Collected Plays 1- Wole Soyinka

Collected Plays:  Volume 1 by Wole Soyinka

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


One of the first things I noticed about "A Dance in the Forest" is that it is not not very nationalistic, even though it was performed for the celebration of Nigerian independence in October 1960.  If anything it seems like a warning to move forward rather than get stuck in a past mindset.


There are also some pretty serious critiques of some of the changes due to modernization.  Rola comments that "this whole family business sickens me," to which Obaneja responds, "it never used to be a problem" (9).  From my experience in Ghana this summer I noticed that there is a serious tension between the traditional family (extended family, cousins, uncles, etc) and the nuclear family that has been introduced.  Disputes over land and inheritance and the whole view of family life have been in flux due to Western influences.

Back

Sometimes I wake up surprised that I am in this room.  The chipped blue walls I painted in high school.  A bed so enormous I can turn sideways and my feet will not dangle when I can’t sleep.  The box in the top of my closet with pictures of once living realities and fading memories.  A mirror on the dresser to remind me that I forgot to plaster on my makeup.  Carpet—warn fuzzy carpet, AC and a computer with unlimited Facebook access in the corner.  But there is something new.  Something that changed.

Me.

You know, I can still hear their voices.  The blaring radio with the blown speakers wakes me up.  Then come the children’s laughter echoing as they run up the hill to school singing the wrong words to Celin Deon.  I should run, but not after that Larium dream, and my mosquito net fell in on me again.

A Ghanaian Funeral: Part 3

Burial:

Funerals are a huge deal in Ghana. There are many rules and regulations because tradition says that the dead watch over the living to make sure they are fulfilling their family responsibilities. Here is a brief background surrounding the funeral process.

If there is more than one death in a family, the oldest must be buried first, no matter how long someone else might have been dead. Bodies can be preserved by keeping them on ice. This insures that the family can have funeral clothes made and make the funeral preparations. It is a very expensive process, but of utmost importance in society.

Children under the age of eighteen are not given funeral rites. It is believed that if you perform a funeral for a child that the spirits will come back and take another child.

After a death, the spirit is believed to hang around for about forty days. Traditionally the family would have to sleep in the same room as the corpse, but with westernization many of these things are changing. Today most people still wear mourning clothes and eat only light foods forty days following the death of a close family member.

The burial is held before the funeral. The body is carried in a taxi with a parade of family members and friends behind it. This part of the funeral is more personal and private than the large funeral where the entire community is invited. As people follow the taxi they should cheer and dance, celebrating the life of the person lived. Some weep, and the sorrow is still present even though it is not readily apparent with a brief glance. While the burial is performed, the widow goes off and breaks a pot to signify that the marriage is over.

I cannot help but admire the funeral rites of Ghanaians. I think there is something to this celebration that they keep keying into. Death is inevitable, but what of the blessing that person was in this world and the happiness we shared with the loved one? Walking back from the burial I ran into Danielle. She turned to me and asked, “What is the party for?” I hope someday mine will be similar, and that someone else too could respond, “It is a funeral.”

Love,
Ava

(Field Notes 17.13, 24.3-10, 34.10-18, 87.6 Picture Files 0605)

A Ghanaian Funeral: Part 2

Seventh Day Celebration:

It was too hot to go to another funeral. Jones had invited us the other day, and we agreed for the sake of being polite. Hadn’t I already been to a funeral? I crawled out of the comfort of my mosquito net, pushed my sweaty hair back from my forehead, dropped my book and followed my friends to the taxi station. Turns out that this was nothing like the funeral I first experienced.

An hour later we arrived in Mampong. Jones was there waiting for us with a friend he called his brother. He told us that this was the Seventh Day Celebration part of the funeral rites. It is held a week after the death to raise money for the funeral expenses and to begin the celebrations surrounding the life of the individual. You can wear anything but white, but most people were wearing your typical red and black attire. Anyone and everyone should come. These Ghanaian funerals are not cheap.

