The Tragedies of Yorùbá’s Spiritual Space
The Tragedies of Yorùbá’s Spiritual Space

Summary/Abstract: In his play The Road, written in 1965, Wole Soyinka, the 1986’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, addresses in sombre shades not only to the historical tragedies of the Nigerian space, but also to an obsolete cosmology unable to balance the social structures born in the postcolonial aftermath. Its engagement with rituals and masks, with the distortion of the Christian religion - forcedly imposed within a collective mind not prone to it - transforms the African cosmology in a haunting turmoil of trials and errors. In 1970, after his imprisonment during the Nigerian War, the Nigerian playwright creates a God-like figure in Madmen and Specialists, a tragedy considered one of the gloomiest collections of representations in the history of the African theatre. We will argue that both plays advance proposals of hybrid gods, and both plays end by envisioning failures and death. Through these forms of death, the complex creations of an alienated collective mind strain to shape a space in which the ancient cyclic pilgrimage of old gods and the linear progressive design of the modern gods share a dimension of death and revival around which a new social identity could be interwoven.

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