Wole and the Suspension of Disbelief

First, let me just say that from the short video we watched in class, if they made a third Bruce Almighty type movie and Morgan Freeman was not available to play God, Soyinka would be my next choice. He rocks the smarts AND the stylish white hair/ beard. Too cool.

I think the fact that Ake falls under the heading of "autobiographical" contributes to our unwillingness to believe the narrative Soyinka is leading us through. We are much more accepting of child narrators in novels like Huckleberry Finn; in novels like this, the author often contrasts instances of childlike ignorance of the way the world functions and moments of adult like lucidity and analysis. Wole is the same way- it is a stylized narrative, albeit non fictional, that represents the older Wole reflecting upon and glossing his own childhood and trying to relate it to the development of a nation. I cut Soyinka some slack- I much prefer this approach to a style that tries to accurately to depict childhood. What if three year old Wole kept a journal? Dear diary, today I ate some tasty dirt behind the mission. Dear diary, today I napped through dinner because I followed this band and got lost. It would be boring precisely because these would be unrelated, meaningless episodes. We need the older Soyinka to be there to give them structure and relate them to his life as a whole. What kind of conclusions could we draw from garbled incidents written in inarticulate three year old speak? Is it the truth? Was he really a genius? I don't know or particularly care. Perhaps he read the sign at age three, or perhaps he saw the sign so many times after that he can't remember not knowing what the words meant. However, the story is so much more enjoyable if you don't get too hung up on the details.