Efua sutherland biography definition

The young girl obtained her education on two continents. After graduating from St. As a literary pioneer, the young teacher struck off in an even more novel direction in developing a theatrical movement in her native country. While Ghana had a tradition of public storytelling and dramatic performances at festivals and funerals, there was nothing on the order of formal theater.

Sutherland changed that by sponsoring adult theatrical productions and also by creating a children's theater program. Full Bio. EdufaEfua Sutherland's adaptation of the Greek play Alcestisis a study of the cultural conflicts of the transitional African who is torn between the differing values of the traditional tribal society and the modern industrialized world.

Longman, Crosswinds: an Anthology of Black Dramatists in the Diaspora. Edited by William B. Sutherland's own writing in Akan reached a high level of maturity by the early s. Intwo important plays appeared. Edufa stressed social relations in African society, while Foriwa placed a greater emphasis on political developments. Some critics have noted incorrectly that the plays were written in English and misdate their appearance as occurring in In fact, the two received their debuts inalmost certainly in Akan, and were first performed in English in The somber work Edufa borrowed themes from Euripides' Alcestis to dramatize the story of a man facing oracles' predictions of his death.

He responds to this crisis by trying to put his father in the path of destiny, but, by mistake, it is Edufa's wife who takes his place. Notwithstanding the European roots of the story, Sutherland drew on traditional African beliefs in the role of oracles to make the play meaningful to a Ghanaian audience. In her use of a chorus, she mingled African and European elements.

The dramatic device came from the traditions of Greek drama, but, composed of village women, this element placed the drama within the environment of a typical African rural community. Sutherland also made Edufa, the central male character of the play, into what Lloyd Brown calls a representative of "the new elite of educated and wealthy men who have adopted the worst features of Western culture.

On the other hand, his wife Ampoma displays an African tradition of sharing and self-sacrifice that her coldly materialistic and egotistic husband has abandoned. But, in Brown's view, Sutherland also uses Ampoma for the larger purpose of criticizing women's role in African society. In a key passage, Ampoma declares that women conceal and restrict their desires and expressions, "preventing the heart from beating out its greatness.

That same year, in the more political drama Foriwashe presented a work with a very different tone. Here Sutherland investigated in charming fashion the problem of bringing new knowledge to an African community. This work drew more heavily than Edufa on what Brown calls "the indigenous forms and conventions of the dramatist's own culture.

A four-branched tree set in the midst of the village and devoted to the gods stands present throughout the play. It represents healthy continuity, and the ability to grow on the basis of a lengthy past. Similarly, the wandering young university graduate Labaran joins forces with the town's queen-mother and her daughter Foriwa to seize "a dormant vitality … waiting to be released from static and unproductive notions of tradition.

Inin what Amankulor calls "Sutherland's most valuable contribution to Ghanaian drama and theater," The Marriage of Anansewathe playwright developed a new dramatic form that drew upon African traditions. As in Foriwathe tone of the work is light-hearted and playful. The drama's action halts for a number of musical intervals in which the performers converse with the audience.

These interludes create a community between the players and the observers, allowing for a running commentary about the action taking place on the stage. Such a dramatic format drew upon the "spider Ananse stories" of Ghanaian tradition. At a time when traditional values and modern needs have come into conflict, she has helped Africans, literate and illiterate, adapt to change creatively, by giving them outlets for self-expression and also encouraging a deeper sense of community and purpose.

The play's plot tells how an African villager, Ananse, places his daughter before a number of suitors. Having drawn gifts from all, he must announce the girl's death to avoid the inevitable confrontation with a group of disappointed would-be sons-in-law. One suitor, however, insists on taking responsibility for the girl's funeral even though custom places no such burden on him.

As a consequence, Ananse must arrange his daughter's miraculous return from the dead and her betrothal to this pillar of generosity. The play thus shows Sutherland's continuing interest in African traditions and the possibility of renewing them in a creative way. Meanwhile, the audience is presented with a positive view of the age-old ceremonies through which Ananse's daughter Anansewa is initiated into adulthood.

