By Hilary Akuburunwa, edited by Japhet Davidson

Kekeghe’s Broken Edges is a beautifully scripted play which borders on lunacy. The mild and extreme maladies, which flood the scenes of the play, are metaphoric reflections of the effects of administrative failings and marital brokenness in the Nigerian sociopolitical space.

These maladies are seen in the angst, insincerity, desperation, fear, and levity shown by the characters. Through the play, Kekeghe chiefly tears into Nigeria’s repressive, political system which is peopled with plunderers who loot funds and repress the vulnerable masses.

The neurotic tendencies of the characters are a statement of Kekeghe’s status as a holder of a doctorate in literature and medicine — a degree which establishes the relationship between literature and psychiatry.

Broken Edges is tactically segmented into seven parts: “the remains” and six “processions”. The play is set in Imode Community, an allegorical representation of a limbless Nigeria. In the exposition of the play, we see the aggressive Ejaita, slate the leaders of Imode for embezzling funds and leaving the Community in ruins.

This scene is a foreshadowing of the penultimate part of the play as the playwright, for a creative effect, steers those events to the present which sees Ejaita, evince a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in submission to the psychological bruise he suffers due to the heinous killing of his friend, Ederha.

In the first procession of the play, Ejaita, in the company of other aggrieved youths, fearlessly confronts Chief Tafie, the Moderator, and Professor Uduakpo as he seeks answers to the lingering questions which hover around the onslaught of the defenceless farmers and other episodes of sociopolitical depreciation. Pa Okorhi, Ejaita’s father, later commits suicide after sliding into depression as a result of persistent family skirmishes and his wife’s shameless flirting with soldiers.

After the death of Pa Okorhi, the President General engages Ejaita in an ameliorative discourse as he tries to towel Ejaita’s unseen tears. Ejaita heeds the advice of the President General as he, Ejaita, agrees to resort to farming together with Ederha because of the elusiveness of government jobs. It is at their farms, that they are attacked and most of them, including Ederha, gruesomely killed.

The tragic events culminate in Ejaita, burning his credentials in reaction to his joblessness and other feelings of disillusionment as a bright young graduate. In this evocative play, we see the portrayals of lunacy and many striking, archetypal representations. The playwright achieves this with the deployment of a very aesthetic language. With the roles and settings, invented by the playwright, it is obvious that his investigative thrusts are “broken homes” and a “broken Nigerian leadership”. The brokenness of these sectors clearly informed the title of the play.

Ejaita, one of the major characters, manifests both neurosis and psychosis. The deterioration of Imode’s socioeconomic challenges forces his initial neurotic state to drift to psychosis which results in his being chained to a domestic madhouse. Through Ejaita’s lamentation, Kekeghe unzips the agonizing realities of Nigeria — a nation of wreckage where people with dignity live indignifying lives while those with decayed dignities live in affluence. The fearless playwright simply infers that Nigeria is not a healthy space where virtues thrive.

Madam Gold, Ejaita’s mother, also portrays lunacy in the play. Her neurotic traits are made manifest in her insatiable desire for extravagance. She regularly nags and disparages Ejaita and Pa Okorhi, her husband and Ejaita’s father.

Madness also permeates the political setting of Imode, as Tafie, the Commissioner for Security, display the madness of desperation when he addresses the angry youths. Tafie shamelessly engages in the conventional blame game as he vilifies members of the Rebranding People Party (RPP) for the regression of the Community. The pretentious empathy, which he shows in his address, typifies the oratorical rascality of Nigerian politicians who deploy rhetorics to sterilize the minds of the masses.

The events and characters of the play are archetypes of the Nigerian society in which the playwright lives. They are a vivid representation of a failed nation.

The play’s language is aesthetic. Kekeghe creams the dialogues with beautiful, figurative expressions and humour. We see how he adorns the dialogues with personifications, similes, paradoxical expressions, metaphors, and other figurative utterances.

In this tragedy, we see how the author metaphorically produces pictures of the dysfunctional sectors of the Nigerian nation. He creates portraits of the lunacy which buzzes around the repressive, political system of Nigeria, the military, the family, the educational system, and other sectors. Worthy of a resounding applause is his hybridization of drama and poetry.

Akuburunwa studied English and literature at the Delta State University, Abraka.