasingly evident as the play progresses that unlike what we saw in The Strong Breed, the mendicants are much more central to the overall ethos of the play than other characters’ responses to their disabilities might initially lead us to believe. Also, as has already been noted, the mendicants frequently break out into song and dance, often for no apparent reason other than to interrupt the flow of the action and to redirect it momentarily toward themselves. Dende and the Reformed Aweri Fraternity in Kongi’s Harvest have no such luxury. Furthermore, the group of choric arbiters in Madmen and Specialists is decidedly different from the one we find in Soyinka’s adaptation of The Bacchae of Euripides. There the choric function is regulated by a classical ritual disposition, and the Bacchantes, now mixed with a group of slaves, are meant to influence our ethical responses to the action through the modulation of ritual rhythm that is so central to both the original Euripidean text and Soyinka’s adaptation of it.

The formal features of the mendicants and the internal dynamic established among them are both significant for understanding the peculiar nature of their role in the play. The group is led by Aafa, who suffers from epileptic spasms, something that we suspect he sometimes manufactures to aid him in the getting of alms. At least that is what the other beggars accuse him of. But there is no doubt that the source of the original illness could be traced back to psychic trauma sustained during his stint as a chaplain on the war front. His description of the first time he suffered the spasms is illuminating in this respect:

The understated way in which Aafa describes what happened should not detract from the fact that it was a severely traumatic event. Praying for the kneeling soldiers about to go off to the field, he hears what is obviously the sound of a coming bomb, and when he opens his eyes they have all been blasted out of existence. Curiously enough, he does not mention any injuries to himself, focusing only on the spasms that were the reaction to the shock. But there is no doubt too that the incident places him at the threshold of life and death. When he invokes God, it is no longer as a chaplain, but as someone who is suggestively situated on the boundary between the living and the dead. His pretend spasms are then the invocation of a form of the uncanny, the placement of his body upon the boundary that lies between the wholly human and the wholly mechanical, making him a liminal figure par excellance.⁴ It is this also that lends him his determinedly nihilistic tone, something which of course is produced by and subtends the general ethos of the war.

Each of the other mendicants has also suffered some nasty effect of war. Goyi has a steel contraption inserted into his back, giving him a stiff and mechanical gait much like a robot’s;⁵ Blindman has lost his eyesight, but keeps the spectacles he had with him when the blast happened as a souvenir of things past. Cripple seems the least sentimental of them all, and among them functions as the voice of internal critique. What brings them together as a group, as opposed to a collection of individuals, is their having all been students of Old Man and his philosophy of As during their various periods of convalescence in the military field hospital.

Their specific role as choric arbiters straddling several domains of signification is expressed in the drama in a variety of ways. When the play opens, we find them casting dice, the stakes for their game being negotiable parts of their own bodies:

This exchange immediately invites us to read them as Fates, the only qualification being that they never make any attempt whatsoever to predict or interpret the future except for how it might relate to their begging for alms. However, we find as the play unfolds that their insights about the background to the action and about other characters is not entirely related to past events; the information they provide is sometimes also premonitory. Such is the case in the reenactment of Bero’s methods of extracting information from his victims, which ends in Blindman’s shooting pantomime: “I know what he means. (He points an imaginary gun.) Bang! All in the line of duty!” (11). The implication of this mimed shooting is later actualized when Bero shoots Old Man at the end of the play. The same can be said about Aafa’s disquisition on vultures, an epithet he wholeheartedly claims for the group as a sign of the service they provide for the rest of the populace: “We clean up the mess made by others” (11). We later find that the mess he is referring to is the mess of human carnage due to the war, and that their participation in the cannibalistic feast set up by Old Man is a significant form of such “cleaning up.” These two examples suggest that the mendicants’ choric role is not solely connected to providing information, but is also designed as anticipatory of later action in the play. Thus their casting of dice at the beginning of the play also signals their role as portentous choric arbiters that can both provide information and hint subliminally at the future. And yet this portentousness is undermined by being completely intermeshed with the mundaneness of their everyday lives. The volatile proximity between everydayness and the portentousness is part of the definition of their collective liminality.

