“There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man; there is only one world to the spirit of our race.”
Only one. As I read Death and the Kings Horseman, I can’t help but focus on these words. The Praise Singer’s speech has a stilted, almost other-worldly quality— a world which Soyinka purposely shrouds in a certain mystery. It is a world to which the reader (or audience, if you are lucky enough to be watching this on stage) cannot gain access, however much they may want to. It is a private world, made public only through necessity. And it is the Praise Singer who presents us with the wisdoms of this world.
Why do we tell stories the way we do? Whether consciously or not, as story tellers we continuously make choices to represent things the way we see them, or rather, the way we believe them to be. Representation is a loaded word. And Soyinka himself, in his decision to portray his characters the way he does, commits a certain violence against them. Although each character has been written with care and detail, none of them can claim for themselves the status of being complete— they are representations of Soyinka’s view of the world, and in turn they too, bring their own stories of representation to the table.
The Praise Singer is the thread connecting the dead king to Elesin. Through him the community is prevented from going astray. The human equivalent of an alarm clock, the Praise Singer’s words hearken back to pre-colonial times when matters of life and death were in the control of Elesin and his contemporaries. He is the voice of history— of what Soyinka portrays as a timeless past which cannot wholly be erased. The words of the Praise Singer are heavy— they bear the weight of representation of a world. I have used the word ‘a’ deliberately here, for this is not the world you and I know. It is one of seeming contradictions, where death is the pathway to life, and the “soul of man” is a fact and not a philosophic debate.
But what makes this world important enough for me to neglect all other aspects of the play and focus merely on this one line? After all, the Praise Singer is not the character driving the plot forward. He is a mere spotlight through whose light Elesin is made visible. The answer to the question above does not lie in the nature of the world itself, but in the words “only one”. The Praise Singer speaks of a world saturated with “the spirit of our race”. It exists in singularity and is not just specific to his people but has remained despite the “white slavers” attempts to wrench it of its “heart”, “mind”, and “muscle”. The world that the Praise Singer represents is alive— death is merely a method of affirming the vitality of this life. This representation of the world does not only conflict with that of the colonizers but in a way confirms it as well. There is a clear agreement that there exists “only one world”. The struggle arises over what that world should look like.
However, if we analyze the words of the Praise Singer a little further, it soon becomes clear that perhaps he is arguing something else entirely. To him, the struggle may not be one of claiming the world through ousting the other. It almost seems as if his words hold the potential of the presence of multiple worlds coexisting side by side. If one is to focus on the spatial layout of the play this theory holds. Pilkings house is near enough to the market place for him to hear the beating of the drums, yet to the space he occupies may as well be another world for all its similarity to the one outside. What makes Pilkings’ world different from the Praise Singer’s is the fact that he does acknowledge the presence of the latter in it. This presence exists in his shadow, and Pilkings’ purpose in this world is to fashion men like the Praise Singer in his own image— a white image. The Praise Singer’s world on the other hand does not preclude the existence of the other. His words are simple— there is “only one” world in which the “soul of man” can be free, in which the “spirit” of his people can be. And this world, if nothing else, is safe from Pilkings through his sheer inability to understand it.
Decoloniality and Decolonization 