Amos Tutuola and the Colonial Carnival

The truth is an offense but not a sin!
Is he who laugh last, is he who win!

—Bob Marley, "Jah Live" (1975)

From the time of its publication in 1952, the supernatural tale The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead's Town by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola has generated an enormous amount of both critical confusion and controversy. Western critics initially reacted quite favorably towards the book and praised it for its rich, albeit "primitive," adherence to Yoruba oral, folk traditions. Perhaps its most well-known European proponent was the poet Dylan Thomas who described it in a review as a

brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching story, or series of stories, written in young English by a West African, about the journey of an expert and devoted palm-wine drinkard through a nightmare of indescribable adventures. (qtd. in Lindfors 7)

Anthony West, a critic for The New Yorker, went so far as to say that in reading it, "[o]ne catches a glimpse of the very beginning of literature, that moment when writing at last seizes and pins down the myths and legends of an analphabetic culture" (222). Although most Western critics praised the book in a similar backhanded fashion for its freewheeling descriptions of exotic characters and situations, they ultimately found it lacking in "true" literary merit.

African reactions to the book were generally less favorable. Many educated Nigerians were highly incensed to discover that such a "primitive" book, written in broken English by a lowly messenger, was being lauded in European intellectual circles as the pinnacle of Nigerian culture. In particular, with Nigerian political independence nearly in sight in the early 1950s, Tutuola's world of bogey-men was one that most educated Nigerians would have liked to purge forever from global perceptions of their country (Lindfors 344). In addition, African critics were quick to point out that in many instances Tutuola outright botches his retelling of traditional folk tales or at best merely offers inferior English renditions of pre-existing Yoruba originals. All in all, the book proved something of a general embarrassment to the Nigerian intellectual establishment of 1952. ¹

In terms of its relationship to the discourse of Western colonialism, The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a far more complex and subversive book than it has generally been given credit for being. Admittedly, at first glance the story seems no more than a mythical romp by an unnamed, picaresque hero through a dream world in search of his dead palm-wine tapster. On this fairy tale quest, all normal laws of time, place, and nature are suspended. The hero changes his own physical form at will, moves effortlessly between the lands of the living and the dead, and encounters varied and wondrous creatures, many of whom he must fight and/or flee. What is to be made of this world and why would Tutuola choose it as his subject? More important, how could a such a fantastic story, one that would seem to have so little to say about the real world and its numerous problems, ever be called subversive?

It is important to pay close attention to the way in which Tutuola employs traditional folk tales in The Palm-Wine Drinkard. His retelling of these anecdotes has earned him the censure of African critics who argue that in many cases his stories deviate substantially from the Yoruba originals upon which they are based. However, Tutuola's retelling of these various stories may be regarded as instances of what Henry Louis Gates has dubbed "unmotivated signification" in his book The Signifying Monkey (xxvi). Gates suggests that in instances of "unmotivated signifyin(g)"—pastiche or noncritical parody—an established story or trope is not appropriated or echoed for the purpose of disparaging it. Rather, the intention behind this sort of signifyin(g) is to establish common cultural-narrative ground with a specific predicate work or literary tradition. Gates describes...