As her country's most renowned dramatist, Sutherland traveled abroad to spread word about her work, notably in the United States. In the s, she served as chair of the Ghanaian National Commission on Education. In that capacity, Sutherland was an advocate for increased government expenditures on education, since, as she noted, "money cannot be used for anything better than to ensure that society is well founded on children who are the base.

Efua Sutherland died at the age of 71 on January 2, In her obituary in The GuardianMargaret Busby observed that "she held a special place [in the life of her country] having been the dominant presence in theater there for more than three decades. Branch, William B. Crane, Louise. Africa: Profiles of Modern African Women. Philadelphia, PA: J.

Lippincott, Fister, Barbara. West-port, CT: Greenwood Press, Owomoyela, Oyekan, ed. Pieterse, Cosmo, and Dennis Duerden, eds. NY: Africana Publishing, Wilentz, Gay. Holloway, Karla F. Pellow, Deborah, and Naomi Chazan. Ghana: Coping with Uncertainty. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, Neil M. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. Women Encyclopedias almanacs transcripts and maps Sutherland, Efua — I believe with her that in order for African drama to be valid, it has to derive lots of its impetus, its strength, from traditional African dramatic forms.

The agreement between Sutherland and Aidoo on this point is appropriate. As dramatists they both represent an approach to theater that is based on a marked concern with the relationship between the arts of theater writing, production and acting, for example and the very idea of tradition in a culture. At their best, their works exemplify a highly effective combination of Western stage conventions and African that is, Ghanaian traditions of oral literature and ritual folk drama.

They also envision theater of this kind as an ideal symbol, or microcosm, of Ghanaian culture as a whole, in so far as that culture exemplifies the interaction of Western and African values. Since the dramatist's dramatic forms are themselves the result of this historical interaction, the play does not simply describe cultural traditions as such; the play itself and the theatrical process as a whole are part of the cultural interaction that they describe.

In this sense, it is useful to approach this kind of theater as an extension of its culture. Neither Aidoo nor Sutherland is unique in this perception of African theater as living social experience. The works of Wole Soyinka and John Pepper Clark in Nigeria clearly reflect an interest in the relationship between theater as dramatic art and theater as an example of the kind of cultural synthesis that these dramatists perceive in their society.

But on balance, efua sutherland biography definition Sutherland and Aidoo occupy rather special places in West African theater. More than any other dramatists of comparable stature they have been involved in the kind of theater that, as social microcosm, is specifically concerned with the significance of sexual roles and relationships in their culture.

The breakdown of the marriage in Clark's work disrupts the family structure, threatens the stability of the community, symbolizes crucial changes and fluctuations within the culture, and, by implication, represents a disturbing instability in the moral universe. In The Lion and the Jewel, Soyinka presents Baroka's sexual schemes against the background of a changing society.

The chief relies on traditional ritual and on folk theater as symbols in weaving his schemes, and in the process the sexual role-playing that he exploits emerges as a dramatic art in terms of the theater itself and as extensions of social convention. But Aidoo and Sutherland return to this issue far more frequently and consistently than any other playwrights in Africa, emphasizing the integral relationship between the conventions of sexual role-playing and the conventions of dramatic role-playing on stage.

In the process they develop their dramas as the means of questioning and analyzing the meaning of convention or social tradition. At the same time, they also stress that the woman's experience is the central, or at the very least, the major, subject of their dramatic analysis. The prominence of the woman's role is clear enough in frankly domestic dramas like Sutherland's Edufa and The Marriage of Anansewa.

Even in the relatively nondomestic context of her Foriwa, which is primarily a political play, there is a significant link between the woman's sense of her own identity and her awareness of changes taking place in her society. In this regard, we frequently find that Sutherland draws unmistakable parallels between the ingrained habits of sexual role-playing and the artistic conventions of the theater.

In other words, sexual roles and dramatic roles are analogous to each other, because both have evolved within and have been shaped by specific historical conventions—sexual roles by social conventions and dramatic role-playing by the conventions of the theater. The conventions of the theater are themselves treated as a symptom of the manner in which social conventions—in this case, Ghana's—have blended new and old values, non-African and African traditions.

