OKONKWỌ (AN OPERATIC ADAPTATION OF CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART)

ABSTRACT

There seems to be a general view and understanding by the different cultures of the world that a people’s story can never be told enough or stopped from being told, no matter the form or the medium used. In this age of rapid changes, we are also saddled with the rapid ripple effects of thesechanges which force us to find alternative new ways of appreciating some of the important things we hold dear. A classic work as Things Fall Apart written by Chinua Achebe more than five decades ago needs not be limited to just the novel itself or a movie adaptation considering the strategic significance it gives to the image and historical essence of Africa, the Black race and all the people whose stories crossed path/s with it; hence, a need to diversify its medium of appreciation, preservation and promotion as far and as much as the creative  mind  can  deal  with.  Adapting  Things  Fall  Apart  into  an  (African)  opera  will contribute to this diversification when done by a musically creative and artistic mind with good grasp and understanding of the work itself. It is achievable through a good crafting of the work into a fine libretto that would accommodate both the English and Igbo languages used    inter-textually;    making    up    fitful    choruses,    recitatives,    arias,    instrumental accompaniments, dances, etc that will have to considerably represent African vocalism and African  musical  idioms  (especially  of  the  Igbo  areas)  in  sound; employing  the  African instrumental  techniques  like  the  African  pianism  and  drummistic  piano  accompaniment styles, etc to make up for the mixed ensemble accompaniment, as well as deploying all other necessary effects  and techniques  of  intercultural  and multicultural  research-compositional styles that can enable a modern opera represent a good level of African Identity.

Chapter One

Introduction

1.1 Background of the study

The media of African arts production and exportation are changing in varying degrees and forms. Their producers have the liberty to adapt to the changes or find ways of reinventing their products soas to sustain relevance and project their presence in the international circles as well as preserve same for generations unborn. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is reported to have been translated into more than 30 languages all over the world yet the original language of the author is not popularly known to be one of them. This compels questions like: If some important historical records written as stories in the  bible have been adapted into different versions of opera by different composers in the contemporary times and fashion, why not an important and popular story about Africa like the Things Fall Apart? It is possible to realize an opera that can reflect the  true nature of the story while allowing influences by modern compositional   trends  in   African  music  and  African  musical  arts.  This  work  mainly contributes  to  the  diversification  of  the  appreciation  given  to  literary  works  of  arts. Expectedly, the  deployment of ‘research-composition’  (Onyeji: 2008) in some areas of the work will  draw from the musical cultures of the settings used in the novel itself (which areIdemili areas of Anambra State, Nigeria) as well as those of other areas in Igbo land. On research-composition   as  one  of  the  major  driving  forces  in  African  musical   creative processes, the proponent, Onyeji (2008) asserts:

(It) is an approach to composition in which in-depth ethnomusicological research on the indigenous music of a given culture informs the creative and compositional theory of  modern  art  music  composition.  It  is  a  compositional  process  that  enables  a composer produce modern African music of any length or magnitude by the study and application of creative elements and idioms from identified African musical type or tradition (p.15).

The projection of these indigenous musical culture(s) and types of the selected areas through research-composition  enabled in drawing the interest of an ordinary viewer of the opera to African creative skills artistically used in treating and sophisticating native musical idioms. There is more than one instance of the redacted excerpts of the  traditional concepts gotten from  the fieldwork.  However,  it is more germane  to  represent  that of Egwugwu—which formedone of the most important themes of Chinua  Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Mmonwu (masquerade). See:

(This is an excerpt of the Egwugwu masquerade music as played and sung by the masquerade’s adherents in Ogidi where the fieldwork to this research was conducted)

1.2 Purpose of the study

This work seeks to diversify the appreciation  of the widely-acclaimed  novel, Things  Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. By so doing, it equally opens up another medium of understanding, promoting and documenting the historical significance embodied by the novel. Extensively, this effort will help to awaken the African motion picture handlers (Nollywood precisely) to other possible art forms – (African opera being one) – which they can popularize by using them in the transfer of dramatic or filmic ideas, as to achieve quality variety in the African art.

