A Dance of the Forests — Alternative Ending

 A Dance of the Forests — Alternative Ending

This activity was assigned by Megha Trivedi Ma'am. It is part of the "Thinking Activity" series for the study of Post-colonial Literature or African Drama, specifically focusing on the complex ending of Soyinka’s 1960 play.

[The court of the Forest Head. The masquerade has reached its fever pitch. The Half-Child hovers above the assembly, borne aloft by Eshuoro's dark insistence. Demoke stands below, the carved totem at his feet, his hands trembling with the weight of what he has done and what he has yet to do. The Dead Man and the Dead Woman watch from the margins of the clearing, their faces no longer mournful but expectant — the way the very old watch the very young make the same mistakes.]

FOREST HEAD (withdrawing into the canopy, his voice descending like rainfall): I have seen enough of what men choose. The Half-Child is above you. Reach for it or let it fall. What you do now, you have always done. What you do now, you will always do.

DEMOKE (raising his hands slowly): Then let what I always do — be different this time.

[A silence falls over the forest. Even the drums go mute. Eshuoro freezes mid-descent, uncertain. This — this pause, this hesitation in the machinery of fate — was not supposed to happen.]

ESHUORO (hissing): You cannot unmake the pattern, carver. Your hands kill what they love. They killed your apprentice. They carved a summit that should not have been carved. Give me the child, and the dance ends cleanly.

DEMOKE: The dance has never ended cleanly. That is precisely the complaint.

[He does not catch the Half-Child. He does something unexpected: he kneels. He kneels beside the totem he has carved, that enormous, sky-reaching column of wood that cost Oremole his life, and he begins, with his bare hands, to dismantle it — pulling at the carvings he spent years perfecting, breaking faces from the bark, pressing the fragments into the forest floor.]

ROLA (stepping forward, alarmed): Demoke — what are you doing?

DEMOKE: I am returning what I took. I climbed too high because I could not bear that another should stand where I stood. I carved Oremole's face into the totem so the world would remember my guilt while celebrating my genius. Every face I cut was an act of vanity dressed as devotion. I am unmaking it.

ADENEBI (sneering from the edges): Sentimental fool. The totem is already part of the Gathering. It cannot be unmade. History cannot be unmade.

DEAD WOMAN (stepping forward for the first time with volition, not as ghost but as witness): He is not trying to unmake history. He is refusing to let it justify him.

[The Half-Child descends slowly, not caught, not dropped — it settles, as if choosing, into the arms of the Dead Woman. She looks at it. The child, that perpetually unborn thing, that vessel of all the futures humanity has aborted, opens its eyes for the first time in the play.]

DEAD MAN (quietly): It sees her.

FOREST HEAD (re-emerging, his tone different now — less like a god performing and more like one genuinely surprised): This was not what I expected.

ESHUORO (in fury): It is a trick. The carver distracts us with false humility while —

DEMOKE (still kneeling, hands bleeding from the broken wood): There is no trick. I am not a good man. I murdered my apprentice for the crime of being talented and young. I have lived inside the monument to that murder and called it art. I do not deserve the Half-Child. I do not deserve redemption. I am simply refusing — for once — to accept the story that my greatness excuses my cruelty.

[A long pause. The forest breathes.]

ROLA (slowly, something cracking open in her voice): And what of us who sent men to their deaths with a smile and called it power? What is the shape of our refusing?

ADENEBI: I have built roads, I have spoken for my people — what is the refusing for a man who served?

DEAD WOMAN: The refusing looks different for each of you. But it begins the same way. It begins by stopping the dance long enough to hear what the drums are actually saying.

[She holds the Half-Child up. The child does not cry. It turns its head slowly — toward the forest, toward the gathering, toward the distant sound of celebration in the village where men are busy congratulating themselves on independence, on newness, on a future they have not yet examined.]

FOREST HEAD: What will you do with it, woman? You are dead. You have no future to give it.

DEAD WOMAN: No. But the living do — if they choose to stop celebrating long enough to earn one.

[She walks toward Rola. Not Demoke — Rola. The woman who sinned without genius to hide behind, who destroyed without art to sanctify the wreckage. Rola who has no monument, no totem, no posterity to appeal to.]

ROLA (recoiling): Why me? Give it to Demoke. He is the one who — he is the artist, he is —

DEAD WOMAN: He is still kneeling. That is good. But you are standing. You are the one still choosing.

[Rola receives the Half-Child. It is heavier than she expected. She almost staggers. The Dead Woman steps back, satisfied — and then, for the first time, she looks at the Dead Man with something other than grief.]

DEAD MAN: Is it over?

DEAD WOMAN: It is the same. But perhaps the same can be different this time.

[Eshuoro howls. The sound fills the trees and then — empties out. He does not vanish so much as become unnecessary. He retreats into the upper canopy, biding.]

FOREST HEAD (to himself, in a voice the audience hears but no character does): They will forget. They always forget. The child will grow heavy, and Rola will set it down, and Demoke will rebuild his totem, and Adenebi will find new roads to charge too much for. The dance does not end. But —

[He pauses. He watches Demoke still kneeling, pulling apart his life's work with bleeding hands.]

FOREST HEAD: — but this is new. This small refusal. This one man, in this one clearing, choosing not to be forgiven too quickly. Perhaps that is enough to change the music, if not the dance.

[The drums resume, slower now. The Half-Child turns its face toward the audience. Its eyes are open. The forest closes around them all.]

[END]

A Note on the Alternative:

Soyinka's original ending is deliberately bleak and cyclical — Forest Head delivers his famous soliloquy lamenting humanity's incorrigibility, and Demoke's act of catching the Half-Child offers only a fragile, ambiguous mercy. This alternative shifts the locus of possible grace from heroic action (catching the child, the grand gesture) to renunciation — Demoke's dismantling of his own monument. It also reassigns moral agency to Rola, traditionally coded as the play's most sensual sinner, as a way of arguing that redemption, if it comes at all, comes to those without the cover of genius or office. Forest Head's final speech preserves Soyinka's deep skepticism while allowing a hairline crack of possibility — not optimism, but the suggestion that even a pattern worn into stone can shift, grain by grain, under the pressure of one person refusing to perform it.