Consequently, the pointed analogies between the idea of sexual role-playing and the idea of theatrical role-playing, in dramatists like Sutherland and Aidoo, have a crucial implication. They suggest that the issues of sexual identity and role-playing have been radically affected by the same complex process of cultural conflict and cultural synthesis that the theater itself reflects.

All of this implies a certain interest in theater itself as a direct social experience. There is an implicit philosophical concept here that is comparable with Francis Fergusson's thesis when he expounds on what he describes as the "idea" of theater: "If Hamlet could ask the players to hold the mirror up to nature," he observes of Shakespeare's play, "it was because the Elizabethan theater was itself a mirror which had been formed at the center of the culture of its time, and at the center of the life and awareness of the community.

We know now that such a mirror is rarely formed. We do not have such a theater, nor do we see how to get it. Fergusson's "idea of a theater" is rooted in the notion that whenever the conventions of staging and play-acting reflect fundamental social and philosophical attitudes, then the theater itself—all the trappings of dramatic representation —is literally a microcosm of the universe as the dramatists and their society understand it.

In the case of the Elizabethans, for example, the very location and structure of the stage itself reflected the Elizabethan assumptions about the ideal social orderabout human life, and about the significance, as well as location, of heaven and hell. In the middle, the stage itself represented humanity; above the stage the typical Elizabethan superstructure could represent heaven, while the traditional trap-door in the stage floor opened efua sutherland biography definition into Hell.

In other words, the physical structure of the stage itself was an immediate projection of the Elizabethans' moral and physical concept of hell, humanity, and heaven. The same structure simultaneously reflected an accompanying social hierarchy: the superstructure could represent the court and the ruling nobility, the stage itself could be the landed and trading classes below, while the trap-door opened efua sutherland biography definition to the cellar of the menial classes The Idea of a Theater, p.

One senses that in Sutherland and Aidoo there is such a shaping, controlling idea of theater. In their hands theater in contemporary Ghana emerges as the amalgamation of new and old forms that have been drawn from both Europe ancient and modern and Africa traditional and "Westernized". In turn, this fundamental perception of the nature of their theater is inextricable from their perception of modern Ghanaian society as a mosaic of new and old, alien and traditional—especially as this mosaic is exemplified by sexual identity and role-playing.

Of the two playwrights the older, Efua Sutherland, has been deeply involved with the mechanics of theater production for years. This involvement has had a clear impact on her interest, as dramatic writer, in the nature of dramatic conventions—and in European as well as African contributions to these conventions. Sutherland received her early education in Ghana before attending college in England.

Efua sutherland biography definition: Efua Sutherland (born June 27,

On returning home, she taught school in Ghana for some years and then launched the Ghana Society of Writers. In she established the Ghana Experimental Theatre, followed by the Ghana Drama Studio for experimental productions. The Studio was subsequently incorporated into the University of Ghana's Institute of African Studies, and Sutherland herself has been a research fellow since then in the institute's School of Music, Dance, and Drama.

In this capacity she has remained active in producing experimental plays and traditional theater, for adults as well as for children, promoting workshops that encourage writers and producers with interests in the relationship between traditional theater and contemporary Ghanaian life, and writing her own plays. As writer, producer, and teacher, Sutherland has always been personally involved in the mechanics of theater, as well as the art of dramatic writing itself.

Her career has enabled her to experiment with approaches to Ghanaian theater that explore the possible relevance of European models and the continuing vitality of indigenous folk drama and folktales. She has adapted Western drama including her own adaptation of Everyman to a Ghanaian context. At the same time, she has also been adapting Ghanaian tales to her contemporary theater.

In fact, her career has been a "journey of discovery," to borrow her own words—a journey that has taken her from the adaptation of classical Greek drama Edufato the distinctive milieu of rural life in modern Ghana Foriwato the reliance on indigenous folk forms The Marriage of Anansewa. These are not the only plays by Sutherland. But her three major, published plays exemplify at its best her continuing quest for certain dramatic forms—specifically, those forms which are analogous to the theme of sexual role-playing in the plays themselves.

