Wole Soyinka
the appellation suggests and as revealed in the riot of disorder in her bed-
room and the profligate jumble of commodities and objects in her market
stalls, embodies flamboyant disorganization and barely contained chaos.
There is a slight hint in the author-protagonist’s structuring of these con-
trasts in the sensibilities of his parents, that this may be the foundation
of the mature artists’ embrace of duality and contradiction as the very
source of art in general and the Ogun muse in particular, the “wildness”
of the mother corresponding to the fiery aspect of Ogun’s temper and
“Essay’s” passion for order and organization corresponding to the god’s
more deliberative, recreative traits, especially since inIsara, Soditan, the
cognomen that “Essay” assumes in that work, embodies many of Ogun’s
questing and creative attributes.
The complement of other adult figures who populate the growing
protagonist’s consciousness is a large amalgam of social and moral types
who are, in every instance, brilliantly presented in their individualities
or even eccentricities. This large cast includes “Daodu” and “Beere”
(the Revd. And Mrs. Ransome-Kuti) who together compositely embody
the ethic of uncompromising personal and national self-reliance and
civic-mindedness; “Mayself,” the sponger who ultimately wears out the
immense hospitality of the author’s parents; the author’s grandfather,
one of the last in a vanishing breed of hardy Yoruba yeomanry; and the
lunatic pair of husband and wife, Sorowanke and Yokolu, whose place
in the imaginative universe of the memoir lends credence to Foucault’s
claims inMadness and Civilizationthat before it became medicalized, in-
stitutionalized and confined, “madness” had a voice, a logic of its own
which was not merely “unreason,” not merely the incommensurable
“Other” of Reason, but was one of the accepted modalities of social
being.
One of the most astonishing features of the narrative ofAk ́eis the rel-
ative absence, compared with the preponderance of profiles of adult
figures, of powerfully rendered portraits of members of the author-
protagonist’s own peer group. In all, only about three children or play-
mates of the young Soyinka are given any tangible, individualized pres-
ence in this memoir of childhood. These are Bukola, the “emere” child,
Osiki, a primary school playmate and Iku, the quintessential intransi-
gentflanneurthat we encounter in the briefly narrated episode of the
author’s secondary schooldays at the Abeokuta Grammar School. It
must be said however, that whatAk ́elacks in numbers regarding the
presence of age mates of the protagonist it makes up for in the inten-
sity and resonance of the author’s re-creation of these three figures from