“TESS ONWUEME'S SOULAR SYSTEM: Trilogy of the She-Kings—Parables, Reigns, Calabashes”

Anything, which cannot stand the force of change, must be uprooted or be blown into obliv­ion by the storm heralding the new season!

Ona (Broken Calabash, by Tess Onwueme)



The task of woman is to build—to create.

Zo (Parables for a Season, by Tess Onwueme)



How do you think you can snap the finger without the right thumb?

Omu (The Reign of Wazobia, by Tess Onwueme)

Does it widen our awe of Tess Onwueme's dramaturgical sorcery to know that, though still in her mid-thirties, she has "authored” five childrenr a Ph.D. in dramatic Literature, more than sixteen plays (ten published), and scores of intergenerational hook-ups, lectures, cultural re­unions, articles, choral/ritual performances, and poems? That her stunning plays, spun from the rich threads of West African culture, have enjoyed international premieres at the Bonstelle Theater in Detroit, the National Theatre of Nigeria, and tine First International Conference on Women Play­wrights in Buffalo, New York? Or that she was the first and only female to win the Drama Prize given by the Association of Nigerian Authors (in 1985. for The Desert Encroaches), and the first woman to act as President of the ANA? Perhaps…perhaps. What it does widen, however, is our apprecia­tion of a life committed, a life experiential, a life dramatic, and a life prolific. These lives, stitched into the kente of rich‑creativity, weave regal woman, familial/ancestral struggles, bidimensional sojourns, and truncated/recon­structed legacies (see Legacies, 1988) into joy- or pain-colored theatrical tapestries.

Certainty, The broken Calabash, Parables for a Sea­son and The Reign of Wazobia may be seen on the one hand as a trilogy. But they also may be enjoyed as distinct and self-woven fabrics of drama, adhering to their own pattern-frames of time, logic, space, and rhythm yet threaded into an ancient-to-current continuum made whole and healthy by belief system, mythopoeic ritual, parable, humor, satire, proverb, ceremony, soul-tossing conflict, and folkadelic webbing. Of this

dramaturge’s important work, Kendall, chair of the Department of Theater at Smith Col­lege, has noted:

Her plays not only bring the range and beauty of Nige­rian culture to an international audience, they create the artistic bridges crucial to the development of a multicultural educational environment. In Legacies, for example, she explores the links and breakages be­tween African-American and African peoples. In The Reign of Wazobia, she examines the intersections of tradition and ritual, the construction of gender, and the construction of “woman," in a framework which is par­ticular to Nigeria but which is pertinent to women in the U.S.A. and many other countries (correspondence, June I8, 1991)



Onwueme's cultural influences and aesthetic kinships may be said to span a good stretch of the Afrocentric, Eurocentric, and multicultural rainbow oral literature and Folklore, Elizabethan (especially Shakespearean and modem European drama. African and black diasporan expression. Among her literary soul mates are Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, Athol Fugard, Sam­uel Beckett, Derek Walcott, John Pepper Clark, Albert Ca­mus, Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison, Anton Chekhov, Femi Osofisan, Ngugi Wa Thiong'0, George Bernard Shaw, Athol Fugard, August Wilson, Amos Tutuola, Gloria Naylor, Buchi Emecheta, Dennis Brutus. Alex LaGuma, Mariama Ba, and Sembene Ousmane.

Onwueme's plays, inside and outside this collection, transmit certain messages on both ostensible and figurative levels. Levels is a good word here, for upon entering Onwueme's dramatic "soular system," one is simultaneously engaged by numerous dimensions: feminine and feminist, tangible and ethereal, god and mortal, woman and man, she-king and he-queen, astral and physical, empowered and unempowered, democratic and fascistic, ancient and pres­ent, Afrocentric and eurocentric. (One must hasten to add, however, that her work is never so contrived or fragmented that it can be reduced to predictable polarities and duali­ties,) Add this: 'revolt of intellectual modernity against a decadent traditional value of the caste order" and "the indi­vidual conviction of insurmountability of genuine love for another person in spite of traditional and unholy attitudes of discrimination" (Introductory notes to the first edition of The Broken Calabash).

But what, ostensibly, are these plays -about"? For start­ers, they -dramatically" suggest a rearrangement of the world so as to strip it of male hegemony, class oppression, indifference to youth, needless war ("When, when, when will men learn to accept that they cannot gain peace from war?" Wazobia, The Reign of Wazobia), blind deference to elders ("Longevity is no measure of wisdom," Wazobia, Wazobia), counterproductive power struggles (especially in Parables for a Season and The Reign of Wazobla), and the "leprous grip of the disease of freedom"' (Metaphor for "whitebody"—Igbo euphemism for leprosy—and the oxymoronic role of white missionaries).