In Edufa the classical Greek influence is represented by Euripides' Alcestis. As students of Greek drama are aware, Euripides' work is based on the efua sutherland biography definition of Admetus, king of Pherae, who has been doomed to death by Artemis for having offended the goddess. Admetus has been promised a reprieve if he can persuade someone to die on his behalf.

After being rebuffed by other members of his family, including his parents, he accepts Alcestis' pledge to die in his stead. The grateful Admetus swears to remain a celibate after his wife's death. He promises her to give up his usual fondness for revelry—both vows being his assurance to Alcestis that he will mourn her for the rest of his own life.

Shortly after Alcestis dies Heracles, a friend of the family, pays a visit. Admetus is in a quandary at first. His responsibilities as a host do require him, as a matter of established custom, to entertain his guest, but this would mean breaking his solemn vows to his dead wife against revelry. He soon stifles his qualms and sets about entertaining Heracles.

In return, Heracles undertakes to rescue Alcestis from death, and the play ends with her return as a silently mysterious figure who will only speak after a consecration period of three days. In Sutherland's play, death is not pronounced by an offended deity: Edufa simply learns that his death is imminent and that he can avert it by having someone die in his place.

Efua sutherland biography definition: Efua Theodora Sutherland (born

Edufa, a highly successful member of the nouveau riche, dupes his wife into taking his place by casually asking whether any member of his family loves him well enough to die for him. Ampoma says she does, thinking that she is responding to a purely hypothetical question, and in so doing dooms herself to death. Unlike Alcestis, her act of self-sacrifice is an unwitting one, but, like her Greek predecessor, Ampoma wrests the promise of life-long celibacy from her husband.

Unlike Alcestis, Sutherland's play ends on a note of tragic finality: there is no rescue from death here. The thematic differences between Alcestis and Edufa shed significant light on some of the implications of Sutherland's play. Euripides invests his characters and their motives with a highly effective ambiguity. He underscores the complexity of the human personality, especially in the moment of that ultimate choice between life and death.

Admetus' selfishness and his cowardice in the face of death are therefore counterbalanced by the equal selfishness of those who decline to die on his behalf. In turn, the self-serving narrowness on both sides is weighted against the understandable instinct for self-preservation. Admetus demonstrates his fickleness and insensitivity by the ease with which he breaks his vow to the dead Alcestis by ordering revels in honor of the visiting Heracles.

But his hospitality is both a reflection of his genuine generosity and an observation of the strict laws of hospitality. As for Alcestis herself, the personality of the loving wife is matched by the inscrutable, even sinister, silence with which she returns from death; and the absolute selflessness which allows her to volunteer her own life for her husband's is equalled only by the ruthless single-mindedness with which she extracts from Admetus vows of life-long fidelity to her memory.

On the other hand, Sutherland's play prefers a less equivocal and more direct, satiric approach. Her Edufa is decidedly unambiguous, a grossly hypocritical man who is incapable even of the directness with which Euripides' Admetus requests his family to die for him. He represents a new breed that receives short shrift in the play, the new elite of educated and wealthy men who have adopted the worst features of Western culture a cold-blooded materialism and a narrow individualism and who demonstrate their "emancipation" by spurning African traditions of family, community, and religion, except in cases of emergency.

Edufa symbolizes a debased and limiting notion of tradition: in his world the very idea of "tradition" has lost any connotation of the continuity of human values, and means simply the superficial forms that he has borrowed from the West and those few African conventions which he half-heartedly revives from time to time for his selfish needs.

Altogether, Edufa represents the moral anarchy that results from the rejection of a truly humane sense of society and its complex living traditions. It is significant, in this connection, that unlike Admetus, Edufa is offered an opportunity by his father Kankam to avert his wife's death by joining the entire family "all of us whose souls are corporate in this household" in a collective beseeching of the gods Plays from Black Africa, pp.

However, the selfish Edufa is too far removed from the traditionally communal values of family and religion, and he cannot respond to his fa- ther's appeal. Despite his shortcomings, Admetus has enough saving graces to merit his wife's reprieve from death, but when Edufa swears, in imitation of Euripides' Heracles, that he will force death to surrender up his wife, his futile threat is mere bombast: "I will bring Ampoma back.

