Wole Soyinka
In an ascending order of centrality in the plot structure of each work,
social antagonisms – and the social movements and energies to which
they give rise – occupy the foreground of the narrative inIsaraand
Ibadan, in a sublimated and artfully ludic mode in the former and in a
literal, pervasive though fragmentary form in the latter. While inAk ́eand
Isarathe narrativization of social struggles and movements is mediated
by techniques which distance the author-narrator – who is at any rate
not a participant in the experiences recounted in these texts – from the
events narrated, inIbadanthe entire narrative seems to be driven by
the author-protagonist’s excessive self-regard as the pivot around which
diverse insurrectionary activities and currents revolve.
One key aspect of the overdetermining importance of the world of
adults in the formation of the young Soyinka’s sensibility and conscious-
ness inAk ́eis the fascination exercised on his imagination by the pas-
sionate debates and arguments of his father and his friends on just about
every topic under the sun, but principally on the rapidly changing times
in which they lived. In his “Author’s Note” toIsara, Soyinka ascribes
the impulse to write this loving and respectful memoir of his father and
his generation to his discovery of a tin box belonging to his late fa-
ther and the consequent “eavesdropping” on the contents of the box –
“letters, old journals with marked pages and annotations, notebook jot-
tings, tax and other levy receipts, minutes of meetings and school reports,
program notes of special events and so on (Isara, v).” These “found”
items of a rather special heirloom can only be considered complemen-
tary to Soyinka’s own direct experience of the passionate disputations of
his father and his circle of friends and colleagues, an experience amply
recorded inAk ́e. And perhaps the one truly new item in the contents
of the tin-box heirloom is the correspondence between the author’s fa-
ther and an American “pen pal,” Wade Cudeback, resident of an exotic
sounding place-name in the United States – Ashtabula. What the cache
of correspondence between the two adds to what Soyinka already knew
about his father and his cohorts is brilliantly encoded in the presenta-
tion of Ashtabula as a point on the mental and imaginative horizon of
Yode Soditan and his circle of friends that is a polar opposite to their
internal, indigenous reference point, their hometown, Isara. However,
by a narratological sleight of hand, Soyinka brings these two polar op-
posites of inside and outside, the home and the world, the local and the
foreign within the compass of mutually constituted locations in a com-
mon earth such that when Wade Cudeback finally shows up in person
in Isara at the end of the narrative, Soditan can say to him: “Welcome to