Volume 9
Number 1 January 2024 Article 15
January 2024
COUNTER-DISCOURSE AND POWER IN AHMED YERIMAH’S HARD COUNTER-DISCOURSE AND POWER IN AHMED YERIMAH’S HARD GROUND AND UWEMEDIMO ATAKPO’S WATERING THE HARD GROUND AND UWEMEDIMO ATAKPO’S WATERING THE HARD GROUND
GROUND
Anietie Francis Udofia
Department of Theatre Arts University of Uyo, Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria, [email protected]
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Recommended Citation Recommended Citation
Udofia, Anietie Francis (2024) "COUNTER-DISCOURSE AND POWER IN AHMED YERIMAH’S HARD GROUND AND UWEMEDIMO ATAKPO’S WATERING THE HARD GROUND," International Review of Humanities Studies: Vol. 9: No. 1, Article 15.
Available at: https://scholarhub.ui.ac.id/irhs/vol9/iss1/15
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Received: November 2023, Reviewed: December 2023, Accepted: January 2024
COUNTER-DISCOURSE AND POWER
IN AHMED YERIMAH’S HARD GROUND AND UWEMEDIMO ATAKPO’S WATERING THE HARD GROUND
Anietie Francis Udofia Department of Performing Arts
Akwa Ibom State University (AKSU), Obio Akpa Campus [email protected]
ABSTRACT
Niger Delta uprising always evokes controversial positions viewed from a single perspective from the pages of print to electronic media with which many dramas and films on their themes clone some intertextual discourses as the absolute voice on the Niger Deltans’ problem. The major concern is usually the violence caused by the people of the Niger Delta to disrupt the peace of the Nigerian society without giving a second thought to the people’s complaint about the political which worsens the situations of the region.
Using qualitative research methodology, framed on Mikhail Bakhtins’ theory of Dialogism as a suitable theoretical framework for essential critical guide, this paper discusses Uwemedimo Atakpo’s Watering the Hard Ground as a counter-discourse to Ahmed Yerima’s position in Hard Ground over Niger Delta people’s struggle, activities and their way forward in Nigeria. The objectives of the study are to examine the positions raised in Hard Ground and the counter point in Hard Ground on Niger Delta situation;
to identify the areas of convergences and divergences in the two texts, and to assess how each text negotiates the way forward for the region. Findings show that Hard Ground discusses aggressiveness and self-destruction as the cause of frustration, while Watering the Hard Ground negotiates neglect and exclusion from the mainstream of lucrative activities as the cause of aggressiveness in Niger Delta. The two texts agree that violence is destructive to both the Government and the people; Hard Ground suggests repentance as a solution, while Watering the Hard Ground suggests the cleansing off of the industrial pollutions, education and inclusion of the people in government benefits. The paper concludes that dialogue between the two texts has given rise to a rational rethink over the Niger Delta controversy, and that counter-discourse may raise inimical frontiers in drama but it evolves a fresh premise that generates power to the society.
KEYWORDS: Counter-discourse, Power, Dialogism, Drama, Niger-Delta.
INTRODUCTION
Two good heads, they say are better, then, many heads should be best; but two dissimilar minds that interrogate a similar subject may command oneness that creates
harmony. It is possible for a single act or situation viewed by many people to spring diverse opinions, which suggests that a bubble of radical opinions generates power and"power produces knowledge” (Foucault cited in Haralambos, Holborn and Heald561).
To Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin,knowledge garnered from dissenting views on a subject furthercreates “cultural hegemony…through canonical assumptions”
(7). Such canonical assumptions are deduced in the dialogue Ahmed Yerima creates in his HardGroundwhich UwemedimoAtakpowrites back inWatering the Hard Ground for a common purpose of portraying reality in the struggle of the Niger Delta people of Nigeria.