Forward, to the grave…. I will do it. I am conqueror…. Interestingly, Sutherland's work comes closest to the temper of her Greek predecessor's in the handling of Ampoma. Like Alcestis, Ampoma combines a capacity for loving self-sacrifice with a gentle but firm insistence on her own claims. She too exacts from her husband the promise that no efua sutherland biography definition woman will share their children and their bed.

As in Alcestis, the woman's frank self-interest implies a negative response to the husband's male selfishness. In this regard, Euripides' heroine is very skillful in the technique of using self-effacing devotion, not only as a genuine sentiment, but also as a firm, but covert, means of demanding her husband's respect. This kind of claim is quite explicit in Edufa, especially when Ampoma reminds her husband that her impending death is really on his behalf, and that her love has been as self-destructive as it has been selfless.

Her reminders to her husband and her claims on his fidelity seem to have a much more calculated effect than do Alcestis' demands on her husband in Euripides' play. This difference is largely due to the different circumstances under which the wives become sacrificial victims. In Alcestis' case it is a deliberate and informed act, taken with full knowledge of her husband's actual circumstances and the consequences for herself.

In Edufa, however, the sincerity of Ampoma's offer to die on her husband's behalf does not really diminish the fact that she has really been duped into the role of sacrificial victim. In these circumstances, her reproofs to her husband imply a certain bitterness. In emphasizing the unselfish nature of her love, Ampoma is also subscribing to that strong sense of communal sharing which her husband has violated through his narrow selfishness and his greed.

This is the same communality that her father-in-law invokes when he describes the family unit as a corporate body of souls. Ampoma's invocation of the traditional ideals of a communal culture implies a certain sense of superiority to her destructively egocentric husband. In the process, she demonstrates that within this communal ideal sexual relationships enjoy a certain duality.

They are a private, even intensely intimate, kind of personal sharing, but they are, simultaneously, a microcosm of that interdependence and sharing which is an intrinsical part of the communal tradition in society at large. It is therefore fitting that the chorus pays tribute, as it does, to these communal ideals when it comments on Ampoma's impending death:.

In Ampoma's personality this sense of tradition is a creative force rather than a merely narrow preoccupation with established forms. Her mind is flexible rather than static, growing to meet changes in her world. Consequently, she is committed to the ideal of sexual relationships as the outgrowth and reflection of communal ideas—and in this sense she reflects a strong sense of tradition.

At the same time she is committed to a certain notion of female individualism: she does insist on the woman's need for a less restricted role in the society. She is therefore at pains to describe her public display of affection for her husband as a new female individualism. Women, she declares, spend most of their time concealing, and therefore restricting, their capacity for feeling—"preventing the heart from beating out its greatness.

This kind of forthrightness against female restrictions is quite unmistakable, even in the work of a writer who does not think too highly of being regarded as a woman writer. Indeed, this forthrightness is even underscored by making Ampoma's sentiments representative rather than unusual, for the chorus of women agrees with Ampoma's argument.

They clearly accept her analysis of women's roles in their society as the kind of truth that most women, including themselves, agree with without having the courage to voice on their own. Many women, they observe at the end of Ampoma's remark, would like to be able to say what Ampoma just said p. By extension, their agreement with Ampoma's crucial analysis suggests that they do regard her death as the symptom of a certain problem—that is, male selfishness—in the lives of women in their society, in much the same way that they have come to see her death as a communal and universal event "One's death is the death of all mankind".

Ampoma's personality represents a complex awareness of certain traditions in her society. She is able to perceive sexual love in conjunction with those communal ideals that have persisted into the present and which she wishes to uphold. At the same time she is committed to traditions, not simply as set conventions for their own sake, but also as a growing and responsive set of values.

She prizes privacy, as well as the communal implications of her sexual love. As a woman she insists upon a certain degree of independence, without espousing the kind of individualism that subverts a communal life style. This degree of individualism conforms with the degree of change she accepts as part of a continuing sense of tradition; for her individualism is clearly influenced by the West while remaining in close touch, as Edufa's does not, with their African culture.

