For anyone who has read Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and noticed the obvious omission of the ‘African voice’, you will immediately sense the act of reclamation upon reading Joan Anim-Addo’s re-adaption, Imoinda.
From the very first Act of Anim-Addo’s play, the decision to open on a significant black cultural ‘event’ (cornrowing hair), to her choice of not giving name to the white slavers, to her deployment of African speech and euphemism – all of these acts feel nothing short of retribution.
Within this idea, the most distinctively marked act of reclamation is that of African ritual and spirituality.
To understand the significance of Anim-Addo’s work it’s important that we look at how ritual and spirituality were represented in early European history.
The literature of the time shows to what extent the black image became demonised. Barbara Bush describes some the fictions pervasive at the time: representations of the ‘she devil’, the ‘dangerous obeah women’, and of general ‘bad African practices’ were all commonly observed in reference.
Despite these negative representations, Bush argues that, for African people themselves, these rituals served to fortify their sense of identity, and worked as a spiritual form of resistance.
Imoinda begins with the burial procession of our named character’s father. The songs that begin to be sung, the dance that begin to reverberate; this sense of tribalism the reader is able to understand not as some kind of evil and demonic practice but as a divine and honourable component of their culture.
To look even closer on the issue of reclamation, a scenic comparison can made between Anim-Addo’s Imoinda and Shakespeare’s Othello.
Second only to Desdemona, Othello prizes nothing more than the handkerchief passed down to him from his mother, who was, revealingly, ‘a thought-reading Sybil’.
Considering it’s African (and therefore tainted) history, Ruth Cowling remarks how, from the perspective of Elizabethan England, this handkerchief can be read as a representation of evil and mysticism.
Looking then from this perspective, can we not imagine how the evil powers of this garment worked to strip Othello of his famed (European) reasonability, and ultimately caused him to murder his own wife?
In this reading it’s important to note that this is not an apparition taking over Othello but rather a beast emerging from him. Aligning with the ‘fatal’ representations of black people at that time, this is to say that the devil was always present, only lurking beneath a false European veneer.
Here the workings of African spirituality falls greatly in line with popular representations of the time.
Anim-Addo utilizes spirituality in quite a different manner. Imoinda at first strikes us as quite detached and unaffected by her father’s death. At the insistence of her handmaiden that she mourn for her father, Imoinda proudly proclaims that she is, ‘no longer a child’, and then questions, ‘what can sorrow do to me?’.
This adopted affectation, however, soon dissipates under the progression of the drums, the chanting and the chief mourner’s proclamation about her father’s greatness.
We, alongside Imoinda, come to realise that this burial cloth is not just a cover for her father in death, but is a symbol for the people’s history he stood for. At once touching the cloth, Imoinda breaks down: ‘I am found out, it is not true that I am fully a woman’.
Here we see how ritual and spirituality within African culture can work to bring a person closer to themselves and their community.
In reclaiming the precepts of African ritual and spirituality Anim-Addo gives life to both character and culture. It is an important act of retribution for a history abused.
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