In the literary discipline, writers always assume theyare evolving a newdiscourse quite distinct from anyone else’sto discuss, but it always unfolds that one idea actually reminds of a certain opinion raised in another which clarifies that discourses actually build and spill into another. Writing then becomes an old discourse put forth in a new way. These positions propel a unified basis within which reasons for negotiating a counter position may not arise in a text. This can project absoluteness devoid of differentiation over a people’s fate, and those whose fate is sealed in such irreversible conclusiveness may be stereotyped permanently.
However, raising a counter position on the same subject, may be, by cloning on the antecedent of a text, may generate a massive rumble of conflicts.This is what actually creates the “unity and interaction (struggle) of opposites” (Kalagbo32). Thus, the stranglehold of discordant voices dispensed through writings can stimulate more discursive outlets. In a situation one position shifts the position on which the initial focus was, countertextuality has come to play. Countertextuality becomes the survival of opposite discursive forces. According to Eleanor Munro, “these opposite forces would rest in balance throughout creation- in the world at large, within the family, and in each person’s life and body” (32).
Counter discourse maydisclose the enclosed side of a discourse. It may carve an opening tostimulate a reality circumscribed in (likely) a text. In this way, it exposes commonness to its uncommonness. Such commonness is raised about the Niger Delta people of Nigeria in Hard Ground as a people who are self-destructive, unpatriotic and ingrate to nature. The people as conceived as volatile to themselves and lethal to others, barbaric and shamanistic, and directionless in life. They are further viewed as people who switch off the glow of moral radiance of education to grope in the furor of ignorance for life without a tenable reason than what stimulants reinforce ab initio. However, the uncommonness is raised in Watering the Hard Ground that they are people who have been marginalized, exploited, impoverished and dehumanized; a people who by clarity of mind unanimously awake to battle the government of the day for a fair share of the natural resources in their domain. A situation a strong voice (backed by the government for instance) portrays Niger Delta people as self-cannibalistic, that may remain the outlook of the Niger Delta people to others which the Niger Deltans themselves may not know.Yet, when an opposing voice is raised, likely through the same medium, a counter discourse has set in.
Two people may not think alike on the same subject. Counter discursivity sees the unseen by the people. Thus, it may not erase the façade of the previous design of a single truth; but it may make a two out of its oneness; it may unveil atwo implicit in the one to showcase its twoness; and that is a mechanism to reflects another truth that nothing is quite absolute without negotiation. Therefore, when an idea is challenged, a cleft is carved to create fissures for newness to sprout as “conflicting intentions… set in motion”
(Zukav 107). Counter-discourse can stir the urge to look at a particular opinion differently, and such differentiation may raise newer opinions that may, in a way, create
countless discourse as truths on a single subject. However, the need to examine counter discursivity in the two text is vital towards understanding the situation of the Niger Delta people of Nigeria.
The case of the Niger Delta struggle has usually been raised as one aimless strand of self-induced concept educing at one end that it is either aggressiveness that activates frustration or that it is frustration that triggers off aggressiveness at the other end. Both comments are rationalized strongly about the Niger Delta region. When frustration stimulates aggression and the cause is identified and addressed, aggressiveness begins to die a natural death, but if it is aggression that causes frustration, a thing of esteem is tempered with (Rose 253-254). On such indeterminacy, polar views in writing that may project two truths of the same thing are inevitable.When two truths are told, it swells the act of a noble subject (Shakespeare 23). Then, counter-discourse projects two truths that one is truthful.
On this position, this essay interrogates counter-discourse in two plays that discuss the Niger Delta issue, generating an aspect of power and unity of purpose by linking antecedence in one text to their disparagement in another. Although in the literary discipline:
all literary texts are woven out of other literary texts not in the conventional sense that they bear traces of influence but in the more radical sense that every word, phrase or segment is a working of other writings which precedes or surrounds the individual work – (that) there is no such thing as literary originality, no such thing as the first literary work; all literature is intertextual (Barthes (1972) cited in Eagleton 119).
