Western Classics and their Adaptation within the African Psyche: A Case Study of Walcott’s “The Odyssey” and Soyinka’s “The Bacchae of Euripedes”
Muhammad Safeer Awan
Department of English (FLL)
International Islamic University, Islamabad
In an essay with something to say about the earliest roots of colonialism in relation to the emergence of African literary trends in post-colonial contexts, Bernth Lindfors recounts that English, already a lingua franca, proved an expeditious vehicle for an “ambitious networking enterprise” whereby
… the mobile language community penetrated, occupied and colonized the immobile language communities, extending communicative hegemony over numerous widely scattered peoples by implanting its own tongue in the mouths of all it met … … The British … soon were in control of much of the import-export trade, for their voices carried further than anyone else’s. They came, they communicated, and they conquered, forging linguistic links not only directly between themselves and their many hosts but also laterally between all those hosts with who they had established productive parasitic intercourse. Their empire was a vast, worldwide internet connected by a single operational code. Anglophonia ruled the waves. (ARIEL, p.153)
Of course, these images are very clear for us, within our own post-colonial context in Pakistan and India; both in relation to the linguistic-cultural impositions as manifested by the Anglophone (especially literary) norms initiated by the Macaulay Minute and in the current computer terminology of ‘websites’ and ‘nets’ – altogether very ‘parasitic’ in their suggestiveness.1
However, in the case of the subcontinent, the relationship between the conquerors and the conquered, in various terms and at various levels, even within Anglophone perimeters, was never as stark as in the African continent. The subcontinental civilizations, both Muslim and Hindu, had firmly established, written literary traditions of their own at par with, if not better than those which the British had and sought to impose. While adopting many of the linguistic ‘advantages’ of the colonizers’ English for their own economic, social or political ends, the Indians were never really entirely pliable. Their older cultures viewed the Angrez (English/Whites) with a contempt masked by politeness and a seeming docility – an impassive quality, of sorts.
Africa suffered the effects of British colonization much more virulently. With its comparatively primitive, oral cultural-literary traditions and its heterogeneous, fragmented tribal societies, it was in no position to resist the more developed British onslaught. The effects were deeper and wider, the consequences more ominous. This assertion may be aptly reinforced with the fact that a vast depopulation of large tracts of the African continent continued for such a long time – countless blacks being sent into slavery in the West, to Europe and the American colonies.
In the same way, the cultural imperialism was also that much more intense. The traders and missionaries did their work well, in imposing not only their language and literature, but their habits, ideas and religious norms, even, over major parts of Africa. While the sociological, and other dimensions are not really within the scope of this research, 2 some important aspects of the English and, by extension, the larger, European – literary tradition in influencing current Black writers of African origin (whether in Africa itself or the Caribbean) are. Lindofrs again informs us, that
At first a disgruntled, inarticulate Caliban might explain to Prospero and Mrianda that “You taught me language, and my profit on’t/is, I know how to curse”, but once he had achieved a fuller fluency and learned how to read and write, Caliban discovered himself in command of an expressive power that went well beyond impotent imprecations. English became for him an instrument of self-assertion, a tool of liberation, a means to desirable counter – hegemonic ends. He could now talk back to those who had stolen his island and could make his grievances known to an international tribunal. He was hooked up and plugged into a global information superhighway, a brave new world of intelligible interactive discourse. (154)
The Essay on English Language and British English
Language is a social-cultural-geographical phenomenon. There is a deep relationship between language, culture and society. When we study a language, we have to study its dialects, register, slang, taboo, idiolects, etc. We can find the role of language and culture in The Parent Trap movie. The movie tells us about the differences culture of 2 girls who live in London and California. They were ...
This ‘tempestuous’ allegory, based as it is on the example of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, makes a number of very fine points. That, firstly, the Africans resented the imposition of English. That in the next phase, they took to the language as a means of socio-economic uplift/improvement; and in the next, as a weapon of resistance, a means of bolstering their sense of identity and struggling for their national liberation using the White Man’s own language to present the catalogue of his infamies and atrocities before the reading public in an increasingly ‘globalized’, aware, English-using world. The first generation of black–and, in the case of the Caribbean, Creole – writers using English as a medium of expression reflect the entire range of these concerns. From Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to N’Gugi’s A Grain of Wheat, we have expressions of the sense of loss, deracinatin and inferiority so effectively engendered by decades and centuries of British colonial manipulation; at the same time, we also have a glaring view of the pen-up anger and frustration, exploding into violence and transforming into larger, national freedom movement, or struggles, along, the Mau-Mau lines in Kenya, and elsewhere.
