The literary significance of proverbs used in selected West African drama

Abstract

Literature is an avenue for the artistic re-production of the life and cultural elements of people in the form of prose, poetry, and drama. The culture of every group in particular is established linguistically through narrative exchanges that determine the relevance of the belief systems which hold the people together. To understand a culture, particularly one in which orality is still a predominant form of recording history and phenomena, one requires some acquaintance with its oral forms. As a group of people survive in a particular society, they continually foster their own relevant customs through different modes such as proverbs, songs, symbols, folktales and mythologies among others. These literary works express ideas and the concerns of the people at the time. One of such literary types which is well known in literary genre and often used to decode the culture of a people is proverbs. These proverbs often connote historical antecedents, customs, as well as the hopes, desires and fears of the people. This thesis therefore analyzed the use of proverbs in West African Drama with Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest (2014), Sola Owonibi’s Peace by Pieces, (2016) and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa (1970) as case studies. The thesis purposively samples 120 proverbs out of which eighty (80) are analysed using the reflectionist and performance art theories as frameworks, delving into the influence and significance of the socio-cultural contexts on the intra and extra-textual interpretation and understanding of the proverbs used. The study establishes that the use of proverbs is very relevant to the study of drama as it helps to sustain cultures and finally recommends that writers maintain the proverbs in their original languages offering translations as footnotes.