“Why didn’t you just stay where you were, a relic in the memory of poets?”: Yoruban ritual and sororal commonality in Fémi Òsófisan’s Tègònni: An African Antigone

Abstract

This article discusses Fémi Òsófisan’s transnational play Tègònni: An African Antigone in the context of other African and European rewritings of Sophocles’ Antigone. The article argues that Òsófisan employs Yoruban ritual for a postcolonial revision of Greek tragedy that constructs an alternative tradition to the Western claim of Antigone as a foundational text of European democratic identity. Through innovative framing and by multiplying the protagonist, the play emphasizes that Sophocles’ Antigone depends on theatrical reincarnations in order to survive. At the same time, the play’s setting in colonial Yorubaland and its cross-racial casting allowed for oblique criticism of the Nigerian leaders of the late 1990s. In contrast to the usual reception of Antigone as a solitary, heroic martyr who scorns her sister’s apolitical cowardice, Òsófisan presents Tègònni’s rebellion as a collective female movement, thus rewriting Ismene’s role. Òsófisan’s portrayal of sisterly solidarity is paralleled in recent feminist readings and literary rewritings of Sophocles’ Antigone which seek to redeem Ismene as a political agent and to explore interpretations beyond the rejection of female commonality that had been taken as typical of Antigone the character and the play itself.