Amos Tutuola

Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) was the first African novel to be published in English outside Africa—and, as a result, the text’s journey towards publication required that both author and publishers navigate wholly uncharted territory. This process is captured in a detailed archive of correspondence, which, despite having received little critical attention, is of great significance to the history of African literature. Not only does it show the first recognition of a Western market for ‘world literature,’ it also reveals quite unexpected power dynamics, in which Tutuola, often perceived as naïve, asserts confident agency from the earliest stages.
We might expect that, between a major British press and a Nigerian author with limited education, power would be concentrated in the hands of the former. However, in spite of Tutuola’s marginalised position, the correspondence not only shows the two parties actively engaged in mutual negotiations, we find Tutuola constantly seizing the initiative: securing better terms, promoting his next manuscript, then seeking translation and adaptation rights. Meanwhile, Faber&Faber is overwhelmingly enthusiastic, positive and accommodating—responding to Tutuola’s request for an advance, for instance, with an emphatic marginal “yes.”
However, internal correspondence also reveals uncertainties, not only about the peculiarities of this particular text, but also about the concept of an African as an author for Western audiences. We will trace these crossing currents and surprising dynamics, revealing the wide-ranging implications of this daring, seminal moment in publication history.

This article considers translations of African texts from English to French in the context of recent conceptualizations of world literature. Translation is a key mechanism, dynamic and metaphor in world literature. However, its idealized connotations should not distract from the material realities of a process governed by uneven structures of production and reception. Two cases are illustrative: Amos Tutuola’s L’Ivrogne dans la brousse (The Palm-Wine Drinkard) (trans. Raymond Queneau 1953; 1952) and Chinua Achebe’s Le Monde s’effondre (Things Fall Apart) (trans. Michel Ligny
1966; 1958) published respectively by Gallimard and Présence Africaine. The rapturous mainstream reception of Raymond Queneau’s stylistic appropriation of Tutuola is here contrasted with the subdued reception of Achebe’s text in France in the late 1960s. The translators’ spectral presence in text and paratext is key to understanding the position of the translated texts in relation to the aesthetic, political and commercial stakes of their publishing contexts. Colonial and postcolonial book history thus confirms the material instability and relationality of any totalizing model of a world literary system and the methodological limits of a singular abstract concept of world literary time or space.

The Unacknowledged Ghosts of a Century of War: The Yoruba Wars and the Novels of Amos Tutuola During the nineteenth century, in the southwest of what is now Nigeria, the Yoruba peoples suffered nearly a hundred years of war. Many cities and countless villages were wiped out, thousands of civilians were killed, enslaved or perished of famine. The wars were ended abruptly by the British Empire, but they were never resolved, simply suppressed. Memory of the wars was also repressed by new nationalist movements, who created myths of timeless, unifying tradition, divorced from history. The sense of hostile fragmentation has not vanished, however: in Nigeria, since 1999, communal conflicts have claimed 13,500 lives. By reading Tutuola's texts against this history, we see how unspeakable trauma can be voiced, cried out worldwide—and yet, can go unheard. The history of the Yoruba Wars is, like the slave trade, a history which is difficult to look at directly: they are histories of guilt, of internecine violence, and histories which whisper threats of future conflict. Anthropologist Rosalind Shaw has demonstrated how these dangerous, traumatic histories are indirectly remembered through folklore and folk practice: predatory spirits, for example, which echo slave raiders. We find this kind of encoding elaborated and expanded upon in the novels of Amos Tutuola, novels which have almost universally been dismissed as fanciful. Read against the history of the Yoruba Wars, however, these novels are illuminated as dramatisations of trauma, riven by splits between self and other and haunted by violence. Against nationalist myths of unity, Tutuola's novels foreground division, multiplicity, interruptions and violent eruptions.

A profile of Yoruba novelist and storyteller Amos Tutuola that is written for the Weird Fiction Review. Includes an analysis of "The Complete Gentleman," an excerpt of Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard republished in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (ed. VanderMeer and VanderMeer).

Please click the attached link if you wish to read the article: http://weirdfictionreview.com/2014/09/101-weird-writers-34-amos-tutuola/