By HENRY AKUBUIRO
Though we may decry or laugh at the idiocies of the aberrant child and the vane pursuits of the philandering officer, agents of parody in literature serve as vehicles in the process of transformational change. Through these fictional archetypes, we see the ease with which man oversteps the borders of civility in dealing with fellow men; through their behaviours and linguistic coding, we come to terms with the tragedy of hubris, making us to be wary of these vaulting missteps ourselves, which can also elicit similar emotions in real life; through them, we are exposed to the vagaries of metropolitan culture. Agents of parody do not necessarily privilege entertainment over pedagogy.
Jerry Alagbaoso’ oeuvre pays witness to a restless, prolific spirit making claims to cannonisation with his imaginative constructs. Alagbaoso’s plays and fiction are designed as parodies and comedies to reflect social trajectories. No doubt, the playwright is a keen observer of the society. In his social mimesis, immorality, exploitation, corruption and inactions prove weighty a problem to everybody. He, thus, functions as a realist depicting characters close to reality.
In his inaugural lecture entitled “Ridentem Dicere Verum: Literature and the Common Welfare”, Charles Nnolim avers that
… imaginative literature is that writing which is more emotionally moving than intellectually instructive; that writing which primarily deals with a make-believe world, whose language is highly connotative rather than denotative, symbolic rather than literal, figurative rather than plain; and whose ultimate aim is to produce a satisfying aesthetic effect and find anchor as a work of art… The ultimate test of literature as a ‘verbal work of art’ is its functionality and its imaginative import (3).
Drama, more than any other genre of literature deployed by Alagbaoso, collaborates Nnolim’s observation that “… literature exists to please, to lighten the burden of men’s lives, to make us forget for a short while our sorrows and disappointments in life, to help us face our frustrations and uncertain futures” (5). A look at Alagbaoso’s recently reissued plays –Collected Play 1, which contains Specks in Our Eyes, Sorters and Sortees, Ina-aga, Armchair Parents, and The First Lady; Collected Plays II, which contains Oh! My Rolls Royce and My Fairly Old Wife, The First Lady, His Excellency and the Siren, and Honourable Chairman; Collected Plays III, which contains ; as well as the solo play, Tony Wants to Marry, point to the direction of that social function declared by Nnolim.
Alagbaoso’s works do not sanction some utopian existence when society hasn’t yet lifted itself from dystopian vicissitudes. His works reflect the society like a mirror does to a face, be it ugly or beautiful. For him, there is no compromise in character portraitures –the irredeemable is presented the way he is, even if he is used to bib-and-tucker. Kimani Njogu believes that the “artist creates from a socio-historical milieu of which he or she is a product and, similarly, the addressee is a social product also informed by the socio-political events with which he or she is in contact. The literary space, in turn, reshapes the history of the place and time in which it is received” (10).
Little wonder, his plays and fiction share some similarities with contemporary Nollywood films in terms of contents. Writing in the book, Global Nollywood, Matthias Krings and Onookome Onome (editors) reveal that
Nollywood films dramatise shocking transgressions of social norms. The main protagonists are driven by all sorts of human desires and thus share emotions most viewers are likely to have experienced themselves: the aspiration to get rich, envying other people’s success, the longing for a beautiful man or woman (16).
Alagbaoso underpins his writings with satirical trusts to augment the entertainment values of his dramaturgy. He works interrogate the fragrant abuse of power and kowtowing to money worship, hypocrisy in governance, arrogance of women close to the corridors of power, moral retardation among university undergraduates, parental irresponsibility, youthful exuberance, dishonesty in social relations and corruption in low and high places. Using everyday settings –homes, schools and offices –his works place the society on trial, but in this trial, the reader is the judge; he alone reprimands the characters at will and feels empathic with their miserable conditions.
Societal hawks on the rampage
The tragedy of postcolonial Africa is the disproportionate spread of wealth, with the poor finding it absolutely hard to break into the elect fold. Left with no option, they grovel at the feet of the former to get a taste of the pudding. Subverting the hierarchies is too much task to undertake most times. For the privileged class, they turn themselves into demigods, and the lists of subalterns get wider. A female in search of job has to resort to the commoditisation of her body to get ahead. These are visible in Alagbaoso’s writings, and the echoes are felt far and wide.
Writing on “Embedding Postcoloniality in Post-Apartheid Literature”, Huma Ibrahim observes that “the idea of cosmopolitanism becomes hollow when one examines poverty, xenophobia, state violence against minorities and systemic class oppressions endemic to most postcolonial societies” (165).
