Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  Three Tales from Nigeria

  FOREST OF A THOUSAND DAEMONS, by D. O. Fagunwa, translated from the Yoruba by Wole Soyinka. 140 pp. Random House, 1983.

  THE WITCH-HERBALIST OF THE REMOTE TOWN, by Amos Tutuola. 205 pp. Faber & Faber, 1981.

  DOUBLE YOKE, by Buchi Emecheta. 163 pp. Braziller, 1983.

  The shift from spoken to written narrative is nowhere complete; there is always a voice, and in the case of exemplary modern novelists like Proust and Henry James it seems sometimes there is only the voice, coaxing us on to another page and another brandy, in these readerly circumstances of strange nocturnal intimacy. When we turn, however, to works markedly nearer the beginnings of writing than the outpourings of these two elegant and highly self-conscious scribes, we experience a dismay, a disorientation, for which the lucid epics of Homer and the oft-retold chronicles of the Bible have not quite prepared us. We do not know the language, the code of mythology and tradition, and feel oppressively confused, as when we look at the Tibetan pantheon arrayed on a thang-ka, while an equally populous mural, say, of the Last Judgment or the Battle of Waterloo quickly sorts itself out. There is always a code, and oral narrative disconcertingly assumes that we know it.

  Forest of a Thousand Daemons, by D. O. Fagunwa, was first published in 1939—just yesterday, on the calendar of Western literature. A man of this century, Fagunwa was born in 1903 and died in 1963. Yet this first of his five novels in the language of the Yoruba—a black people concentrated in southwestern Nigeria—takes us back to a time when narratives existed only in the memories and utterances of their tellers. The opening page instructs the readers how to read a novel: “Firstly, whenever a character in my story speaks in his own person, you must put yourself in his place and speak as if you are that very man.… In addition, as men of discerning—and this is the second task you must perform—you will yourselves extract various wisdoms from the story as you follow its progress.” Even so, the narrative, as if to soften the strangeness of its existence as a text, is presented as an oral tale that the writer has taken from the dictation of another. The writer, on a morning of benign beauty (“A beatific breeze rustled the dark leaves of the forest, deep dark and shimmering leaves, the sun rose from the East in God’s own splendour, spread its light into the world and the sons of men began their daily perambulations”), is seated in his favorite chair, “settled into it with voluptuous contentment,” when an elderly stranger comes up to him, chats, sighs, and then commands: “Take up your pen and paper and write down the story which I will now tell.… I am concerned about the future and there is this fear that I may die unexpectedly and my story die with me. But if I pass it on to you now and you take it all down diligently, even when the day comes that I must meet my Maker, the world will not forget me.” So, its double-edged reward established (for the reader, “various wisdoms”; for the teller, immortality), the tale begins.

  The teller identifies himself as “Akara-ogun, Compound-of-Spells, one of the formidable hunters of a bygone age,” and relates how his mother, a witch momentarily in the shape of an antelope, was fatally shot by his father, who within a month himself died, of no named disease—he simply “followed her.” Akara-ogun, then, an orphan in his twenty-sixth year, travels to Irunmale, the Forest of a Thousand Daemons, where he survives a welter of horrific encounters, mostly with supernatural creatures called ghommids, which the translator’s glossary describes as “beings neither human nor animal nor strictly demi-gods, mostly dwellers in forests where they live within trees.” A fair specimen is Agbako: “He wore a cap of iron, a coat of brass, and on his loins were leather shorts. His knees right down to his feet appeared to be palm leaves; from his navel to the bulge of his buttocks, metal network; and there was no creature on earth which had not found a home in this netting which even embraced a live snake among its links, darting out its tongue as Agbako trod the earth. His head was long and large, the sixteen eyes being arranged around the base of his head, and there was no living man who could stare into those eyes without trembling, they rolled endlessly round like the face of a clock.” The procession of such patchwork monsters at times aspires to be a version of The Pilgrim’s Progress; Akara-ogun comes to the city called Filth, “a city of greed and contumely, a city of envy and of thievery, a city of fights and wrangles, a city of death and diseases—a veritable city of sinners.” What strikes the reader, however, in these moralistic apparitions is the redolence of certain details: many of these citizen-sinners “wore their clothes inside out.… Every garment shone with filth, it was more like the inside of a hunter’s bag.” Later, our hero wearily sits on a dead and bloated goat: “The moment my buttocks hit the carcass, it burst, and the gall bladder and intestines flushed my buttocks with their fetid fluids.”

