Isara: A Voyage Around Essay

Like his evocative memoir Ake: The Years of Childhood , this semi-fictionalized, multigenerational family saga by the Nigerian novelist-poet-dramatist Nobel laureate is rich with the sights, sounds and textures of his native land under colonial rule. At the center is his schoolteacher father (``Essay''), unflappable, philosophical, given to browsing in exotic journals; we also meet Soyinka's grandparents locked in a sometimes tempestuous marriage, and a large cast of secondary characters, among them merchant adventurer Sipe (``Resolute Rooster''), a cripple named Node, and Ray Gunnar, a Trinidadian stowaway turned huckster. In musical, quicksilver prose, Soyinka magically re-creates a world in which local healers compete with pharmacists, and Yoruba religion vies with Christianity; African customs, rituals and traditional social relations are reshaped as Nigerians struggle to find their place in a modernizing society. After Mussolini attacked Ethiopia, the British whipped up patriotism in the Nigerian protectorate; Soyinka probes his father's generation's uneasy love-hate relationship with the British. (Oct.)