Aké: The Years of Childhood

3.5 Stars

It took me a while to read this book, but I'm glad I did. This book was charming, but read more like a series of short stories than a real novel. I guess that's how life is: a collection of our stories and experiences.

I loved being in young Wole Soyinka's head. He was curious and troublesome, and made me laugh on quite a few occasions. After reading it, however, I can't help but wonder how Mr. Soyinka could possibly remember all that happened to him as a child in such vivid detail. Perhaps if a childhood is as eventful as his own, one cannot help but remember the little things. I suppose it also helps to have close family members with recollective memories as well. ;)

The Flavor of Childhood is Universal

I've never been to Nigeria, nor even West Africa, and though I've known many Nigerians, including a number of Yoruba, I could never say, until I read AKÉ, THE YEARS OF CHILDHOOD, that I had any real idea about where they came from. You can read other Nigerian writers---Tutuola, Achebe, Ekwensi, Nzekwu, Amadi---or listen to Nigerian music from Fela, Ebenezer Obey, `King' Sunny Ade, or Olatunji---there's a vast world of Nigerian culture, but until you've read Soyinka, you haven't tasted the real flavor of it. Seeing that I've just confessed that I haven't been there, how do I dare to say such a thing ? It's because I believe that the human experience has both particular and universal elements and Soyinka is at his best in describing his childhood days in such a way that both are clearly present. Childhood is a welter of impressions, small events, accidents, misunderstandings, broken promises, smells, sounds, and feelings. Everyone's childhood is composed of just these things. But how about a childhood in Abeokuta, Nigeria in the late 1930s and 1940s ? In Soyinka's autobiography, we appreciate the specific qualities of those years in that place in magnificent detail...addiction to powdered milk, getting lost because you followed a marching band, stewing a snake, dislike of being an 'exhibit', learning to love books. Everything is told from a child's point of view, with no attempt to be prescient after the fact. [The thing that annoyed me tremendously about Jean Paul Sartre's "The Words".] Soyinka comes across as a very honest man.
The first few pages are a little bewildering, before you sink into the comfortable flow of humorous, tender, wondering memories. I liked the use of Yoruba expressions and sayings, translated at the bottom of each page-if Europeans could bombard us with German, French, Latin, etc., why not Yoruba ? Soyinka makes no concessions, and that's great. Most of the famous autobiographies of world literature have come from Europe and America. Now Africa has produced one to stand up with the best of them.

Estas memorias noveladas me han hecho reír, me han estremecido, pero sobre todo, con ellas he ampliado enormemente mis horizontes. He aprendido con ellas, me he preguntado cosas y me he reafirmado en otras.
El libro nos relata la infancia de Soyinka desde que tiene uso de memoria hasta que cumple 11 años. Es un periodo corto en el tiempo para un adulto... eterno para un niño, y a través de los ojos de ese niño que fue el autor, vemos y descubrimos el mundo. Es una delicia descubrir todo lo cotidiano de la vida con esa mirada siempre sorprendida, optimista y segura de sí misma.
Vamos a aprender cómo era la vida en Nigeria durante los años 40 en una familia acomodada (en ese contexto)... todo el libro parecer una carta de amor a sus padres, pero contado con muchísimo humor e ironía. Descubriremos muchos pedazos de la cultura yoruba, de sus creencias, rituales, del choque de culturas, de la religión y el enfrentamiento cada vez mayor con el hombre blanco y su política colonizadora.
Aunque casi todo el libro parece un compendio de anécdotas infantiles absurdas, escalofriantes, divertidísimas, emotivas... hacia el final el libro comienza a desarrollar un tono mucho más serio al describir la lucha por los derechos de las mujeres, con sus marchas y manifestaciones, en las que el propio Soyinka participó, así como su madre y varios familiares, que tomaron una parte muy activa en el conflicto.
El libro está plagado de eventos reales y personajes Históricos, pero en todo momento sientes que todo lo que el autor cuenta es algo enormemente personal, son los recuerdos de la vida de un niño inocente que no juzga el mundo en el que vive, que aún no se pregunta por qué suceden la mayoría de las cosas, que da por hecho que sus padres siempre tienen razón...
En fin, es un libro maravilloso. No será para todo el mundo, pero yo lo he disfrutado una barbaridad y no puedo dejar de recomendarlo para aquellos que quieran aprender un poco de otras culturas de manera amena y sorprendente.
Wole Soyinka recibió el Premio Nobel de Literatura en 1987, fue el primer africano en recibir el galardón en esta categoría.

