The Rehearsal Is the Play: Dramatic Self-Reflexivity and This Africa Of Ours…1

John Conteh-Morgan

Dramatic self-reflexivity, the well-known process whereby a theatrical representation “doubles back on itself” (Dobrov 2001: 9)2 and bares the processes of its own creation, is a central but underinvestigated feature of the writings, and in particular the theatre, of Werewere Liking. “On ne peut pas avoir une arme sans réfléchir sur elle,” she explained, “et l’art c’est une arme, un outil. En même temps que je traite un sujet, je réfléchis sur la manière de le traiter” (Conteh- Morgan 1995). But because her theatre, especially in its early, so- called ritual phase, is so clearly transitive—in its desire to transform communities and by extension larger society, to heal afflicted souls and create new, regenerated citizens made of “jasper and coral”— criticism has tended to focus on this transformative aspect of her work. If, however, Liking’s drama is undeniably instrumental, like the tool or weapon in her statement above, or the real-life rituals— funerary, therapeutic, or initiation—on which it is modeled, it contains no less, like those very rituals, a self-mirroring or self-reflexive experimental side. The anthropologist Victor Turner situates the experimental or festive quality of rituals in the liminal phase of the event, a period that can last from a few days to several years, and one during which the novices, spatially and symbolically separated from the profane world of fixed and stable positions and categories (social, political, gender,

1 See pages in this volume for a translation by the present writer of excerpts of the play. 2 Other useful studies of metatheatricality consulted include Stam 1985 and Schemling 1982. 184 JOHN CONTEH-MORGAN moral, cognitive, aesthetic, and so on), are taught to experiment with new meanings and forms (Turner 1982: 20-88). It is a period of sacred freedom, Turner explains, when the sharp distinctions and binary classifications of everyday social life merge and are blurred, and when the novices, stripped of their old identities, enter a zone of indeterminacy where they are now, for example, both ghosts and human beings—the former because they are dead to their old statuses, the latter because of their future symbolic rebirth to new ones: men and women (an act of transcendence of gender differentiation), animals and humans, and so on. The liminal world, in other words, beholds new possibilities; it is a period of creativity and innovation, which provides a potentially subversive glimpse into an order of society, of being and becoming that is radically other, different (Turner 1982: 20-88). But the new order glimpsed is not just social, expressed in the topsy-turvydom of inversions and reversals of previous social roles and relationships. It is also artistic and cultural. In an observation that is of particular relevance to the cultural significance of Liking’s oeuvre, and more immediately to the theme of this contribution, and one that is worth quoting in full, Turner writes:

[In liminality] the factors or elements of culture may be recombined in numerous, often grotesque ways, grotesque because they are arrayed in terms of possible or fantasized rather than experienced combinations… In other words, in liminality people “play” with the elements of the familiar and defamiliarize them (27). There is a play of meanings, involving the reversal of hierarchical orderings of values and social statuses. There is a play with words resulting in the generation of secret initiatory languages as well as joyful or serious punning… Liminality is peculiarly conducive to play… to the introduction of new forms of symbolic action, such as word- games or original masks. (85: emphasis in original)

It is precisely the above feature of experimentation and innovation, of self-reflexive artistry (and not just of social reflexivity) characteristic of ritual liminality, that Liking has attempted to appropriate in her writings.3 It is also this attempt that explains a certain quality of

3 By drawing attention to the source in ritual ceremonial of Liking’s practice of self- reflexivity, I am in no way denying the possible influence on her of international avant-garde theatre practice, even if such influence has more often been suggested than actually demonstrated. The point, in any case, is that such influence as may indeed exist does not arrive in a cultural vacuum, but rather intersects with pre- existing, indigenous conceptions of metatheatricality that constitute Liking’s