Abipa, Are the gods to Blame?

Rotimi's plays are full of rewards for the seeker of history patterns that elevate consciousness. Collage from scattered pieces of time.

Ah Ola Rotimi, that mind arrests. After The Gods Are Not To Blame, I was, for some days, going to displace Jero's Metamorphosis as a favourite play. Of course, I couldn't!

Photo by Sunmola Adegbenga

But you see, as far as world history is concerned, I believe the problem of man has always been man himself.  And although the eccentric Aristotle would think actions - and not character - the pivot of all human tragedies, till this day, something continues to strike me as a vague notion that it is while men are drunk with the vainglory of the present that they really fully exhume the gory decays of the past. Obsession, appetite, spillage. Something like that.

In Soyinka's Idanre, it is the elders of Ire who visit the god of war, Ogun himself to crown him as generalissimo of their clan (even though it ends up with them being slaughtered by the very god they enthroned as ally). And in Rotimi's Kurunmi, it is the people of Ijaiye who massage Kurunmi's war-shoulders to a fight with enemy-towns, a hundred over.

Odewale, the prophesied son of doom comes a year after Idanre is published. It was through this book that I first became acquainted with Oedipus' tale. What really stricks me about it now is the title Rotimi chose. 

 
Like any deeply original work is wont to, the play could communicate more than one meaning. One could tread the plot on a cause-effect notion of bereavement, that all tragic ends are a cycle of conscious denials against the caution of time, the oracle of mankind, and a human forgetting of that principle.

The misfortune that befell Kutuje took its turn after the coronation of Odewale as king by either Odewale or the people, without consulting the gods. In our days we make same conclusions when we make people who have helped us come through storms as Lord over our affairs.

Come to think of it, was it really bizarre for Odewale to have only acted original, being the typical insecure warlord in history, who clenched the gourd of power till it ruptured? I had even asked my literature teacher why, in the story, the gods - if they knew what Odewale meant to the future - still allowed his passage into the world of humans.

It reminds me of Abiku. The wandering child returning to torment his mother. Such as Odewale, only that he is not coming to torment with the sadness of death but to lay with his mother, there is a parallel essence to its signifying the rolling boulder of war and ruin which cannot, in time, unwind!

Abipa, I was drawn to his person. "Born to Kill". Sometimes, I wish I could encounter him in a dream and ask: how did it feel to become your own murderer in all your own innocence? Like mankind, after the war to the war after. I would imagine him replying:

Vain are the sun's sad songs

Vain earth's shiver, full of evil rites

Vain are cowries at my toe

Vain the cavern's arid throat

Shut, as years, drown

In sheaves of dark viper rein

Once and a tumbling path

Dirge, dawn, feast of passage

Vain grows finger of light

To track a skein of life through

Wine-scented tunnels, endure memory

On crossroads at the hunt

The knot is pardoned with retreat

And aged hairs of the wind

Breed ghost anthem, death tongue

To a vigil of seasons change

Must I grope for spells and fumes

For starlit cries of pulsing lust?

Abipa may not contest

Scars, retract ancient thirst

To drink the rain of ruin

So when this shrewd wind 

Throws me where I came

Know - the warmest cave was mother's