The Palm-Wine Drinkard

This week, we move to consider Amos Tutuola's weird yet groundbreaking novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town. When it first appeared in 1952, the reviews were a mixture of astonishment and admiration; Dylan Thomas famously proclaimed it a "brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching story," and other reviews were also quite positive; others called it a "strange, eerie, poetic novel" and praised it as the embodiment of an African perspective of Africa. And yet, today, modern African writers such as Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong'o have tended to disparage Tutuola, accusing him of being too eager -- even if unconsciously -- ready to write just the sort of exotic, juju-filled story that Western readers expected from the "dark continent."

Forty years after its publication, in 1992, I was fortunate to have a brief correspondence with Mr. Tutuola, and to receive a contribution from him for a book I had proposed at the time: Without Any Rules: The Politics and Poetics of the Vernacular. Unfortunately, as fate would have it, the book proposal never found a home, and when Mr. Tutuola passed on in 1997, I found myself with his contribution still unpublished. And so, it occurred to me that I might share it with the class here on the website. I had asked contributors to reflect on what they considered their "vernacular" mode of writing, and what follows is the opening section of Mr. Tutuola's reply -- it has never been published before now:

By vernacular, I suppose, one means the language into which a child is born and is brought up. A language he picks up almost spontaneously as a matter of course when growing up. By this definition, my own ‘vernacular’ or ’mother tongue’ is Yoruba – a language spoken by a subgroup in West Africa, particularly in the Western and Eastern parts of Nigeria and the Benin Republic. Their root is of course in Nigeria. The people in these areas would now be about 20 million. The sub-group is also called Yoruba people. 

I was born at a time the meeting of our own culture and that of Europe had taken place – indeed at a time British colonialists still held the political and economic leverages of my country and that of some other African countries. This is to say I grew up at a time I had no choice but to be exposed to another language. The language of our colonies. The language in which the official business of my country is conducted, to wit, English. 

But I was not to confront this language until I started schooling. And as fate would have it, I could not get far in formal schooling due to lack of finance (as I lost my father at a tender age). Thus, I had what can be referred to as a tolerable exposure to Yoruba, my mother tongue. 

Years after, when I wanted to write, English, the official language of my country, was the one I wrote in. Ordinarily, this would be a little surprising, given my barely indepth knowledge of the language on the one hand, and my appreciable grounding in Yoruba, my mother tongue, on the other. But that was what I found myself doing. 

Although I wrote (and still do)in English, my writings, looking back now, are still in Yoruba, my mother tongue. In here is deliberately put in italics. The medium in which my ideas are expressed is English, but when I write, the ideas I express, the atmosphere I create, and as reviewers of my works (perhaps rightly) maintain, the gestures readers encounter on the pages of the books I write are Yorubaish. Thus I think it can be said that beyond being a Yoruba writing in English, my works are African in conception.

I think that Mr. Tutuola's comments here give us a remarkable account of the unexpected combinations, conflicts, and sometimes fortuitous collisions of language and consciousness that are a powerful feature of postcolonial writings. Should a writer seeking to resist colonization be obliged to write in the colonizer's tongue? And if she or he chooses it despite its histories, can it be shaped, as Tutuola suggests, back into a "native" language?

Two years after The Palm-Wine Drinkard, he published My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which was later the inspiration for an electronic album by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, which is widely regarded as one of the most powerful, pioneering recordings of its kind. I urge everyone to read -- and listen to -- all of these remarkable works.