REVIEW: THE WIVES’ REVOLT BY J P CLARK

The Wives’ Revolt is the first comedy by J P Clark, the renowned poet and playwright. The play portrays a world where women are fed up with the injustices meted out to them by men.

Plot

Erhuwaren men share the money paid to them by the company that drills oil from their community. They share it in three parts – one for the elders, one for the men and the last for the women. The problem is that the ‘elders’ are all men.

The women say “no!” To make it fair, they demand the money be split into two – a simple division between the sexes. But the men also say “no!” The women revolt, beginning a cycle of ‘do me, I do you’.

Thoughts

There are only three characters in this drama - making the story easy to follow from the outset. It clearly dramatises the injustice the women suffer at the hands of their men. Unlike in traditional times, when the fairer sex had to swallow whatever males gave them, the wives (and even the mothers of the men) of the Erhuwaren don’t take ‘no’ for an answer. They know how to fight for their rights.

Okoro represents the deepest kinds of misogyny: when men don’t help their women to do the chores, don’t give their wives enough money for food and yet complain the soup isn’t tasty. Or those who beat up their partners in a drunken state and cap it all by accusing them of crimes they haven’t committed.

Koko, the wife of Okoro, conveys female dynamism: the living version of the saying, ‘as you make your bed, so you will lie on it’. If you want peace, they’ll give you peace. But if you want trouble, they’ll neither spare you nor themselves.

Idama, the friend and peer of Okoro, is the human conscience struggling to create a balance between a man’s longing to satisfy himself and the need to do so without offending anyone.

Verdict

The blurb of this 62-page book calls it a ‘hilarious piece’. But when I was done reading I realised I hadn’t laughed once. It reminds me of literary critic Professor N A Akwanya’s thoughts on genre. He said: “Tragedy is not tragedy just because it can make the reader cry.”

In the same way, this work succeeds as a well-written comedy – not because it is hilarious because, to me, it isn’t – but because it showcases an almost surreal world where actions, no matter how horrible they are, do not attract serious consequences.

You may need to keep a dictionary beside you to look up uncommonly used words like ‘repudiating’ (means ‘refuse to accept’). But not to worry – most of the language isn’t beyond the reach of an average reader.

THE WIVES' REVOLT
Coming to this play from Ola Rotimi's action-packed sensational farce, this equally farcical comedy is, however, more a drama of mental pictures than it is an imitation of significant action. Like a radio play, it depends quite heavily on 'the extension of our sense of hearing' (Mclluhan) than on the exercise of our sense of seeing. Ideally, theatre is an audio-visual medium. The female protest march in the penultimate
scene would definitely have been more dramatic and as such more effective had it been staged before our very eyes. Knowing the theatrical difficulties this would entail, however, the playwright reports the event through a character, Koko. The sounds of protest, it would be obvious, would have to be carried or broadcast to the audience mechanically. Possibly because of the inadequacies of such broadcast medium, the playwright makes Koko recite to us the words of the protest chant.

This is not to say that there are no very dramatic episodes in the play. The penultimate scene, in fact, is where the play truly comes alive for the first time, especially with the physical fight between Okoro and his wife. There is also the very effective visual of Okoro in the fourth Movement carrying a baby on his back.
The problem here, however, would be how to make the baby act and cry according to script, except, again, we would have to resort to the use of a mechanical medium. One cannot help imagining that the play would have been a lot more effective if the playwright had adopted an Athol-Fugard-style narrative monologue interspersed with illustrative skits, a simulation of the television documentary. With the number of folkloric songs in this play (an asset) it would also have been possible for the playwright to adopt the Anansesem motif. As it is, however, the playwright relies heavily on dialogue which easily becomes unnatural as he forces in extraneous reference after extraneous reference without due regard for conversational
coherence. This is the only way our playwright is able to bring in so many themes in such a short play. A list of the themes, which are mostly verbally-asserted rather than enacted, is given below, after an enunciation the major one.

