Rotimi babatunde biography channel

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Rotimi babatunde biography channel

Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. Nigerian writer and playwright. Biography and education [ edit ]. Works [ edit ]. Award and Prizes [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. The Sunday Times. Archived from the original on 7 February Hay Festival. ED Exactly. My intention with the play was not only to make connections between experiences from different points in time but also to fuse the past, present and future into a new realm of simultaneous singularity — a realm that is, perhaps, similar to the one that Wole Soyinka theorised in The Fourth Stage.

Some people have argued that the zone of experience being explored by contemporary writers connected with the continent of Africa is way too narrow. I think more needs to be done by our writers of fiction to illuminate the present by refracting it through the prism of history. ED I like this because I see that your works existing in a continuum, feeding itself by itself.

RB Self-reflexivity and formal circularity in my writing is sometimes just what it is — the prankster in me trying to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. That can be seen as the writing feeding on itself, ouroborus-like — you know, like the serpent swallowing its own tail. However, in line with your earlier observation, self-reflexivity in my writing is also functional.

It gives one an extra tool with which to disrupt orthodox readings of history and to plumb human experience. ED So, which pasts are you interested in? RB Much writing about Africa refers only as far back as European colonialism of the continent and ignores even major historical experiences prior to that, for example the traumas of the trans-Atlantic slave trafficking era.

The buried past can be seen as metonymic of other dimensions of the hidden. Consequently, in my excavation of the subterranean, contemporary experiences that have been subsumed under more dominant narratives also come into major focus. They take a landscape; make it dystopic, at the same time filling it with so much grace. RB Cormac McCarthy is a terrific writer.

His virtues lie not only in his descriptive energy and in his uncompromising handling of challenging themes but also in his ability to exteriorise the interior in, and with, his landscapes. And those landscapes are not always realistic landscapes, even though they superficially appear so. Oftentimes, they are actually landscapes of the imagination, landscapes that are concretisations of abstract, existential concerns.

RB The novel continues to remain one of the most useful intellectual instruments we have to investigate the workings of reality and illusion, and to show how both ontological polarities, at the moments they overlap, beguilingly undermine and reinforce each other. That was what Don Quixote, at the very beginning of the history of the novel form, was all about.

And that is what the fiction of writers like Saramago and Tabucchi, of Borges and Calvino, continue to remain about, even centuries after Cervantes created Quixote. ED Can you do this same thing with plays; investigate the workings of reality and illusion? RB Awareness of that potential is central to my practice as a playwright. Theatre has been enriched from time immemorial by thespians who explored with haunting intensity that investigative possibility.

Permit me to illustrate with a story about Polus, an actor in Attic theatre, who brought an urn containing the ashes of his dead son onto the stage. In his performance, he was using the lines of Sophocles to mourn not only the fictional Orestes but also his recently dead son. I also remember an incident that happened while I was in primary school.

She knelt down beside her brother — who was lying still on the floor, his toga stained red with fake blood — to check if he was truly dead or not. I still find that incident fascinating. My alertness to the virtues of blurring boundaries in theatre is not only informed by my love for the whimsical. Destabilising certainties makes the ground beneath the feet of the audience quake.

And I think good plays make their audience uncomfortable, they make the audience re-think matters that seem long settled. Many excellent plays even go as far as inflicting some pain on members of the audience.