Ananse/Èşù Rising: Trickster Figures and Shakespeare in Davlin Thomas’s Lear Ananci, a Caribbean King Lear

Abstract

Many contemporary rewritings of the Shakespeare canon capture the enduring and unending global relationship with the English Bard. The radical transformation of the canon from the beginning of the twentieth century in particular dramatizes the conflicting situations in the adapters’ countries in what often amounts to the use of the alien potentialities of the canon to address the failings of the present. One fine example of such rewritings is Davlin Thomas’s Lear Ananci, a Caribbean version of King Lear1. This paper examines how Thomas appropriates both Shakespeare’s King Lear and Ananci (that he merges his features with the Yoruba hero-god, Èṣù) in order to provide forceful and penetrating insights about the failure of postcolonial realities in the English-speaking Caribbean country of the author. While the play clearly comes across as a concrete affirmation of the continuing relevance of Shakespeare to global politics, it also affirms the continuing place of African tradition and ritual aesthetics in the New World through the playwright’s use of narrative resources that he draws from the Yoruba/African diasporic performance tradition, which comes in the guise of the Akan mythicfigure, Ananse (written Ananci in the Caribbean).