Now, here is Ayo, very ambitious for you. He wants to send his son into battle and believe me, the world of books is a battlefield, it is an even tougher battlefield than the ones we used to know. So how does he prepare him? By stuffing his head with books. But book-learning, and especially success in book-learning only creates other battles. Do you know that?

Delightful!

"It is time to commence the mental shifts for admittance to yet another irrational world of adults and their discipline."

The closing lines of this childhood memoir made me smile. What a mistake to underestimate the rationality of children while overestimating that of grown-ups! To a child, the grown-up rules and routines, their ideas and dogmas, seem overwhelmingly crazy. The pedagogical value of forbidding shoes in a school remains a mystery, both to the young boy about to change schools yet again on the very last page of this account, and to the reader, who also has to bid farewell to the magic of this very special childhood with a father called Essay (S.A. - how I would love to change my initials!), and a mother called Wild Christian, just to name the closest relatives in Aké. The sheer variety of cultural and natural influences is a brilliant manifesto for human crosscultural learning and understanding.

I have long been an admirer of Wole Soyinka's poetry and plays, and his childhood memories fully explain how he developed the wit, intelligence and empathy to create them.

A noble Nobel!

How often do I call something 'Proustian'? Not that often, yes? So, pay attention, because this work brings to mind that languid tidal wave in all the right ways.

Out of the entirety of ISoLT, Swann's Way is the volumetric portion that stays with me, both out of the initial contact of superb wonder and my penchant for childhood narratives that don't talk down to its younger self. To begin to read those pages is to dive and it is the same here in Aké, land calling to faith calling to logistics within the first paragraph in perhaps not as lengthy a sentence but indeed in as dense a phrase. Each and every sentence is more of a beam than a part, interchange of far reaching wave and concentrating of particle as Soyinka conjures up his childhood in as delightfully subsuming a manner as the best fiction often does. He didn't win the Nobel Prize for nothing, I can tell you that.

Of course, that previous reference doesn't persuade as well as I used to think, so there must be more. First off there's the novelty, for how often do you read an autobiography set in a Yoruba village in western Nigeria? Admittedly, the story taking place before and during WWII grounds one a bit, but here the new is traded for the novel lens, a view of things both turned on its head and lushly unique. I wouldn't hold your breath if that's your main incentive for reading, though. Soyinka does not live through the war on paper till he is eleven, and there are memories from three to two to an unnamed farther back in his yearly life to first off contemplate and contend.

If a child is telling you a story, wouldn't you say that it's best they be both precocious and all too young, offering up tales of strange exploits combined with the most precious of thoughts? If that's the case, I cannot think of a more perfect protagonist than little Wole. Always stubborn, always questioning, always following his interests both physical and intellectual, viewing the admonishment of various adults as guidelines he is fully free to evaluate and critique in as vocal a manner as is necessary. That latter audacious insight leads to rampant classifications, formation of definition for everything from the 'without time' guava tree to his own parents, the nickname of his father of especial note:

n  It did not take long for him to enter my consciousness simply as Essay, as one of those careful stylistic exercises in prose which follow set rules of composition, are products of fastidiousness and elegance, set down in beautiful calligraphy that would be the envy of most copyists of any age.n

This mentality counters and swerves around every aspect of life, portraying in astonishing ways every matter encountered by a child, communal bedrooms and hungry house-guests considered just as thoughtfully as culture clash and the passage of time. Amongst all these disparate scenes of a child's life intersecting with events both tickling and somber, a particular favorite of mine is the eclectic rhetoric birthed by the principal at Wole's Grammar School demanding that every student accused of a misdemeanor defend themselves in a schoolyard trial. If the defense meets Daodu's, the esteemed Winston Churchillesque principal himself, standards, the accused goes free, the obviousness of their crime or the absurdity of their argument having little to no impact on the decision.This surprisingly reasonable stance leads to eloquence regarding the matter of a stolen chicken being conducted along the lines of:

n  I concurred principal, and there being no time like now because action speaks louder than words time and tide waiteth for no man opportunity once lost cannot be regained saves nine, principal, and finally, one good turn deserves another so, with these thoughts for our guide, we spread out, closed in on this cock in order to catch it and restore to the poultry yard from which it escaped.n

Delightful.