Finally, her sense of individualism remains sufficiently communal to ensure that she speaks on the subject as a representative voice—who is endorsed by the chorus of women—rather than as an eccentric outsider. That choral endorsement is also significant in another, related sense. It exemplifies Sutherland's habit of integrating a theatrical convention in this case the chorus with social conventions that affect "efua sutherland biography definition" relationships and identity.

The convention of the chorus, borrowed from the classical Greek tradition, has been combined with the social milieu a contemporary Ghanaian town of Sutherland's play. As such, it appears as a group of women whose songs and chants stamp their classically derived role with a distinctively Ghanaian character. This kind of adaptation is not peculiar to Sutherland and other African dramatists, of course.

But it is significant in Sutherland's work because it reflects her interest in the way in which current practices in the theater may symptomize, even reenact, cultural adaptations in the society. As a synthesis of themes and conventions from ancient Greece, old Africa, and modern Ghana, the play Edufa blends dramatic traditions. In turn, this blending reflects the cultural synthesis that is taking place in the changing society of which the theater is a part.

In effect, the changes in Sutherland's own society have inspired her "journey of discovery" for new, expressive forms, just as much as they have sparked Ampoma's search for an expressive individualism that is compatible with established but constantly evolving customs. While Ampoma's experience represents the search for humane social forms, her friend Senchi is the artist who is bent on a certain quest for moral order and for the appropriate means of expressing that moral vision.

Her friendship with Senchi, wandering poet and singer, reinforces the impression that efua sutherland biography definition personalities are brought together in the play to function as a composite character. Senchi feels uprooted and alienated, and, as such, he is an extreme form of the muted restiveness which Ampoma reveals in herself from time to time.

Senchi's role in Edufa is roughly analogous to Heracles' in Euripides' Alcestis. Both Heracles and Senchi are travellers who just happen to visit their friends at a time of crisis. The similarity ends here. Senchi is a perpetual itinerant. Unlike the ebullient and gregarious Heracles, he is alienated and often cynical. His alienation as artist is more than the effect of his own critical and questioning intelligence.

It is also the outcome of dislocating changes in his society, changes which have uprooted the old African ways respect for family, upholding of close-knit community ties, and so forth in some quarters. Perpetual transient that he is, Senchi literally lives the experience of dislocation. Because he is repelled by the moral dislocations that he sees around him in the person of someone like Edufa, he is strongly committed to the idea of moral stability and to a social order that is stable while remaining flexible enough to accept orderly and humane change.

He shares this commitment with Ampoma. Therefore, her fate intensifies his barely concealed contempt for Edufa and for the new disruptiveness that is represented by Edufa's narrow selfishness and Western affectations. In Senchi's own words, both Edufa and himself make an odd pair, as friends, because Edufa's gross materialism is incompatible with Senchi's spiritual intensity as poet Plays from Black Africa, pp.

Senchi's search for what he calls a kind and loving person p. The circumstances of Ampoma's death represent another failure in that search. Her death means that he has ended up blank again p. Senchi's role in the play also bears upon the relationship between artistic form and the social themes of the artist. In a personal sense, his itinerant habits and ill-fitting clothes are symbolic forms, reflecting the dislocation and disharmony which his satiric songs and stories describe.

His language and the narrative style of his stories and social commentary are usually incomprehensible to everyone around him, but that very incomprehensibility underscores the sense of moral breakdown and emotional confusion he sees around him in Edufa's home and social class. Finally, the inability of others around him to understand much of what he says emphasizes his profound alienation from society in general.

Senchi's role and personality are as integral to the hybrid nature of Sutherland's theater as is his friend Ampoma. As we have already suggested, Ampoma's personality is an eclectic one, and it conforms with the hybrid nature of the play's forms, themes, and social environment. In Senchi's case, we have a rather ambiguous personality.

He is repelled by Edufa's shallow imitation of Western individualism and materialism. At the same time, his own eccentricities as an alienated intellectual reflect his Westernization; for the spectacle of a poet who is deeply isolated from his own society is a familiar Western image rather than a traditional role for artists in the old Africa.

