The Political Grotesque as Reelected in Bate Besong's "The Most Cruel Death..."

By Alfred Matumamboh
The Herald, Nov. 18-19, 2002

Bate Besong’s dramaturgy generally deals with political decadence in the higher echelon of the political structure. In The Most Cruel Death of the Talkative Zombie, the grotesque form of the play provides the energy that animates and amplifies its political content. The play deals with organized state terrorism inflicted on a people in that some of the members of this region are "secessionists" and "subversives". So in a bid to crush the so-called separatist element, hell is let loose on the region. Indiscriminate arrest, torture and massacre are carried out. The character Toura, at the end of the play summarizes the point, "And to trap a handful of secessionists, he decided to Hiroshima a whole region".

This play is indeed rich in meaning. It can be read as an artistic examination of Cameroon’s political birth, because it offers an imaginative rendering of the faults committed at the dawn of political independence of this country. We can also read it as an image of a society in the throes of collective self-destruction. The dangers of absolute power are another perspective. One can also read it as an imaginative dissection and portrayed of state terrorism carried out against its people. This is the angle of reading this paper will adopt.

The two groups that are locked in a deadly confrontation are on the one hand the neo-colonial regime backed by France and on the other, the opposition party within the francophone region and the Anglophone community as a whole. The state brutalisation of the people is carried out with schizophrenic frenzy.

Reading the play through, one has the impression that the dramatist is a student of Frantz Fanon, that most creative genius in the analysis of violence in colonial and neo-colonial settings.

Bernard McElroy in his book, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque, helps us to locate the source of the terror of the grotesque. He contends: " For Rustin, the source of the terror of the grotesque is…the fear which arises out of the contemplation of great powers in destructive operation, and generally from the perception of the presence of death."

In The Most Cruel Death…, Yaro Amichive symbolizes the "great powers in destructive operation, "He is an avatar of evil, of frightening force of destruction, in love with torture and murder. A character with a high concentration of evil energy, flat, one dimensional, yet not an artistic flaw. His implacable thirst for blood induces a sinister atmosphere in the play. He destroys the political detainees with exaggerated excitement. The more he destroys, the more excited he becomes. Evidently, Amichive is a raving maniac, a beast! He reaches the height of demonic bestiality when he is seen "…licking the blood of prisoners".

"At its most effective, as in, say, the best stories of Kafka, the modern grotesque serves not only to satirize and to heighten, but to expose", contends McElroy. With an insane maniac full of cannibalistic proclivity, in position of military power, society becomes a huge convulsive graveyard. Not surprising therefore, "stage is filled with groans from the dying heaps upon heaps of unconscious victims of Yaro’s gorillas". Such graphic scenes of mindless savagery abound especially in the second part of the play which is entitled in French, "Il n’ya pas Dieu ici". With a profusion of such gory actions and images, an eerie and unsettled atmosphere is generated and pervades the play, producing intense revulsion as a felt response in the reader or audience.

The three things that preoccupy the playwright are to satirize, heighten and expose the horror and terror engendered in a morally dark socio-political landscape, where the men in power have lost their sense of logic, power to restrain and above all fellow feeling.

The dramatist intensifies this sense of horror and terror that pervades the play. There is constant talk of killing, brutalisation, death, massacre, pogrom, etc and barbaric methods of human destruction such as using blunt swords to murder, men thrown into a mine shaft, others killed firing squad, some buried alive more drowned etc. The intention is to intimidate the entire society so that in that cowed and mentally and psychologically broken state, "blind loyalty, blind obedience" will be the first communion of any patriot.