by Amos Tutuola
DON’T PAY BAD FOR BAD
Amos Tutuola
Cheeky Frawg Books
Tallahassee, Florida
This edition copyright © 2012, the Estate of Amos Tutuola. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.
Introduction copyright © 2012 Yinka Tutuola.
Afterword copyright © 2012 Matthew Cheney.
ISBN: 978-0-9857904-3-1 (ebook edition)
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Contents
Introduction by Yinka Tutuola
Don’t Pay Bad For Bad
Remember The Day After Tomorrow
Ajaiyi And The Witch Doctor
The Elephant Woman
The Town Of Famine (Feather Woman Of The Jungle)
Ajantala, The Noxious Guest
The Palm-Wine Tapper And The Strange Fellows
Tort And The Dancing Market-Women
Tort’s Bitter Marriage
A Few Words As Afterword To Amos Tutuola by Matthew Cheney
Further Reading
About the Author
My Father, The Storyteller
by Yinka Tutuola
“Although his first book came off the press in 1952, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead’s Town continues to excite readers and inspire literary scholars today close to a half century later. The nine novels (counting The Wild Hunter in the Bush of Ghosts) and two collections of short stories he published in the course of his controversial but commendable and courageous career place him among the most productive of African writers, and one can argue that, like the intrepid Ogun, he cleared the path for later literary stalwarts like Chinua Achebe, Flora Nwapa, and Wole Soyinka.”
—Professor Oyekan Owomoyela, “Amos Tutuola: A Man of His Times”
My own introduction to literature was through two traditions. When I was in school we read both English and African literature in English. I enjoyed reading all the books (both English, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,and the African, like The Drummer Boy, etc). But it was the African ones that I was able to identify with. However, my father’s books were unique, both to me and my friends who read them. Like in Alice in Wonderland, we were always trying to figure out the odyssey of the heroes in his books. We imagined ourselves facing the rigours, ordeals and dilemmas the heroes faced. I enjoyed all my father’s books and I used to discuss them with him. I also asked questions. But as small as I was then I could easily pick on his grammar and at times I would make suggestions.
Looking behind some years later I discovered that he preferred direct translation of the Yoruba words, thoughts and usage into English word-for-word, rather than to use their English equivalents or express them in the same way as an Englishman. This according to him added “flavor to my stories.” For example, the word “second” (a unit of time) is expressed as “a twinkle of an eye” by the Yoruba people and this is exactly how he used it in his books. There are many examples of words like this, which many thought he coined or which they attributed to his ignorance of the rules of grammar. But these kinds of expressions are the real day-to-day Yoruba way of expressing such words, thoughts, or actions.
Professor Ogundipe-Leslie noted this well when she pointed out that my father “has simply and boldly (or perhaps innocently) carried across into his English prose the linguistic pattern and literary habits of his Yoruba language, using English words as counters. He is basically speaking Yoruba but using English words.” This, I think, is one of those things that made him unique among African writers. He believed folk stories, by all means, should be told choosing words that would ultimately express the original local meaning or thought, even at the expense of good grammar. This is where some went against him. But he stood his ground and many loved him for it.
My father was a very simple, humble and hard-working gentleman. He loved his family, people and community. He was always interested in helping people. He was passionate. But he was always busy writing his stories. Whenever he was not having visitors or doing some kind of domestic work, he would be at his table writing or typing till as late as two, even three in the morning. He was never tired of writing and typing.
Anyone who had the opportunity of meeting him when he was alive would quite agree that he was far from being an introvert. He had a very good sense of humor. In fact “humor” could be said to be his language or way of expression. He never liked to be too serious about issues. He believed life should be handled with a sense of humor at all times. He believed this makes the challenges of life less intimidating and helps keep one better focused on what lines of action to take. At home and at work he was a man of humor. He taught, advised, entertained, and corrected with humor. All his novels are written demonstrations and extensions of his sense of humor, for he saw and believed himself to be an entertainer (as a story teller) rather than a writer. Actually, it was the lack of audience at his workplace that made him turn to writing out the stories on paper. Humor was not peculiar to him alone; rather it is a Yoruba character—a way of talking, passing messages, teaching morals, warning, and so on.