With the later generation of African and Caribbean writers, more ‘in touch’ with broader, international perspectives, and without the anger of earlier generations, we can now witness a deeper, more complex response to English as a creative medium – and, by extension, the classical traditions of Greece and Rome, as passed down through the English canon into the realms of the Third World imagination. This “leap” from the past to the future, giving access to a larger imaginative universe or palette, however,
… required years of schooling, including faithful adherence to grueling gymnastic regimen that bent him [Caliban] out of his original shape. By the time he mastered all the necessary moves, he had become a different person – accultured, assimilated, melded, hybridized. He was now a man of two worlds, no longer at ease in the old dispensation yet not entirely at home in the new. (Lindfors, 154)
Obviously, continuing the Caliban saga, the nature of Caliban himself had to change, or evolve, in terms of his essential grounding. Ultimately, a hybridization was inevitable. Yet, this process also proved beneficial, in terms of the tensions generated by the melding of different, even opposing traditions. A more intricate, richer literature has emerged.
The Essay on English as a World Language
The global spread of English over the last 50 years is remarkable. It is unprecedented in several ways: by the increasing number of users of the language, by its depth of permeation [“pE:mI’eISn] into societies and its range of functions. There is a model consisting of 3 circles proposed by B.B. Kachru in 1982 in order to describe regional varieties of English. The 1st or inner circle ...
In the case of this research, we shall be taking up two writers and their plays within the scope of our analysis i.e. Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey (in the Afro-Caribean context) and Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripedes (in the Nigerian / African context).
The contention is that both these works by these seasoned, mature writers, represent creative attempts to “revitalize” western canonical works by offering a visionary reconstruction of subterranean mythic recurrences through a “creolization” rooted in Caribbean folklore on the one hand, and an exploration of the Dionysian myth in the light of Yoruba (Nigerian) cosmology on the other. This imaginative restructuring of literary and religious myths does not so much betray a need for classical validation as a comparative scrutiny of archetypical patterns disclosing “latent cross-culturalities” (Harris, “Quetzalcoat” 40) i.e. a subterranean cross-cultural polyphonic structure. Thus, while there has been an adaptation of classical English / Western canonical structures into the African and Afro-Caribbean (“Black”) psyches, these structures have actually melded with more primitive, traditional aspects of “native” folklore and myth.
Walcott and Soyinka’s lays reveal an unrelenting obsession with myth and make clear its complex interaction with history. The two playwrights’ poetic imagination is constantly immersed in currents of change by crossing mythological archetypes (Caribbean, Yoruba and European) with fresh historical insights and by bringing myths “into explosive contact with the rawness of the present” (Moore 169).
This reactivation and creative mutation of mythological themes reveal the two poets as both “users” and “creators” of myths; their imagination is both rooted in mythic grounds and involved in a “mythopoetic” dynamic of cultural cross-fertilization.
In addition, by focusing first on the literary model of The Odyssey, then on The Bacchae, we can bring to light the common themes of exile and difficult, problem-ridden homeocoming and the reapplication of these in post-colonial terms. These two inspirational Greek classics, in spite of all their ‘English public school-type’ associations, became important sources for probing into the meanings of cultural disorientation, clash of civilizations, search for identity and recognition, and the ambiguity of character in which creativity and violence blend with equal intensity. Soyinka and Walcott, as they transform the original Western texts via their poetic strategies, translating them into an African and a Caribbean context, represent linkages ultimately ‘reconnecting’ or ‘reaching out’ across continents, healing the wounds of history. Thus, a commonality of poetic vision is offered which evades fixed notions of race and ethnicity, fully engaging in the process of creative possibilities engendered by cultural tensions.
The Essay on Odysseus Women Show Home
The many women that are included in Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey, all are presented with a certain appeal to them for which they come to attract Odysseus's eye. A group of the women that comes into contact with him are those helpful souls. Lets use Nausicaa as an example, she who encounters him when he arrives at her fathers land Scherif. Her charm, innocence and virtue are what intrigue ...
Walcott’s version of The Odyssey follows the Homeric outline rather closely; yet, under the surface of the faithful, epical “stage version” lies a much deeper cross-cultural dialogue between the ‘Old’ world and the ‘New’. This balance between presenting the epic spirit of Homer and activating Caribbean voices at the same time, is foreground from the beginning with a “Prologue” sung by Blind Billy Blue, a West Indian character, a calypso singer acting as Homeric alter ego connecting two oral traditions with his verse.
