Palm-Wine Drinkard

"I cut a tree and carved it into a paddle, then I gave it to my wife and I told her to enter the river with me; when we entered the river, I commanded one juju which was given me by a kind spirit who was a friend of mine and at once the juju changed me to a big canoe. Then my wife went inside the

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canoe with the paddle and paddling it, she used the canoe as 'ferry' to carry passengers across the river, the fare for adults was 3d (three pence) and half fare for children." "When we traveled for two and half days, we reached the Deads' road from which dead babies drove us, and when we reached there, we could not travel on it because of fearful dead babies, etc. which were still on it."

Amos Tutuola begins the transcription of African oral literature with a sprawling and entirely unpredictable account of the Father of All Gods traveling for more than a decade--mostly in the company of a wife that he picks up along the way--in search of his prodigiously skillful (and lamentably deceased) palm-wine tapster. The passages above should give some idea of the strange, confident and somehow abridged use of grammar, along with the narrator's focused refusal to provide ancillary details or supporting facts while describing outlandish events that seem to beg for more attention. How do you devote just three sentences out of 130 pages to the time that you transformed yourself into a canoe in order for your wife to make lunch money by using you as a passenger vehicle?

"The Palm-Wine Drinkard" reads like a compendium of folklore. It is unified by the mission of the protagonist; but many of the episodes are so symbolically and moralistically complete that they seem borrowed from oral traditions where they might normally stand alone. Unless you regularly consume fairy tales or ancient folklore, Tutuola's effort should prove a refreshing and memorable experience. Do not expect great attention to structure or particularly satisfying resolution; come along for the ride.

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All kinds of awesome.

The unnamed protagonist meanders through a fabulous mosaic of folk tales. Reminds me of books like the Red Fairy Book by Andrew Lang (1890), The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) has that same delightful lack of self-consciousness and weird, rambly lack of adherence to more

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conventional and more modern writing traditions.

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I read Tutuola's novel in a college course, where it was analyzed in terms of how it reflects the rhythm of drumming and oral storytelling. Later I encountered palm wine, and it isn't hard to imagine how it might be seen as magical and sacred--it comes fermented straight out of the tree!

"I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm wine in my life." The unnamed narrator, who is also the "father of all the gods", takes his wife and cutlass on the road to find his palm-wine tapster in the land of deads. When deads and

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alives collide, juju ensues! African dreamtime story cannily told, with knowing punctuation.

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In some times and places, madmen were viewed with a sort of wary deference. Were they simply insane, or touched by the hand of God? You couldn't be sure. That same sort of holy madness - chilling and funny by turns - infuses every page of this story. What part is myth and what part is novel? You

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can't really tell where one ends and the other begins. To pick up this book is to find yourself unexpectedly wrenched from the world and deposited into a dangerous wonderland that almost, but not quite, makes sense. I wish I'd known years ago how strange and great this book is. I already look forward to many re-readings.

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Wacky African folk novel. One of the strangest books I've ever read.

This is a story about an alcoholic. His palm-wine tapster dies and he (the palm-wine drinkard) goes on a quest through the land of the dead to bring him (the palm-wine tapster) back because he (the palm-wine drinkard) really needs a drink.

The novel is a series of episodes drawn from Yoruba folk

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tales that are sometimes amazing, sometimes funny and sometimes horrific. There’s an internal logic to the book, but it’s the logic of fairy tales, children and nightmares. Tutuola never lets this logic slip and it forces your mind to imagine the most impossible things.

“...I myself had changed into a flat pebble and was throwing myself along the way...”

The first thing you’ll notice about the book is that it’s written very strangely. At first I took it that the narrator was drunk or really needed a drink, but there’s more going on than that. There’s something about the way he describes actions that’s a bit wonky. It’s as if the way the characters interact with their environment is different in this world than it is in ours. Very atmospheric.

And he will repeat the subject of a sentence by noun rather than switching to “it” etc. It’s just like children do when they tell you a story, repeating clauses because they’re too young to understand that what’s hard for them isn’t hard for you. Many things happen to the narrator, many of them extremely unpleasant, and he is often far from in control, but you realise early on that the narrator may be far more that he initially seems to be, and that he is far more comfortable and powerful in the land of the dead than you the reader are. I got the sense that the narrator speaks like that because in this scenario I am the child. Rather disconcerting.

An intense, unique and sometimes uncomfortable read that my eyes were constantly drawn back to.

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I'm not going to write a full review here, as it's a long time since I read the work.
At first reading I found it frustrating and difficult to get into - but it's a short book and re-reading it since has paid off.

Even decades later, I find it still echoing in my mind - for good reasons.

I can think

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of no comparators that would do it justice except for that eccentric genius and mischievous raconteur Brian O'Nolan (otherwise published as Flann O'Brien / Myles na gCopaleen).

Tutuola takes the organic playfulness and inventiveness of 'pidgin' english and brews it into something else, as crazy and inventive as the wildest Shakespearean or Monty Pythonesque riff.

He takes narrative content and traditions of the Yoruba storyteller and distills and rebrews them; the shaggy dog story turns into a pack of wild dogs with teeth and the narrative jumps as wildly as the ramblings of a mad dipsomaniac in the clink for 'drunk and disorderly'.

He shifts the conventions of traditional Western storytelling, but in making the narrator a shapeshifter with an unfettered imagination he reminded me of the ancient story/belief/poetic traditions in celtic literature (also derived from a long and, until comparatively recently, completely oral tradition).

Solely on the basis of the Drinkard's ramblings, you might not put Tutuola up there with Joyce, but you certainly might want too compare sections of his free-flowing and intoxicated/intoxicating prose with that venerated author's work.

But please note that my comments are not meant to reduce Tutuola's work to a shadow cast by the tradition of another culture or even his own - he is 'sui generis', his own unique genius. These notes are simply made on the basis of my own narrow cultural perspective restricting my view of his background and other work in an attempt to entice you into his surreal world. There is perhaps something both very ancient and daringly modern mixed together - the trickster's tales set in a fairground hall of mirrors.

If you can get your hands on this small work and put aside all your expectations, letting yourself get used to the shock of the very unusual, then you also may get a taste for this palm-wine brew and at very least you'll have discovered a new way of writing.

[This book was included in the syllabus for my 1978-9 degree optional module - 'Literature of the Commonwealth'; LoC was the only course in the English Department that was offered in Welsh. I found many harmonies and the same post-colonial aspirations in the authors - from Atwood to Walcott - as in our own cultural perspective i.e. Wales as England's first (and possibly last?) colony.
I enjoyed the course immensely, in fact best of all my degree modules, especially as I was the sole student that year and enjoyed one to one seminars with the brilliant Ned Thomas, who generously gave me a first!]

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