Another opinion is that what may be absorbed as a truth of a people in one text may be the opposite in reality or what EtopAkwang calls “the temporal flow of sublime flames…to a universal and ‘essential’ description (51). There is always a polar view to a discourse in drama. Polarity generates a new way of reasoning, and such newness creates a fresh discourse.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
This paper is based on a theory called Dialogism. The theory is necessary in this work because its major assertion is thatideas in a text are drawn from another text and that literary works embody the juxtaposition of ideas of similar, varying or indeterminate positions that have undeniable linkage with another. No utterance, idea or statement is absolute or independent without a cause to its construction or a purpose for which it is uttered. Therefore, ideas found in one text are actually a reaction or an explanation to another text, which means, a binary interchange of opinion in literary work may advocate or negate a premise as observed in Dialogism.
Dialogism was formulated by Mickail Bakhtin, a Russian cultural philosopher, who lived from 1895 to 1975. According to Imoh Emenyi, as literary texts themselves “assume the status of discourses, or language which attracts responses…
Mikhail Bakhtin… propounded the theory of dialogism to explain the multiplicity and connectedness of human experiences across genres, groups, generations and epochs…”
(60). The idea of connectedness of human experience and discrepancy runs across the imperial (colonizer) and the colonized literary works in old and new texts, canonical and intermediate texts, down to religious and secular texts. However, the most current form of textual dialogism is the replete and proliferation of mythical tales of various societies
and epochs in scripts and films. In Chester Starr (1971), Philip Freund (2005), Bankole Bello (2007), Afolabi Adesanya (1997) and Seema Hasan (2003), it is acknowledged that the Egyptian idea of performance was borrowed by Greeks in their worship of Dionysus but negotiated in the moral thrust for social order. It is written that Sanskrit tradition birthed from the Rig Vedas’s model codified by Bharata as the performance code for Hindu dramaturgyhas the semblance of the Egyptian and Greek’s dramatic precedence but negotiated to project eastern metaphysics. The dynasties preceding the Pear Orchard dramaturgy and the forms such as Zaju, Nanxi, and even Kunqu with their grid of stylized reforms that came after them maintained a steady set of operas and acrobaticsbut negotiated by streamlining dramatic unities to evolve a beginning, middle anda logical end like the occidental drama within which films are based. (161-163, 60-72, 63-65, 14- 19). All tales embody basic semblance to another; yet they are negotiated to reflect the misgivings of a discourse. Each function marks off a protagonist and antagonist tangled in an exposition, jumbled in a quest to end in eitherjoy or sorrow (Propp cited in Bressler, 87).
The reemergence of the ideas of a previous tale in another story is not doubtful in literary works; thus, the nucleus of dialogism is the interplays of claims that practically squirt some arbitrary indefinitenessfor differentiation in proofs for claims of a discourse as found in texts such as John Pepper Clark’s The Raft and Osofisan’sAnother Raft,Yerima’sOba Ovonramwen and Ola Rotimi’sOvonramwenNogbaisi, Wole Soyinka’s Strong Breed and No more the Wasted Breed by Femi Osifisan,then Hard Groundand Watering the Hard Ground. Borrowing from a particular idea to fine tune another may deepen a discourse but drawing a fact from one to counter in another may widen a scope but more importantly; it will germinate a fresh tendril or argument - all are aspects of dialogism.
Dialogism functions as a device to link universal ideasto emphasize a specific culture that may create an opening for further discourse. A more unifying factor that cuts across cultures to reflect connectedness is language (Oluwabamide 15). Such is noticed in the interplay of Atakpo’s language in Watering the Hard Ground dovetailing the dramatic dispositions of Yerima inHard Ground to couch a discordant rethink. Thus, “a language is revealed in all its distinctiveness, only when it is brought into relationship with other languages entering with them into one single heteroglot unity of societal becoming” (Bakhtin 411). Such is found in The Cult Explosion by David Hunt and Wale Osisanwo’s Introduction to Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics that in the religious practices today, strands of the religious practices denoting a different bloc are lumped as direct imports of cosmic unity. It is what Charles Nwadigwe sees as “functional duality”
(97). Dialogism pairs up two opinions, vets speculations but unifies many ideas as a stream of consciousness denoting the same thing in a different way or a different thing in the same way giving rise to a newness that compels faith and power.