In contrast, yes there are mentions of colonialism, racism, sexism, and usual age old mix of -isms and co. However, the young Wole's view is always a mix of engagement and critique, accepting what makes sense to him and puzzling over the nonsensical with the aid of knowledgeable adults. I will admit that the last events of a powerful feminist uprising combined with a well grounded criticism of the acts of white people in WWIIwon my heart in the most biased of ways, but I challenge anyone to not be stirred by those dramatic last pages.

Finally, this boy from a young age has a fervent interest in books. What's not to love about that?

n  I looked at him in some astonishment. Not feel like coming to school! The coloured maps, pictures and other hangings on the walls, the coloured counters, markers, slates, inkwells in neat round holes, crayons and drawing-books, a shelf laden with modelled objects - animals, human beings, implements - raffia and basket-work in various stages of completion, even the blackboards, chalk, and duster...I had yet to see a more inviting playroom! In addition, I had made some vague, intuitive connection between school and the piles of books with which my father appeared to commune so religiously in the front room, and which had constantly to be snatched from me as soon as my hands grew long enough to reach them on the table.

'I shall come everyday' I confidently declared. n

Aké, the first volume of Nigerian Nobel prize winner Wole Soyinka's (possibly slightly fictionalised) autobiography, is the first book of his I've read. For most authors, an autobiography is probably not the best place to start; most of the time, I want a reason to care about what the author has done before getting into his life story.

In this case, though, it doesn't disappoint at all. Aké chronicles young Wole's childhood up to about 11 years of age, and given that he was born in 1934, that's a fairly tumultuous time. While the world war rages somewhere just beyond the horizon, Nigeria is somewhere in between the old ways and the new ones, stuck between old tribal kingdoms and the new world, the old religion and Christianity, the old language and English, still ruled by the British but beginning to find a new identity of its own - which isn't an easy process, as shown by the occasional sobering flash-forward to Nigeria in the early 80s.

Soyinka spins this into an amazingly vivid tale, which doesn't shy away from dark subjects but tackles it all with a great sense of humour and the wide eyes of a child who, at first, doesn't understand half of what's going on around him. In a slightly unusual but very well-crafted narrative, he tells the whole story from the perspective of himself as a child (I'm somewhat reminded of Roth's The Plot Against America) which means that as he grows up, the story becomes more intricate, the adult characters more three-dimensional, and his observations more astute; mirroring, in a way, a young country starting to find its footing (Nigeria wouldn't achieve independence until 1960). As with many childhood stories, it's more of an episodic tale than a straight narrative, which means that it tends to be a little disjointed and slow-paced at times - but even then the fantastically colourful prose makes it worth it. For all the times the novel makes me crack up laughing, or even be nostalgic for a time I've never lived in in a country I never visited and a culture I was never part of, there's always the sly adult Soyinka somewhere behind it, using his young self as an only mostly reliable narrator to describe how we come to understand - and challenge - the world.

Ein Buch, das es mir nicht immer leicht gemacht hat und an dem ich lange Abende mitschreibend und nebenbei recherchierend saß, weil es nicht für den westlichen Leser geschrieben ist.
Es breitet also all die Speisen und religiösen, mythischen Ideen, Traditionen und Familienkonzepte vor dem Leser aus und benennt diese mit den originalen Yoruba-Wörtern. Das Glossar ist nur bedingt in der Lage, diesem Ansturm gerecht zu werden, außerdem weigere ich mich oft, den Lesefluss abreißen zu lassen, um hinten nachzusehen, was "Buka" (Stand), "Abiku" (Teufelskind) oder ein "Ibatan" (Verwandter) bedeuten. Vieles hat sich im Verlauf geklärt, anderes habe ich wohl nur halb verstanden.

Aber das Wichtigste ist natürlich, dass Soyinkas überbordender Roman seiner eigenen Kindheit in Südnigeria ein großes Fest ist: Wir begleiten ihn als 3jährigen, wenn er im Kreis seiner großen Familie vorlaut verkündet, nun reif für die Schule zu sein und diesen Plan rigoros umsetzt. Seine Mutter - "Wild Christian" ist dann auch deutlicher dem Christentum zugeneigt als der Vater "Essay", der die "Ogun", die alten Götter der Yoruba noch am Werk sieht und seinen Sohn wie die anderen Kinder (Dipolos, Capido, Lawanle, Joseph, Folosade...) durch Amulette und Schutzverletzungen immunisieren will gegen das Böse in der Welt. (Nicht zuletzt gegen Hitler, den ein drollig Verrückter in Ake mit seinem Amulett-Gurt vernichten will, wenn ihn diese nervenden Briten denn über den Teich ließen).