Critical to their discursive position in the play is the degree to which they are taken at different times as instruments of the will of Old Man and of Bero, father and son. Dr. Bero, originally a physician, switches to the Secret Service when he goes to the war front. This switch allows him to indulge his desire for total control over human bodies. His “laboratory” now becomes a laboratory of torture rather than of rational scientific and medical experiment. As an agent of the system, however, he seems peculiarly oblivious of its operating ideology. Contrastively, Old Man has an elaborate if quite contorted sense of the ideology that undergirds the system. Under psychological torture by his own son, Old Man cryptically identifies the parameters of As and manages to crystallize in his own demented way the dominant ideology of the war system. Having been put in charge of the rehabilitation of war wounded, he transforms his task to subversive effect by providing the disabled soldiers under his charge with the capacity to transcend the mind/body dichotomy implied by their maimed identities. His ideology of As is revealed in a fragmented and roundabout way throughout the play and may be taken as an encapsulation, at the level of ideological rhetoric, of the maimed identities of his charges. In other words, his disquisition upon As is a metonymic displacement to the level of ideology of the fact of the fragmented bodily identities of the mendicants themselves. Furthermore, his rhetoric of As also mirrors their highly neurotic and deconstructive mode of action within the play. The rhetoric of As both reflects the spoiled identities of the maimed and war wounded and produces them as objects of ideological disquisition.

The ideology of As is meant to retain an enigmatic aura that needs to be worked at laboriously but that can only be partially understood. The first difficulty with interpreting As is that it is the decontextualized first word of a well-known biblical statement: “As it Was in the Beginning, so Shall it Be in the End…” or, as Old Man puts it in another context: “As Was, Is, Now, As ever Shall Be…” (62). Naming As while separating it from its expressive context suggests another level of metonymic displacement, for not only has a part of the sentence been made to stand for the entire sentence sequence, but that part has been allowed to accrue to itself all the mystery and numinousness inherent in the originating biblical statement. It has also been transferred into the domain of political ideology and thus carries all the numinous and sacred potential of the statement into that of the political. As is then both an invocation of the promise of Godhead and an atrophied version of that promise. Thus, in the many instances in which As is mentioned in the play, it is meant to generate confusion and bafflement as to its real meaning. Since we have an unwitting exemplar of As and the System in the person of Dr. Bero, we realize that As is also meant to signal the replacement of the pastoral care that is one of the assumed tasks of medical and religious systems with the idea of mindless state brutality, whose most direct articulation is war. Significantly, however, Old Man’s hospital is not diametrically opposed to Dr. Bero’s laboratory as such, but is rather dialectically related to it. It represents an overlap and counterpoint to Bero’s torture chamber, and each of them represents the instrumentalization of biopower (the control of human bodies and their desires) for different effects.⁶ They come together as expressions of the microtechniques of such biopower within a mindless political system, one of whose main objectives is the production of docility.

Indeed, read in this dialectical manner, it is Bero who provides a simultaneous understanding and critique of his father’s subversive tasks:

For Bero, readjustment to the pieces and remnants of the soldiers’ maimed bodies should as a necessity involve rehabilitating them into economically viable units of labor. To his mind, autonomy is equated directly with labor potential and not to any fancy ideas about self-reflexivity. Note that the word “teach” in the extract above is attached both to the process of producing instrumental labor potential and to developing independent minds. However, Old Man is not merely interested in providing the wounded soldiers with the capacity for self-reflexivity. He also wants to make of them instruments of general subversion. Bero and Old Man then have one thing in common: they are both intent on perfecting a means by which to instrumentalize human bodies, even if the implications of Old Man’s subversive rehabilitative practice seem quite different from the experiments of his son.

In Old Man’s own description of the ideology of As, he does not limit it solely to a war mentality; As is supposed to be systemic rather than exceptional:

The mendicants at this point interrupt his flow with one of their songs. But what Old Man has told them is that there is no room for subversion outside or beyond the system of As. Subversion must be understood as immanent rather than transcendent. It is a practice of affiliation as much as of attack, a guerilla tactic of alertness and the constant reconstitution of positions. Thus the mendicants are all thoroughly implicated and are of necessity subversives through their physical condition of impairment and not in spite of it. It is this condition that helps them articulate the dominant logic of war within their own bodies and to subvert this logic by the resituation of their fragmented bodies as sites of thought. That is the meaning of the curious reference Old Man makes to them as “the cyst in the system that irritates, the foul gurgle of the cistern, the expiring function of a faulty cistern.” What makes them so dangerous is not merely their condition of disability, but the fact that they are capable of questioning the system, reminding its operatives of their shared humanity (admittedly back in a period of childhood, when they were in “rompers, with leaky and smutty faces”). Not only that, to self-identify as one that questions is to automatically invite the system to settle upon you as one on whom it might exercise its abominable practices for securing acquiescent and docile subjectivity. And we know from what we have seen of Dr. Bero’s activities that the “practice” is very far from pleasant. The whiff of Orwell’s 1984 is impossible to miss here.

