Amos Tutuola Quotes

[Death] was not at home by that time, he was in his yam garden.

We had sold our death to somebody at the door for the sum of £70:18:6d and lent our fear to somebody at the door as well on interest of £3:10:0d per month, so we did not care about death and we did not fear again.

When we traveled for two and half days, we reached the Deads' road from which dead babies drove us, and when we reached there, we could not travel on it because of fearful dead babies, etc. which were still on it.

But when the fire was about to quench, their children came with whips and stones then they began to whip and stone our heads; when they left that, they began to climb on our heads and jump from one to the second; after that they started to spit, make urine and pass excreta on our heads; but when the eagle saw that they wanted to nail our heads, then it drove all of them away from the field with its beak.

One such individual was Amos Tutuola, who was a talented writer. His most famous novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, published in 1946, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, in 1954, explore Yoruba traditions and folklore. He received a great deal of criticism from Nigerian literary critics for his use of “broken or Pidgin English.” Luckily for all of us, Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet and writer, was enthralled by Tutuola’s “bewitching literary prose” and wrote glowing reviews that helped Tutuola’s work attain international acclaim. I still believe that Tutuola’s critics in Nigeria missed the point. The beauty of his tales was fantastical expression of a form of an indigenous Yoruba, therefore African, magical realism. It is important to note that his books came out several decades before the brilliant Gabriel García Márquez published his own masterpieces of Latin American literature, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Now, in all that he has done, Amos Tutuola is not sui generis. Is he ungrammatical? Yes. But James Joyce is more ungrammatical than Tutuola. Ezekiel Mphahlele has often said and written that African writers are doing violence to English. Violence? Has Joyce not done more violence to the English Language? Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is written in seven dialects, he tells us. It is acknowledged a classic. We accept it, forget that it has no "grammar", and go ahead to learn his "grammar" and what he has to tell us. Let Tutuola write "no grammar" and the hyenas and jackals whine and growl. Let Gabriel Okara write a "no grammar" Okolo. They are mum. Why? Education drives out of the mind superstition, daydreaming, building of castles in the air, cultivation of yarns, and replaces them with a rational practical mind, almost devoid of imagination. Some of these minds having failed to write imaginative stories, turn to that aristocratic type of criticism which magnifies trivialities beyond their real size. They fail to touch other virtues in a work because they do not have the imagination to perceive these mysteries. Art is arbitrary. Anybody can begin his own style. Having begun it arbitrarily, if he persists to produce in that particular mode, he can enlarge and elevate it to something permanent, to something other artists will come to learn and copy, to something the critics will catch up with and appreciate.

The hawk plays with the pigeon and the pigeon is happy, but not knowing that it is playing with death.

Then, frighteningly, he said, 'But as you are a man, how are you going to deliver your pregnancy? This is a big problem for you.

A tortoise's shell is a house of the poverty and if the tortoise is taken to the wealthy town, it will still be living in its house of poverty.

Truths are failed to sell in the market but lies are purchased with high price without pricing it.

The rope of the truth is thin but there is nobody who can cut it; the rope of lie is thick as a large pillar but it can be cut easily into a thousand pieces.

There is no chance for other matter in the stomach of a hungry person.

A cruel man cannot change another man's destiny.

I had forgotten that things might change in future and that promise was a debt.

A tormentor forces his victims to be hardy.

Having left this village to a distance of a mile this ghost magician came to me on the way, he asked me to let both of us share the gifts, but when i refused he changed to a poisonous snake, he wanted to bite me to death, so I myself used my magical power and changed to a long stick at the same moment and started to beat him repeatedly. When he felt much pain and near to die, then he changed from the snake to a great fire and burnt this stick to ashes, after that he started to burn me too. Without hesitation I myself changed to rain, so I quenched him at once.