The famous play written by Wole Soyinka, “The strong breed” tells the story of Emen, who lives in a strange village and has to sacrifice his life in order to save the village.
It is a highly symbolic play. The play seems to suggest that death is a crucial marker in the struggle between individual will and community wholeness. Here Soyinka blends the past with the present. The play is marked with flashbacks between Eman’s past and the present where he sees images of his father and his dead wife Omae. His father’s reminder that they were destined to be carriers prompts him to go back to his village after twelve years. The protagonist (Eman) is a stranger who has come to this particular village to act as a teacher and share his education. On the night of the purification ceremony he learns that Ifada, a helpless idiot boy whom he has befriended has been selected as ‘carrier’ and victim; and he is driven by compassion to take Ifada’s part in the ritual. The crisis brings back memories. While checking the pedigree of Eman’s family, we can identify that his father was also a carrier and sacrificed his life. So Eman has fled the family tradition of symbolic sacrifice.
Important sources
1: Malayalam movie, Thaniyavarthanam (1987) which tells how deep the blind faith is in rural india and how our perception of something , makes it right or wrong rather thatn what really it is. Balan Mash (protagonist) is a teacher who lives in a tiny hamlet in Kerala. Balan Mash has a uncle who is mentally challenged. His uncle became a mental patient after a separation with his lover; this underlines the deep-rooted belief among their family that one male from each generation will go mad.One night changes it all, when Balan has a nightmare. People start suspecting Balan of following the footsteps of his uncle into madness because Balan's uncle fell mentally ill with a nightmare.
Now Balan's community evaluates each and every move he makes; he is deemed a lunatic and his actions are misinterpreted. Eventually his family joins the gang and he is sent to the asylum. The doctor declares him sane. But society doesn't agree. Helpless, Balan plays mad. Ultimately, Balan's mother poisons him to free him from the world.
2:Agnisakshi, malayalam novel written by Lalithambhika Antharjanam
It is the story of a Nampoothiri woman’s struggle to rise above the shackles of tradition and her journey towards self-realisation. Based on a novel by the same name by noted Malayalam writer Lalithambika Antharjanam, Agnisakshi is the story of two individuals who love and respect each other, but whose life together is doomed right from the beginning. Set against the turbulence of the freedom struggle, the film showcases the conflict between tradition and progressive reforms, the caste system and the emancipation of women.
In this novel author portrayed tribal life very clearly. At one level, their visions are almost identical: they visualize the disintegration of a primitive community under the impact of a new faith or an alien value-system. But to see the disintegration of Lulla village (In the novel, Dadi Budha) and the tribal community in Umuofia (In Things Fall Apart) as parts of the same process of change is to play down the role of colonialism as an agent of disruption. Achebe’s allusion to W.B. Yeats is not a gesture of submission; it interrogates its cosmic, universalist vision of change. Although Gopinath does not directly refer to Yeats, he also focuses the traumatic expression of colonialism in his work.
4: Disgrace, novel written by J.M Coetzee
The novel takes its inspiration from South Africa's contemporary social and political conflict, and offers a bleak look at the country. As in all of his mature novels, Coetzee here deals with the theme of exploitation. His favorite approach has been to explore the innocuous-seeming use of another person to fill one's gentler emotional needs.This is a story of both regional and universal significance. The central character is a confusing person, at once an intellectual snob who is contemptuous of others and also a person who commits outrageous mistakes. His story is also local; he is a white South African male in a world where such men no longer hold the power they once did. He is forced to rethink his entire world at an age when he believes he is too old to change and, in fact, should have a right not to. The novel also explores the difficulty of communication between men and women, between parents and children, and between humans and animals.
