THE AESTHETICS OF ALIENATION IN MODERN NIGERIAN DRAMA: A MARXIST READING OF OBAFEMI’S SUICIDE SYNDROME

Abstract

Nigeria has witnessed a steady development in modern drama consciousness and practice. As Johnson (2001) accurately opines, this is self-evident in the plethora of published and unpublished dramatic works that presently adumbrate the literary, dramatic and theatrical landscape of the country, and also in the innumerable stage, radio, television and video productions of these and other play scripts and dramatic creations by professionals, academic and amateur groups.
Apparently, of all the various academics who are among the practising and accomplished playwrights in Nigeria are the likes of Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Femi Osofisan and Zulu Sofola. However, while it is possible to proudly boast of an avalanche of extensive critical studies as enduring reactions to the canon of dramatic literature that has evolved from the more elderly and more popular practitioners like Soyinka and his contemporaries, mentioned above, virtually almost nothing is available on the generation of the younger playwrights like Yerima and Obafemi. Interestingly, the generation of the younger playwrights though, are less popular among the critics of dramatic literature home and abroad they are more famous as Marxist writers whose aesthetic standpoints evince the alienation between the haves and the have nots of the society. It is against this background that this paper explores the Marxist‟s critical position in the assessment of the Nigerian theatrical topography that features this generation of playwrights represented by Obafemi. As Taine has identified, literature is the product of three interfusing factors of moment, race and milieu. To these factors, Marx and Engel were to add the "economic" factor which completes the continuum and literature has since then been viewed, along politics, religion, and philosophy as the superstructure of human activities. If we concern ourselves with the explanation of the economic factor, discovery is made that there is a new sense of awareness in Nigerian theatre. This awareness has resulted in what Gbilekaa tags the theatre of radical poetics which is what explains the dramatic topographies of most of the post-Civil War playwrights whose commitment is nothing but the exposition of the alienation tendencies that typifies the relationship between the bourgeois and the proletariat.