Alagbaoso’s novel, Officers and Men, reveals the craze for materialism, evidenced in the scramble for juicy appointments in civil and paramilitary services. Some of the applicants in a paramilitary agency depicted in Officers and Men are not interested in the job but what they can get out of it. In response to the question by the Assistant Commander-General, Alhaji Sirdee, why he wants a job in the National Caring Service, an applicant, Mr. Yomi, responds: “I think I am old enough to know where it is happening. I had a secondary school classmate at the CMS Grammar School while I left Toronto…. Today, my friend and mate has many wives, a number of girlfriends, a fleet of cars and many houses. So, I wish to emulate him….” (21).
Expectedly, this answer fills the members of the panel with astonishment and disappointment. But he isn’t the only buffoon with a misplaced value. Miss Miriam, responds to the same question: “Since my primary school days, I have loved the uniforms of those working in the military and paramilitary services … In short, it has always been my dream to wear any of these uniforms” (22). Such absurd responses at the interview, the Assistant Commander-General, Mrs Kof, laments, is just a reflection of a society steeped in the craze for materialism.
A clear demonstration of favouritism permeating the social fabric is aptly demonstrated in the novel when Dr. Timmy Jimmy, the training officer, shows favouritism to the underperforming Miriam as a prelude to sexual advances: “Dr. Jimmy was thrown into ecstasy. He held Miriam’s soft hands, hugged her, and with shaky hands, proceeded to untying the back of her dress. Soon, his hands were rubbing Miriam’s upper back” (38). Miriam later becomes the Area Commander’s PA, a position she uses to commit financial crimes, but is absolved on account of her personal relationship with her boss, which earns her an elevation to a second wife.
Specks in Our Eyes, one of the most interesting plays in Collected Play 1, revisits community leadership. It’s not only in high places that the table is muddied with sticky fingers of greed and hypocrisy. Instead of commending for her exemplary work, the executive members of Ama Ihite Development Union (ADU), decides to gang up against the performing principal, Lady Ijeoyibo. “We have received reports of gross misconduct and arrogance on top of that. She has been accused, also, of charging illegal fees and illegal Parent Teacher Association dues,” the president of the union, Ikeobodo, declares at the meeting (27). In actual fact, she has been supportive to all comers. The conspiracy of the male chauvinists only fail with the intervention of the community’s youths. Akataka, a youth, puts it straight: “… I gathered from the grapevine that few of us in this meeting have approached her with financial requests which she obliged. How dare these same people turn around to ask that she be probed?” (29). It later dawns on all that the principal has even been compelled to buy some committee members cars from fees collected from the school, while some borrowed from the school treasury without repaying.
The four plays in Collected Play II have something to do with power and wealth and how they are misused. The societal hawks, this time, are the nouvre riche and those in authority. The satire, My Rolls Royce and My Fairly Old Wife, features an arrogant moneybag at home with braggadocio, even in the house of God. Reverend Ozor, who superintends over the congregation at the St. Monica’s Church, reduces himself to a mere errand boy to the swashbuckling Chief Ego-na-atakasi, who claims to have billions in different denominations. Just as he lacks respect for men of God, he doesn’t respect the traditional institution either, yet he is worshipped by the congregation.
Corruption is revisited in The First Lady as the electorate and the elected play the game of lucre. The politician named Chairman and his wife are products of a society that celebrates mediocrity and materialism in the name of loyalty. The politics of settlement and disillusionment are both interwoven in this socio-political drama. Against his expectation, Ben Ama wins the local government election, but it doesn’t take long before he and his wife begin to abuse the office.
A community setting (Amaokorie) recurs in the play, His Excellency and His Sirens, and the gimmicks of electioneering in which aspirants speak tongue in cheek and the subvertion of people’s wills through rigging is brought to the fore. The character named Representative testifies to His Excellency: “Sir, this is to inform you that what we are witnessing today is not an election or voting but a big fraud –an open one for that matter! Chief Promise Ekenwa’s ballot box has turned out to be a magic and wonder box with a lot of fake voters’ cards….” (131). The revolt of the mob over the His Excellency’s disturbing convoy, which leads to the sacking of the court, is a vote of no confidence on the bad eggs within the establishment. The author calls for a change in orientation.
The society is brimming with fake people –what do we say about Dr. Armstrong, a former lecturer in America, in the play, Honourable Chairman, who, having lost his job, begins to organise fake honorary degrees for some businessmen and politicians? Even a man of God, Pastor Mirage Airze, is no better in Signs and Wonders as he plays the role of a he-goat to a she-goat. The dawn of realisation comes when Commander discovers his wife, Miriam, in a compromising position. “This is sacrilege, Pastor!” he thunders. There are hawks everywhere, Alagbaoso tells us.
