Wole Soyinka
special problem in Soyinka’s prose works. Within the allegorical frame-
work of narrative inSeason of Anomy, these melodramatic scenes depicting
actual historical figures as embodiments of great, monstrous evil repre-
sent the lowest possible point of artistic and intellectual yield. And this is
without ignoring the fact that the moral scheme of the sub-genre of alle-
gory traditionally has a binary, dichotomizing pattern of essential Good
confronting essential Evil since this pertains to the pre-novelistic forms
of allegory.
Between the first three of Soyinka’s prose works,The Interpreters,The
Man Died, andSeason of Anomy, and the subsequent three,Ak ́e,Isaraand
Ibadan, there is a hiatus of about a decade in the publication dates. As we
have remarked earlier, with the publication ofSeason of Anomy, the last title
in the first three prose works, it seemed that Soyinka had come to a dead
end, as far as writing novels was concerned. This fact somewhat helps to
explain the hiatus in the publication history of the two sets of his prose
works. There is of course the added factor that the years between the
publication of these two sets of prose writings were years when Soyinka
was at his most active in the theatre, his preferred medium of expression.
Finally, it is important to note that if it is probably the case that a writer of
Soyinka’s profound and sustained curiosity about the sources and nature
of his talents and sensibilities as an artist would sooner or later have
writtenAk ́e, the work of childhood memoir,IsaraandIbadan, as Soyinka
asserts in the prefatory note toIbadan, are “happenings” which were
provoked by social and political crises demanding the writer-activist’s
artistic responses in the form of the biographical or autobiographical
memoir.
Ak ́e,IsaraandIbadan, as memoirs, share many things in common,
although at a first approximation the difference of authorial intent and
achieved aesthetic effects between the three works seem to outweigh the
similarities. I would urge, however, that underlying the mass of differences
between the three texts is the fact that the narrative in each work is
organized around the idea of a powerful subliminal psychictropismthat
drives individuals and social groups towards emotional and spiritual
fulfillment and its many modalities – community, wholeness, love and
grace.
Ak ́e, as a memoir of Soyinka’s childhood years is not a conventional
Bildungsroman, a coming of age narrative; it is not a story of growing up
through an embittering loss of innocence or of a traumatic shedding
of illusions through very painful experience. The most sorrowful event
in the narrative is the death of a sibling at exactly her first birthday