Reinventing The Primordial: Human Blood Ritual and the Lure of Power in Esiaba Irobi’s Nwokedi

ABSTRACT Many critics of Esiaba Irobi’s Nwokedi have contended that the play portrays an atmosphere of terror and irrationality, which reflects Irobi’s fascination with an ‘invitation to orgy’ (Eagleton) as the panacea to the oppressive political leadership in his postcolonial Nigeria. Beyond this observation, however, the position that in his obsession with power, Nwokedi, the protagonist snowballs into an object of terror himself has not been fully examined. Seeking to further this point of reflection, this paper engages the Hegelian theory of freedom in relation to the Dionysian myth of irrationality as a paradigm for examining the ironical attitude of power in Nwokedi. It interrogates the lure of power and the attempt to reinvent primordial human blood ritual in the play. Nwokedi’s positive riot of perversity, set against a politician’s economics of exploitation results in the death-drive that commands its beholder to relish human annihilation at that point where the opposition between law and personal desire is ‘most dramatically dismantled’ (Eagleton). The paper concludes that if the enchanted ritual revolutionist becomes at once deity and rebel, judge and outlaw, autocrat and anarchist, he equally plunges headlong into that solitude which is both self-willed and tragic.