Ritual Interruption

This essay revisits Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman through the prism of Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer, only to fracture the coherence of that figure within the colonial encounter. Elesin Oba’s suspended subjectivity is not a metaphysical lapse or a tragic misreading between cultural grammars; it is a colonial deformation of ritual legibility, where the sacred and the abject no longer oppose but cohabit. The British interruption of Yoruba ritual suicide enacts more than cultural interference: it inaugurates a “state of exception” in which the suspension of indigenous law reasserts imperial sovereignty. Yet Soyinka’s dramaturgy exceeds Agamben’s juridico-political logic. Elesin is not merely abandoned by law but saturated by competing orders of ritual cosmology and colonial biopolitics that overdetermine his body. His death, once a consecrated passage, becomes a foreclosure of sacrifice itself as a recognizable form. In staging this impasse, Soyinka does not illustrate Agamben’s paradigm; he displaces it. What emerges is a sacrificial subject fractured between ritual investiture and colonial apprehension, whose interrupted body is left neither sanctified nor redeemed, but suspended in the epistemic violence of imperial modernity.