The first scene, imagined by Walcott and absent from Homer’s poem, shows the Greek warriors laying their weapons on a pyre in ritual farewell after the end of the Trojan wars, as Odysseus (or Ulysses) expresses his longing to return home. He inherits the shields of Achilles, after a hot argument with another hero, Ajax, who is bitterly aroused and curses Odysseus, “Bear it you turtle! Take ten years to reach your coast” (4).
Ten years later, the Swineherd Enmaeus, when he sees Odysseus holding the same shield after his long wanderings, addresses him similarly: “You look like a turtle, poking out from that shell” (111); and on their reunion, evading Penelope’s question, “will you miss the sea?”, he dreamily utters, “turtles paddling the shields of their shells” (159).
Just as the turtle carries its “home” on its back, Odysseus accumulates in his twenty years of wandering the memories and experiences that form the “shell” of his personality, his mythified as well as dark, complex sides:
ODYSSUES: My house has dark rooms that I dare not examine.
The Term Paper on The Odyssey Odysseus Homer Life
The Odyssey The Odyssey is one of the two great epic poems written by the ancient Greek poet Homer. Due to its antiquity, it is not known when or where it was first written, nevertheless, the approximate date and place is 700 BC Greece. Later publications are widespread as the text is transcribed in modern English with no deviation from the original story. The story is set in the lands and seas in ...
PENELOPE: Where’s your house?
ODYSSEUS: Here (He touches his temple) the crab moves with its property.
PENELOPE: And turtles. (131).
Walcott brings into sharp focus the ambivalent nature of homecoming and injects post-colonial concerns into the Western narrative. The figure of Odysseus appears as a personification of “Caribbean poetic subjectivity … a migrant condition perennially poised between journeying and a desire for home” (Thieme).
When Odysseus is shipwrecked in Sheria, Alcinous’ kingdom, Nausicaa notices, “the map of the world’s on your back. The skin’s peeling” (50).
This Donne-like metaphysical conceit reflects in cartographic terms the restlessly questing Caribbean spirit longing for a “home” but at the same time resisting psychic and cultural enclosure, or restriction. Odysseus’ back, like a turtle’s, represents the somatic expression of his psychic, spiritual heritage; the world has become his home, his exile a “pleasure”. He has become, to quote from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”, “a part of all that [he has] met”, and further,
… seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, (lines 13-15, 18)
In Walcott’s version, these Tennysonian lines are echoed by Odysseus’ mother when she asks:
Wasn’t this the promise I made you, Odysseus,
That in the oak’s crooked shade you would take your ease,
Quiet as a statue, with a stone bench for your plinth,
That here, in this orchard is where you would end your days,
With memories as sweet as the honeycomb’s labyrinth? (158-159)
“Quiet as a statue” expresses Odysseus’ fear of stasis and the “stone bench” suggests the petrified world he would have to live in if his mother’s vision came true. Against the perspective of homecoming as sterile fixity comes Athena’s final advice: “the harbour of home is what your wanderings mean” (159), echoing Menelaus’ conception of home as “God’s trial. We earn home like everything else” (29)
Odysseus’ exile thus represents rites of passage to his own self/home in the form of confrontations with different types of societies and spheres of existence. His first ordeal is the imprisonment on the island of the one-eyed giant, Cyclops. Walcott translates this episode into a critique of totalitarian government in present-day contexts. He signals the leap in time by having Odysseus introduce his telling as “the future is where we begin” (6) and the “Martial Chorus” sing “a thousand years in the future” (60).
The Term Paper on Apollonian And Dionysian Dionysus Ecstasy God
The Apollonian and Dionysian man complete each other in the sense that these two terms create our society. The Apollonian man was given its name from Apollo, the sun-god. He represents light, clarity, and form. The Dionysian man was given its name from the Greek god Dionysus. As the wine-god, he represents drunkenness and ecstasy. The Dionysian was the primal aspect of reality, as well as raw ...
The Cyclops’ society is presented as a timeless “era of the grey colonels” (62) where “thought is forbidden” and “History erased” (61).
