Wole Soyinka
and avatars is, moreover, not confined to the writer in moments of great
peril or confinement; rather, it extends in a great expanse which applies
to diverse aspects and stages in the life of our author and even embraces
the “selves” of others. In other words, it is a pattern that goes to the roots
of Soyinka’s creative imagination.
It is perhaps useful here to focus on the manner in which this pattern
enables Soyinka to remember, encode and reinvent the “self” and its
doubles from the earliest childhood experiences to those of the adult,
mature artist and public intellectual. This is all the more interesting
given the structure of what appears to be an extensive transcoding that
operates between the fictional and nonfictional works such that a non-
linear evolutionary pattern in the formation of the artist’s selfhood is
imagined both retrospectively and prospectively. Thus, in one instance
of the textual inscription of this structure, in the novelThe Interpreters
(), Egbo recollects a childhood incident in which he came up with
the ultimate rationalization of his refusal, when greeting his guardian’s
husband in particular, and all elders and adults in general, to prostrate.
Among males, greeting one’s elders in full prostration is one of the most
important “conduct” rituals in traditional Yoruba culture. This onerous
form of rebellious self-assertion against a central protocol of “proper”
etiquette is rendered in almost exact details by Soyinka in the nonfic-
tional book ofhischildhood,Ak ́e(). As recounted by Soyinka in this
particular text, the incident takes place in the palace of the Odemo of
Isara, and in the august company of the author’s father’s peers, which
comprises the chiefly and professional doyens of the town. The event
is precipitated when a truculent elder demands, or rathercommands,the
prostration obeisance from the very young, very tiny Soyinka. InThe
Interpreters, Egbo says: “If I only kneel to God, why should I prostrate to
you?” (TI,). InAk ́e, the young Soyinka asks, in the startled company
of his father’s friends and relatives: “If I don’t prostrate myself to God,
why should I prostrate to you?” (Ak ́e,).
By way of a short, necessary gloss on this pair of textual inscriptions
of an assertive youthful rebelliousness, it should be noted that it is less a
gratuitous transgression of regulatory “conduct” codes that is involved
here than the rejection of a prescribed, normative act – flat out, face-
down prostration to all of one’s elders – whose interpellative objective is to
naturalize what the young protagonist in each respective case intuitively
perceives to be an over-regulated and degraded selfhood. Thus, what
emerges, what is textualized and enters into a vast machinery of exchange