The mendicants’ proximity and indeed induction into Old Man’s subversive ideology means that even though they bear the contaminating stigmata of war, they also actively insinuate themselves into the discourse of Power that might have completely Othered them and made them disposable to the social. They thus help to define the problematic shifting boundaries between purity and danger and inside and outside. Following Old Man’s lead, they challenge the most fundamental taboo that is to be found in many human societies, namely, that against the eating of human flesh. This taboo is rendered at least rhetorically void through the operation of a clever and sophistical argument in justification of cannibalism by Old Man. Since all animals kill in order to eat but man kills only in order to destroy, the only way for restoring man’s superiority within the scheme of living beings is for him not to waste (this word operating in more than one sense) but to partake of whatever he kills. Old Man’s cannibalistic feast operates not by countering or even negating the mindless illogicality of war, but rather by extending that illogicality toward the annulment of all sentiment about what it is to be human. War wastes indiscriminately by killing man and destroying the environment, man attempts to counteract this by wasting not of human flesh, but the ultimate effect of the waste/waste-not dialectic is the dehumanization of man. In this way, Old Man accomplishes in the rhetorical domain what war does in the domain of the battlefield.

But then we come against an intractable paradox. Even though they are aligned to Old Man and are thus agents of subversion, the disabled mendicants are also shown to be operatives in the employ of Dr. Bero. They are therefore not merely compromised by being in the system but are actually servants of it. Their throwing of dice and waylaying passersby for alms when we first see them is only a cover for being able to spy on Si Bero and the group of old women who are the representatives of healing spirits and close to the natural rhythms of the earth. In the larger scheme of things, the disabled mendicants are instruments of a dastardly surveillance apparatus and therefore avatars of the negating aspects of As. Their quarrels with Bero are ultimately quarrels about remuneration and not about the ethical dubiousness of their task as spies. Furthermore, it appears that under instruction from Bero they have been willing accomplices in the enforced detention of Old Man. It is in the mendicants’ odd discursive location as simultaneously within and without, for and against the system that we detect the parameters of aesthetic nervousness in the play.

Critics have conventionally seen Madmen and Specialists as entirely nihilistic and indeed dominated by evil. Ketu Katrak suggests that unlike previous plays of Soyinka that elaborated upon the Ogun heroic ideal, Madmen and Specialists has no transitional abyss that might require bridging by a sacrificial hero. The annulment of this transitional space is due to the play’s dark meditation on the Biafran War, with no clear sense of hope of rescue from its nihilistic surface (Katrak 1986, 154–158; see also Jeyifo 2004, 141–144). In this account, the mendicants are read as inherently negative and coextensive with the evil that we see in Dr. Bero and, to some degree, in Old Man himself. However, to read the play in terms of the dominance of evil is to ignore the subtle ways in which it invokes a sense of liminality for the mendicants. This sense of liminality is admittedly not equivalent to what we find in The Strong Breed, Death and the King’s Horseman, The Road, or even Kongi’s Harvest, where Daudu and Segi jointly express the Ogunian ideal. However, the notion of liminality is still pertinent to a discussion of the disabled mendicants. As instruments both of Old Man’s challenge to the order of As and of Dr. Bero’s apparatus of torture and surveillance on behalf of the state, the mendicants are defined as doubly anomalous, once for carrying all the marks of physical disability and the social stigma that is involved in that, and another for being instruments of sundry irrationalities that proceed from opposite ideological directions simultaneously. They are anomalous in a physical and material sense because of their disability and, more importantly, because their standpoint is politically salient to the two contrastive factions as represented by Old Man and Bero. And yet, the two terms of their anomalousness are transcended by a third term, namely, the degree to which they act as a failed synthesis within a structure of dialectical mediation.