The Cyclops’ one eye stands for repressive one-sidedness and spiritual blindness, his cannibalism (he eats Odysseus’ companions) for his destructive power. Odysseus conceals his identity under the pseudonym “No body”. Thus, in a society where “there is no I after the eye, no more history” (60), to survive is to apparently negate one’s identity, to merge into “nothingness” in order to subvert the society from within. At the same time, as Robert Hamner suggests in his excellent review of this play, the linguistic linkage of nobody / nowhere / nothing echoes other socio-political implications (104-105)/ It reflects, also, the Caribbean historical trauma rooted in a void created by European conquest and the institution of slavery which transported countless “nobodies” to a “nowhere” where their past heritage, racial memories, cultures and individualities were all reduced to “nothing”. It also contradicts V.S. Naipaul’s rather asinine statement that, “nothing was created in the West Indies” (29).
Like the Cyclops’ nation, “sheep herded in pens” (61), the Caribbean folk seemed featureless and insignificant, doomed to the slavish fate of a subject people – yet these very features of negation enabled them to survive in the West Indies, and to ultimately achieve their self-expression after independence.
Another significant ordeal occurs in Circe’s “brothel” (76), representing a double rite of passage. The two “divine temptresses” of the Homeric tradition, Crice and Calypso, are semantically combined in a pun in Billy Blue’s “Calypso” music, introducing the scene on Crice’s island. Here, she reveals that Odysseus must enter Hades and find and consult the seer Tiresias, who will disclose his future. This ritual is symbolically transposed into an Afro-Caribbean voodoo-type Shango ceremony where Zeus and Athena are invoked alongside Ogun, Erzulie and Shango. Odysseus’ eyes are “wrapped in a black cloth” (88) and he is given a wooden sword “severing the world of light from one past knowing” (88) and symbolizing the duality of human nature and the cosmic order: “the world / the underworld”, “body/soul” (88), life / death, known / unknown. As an “archetypical protagonist of the chthonic realm” (Moore, “Myth”, 3), “the shadow of imagination” (85), he undertakes an inner voyage towards a self-resolution or balancing, and he finally reaches Ithaca with a deeper knowledge of himself.
In addition to these ordeals, we have the symbolism of the “sea” motifs. These are key concepts in Walcott’s work, who by adopting Homer’s The Odyssey creatively opens up the ‘closed’ Mediterranean world and expands it to the New World. The sea evokes the peculiar poetic power of the Caribbean landscape and the internal creative rhythm of the West-Indian psyche. According to Harris, the Caribbean Sea represents a “complex womb” (Palace, 39) in which the “sound of surf” introducing the prologue sets from the very beginning the metaphor of the sea as a sort of poetic continuing of imaginative visions and revisions through the cross-cultural dialogue. Walcott’s imagination, thus, creatively fluctuates between transformation and continuity, thereby manifesting a post-colonial ambivalence which contradicts and at the same time expands the Homeric literary myth beyond the boundaries of cultural constrictions.
The Bacchae of Euripedes provides another canonical model in the Western/English literary contexts, which Soyinka creatively appropriates and revitalizes by infusing the Greek structure and text with his native Yoruba metaphysical concepts as well as socio-political comments. Edward Said considers The Bacchae of Euripides as, perhaps, “the most Asiatic of the Attic-dramas [where] Dionysus is explicitly connected with his Asian origins and with the strangely threatening excesses of oriental mysteries” (Orientalism, 56).
The play represents the ‘Meeting place’ of two overlapping traditions: Dionysism, an archaic cult originating from Thrace or Asia, and the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries devoted to Apollo and controlled by the authorities of the “polis” (city) represented in the original play by Pentheus, king of Thebes. Both mysteries belong to the ancient traditions of vegetation gods. The tension between ‘Dionysian’ and ‘Apollonian’ in purely Hellenistic terms, is also represented.