I took a deep breath and plunged into the crowd, going through the clumsy routine I was only half sure of, trying to maintain an impossibly low profile being white and all. I greeted the elders, vacillated between good eye contact, bowing, and offered my condolences for the death through an abysmal greeting in clobbered Twi. I was so engrossed in keeping up the routine that I didn’t notice that Jones’ “brother” was holding my hand. When he got an inch away from my lips I clued in, pulled away, and then got kissed on the ear.

Recovering from the shock of it we went out back where the family was serving Fanta and Coke products, much like a regular funeral. Brother sat right beside me. I leaned towards Maggie.

“Is this a kissing culture?”
“Definitely not.”
“Oh.”
“Did he kiss you?”
“I hardly know…”

We sat there for a half an hour. I could only use my language barrier as a shield for so long before Brother’s proposals drifted to the other white girls in the group. After hanging around for the polite thirty minutes we decided it was time to make our donation and catch the fastest tro-tro back to Wiamoase.

We ended up having the whole car to ourselves and laughed the entire way home. If that was not a cultural experience, or even a funeral experience, tell me then, where is a story like this supposed to go?

Gipsy

A Ghanaian Funeral: Part 1

Funeral:

Funerals are held on the first weekend of the month. People always die, and so there are always funerals. It did not take me long after looking over this invitation to realize this was like nothing I had ever experienced before.

Program


This fancy program is typical of a Ghanaian funeral. These programs are very expensive, but performing funeral rites correctly is taken very seriously. They believe that the spirit of the family member holds them responsible for the procession. You must be 18 or older to attend.

Important Plants of Ghana

Ghana is blessed with rich and fertile soil. Agriculture is the main source of income for Ghanaians, and there are an abundant amount of indigenous trees and plants, as well as some imported ones, like cocoa. They are beneficial not just for food, but also for medical purposes. Many people today still stay away from the local clinics and use their own remedies, and most of them work.

Learning the plants turned out to be a fun experience. It is how the local children would teach us Twi. I also learned that many of the schools in Ghana have farms in order to provide a little extra money to better their school. This is important to do in developing countries when the government does not have a lot of money for education.

The largest challenge according to Dua, a teacher at Salvation Army who taught me about his farm, is storage and spoilage. Many of the crops like tomatoes, oranges, plantains, and corn must be sold fast and cheap. They have no way of storing them, and many go to waste because they cannot be sold. We saw one woman in Cape Coast who was selling about a hundred oranges for 3 cedi (2 USD), just to try and get rid of them. Another challenge Ghana faces is that the weeds grow just as well as the plants. Weeding is very important and takes a lot of work. Being a farmer is a challenging job.

Kwadu- Banana Tree. Bananas are an important fruit in Ghana because they are abundant and tasty. They come in many shapes and sizes, and are often difficult to distinguish from plantains. You can tell if the tree is a banana tree because there is more white on the back side of the leaf.

To Market to Market to Buy... a What?

If you are expecting to hear about a wide variety of exotic fruit that you have never heard of or imagined before you are going to be disappointed. Are they the same? Absolutely not, but it is a subtle, almost tricky the way fruit in Ghana tried to be like everything I already knew about—but not.

Let me walk you through the bargaining process of the market. You either go on Thursday’s to the Wiamoase market, or you hold out and go with Christiana on Tuesdays. Having a native with you makes bargaining a lot easier. You get fair prices on cabs as well as your supplies. Each week we would go to the market with a list of items we needed to find. On most trips Christiana would disappear for about twenty minutes doing who knows what, and during that time we were most likely to explore different fruit options.

First we come to “anka,” the oranges, or what you would think of as an orange. The main difference is that these oranges have green skin. I think I actually said “Oh brave new world” when I first saw one. Just when you thought you had a grip on that, turns out there are two different types of oranges with green skin. There are some with red fruit on the inside, which are called white oranges (yeah, I know), and the orange colored fruit ones are called red oranges. It took me awhile before I learned how to properly eat the Ghanaian oranges. You shave off the outside with a machete, careful not to pierce the inside layers, cut off the top, and then squeeze out the juice. They are too fibrous to eat. If you try to bite into them you will have a half an hours worth of flossing that night and juice dripping down your elbows. I also learned that the locals do not “take,” or eat oranges for breakfast because they believe it gives people stomach ulcers.