Visionary mythopoesis in fictional and nonfictional prose valence of playfulness and seriousness depending on the person, the
occasion, the challenge faced.
This factor surely lies behind the considerable difference in the profiles
of “Essay” inAk ́eand Yode Soditan inIsara, even though these are profiles
of the same person, the author’s father. The latter profile is far more
rounded since it belongs to a text that is, after all, a memoir of Yode
Soditan and his generation. But even so, what makes theIsaraprofile
more intriguing is the considerable amplification of the flashes of wit,
great sense of humor, the vulnerabilities and unfulfilled professional and
emotional yearnings of the author’s father that we only dimly perceive in
Ak ́e. The “Essay” of that work is, within the constraints imposed by home,
profession and familial obligations, supremely in control of everything,
indeed cannot brook loss of control over environment and circumstance,
as the incident of “Lemo” (“graft it back”) involving the hapless teacher
who helps himself to a flower stalk from Essay’s garden, demonstrates.
By contrast, Yode Soditan inIsarais in a much vaster “garden” where
such control is impossible, for this is a “garden” linking the natal village
to the colonized national territory and the wider world of the British
empire and its European competitors. As with V.S. Naipaul’sA House for
Mr. Biswas,Isarais the tribute of a famous son to a gifted father who did
not have, could not have had, the opportunities available to his son and
his son’s generation.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the entire narrative of
Isara, as multifaceted as it is, turns on the exchange of letters between
Yode Soditan and Wade Cudeback. Or more precisely, on the use of
this correspondence – and the diverse tropes it provides – for powerful
narrativizations of the continuities and discontinuities between the home
and the world, indigenous and foreign. For prior to the inception of this
correspondence with his American pen-pal, Yode had traveled out of
the natal village and had become part of the “Ex-Iles,” a vanguard of
educators of the next generation. But Cudeback’s letters take the process
significantly further by instigating a radical awareness of the severely lim-
ited nature of the education purveyed in Yode’s alma mater, St. Simeons
and, more generally, the values and premises of British colonial edu-
cation of the “natives” in the Nigerian protectorate. This awareness is
precipitated by Yode’s realization that in his replies to Cudeback’s let-
ters, he could barely match the latter’s wealth of details regarding local
history and places and sites of cultural significance precisely because,
though an educated, gifted man, nothing in Yode’s formal education
had prepared him for acquiring such knowledge. The passage which