Synopses of Hard Ground and Watering the Hard Ground
Hard Ground: Nimi is upset that his boys have been massacred in an operation he and few others are aware. He is blamed for the lives that have been lost in the bunkering. He suspects Father Kingsleyto whom he confesses in church and so determined to avenge the loss at all cost. His mother, Mama, whom he is the only child to, is pleading that he gives up the deadly quest; that she just lives because of him since her ailment has made Baba, her husband, to abandon her; butNimi is bent on the mission.
Meanwhile as a mark of success, a group of people comes to celebrate his glorious kill and solicits staking in the struggle. Nimi’s response does not indicate a feasible goal. He rather savours the splendour of his regal garb and instantly wallops into debauchery.
Inadvertently, he guzzles a dose of poison which upsets the coordination of his system.
Transcending to the spiritual world, Tingolongo, a spirit, counsels him. Nimi is vindicated and allowed to return to life. In his lethargy, he is still waiting to behold another arch rival, Don, whom he has been revering as a god until now. Don who has fixed his visit this day is conducted in, and Nimi, in the zeal to round off his course of eliminating his arch rival in the creek, slits the throat of Don. Don is revealed to be Baba, his timid father.
Tension grips all.
Watering the Hard Ground: In Hades, citizens of Niger Delta who fought and died for the region’s course are disturbed by the misplaced purpose which the present generation wages war. The apparitions condemn the activities going on in the region at present.They notice that the livingare not one infighting the course, and that poachers (enemies) are using their division to prey on them. There is sorrow in the land and they are constantly impoverished. They are exploited and leaders they send to represent them in politics, on the other hand, do not argue for the primordial course anymore; they rather conceive of their comrades as detractors to progress and begin to distant themselves from their comrades. The government of the day ends up weakening them through divide-and- rule tactics. They send a message of unification to the living, urging them to fight on until they control their resources.
In Land of the Living, the militants are on camp charting their way forward. They make various introductions of the people who are supporting the course. Riasa Bokuda, the leader and others to include: lecturers, barristers, retired soldiers, engineers, and top business moguls, are made to profess the reason they are supporting the struggle. They state that they quit school, job, politics and other areas of life to join the struggle. More so, they cannot watch strangers come to exploit them by taking away their God’s given resources away to develop other parts of the nation leaving Niger Delta in ruins and underdeveloped. They resolve to vandalize pipelines, kidnap expatriates, disrupt government activities and constantly resist the government until they are given a reasonable share of the resources tapped from the region. Politicians are brought to dialogue. The message is sent to the president that the royal fathers should be carried along, Niger Delta should be developed, jobs should be created for citizens, education should be made accessible and that contracts should be awarded to Niger Delta citizens so that they would be lucratively engaged. Another suggestion is that money should not be siphoned from the Niger Delta to other developed towns who stand on the affluence to mock at the impoverishment of the region and that each region should control its resources. The message is relayed to the presidency. The militants cease fire waiting for the implementation. Meanwhile as everyone surrenders his weapon, Usen-Usen is keeping his weapon, saying, “I sidon dey look” (p 63).
Counter-Discourse (Reviewed)
A discourse is an averment that may be acknowledged as a context of power position in the society.In viewing the import of a playtext and power in the society, a discoursegenerates sentiments to exude command through popular will. According to Van Dijk, “discourse analysis is understanding the nature of social power and dominance.
Once we have such insight, we may begin to formulate about how discourse contributes to their reproduction” (254); and interweaving a counter-discourse is a reactive voice to a discourse. In Michel Foucault’s view, a counter-discourse arises when people that are usually spoken for and spoken about start to speak for themselves (202). In its real outlook, it is a reflection of subversive intent to the position of a culture and undertone of a premise. In Richard Terdiman, “counter-discourse is situated on the challenging border between cultural history and literary criticism… an intricate and continuous interplay of
the opposing dynamics of stability and destabilization”
(http://www.cornepress.cornel.edu).
