by Amos Tutuola
The primary controversies about Tutuola have been over his originality and his style of English. He has been accused of plagiarism and of being popular only because he fits a stereotype of a “primitive”, uneducated African simpleton. His detractors are passionate, their denunciations vitriolic because in their eyes Tutuola plays to stereotypes so as to gain approval from non-African readers who are ignorant of the rich and complex cultures of the continent.
The question of originality is easiest to dispense with. Tutuola admitted his influences, and they are clear: Yoruba oral tradition, the Yoruba writings of D.O. Fagunwa, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Later, as Tutuola received books from England, other influences would appear and his work would gain a slightly more conventional form. No writer is without influences or even direct borrowings, and like all great writers, what Tutuola’s best work achieves is an amalgamation of these influences. It is a rare Tutuola story that is simply a retelling of a Yoruba folktale, for instance—instead, his stories mix elements from folktales with material from other sources, including Tutuola’s own imagination, to create stories that are both resonant and unique.
Tutuola’s use of English has been challenging readers from the beginning. His first language was Yoruba, and with only a few years of schooling, he did not have the opportunity for consistent training in written English. His works were edited for clarity from the beginning, although the history of that editing could almost make for a book itself. Tutuola sometimes expressed a desire to write more “proper” English, in adulthood he attended classes when he could to improve his knowledge, and his last few manuscripts were polished by the American professor Robert Wren, who was, according to Bernth Lindfors, “responsible for purifying and refining the author’s language”.2 Reading Tutuola’s work in the order of its publication, we see in the first few books a unique mode of expression that was compared to Joyce and Faulkner, then his books in the 1960s that seemed to have little if any editing (while at the same time Tutuola’s method was moving deliberately closer to standard fictional practices as he read and learned more), and then finally the last books, Yoruba Folktales (1986) and The Village Witch Doctor and Other Stories (1990), where the English is mostly standard and the story forms are richer with “normal” fictional techniques such as detailed description and dramatized dialogue.
Tutuola’s prose, then, has always been subject to some editing, and that is true of this volume as well. Compare, for instance, the version of “The Town of Famine (The Feather Woman of the Jungle)” published here with the version published in 1962 in the book Feather Woman of the Jungle. Here is a passage from the 1962 version:
Having heard like that as well from him, then without hesitation, I started to drink the cold water. But when it was not yet daybreak when I was woken by hunger in the following morning. I hardly got up when I went to the king’s attendants, I complained to them again that since I had come to the town I had nothing to eat except cold water which I was drinking. I complained to them perhaps they might help me. But I was very surprised that they did not allow me to tell them all of my complaints when they interrupted immediately they heard the word “hunger” from me. They naked themselves and told me to look how every one of them was leaned. They told me further that I, too, would soon become bones if I kept longer in that town.3
Here is that same paragraph as it has been rendered by the editor of this edition:
Then, having now heard the same from him, without hesitation I started to drink the cold water. It was not yet daybreak when I was woken by hunger in the following morning. I had hardly got up when I went to the king’s attendants. I complained to them again that since I had come to the town I had nothing to eat except cold water, which I was drinking. I complained to them perhaps they might help me, but I was very surprised that they did not allow me to tell them all of my complaints, for they interrupted immediately after they heard the word “hunger” from me. They stripped themselves naked and told me to look how every one of them had become lean. They told me further that I, too, would soon become bones if I kept longer in that town.
Even a sensitive, thoughtful edit such as this raises complex questions of authenticity. What voice is the “true” voice of Tutuola? He was not an artist who knew the rules and set out to break them so much as he was a writer whose style achieved unique expressions through his ignorance of some of the rules of standard written English and, perhaps even more importantly, his tendency to make English fit the patterns of the Yoruba language that he was most comfortable with. At times in his life, if not always, he claimed to aspire to the unadorned, matter-of-fact, standardized prose of Achebe, and he apparently welcomed the editing of his sentences into standardized forms. How much of this came from embarrassment, or in reaction to critics who found his prose “childish” and “ungrammatical”, is difficult to know. The challenge for editors is to decide what is a “mistake” and what is an essential element of Tutuola’s style. No two editors would burnish his prose in exactly the same way. This is not, though, a challenge unique to editors of Tutuola’s works.
Perhaps one day we will be able to afford Tutuola the sorts of academic critical editions afforded to major American and European writers—collections that include facsimiles of manuscripts alongside edited versions. Or perhaps we could have multiple editions as we have editions of Shakespeare in the original spelling and punctuation to complement the more common modernized editions (Hamlet, after all, in the First Folio spoke of “The vndiscouered Countrey, from whose Borne/ No Traueller returnes…”). A thousand dissertations have been written on variations in editions of Joyce’s books, and Faulkner’s novels, too, have been edited and unedited, so the early comparisons of Tutuola to those two Modernist masters were even more accurate than was known at the time. For many great writers, there is no definitive text.
What survives the editing is imagination, vision, attitude. Plenty of writers have first been acclaimed in terrible translations, and so we know that greatness is not only a matter of style, but also of structure, image, and intangible qualities of form and content: the magic of genius.
The foundation of Tutuola’s uniqueness is the utter unpredictability of his tales. Reading them, we have a sense that word by word and sentence-by-sentence, anything could happen. It is a mistake to refer to Tutuola’s writings as “magical realism”, because they are stories that defy any neat borders between fantasy and reality, dream and waking, legend and history, past and present. They are no less or more magical than they are realistic; they are stories that deny a distinction between the two categories. They often seem to exist outside of time—indeed, another criticism of Tutuola has been that he never engaged with the political realities of his world in the way that most African writers have. (Such a reductive and narrow view of how literature works would likely say the same of Kafka.) With some of the stories, a first reading is tremendously disorienting, because we are trained as readers to let stories fill us with expectations based on causalities that we either understand from our own world or that have been delineated within the reality of the story itself. That’s what creates suspense and allows us an idea of coherent characters and events. With Tutuola’s stories, it can be difficult to get your bearings on a first reading. This effect is enhanced by Tutuola’s nonstandard English. It is a language ideally suited to the stories, wreaking havoc with our grammatical expectations in the same way the tales’ events wreak havoc with our narrative expectations. Reading Tutuola, we learn to read anew.
