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Amos Tutuola (1920-1997) |
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Nigerian writer, who gained world fame with his story The Palm-Wine Drinkard, published by Faber & Faber in 1952. The book was based on Yoruba folktales, but in his own country Amos Tutuola was accused of falsifications and uncivilized language. The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has said, that Tutuola's works can also be read as moral tales commenting Western consumerism. "I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life. In those days we did not know other money, except COWRIES, so that everything was very cheap, and my father was the richest man in our town." (from The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola, New York: Grove Press, 1994, p. 191) Amos Tutuola was born in Abeokuta, a large town in Western Nigeria. His father, Charles Tutuola, was was a farmer. His first folk stories Tutuola heard at his Yoruba-speaking mother's knee. When he was about 7 years old, one of his father's cousins took him to live as a servant with F.O. Monu, an Ibe man. Instead of paying Tutuola money, he sent the young boy to the Salvation Army primary school. He attended Lagos High School for a year, and worked as a live-in houseboy for a government clerk in order to ensure his tuition at the school. When his father died in December 1938, Tutuola had to end his studies. He tried his luck as a farmer, but his crop failed and he moved to Lagos in 1940. During World War II Tutuola worked for the Royal Air Forces as a
blacksmith, and took a number of odd jobs, including selling bread,
and, after a year of unemployment, messengering for the Nigerian
Department
of Labor. This "unsatisfacroty job," as Tutuola called it, left him
with plenty of free time, which he
spent scribbling stories on scrap paper. From the beginning, Tutuola
wrote in English rather than in Yoruba, his mother
tongue. His first long narrative, 'The Wild Hunter in the Bush of the
Ghosts', influenced by D.O. Fagunwa's Ogboju ode ninu igbo irunmale,
was bought by Focal Press, an English publisher of photography books.
Tutuola's original intention was not to send the story to anywhere. Right
from his childhood, Tutuola had a gift for story-telling. Writing with
lead pencil three hours each day for five days, Tutuola completed his
full-length novel, The Palm-Wine
Drinkard, in 1950. ('Amos Tutuola: Debts and Assets' by Bernt Lindfors, in Cahiers d'Études africaines, Année 1970, p. 307)
He sent the draft to the United Society for Christian Literature. The
organization promised that they will try to find a publisher for it. Many of
the folk tales and motifs in the work exist in Yoruba oral tradition,
such as the magical transformations, animals behaving like humans, and
superhuman beings. Tutuola first heard the story of the drinkard from
an old man on a Yaruba palm plantation. The novel is a transcription in
pidgin English prose
of an oral tale of his own intervention. It recounted the mythological
tale of a drunken man, who follows his dead tapster into "Deads' Town,"
a world of magic, ghosts, demons, and supernatural beings. Bernth
Lindfors has noted that the drunkard's adventures have similarities
with the everyman character's adventures in Bunyan's religious allegory
The Pilgrim's Progress, which was available in Nigeria in a Yoruba translation (Comparative Approaches to African Literatures, 1994, p. 8). Tutuola had read the book just two years before he started writing The Palm-Wine Drinkard. "All of Tutuola's books present an oddly timeless world where ancient Yoruba folkloric and religious realities simultaneously exist with Western Christian and scientific realities. . . . While no explicit references are given by the author to major events in Africa's colonial and postcolonial history, it is easy to be struck by how the persistently repeated motif of "trial by fire," a passage heroically won by demonstrations of courage, ingenuity, faith, and intensively focused and lengthy labor, speaks to the present political, social and economic realities of postcolonial Africa." (Norman Weinstein in Postcolonial African Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Pushipa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne, Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1998, p. , p. 473) In 1947 Tutuola married married Victoria Alake; they had eight children. The Palm-Wine Drinkard was
published in 1952 in London by a major British publisher, Faber and
Faber, and next year in New York by Grove Press. Dylan Thomas wrote in
his review, "nothing is too prodigious or too trivial to put down in
this tall, devilish story." (The Observer, 6 July, 1952) The novel was praised in England and the
United States, but Tutuola's most severe critics were his own
countrymen, who attacked his imperfect English and complained that he was presenting negative
stereotypes about Africa. Chinua Achebe said that the novel asks the
question,"what happens when a man immerses
himself in pleasure to the exclusion of all work." (The Chinua Achebe Encyclopedia, edited by M. Keith Booker, 2003, p. 219) When Eric Larrabee interviewed Tutuola in 1953, Tutuola did not regard himself as a writer. Moreover, he owned no books. ('Amos Tutuola: Debts and Assets' by Bernt Lindfors, in Cahiers d'Études africaines, Année 1970, p. 320) It has been even claimed that Tutuola's writing was, in a sense, a historical accident, "because the combination of his peculiar talent and the patronizing colonial attitude which found entertainment in his English and so brought him into print was a chance conjunction of unique circumstances." (Andrew Gurr, in 20th Century Fiction, edited by James Vinson, 1983, pp. 677-678) After the storm had calmed, the stage version of the novel was first performed in the Arts Theatre of the University of Ibadan, in April 1963, with the Yoruba composer Kola Ogunmola in the leading role. In spite of the success and critical acclaim of the novel, Tutuola did not think himself as an author. For a long period he did not read or even own books. