Otaelo: Reading Shakespeare’s Othello in Igbo Culture

Abstract

Adaptations involve the translation or the transposition of an original text into another form--rendering of the plays of other cultures in terms of place, time, title and sometimes framework and thematic concern, without losing the dramatic quality. The essence of adaptation, what Adeoti calls “looking back on the ancients” (4), foregrounds the liberal humanist concern about the world that is to Barry “essentially unchanging” (18). Shakespeare has enjoyed tremendous attention, in terms of the adaptation of his works by African, Caribbean and dramatists of other climes than perhaps any other writers known. Several of his works have yielded to “re-contextualising” or “transculturation” (Hutcheon146), which allowed for, in the opinion of Conteh-Morgan and Olaniyan, “inter-cultural negotiations”(53). This paper examines one of such efforts by Ahmed Yerima, a foremost Nigerian dramatist, whose dramaturgy is marked by the clear-cut evidence of the influence of Soyinka’s Ogun tragedy, that owes its conception to Nietzsche’s and “best understood in Hellenic values as a totality of the Dionysian, Apollonian and Promethean virtues” (Soyinka 231). He merges indigenous cultural material with Western model, in his adaptation of Othello, to “re-work Shakespeare in African terms,” as argued by Banham et al (287). With the Igbo Osu caste system, a ritual and cultural practice that separates rather than unite the people as his central focus, he draws attention to the sameness and difference between the source text and the adaptation, much as the play engages with the postcolonial reality and concern of the African society in a fast changing world.