What is the nature of this failed synthesis? We have already noted that Old Man’s military field hospital and Dr. Bero’s laboratory are dialectically related. With respect to the disabled mendicants, however, the thing to note is that they do not represent a heroic ideal of any sort that might counter either Bero’s or Old Man’s contrastive ideological dispositions. Even among themselves their camaraderie is only partial and skin deep, as they are always quarrelling and disagreeing with one another, with sporadic threats of violence often at the fore.⁷ This is particularly so with regard to Aafa, who detests having his opinions questioned at any time. Whenever any of the others appear to question his views on anything, even if indirectly, he launches into threatening language and behavior. The mendicants pause in their quarrelling only when they have to confront an external agent such as Si Bero, Dr. Bero, or Old Man. In this sense, they seem as a group to have assimilated the negative aspects of authoritarianism shared by both Old Man and Bero and are thus only a negative synthesis of the two representative standpoints. This assimilation is further confirmed by their discursive location within the triptych representational structure of the stage. Throughout the play the action oscillates between three spaces, as is outlined in the first stage directions: “Open space before Bero’s home and surgery. The surgery is down in a cellar. The level ground in the fore and immediate front space serve as drying space for assorted barks and herbs. The higher structure to one side is a form of semi-open hut.”

Within this triptych structure, the surgery collapses the essences of both Old Man and Bero within itself—it is Bero’s “lab” and the place where Old Man is held captive and from which he declaims his peculiar subversive logic—while the space before the house is where the mendicants ply their trade. The semi-open hut, on the other hand, is the abode of the old women, collectors of herbs and the representatives of a countervailing standpoint of healing set against the madness of the male characters. However, as the play progresses the triptych structure is contracted into a diptych, with only the oscillation between the old women’s abode and the surgery remaining. This is conveyed by means of a play of lighting, with different parts of the stage being illuminated to show the switch in scene from one to the other. The mendicants are completely assimilated to the space of the surgery, and thus, strictly through the disposition of the spatial logic of the play, to the overlapping irrationalities of Bero and Old Man. The external space that they previously occupied has been completely annulled. Even though a group with their own internal dynamic and contradictions, they are ultimately not an independent entity as such, but only meaningful as they are constitutively assimilated to the dominant logic of biopower that governs the system.

This assimilation to the dominant is further revealed in the degree to which, even while challenging the negative epithets about disability launched at them by other characters, they sometimes echo the same atrophied perceptions among themselves. Again, Aafa is the main culprit. At one point he makes a lunge for Goyi’s crotch:

Critically also, apart from the speech that Blindman and Aafa make toward the end of the play, the mendicants are generally portrayed as clowns rather than as particularly insightful interlocutors. In fact, what is described as “thinking” minds in mangled bodies is to be taken strictly on faith only; we only discern their “thinking” when they are repeating, as if by rote, the main tenets of Old Man’s teaching. In other words, whether in the hands of Old Man or in that of Dr. Bero, they would have ended up as automatons, concerned mainly with how to eke out survival in their disabled condition. Unlike characters such as Brother Jero, Professor, Elesin Oba, and even Eman, who as characters mobilize, orchestrate, and subvert a variety of ritual idioms as a means of triggering the self-examination of society (Jeyifo 2004, 83–119), the mendicants in Madmen and Specialists do not produce any such questioning outside the framework that is established for them by others. Despite their being used as instruments of subversion sharpened through induction into the ideology of As they are really only docile subjects. Docility here is not to be interpreted as mere passiveness; rather, it is the fact that they are ultimately characters to whom things occur and whose disposition is to acquiesce in the dominant. Their lack of self-reflexivity is to be discerned in the eagerness with which they desire to go on the promised circus tour, where they would presumably have been part of a freakshow. Thus, the following stage directions are telling about their disposition toward being objectified as spectacle:

Considered in this way, their many songs throughout the play may be reinterpreted as part of their extended “rehearsal” for their role as clowns in the world’s pantomime of forms. The play is framed by an unendingly repetitious ritual action paced entirely by interruptions, and in that respect it differs markedly from The Strong Breed, which, though also focused on ritual, is steadier in connecting character dilemma to overall ritual unfoldment. Thus the mendicants end up providing an assimilable spectacle rather than a stubborn singularity that would have to be taken into account as such in the implicit dialectical movement suggested by the play. What we see, then, is that an integral poetic ritual action, as represented by the mendicants, attempts to transcend both the empiricist (Dr. Bero) and idealist (Old Man) impulses of the play only to collapse into the arrested idiom of a failed mediation. All the dramatic ratios within which the disabled mendicants are located—dialectical interplay between characters, triptych/diptych spatial structure, contrastive and overlapping ideologies of the instrumentalization of human bodies—point to the fact that they represent such a failed synthesis.