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) was also published by Faber and Faber. The underworld odyssey followed the narrative pattern of his debut novel: this time an eight-year-old boy, abandoned during a slave raid, flees into the bush, "a place of ghosts and spirits". The next twenty-four years he spends wandering in a spirit world, longing to return to his earthly home. Geoffrey Parrinder has reported: "I realized how deeply he lived in his own narrative when I asked Tutuola the reason for the apparently haphazard order of the towns of the ghosts. He replied, quite simply, "That is the order in which I came to them."" ('Foreword' by Geoffrey Parrinder, in The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, New York: Grove Press, 1994, p. 11) Brian Eno and David Byrne took the title of the book for their 1981 album. Simbi and the Satyr of the Dark Jungle (1955), in which the protagonist is a girl, and The Brave African Huntress (1958), about a heroic woman rescuing her four brothers, continued the theme of the quest. It has been said, that if Tutuola had never written a line, he would have been a famous village storyteller. He often told of dreams, the most basic source of archetypal images. Tutuola's language is uncorrupted by Western literary gimmicks, words are short and simple, but the impact is fresh and poetic. "It was not yet eight o'clock in the night before everybody slept in this town, and again when it was ten o'clock a heavy rain came and beat me till the morning, and also the mosquitoes which were as big as flies did not let me rest once till the morning, but I had no hands to be driving them away from my body, although it is only in this "Bush of Ghosts" such big mosquitoes could be found, and I was in the rain throughout the night I was feeling the cold so that I was shaking together with my voice, but had no fire to warm my body." ('My Life with Cows,' in The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, p. 46) The first full-length study of Amos Tutuola, written by Harold Collins, came out in 1969. After The Palm-Wine Drinkard Tutuola never had quite the same success. Reviewers complained that Tutuola's idiom has lost its charm and spontaneity and there is none of the nightmare fascination of the earlier books. He continued to explore Yoruba traditions and its folkloric sources, and published such works as The Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town (1981) and The Village Witch Doctor and Other Stories (1990), in which ghosts, sorcerers, and magic continue their existence in the modern world of clocks, televisions, and telephones. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts contains the story 'Television-handed Ghostess,' in which the narrator meets a ghostess, who has sores on her head and all over her body. She tells her story: she would be healed if the narrator licks her sore every day with his tongue for ten years. "Having related her story and said that if I am licking the sore it would be healed as the sorcerers said, so I replied—"I want you to go back to your sorcerers and tell them I refuse to lick the sore." After I told her like this she said again—"It is not a matter of going back to the sorcerers, but if you can do it look at my palm or hand." But when she told me to look at her palm and opened it nearly to touch my face, it was exactly as a television, I saw my town, mother, brother and all my playmates, then she was asking me frequently—"do you agree to be licking the sore with your tongue, tell me, now, yes or no?" (The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, pp. 162-163) Throughout
many of his most productive years Tutuola worked as a storekeeper for
the Nigerian Broadcasting Company. In 1957 he was transferred to
Ibadan, Western Nigeria, where he started to adapt the work into the
stage. Tutuola became also one of the founders of Mbari Club, the
writers' and publishers' organization in Ibadan. He was a research
fellow at the University of Ife in 1979 and then an associate of the
International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Along with
Joseph Brodsky, Toni Morrison and R.K. Narayan, he was elected in 1987
an honorary fellow of the Modern Language Association. In the late 1980s Tutola moved to back Ibadan. He died
on June
8, 1997, from hypertension and diabetes. "But now the forests are
gone," Tutuola once said. "I believe the immortal creatures must have
moved away." ('Introduction' by Michael Thelwell, in The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, p. 190) Much of his letters, papers
and holographic manuscipts have been collected at the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas. For further reading: Seven African Writers by Gerald Moore (1962); Amos Tutuola by Harold R. Collins (1969); Language and Theme by Emmanuel R. Obiechina (1970); Mother is Gold by Adrian A. Roscoe (1971); Perspectives on African Literature, ed. Christopher Hewywood (1971); 'Tutuola, Amon,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975); Critical Perspectives on Amos Tutuola, ed. Bernth Lindfors (1975); 'Tutuola, Amos' by Andrew Gurr, in 20th Century Fiction, edited by James Vinson (1983); Culture and the Nigerian Novel by Oladele Taiwo (1976); European-Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa, Vol. 2, by Albert S. Gérard (1986); Hope and Impediments by Chinua Achebe (1988); Comparative Approaches to African Literatures by Bernth Lindfors (1994); Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality and History in the Work of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri by Ato Quayson (1997); 'Amos Tutuola (1920- )' by Norman Weinstein, in Post-Colonial African Writers, edited by Pushipa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne (1998); Amos Tutuola Revisited by Oyekan Owomoyela (1999); Three Great African Novelists: Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka & Amos Tutuola by Anjali Gera (2001); Amos Tutuola: Factotum as a Pioneer by Jare Ajayi (2003); Early West African Writers: Amos Tutuola, Cyprian Ekwensi and Ayi Kwei Armah by Bernth Lindfors (2010); The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity, and Ownership by Mukoma Wa Ngugi (2018); Afropolitan Horizons: Essays Toward a Literary Anthropology of Nigeria by Ulf Hannerz (2022) - See also: Wole Soyinka, who was born in Yoruba people, and Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot whose support was required to secure the publication of The Palm-Wine Drinkard in Britain. Selected works:
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