  The earthy seethe toward which Fagunwa’s imagination tends is tugged skyward on nearly every page by a pious interjection: “evil cannot fail but end a heart of evil. Thus did this woman die the death of a dog and rot like bananas: even thus did the King of Heaven raise this righteous king in triumph above their schemes.” When, in the last long episode, the hero finds himself privileged to spend seven days with the saintly and immortal Iragbeje in his sublime house with seven wings, the rigors of enlightenment wear out the narrator, who after two days of fable and preachment declares, “there remained five days of our stay with Iragbeje, but I cannot tell you all the marvels which our eyes witnessed and our ears heard during these five days, for time is flying.” On the seventh day, in a room whose “floor, ceiling and walls alike and every furnishing or article … were all white as cotton fluff,” Iragbeje talks about the Creator and concludes, “Therefore when it is good for us, let us remember our Lord.” Morals leap into being at every level of the narrative. Akara-ogun offers this wisdom to his audience, which in the course of three days of public dictation has grown quite large: “If a man overreaches himself, he crashes to the ground.… If a nation is self-satisfied it will soon enough become enslaved to another; if a powerful government preens itself, before a bird’s touchdown its peoples will disperse before its very eyes.” And the author-scribe concludes with a prayer that “we black people will never again be left behind in the world.”

  The determined moralistic impulse consorts incongruously with the folkloristic elements; more erratically than Milton, Fagunwa identifies the old pagan gods with Christian devils. When Akara-ogun marries a lovely ghommid, she does allow, some time after their wedding, that she has a nephew whose name is Chaos. “That child,” she goes on, “grew up and sought employment under Satan who is king of hell. I learnt later Chaos was a most conscientious worker and earned rapid promotion at his job, and it pleases me greatly to learn that he is at this moment foreman of those who feed the fires of hell with oil.” But the non-Christian supernatural is elsewhere a pathway to religious revelation; the teeming world of the ghommids is felt as merely a slightly darker department of the real world. Modern Africa peeks through. The exalted Iragbeje advises Akara-ogun matter-of-factly, “Do not permit your child to keep bad company, that he start from youth to pub-crawl, insulting women all over town, dancing unclean dances in public places and boasting, ‘We are the ones who count, we are the elite over others.’ ”

  Fagunwa’s frame of reference included, along with Yoruba folklore and the Biblical tales so frequently echoed and paralleled, contemporary terms and texts as of the late Thirties in a British colony. Passages in Forest of a Thousand Daemons build like pieces of a novel; the plot begins to yield moral complexities and to reveal inner lives. When Kako, a warrior who joins Akara-ogun’s band, abruptly deserts a woman with whom he has lived for seven years and is, according to custom, about to marry, she pleads her case with the sentimental fullness of a bourgeois heroine: “Ah! Is this now my reward from you? When at first you courted me I refused you, but you turned on the honey tongue and fooled me until I believed that there lived no man like you. I gave you my love so selflessly that the fever of love seized me, that the lunacy of love mounted my hea
d.…” Kako, a warrior of the old school, is in no mood for a moral dilemma; he curses his plaintive consort as “woman of death, mother of witchery seeking to obstruct my path of duty,” and strikes her with his machete so that “it lacked only a little for the woman to be cloven clean in two.” She had been obstructing as well the flow of adventure and wisdom-imparting; in shared relief, the narrator and Kako together make merry for the next nine days. Their companions tease Kako about his slain woman, saying, “Deal-me-death thrusts her neck at the husband—such was the wife of Kako.” She is flattened into an allegorical name, and her disturbing outcry sinks back like a bubble into the two-dimensional, alternately hectic and pious narrative.

