The Symbolism Of Journey In Sunma By Wole Soyinka

Abstract: Wole Soyinka has been acknowledged as one of the most powerful and talented writers of the twentieth century African writers. He is a member of the Yoruba people, one of the three major racial groups in Nigeria. “The strong breed” bears a symbol of elements which form the ritual under pattern of the action in the play. The woman Sunma, the friend of the protagonist Eman is more ready than the man for beginning the journey. Though Eman foresees that the journey may not bring any peace, yet Sunma symbolizes the change that it may bring in their personal lives. But to each character, journey means something different. Thus Soyinka brings out the journey motif, which is not merely the readiness of the ‘lorry’, which is ‘hooting’. It is

“Soyinka implies that the tradition of the willing carrier which is Eman’s inheritance is one worthy of respect, in that it dignifies both the suffering of the hero and the witness of the spectators. His rejection of such characters as the gross Kadiye and the hateful Jaguna does not, as some critics have supposed, amount to rejection of traditional religious ideas. On the contrary, it is the best of these ideas, together with the ritual and mythology which embody them, that have provided his richest store of metaphor and dramatic symbol; but they call out for reinterpretation in terms of ever-changing values and conditions2”. Soyinka himself explains the real meaning of suffering: ‘It is true that to understand, to understand profoundly, is to be unnerved, to be deprived of the will to act. For is not human reality dwarfed by the awe and wonder, the inevitability of the cosmic gulf?....suffering, the truly overwhelming suffering of Sango, of Lear, of Oedipus, this suffering hones the psyche to a finely self-annihilating perceptiveness and renders further action futile and, above all, lacking in

There is tension in the village as the play opens, strangers are making hasty departures, Ifada has already been marked down as a possible carrier, and the child drags an effigy through the streets. The one person apparently unaffected by the deepening sense of evil is Eman, and he is the one who eventually confronts it. But he escapes from those who are preparing him and as he runs, hides and searches for water, episodes from the past flow into his mind and are acted out on the stage. The episodes, which provide the ‘biography’ of the protagonist above, fill in the background, comment on the scenes in Jaguna’s village and provide a context for Eman’s actions in the play. They establish particularly clearly the tension between Eman’s inherited sense of responsibility to the community and his tendency to flee when confronted with testing