Einen Teil des Buchs bilden die Konflikte und auch der Alltag der Familie, die offenbar recht begütert und bedeutend ist, da der Vater Schulleiter ist und sie auf dem Pfarreigelände leben. Von wirtschaftlicher Not ist also nichts zu spüren, eine sozioökonomische Analyse ist allerdings auch nicht das Anliegen des Buchs. Eher geht es um die allmähliche Symbiose aus Christentum ("Sie brachten uns die Kirche und nahmen unser Land, wogegen wir aufgrund des Christentums nichts sagen konnten.") und den Yoruba-Sagen. Spannend fand ich, wie es Soyinka schafft, diese Szenen als optische Feste zu starten, sie dann aber moralisch eskalieren zu lassen, wenn sich Wole fragt, ob ein Egungun überhaupt ein Christ sein kann und ob er nicht vom Teufel besessen ist, weil er regelmäßig Wut empfindet. Wer sich für die "Emi Esu", die Teufelskinder in Nigeria interessiert, findet auf Arte eine erschreckende Doku zu diesen ausgestoßenen Kindern. Dass Wole also wirklich Angst vor dem Dunklen in sich hat, wird hier verständlich. Bettnässende Kinder werden hier auch gerne nackt durchs Dorf getrieben und ausgelacht. Auch wenn man sich als Leser grün und blau ärgert über diese Fiesheiten, schildert Soyinka diese Passage, wie viele andere, ohne moralische Empörung. Wie auch, wenn sie zur Praxis gehören. Ein entscheidender Nachteil der weißen, von Briten geleiteten Schule ist passenderweise auch der Umstand, dass es dort keine Prügelstrafe gibt - Woles Eltern fragen sich, wie man denn so Kinder erziehen kann. Ich vermute, dass dieses Erziehungskonzept um 1940 auch in anderen Teilen der Welt noch begeisterte Anhänger hatte. Man sollte sich nur bewusst machen, dass Soyinka ohne Schonung eine Gemeinschaft zeigt, die noch stark durchdrungen ist von Werten der Unterordnung der Jüngeren, von Mut und männlicher Stärke. Gerade dass Wole viel lieber lesend in der Ecke sitzt, macht ihn für seine Mutter so verdächtig. Er ist aufgrund seiner Interessen eine Randfigur dieser Gesellschaft und kann sie daher so genau betrachten und in ihren Brüchen wahrnehmen.

Nicht immer war ich über die Erzählstimme glücklich. Erschien mir Wole im ersten Teil oft zu vorlaut und altklug, fand ich seine Beobachtungen auf den späteren Seiten zwar interessant als Einblick in die Yoruba-Gesellschaft, die sich allmählich feministisch und nationalstaatlich organisiert. Aber mir hat auch oft die authentische Gefühlslage und Stimme eines 10jährigen gefehlt. Soyinka stattet seinen Wole mit einer hochliterarischen Sprache und einer nahezu grenzenlose Auffassungsgabe aus, die die Figur des Wole zu 90% des Buchs einfach verschwinden lässt, was mich erzählerisch oft ermüdete. Soyinka kann ungeheuer starke Szenen voller Lebendigkeit schreiben, aber der große Erzählbogen fühlte sich für mich etwas trocken an, weil das Buch thematisch vor sich hin mäandert und zu wenige Plotpunkte setzt.
Immer dort, wo Wole als Figur tatsächlich auftritt und nicht bloß als erzählerisches Alibi herhalten muss, fand ich das Buch am immersivsten: Beim Streit mit dem kleinen Bruder, bei der Jagd auf eine Schlange, bei der Schilderung eines - HERRLICH LUSTIGEN - Gerichtsverfahrens in der Schule.

Ein tolles Buch also, das mir tiefe Einblicke in eine südnigerianische Familie um 1940 ermöglicht und mir auf vielen Ebenen die reiche Geschichte der Region vorstellt, das mich aber auch einige Male abgeworfen oder erzählerisch überfordert/eingeschläfert hat.

7 von 10 Punkten. Leseempfehlung für die langen Atemträger, für die Literatur-Emi-Esus unter euch ;-)