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Isara
and
Ibadan
, in a sublimated and artfully ludic mode in the former and in a
literal, pervasive though fragmentary form in the latter. While in
Ak´e
and
Isara
the narrativization of social struggles and movements is mediated
by techniques which distance the author-narrator – who is at any rate
not a participant in the experiences recounted in these texts – from the
events narrated, in
Ibadan
the entire narrative seems to be driven by
the author-protagonist’s excessive self-regard as the pivot around which
diverse insurrectionary activities and currents revolve.
One key aspect of the overdetermining importance of the world of
adults in the formation of the young Soyinka’s sensibility and conscious-
ness in
Ak´e
is the fascination exercised on his imagination by the pas-
sionate debates and arguments of his father and his friends on just about
every topic under the sun, but principally on the rapidly changing times
in which they lived. In his “Author’s Note” to
Isara
, Soyinka ascribes
the impulse to write this loving and respectful memoir of his father and
his generation to his discovery of a tin box belonging to his late fa-
ther and the consequent “eavesdropping” on the contents of the box –
“letters, old journals with marked pages and annotations, notebook jot-
tings, tax and other levy receipts, minutes of meetings and school reports,
program notes of special events and so on (
Isara
, v).” These “found”
items of a rather special heirloom can only be considered complemen-
tary to Soyinka’s own direct experience of the passionate disputations of
his father and his circle of friends and colleagues, an experience amply
recorded in
Ak´e
. And perhaps the one truly new item in the contents
of the tin-box heirloom is the correspondence between the author’s fa-
ther and an American “pen pal,” Wade Cudeback, resident of an exotic
sounding place-name in the United States – Ashtabula. What the cache
of correspondence between the two adds to what Soyinka already knew
about his father and his cohorts is brilliantly encoded in the presenta-
tion of Ashtabula as a point on the mental and imaginative horizon of
Yode Soditan and his circle of friends that is a polar opposite to their
internal, indigenous reference point, their hometown, Isara. However,
by a narratological sleight of hand, Soyinka brings these two polar op-
posites of inside and outside, the home and the world, the local and the
foreign within the compass of mutually constituted locations in a com-
mon earth such that when Wade Cudeback finally shows up in person
in Isara at the end of the narrative, Soditan can say to him: “Welcome to
Visionary mythopoesis in fictional and nonfictional prose
Ashtabula!” This is why
Isara
, the memoir, is Soyinka’s most densely struc-
tured, and ingeniously textured prose work, for neither
Ak´e
nor
Ibadan
has
an “Ashtabula” as a social imaginary which powerfully encodes perspec-
tives that might enable breaking free of narrow, bounded and constrain-
ing horizons for the elites of colonized (and neocolonial) spaces. And
indeed, it requires a careful labor of textual exegesis to track the com-
plexity which Soyinka infuses into his depiction of this Isara-Ashtabula
continuum.
Very early in the narrative of
Isara
we are allowed a glimpse into the
thoughts which the name “Ashtabula” has provoked in Yode Soditan,
the fictionalized name of the author’s father:
It had taken quite a while before the schoolteacher brought himself to accept
the word as yet another place-name. Like Isara. Or Kaura Namoda. That had
made him pause. What would the natives of Ashtabula think of that one? Or
Olomitutu? How did it sound in their ears? Even so, as a name for white people –
Ashtabula? This hand from beyond the seas had stretched the bounds of place-
naming beyond easy acceptance. What spirits had presided over the naming
ceremonies of such a place? A settlement was no different from a child, you
recognized its essence in the name. That was the problem – there was nothing
remotely European about the name Ashtabula! Or were Americans now far
removed from white stock and breeding? (
Isara
,
)
The silent disquisition on naming and identity in this passage is not the
familiar one in contemporary critical theory on the vital link between
hegemonic consolidation of power and its almost limitless capacity to
entrench itself through the capacity to “own” things and control rela-
tionships by acts of naming;
rather, Yode’s thoughts here belong to an
older Yoruba tradition embedded in Ifa divinatory lore which sees nam-
ing things, people and relationships “correctly” and “appropriately” as
flexibly linked to essence and fate.
It is this premise which leads Yode to
conjecture that Ashtabula could
not
possibly be a white American place-
name, unless of course white Americans had totally cut themselves off
from their natal stock in the “old countries” in Europe. But then that other
conception of naming and identity in contemporary cultural criticism
which hinges on power and domination is very much part of the delib-
erately ludic ensemble of tropes on naming that feature so extensively
in
Isara
. This particular conception actually structures the tensions and
antagonisms in the following passage from the fifth chapter of the work,
titled “Homecoming” where “home” stands for many things: Isara, the
natal village; locally produced goods and services in competition with
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