by Chika Unigwe, author of The Middle Daughter
One of my fondest childhood memories is watching a play with my classmates – we were probably in SS1 then (the equivalent of 10th grade ) – in our boarding school’s assembly hall. A travelling university theatre group had made a stop at our school to stage Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame. It was a stunning performance in English and Rotimi’s Yoruba language. That play introduced me to Yoruba gods and sayings. After the perfomance, we were told that it was a retelling of a Greek play: Oedipus Rex. How could it be, we wondered, that this very Yoruba play about Odewale who was cursed with killing his father and marrying his mother, was a retelling of an ancient Greek play?
I don’t recall when I eventually did read Oedipus Rex, but I recall being fascinated by the idea that something written in a different time, for a different culture, resonated so well in a Nigerian context, over a thousand years later. It was mind boggling. Even now, when I think of it, I find it difficult to imagine the characters as anything but Yoruba-speaking Nigerians.
Perhaps, had my classmates and I been more astute, or more mature, had we read more Greek myths, we would have understood that like our Nigerian folktales, myths are living things. They are not the past, they do not expire. And therefore, like our folktales lend themselves to adaptations. There are no “official” versions of Greek myths. In fact, different versions appear to contradict themselves. For instance, the myth of Hades and Persephone – the myth I reimagined in The Middle Daughter – has versions where Persephone’s tricked into eating the pomegranate seeds that keep her bound to Hades, and versions where she eats the seeds willingly out of love for her abductor (Stockholm syndrome?).
Additionally, all the stuff that Greek myths are made of: desire, revenge, oppression, lust for power, love are things that humans – since the beginning of time – have grappled with. The myths remind us that after all is said and done, we as humans have more that connects us than not. There’s nothing new under the sun.
Furthermore, myths (like our folktales) always speak to the now whatever and wherever our ‘now’ happens to exist in. That is their superpower. That is why they transcend time and culture and race. They give us a lens through which we interpret our own experiences. The myth of Cassandra is one that Ngugi Wa Thiongo, the Kenyan writer used in a radio interview some years back, to describe the writer’s role in his country: doomed to prophesy but never to be believed. It was so apt, so natural, it seemed like the only way to express his frustration at the chaos he’d warned about playing out.
Arguably, it’s not just Greek classics and myths that do this. Any piece of fiction that is well written transcends time and place. Someone once said that it is in writing the particular that we approach the universal, or something to that effect. How true that is. I have read American and European texts set in the most provincial cities, with characters that would seem to have little in common with me, and yet the stories seem to have been written specifically for me, as if the writer had bored themselves into my mind and reproduced everything I was thinking.
Texts are not defined by the origins of the writers but by their content, and how well they articulate the human condition. That’s why we read. Not just to be entertained, but to assure ourselves that we are part of a community, that we are not stranded, islands on our own. That’s how I experience reading.
Chika Unigwe was born and raised in Enugu, Nigeria. She graduated from the University of Nigeria, KU Leuven (Belgium) and has a PhD from Leiden University, Holland. Author of The Middle Daughter (Dzanc Books, April 2023), Unigwe’s previous work includes novels On Black Sisters Street and Night Dancer as well as the short story collection Better Never than Late. She was also a contributor to Of This Our Country: Acclaimed Nigerian Writers on the Home, Identity and Culture They Know; Lagos Noir; New Daughters of Africa; and Regiones Imaginaires. Find her online at ChikaUnigwe.com and follow her on Facebook, Instagram (@chikaunigweauthor), Twitter (@chikaunigwe), and LinkedIn.