Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

In conclusion, all these prescriptions and proscriptions, all these dogmas about the universal and the eternal verities; all this proselytizing for European literary fashions, even dead ones; all this hankering after definitions may in the end prove worse than futile by creating needless anxieties. For as everybody knows, anxiety can hinder creative performance, from sex to science.

I have no doubt at all about the existence of the African novel. This form of fiction has seized the imagination of many African writers and they will use it according to their differing abilities, sensibilities and visions without seeking anyone’s permission. I believe it will grow and prosper. I believe it has a great future.

Recently one of my students pointed to a phrase on the cover of Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King and said, “Do you agree with that?” It was a comment credited to my good friend Ezekiel Mphahlele, to the effect that this was “the great African novel.” I told the student that I had nothing to say because I had an interest in the matter; and I’m glad to say, the joke was well taken. Actually, I admire The Radiance of the King quite a lot; still, I do hope that the great African novel will not be about a disreputable European.

Halifax, Canada, 1973

This address was published in the Dalhousie Review, vol. 53, no. 4, December 1973; subsequently in Morning Yet on Creation Day, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1975.

A YOUNG NIGERIAN WOMAN doing a higher degree in America said to me when I taught there in the 1970s, “I hear you teach Tutuola.” It was not a simple statement; her accent was heavy with accusation. We discussed the matter for a while and it became quite clear that she considered The Palm-Wine Drinkard to be childish and crude and certainly not the kind of thing a patriotic Nigerian should be exporting to America. Back in Nigeria a few years later I also noticed a certain condescension among my students towards the book and a clear indication that they did not consider it good enough to engage the serious attention of educated adults like themselves. They could not see what it was about.

Now, if I were one of those who hold the view that literature does not have to be about anything I would have been able to tell that young woman and those students of mine not to worry—that “this tall devilish story” (as Dylan Thomas called it) should be enjoyed solely for its own sake, as “literature in the service of itself,” as the work of “a writer without problems.”1

“Problems” in this context, we must understand, is the apparently misguided and old-fashioned desire on the part of some African writers to prove a point or teach a moral in their writing which some advanced critics tell us is so unworthy! Actually, Tutuola does have “problems”; he is the most moralistic of all Nige

rian writers, being fully as single-minded in the matter as the chap-book authors of the Onitsha Market. His superiority over those pamphlet writers has nothing to do with a vision of “literature in the service of itself,” but arises out of a richer imagination and a more soundly based moralism. For while they are offering a half-baked ethic of escapism from the pressures of modern township living, he has his two feet firmly planted in the hard soil of an ancient oral, and moral, tradition.

Of course, Tutuola’s art conceals—or rather clothes—his purpose, as all good art must do. But anybody who asks what the story is about can hardly have read him. And I suspect that many who talk about Tutuola one way or another are yet to read him.

The first two sentences in The Palm-Wine Drinkard tell us clearly enough what the story is about:

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.2

The reader may, of course, be so taken with Tutuola’s vigorous and unusual prose style or beguiled by that felicitous coinage, “drinkard,” that he misses the social and ethical question being proposed: What happens when a man immerses himself in pleasure to the exclusion of all work; when he raises pleasure to the status of work and occupation and says in effect: “Pleasure be thou my work!”? The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a rich and spectacular exploration of this gross perversion, its expiation through appropriate punishment and the offender’s final restoration. That’s what the story is about.

Tutuola does not waste any time exploring or elaborating on the offence itself. The offender/protagonist/narrator states the case simply and bluntly in those two short sentences on page one, gives an equally brief and precise background to it, and proceeds to spend the rest of the book on the punishment he undergoes in atonement for his offence and then a fairly brief coda on his restoration.

This disposition of emphases might appear somewhat uneven to the “modern” reader brought up on lengthy psychological interpretations of guilt. But Tutuola belongs primarily to humanity’s earlier tradition which could say simply: “Thou shalt not commit murder,” without necessarily having to explore what motivations might lurk in murky prenatal experience! But he also knows perhaps instinctively what the moderns are all about and so makes a gesture to them in this seemingly harmless piece of family background:

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.3

Again, Tutuola has packed into a simple and brief statement a huge social and ethical proposition: A man who will not work can only stay alive if he can somehow commandeer to his own use the labour of other people either by becoming a common thief or a slave-owner. Thanks to the affluence of a father (he “was the richest man in our town”), who is willing to indulge his son’s outrageous appetite, the Drinkard is enabled to buy a slave and to press him into a daily round of exploitative and socially useless work. The point is therefore made quite clearly—lest we be tempted to dismiss the Drinkard’s love of palm-wine as a personal drinking problem—that refusal to work cannot be a simple “self-regarding act” but is a social and moral offence of colossal consequence.

Tutuola’s moral universe is one in which work and play in their numerous variations complement each other. The good life, he seems to say, is that in which business and pleasure, striving and repose, giving and receiving, suffering and enjoyment, punishment and reprieve, poverty and wealth, have their place, their time and their measure. We give work and struggle; and in the end we take rest and fulfilment.