  Much the same hurried and harsh texture is presented by Amos Tutuola’s The Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town, except that Tutuola is a Yoruba who writes in English, which brings the menacing, scarred masks of his devil dance closer to our faces. He is the author, of course, of The Palm-Wine Drinkard, whose publication in 1952 was urged by T. S. Eliot and hailed by Dylan Thomas, in a review that called it “a brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching story.” The middle two adjectives still apply to this later work, Tutuola’s first book in fourteen years. (There have been five others since the famous first.) The Palm-Wine Drinkard concerned the narrator’s pursuit of his own private palm-wine tapster into the Deads’ Town; the search in The Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town is for relief from the hero’s wife’s barrenness. To the striking but on the whole amiable eccentricities of his early style Tutuola has added several distracting tics; one is the very free use of the abbreviation “etc.” (“the skins of various kinds of animals such as lions, tigers, leopards, crocodiles, boar, forest lizards, etc.”; “the chief of pagan, idol, spirit, god, etc. worshippers”; “dressed in beautiful clothes, etc.”; etc.), and another is the curious but consistent substitution of the word “twinkling” for “minute,” on the ground that “in the Yoruba language, ‘twinkling’ means minute”—this produces such remarkable verbal formations as “a half-twinkling or thirty seconds,” “one-twinkling intervals,” “sixty twinklings” (an hour), “a few sixtieths of a twinkling” (a few seconds), and “two hundred and forty twinklings” (four hours). To confuse our computations further, the nameless narrator travels with four ghostly companions, or “partners”:

  Although I had left my town without human wayfarers or partners, my first “mind” and my second “mind” were my partners, while the third partner which was my “memory” had also prepared itself ready to help me perhaps whenever my two “minds” failed to advise or deserted me. And it was also prepared to record all the offences which the two “minds” might commit. Again, my fourth partner was my “Supreme Second” who was totally invisible and who was entirely supreme to the three of them, yet he had prepared himself ready to guide me throughout my journey.

  Can the first of these inner subdivisions be based upon too literal a hearing of the phrase “being of two minds”? Or upon a prescient inkling of the distinction between the right and left sides of the brain? No clear personality difference between the first “mind” and the second emerged for this reader; they both seem cowardly and erratic advisers to our hero, compared with his “memory,” the guardian-angel-like “Supreme Second,” and his faithful bag of juju tricks as he does battle with such black hats as the Brutal Ape, the Abnormal Squatting Man of the Jungle, the Long-Breasted Mother of the Mountain, the Crazy Removable-Headed Wild Man, and the Offensive Wild People. The plurality of inner voices imposes the delay of consultation upon every encounter:

  So as my first “mind” and second “mind” could not tell me what to do to save myself from this fast-moving strange shadow at this time, I began to think of another way to remove the sadness and depression from my “memory.” After a while, as this thick shadow was still taking me to a greater height in the sky, it came to my “memory” unexpectedly to use one of my juju which had the power to make me disappear suddenly. So without hesitation, I used this juju. But I was greatly shocked that when I used it, it had no effect at all. And it was later on I understood that it could not help if my bare feet were not on the ground.

  There is a certain psychological realism in this subdivided hero as he keeps trying to rally his scattered inner forces and bring them, like a sulky committee, to the vote of action. We are all more persons than the unitary conventions of social proceedings acknowledge. And there is a certain eerie evocativeness in some of Tutuola’s slippery dealings with the English language. Here is the Abnormal Squatting Man of the Jungle, who subdues his prey with his icy touch and breath:

  His head was bigger than necessary with two fearful eyes. The two eyes went deeply into his skull.… His beard was long to about forty centimetres, it was very bushy and stale, and hundreds of fleas were moving here and there in it. But his thick and twisted arms and legs were able to carry his over-inflated belly, from which he used to blow out the cold onto his victims.… The other parts of his body which were not covered by the muddled dirty hair, were full of big smelling mumps. To my surprise and fear when he was aloof, he seemed a powerless, morbid, wild jungle man.… Some time when the day was lurid, and as the hair which covered his head and body was just like light brown weeds, he used to lurk in the weeds for his victim, and when the victim came near him, he jumped on him or her unexpectedly and then started to blow the cold onto his or her body as hastily as he could. Again, he pretended sometimes to be motley, or when he saw one at a distance he burst into silly laughter suddenly as if he was mad.

