AMOS TUTUOLA - THE PALM-WINE DRINKARD

Image: author photo

I may have read this novel before, or maybe it was only the sensation of having read it before, as the stories in The Palm-Wine Drinkard are stories human beings have been telling for a very long time. We are in a mythic realm — of the Yoruba tradition, specifically. A man and his wife go into the bush, encounter supernatural beasts, suffer, and eventually get out of their various predicaments, sometimes by cunning, more often by luck. A 1953 New York Times review of the novel called Mr. Tutuola a ‘true primitive’ — and, as many scholars have pointed out, missed the point. Mr. Tutuola’s unique idiom, forged by his education in Lagos and his life experience in the villages of the Nigerian bush, is just as valid a literary aesthetic as James Joyce’s; this idiom suits the stories he tells for many reasons, but the simplest reason I can find is that it sounds good when read aloud.  Read, June 2020.