The Strong Breed Soyinka Beloved

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Reader Response Essay - On The Strong Breed

Reading Wole Soyinka’s Strong Breed, I get to wondering about disclosure and ritual, disclosure between characters and to audiences, rituals of drama and religion.

As I read the play, I see ample signs that both Sunma and Eman know about the curse-binding ritual that is to take place before midnight. I see signs of Sunma’s more specific knowledge in her shunning of Ifada from the start of the play. She declares, “Get away, idiot” (853). From the start Sunma is agitated and hopes that she and Eman might get away for “only two days” (857), as long as the two of them might “watch the new year together--in some other place” (856). Once Eman decides he doesn’t want to go away, Sunma wants …show more content…

There’s the flashback scene between Eman and his father, in which the father is embarking on his own annual purification ritual for his people, a job for which Eman declares himself “totally unfitted” (865). The way Eman shields Ifada suggests to me that his tradition of the carrier ritual differs from that he finds in Sunma’s village. Eman later tells Jaguna that “[a] village which cannot produce its own carrier contains no men” (862). For Eman, the ritual doesn’t work if the carrier isn’t strong and willing, and when he himself becomes the carrier, I’m not altogether surprised. It’s a predictable irony, an example of the common literary theme of the son becoming the father, whatever Eman’s declarations of being unfit for the job, despite his fear and flight after he takes Ifada’s place as ritual carrier.

If Eman knows what the ritual entails and apparently volunteers, why’s he run? That’s the question Jaguna asks, to which Oroge answers, “I don’t know. I don’t really know” (864). I suppose that it’s one thing to think himself capable of such sacrifice and another to actually carry through with it. And he might have been there less than a year and not know what the ritual entails. Does Eman get frightened when this ritual itself becomes sufficiently different from the purification rituals he grew up with? The reasons for the rituals might

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