Chika Ose-Agbo and The Goat and Pot’s Quarrel.

A new play, And The Goat Broke The Pot, explores the failures of matrimonies and examines how homes, falling to spousal misunderstanding and abuses, grope for solutions.

NKRUMAH BANKONG-OBI/Lafia

The world sometimes shrinks, diminishing to a fraction, thus enabling writers to fold it into sheaves. They don’t make it disappear but mend its faults. And then, if the reader gives the writer a hand, the task of reformation becomes much easier. It is for finding solutions, especially since mankind, plagued by a plethora of existential challenges, has had to brush aside the romantic averment of arts for arts’ sake – the correctional navigational quills becoming the main thrust of the artist or writers’ preoccupation.

One such creative coursing on the writing artery of the creative enterprise is Chika Ose-Agbo, a gifted academic, poet and folklorist, who is deploying her arsenal from a deep reservoir to shed light on a darkening world. Her latest offering, And The Goat Broke The Goat, is a play. Cuts for itself the task of bringing to the fore, the prevalent and dreadful problem of domestic violence or spousal abuse. As I know, journalists, social commentators and indeed social workers have expended reams of papers on this subject. But given its uniqueness as a genre of literature, drama is capable of stretching the issue and situating it at the platforms wherever meaningful dialogue of social cohesion may be held.

To be forthcoming, Ose-Agbo’s play is the story of several families. We have Gilb and Agnes, with Agnes the object of Gilb’s pugilistic practice. At any slightest perceived misconduct, he pounces, he strikes and he leaves in a shadow, perpetually in fear of her husband. In another phase, we encounter. To tame his wild and misplaced energy, his sister-in-law, Eno or Made Destiny Suites had to arrange for some military men to beat him in retaliation for his misdeed. Besides the beating, the soldiers extracted a note of compliance from him, stating that he would never touch her in any way that isn’t romantic again. It worked. The wild creature was tame to a domestic pet. Take this conversation for proof:

Otaru:…There is this Pastor neighbour that most people always accuse of physically and emotionally abusing his wife. However, his wife never admitted it. A few days ago, he tied her hands behind him and asked his children to flog their mother while he repeatedly kicked her on the chest. As I am talking to you now, she is battling for her life in the ICU at the Dalhatu Araf Specialist Hospital.

Ene: hmmmm. I even heard that the woman is the breadwinner of the family. Why did she not do anything about her situation?

Eno: Maybe she didn’t have anywhere to go to…

At this point, Eno, exasperated with another woman’s subservient submission to the fate set by a heartless husband, tells her own story:

Agnes: This was what I went through in the first three years of my marriage. A few months after our marriage, my husband turned from the kind and loving man I courted to a monster, tormentor, wife beater and man and manipulator. He will psychologically and physically abuse me and still make me feel guilty. After I miscarried my first pregnancy, ‘I borrowed sense’ and opened up to my elder sister. Thank God I did, a few months back, she used soldiers to reset my husband’s brain.

Then, there is the family of Tina and Dona, where the lady is the abuser. She ridicules, threatens and physically assaults her husband until, unable to bear the liquidating grit of a lioness, he bolts from the house, taking along his kids. From his hidden location, he watches his estranged wife in financial and emotional turmoil. And then convinced that she is a new creature, he comes to her rescue, hence ending that cycle of subjecting the family to a motherly absence. Ms Ose-Agbo also presents us with also with Madame and Levi. Taken by a debilitating betting addiction, Levi loses every iota of manliness. At home, roles are switched as the husband becomes a wife and vice versa.

In this book, one encounters the absurdities that married couples go through to sustain their homes. Unorthodox systems, including poisons are administered to end it all. Women travel far to find solutions to the psychological wilderness that their husbands have thrown them. Husbands, overwhelmed by the giant forces of society, such as the soldiers in Agnes and Gilb’s case, become spineless, “No violence advocates,” doubling down to accept defeat even where a contest doesn’t exist.

All of the characters kept their homes, enduring pain of varying degrees. Take the case of Eno, who, for lack of other options, abstains from even bothering about the infidelity of Greg, her husband. But she must extract a compensation, a kind of poetic justice for the longsuffering. She ignores him but sticks around in the firm believing that she hasn’t found any reason to suspect him of any infidelity. Madame lives with Levi who has made himself invertebrate by his loyalty to usury – a dog of the bet shops. Dona, losing his ‘husbandhood’, takes to his heels but soon allows room for reconciliation, offering to avail his wife, of the services of a counsellor. More praise belongs to Papa Eze who, to restore sense to his wife-beating son, Eze, organises a communal beating of the culprit openly, to give justice to the woman.

The playwright begins by providing insight into her choice of title. Readers must understand that the proverbial fight between the goat and its final host, the pot, sometimes leads to a reversal of roles. And the pot, having been so adept at holding the goat, becomes the victim of destruction. This is the message that Ose-Agbo derives from folklore to work through her timely play. “It tells the story of the pot always cooking the goat. Then, one day, in a fit of anger, the goat broke the pot while it was on fire,” she says of the derivative import of the title. What does Ose-Agbo mean? That the genders are fast reversing bad behaviour (as Madame says to Eno on page 36). Unorthodox solutions are being tapped on to solve domestic violence and remedies are now procured, however low-standard they may be, to solve the challenge in homes, where the natural love medicine has failed.

The play calls attention to the disaster lurking around and destroying homes. That is being literal. It is about love that has gone woke. The playwright talks in all terms about the home. And if the home is at the heart of social orientation, then we need to build other forms of socialization into the story. Therefore, the indignities, the character miscarriages and supplanted marriages we find in the text are all firmly placed in our politics, religion and other social orifices. It is the simple reason why agents of government and indeed the private sector who are concerned about the socio-political health of this country, must ensure that this play is mounted for everyone to see, to learn and to partake in the character restructuring. The simplicity of the problem is here, the odious is presented and the reader/audience is availed a golden chance to decide on which side of the love affair they want to belong.

Although the author designed the play to be easily staged. The plot, in attempting to be episodic, loses some steam. This leads to the invaluable loss of character development and conflict or crisis- building. And The Goat Broke The Pot could have added more vigour, if all action was limited to a structured piece, maybe told through the lens of two families and their struggles. Perhaps, in utilising postmodernist multiple simultaneous staging, a lot of the action got lost in the process. But this is not a problem. If this play is staged, the director, if he knows his craft can atone for the infractions of the written text by deploying flashbacks, etc.

Again, as Thomas McGrath says in his poem, ‘Simple Love’, our collective passivity will leave us in a quandary, defying without attempting, solutions to social challenges: “But love without direction is a cheap blanket/And even if it did no one any harm/No one is warm.” Therefore, it is in man’s collective interest to go back to the time-honoured values of homemaking and find new curves for ensuring that not just the institution of marriage is retooled and properly practised but also ensure that the products therefrom have the requisite orientation to live within the acceptable ethos of humanity.