It’s Black History Month, and that means it’s time to check out some awesome writers of Africa and the Diaspora! First up on the list, Nigeria’s remarkable Amos Tutuola and his second novel, MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS.
A young boy is startled awake by the sound of gunfire. Fleeing an incoming army and the prospect of enslavement, he and his brother flee into the countryside, but quickly become separated. Our young protagonist discovers he has entered a mythical landscape known as the Bush of Ghosts, full of all sorts of wonders and terrors, but with no obvious way to get home. As he searches and searches, and as the years pass, our hero grows up and adapts to this new world, even settling down with a shape-shifting wife, but deep in his heart he years to find that one road back to his family and the land of mortals…
A sorta sequel to Tutuola’s first book, THE PALM WINE DRINKARD (the hero of which is mentioned a few times) MY LIFE IN THE BOOK OF GHOSTS shares with that story a similarly episodic narrative and a prose style deliberately evocative of West African cadences. I would say that this book utilizes fewer Creole words and expressions, so it may be considered just that bit more accessible to the casual reader.
The biggest difference, for me, though, is the nature of our narrator. In THE PALM WINE DRINKARD, our main character is a grown man whose motivation is to get drunk, meaning to a degree there’s the sense the entire narrative is a bit of a lark. Here we follow the exploits of a child, who is incredibly vulnerable, and the backdrop of a country drowning in violence means that even his sought after home is not without its dangers. This is a disquieting tale, and even without the wonderfully bizarre incidents (crikey, have I mentioned the spider-eating ghosts? The town whose oldest woman is a giant sitting at its center with eyeballs spitting fire? The long, tortuous adventure when our hero gets turned into a cow? How The Devil officiates at his wedding? A LOT HAPPENS IN THIS BOOK) this would be a difficult, if ultimately extremely rewarding read.
Unlike in the Odyssey (another tale of a man seeking the familiar), in the Bush of Ghosts you might never be able to get home again. Me like books.
Me Like Books 