AKE（ISBN=9780679725404） 下载 pdf 百度网盘 epub 免费 2025 电子版 mobi 在线

　　When he was 4 years old, spurred by insatiable curiosity and

the beat of a marching drum, Wole Soyinka slipped silently through

the gate of his parents' yard and followed a police band to a

distant village. This was his first journey beyond Aké, Nigeria,

and reading his account is akin to witnessing a child's

epiphany:　　

The parsonage wall had vanished forever but it no longer

mattered. Those token bits and pieces of Aké which had entered our

home on occasions, or which gave off hints of their nature in those

Sunday encounters at church, were beginning to emerge in their

proper shapes and sizes.

He returned, perched upon the handlebars of a policeman's

bicycle, "markedly different from whatever I was before the march."

The reader's horizons feel similarly expanded after finishing this

astonishing book. 　　

Nobel laureate Soyinka is a prolific playwright, poet, novelist,

and critic, but seems to have found his purest voice as an

autobiographer. Aké: The Years of Childhood is a memoir of stunning

beauty, humor, and perception--a lyrical account of one boy's

attempt to grasp the often irrational and hypocritical world of

adults that equally repels and seduces him. Soyinka elevates brief

anecdotes into history lessons, conversations into morality plays,

memories into awakenings. Various cultures, religions, and

languages mingled freely in the Aké of his youth, fostering endless

contradictions and personalized hybrids, particularly when it comes

to religion. Christian teachings, the wisdom of the ogboni, or

ruling elders, and the power of ancestral spirits--who alternately

terrify and inspire him--all carried equal metaphysical weight.

Surrounded by such a collage, he notes that "God had a habit of

either not answering one's prayers at all, or answering them in a

way that was not straightforward."　　

In writing from a child's perspective, Soyinka expresses youthful

idealism and unfiltered honesty while escaping the adult snares of

cynicism and intolerance. His stinging indictment of colonialism

takes on added power owing to the elegance of his attack. He also

spears Nigeria's increasing Westernization, its movement toward

modernity and materialism, as he describes his beloved village

markets deteriorating from a "procession of magicians" to rows of

"fantasy stores lit by neon and batteries of coloured bulbs" where

the "blare of motor-horns compete with a high-decibel outpouring of

rock and funk and punk and other thunk-thunk from lands of

instant-culture heroes." 　　

The book closes with an 11-year-old Soyinka preparing to enroll

in a government college, declaring it "time to commence the mental

shifts for admittance to yet another irrational world of adults and

their discipline." Aké is an eloquent testament to the wisdom of

youth. --Shawn Carkonen

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媒体评论

　　A classic of African autobiography, indeed a classic of

chilhood memoirs wherever and whenever produced. --

The New York

Times Book Review