1.3 Significance of the study

The one peculiarity shared by all art works is their ability to interrelate and adapt to other art forms, media, and even regions. As such, we can have a fiction made into a play or a play made  into  a  fiction;  or  we  can  have  a  poem  visualized  into  a  painting  or  a  painting transformed into a written text. We can also have a drama that was set in another continent adapted as a story that happened in another. These possibilities make arts inexhaustible and boundless in their potential. Considering such possibilities, music, as one of those arts, has its own potential  of adapting  a different  art form  to  itself.  Of  such art forms it can adapt, fictional arts is one. And when such happens, we say that a dramatized story has been set to music. Bearing this in mind, this work sets out to diversify the possible art forms and media of appreciating the classic novel, Things Fall Apart – published in 1958 by the late Chinua Achebe – by adapting it into an African opera as well as other works in same category. Aside that is the totality of contributing to the archiving and promotion of the novel which bears a great deal of history of the  pre-colonial  African.  Additionally,  it seeks to contribute  and promote studies in African operatic adaptations, especially in music institutions of Africa and at other places interested in African studies and African musical culture.

1.4 Aims and Objectives

The following are the aims and objectives of this study.

1.        To make a contribution to a more studied growth of African Musical Theatre.

2.        To contribute to the archiving of an important document as Things Fall Apart using the entertaining medium of music.

1.5. Scope

The opera covers the more musical and dramatic areas in the novel, Things Fall Apart leaving out  the  less  musical  and  dramatic  ones  which  could  be  merely  prosaic  or  musically unimportant details. There are 24 chapters in the novel and they are in three parts. The first part contains the first 13 chapters. The second part contains chapters 14-19, while the third part contains chapter 20-24. In these mentioned parts and chapters, some details were cut out as they may not be necessary for the music which is more emphasized in an opera. Example of such places is in chapter 3 where Okonkwo, the protagonist of the novel met with another remarkable  character,  Nwakibie,  to  help  him  with  yam  seedlings  for  his  farm.  Another example of such place is in chapter 11 which has along narrative of the tortoise and the birds, and other examples. The opera also  accommodated  and elaborated some important scenes where poems were used by the  characters.  An example of such is the encounter  between Okonkwo and Uchendu in chapter 14. In the encounter, Uchendu sang: “For whom is it well, for whom is it well? There is no one for whom it is well” (p.108).

Such poems were elaborately composed as to be sung both by the character and the chorus (audience-participants).  Such places are accompanied by a mixed ensemble of Western and African  instruments.  The  opera  also  made  provisions  for  scenes  that  will accommodate organized dance steps, choreographies or make-shift dances that can come up at some scenes as elicited  in the novel or at the discretion  of the director or  producer of the opera. An

example of such is seen in Act III, scene I titled “Iyi-Uwa” where a group of women danced in celebration of Ekwefi’s reassurance of motherhood as represented in a chapter of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. In all, the 24 chapters of the novel were collapsed into  4 Acts and 16 scenes excluding the overture.

1.6. Methodology

Music, like other arts, is always characterized by that significant trait of order. Its harmony, rhythm and horizontal stack of notes that form the melody are some of the characteristics of such orderliness. An opera that will reflect, to a good extent, the true essence of an African story, needs approaches that would be thought out well; and that is why a methodology to such attempts deserves a mention.

This work’s method of research begins with a library research (online and offline) which reviews the nature of opera as a compositional genre already existing in musicological studies of the past and the present.   The  researcher   now  embarks   on  an  intense  field-work   where  analysis   of   mmonwu (masquerade)  musical  theatre  genres  like Egwugwun’egwuregwuof the Ogidi  people in Anambra State—the  hometown  of the Chinua Achebe,  the author  of Things  Fall  Apart.(Evidence  of this is shown in a picture displayed on page 37). This was necessary considering that there were countless mention of Egwugwu  in two chapters  of Things Fall  Apart. That experience lends opportunity for making  a structure  that  allows  free  musical  creativity  around  the dramatic,  musical  and  textural material of study; a structure that hopes to meet the demands of the modern scriptwriting for the musical theatre while expressing the traditional essence of its inspirational source.

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