The Palm-wine Drinkard ; And, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

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Grove Press, 1994 - Fiction - 307 pages
"Since its first publication in 1952, The Palm-Wine Drinkard has come to be regarded as the masterwork of one of Africa’s best and most influential writers. Drawing on the Yoruba oral folktale tradition, and embellishing his story with strong mythical and psychological implications, Tutuola describes the odyssey of a devoted palm-wine drinkard through a nightmare of fantastic adventure.In My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, the charm of his distinctive English blends with Nigerian Amos Tutuola’s extraordinary imagination and the mythology of West African tribal life to present a bewitching, nightmarish adventure story. A small boy, left alone to face the terrors of the bush, the impenetrable thickets of the topical forest inhabited only by ghosts, meets all the vile spirits of African mythology and is initiated into the worlds of fear, disease, and death. Tutuola uncannily evokes the awaking of a mortal soul in confrontation with the reality of a people’s world of legend." -- Publisher's description.
 

Contents

Foreword page
9
The Meaning of Bad and Good
17
The SmellingGhost
29
My Life with Cows
43
At a Ghost Mothers Birthday Function
52
My First Wedding Day in the Bush of Ghosts
59
On my way to the 9th Town of Ghosts
65
RiverGhosts Galaday under the River
72
Barbing Day in the Town of Short Ghosts
105
The Super Lady
112
Where Woman Marries Woman
123
On the Queer Way to Homeward
129
meet my Dead Cousin in the 10th Town
144
Invisible Magnetic Missive sent to Me from Home
154
Televisionhanded Ghostess
161
The FutureSign Tree
167

In the Spiders Web Bush
89
The Short Ghosts and their Flasheyed Mother
96
The PalmWine Drinkard
175
Copyright

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About the author (1994)

Amos Tutuola was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria. He received his elementary education at a Salvation Army school and has lived mostly at Ibadan, where he was for a long time a messenger. His highly controversial reputation as a writer is based on his unique style, a type of pidgin English. Tutuola's most popular work so far is his romance, The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), an extremely imaginative tall tale drawn from Yoruba legends and myths about a journey into the land of the dead. Despite the controversy surrounding Tutuola's "wrong" use of English, his historical significance as a writer cannot be disputed. Among the first black African writers to be published and win some degree of international recognition, he was also the first writer to see the possibilities of translating African mythology into English in an imaginative way. For all the controversy, Tutuola is highly popular and his books have been translated into many languages.

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