But the "about" factor has a flip side to it: herein the same images, folk webbings, faith structures, poetic testi­monials, ceremonies, combative dialogues, and semiotic soliloquies are employed, not in stripping a world (soular system?), but in rituals of cultural coherence, reclamation, rescue, and reconstruction. Within this context of therapeu­tic remythification, the She-King Trilogy (as I call it) is about tile healing salve of humor, as in signifying (“feet so long they can stand on the moon," Zo, Wazobia); the intrinsic value of women to men and women to women ("With or without man, make a meaning of your life," Wazobia, (Wa­zobia); the predominance of the proverb in African cultures as an educational tool ("A child who asks questions never misses the road,' Priest of Ani, Wazobia); the need for cross-gender collaboration and harmony: the a priori view of mother as Earth/Earth as mother ("Mother, you are deep like the Earth herself,' Zo, Parables for a Season); the culturally centered position of the black male child and the ominous historical threat to his survival ("Ah—world! / A black male child costly as a gem/ And I who longed for one since lost my twins to the slave raiders, to / be lessed with a male child...?" Old Termite, Parables); and in-evocable ties to past and land ("umbilical cords were buried right at the root of trees in this very soil,' Wazobia, Wazobia).

In this young playwright's mind's eye, African theater, the oldest in the world, burns full up with folk- and funk-spun energy, rich and robust giggle-humor, raw visceral movement, acrobatic intelligence, life-death intimacies (We live in the twin-fold of life and death," Wazobia, Parables), pageantry, town criers, griots, gods ("Sometimes the gods like to humor us in our shame,' ldehen, Wazobia), masks and masking ("We all wear more than one face at a time in this society," Ona, Calabash, conflict, ritual dancers, con­tradictions waiting to be satirized ("You Christians and your lord who forbids stealing and yet calls himself a thief (in the night)," Courtuma, Calabash), music, poetry, fetishes, shrines, body decorations, and festivals.

Onwueme has meticulously and brilliantly restitched many of these traditional and modern elements into plays that are temporally cyclical, thematically modal ideo-rhythmically intricate, and histrionically edifying, in these woman-and god-centered tapestries and murals. On­wueme's workswornanship, reminiscent of sister-scholar­artists like Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham, is re­vealed as consummate and whole. Like her foremothers (and forefathers), she probes the deep ancient underpin­nings of culture, character, image conduit, and ritual. Such probings have taken her into the multidimensional worlds of myth breaking, mythmaking, and myth merging. As an African-Nigerian-Igbo-woman-feminist-artist, Onwueme in her life and history has been, at least on one level, conflict, configured by colonialism, tribalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, stereotype, and classism. In The Broken Calabash, The Reign of Wazobia, and Parables for a Season, she reimages, reforges, reshapes, renews, and reinvents woman/human societies for the stage.

The women in this trilogy are all ascending. Involved women. Evolved women. Evolving women. African women with themselves, their men, their children, their families, their neighbors. Extended families. Black folks. Though there are forces that would devolve—and, if possible, dis­solve—them. Through drama (life-mirrowing), Onwueme lifts these women, helps them—and their men—resee and re­ceive themselves as ancient, traditional, and reenvisioned citizens. Woman as king; man as cohort; the sin of too much father-love—a tragic, stifling love—for daughter in Calabash; king-mother roles in Aniocha-Igbo society; the clash of his­torical myth and revolutionary-intellectual modernity; re­adapting precolonial mother-daughter relationships to contemporary needs and values; harmonizing African inde­pendence, pan-Africanism, and Afrocentricity with cross-cultural black consciousness (again, see Legacies). Such are the major themes and major schemes of Onwueme as she manipulates vision, canvas, stage, village, festival, campus, chorus, sitting room, masquerade, symbol, sign, etymology, anthropology, ethnography, mythology, xylo­phone, gong, ekwe, dente, high life, music, birth, death, and marriage. Hers is a multicultural theatrical spectrum that encompasses the Afro-Indian-Greeco-Roman-Hebrew-Christian -European continuum.

In Parables for a Season and The Reign of Wazobia women who by law or tradition have rightfully ascended to the kingship—even if only temporarily—are being under­mined by men, occasionally by women, and sometimes in the context of cross-gender plotting. One of the male strate­gies is all too familiar to African-American villagers, the divide-and-conquer pattern. lyase, who plots with Idehen (Iago?) against newly crowned she-king Wazobia, notes:

We must catch the lion by getting hold of its cub. In spite of avowed solidarity, women are women. You can­not rule out petty jealousies among them.

Throw a grain of maize on a brood of chicks. Grip the hen as they cackle for the booty, (Wazobia).



But as the plot and plotting thicken, as the men “hold their meeting to unseat Wazobia," the wise elder stateswoman Omu directs the women thusly:

Together we form this moon shape. Lie in ambush sur­rounding the throne as the men emerge. We, together in this naked legion, will salute them in our natural state. Taunting their eyes with their own shame. This naked dance is a last resort women have had over the ages. If our men force us to the wall, we must use it as our final weapon. Unusual problems demand unusual solutions. (Wazobia)

In Onwueme's soular system, women cannot be reduced to a group of quarreling chicks. Instead, they induce and sus­tain bonding, express solidarity, and when tempers flare and there is a call for vengeful violence, Wazobia reminds them of their mission: “Women peace! Peace Spill no blood! Ours is to plant seed-yams. Not blood to feed worms." This young king/queen knows that the song (the word, nommo, songi­fied naming) is the thing. 'Traditionally, one exorcises ugli­ness and expiates evil and bad feelings through the use of song and callings (as in blues). So Wazobia steadies her sisters (and us) with this war-peace cry:

"Sing, women! Stand firm on the soil! Sing! Sing!