Major Theme: Need for Female-Gender Respect
The primary theme is the unsavoury consequences of the traditional condonation of gender discrimination in African societies. The events here reenacted are true history but have, ofcourse, been creatively remoulded to succinctly convey the social lessons intended. An oil company had given monetary compensation to the Erhuwaren community for the despoilment of their land through oil exploration. The money was shared into three parts: one part to the elders, one part to the males and the third part to the females. The females, led by the wives, felt that the sharing was unfair, since all the elders were males (females, no matter how old they become are not admisable to the elders council) They protested this inequity so stridently in a public meeting. that when three men testified before the elders that their wives
had started turning into goats to harass law-abiding townfolk, they were believed. Rather than appease the aggrieved women, therefore, the town rulership responded by banning all goats (a domestic animal mostly owned by women while men owned pigs) from the town. The women, therefore, decided to march in protest through a number of Ughievwen clan towns and ended up in Eyara, a traditional rival town in the creation of Udje satiric songs. While the protest lasted, the men had to do all the domestic work, including childcare. In the end, the men learnt the importance of the role of women in society and agreed to share the compensation equally with the womenfolk and, in addition, pay compensation to them. The obnoxious law was also repealed.

The story teaches that women are indispensible in society and ought to be treated with respect. The dialogues of Koko and her male-chauvinistic husband help to place in pejorative light a lot of the traditional African attitudes to women and women affairs. Early and polygamous marriages are implicity criticized (IV, pp. 26 & 36)) That the women are accused of withcraft is significant since this is the same manner in which women in African societies are unjustly targeted during witch-hunts. The listing of female chores in Movement III show the subordination of women in society. Although the fire-making and water-fetching difficulties of Okoro and Idama are farcical, they do illustrate the importance of women in the African home. Their inevitability is make most clear when Okoro asks the crying baby he is backingif it wants to be breast-fed. and proceeds to rave at the poor child accusing it of failing to realize that 'those with full breasts' have walked out of town ((IV, p. 26) (These instances, also, however, show that there is need for basic survival skills among men in African societies) The continuous reference to old girls (an attempt by the playwright to translate the pejorative 'emetogbe') indicates that there is a high rate of divorce in the society. Koko is used to very effectively describe and upbraid the injustice of African divorce, which discountenances all the contributions the wife has made to the building of the home as she is usually sent parking without alimony (V, p.51) In fact, her bride price has to be refunded by her family! . Adultery attracts for the female threat of death by cutlass (V, p. 41) while it is condoned for males (II, p.12) The norm in African matrimony appears to be discontentment, bickering and recriminations (IV, p. 25). The in-laws do not help matters, being given to unconditional negative regard and expectations (III) These various examples and issues should be brought up and exhaustively treated during group study discussions,
drawing, especially, on traditional experience.

Other Themes (Not dramatically demonstrated and as such ephemeral and journalistic in value):
1. Oil explorational devastation of the land: Koko makes reference to land turned-up into pits and mounds 'like a place oil companies have passed through in search of new fields' (II) Pollution of the waters mean that the imported iced fish has replaced the natural fresh fish even among traditional fishing societies (II) Despite the despoilation, the oil money goes to Nigerian capitals far from the oil fields (II, VI) The compensations paid to the local communities are so little they cannot build schools or roads (p.60) and, as we see in this play, often cause tragic splits. Prof. G.G. Darah who specializes in the oral literature of this area, in a conversation, points out the unfortunate case of an Urhobo clan where a four-million-Naira compensation led to the beheading of the traditional ruler and bitter internicine conflict.
2. Currupt acquisition of traditional honorary titles (II, IV, p.33)
3. Unhygeinic preparation of garri (a staple food)
4. Filthiness of Lagos
5. Superstition (II, IV, p.33)
6. Domestic issues

Language
The language of this play is highly figurative. The playwright puts in the mouths of his rural characters a lot of striking similes appropriately drawn from the local flora and fauna:
1. Ants are aptly descibed as able to move big objects, though mute, while flies (women in this context) despite all their noise cannot move anything (II, p. 11)
2. Okoro says he wont be picked up by the tail like some wet rat out of a sewer (II, p12)
3. Okoro describes the fish in his mouth as 'soft as water-yam in oil'(II, p. 3)) Other examples are:
4. 'what they fed their guests on couldn't fill the belly of an eel' (IV, p. 34)
5. 'walking like a hen that has just laid' (V, p.38)
6. 'hotter than pepper taken by the Ijaw with palm wine' (V, p.41)
7. 'Words break in your mouth as an unripe banana (V, p.48)
There are other striking usages as when Okoro says the females if they protest to the capital would be 'snuffed out as so many spluttering candles' (II, p.15) and a few queer ones as 'watch your mouth' (II) , 'Nobody called you a tell-tale' (II) and Koko who reportedly 'bobs' while serving the husband water (II, p. 14)

Editorial
Koko is erroneously presented as Idama in page 44 and as Okoro in page 46.

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