The gnostic, worldly and radical humanism of Wole Soyinka and circulation with other situations and contexts in Soyinka’s fictional
and nonfictional works, is a notion of an inviolable, infrangible self which
is, at all costs, to be protected against any and every attempt at its being
subdued, even at the grave risk of infractions against central, normalizing
societal rules and codes. This, surely, is the “self” that is revealed in the
following passage fromAk ́ewhich, in fact, takes us much further back in
the author’s life than the “prostration” refusal episode:
As I scrubbed myself in the bathroom I felt ill with apprehension. Lawanle’s
words had merely increased the unease which was lately surreptitiously trans-
mitted to me – those sentences that began on mother’s tongue, but were never
complete, the fleeting disapproval of some privilege extended to me by Essay,
the pursing of the mouth as I made off with my mat to his room while Tinu,
cousins and all retired to the common mat.I hated that communal mat, I realized quite
suddenly; it went beyond merely feeling special in Essay’s room. I hated it with a vehemence
that went beyond the fact that some of the others, much older than I, still continued to wet the
mat. I simply preferred to be on my own.(Ak ́e,) (My emphasis)
As narrated by Soyinka in the passages following this quote, it takes the
carefully planned ruses and stratagems of “Wild Christian,” his mother,
with the covert connivance of “Essay,” his father, to “break” the young
boy into the world of the “communal mat,” but even so the “interpella-
tion” is not completely successful:
That following night I lay on my mat in the dark and cried. My transfer was
permanent. And there could be no mistaking the rather guilty half-smile con-
firmation on my father’s face. ()
The incorporation by Soyinka into his fictional and nonfictional writings
of his total rejection of two of the most powerfully normalizing and inter-
pellative “conduct” codes and ritualized practices of traditional Yoruba
culture for early childhood – the prostration obeisance and the shared
communal mat – is made in each case without much commentary by
the author. This, I suggest, is deliberate, for their inscription without
commentary is far more powerfully encoding than what a gloss might
accomplish. Readers able to decode such inscriptions in fact know, by
silent registration, that the “self” textualized by these radical refusals is
one that would go to the uttermost limits in following its own intuitions,
its own proclivities. This reflexive incarnation of the “self” by Soyinka
in the mask of radical, dissenting nonconformism is not monolithic, it is
highly differentiated and it is this differentiation that provides an expla-
nation for the considerable differences in tone, form and impact in the