A Mythic Reading of the Materialist Epiphany in Femi Osofisan’s Another Raft

Abstract

This paper is a mythic reading of Another Raft written and published in 1988 by the Nigerian playwright, Femi Osofisan. The paper gives a materialist interpretation of the play and its mythic resources to illustrate Osofisan’s drama as a dispassionate critique of society. It observes that the playwright’s deployment of mythology in the play, and the play’s intertextual connection to an earlier one, The Raft (published 1964), by J. P. Clark, is revelatory. One problem any reader familiar with the two plays may find with understanding Osofisan’s version is the prominent use of supernatural beings as characters mingling with humans, which is nonexistent in the older play. This paper’s interpretation, therefore, reveals and affirms that the supernatural figures in the play are only creative metaphors deployed by the playwright to comment on the mundane social reality of the world outside the text. It also reveals that Osofisan’s response in Another Raft to Clark’s The Raft is to differ ideologically from the older play on the root causes of the decadence and sterility in Nigeria’s social and political space. Osofisan’s response demystifies the seemingly elusive solution to the cankerworms destroying the fabric of the nation. The paper concludes that Osofisan’s recourse to mythic and traditional elements is very helpful to his creative imagination and his effort to provide a panacea, through the theatre, to the obstacles impeding economic and political progress in postcolonial Nigerian society.