Apart from shifting from a position in literary construct, counter-discourse also implies the detour from a primordial precinct. It may be “a radical questioning of the basic assumptions of dominant systems” (Ashcroft. Griffiths and Tiffin 176). According to Richard Terdiman, a conscious revolt to the vortex of argument “by asserting its opposition to the centre and constantly interrogating the dominance of the ‘standard’, establishes itself as a contrastive or counter-discourse” (168). In the same vein, a text, as noted in Yerima’s Hard Ground is a construct of claims that filter through social and cultural facts that raise a structure of power to itself through a literary tool. That, by right, is a discourse. However, according to Helen Gilbert and Toane Tompkins, “counter- discourse actively works to destabilize the power structures of the original text rather than simply to acknowledge its influence…” (16).This is the case in the interplay between Hard Ground and Watering the Hard Ground.
Counter-discourse in Hard Ground and Watering the Hand Ground
Counter-discourse is the negation of an idea or a set of them implied in a particular text. Words may be used, phrases may be adumbrated, a whole theme may be paraphrased; yet the main issue is that when the idea of a text is countered, as in drama - scene to scene, act to act and likely maxim to maxim, countertextuality has come to play.
Intertextuality is conceived to originate from the idea of a poststructuralist, Mikhail Bakhtin but counter-discourse gains prominence in Foucault’s writings. In the idea of Julia Kristeva, Bahktin was one of the initial scholars to raise a system of literary interlink that shows the relatedness of one literariness to another and the trace of one idea in another structurally (35-36). On the other hand, Jacques Derrida cited in Charles Bressler discusses that “all human knowledge and self-identity… spring from difference, not sameness” (109). Through differentiation, a new text emerges (Adejare 122).
Counter-discourse is a reactionary activity that the origin may not be certain. According to Haralambos, Holborn and Heald, “the resulting social reality provides a (counter)- discourse, which is a way of conceptualizing an issue and provides a framework for discussion and action…, (and) we believe the resulting perception of the world as being true” (309).
In Uwemedimo Atakpo’s Watering the Hard Ground, ideas interrogating Ahmed Yerima’s Hard Ground are raised but bent to have a progressive import in the society.
The ideas are arranged to “Individuality and Labeling”, “Awareness and Determination”, and “Purpose”
Individuality and Labeling: in Hard Ground, Niger Delta struggle is a personal choice for a rebel, the essence of taking to arms is not a concern of anyone else. Anyone who chooses to take to arms does so out of sheer criminality which is abhorred by other Niger Deltans themselves. In such situation, anyone who takes to arms in the region has transgressed, and the one who transgresses is labeled; he is condemned. This is reflected in the dialogue of NIMI, MAMA and BABA thus:
NIMI: I did not ask anyone to rescue me. Now, I shall be labeled a vulture. And any child with a knife can butcher me, tear me apart or even hang me by the neck till life drips out of my body like river water and I shall be left to die a slow and painful death… they shall smoke me out like they do all vultures… I will be chased like a trapped rabbit. They shall fling me to the wolf boys who will spit on me first …
MAMA: My Lord God, what have I done wrong … who have I offended?...
BABA: Woman, control yourself this is not how we want to handle this matter.
MAMA: How else? My only child turns a monster before my death?
How else can I exorcise this evil spirit from my baby (p.
11).
In Yerima’sHard Ground, a militant is portrayed as a deviant, a monster and an outlaw transforming from human toa beast. He is an object of derision to the society; a scavenger who picks left-overs from the gutters and dump-sites to eat. A militant in self- reclamation advertently accedes to this label in this conversation:
BABA: You say nothing. But twenty people died in the camp, butchered like sacrificial dogs for the gods. And your name, Nimi, was on every set of lips. Nimi did this, Nimi did that. Bodies littered everywhere. But you say you know nothing. Some even call you the scorpion (NIMI Chuckles, shakes his head and keeps chuckling).
INYINGIFAA: Are you not the scorpion? Or they made that up too?
NIMI: I am the scorpion (p.12).
