Performance Elements that Keep Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino Alive on Paper, the Stage, and in the Mind

Abstract

Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino is effervescent and defiantly fresh. Previous commentators suggest the work’s influence, appeal, and popularity stem from its style but they have not directly credited the performance elements without which Song of Lawino would perhaps not have flourished, or the probable influences Okot p’Bitek must have picked from the theatre as a performer and curator. I take Song of Lawino as a staged performance, with an imagined physical audience, not just the reader. Performances acquire their performativity from the dramatic, that is, the extra-ordinary and spectacular. Additionally, the domestic situation forming the poem’s subject matter projects Song of Lawino as a performance in traditional Africa, where characters behave according to gender and social expectations. My paper demonstrates how performance elements (the performer, techniques, venue, text, director, and audience) contribute to the poem’s success and timelessness as performance art, literature, and repository of African traditions.