Ìsarà, a Voyage Around "Essay"

In 1984, two years after writing his classic childhood autobiography Aké, Wole Soyinka opened a tin box that had belonged to his father, a schoolteacher during Nigera's Colonial period. The simple contents of this box -- "a handful of letters, old journals with jottings, tax and other levy receipts, minutes of meetings and school reports, program notes of special events" -- provide the fuel for this second installment of Soyinka's memoirs: a son's fictionalized "voyage" into the life and times of his father.