The Palm-Wine Drinkard
The
Palm-Wine Drinkard
(subtitled "and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead's Town") is a
novel published in 1952 by the Nigerian author Amos
Tutuola. The first African novel published
in English outside of Africa, this quest tale based on Yoruba folktales is written in a modified Yoruba English or Pidgin English. In it, a man follows his brewer into the land of
the dead, encountering many spirits and adventures. The novel has always been
controversial, inspiring both admiration and contempt among Western and
Nigerian critics, but has emerged as one of the most important texts in the
African literary canon, translated into more than a dozen languages.
Plot
The
Palm-Wine Drinkard, told in the first person, is about an unnamed man
who is addicted to palm wine,
which is made from the fermented sap of the palm tree and used in ceremonies
all over West Africa. The son of a rich man, the narrator can afford his own tapster (a man who taps the palm tree
for sap and then prepares the wine). When the tapster dies, cutting off his
supply, the desperate narrator sets off for Dead's Town to try to bring the
tapster back. He travels through a world of magic and supernatural beings,
surviving various tests and finally gains a magic egg with never-ending palm
wine.
Criticism
The
Palm-Wine Drinkard was widely reviewed in Western publications when it
was published by Faber and Faber.
In 1975, the Africanist literary critic Bernth Lindfors produced an anthology
of all the reviews of Tutuola's work published to date. The first review was an
enthusiastic one from Dylan
Thomas, who felt it was "simply and
carefully described" in "young English"; his lyrical 500-word
review drew attention to Tutuola’s work and set the tone for succeeding
criticism.
The
early reviewers after Thomas, however, consistently described the book as
"primitive", "primeval", "naïve",
"un-willed", "lazy," and "barbaric" or
"barbarous". The New York Times
Book Review was typical in describing Tutuola
as "a true primitive" whose world had "no connection at all with
the European rational and Christian traditions," adding that Tutuola was
"not a revolutionist of the word, …not a surrealist" but an author with
an "un-willed style" whose text had "nothing to do with the
author’s intentions." The
New Yorker took this criticism to its logical
ends, stating that Tutuola was “being taken a great deal too seriously” as he
is just a “natural storyteller" with a "lack of inhibition" and
an "uncorrupted innocence" whose text was not new to anyone who had
been raised on "old-fashioned nursery literature." The reviewer
concluded that American authors should not imitate Tutuola, as "it would
be fatal for a writer with a richer literary inheritance." In The
Spectator, Kingsley
Amis called the book an
"unfathomable African myth", but credited it with a "unique
grotesque humour" that is a "severe test" for the reader.
Given
these Western reviews, it is not surprising that African intellectuals of the
time saw the book as bad for Africa, believing that the story showed Nigerians
as illiterate and superstitious drunks. They worried that the novel confirmed
Europeans’ racist "fantastic" concepts of Africa, "a continent
of which they are profoundly ignorant." Some criticized the novel as
unoriginal, labeling it as little more than a retelling of Yoruba tales heard
in the village square and Tutuola as "merely" a story teller who
embellished stories for a given audience. Some insisted that Tutuola’s
"strange lingo" was related to neither Yoruba nor West African Pidgin English.
It
was only later that the novel began to rise in the general estimation. Critics
began to value Tutuola's literary style as a unique exploration of the
possibilities of African folklore instead of the more typical realist imitation
of European novels in African novels. One of the contributions Tutuola made was
to "kill forever any idea that Africans are copyists of the cultures of
other races." Tutuola was seen as a "pioneer of a new literary form,
based on an ancient verbal style." Rather than seeing the book as mere
pastiche, critics began to note that Tutuola had done a great deal "to impose
an extraordinary unity upon his apparently random collection of traditional
material" and that what may have started as "fragments of folklore,
ritual and belief" had "all passed through the transmuting fire of an
individual imagination."[ The Nigerian critic E. N. Obiechina
argued that the narrator’s “cosmopolitanism" enables him "to move
freely through the rigidly partitioned world of the traditional
folk-tale." In contrast to the works of an author like Kafka, he added, in which human beings are the impotent victims
of inexorable fate, the narrator of The Palm Wine Drinkard "is the
proud possessor of great magical powers with which he defies even Fate
itself." The lack of resolution in the novel was also seen as more
authentic, meant to enable group discussion in the same way that African riddles, proverbs,
and folktales did. Tutuola was no more ungrammatical than James
Joyce or Mark
Twain, whose use of dialect was more
violent, others argued. The Nigerian novelist Chinua
Achebe also defended Tutuola's work,
stating that it could be read as a moral commentary on Western consumerism.
Well
aware of the criticism, Tutuola has stated that he had no regrets,
"Probably if I had more education, that might change my writing or improve
it or change it to another thing people would not admire. Well, I cannot say.
Perhaps with higher education, I might not be as popular a writer. I might not
write folktales. I might not take it as anything important. I would take it as
superstition and not write in that line." He also added "I wrote The
Palm-Wine Drinkard for the people of the other countries to read the Yoruba
folklores. ... My purpose of writing is to make other people to understand more
about Yoruba people and in fact they have already understood more than ever
before."
Although
The Palm-Wine Drinkard is often described as magical
realism, the term was not invented until
1955, after the novel was published.
In popular culture
References
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