“Transgressing” Wisdom and Elderhood in Times of War? The Shifting Identity of the Elderly Queen in the Performance of Women of Owu

Old age is a relatively new area of critical inquiry in African literary and, particularly, theatre studies. This paper aims to explore in what ways an elderly Queen, Erelu Afin, in a 2016 University of Ibadan production of Femi Osofisan’s Women of Owu is a subject of cultural and ideological debates that disrupt, supposedly, normative understandings of old age, enabling one to reflect on the assumptions embedded in gender discourse. Wisdom and experience are often interlaced with life course and, ultimately, with elderhood in such ways that a presumable absence of these factors opens up the role and status of an elderly person to interrogation. The paper engages Stuart Hall’s understanding of identity in order to reflect on the shifting potential of one’s identity when it comes to the elderly Queen in particular and gender in general. Coupled with visual elements, an exploration of speech enunciations, situations of interlocution and kinesic factors, as they are performed in collation with other characters in the performance, will allow me to explore the dynamism of gender identity as it correlates with old age in a politically turbulent environment.