Guardians and impotent rods
Two idioms are at the heart of this discourse: spare the rod and spoil the child, and what breeds in the bone will always come out in the flesh. In Alagbaoso’s works, as juvenile immorality mutates under their watch, irresponsible parents merely nutate at the corner. In our society, an only child is pampered by most parents, thinking they are doing him a big favour; but this creates a problem, for the child has everything at his beck and call, thinking that the earth is now a paradise. The tendency to breed a wayward child is high in this type of situation.
In Alagbaoso’s play, Tony Wants to Marry, we are introduced to the consequences of the only child syndrome among African families. Tony, aka Tony Touch, is the only son of Mr. Johnson and Agnes Ezekiel. A spoilt child, compared to his two sisters, Tony is the pre-eminent family’s black sheep. Under the guise of searching for wife, the self-acclaimed handsome Tony becomes randy and reckless with women, bedding them and discarding them at will until he meets a hard nut to crack in the prayerful Miss Tonia Ignatius, who provides that moment of rude awakening for the Casanova.
Tony’s irreverent behaviour couldn’t have been possible if his excesses are not condoned by his mother. His father appears helpless and sometimes adopts a siddon-look posture when his domineering wife seeks to have her way. The family is in trouble when the queen of the house wants to play the role of the king! This comedy explores the dereliction of familial responsibility and the enthronement of inconsequential values. Mr Johnson Ezekiel berates his wife, Agnes, on Tony’s conduct unbecoming:
are you not the only one who is always protecting him whenever I scold him as his father? Is he no more your only son or male child? How does one explain how that idiot –handsome for nothing –habours girls from Monday to Sunday, that is, seven days in a week, in the name of classmates, peer group or course mates? Is Tony not up to the age of settling down in marriage? (13).
Alagbaoso’s carefully creates aesthetics that elicit peals of laughter from the workaday lives of the Ezekiels, but don’t be deceived. The motive is in congruent with what Nnolim says: “… a good aesthetic experience not only does no one any harm but relieves tensions and suppresses destructive impulses, thus resolving lesser conflicts within us and helping to create an integration or harmony within the self” (6). Thus, the comedy achieves a happy ending when Tony turns a new leaf: “I hereby … regret my past unbecoming actions… I shall henceforth endeavor to be in the Lord” (70).
The play, Sorters and Sorties, lampoons intellectual laziness among today’s students, who resort to bribery (sorting) to pass exams. But it takes a compromised lecturer to make that possible. The audacity of Becky Moore to have a higher mark in exchange for sex is underscored in her remarks when she visited Dr. Clemento Wise’s office: “Please, Dockee, ensure my mark is upgraded higher than everyone else’s. they must pay for assaulting me… Please, sort me higher than everyone else –male or female, whether more brilliant than me or not. After all, the end justifies the means. I want my ends, I have shown you my means. My grade will not be an exception” (88). In response, the “king of sorting” rewards her with 84 marks. But the bridge is too far the moral dupes to cross the line.
In another play, Ina-aga, contained in Collected Plays 1, Chief Ome-Aku, throws caution to the winds as he goes after university, female undergrads riding on his commercial motorcycle. One of such girls, whom he refused to collect fare from, Edna, describes the elderly man as “putting one yeye coat and slippers”, while Roseline admits giving him a fake address and phone number after he has lavished gifts on him. Well, the ina-aga rider eventually gets his comeuppance, thanks to the female students and their collaborating male friends on the loose.
Alagbaoso writings drum it into our ears that it takes indifferent parents for immorality to mutate, and the social hawks aren’t despairing yet to lord it over the rest of us. Think of a zero sum game, and that may well be an apt platitude.
Works cited
Alagbaoso, Jerry Tony Wants to Marry, Kraft Books, Ibadan, 2016
————————-Collected Plays I
———————— Collected Play II
————————-Collected Play III
Mathias Krings & Onookome Okome, Global Nollywood: The Transitional Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry, Indiana University Press, Bloomington Indiana, USA, 2013
Nnolim, Charles, “Inaugural: Ridentem Dicere Verum: Literature and the Common Welfare” in Literature, Literary Criticism and National Development, University of Port Harcourt Press, 2012, p 3
Njogu, Kimani, Reading Poetry as Dialogue: An East African Literary Tradition, Nairobi: JKF, 2004
Ibrahim, Huma, Journal of the African Literature Association, ed. Mohammed Kamara, Vol. 9. No. 3, Summer, 2015