This reflects, it is the individual that is irked not a group, and it is the ire that goads the angered to transform the human self to an inhuman personality, a dreadful manifestation of the bestial being.
In Watering the Hard Ground, however, Atakpo debunks individuality in the struggle, snubsthe labeling of one who takes to arm in the region for the struggling purpose but rationalizes militancy as a collective and conscious crusade. This is portrayed thus in these lines:
REX LAWSON: I suppose we gave our all. Let the living chart their course.
KEN SARO-WIWA: If we let them chart their course, it might negate what we fought and died for. We should find a way to send a message to them.
ADIAHA EDEM: What will be our message?
ISAAC (sic) BOKO:Message of hope and solidarity. Message of oneness and strength.
KEN SARO-WIWA: …The message… we should send should be more on togetherness… that unity is strength.
SIR JUSTICE UDO UDOMA: What I experienced before I got here was very bad. The Ijaws had their own nation. The Ogonis had a different nation. The Ibibio had two or three nations. The Ishekiris, the Kalabaris, the Urhobos had different nations. The entire situation was chaotic and poachers used the situation to prey on them.
ADIAHA EDEM: So they forgot what we laid the foundation for…
(pp. 6-7).
In juxtaposing Yerima and Atakpo’s perception of the Niger Delta uprising, Yerima elicits it to have been borne out of carelessness in parenting; then, that it is an act of criminality a delinquent child obliges to wallow in; whereas Atakpo negotiates it as anadmissiblecourse endorsed from the spirit realm as a collective crusade from outset.
Ignominious vs Conscious: In Hard Ground, the people are aware of their problem. Education, for instance is a problem that has already been downplayed. Altruism is preached tothem but to get anything, they either shed their blood or shed another’s to get something, to be human, and to be revered as a people.. By this act, they rather stir the hornet than taming the tide, and all is borne out of moral deficiency. Violence precipitates violence, and the aggressiveness widens the space of success. Yerima portrays it thus:
NIMI: The school you sent me to was made of wasteland and poverty. And even as a child, you smelt it and you quickly learn that nothing is free, unless you ask for it, and when they refuse to give you, you grab it, and that is what we are doing.
BABA: So it is your right to kill?
NIMI: If we have to, Baba (Mama bursts out crying) poverty stinks, and if another man holds the soap, and won’t let you have it, then nudge him slightly and collect it. For you need a good bath to become a decent perfumed human being like him.
INYINGIFAA:Nudge him to death if necessary?
NIMI: Yes, if necessary, and often by any means we can lay our hands on (p. 13).
This position reflects the natural instinct of man to eat, to clothe and to have a home to rest. It is the lack of these basic needs that evokes violence in Niger Delta. Every irked Niger Deltan is on the prowl to nudge those who hold his assumed right by any means to collect so that he can also live as a human being in the region.Action in this sense is placed over purpose, and they prefer stretching the action even to the point of taking people’s lives or destroying themselves. By the position of the text, the people have come to the knowledge of their problems but their determination to solve them appears detrimental; for as long as they nudge to snatch, they would be hunted to death.
Observing the people from the social and legal context, the choice to perish has outweighed the choice to survive.
Watering the Hard Ground does not agree that the Niger Delta people are struggling blindly against Hard Ground’s position which they have relegated education to the background and lost their sense of reasoning. The text emphasizes that the consciousness to resist for change is spurred by education; that it is education that has opened the people’s eyes to realize the level of dehumanization they are forced to bear.
The decision to fight is borne out of spiritual, moral and physical wakefulness which everyone at all level is involved. Atakpo poses the counter this way:
ALHAJI RIASA BOKUDA: I thank you very much people of the Niger Delta. Our learned doctor here … organized us and made us see the levels of ignorance, poverty, and neglect of our region by the powers that have been. We
decided after school to resist the government that relegated our people to the background, exploited us, impoverish our areas while taking away our God’s given wealth. Today we have more than ten groups fighting, resisting and will continue to resist the government that will not hear us and remove our plight (pp. 22-23).
