Ake is not one of the books you just jump into, jumping around, swimming freely in the narrative. It’s more like a mud-think river with hippopotomouses and catfish swimming in the muck. Slow. Thick. Taking it’s time. The voice reminds me of Naipul- it’s very much one of those male, brown, Post British Colonial I Went to Convent School Serious voices. As such, I’m atttracted to it and I also am frustrated with the limits of the rigid voice.
My library copy dates back a ways and was published in Britain. My first contact with the book was reading the jacket copy and the liner notes, and I was struck by how the writer of the liner notes was attempting to shape, and sell the content to British writers. I no longer have the book in front of me so I can’t quote directly, but it went something like, “Here you will find (name) a quaint and blah-blah village headman; here you will find the ominous and magical world of Ifa, where spriits are real! Here in Ake, everything is so exotic, everything is so familliar.” (That last is a direct quote.) The writer of the notes is trying to both sell the book as ooh, mysterious and exotic! African religion! Whoa, and as a book that;s “just like any other family narrative.”
These liner notes made me think of the pressures and choices Solyinka faced when writing his childhood story. He was writing in English for an audience not made up soley of his Nigerian communities- this was a book that would go into the West and the world. And he was writing about Yoruban religion and Nigerian christiniaty, as well as his family and his boyhood. What did it feel like to think about writing those secrets,t to a world that exoticizes, fears and poo-poos that African spirituality? I wonder if he was blocked often in writing, or if it came easy.
In the end, the liner notes are the liner notes. Solyinka does not write his spirituality or his inner knowledge in an exotifying or pandering way. It is indeed ordinary because it is. He simply tells his stories of egun as they happened, because they did happen that way. But how much unseen work lays behind that writing?
