Atipo, Medaye, Sons and Old Age
…continued from POST #10 by Olakunbi Olasope
The fundamental importance of male children to a Greek man is similar to their importance to a Yoruba man, especially a king. Sons not only provide support for their parents’ old age but bestow a kind of immortality through the perpetuation of a man’s family name, his property and line. A woman, by contrast, is viewed as a passive conduit of female fecundity, passing on her husband’s name and property to his male heirs. Since Atipo has broken the marital bargain by abandoning Medaye for a more strategic marriage, she retaliates by inflicting childlessness on him. By striking at the heart of his social status and gender identity through the annihilation of his lineage, she rightly sees that only the death of Atipo’s sons and his new bride, who might bear other sons, will make him suffer the agony he has caused her. Indeed, men and women express love differently. For some of the audience, Atipo is a cheap and contemptible character. He has betrayed his wife and children by marrying Kurunmi’s daughter. He pays dearly for this trespass, though. Atipo—living in exile with all the associated difficulties, naturally seeks to secure his family’s position, both financially and socially, by marrying the princess. His plan is to knit the families together by contributing more children via the princess. It is Atipo, not Medaye, who reflects the standard stereotype of the self-interested, dangerous foreigner seeking to use marriage to the princess to infiltrate and usurp the town as Atipo makes clear, he is not marrying Kurunmi’s daughter for love. Rather, he is marrying her for personal gain. Nor does he seem aware that his quest for personal status and gain through marriage is a danger to the community. Atipo seems genuinely shocked that Medaye is not taking his decision and her subsequent situation well. Whereas he acknowledges her anger, he underestimates its force. For the other group of audience, Atipo is a warrior, the kind of warrior that death will meet standing on the battlefield. He cannot go to war because he is an exile in Ijaiye. For him, marrying Kurunmi’s daughter, Iyinpo, is the ticket to the semblance of a normal life. Marriage to Iyinpo will confer citizenship on him and he will be able to command the Ijaiye troops. By so doing, he will be re-integrated into the community with royal privileges. Peradventure he dies at the war front, he be celebrated as a hero. Medaye may be the one who destroys Kurunmi and his daughter, but it is Atipo, not Medaye, who transgresses the foreigner’s code and unleashes war – in the form of Medaye’s wrath – upon the city.
In Medaye, then, we see the two sides of the ideology of the stranger who is no threat and a benefit to the city so long as her fruitfulness and sexuality are contained within the proper relationship befitting foreigner status. It is only when she is forced outside the boundaries by the actions of her husband that she becomes dangerous. Her consuming loyalty to Atipo robs her of any rational thinking. We have the two sides of Medaye’s nature battling against each other—the rejected wife fighting with the loving mother—her all-consuming passion for revenge in conflict with the clear knowledge that by killing her children she will be destroying herself too. Hatred of others is also destructive of oneself. Medaye defies in the most dramatic way the positive ideals and the desirable stereotypes of Yoruba womanhood of sexual restraint, meekness first to one’s father and then to one’s husband, and dedication to one’s children. But the tragedy seems inevitable since exclusivist commitments are the only basis of the marriage between Medaye and Atipo.
Medaye in a sense, a pathetic victim, will make no pathetic adversary. In a sudden reversal at the end of the play, Medaye, the underdog becomes the survivor…