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On The Strong Breed, Again

My blog statistics reveals that people who search Google for themes in or discussions about Wole Soyinka’s The Strong Breed often find themselves on my blog, specifically on this page where almost exactly a year ago I had written an unflattering rant/review of Wole Soyinka’s use of a wrong contraction. This is a grammatical flaw that no other publication has pointed out in the many decades that the book has been around, or since.  (Click on the photo below to enlarge and see the error.)

About two months ago when I received a gift box of some African books from the 60s and 70s from a colleague, Wole Soyinka’s The Strong Breed was one of them. There were actually two editions, published by two different publishers at different times. The first thing I did on finding the issues was to look for this error to see if any of the subsequent editions had it corrected in them. The findings: no! I have now examined four different editions of the work and the error remains. (And I believe it’s an error because contractions aren’t formed like that.)

In any case, it is good enough that students of the play who have found themselves on my blog would have taken something crucial away other than the fact that it is one of the playwright’s well known brilliant works examining relationships between ritual, society, and life.  But as you would see as resulting from the comments in the initial post, ad hominem attacks on my intentions rather than on the merits of my argument dominated the first conversation and prevented a more robust discussion. Maybe this time, it will be better. Or not. Either way, this should be my last word on the matter. Promise.

One shouldn’t spend too much time in the grammar class. 🙁

 

On The Strong Breed, Again was published on June 10th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , under the Uncategorized category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

On The Strong Breed

There are several things to do when one is a “retired” foreign language teacher with time on his hands. One could begin to translate a book of English fiction into Yoruba just for the sake of it – never mind that many of our “modern” people don’t read in the language anymore. At least one can convince oneself that it is an effort in the furtherance of literature.

One could also begin to read old books, some of which one had bought over a year ago but had not got a chance to open due to the busy nature of one’s teaching and learning commitments. As much as catching up on old books is concerned, my bed at the moment is littered with open copies of “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, “Slow Man” by J.M. Coetzee and Chika Unigwe’s “On Black Sister’s Street”.

But yesterday, I stumbled on a copy of Wole Soyinka’s “Collected Plays 1” which I had bought from Amazon two months ago. It had in it A Dance of the Forests, The Swamp Dwellers, The Strong Breed, The Road, and The Baccae of Euripides. I’ve read all of them at one point or the other before, but it struck me that there was a part of The Strong Breed that once seemed very strange to me in grammatical accuracy. Today I began to look for it, and it didn’t take me too long for me to to spot. I’ve found it. Wole Soyinka, or his editor at the time, seemed to have missed an almost negligible grammatical rule for one of the lines in the play. Almost negligible, but not quite forgivable for an author that has now gone ahead to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here:

SUNMA: You don’t even want me here?

EMAN: But you have to go home haven’t you? *

SUNMA: I had hoped we would watch the new year together – in some other place.

pg 120.

The first time I spotted this in 2001, I was sure that it had missed the editor’s eye especially since a random internet search did not produce any result of anyone having spotted it before. But seeing it still in another edition of the book convinced me either of the author’s insistence, or on the forgivableness of the slip on some level. Or not. The character of Emma is neither a teacher known for grandiose language nor an illiterate known for the same. In fact, his ability to speak well was never in question throughout the short play so it couldn’t have been part of character. It could only have been an error. What surprised me was how it was repeated in all the editions I have read. So I’ve brought it here for debate. What special reason could be given for this sentence written like this?

Of course after this, I shall be expecting a cheque from the publishers for my eagle-eyed spotting of a faulty line in a book more than four decades old.

On The Strong Breed was published on June 13th, 2010, with the tags , , , , , under the Academic, Observations category. There are currently 24 comments on this article so far.