All in perspective

It took me four different tries to get past the first four pages. No joke. Because of Elmaz’s cry to start reading Ake early (I believe she gave this same sinister warning for Places and Memory for Forgetfulness . . . need I say more?) I plopped myself down at an outdoor Peet’s coffee shop in Berkeley. I thought the warm sun and comfort of coffee would help me ease into this book. Bad idea. A coffee place was not the library, where there’s an understood rule to shut up. Everyone’s conversations literally screamed in my ears for attention. Since I’m cursed with the “I-need-total-silence-rule” in order to read/ absorb/ learn, I had to leave Peets and go home to no distractions. Which home and no distractions is a total contradiction. But I don’t want to go off on such a tangent that Elmaz thinks I’m purposely avoiding Ake. Which I’m not. (wink) So once home I sat in the living room and tried to again just get past pg 4. Couldn’t. Then I lay down in bed thinking the cushion of pillows and down comforters would help. An hour later I woke up from a nap. My fourth attempt . . . fully pissed off at myself and wondering how I’d get through the whole book if I couldn’t even get through chapter one, I pulled out my notebook, sat in an upright chair and outlined each move Soyinka took us on.

I started to understand what was preventing me from sinking into the story. It starts off in an omniscient voice where “God” became the narrator that led us through Ake. “If God did not actually live there, there was little doubt that he descended first on its crest, then took his one gigantic stride over through babbling markets—which dared to sell on Sundays—into St. Peter’s Church, afterwards visiting the parsonage for tea with the Canon . . . Instead God strode straight into St. Peter’s for morning service . . .” p.1 To start the first chapter with trying to describe a place was my first road block. It usually took me longer to invest in a story if Place is presented to me as the first character. But with that opening, I was expected to believe that God was the narrator and he dragged me through an unknown place. I didn’t even know what country or continent we were on? Then to further throw me off any kind of logical trail, words like parsonage, Canon, and BishopCourt were carelessly tossed around. Soyinka in general liked to toss names around without feeling any debt of responsibility to the reader to explain who these people were. Further into the book, he would pause to explain why he’d given certain people nicknames, like Canon and Essay. But even in those explanations, Soyinka was still not clear on the relationship to the narrator. I didn’t know that Essay was the narrator’s father until the scene where he was confronted by the two soldiers

But, that scene was important for me. You could say, a turning point for me as a reader. I started to understand why the narrator didn’t explain things in a linear fashion (such as reason for nickname >occupation> relationship to narrator). It was because he was just a little boy. The narrator’s child like view, that he didn’t even know his father’s real name, gave me a swift reality check. It made me think about the different ways to reveal a child’s point of view. An easy conclusion to jump to is that a child would speak in simpler terms than a highly intellectualized adult. I believe June Jordan took this approach by keeping her infant memory sections crisp and short. In contrast, Soyinka used sophisticated adult language, but stayed true to a child’s view in the level of understanding of the situation. So when the narrator told the soldiers that he only knew his father’s nickname, “Essay,” that was when I started to have respect for the writer’s intentions. Another example of Soyinka’s employing the child’s perspective was on pg.4. “If I lay across the lawn before our house, face upwards to the sky, my head towards BishopCourt, each spread-out leg would point to the inner compounds of Lower Parsonage.” I just love that image of a boy describing his insular world according to how he laid down in the grass. I used to do that too, be able to lie in my backyard and from each arm, leg, head and hip direction recite where all my neighborhood friends lived. Another favorite scene in the book was the man nicknamed mayself. I cracked up each time mayself spoke, “Oh, you-mean-mayself?” Ny-ou.” Soyinka is a funny man, I thought! There were many moments where Soyinka’s humor made me care for the narrator even more.

Overall, I think once I was able to grab onto a small understanding of what Soyinka was trying to achieve (give a true interpretation of his childhood from an unexpected childhood voice/ perspective), I sunk into his book and happily went along for the ride.