Wole Soyinka
expresses this radical shift in Yode’s sense of the conflicting epistemic
bases of individual and social selfhood is a crucial passage:
So where were the trails, the spots, the landmarks? Where could he take his senior
pupils – assuming he could persuade the mission to such a bold extension of
the history classroom? And yet why not? It was the kind of excursion that was
endorsed in principle byThe Nigerian Teacher – sowhere could he take even a
handful of pupils on such an exercise? Then set them down to write the story
of their passage among the ghosts of their own history. He would pick out the
best essay and send it off to Wade Cudeback – yes, here is something in return
for your Magnetic Mountains and Reversing Falls and the marathon runner
Paul Revere. The thought depressed him: Where did the seminarian tutors of
St. Simeon’s ever take him? Yet in his youth had he not often traversed those
grounds, those battle-contested grounds of Yoruba kingdoms? From Isar`ato
Ilesa, at least four times a year – twice only as he grew older and became inured
to a prolonged exile – passing through Saki, Iseyin, and the ancient city of
Oyo, walking, cycling, entombed in a dust-filled rickety transport. Through the
years of training, were the seminarians ever taught to look? Had his youth truly
vanished through so much history without even knowing that one had tolook!
(Isara,)
In the light of the musings of Yode Soditan in this passage, what
Cudeback’s letters precipitated in Yode’s consciousness is nothing akin
to the classic paradigm of knowledge acquisition encoded in Plato’s myth
of the cave – coming out of the darkness of ignorance and illusion into
the sudden blinding light of truth and reality. Rather, Cudeback’s letters,
symbolized in the meta-trope of “Ashtabula,” divides Yode’s conscious-
ness of self, place and history into “unseeing” and “seeing” phases where
“seeing” signifies openness to all sources of knowledge. The emphasis
in this, it should be noted, is on the word all, for as a Westernized,
Christianized nativeevolu ́e, Yode would normally be expected to fol-
low the prevailing tendency to disparage local, indigenous sources of
knowledge. But as the passage indicates, his “seeing” phase entails re-
valorization of local sources of knowledge not in isolation, but in a dy-
namic, comparative relationship with foreign sources of knowledge. This
is why there is a much narrower gap inIsarabetween Yode and his father
Josiah, on the matter of Christianity versus “paganism” than inAk ́e.This
is also why Soyinka is somewhat inaccurate in declaring in his “Author’s
Note” toIsarathat Yode and his generation embarked on “an intense
quest for a place in the new order, and one of a far more soul-searching
dimension than the generation they spawned would later undertake (vi).”
On the evidence of what we actually encounter inIsaraYode and the
“Ex-Iles” are definitely more self-sacrificing than his son’s generation of