He cherishes the communal humanism of old Africa, and this preference is clearly indicated by his scorn for Edufa's individualistic materialism. At the same time, his Western-style intellectuality and alienation, as poet, make it all but impossible for him to communicate his ideas to the women of the chorus, the very ones in the play whose lives are relatively close to that old communal lifestyle.

In effect, he is a personal example of the ambiguities and patterns of conflict described by the play's themes, and symptomized by its form. To borrow Fergusson's idea of theater, Sutherland's sense of her social milieu, her characters and her dramatic form blends perfectly with a prevailing pattern of ambiguities and adaptations, inside and outside her theater.

There is a marked shift of emphasis in the next two major plays. Sutherland relies less heavily on adapting Western and Ghanaian forms into a hybrid pattern in Foriwa and The Marriage of Anansewa. In these two plays, there is a greater emphasis on reviving a sense of old African traditions, or celebrating the ones that have managed to survive into the modern world.

There is a corresponding shift away from hybrid theatrical conventions towards the indigenous forms and conventions of the dramatist's own culture.

Efua sutherland biography definition: › Literature › Literary

In fact, the themes and the staging of a work like Foriwa do not simply describe the revitalization of indigenous forms and values. The play itself is a part of this process of revitalization, for its very existence reflects a vital and continuing interest, among the playwright and her audience, in the indigenous forms. As theater, Foriwa incorporates the folk rituals of the community's traditional African culture and, in so doing, the play imbues these forms and rituals with a fresh, contemporary significance.

This is comparable with the manner in which its themes call for a renewed commitment to the substance, rather than mere form, of indigenous conventions. At the same time, the play's themes emphasize only those aspects of Western culture that are compatible with Africa's sense of its own traditions and with its place in the modern world.

The play is based on the same materials Sutherland uses for her short story"New Life at Kyerefaso. Their conservatism, and general indifference to improving their community in any progressive sense have led, over the years, to economic decline and the deterioration of the school system. Labaran's objectives are similar to those of the town's Queen Mother, for she has been trying unsuccessfully, for years, to lead her subjects out of their apathy.

Her daughter Foriwa joins forces with the queen and with Labaran, and their crusade for change is climaxed by the town's annual festival in honor of the river Kyerefa. The Queen Mother successfully transforms the festival from the usual parade of meaningless rituals into a ceremony that actually inspires the community to rebuild itself in the spirit of its original founders.

This transformation of the festival from empty rhetoric into a vital force for change is fundamental to the play as a whole. The Queen Mother does not break with the villagers' traditions as such. Rather she insists that these traditions, particularly the annual ceremonies of birth and renewed life, become an actual experience in the life of the community itself.

Thus, she mocks the traditional songs of praise to the ancestral founders of the town and to the river goddess, precisely because the present generation merely mouths the song while shunning the spirit of growth that it actually celebrates. The song has become a highly stylized and empty formality over the years, and the stilted style reflects the community's lack of spirit.

The refrain promises that the singers will offer their "manliness to new life" in the river p. In his words, the river goddess should scream back a scathing response to the singers: "I am the lifestream of Kyerefaso. Your ancestors knew it when they chose to settle beside me. Are you going to do anything else besides dyeing my waters red from year to year with the blood of sheep?

When the Queen Mother repeats the traditional salute to the river-goddess, she transforms the language from a mechanical chant to a new and vibrant challenge: "Are your weapons from now on to be your minds' toil and your hands' toil? They are tired of sitting like vultures upon the rubbish heap they have piled on the half-built walls of their grandfathers" pp.

In short, tradition ought not to be defined solely on the basis of a rigid loyalty to the achievements and symbols of the past. It should also incorporate a capacity for initiative and innovation, the kind of capacity that made the achievements of the past possible. The revitalized, direct language which the Queen Mother uses in her statement is part of a general revitalization of forms, conventions, and language which she perceives as integral to any living tradition.

