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Developing Fictions: Amos Tutuola at Faber and Faber

Peter J. Kalliney

in Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics

Chapter Five assesses the impact of development discourse on the literary institutions of the period. At midcentury, the idea of economic development was crucial for managing the transition from ... More

Chapter Five assesses the impact of development discourse on the literary institutions of the period. At midcentury, the idea of economic development was crucial for managing the transition from imperial governance to national autonomy, especially in Africa. A case study of Amos Tutuola and his experience at Faber and Faber illustrates that metropolitan publishers began the 1950s with high hopes for cultivating African talent and audiences along high modernist lines, only to be disappointed by the fact that colonial intellectuals had a different understanding of what development could accomplish. This treatment goes on to examine how the discourse of development frames Tutuola's first two novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which the chapter reads as implicit criticisms of late colonial development models.Less

Defining Peripheral Modernism

in How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms

The aspects of life transformed through modernization can be summarized in terms identified by Michel de Certeau, whose “supersessionist” model for modernity reflects a transition from orality to ... More

The aspects of life transformed through modernization can be summarized in terms identified by Michel de Certeau, whose “supersessionist” model for modernity reflects a transition from orality to literacy. This model appears to be suitable for understanding the dramatic transition in the purely oral Yoruba culture as a result of its subjugation in the nineteenth century by the modern, literate British Empire. Both Eastern European Jews and Independence-era Africans view tradition and modernity as two concepts that continue to coexist, interact, and compete with one another for several generations. For both Yiddish and African literature, oral, folkloric culture exerts a structural and thematic influence on written narrative through the pronounced fantastic, supernatural character of the first books in these respective traditions. This chapter examines African and Yiddish literature as well as Hasidic literature. It discusses the “deterritorialized languages” of Reb Nakhman and Amos Tutuola by considering some of the ways in which these two writers are connected to the “political immediacy” of modernity.Less

This is not sarcasm believe me yours sincerely: James Kelman, Ken Saro-Wiwa and Amos Tutuola

Iain Lambert

in Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives

This chapter describes the parallels between James Kelman's Translated Accounts and Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy in particular, although any reference to Saro-Wiwa's book also refers to Amos Tutuola's The ... More

This chapter describes the parallels between James Kelman's Translated Accounts and Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy in particular, although any reference to Saro-Wiwa's book also refers to Amos Tutuola's The Palm Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Translated Accounts foregrounds the question of how an author's words are rendered, by whom and why. Saro-Wiwa's use of a first-person narrator links the story to Tutuola's novels, and indeed with Translated Accounts. The language of Translated Accounts forces the reader to slow down and occupy the position of a non-native speaker functioning in a second language. As with the ‘Rotten English’ of Ken Saro-Wiwa, in Translated Accounts Kelman has succeeded in putting his readers in the position of someone far from the linguistic and political centre through the abrogation of a statist prestige variety of language.Less

One Tale, Two Tellers

in How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms

This chapter examines the structural and thematic similarity between Reb Nakhman's mayse aleph (“Tale the First”) and the “Complete Gentleman” episode from Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard. ... More

This chapter examines the structural and thematic similarity between Reb Nakhman's mayse aleph (“Tale the First”) and the “Complete Gentleman” episode from Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Although the two tales exhibit superficial disparities of cultural reference, they also share morphological similarities and direct correspondences that indicate a fundamental structural relationship between them. Despite sharing a common theme and drawing on similar folkloric devices, both Nakhman and Tutuola have modified the “logic” of the fairy tale to illustrate the newly unfixed, unsettled quality of life in their respective cultures at the onset of modernization. Nakhman equates evil with materialism, referring to the modern commercialization of Eastern European Jewish life that was casually associated with the emergence of haskole. Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a conscious representation of the consequences of colonialism on the African tradition.Less

Introduction: Apples and Oranges: On Comparing Yiddish and African Literatures

in How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms

This book explores the paradoxical centrality of peripheral literatures to a theory of global modernism, taking the “minor” literary theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a point of ... More

This book explores the paradoxical centrality of peripheral literatures to a theory of global modernism, taking the “minor” literary theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a point of departure. It compares Yiddish literature produced during the nineteenth century and African literature written in English and French in the mid-twentieth-century. The book considers two pioneering figures in these respective cultures, Amos Tutuola and Reb Nakhman of Breslov. In particular, it compares the “Complete Gentleman” episode from Tutuola's first novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard with Nakhman's first story “The Story of a Lost Princess.” It then turns to the first consciously modern ideologies in Jewish Eastern Europe and Francophone Africa, haskole (the “Jewish Enlightenment”) and negritude. It also offers readings of novels by Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh (Mendele Moykher-Sforim), Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Wole Soyinka, and Ahmadou Kourouma. The book concludes by considering Jewish literature after the Holocaust.Less

Haskole and Negritude Compared

in How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms

This chapter compares haskole and negritude, two philosophical movements that seek modernization without assimilation to the modern hegemony. Haskole attempts to Judaize the Enlightenment, a ... More

This chapter compares haskole and negritude, two philosophical movements that seek modernization without assimilation to the modern hegemony. Haskole attempts to Judaize the Enlightenment, a “universal” movement, by revising ideas that primarily came from France, Great Britain, Germany, and Italy. Negritude attempts to universalize the Black experience and to represent Blacks in a schematic relationship with other cultures. Haskolepremises its modernity on a rejection of the Jewish “folk,” particularly the folk language, Yiddish. Negritude is a synthesizing position between traditional Africa and modern Europe, and articulates a situation similar to the ambivalent attitude toward assimilation and autonomy that characterizes haskole. This chapter also examines what kind of society that was envisioned by maskilim for a modern Jewish culture, and how it differed from the shtetl reality of Eastern Europe. To this end, the chapter looks at a programmatic manuscript by the “moderate” maskil Isaac Meyer Dik, with an emphasis on the linguistic question of daytshmerism—the conscious importation of modern German into Yiddish. It also considers how negritude is connected to the works of Amos Tutuola and Reb Nakhman.Less