Nothing in all this is particularly original. What is so very impressive is Tutuola’s inventiveness in creating new and unexpected circumstances for the unfolding of the theme. For example, to make the point that those whose personal circumstance shields them from the necessity to work are really unfortunate and deprived and must do something to remedy their lack, Tutuola creates the rather dramatic and mysterious, and in the end quite terrible, personage, the Invisible Pawn, otherwise known as Give and Take, who comes to the Drinkard out of the night and tells how he has always heard the word “poor” without really knowing it and asks for help in order to make its acquaintance. Simbi, a character in Tutuola’s later book, has, like the Drinkard, a much too easy childhood and deals with it herself by going out in search of hardship. The Drinkard has too much appetite and too little wisdom to recognize his predicament unaided and has to be forced into dealing with it. I think that one should make the point here that Tutuola’s conception of poverty as creative experience is very different from the view which gave rise in the past to the profession of poverty in certain religions or in societies where the poor are encouraged to make a living out of the mendicant’s bowl. I suspect that Tutuola would consider these manifestations as gross and mistaken. For he is concerned not with poverty as an alternative way of life nor with affluence as necessarily evil. The creative potential of poverty in his vision is really no more than its ability to expose to the world of work those who might otherwise escape its rigours. The romantic fad of patched and dirty jeans among the young of affluent societies today which fakes poverty rather painlessly would not seem to fall into Tutuola’s scheme either.

Even a moderately careful reading of The Palm-Wine Drinkard reveals a number of instances where Tutuola, by consistently placing work and play in close sequence, appears quite clearly to be making a point.

In the episode of the Three Good Creatures we see how music relieves the Drinkard and his wife of the curse of their half-bodied baby. They have just danced non-stop for five days and find themselves unexpectedly rid of their intolerable burden. But right away they also realise that after the dance the life of struggle must be resumed and its details attended to:

Then after we had left these creatures and our half-bodied baby, we started a fresh journey … But we were penniless … then I thought within myself how could we get money for our food etc.4

And so the poet/drinkard who has just sung a lofty panegyric to the three personifications of music, and danced for five days without pausing even to eat, now suddenly becomes a practical man again concerned with money and “food etc.” He carves a paddle, turns himself into a canoe and his wife into a boatman. At the end of the first day they have garnered seven pounds, five shillings and three pence from ferrying passengers across the river. (One small point here: the reformed, or rather reforming, Drinkard is a magician and from time to time does exploit his supernatural powers, but he always has to combine this ability with honest-to-God work. So although he can turn himself into a canoe, he still needs to carve a real paddle!)

If this episode were the only instance in the book where Tutuola makes the point of restoring the ascendancy of work after a binge, one would probably not be justified in attaching particular significance to it, striking though it certainly is. But we do find Tutuola returning again and again to the same motif. In fact, later in the book there is another “special occasion” involving Drum, Dance and Song again. This time the merriment is to celebrate the deliverance of the Red People from an ancient curse and the founding of their new city. On this occasion even Drum, Dance and Song surpass themselves. Such is the power of their music that “people who had been dead for hundreds of years rose up and came to witness”:

The whole people of the new town, the whole people that rose up from the grave, animals, snakes, Spirits and other nameless creatures …5

join in the merriment. The cosmic upheaval unleashed by the three primogenitors of music is only quelled and natural order restored after they have been banished permanently from the world so that only the memory of their visit remains with mankind. Quite clearly the primal force of their presence has proved too strong for the maintenance of the world’s work. Immediately after their gigantic display and banishment Tutuola switches abruptly and dramatically to the theme of work to clinch the point:

So when these three fellows (Drum, Song and Dance) disappeared, the people of the new town went back to their houses … After I had spent a year with my wife in this new town, I became a rich man. Then I hired many labourers to clear bush for me and it was cleared up to three miles square … then I planted the seeds and grain.6

One could give other examples of Tutuola’s juxtaposition of work and play in The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Indeed, it becomes possible, I believe, to see the proper balance between them as a fundamental law of Tutuola’s world, and the consequences of its infringement as the central meaning of the book.

In addition to the primary balance between work and play in the grand design of The Palm-Wine Drinkard we notice also a subordinate or secondary system of interior balance between particularly harsh sectors of the Drinkard’s ordeal and recuperative periods of rest. Compared to the sectors of hardship the periods of respite are few and brief—suggesting a deficit of rest which is however fully justified by the Drinkard’s previous life of indolent frivolity. But though brief and sporadic these intervening episodes of rest/play manage to stand out in arresting prominence, as in the episodes of the White Tree, Wraith Island and Wrong Town. Of these the White Tree yields the richest harvest of interpretation and I should like to examine it a little closely.

The episode of the White Tree occurs immediately after the Drinkard and his wife have endured at the hands of the sadistic inhabitants of Unreturnable-heaven’s Town the most savage torture of the entire journey. It thus seems quite appropriate that afte