“Scenes of Mockery”: Puppetry in Mohammed ben Abdallah’s The Trial of Mallam Ilya and Gerald Vizenor’s Waiting for Wovoka

Traditional and contemporary puppetry, vividly embraced in Mohammed ben Abdallah’s play The Trial of Mallam Ilya (1982) and Gerald Vizenor’s novel Waiting for Wovoka: Envoys of Good Cheer and Liberty (2023), provides a powerful tool to interrogate, to mock, and to combat the continued injustices facing Indigenous peoples. Notions of decolonization through trans-Indigenous juxtaposition (Chadwick Allen), productive correlation (Mita Banerjee), “spaces of co-resistance” (Rebecca Macklin), and “cross-cultural knowledge translation” (Kaiya Aboagye) are drawn on in analyzing the transculturally complex puppets, materially on stage or imaginatively in the narrative, as well as the metaphorical applications of puppeting imagery. The carnivalesque, ironically critical puppet parades, performances, and parleys are linked to multilayered intertextuality with Samuel Beckett’s iconic Waiting for Godot, the Indigenous peoples on both continents “waiting” at certain historical moments “for their hero to earn his name,” in Abdallah’s words (142). Both works underline the danger of “waiting” for a Godot-like puppeteer-savior, however: The seemingly endless waves of violent, self-serving rebellions in Abdallah’s play confirm protagonist Ilya’s insight that “we are all [helpless] puppets” (133), whereas Vizenor’s novel embodies the author’s notion of proactive survivance as the puppeteers craft “spirited hand puppets” to “scare away the snow ghosts” of hegemonic and individual oppression (Waiting for Wovoka manuscript 43-44).