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The Cult Classic That Expanded What African Literature Could Be
Roving Eye is the Book Review's essay series on international writers of the past whose works warrant a fresh look, often in light of reissued, updated or newly translated editions of their books.
Everything about the book spoke in riddles to me: the abstract orange-and-black stick figures on the cover; the vague, enigmatic tag line calling it 'a novel from Africa'; the blurb from Dylan Thomas heralding 'a grisly and bewitching story of indescribable adventures.'
Then there was the title itself: 'The Palm-Wine Drinkard.' (What, exactly, is a 'drinkard'?)
This was my first introduction to the author Amos Tutuola, a Nigerian with little formal education. But he soon became one of the most intriguing international writers I discovered during college and the ravenous, slightly delirious years that followed, their dusty paperbacks excavated from small New York bookstores that have long since vanished. Published in 1952, at the dawn of African independence (and a decade before the classic Heinemann African Writers series appeared), Tutuola's novel stood apart from the others I took home, and its mystery continues to exert a powerful pull.
This month, THE PALM-WINE DRINKARD (Grove, 144 pp., paperback, $17) returns to life in a striking new edition, along with Tutuola's 1954 follow-up, 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,' with introductions by Wole Soyinka and Kaveh Akbar. Originally published under the Evergreen imprint of Grove Press, the books appeared alongside the storied house's rogues' gallery of midcentury American and European avant-garde authors like William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet.
Inspired in part by folk tales and written in an idiosyncratic vernacular that mixes English with Yoruba syntax, 'The Palm-Wine Drinkard' went on to become something of a cult classic in the West. Time magazine named it one of the 100 best fantasy books of all time. It has been hailed as a forerunner of the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez and others, and it had a significant impact on African literature, even if it has been largely overshadowed by Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart.'
How did it become such a crossover success, an early example of what would come to be called 'world literature'? And how was it understood (or not) in its own time, both at home and abroad?
The novel begins with a thorny predicament for the homebrew-loving narrator who weaves together the book's adventures. His personal 'tapster,' who for the past 15 years has been climbing and tapping palm trees to provide for the narrator's extravagant daily consumption of palm wine, falls from a tree and dies. All is not lost, though, for perhaps the dead man can be retrieved from 'deads' town,' where the spirits of the deceased congregate. The problem: how to find this ghostly place, and how to get there through a menacing 'bush' teeming with outlandish creatures and magical spells.
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