Since the prefestival ceremony at which she speaks and the rituals of the festival itself are forms of folk drama within the play as a whole, Sutherland has actually incorporated into her own theater the festival itself are forms of folk drama within the play as a whole, Sutherland has actually incorporated into her own theater the living, constantly renewed traditions of folk art.

In effect, the structure and themes of the play exemplify the very principle that lies at the heart of the Queen Mother's argument. Traditional forms folk artin this case are not simply antiquarian devices to be dusted off and used once a year; they should remain expressive and highly functional forms of communication. The play's structure also depends on symbols and images that are integrated with the dominant theme of rebirth.

These are drawn from the four-branched God-tree that dominates the town square and the setting of the play itself. The tree, near which Labaran has set up house, is actually described as a shrine. Its presence, throughout the play's action, is a highly visual example of what the Queen Mother and her allies are trying to achieve. It is old and a religious symbol and, on this basis, represents a very important link with the town's past.

It is also alive and growing and, in this regard, it emphasizes the need to recognize traditions as living, growing conventions rather than static and antiquarian forms. The tree's central location on stage, and its physical juxtaposition to the socially activist Labaran all have the effect of underscoring its significance as a symbol of social growth and change.

At the same time, its religious significance reflects the degree to which social change should ideally be compatible with the deepest and most cherished of the community's religious and moral traditions. Finally, the "four-branched" design obviously emphasizes a sense of the universe the efua sutherland biography definition directionsindicating in the process that the tree's symbolism is both of local cultural significance and of universal implications.

The kind of balance which Kyerefaso needs to strike between traditionalism and social growth is of immediate relevance to the community, to Africa as a whole, and to all cultures that hope to grow, and preserve their roots, in a changing world. By being located on stage the tree transforms the setting into a symbolic reflection of the community and the world view through which Sutherland presents the community.

Given this centrality and dominance, the tree naturally makes its presence felt on the language of the play. Labaran describes himself and his mission as the scattering of seeds, in the manner of a forest tree p. Significantly, this imaginative use of language and the capacity for growth which it represents, are also attributed to some of Kyerefaso's most apathetic residents, and in the process the dramatist hints at a dormant vitality, in the most unlikely society or individual, waiting to be released from static and unproductive notions of tradition.

Thus, even the lazy draughts players who always ridicule Labaran's reformism are capable of a discriminating attitude towards expressive language, a sense of discrimination that bodes well for their ability to accept the challenges of expressive conventions in their community. The perpetual subject of Foriwa's beauty provides them with an opportunity to display the discriminating taste in language:.

She only needs to show her face in at the door, and like palm wine, the flies come swarming after it. The new life at Kyerefaso flows not only from the revitalized conventions of tradition and language, but also from the personalities and symbolic roles of the efua sutherland biography definition protagonists—Labaran, the Queen Mother, and Foriwa.

Labaran is committed to the idea of reviving decaying communities, by way of new schools, new libraries, and agricultural reform, and he represents what a new generation of Ghanaians and their education should be. He combines a strong reverence for the community's past with a desire to see it benefit from the more useful and humane elements of Western culture.

He embodies the dramatist's familiar ideal, a perception of tradition as continuing customs that are constantly renewed by being exposed to contemporary experience. Labaran is the creative traditionalist, opposed both to the slavishly Western Scholar's Union and to those who are narrowly faithful to the externals of Ghana's communal institutions.

Efua sutherland biography definition: Efua Theodora Sutherland (27 de

Conversely his alliance with the old bookseller in pressing for a new library and a new school involves the ideal union of the old and the new in creative views of tradition. Labaran is a Hausa "from the north" who is initially suspected as an outsider, but his commitment to Kyerefaso, and his eventual acceptance by the town, suggest that the redefinition and revival of local traditions must take place as part of the forging of a new and broader, but ideally inclusive tradition—the tradition of contemporary Ghanaian nationhood as a whole.

At this point Sutherland's dramatic art exemplifies not simply the idea of theater but the idea of national theater. Labaran's most powerful ally is the Queen Mother herself. Her office links her securely with the past and its heritage, but her commitment to contemporary needs endows her with an evolutionary sense of tradition such as Labaran embodies.