Visionary mythopoesis in fictional and nonfictional prose Isara customs and traditions, decides that Agunrin Odubona “must be
called home” and he goes into “osugbo,” the “place where he cannot
be reached,” to accomplish this task. And in a demonstration of that
conception of language which holds that a secret, inscrutable potency
inheres in words and the act of naming, Agunrin Odubona dies at the
very moment when his intervention at the palaver is about to take place
and would have effected a reversal in the fortunes of the progressive,
enlightened camp: he has indeed been “called home” by Jagun from the
innermost recesses of the “heart of divination.” Given the considerable
narrative space that Soyinka gives to this concluding sequence in the
narrative ofIsara, some issues of authorial purpose and achieved effect
in this sequence need to be addressed.
On one level, the problematic concluding narrative sequence ofIsara
means nothing more than a mimetic, realist inclusion of an important
detail in the struggle for ascension to a traditional institution whose core
values, even in a modern setting, include as much of ritual, occult be-
liefs and practices as they are also cognizant of rational awareness of,
and pragmatic accommodation to changing times and conditions. At
this level, Soyinka as author is being faithful to the mimetic demands of
the representation of the event by showing accurately the two levels of
the struggle as the Isara citizenry saw it and talked about it: a struggle
between two shamans for the soul of a community still steeped in the
values of shamanism, and the struggle of the community’s new elites,
one camp adamantly “traditionalist” and the other forward-looking and
“progressive.” But at a more problematic level, mimetic realism trans-
lates to epistemological obscurantism because in the very manner of his
telling of the “calling home” of Agunrin Odubona, Soyinka seems to
imply that the occult, inscrutable powers of “oshugbo” not only consti-
tuted “the heart of knowledge” and ethics in the traditional precolonial
order (clearly a highly problematic postulate), in the changing, conjunc-
tural space of colonizing modernity it also remains a decisive force for
negotiating the dilemmas and contradictions of the new social order.
Isarais one of the very rare instances of a synthesis of simplicity and
complexity in Soyinka’s prose works. In its depiction of the acute sense
of generational encounters with self and tradition under the pressure of
dislocating historical change, it paves the way for the much bleaker and
unsettling narrative ofIbadan, Soyinka’s sequel toAk ́e. Nothing reveals
the prefiguring of the acute dilemmas and crises of consciousness of
the protagonist ofIbadanby the protagonist of the earlier text,Isara,
more than the sober, realistic but grim summation of Yode Soditan, the