In 1977, when Tutuola’s reputation was at a low point in the world and, especially, in Nigeria, Chinua Achebe gave an important speech at the University of Ibadan: “Work and Play in Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard”. Before developing ideas about Tutuola’s moral vision and thematic structures, Achebe said:
A young Nigerian woman doing a higher degree in America said to me when I taught there in the 1970s, “I hear you teach Tutuola.” It was not a simple statement; her a
ccent was heavy with accusation. We discussed the matter for a while and it became quite clear that she considered The Palm-Wine Drinkard to be childish and crude and certainly not the kind of thing a patriotic Nigerian should be exporting to America. Back in Nigeria a few years later I also noticed a certain condescension among my students toward the book and a clear indication that they did not consider it good enough to engage the serious attention of educated adults like themselves. They could not see what it was about.4
We are still learning to see what Tutuola was about. Despite accusations and criticism, despite neglect and abuse, Tutuola’s work has survived for over fifty years so far, finding readers here and there who are enchanted by the wonders of his tales, and who are mesmerized by the strange, surprising turns they take. He is not part of the tradition of African writers who engage the world through stark realism. Instead, his is a different approach, a more phantasmagorical one, more improvisatory and, for all its appeals to the past, a deeply personal one that puts him in a small and special group with such writers as Dambudzo Marechera, Yvonne Vera, and his most obvious heir, Ben Okri. Writers so unique that they cannot be followed or copied, because to do so is to make your imitation obvious. The territory such writers stake out is theirs alone. In that sense, Tutuola is a writer whose work cannot be absorbed into a line or genre, for it is its own antecedent and descendant, gloriously unassimilable.
We are still learning to see what he was about, yes, and we are still learning to read him.
Further Reading
Chinua Achebe, “Work and Play in Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard”. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Robert Elliot Fox, “Tutuola and the Commitment to Tradition”. Research in African Literatures, vol. 29, no. 3 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 203-208.
Carolyn Hart, “In Search of African Literary Aesthetics: Production and Reception of the Texts of Amos Tutuola and Yvonne Vera”. Journal of African Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2 (December 2009), pp. 177–195.
Bernth Lindfors, Early West African Writers: Amos Tutuola, Cyprian Ekwensi, and Ayi Kwei Armah. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2010.
Gail Low, “The Natural Artist: Publishing Amos Tutuola’s ‘The Palm-Wine Drinkard’ in Postwar Britain”. Research in African Literatures, vol. 37, no. 4 (Dec. 1, 2006), pp. 15-33.
Sarah Nuttall, “Reading, Recognition and the Postcolonial”. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 3, issue 3 (2001), pp. 391-404.
Steven M. Tobias, “Amos Tutuola and the Colonial Carnival”. Research in African Literatures, vol. 30, no. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 66-74.
About the Author
Amos Tutuola (1920–1997) was a largely self-taught Nigerian writer who became internationally praised for books based in part on Yoruba folktales, especially the phantasmagorical classic The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952). Welsh poet Dylan Thomas called the novel “thronged, grisly and bewitching,” bringing it even more attention. He is considered an iconic international writer.
Works by Amos Tutuola
The Palm-wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-wine Tapster in the Dead’s Town. London: Faber & Faber, 1954; New York: Grove Press, 1953.
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. London: Faber & Faber, 1954; New York: Grove Press, 1954.
Simbi and the Satyr of the Dark Jungle. London: Faber & Faber, 1955; San Francisco: City Lights, 1988.
The Brave African Huntress, illustrated by Ben Enwonwu. London: Faber & Faber, 1958; New York: Grove Press, 1958.
Feather Woman of the Jungle. London: Faber & Faber, 1962; San Francisco: City Lights, 1988.
Ajaiyi and His Inherited Poverty. London: Faber & Faber, 1967.
Winds of Change: Modern Short Stories from Black Africa, Longman, 1977 (contributor).
The Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town. London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1981.
The Wild Hunter in the Bush of the Ghosts. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1982; revised edition, 1989. A facsimile of the manuscript, edited with an introduction and postscript by Bernth Lindfors.
Yoruba Folktales, compiled and translated by Tutuola, illustrated by Kola Adesokan. Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1986.
Pauper, Brawler, and Slanderer. London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1982.
The Village Witch Doctor, and Other Stories. London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1990.
Honours and Awards
Mbari Club - Co-founder.
Visiting Research Fellow, University of Ife, (now Obafemi Awolowo University) Nigeria, 1979.
Honorary Citizen of New Orleans (USA), 1983.
Honorary Fellow of International Writing Program, University of Iowa, (USA), 1983.
Winner of Grimzane and Cavour Award, Italy, 1989.
Honorary Fellow of the Modern Language Association of America, (the third African ever to be granted).
Noble Patron of the Arts, Pan-African Writers Association, Ghana.
Meridian Award, Odu Themes, Nigeria,1995.
Special Fellowship Award, National League of Veteran Journalists, Nigeria, 1996.
Footnotes
1 Amos Tutuola Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999. Page 1.
2 Early West African Writers: Amos Tutuola, Cyprian Ekwensi, and Ayi Kwei Armah. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2010. Page 106.
3 Feather Woman of the Jungle. London: Faber and Faber, 1962. Page 70.
4 Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Page 100.