Without a positive response over these listed complaints, Niger Delta will continually resist the government. Resisting the government is based on the fact that they are relegated to the background.
Aggressiveness Engenders frustration vs Frustration kindles aggressiveness:
Another counter-discursive point from the two plays is purpose. In Hard Ground, uprising is an aimless outburst in self-contradiction to the already highlighted claim of the root cause of Niger Delta uprising (dehumanization, neglect, and impoverishment), Yerima reverts the position of the text toexuberance buttressing indiscretion. Thus, a rebel is ignominious. These lines reflect Yerima’s perception of these evils:
TINGOLONGO: The struggle will take you all, if you do not allow the heartbeat of your brother control your hot blood.
NIMI: Huum? I don’t understand.
TINGOLONGO: You don’t? I thought you claim to understand everything? Childish fool. Do you know how the tortoise got its shell?
NIMI: No.
TINGOLONGO: Do you know how the coconut got its water?
NIMI: No.
TINGOLONGO: Childish fool. Simple questions, and you have no answers, and you claim to be a god amongst children… a fool … wasted souls (pp. 48-49).
The conversation above is a literary portrayal of Africa’s perception of her world, the cosmic duality. That is, in every physical activity of the Blackman, there is a spiritual undertone to it. This is the seat of judgment to the human deeds, the purpose for which he does and the rationale of the deed to him, the society and his soul. It is the citadel of thoughtdenoting the base of wisdom in one and the bestiality of itinanother. It marks a pure aim from the abstruse one. It is the eschatology of the African universe, the hermit of the human soul. It is Ubuntu. It is reasoning (africanubuntusafari.com.au). Thus, Hard Ground portrays that Niger Delta fighters are rebels, that a rebel does not possess insight;
a rebel does not learn; a rebeldoes not know beyond killing for nothing and dying for nothing.
In the same vein, Yerima further reverts the text to eliciting that aggressiveness activates frustration; that frustration is a choice. A rebel, then, does not indulge in killing for progress but satiates the flimsy urge for cheap popularity and inordinate lurch for lechery. This is captured in the conversation between ALABO and NIMI below:
ALABO: I ask, would we succeed?
NIMI: Yes, sir. We will succeed. The oil companies are closing up because of the hell we are giving them.
The president is talking to us. We are an issue in the next election… for now this is the only way we know how to achieve what we want. Shed our blood and shed theirs too. Is there another way?
ALABO: Have we not learnt anything? We must go beyond blood, blood, blood… you cannot always wait to be wasted.
NIMI: Hail… my blood is hot… I too shall become a warlord. Then action (pp. 40-41).
In Yerima’s view, fighters in the Niger Delta are not prudent. They do not identify their aim to reflect insight. They dabble into frustration through violence.
In Watering the Hard Ground, fighters strategize their activity and it is a calculated upsurge. Against Yerima’s claim, Atakpo counters that the people take to arms because of frustration. These are portrayed thus:
FLORA ODILI: My people, I greet you. You may wonder why I, a woman, have decided to choke my womanhood and join these freedom fighters.
Yes, call us what you like… we are freedom fighters… After what happened to us at Odi, I had no choice but to get into the creeks and join my brothers in arms. At Odi, I was battered and raped … I was not the only one, but I was lucky to be alive. I lost my husband and two children… the Niger Delta is our land … yet we … we say no, a big no to the exploitation that we have experienced for decades. We say no to ignorance and poverty we are forced to accept (pp. 26-27).
On many points, Watering the Hard GroundandHard Groundaddress the same subject matter. The locale is the same, the content is on the turbulence prevalent in the region and approach to character treatment is decipherable. Actually, Atakpo’s text rather draws from Yerima’s standpoint. This shows that “all counter-discourse is intertextual, not all intertextuality is counter-discourse” (Gilbert and Tompkins 16). Hence in evaluatingHard Ground and Watering the Hard Ground, there is what Gabriel Idang views as textual dialectics which intersect the forces of opposites to evolve newness (107). Newness is power highlighted in discourses garnering from dualism. “Dualism causes meanings to be contested, contradicted, and even challenged to yield its authenticity…” (275). A counter-discourse is a dual plunge to the textuality of a text.
