Neither the Iliad Nor the Odyssey: Exploring the Epic Tradition in Arab and African Theater

In both Arab and African cultures, the epic is the stepping stone between myth and culture. The indigenous experience of the epic is quite similar to the Greek experience where myth and folklore turn into a national literature, a history, which playwrights then use as a source material to create drama. In the 20^th century, epic theater came to be used to justify alternative communities. It began to offer oppositional narratives which challenged prevailing orthodoxies, and celebrated minorities. It did this by challenging dominant dramatic forms.
The epitome of this challenge was manifested in the works of two significant playwrights. Epic theater technique constitutes the vehicle of plot and dramatic action in the Nigerian Playwright’s Femi Osofisan Once Upon Four Robbers. The storytelling technique is also used by Osofisan to achieve what Brecht called the alienation effect (Verfermdungs Effekt) in epic theater—a device that enables the characters on stage to elicit audience participation in both plot and dramatic action. Likewise, the Egyptian playwright, Naguib Sorour, uses the same technique in his play Yasseen w (and) Baheya exploring the central conflict of an old ballad about the oppression of peasants by foreign rulers. In the end, both plays serve as a commentary on political and social conditions in contemporary African and Egyptian societies.
This paper attempts simultaneously to engage two different cultures (Arab and African) as they represent themselves in the epic theater form. Both plays are a celebration of the expressiveness of self and are an experiment in developing a new type of ‘authentic’Arab and African drama which consciously departs from the European model and invokes in its form and content, an oral folk tradition. The overall goal of this study is not only to examine the plays using a single theory or a line of approach, but also to study the rich tapestry of thought, theory and cultural contact which informs them.