I could well remember a time (many years ago) when he believed I had spent too much on music and drinks. Instead of saying so directly, he asked me if I had any money with me right there and then. I told him I did and he asked me to bring out a note—any denomination. I brought one out and the next question was ‘‘Who owns it?’’ To this I said, “I do, of course!” He asked me to prove it since my name was not on it. I didn’t know how to prove it, so I asked, “Who owns it, then?” He said, “Nobody!” I knew then that he wanted to teach me something in his usual humorous way, so I asked him, “Explain how money I brought out of my pocket isn’t mine!” After a rather long pause (he always liked been dramatic) he said, “Know from today that money by itself is a long-winged bird that flies away whenever it wills, to wherever it wills; it is an illusion until it is spent on valuable things, and as such it only belongs to someone who ties it down by using it to get tangible, worthy assets having commercial value. Know that it is what you do with ‘money’ that is money!” I never forgot the lesson!
But he was far more humorous with children and teenagers (they were his best friends and he had many, because they always listened with rapt attention) than older people. He was always happy telling them folktales, and giving them funny nicknames from the stories. At times he would buy them refreshments. They loved him so much and always liked to be with him. Adults joined them at times to enjoy themselves too. He was like a village-chief living in a city. He was always accessible and approachable.
Whenever he was on annual leave (before he retired from government work) he would travel to his village with an old Pye reel-to-reel tape recorder—we used to go with him if we are on holidays—and there he collected s
tories of all kinds. At nights in the village, he would buy palm wine to entertain his guests, who would be competing to tell the best stories they could. He would record these stories until very late in the night. He enjoyed being in the village so much. I think if he was not working with the government, he would rather have preferred to live there among the village people, probably because of their simple ways of life.
My father used very few of these stories in his books, for he himself could develop a story from just about anything, any event. But he loved recording these stories anyway. When he returned from the village he would play them back to entertain himself and his visitors. His life was just intertwined with stories—collecting, forming, writing, or telling them. I could remember when I was in primary school and was busy with my own life that he wanted to tell me a story and I was not in the mood for stories. He was very angry with me. This happened to almost everybody in the family. He was always looking for audiences because stories gave him so much joy that he lacked interest in many other things, like going to social parties. In fact, I never saw my father dancing. He loved songs, but they are folksongs again, with stories in them. So everything about him is story, story and story. He would just look at you or an event and turn it into a story.
When reel-to-reel tape recorders went out of fashion and were replaced with more compact cassette recorders, there was a problem. He couldn’t transfer all his stories, for they were too many. He lost a great part of his collection. He was able to transfer only a few. He seemed to me to have lived two kinds of lives. While one was a real, factual physical life, the other was fictional, folkloric, and mythological. There was no doubt that it was the mythological one that gave him the greater joy.
And yet in the real sense of the word, he was not that outgoing. In this regard he was kind of choosy. He disliked meetings that are strictly formal and with all kinds of rules, etc. He disliked being in places where you cannot express yourself the way you think is appropriate, especially when you need to dress formally, follow rigid protocols, like in board meetings. This I believed was why he had academics as friends, for they care less about formalities. So he was always willing to attend their parties, lectures, discussions and so on. He seldom travelled [too far]. Especially if it would mean spending days there. This was on many occasions not his will, for throughout his adult life he suffered from a very severe duodenal ulcer and as such he lived on very special diets. For this reason he always avoided places where it would not be possible or convenient for him to get his kind of food. However, he accepted some local and foreign invitations, to give public readings, to lecture on Yoruba customs and traditions, to tell stories, and so on. He traveled to the United States, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. But he rejected more invitations than he accepted.
As for autobiography, there is basically no autobiography in his works for they are mainly based on Yoruba folktales. Except to say that like the heroes in his works, he passed through many ordeals in life. His education and literary ordeals are well known, but there were personal ones like the ulcer, which strongly deprived him of enjoying many kinds of food and drinks throughout his adult life. Generally, he did not write himself into his books.
But he did make things up. With regard to classics like The Palm-Wine Drinkard, to start with, there is nobody like the hero “the drunkard” in the traditional folktales. This character is wholly his creation. Like the “drunkard” he also created other characters, and it is in the lives and journeys of these characters that the folktales always manifest, whether refashioned or told in a more straightforward fashion as in this collection. Without the creation of the “drunkard” and other characters there would be no central figures to “live” the folktale-life. So, he weaved folktales into his imagination, or vice versa, and it is very difficult to separate Tutuola from the folktales, or to separate the folktales from Tutuola.
Eustace Palmer said this much in The Growth of the African Novel:“Taking his stories direct from his people’s traditional lore, he uses his inexhaustible imagination and inventive power to embellish them, to add to them or alter them, and generally transform them into his own stories conveying his own image.”
Alastair Niven, in his article “Obituary: Amos Tutuola”from the June 16, 1997 issue of The Independent, wrote: “Tutuola was a born story-teller, taking traditional oral material and re-imagining it inimitably. In this way he was, though very different in method and craft, the Grimm or Perrault of Nigerian story-telling, refashioning old tales in a unique way which made them speak across cultures.” This is very true of all his works, not just The Palm-Wine Drinkard. In his work, it is therefore very difficult to separate folktales from Tutuola, or to separate Tutuola from the folktales.