Discourse and Power in Yerima and Atakpo’s Dialogism
In the view of Foucault, textual arguments spawn discourses that“can be positive in the sense that they make it possible for certain things to be achieved” (Haralambos, Holborn and Heald 560). Along the line, in the view of Peter Widdowson, discourses develop from the use of language. This is realized in the interplay of words, idioms, proverbs and the diction both texts parade. To this effect “words are active dynamic social signs, capable of taking on different meanings and connotations for different social classes in different social and historical situation” (38). Such differentiation is realized in
the duality of Niger Delta case as projected in Hard Ground and Watering the Hard Ground. The outcome of the polarity is itself a new look in discourse.
In Hard Ground, Yerima has portrayed Niger Delta as a region impoverished through mismanagement. In Watering the Hard Ground,Atakpo views the Niger Delta cause differently but draws fromYerima’s grounds of argument. That is the glory of intertextuality.Intertextuality generates sameness of focus to tackle a specific social issue such as the Niger Delta struggle for resource control for decades. It activates a
“consciousness occasioned by native intelligence and… the interrogation of rationality”
(Emenyi 62). There is strength in throwing much weight on a discourse.
A more substantial position is the critical stance in which a specific idea is viewed differently in oneness, or many ideas are viewed alike but differently. It sets two independent psyches on spur. Akwang observes that “our psyche and being are constituted and dispersed…” (31), and such indeterminate minds in the battlement for truth through language display which makes for a discourse are all together “unstable and fragmented” (Rice and Waugh 119). The instability alone is a breeding ground to hatch more argument. A successful argument is a projected truth; a truth set on motion is power.
According to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin,
power is invested in the language because it provides the term in which truth itself is constituted. The struggle for power over truth in some senses mimics the… impulse of dominance… (it is) only by stressing the way in which the text transforms the societies and institutions within which it functions (its ‘transformative work’) can such a mimicry be avoided and replaced by a theory and practice which embraces difference and absence as material signs of power rather than negation, not freedom not of subjugation, of creativity not limitation (167-168).
In the view of James Allen, “when we begin to reflect upon our condition and to search diligently… only by such searching and mining are gold and diamonds obtained, and we can find every truth…”(7). A new truth discovered from two polar truths stimulates faith, and“when men of different pursuits… hold identical views… that verdict which results from a concert of discordance elements makes our faith in the object of admiration strong and unassailable” (79). Faith is the strength of discursive intersection itself. “It is, after all, at the point of intersection with other discourses that any discourse becomes determined” (Aschroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 168). The determined position from two polar positions is a hybrid discourse. Such hybridization is a fresh precipitate of power to be engaged again.
Discourses are produced within a real world of power struggle. In politics, arts and science, power is gained through discourse: discourse is a violence that we do to things. Claims to objectivity made on behalf of specific discourses are always spurious. There are no absolutely ‘true’ discourses, only more or less powerful ones (Foucault cited in Widdowson and Selden 160-161).
That is the case in Niger Delta region of Nigeria today in which so many truths are actually true.
CONCLUSION
In observing the dialogue between Hard Ground and Watering the Hard Ground over Niger Delta issue of Nigeria, there is a proof that drama text can stir the hornet of literary discourses in which a single situation may create numerous ideas with facts. This is reasoned in Yerima presenting Niger Delta indigenes as a people that are poised at self- destruction while Atakpo re-presents Niger Deltans as people yearning for life. Yerima sees violence as activity borne out of illiteracy in the region; Atakpo periscopes that the wakefulness to revolt is out of literacy. To Yerima, only the forlorn engages in the revolt to deepen lechery but Atakpo negotiates that it is a collective course for resource control.
One idea sees its twoness in the complementary part. Many opinions are now hatched of the Niger Delta issues, and a single discourse from a single counter waits for a fresh process. That is the beauty of countertextuality which Foucault calls power.
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