The Palm wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

Nigerian fiction

Source – Library book

I have been on the lookout for a second-hand version of this book on one of those lists that readers of many books keep, noting and thinking critically acclaimed or essential in a canon when they were written, and still do today. This is one such book, the debut novel by Amos Tutuola, which was considered one of the first modern African novels in English when it was published in the 1950s. Tutola was born to his father’s third wife and was from the Egba people, which is why he knows the traditional ways. AS THEY follow the Yoruba religion, and also he will have grown up with the Yoruba folktales, which this book is a retelling of. The book was described by T.S. Eliot as a creepy, crawly imagination. Another early champion of the book was Dylan Thomas (I can see this in the palm wine drinking, and also the sense of community and place was strong in Thomas’ work, like it is in Tutuola’s)

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. In those days we did not know other money, except COWRIES, so that everything was very cheap, and my father was the richest man in our town.

My father got eight children and I was the eldest among them, all of the rest were hard workers, but I myself was an expert palm-wine drinkard. I was drinking palm-wine from morning till night and from night

till morning. By that time I could not drink ordinary water at all except palm-wine.

But when my father noticed that I could not do any work more than to drink, he engaged an expert palm-wine tapster for me; he had no other work more than to tap palm-wine every day.

the opening and shows how much he drinks !!

The book is told by the narrator a son of a wealthy man, who said Palm wine drtnkard of the title of the book, as his wealth means he has the money to be able to afford a Palm wine tapist who are those that can tap the Palm tree and make the Palm wine for him to drink. But when this tapist falls to his death, he loses his supply of Palm wine, and the book becomes a sort of Quest novel as he hunts for a new tapist. Along the way, he meets an old man, a kind of sage, in a way that tells him things. But as the quest heads in, he faces obstacles and changes as he fights beasts and saves people, and the narrator changes. This is a richly told book that is steeped in the local folklore of his people. In a way, you feel that the places and world Tutola has described of wealthy tribal sons and their servants are long gone.

THE DESCRIPTION OF THE CURIOUS CREATURE:-

He was a beautiful “complete” gentleman, he dressed with the finest and most costly clothes, all the parts of his body were completed, he was a tall man but stout.

As this gentleman came to the market on that day, if he had been an article or animal for sale, he would be sold at least for £2000 (two thousand pounds). As this complete gentleman came to the market on that day, and at the same time that this lady saw him in the mar-ket, she did nothing more than to ask him where he was living, but this fine gentleman did not answer her or approach her at all. But when she noticed that the fine or complete gentleman did not listen to her, she left her articles and began to watch the movements of the complete gentleman about in the market and left her articles unsold.

the adventure along the way have chapter heading like this

Over the years, I have run this blog, I have tried to cover a lot of fiction from all the different countries in Africa, thus making the fiction not just African, but this is a book from the Egba people of Nigeria and uses the Yoruba folktales,, just as in the last pos,t Laxness has used Icelandic sgas. To talk about his world, well, this was written just after World War II, and he saw Tutola, who had been in the RAF. But he had struggled when he was demobbed to find work, as everyone else had, and he ended up writing this book from his folklore past. It is considered a classic of the first Books from Nigeria to come out in English and lead the way for many of the great writers from his country that followed him. The book was also the first on the Jubilee list to come from books published in the Commonwealth during the Queen’s reign. I hope to read his second novel sometime. Have you read any other books by him?