Pertinent to my reading of Freud’s discussion is the idea that the uncanny cannot be thought to derive solely from ruptures within the familial saga. This is what Freud implies in his reading of Hoffman’s “The Sandman” and in his remark that Nathaniel’s anxiety about his eyes is really a code for the fear of castration by his father. I share the Kleinian view that castration anxiety should be seen as the fear of bodily dismemberment as such and that it is connected to an ultimate understanding of death (Klein 1997, 30–31, 45, 135). However, I want to qualify Klein by insisting that this fear is assimilated under certain conditions to the general sense of a systemic disorder. She provides room for this qualification in her 1948 paper “On the Theory of Anxiety and Guilt” (Klein 1997, 25–42). Here Klein attends to the oscillatory relationship between a primary internal danger and danger perceived as coming from the outside. This throws up the problem of objective versus neurotic danger, and she explains the mechanisms involved by distinguishing between depressive and persecutory anxieties for individuals. It is evident that the systemic uncanny as I understand it may be composed of both depressive and persecutory vectors, though I wish to emphasize the essentially persecutory dimension of feeling a threat to the sense of self that comes from perceptions of social chaos. Even if the fear of dismemberment is evocative of the primal anxiety relating to the child’s original projection/introjection of the mother’s breast, the systemic uncanny may be more directly connected to chaotic events of a social or political nature. It is the conversion of the sense of a systemic disorder into a negative affect that marks what I describe as the systemic uncanny. In the face of persistent physical and social violence, either triggered by acute political chaos or the general collapse of the social order, a process of internalization of these perceived disorders takes place. In such instances, the self is presumed to be constantly under threat, whether this threat ever materializes or not. The internalized translation of disorder does not, however, remain merely internalized, but gets cathected into inchoate senses of guilt, inexplicable terror, or a general sense of disquiet that may or may not be consciously traceable to a direct source. On this reading, the uncanny overlaps with post-traumatic states, and may sometimes be said to be an attenuated effect of these. The process of translation of negative affects in such states from the perception of external disorder into an internal sense of disquiet sits between interiority and externality and cannot be explained exclusively with reference to the familial saga of much psychoanalysis. Ultimately, the systemic uncanny is to be understood in the Kleinian idiom of oscillation, however moving not from the dynamic relations between the child and the mother’s breast and into the consciousness, but from the perceptual surface of fragmented and chaotic details of social life and into the psyche. The fragmented social details then get re-vivified and in their turn gain energy from the psyche such that the social phenomena themselves seem to embody the uncanny as such. The systemic uncanny may be social as well as personal, public as well as private. Even though the force of the systemic uncanny is best discerned as deriving from intense conditions of chaos and confusion and may become attenuated or even dissolved completely with time, within the political domain the range of negative affects inherent in the systemic uncanny may also be present under apparently peaceful conditions, when individuals sense that a threat to their well-being is persistent rather than transient and is directly associated with the state and its apparatuses. This is inarguably the case under totalitarian regimes in Africa and elsewhere, where people are known to disappear or suffer all kinds of brutalities unleashed by the state security apparatus.⁹

What I describe here as systemic, however, is essentially open to historical analysis, even if it may also be productively understood synchronically in terms of a wide-ranging discursive ensemble. Furthermore, it must also be remembered that every culture has a way of translating the uniqueness of epochal events, whether these are negative or positive, into a general transcendent value. As Bernard Cohn (1987, 45) puts it in another context:

