The body unbound: ritual scarification and autobiographical forms in Wole Soyinka�s Ak�: the years of childhood

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Date

2012

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Sage Publications

Abstract

The scarification in Ak� is invested with major significance apropos Soyinka�s ideas on African subjectivity. Scarification among the Yoruba is one of the rites of passage associated with personal development. Scarification literally and metaphorically �opens� the person up socially and cosmically. Personal formation and self-realization are enabled by the Yoruba social code brought into being by its mythology. The meaning of the scarification incident in Ak� is profoundly different. Determined by the form of autobiography which creates a self-constituting subject, the enabling Yoruba sociocultural context is elided. The story of Soyinka�s personal development is allegorical of the story of the development of the modern African subject. For Soyinka, the African subject is a rational subject whose constitution precludes the splitting of the scientific and spiritual which is a consequence of the Cartesian rupture. The African subject should be open to other subjects and the object world. Subjectivity constituted by the autobiographical mode closes off the opening up symbolically signalled by scarification.

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Keywords

Soyinka, autobiography, Bildungsroman, Rites of passage, The subject, Modernity

Citation

Moolla, F.F. (2012). The body unbound: ritual scarification and autobiographical forms in Wole Soyinka�s Ak�: the years of childhood. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 47(1): 27-46