Euripedies’ Bacchae relates the legend of Dionysus’ return to his birthplace, Thebes, to assert his divine authority and impose his worship:
And now I come to Hellas-having taught
All the world else my dances and my rite
Of mysteries, to show me in men’s sight
Manifest god. (Euripedies 8)
The introduction of the Dionysia cult into Greece represents a subversive, liberating force clashing with Pentheus’ brutal; tyrannical, rational regime. The king refuses to acknowledge Dionysus’ divinity, attacks the cult violently and imprisons the hero who miraculously escapes. Pentheus gradually surrenders to Dionysus’ hypnotic power and agrees to be led to the mountain where the Bacchantes and Maenads are engaged in their frenzied rituals. A terrifying revenge is meted out against him when his own mother and sisters, in a state of Bacchic possession, tear his body from limb to limb. All these elements of the myth as adopted by Euripedes are faithfully recapitulated in Soyinka’s version but their cultural, social and political implications are translated into a post-colonial context of liberation from the imperial centre and revitalization via a creative process. Soyinka, in his own words, tells us that he transforms Euripedes’ play into,
… an imaginative exploration of the human revolt against deathness stagnation, the lack of renewal which runs contrary to man’s visceral identity with the nature around him; an exploration which is taken to the ultimate extremism of the expression of ‘Life Force’ through an … arrogation of the right to existence of the other. (“Between Self and System”, 46)
Soyinka thus sets the sterile violence of Pentheus’ regime against Dionysus’ regenerating violence. Thus, in the original play, Dioysus is a mediating figure between the Hellenistic and Asian cultures. He epitomizes the “alien” or “other” doubly inscribed in Oriental and Western Mythology. While preserving these features, or aspects, Soyinka’s Dionysus is modeled on the author’s conception of the Yoruba god Orgun. The Euripidian opposition or tension between Greece and Asia is here creatively disrupted by a third term, Africa. The Dionysian mysteries are further activated by their literary re-inscription in African concepts:
LEADER: Tribute to the holy hills of Ethiopia Caves of the unborn, and the dark ancestral spirits.
Home
Of primal drums round which the dead and living dance (248)
Soyinka expands Euripedes’ geographical scale to include Africa and inserts into the original text the Yoruba metaphysical conception of time and human existence based on the “principle of continuity inherent in myths of origin, secular or cosmic” (“Morality”, 11) i.e. the movements of transition between the various realms of existence, “ancestral” or “unborn”.
According to Soyinka, again,
Euripedes equates the liberation of the human psyche with a harmonious resolution in nature, thereby side-stepping, or at least subjecting the importance of seeming situation of anarchy to that larger man-nature community inter-related renewal … Revolution, as idiom of the theatre and explication of Nature itself is, in my opinion, at the heart of The Bacchae of Euripedes (“Beteen Self and System”, 45)
In the opening scene of Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripedes, the poet Tiresias takes over the role of scapegoat and receives himself the “symbolic flogging” given by overseers who can no longer tell “the difference between ritual and reality” (241).
His “extreme self-sacrifice” represents an individual attempt at spiritual regeneration. The wounds on his lashed body mirror his psychic and social transformation from an agent of a decaying state to a life-and-nature-adoring devotee:
Perhaps those clashes did begin something. … feel a small crack in the dead crust of the soul (24).
The cracking of his skin and soul announces a spiritual rebirth through the recognition of the essential creative / destructive life-principle. Through the revelation of “what flesh is made of … what suffering is” (243), through the intense and inner-most feeling of “life … its force”, Tiresias reaches a superior spiritual dimension and passes “into the universal energy of renewal … like some heroes or gods [he} could name” (243).
He forsakes the “future role” of a psychic intermediary, or medium, and enters the entranced state of the Bakchoi, an incarnation of the god, released from social and psychological restraints. Soyinka thus refashions Dionysus’ features according to his earlier interpretation of Ogun, the creative / destructive suffering god who slaughtered his own in. Both gods’ effect on mankind is simultaneously beneficial and malevolent, “most terrible, most gentle to mankind” (290).
Dionysus is described in Ogunian (Yoruba) terms: he is the “creative flint” (251), the god “of seven paths” (295) who
… makes an anvil of the mountain-peaks Hammers forth a thunderous will (251)
Similarly, Ogun “Him of the Seven Paths” (Ogun Abibiman) is the god of iron and metallurgy and embodies the “combative will” within the cosmic order. Soyinka also refers to the “Dionysian-Apollonian-Promethean essence of Ogun”, a blended archetypical ancestry reflected in Dionysus’ “mesh of elements reconciling a warring universe” (251).
Dionysus also represents, therefore, a harmonizing balance of extreme opposites and an enlightener and catalyst of human potentialities:
TIRESIAS: He frees the mind
Expands and fills it with uplifting visions …
Dionysus grants self-knowledge. (260-261).
The existential dimension of his Mysteries lies in the revelation of the totality of divine, human and natural experience. His cult dissolves the barriers between man and beast: women suckle cubs, they dismember cows thinking they are men.
The intrinsically contradictory character of man and nature i.e. the fusion of opposites such as peace and violence, beauty and horror, life and death are personified in Dionysus and Ogun, in their attempts to soothe the anguish of human severance and deified transformation – something that Soyinka asserts as lying at the very heart of traditional Yoruba tragedy. Both deities suffer and murder, both experience in themselves the primordial contradiction concealed in the essence of all things i.e. suffering through trespass, or presumption. Ultimately, the resolution arrives, the dilemma ends in the achievement of a synthesis via ‘surrender’ to nature itself.
