In doing so, the essay draws from the existing scholarship on Shakespeare, including Jan Kott’s and Ania Loomba’s works. This essay examines how Yerima uses Othello and other plays by Shakespeare to address his own society. It is not about how “to rip out and replace old patches with new or to start the quilt from scratch, but to add to an ongoing work” (Burnett 7). Shakespeare adaptations, as Linda Burnett writes, are “a postcolonial enterprise” and “a patchwork quilt of many perspectives” (7). Bradley’s statement that “ Othello is a drama of modern life … the characters come close to us and the application of the drama to ourselves is more immediate” (171) may as well apply to Otaelo in the way that it engages an ongoing reality and social concern and demonstrates both the admiration and collaboration of a young (and new) writer with an older one, as well as a correspondence between the two writers separated by both temporal and spatial divide. Supposedly in the sense that, while the play uses the context of Othello to dramatize the danger and tragedy of Osu, a socio-cultural practice based on segregation and marginalization among the Igbo people of southeast Nigeria, and similar in many ways to racism (and otherness) at the centre of Shakespeare’s Othello, it also borrows heavily from other plays by Shakespeare including The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and Titus Andronicus. Otaelo is supposedly an adaptation of Othello. Rather, Yerima’s adaptation is informed by the idea of reworking Shakespeare as cultural translation that is useful in addressing his own social concerns. However, Yerima is neither concerned with “rewritings that would give voice to the voiceless reveal the other side of a canonical European work and undermine its master-narrative” nor is he interested in “fragment the classic text to intersperse it with new material and reverse its ending” (Doring 82). Reworkings of his plays in the postcolonial world have therefore largely contested the political and cultural hegemony that Shakespeare represents and hence are termed “canonical counter-discourse,” following Helen Tiffin and her description of how the new plays seek to “destabilize the power structure of the originary text(s)” (22) by seeking to “deconstruct significations of authority and power exercised in the canonical text, to release its strangle hold on representations and, by implication, to intervene in social conditioning” (Gilbert and Tompkins 16). Since the colonial period, Shakespeare has become not just “the quintessence of Englishness and a measure of humanity itself” (Loomba and Orkin 1) – the English Bard was considered “a prime signifier of imperial cultural authority” (Tompkins 15) in former British colonies. In order to give greater resonance to his own play, Otaelo, which he locates in history, the Nigerian playwright Ahmed Yerima also collaborates with and uses Shakespeare’s status. The authors also inform us that any cultural work, including adaptation, should be studied in its relation to the political issues that play out within it since “any work of culture has a history in which its political import is repeatedly transformed” (6). In the General Introduction to their highly informative book on adaptations of Shakespeare, Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier observe that: Sometimes … those who adapt Shakespeare admire the original, are interested in a kind of collaboration with Shakespeare, or make use of Shakespeare’s status to authorize their own work borrow from Shakespeare’s status to give resonance to their own efforts. Shakespeare is, here, now, always, what is currently being made of him. Keywords: adaptation, collaboration, Osu, Shakespeare, social reality, Yerima
Yerima’s play underlines how adaptation makes it possible to view the relationship between an older writer and a young (or new) one in the context of both influence and collaboration. From the perspective of collaboration with Shakespeare through Othello, this essay examines Ahmed Yerima’s Otaelo, which dramatizes the debilitating and tragic effects of the Osu practice among the Igbo people of southeast Nigeria and emphasizes the play’s strong echoes of other plays by Shakespeare, including Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and Titus Andronicus. While this approach suggests collaboration with Shakespeare rather than contesting of the colonial political and cultural hegemony that the English Bard privileges, it also underlines the influence that Shakespeare has on the writers and cultures with which he has been in contact. Several contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare address important, as well as ongoing, socio-cultural and political situations in their various societies.
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