The body unbound: ritual scarification and autobiographical forms in Wole Soyinka�s Ak�: the years of childhood
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Date
2012
Authors
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.
Description
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