Even though they retain a space for the assertion of the usefulness of ritual and cultural values, the images of ritual that Soyinka gives us in his plays often imply a challenge to the commonsensical and the predictable. It is this that allows Olunde to take the place of Elesin Oba as sacrificial carrier at the end of Death and the King’s Horseman and Say Tokyo Kid to stab Professor at the end of The Road, when he blasphemously attempts to convert the egungun masquerade into an instrumental epistemological template. Similar observations might be made of The Lion and the Jewel, Kongi’s Harvest, The Beatification of Area Boy, and The Strong Breed. In each instance, the strength of cultural values is strongly asserted even when much of the action has been devoted to questioning them. Madmen and Specialists is markedly different from all these in that there is absolutely nothing commonsensical and predictable about the play. Quite the opposite. It is a study in deconstructive techniques, and, as we saw, full of interruptions, sharp changes of tone and direction, the failed synthesis of a dialectical movement, and the mirroring and collapse of various polarities of signification both in terms of characterization and in the depiction of stage spectacle. In this way, as we noted earlier, the play is in its overall dramaturgical expression a translation of the systemic disorder that might be said to be pertinent to an understanding of the Biafra War itself. In this translation, the disabled mendicants take center stage. And it is around them that we see the contradictions of aesthetic nervousness. For what we see is that they replicate typically negative depictions of disability (disability as moral deficit/evil) while also suggesting a certain choric energy and the capacity to proliferate interpretative impasses within the text. Their status as a failed synthesis between opposing ideological standpoints also makes them problematic characters that are rid of the capacity to mean anything that is not ultimately assimilated to the dominant, even if this dominant is itself in a state of confusion and flux. Thus, as in many other depictions of disability, the mendicants provide the occasion for a meditation on the tragedy of war, rather than being the heroic protagonists for a way out of the impasse produced by war mentality.

Perhaps what is more important, however, is that the mendicants’ problematic discursive location may also be interpreted as encapsulating the emotional chaos in the mind of the author himself following his incarceration during the war. It is almost as if, being himself traumatized by incarceration, Soyinka seizes upon the mendicants as a means of articulating his own loss of direction and his incapacity to establish hierarchies between the values espoused by the two sides in the Nigerian civil war. The espousal of a preference for either side would of course have been extremely difficult, since like many others he interpreted the war as revealing the fundamental incoherence in the foundation of the Nigerian nation-state as such, something that he had depicted in the earlier A Dance of the Forests, a play originally commissioned to commemorate Nigeria’s independence in 1960. As part of an antimimetic dramatic action, the disabled mendicants are ciphers of an emotional impasse in the mind of the author articulated via a fragmented dramaturgical idiom. In this respect I would endorse Jeyifo’s (2004, 141–142) view that the plotlessness of Madmen and Specialists well captures “war psychosis as an analog of (dis)organized social life,” only adding that the disorganization is also in the mind of the playwright himself. In Madmen and Specialists, Soyinka is no longer able to stand at any point outside the system to manufacture an artistic critique of it. He has been too emotionally affected by the chaos to be entirely free from it. It is interesting to note, then, that Death and the King’s Horseman and The Bacchae of Euripides, both of which followed four years after Madmen and Specialists, do not have the same fragmented idiom. Both of these later plays are more secure in their uses of ritual and were written and produced during his stay in England between 1975 and 1977, when he presumably had a chance to distance himself from the chaos of the war. Madmen and Specialists was produced the very year in which he was released from prison, following on closely from The Man Died, the prison notes that detailed his anguished state of mind during the period of his incarceration. It may thus be argued that Madmen and Specialists is the play that is emotionally closest to the sense of chaos brought on by the war upon the playwright’s psyche and in that respect is not a play just about the civil war but also about the anguished theater of the author’s own mind.

To read his work in this way may be interpreted as falling into the trap of an overly convenient psychoanalysis of the author’s mind, something that is open to serious question and which I would wish to repudiate completely.¹⁰ What I want to suggest is something even bolder and that goes beyond an ordinary attempt at psychoanalyzing the author. I want to suggest that the disabled characters in Soyinka’s work encapsulate most securely his own predisposition toward enigma, open-endedness, and dramaturgic experimentation, and that they are the ones that allow him to properly explore the boundary between the political and the metaphysical, a boundary that is central to all of his creative writing. The disabled characters are thus the objective correlatives of a chaotic postcolonial world as well as being the ciphers of the author’s creative predispositions. On this premise, I would like to argue that disability is as significant to his writing as is the Ogunian aesthetics that have been so painstakingly elaborated by him and his critics as paradigmatic. The full significance of this additional paradigm is only made visible when we take detailed account of the disabled characters he gives us as part of his dramaturgic schema.¹¹ In that respect, reading Soyinka through a disability studies paradigm rescues him for use in a different kind of social commentary than the one with which he has normally been associated. In this we would be doing justice to his stature as the foremost playwright and most fearless political and social commentator on the African continent today.