The progression of my father’s career was both rewarding and sometimes difficult. His work was not known in Nigeria until The Palm-Wine Drinkardwas published in 1952 in England by Faber and Faber. It was in England that he was first acknowledged and admired, for originality. However, knowledge of his work quickly (and almost simultaneously) spread to Nigeria in particular, and Africa as a whole. He was surprised! In fact to say surprised was an understatement. I think it is more appropriate to say he was shocked. It was a big, far-away dream that became a reality. He had always wanted to entertain as many people as possible, as much for applause as anything, and all of a sudden he got an unexpected and, perhaps at that time, an unprecedented foreign attention and praise, paid from no less a country than the United Kingdom. It was a dream come true. He was more than surprised! And when he was published again in the United States . . . !
But his joy was almost doused by some of his academic kinsmen from West Africa, from Nigeria in particular. They took it upon themselves to defend the English language more than the English and the Americans combined, and refused to see anything good in the efforts of a semi-illiterate writer (by Western standards) but an undeniable professional raconteur (by Yoruba standards). To them anything, everything must be judged, evaluated, and recommended only if it passed Western tests and standards. And that was a time when they were fighting Western colonialism, imperialism, culture, influence, you name it, through the writings of their novels, poems, and other works. These West Africans were surprised, too!
As Eldred Jones wrote in an article for the Bulletin of the Association for African Literature in English, “Many West Africans could not share the general enthusiasm because they feared that Tutuola’s language would be taken as being representative of West African English, and also because recognizing, as they no doubt did, the folk stories which Tutuola so grotesquely embroidered, they gave his imagination less credit than would someone who came fresh to these fantastic adventures.”
Some even believed the days for folktales were over. Among them was Adeagbo Akinjogbin (much later a professor of History), who wrote in the June 5, 1954, issue of West Africamagazine: “Most Englishmen, and perhaps Frenchmen, are pleased to believe all sorts of fantastic tales about Africa, a continent of which they are profoundly ignorant. The ‘extraordinary books’ of Mr. Tutuola (which must undoubtedly contain some of the unbelievable things in our folklores) will just suit the temper of his European readers, as they seem to confirm their concepts of Africa. No wonder then that they are being read not only in English, but in French as well. And once this harm (I call it harm) is done, it can hardly be undone again. Mr. Tutuola will get his money and his worldwide fame all right, but the sufferers will be the unfortunate ones who have cause to come to England or Europe. I am not being unduly anxious.”
It is then clear that there were some people who preferred “our folklores” to be swept under the carpet of history. What kind of historian would like to keep the culture and tradition of his people hidden or unknown? Please note that Akinjogbin was not against the use of English in the book but the writing of “some of the unbelievable things in our folklores.”
It is good to note, however, that most of these West Africans were not writers or teachers of literature. In
response to those people who believed that the positive reactions to The Palm-Wine Drinkard (especially) and other books by Tutuola were European mockery of African literature, I think the history of The Palm-Wine Drinkard (now sixty years old) and the other books has proven them wrong. In addition, Chinweizu and others have written in strong terms against such “Eurocentric critics” of African literature, including this important quote from Toward the Decolonization of African Literature:
The prejudice against the oral form manifests itself most strongly in the claim that whatever there was in the African narrative tradition has had a negative influence on the African novel by contaminating the African novel with the “deficiencies” of the oral medium. This prejudice is inculcated and employed by Eurocentric critics to shore up the eminence and authority they would like permanently to confer upon European literature over the minds of Africans. The schema of their argument is as follows: oral is bad, written is good. African narrative is oral, therefore bad; European narrative is written, therefore good. If Africans desire to progress from bad to good they must ape European narrative. Furthermore, they must not allow their apery of European narrative to be marred by influences from African narrative, which, being oral is of course indelibly bad, or beyond redemption. As examples of what they consider characteristically faulty in oral narrative, these idolaters of Europeana allege that African oral narratives have thin plots, thin narrative textures, and undeveloped characters.
Thankfully, several people stood by my father and encouraged him at the time. Many at the University of Ibadan, and later Ife, close by (geographically), were always encouraging him to move on and write more. He was always invited to their campuses for storytelling, public readings, discussions, and parties. But many others outside West Africa were encouraging too. In the United States people like Professor Bernth Lindfors and the late Professor Robert Wren were at the forefront, always in contact; while researching his works, they provided encouragement through critical analysis.