  A number of the villains—e.g., the Crazy Removable-Headed Wild Man, with his luxurious wardrobe of “hundreds of various kinds of large heads, arms, short legs, broad ears, wild eyes, round black bodies, etc.”—are amusingly imagined. But in general the wild imagery of The Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town has neither the schematic coherence and heraldic crispness of literary allegory nor the felt depth and resonance of the surreal images in, say, Kafka or Lewis Carroll, who give us back our own dreams. Though it follows the exact plot curve of Forest of a Thousand Daemons and like it ends in a kind of heaven where instruction and therapy are dealt out in surreal mimicry of school and church, Tutuola’s tale seems not instructive but, in its fantastic way, confessional. A personal passion for fragmentation and interchanging units generates the hero’s many minds, the Crazy Removable-Headed Wild Man’s many body parts, and the Witch-Herbalist’s many voices: “She had various kinds of voices such as a huge voice, a light voice, a sharp voice, the voice of a baby, the voice of a girl, the voice of an old woman, the voice of a young man, the voice of an old man, the voice of a stammerer, the voice of boldness, the voice of boom, the voice of a weeping person, the voice which was amusing and which was annoying, the voice like that of a ringing bell, the voice of various kinds of birds and beasts.” We are in the realm neither of legend nor of dream but of indulged imagination; in this regard Tutuola is a more modern writer than Fagunwa, whose imaginings were at the service of a social ethic. Though Tutuola’s first novel marked the arrival of African fiction on the international stage (The Palm-Wine Drinkard has been translated into thirteen European languages), it has not been imitated, except by him; he is a writer sui generis. This new novel bears out Anthony West’s verdict, thirty years ago in The New Yorker, that The Palm-Wine Drinkard, though affording “a glimpse of the very beginning of literature, that moment when writing at last seizes and pins down the myths and legends of an analphabetic culture,” was “an unrepeatable happy hit.”

  Buchi Emecheta, though she moved to London in 1962, when she was eighteen, and continues to live there, is Nigeria’s best-known female writer. Indeed, few writers of her sex—Ama Ata Aidoo, of Ghana, is the other name that comes to mind—have arisen in any part of tropical Africa. There will surely be more; there is much to say. Ms. Emecheta’s novels, as their very titles indicate—The Slave Girl, The Bride Price, The Joys of Motherhood—concern themselves with the situation of women in a society where their role, though large, has been f
irmly subordinate and where the forces of potential liberation have arrived with bewildering speed.

  The heroine of her new novel, Double Yoke, is an Efik girl, Nko, who must pursue her education at the cost of losing her boyfriend and sexually submitting to an instructor. The novel is dedicated by Ms. Emecheta to “my 1981 students at the Department of English and Literary Studies, University of Calabar,” and takes place in the early Eighties, but for all of its topicality, and along with the professional finesse that helped make it a modest best-seller in England, it retains certain traces of the oral mode. Like Forest of a Thousand Daemons, the book sets up a narrative frame; who is telling the tale, and why, is not taken for granted, and the narrator is not the disembodied third person who relays so much Western fiction to us, as if prose were a camera. A “new lecturer” at the University of Calabar, Miss Bulewao, is introduced with a jaunty touch of self-caricature, and sets her all-male writing class an assignment—“an imaginary story of how you would like your ideal Nigeria to be.” One of her students, Ete Kamba, mulling over this tall order, remembers that Miss Bulewao also said “that oneself was always a very good topic to start writing about” and decides to write about what is uppermost in his mind: “He was going to tell the world how it all had been, between him and his Nko, until Professor Ikot came into their lives.” The chapters that follow have the form of a flashback, taking Ete Kamba and Nko back to their first meeting, at the thanksgiving celebration for a local girl’s passing her examination in hairdressing—no educational advance is too modest to be honored in these villages. Ete Kamba and Nko live in nearby villages but not the same one; he is eighteen, she is two years younger. He goes to the university on a scholarship; she eventually follows. As the story of their involvement and of hers with Professor Ikot unfolds, the tale slips more and more into Nko’s mind, and away from the talk in the male dormitories—handled creditably but without much zest—to more animated interchanges within the female quarters. Yet it all stays somehow contained within Ete Kamba’s flashback, which is delivered in the form of an essay to Miss Bulewao; she asks all the right questions and urges the difficulty toward a solution as happy, given the double-yoked condition of the educated African woman, as it can be. The scribe enabled Akara-ogun to relate his pilgrim’s progress to the world; the act of writing still has a power of magical release in the University of Calabar.