According to Soyinka, the mythic society of the Yoruba gods manifests the “familiar Hegelian tension” between stasis (as represented by Obatala, and other such figures) and action (as represented by Ogun).
The Yoruba pantheon is, thus, very ‘human’ in its frailties and imperfections, and in yearning for perfectibility, within a cosmic ‘totality’. The proverbial wheel, here, also comes ‘full circle’ with the post-colonial tensions between action and stasis, home and exile, as expressed in Walcott’s work discussed earlier.
Through the exploration of the transformative and, therefore, fertile potentialities of myth, both Soyinka and Walcott transcend the static nature of tradition and enter a deeper dimension of creativity, capable of engendering a ‘new’ cultural ethos. This acute yearning for an identity, possibly a communal one, is reflected in the figures conceived by these two artists i.e. Odysseus and Dionysus / Ogun, embodying their desires and hopes as ‘alter egos’, no less. Walcott uses the archetypical figures or Odysseus as a representative of the ‘travelling’ West Indian poetic spirit and fluidity of imagination, that “resist closure, unitary definition” (Thieme); whereas Soyinka returns to ancient Yoruba myths and discovers an underlying universality in the latent correspondences between African, European and Asian symbols.
Beyond their different political agendas and poetic strategies, Walcott and Soyinka emphasize the need for individual self-discovery and offer a humanistic, cross-cultural vision transcending conventional thoughts and value systems. Both, through these works, also reveal how deeply they have imbibed from the springs of the Western canon, in literary terms, and how far their creative psyches have been determined by such a process. Finally, we are able to realize how vital English itself has been, as a creative tool, an intermediary between cultures and bridge lining diverse traditions into a more ‘universal’ symbiosis, of sorts. Because of its flexible adaptation, Caliban has taken his rightful place amongst the Prosperos and Mirandas.
Notes
1. For a very fine exposition of these aspects of British Colonialism, see Gauri Vishwanathan’s The Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
2. As a mater of interest, readers may consult these volumes for a more detailed account of the colonization of Africa and Black slave trade: (i) A. E. Ayandele, The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria. London: Longman, 1966; (ii) P.B. Clarke, West Africa and Christianity C. 1450-1980. London: Arnold, 1985 (iii) P.D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: U. Wisconsin Press, 1969; (iv) J.E. Inikori (ed) Forced Migration – The Impact of the Slave on African Societies. London: Hutchinson, 1981; (v) R.W. July, The Origins of Modern African Thought. New York: Praeper, 1967; (vi) T.W. Schick, Behold the Promised Land. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1977.
Works Cited
• Euripedes. The Bacchae. Tr. G. Murray. London: Allen and Unwin, 1924.
• Hamner, Robert. “Quetzalcoatl and the Smoking Mirror: Reflections on Originality and Tradition”. In Wasafiri 20 (Autumn 1994).
• Harris, Wilson. Palace of the Peacock from The Guyana Quartet. London: Faber and Faber, 1985.
• Homer. The Odyssey. Tr. E. V. Rieu. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946.
• Lindfors, Bernth. “Sites of Production in African Literature Scholarship”. ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature. 31:1&2, Jan-Apr. 2000.
• Moore, Gerald. “The Uses of Myth: an Examination of African Revolutionary Drama”. Declarations of Cultural Independence in the English Speaking World – A Symposium. Ed. L. Sampietro. Universita Degli Studi di Milano, Italy: D’Imperio Editore Nova, 1989.
• Naipaul, V. S. The Middle Passage. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
• Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.
• Soyinka, Wole. The Bacchae of Euripedes – Collected Plays. Oxford: OUP, 1973.
• ___________ “Morality and Aesthetics in the Ritual Archetype”. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: CUP, 1976.
• ___________ “Between Self and System: The Artist in Search of Liberation”. Art, Dialogue and Outrage. n.p. n.d.
• Thieme, John. “Derek Walcott’s Odysseys”. Delivered at the Conference, “Moving Words, Moving Worlds”. University of Leeds, UK, September, 1994.
• Tennyson, Lord Alfred. “Ulysses”. Tennysons: A Selected Edition. Ed. Christopher Ricks. London: Longman, 1989.
• Walcott, Derek. The Odyssey: A Stage Version. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990.
