Odd Jobs (106 page)

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 head.…” 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”:

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:

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:

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 firmly 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.

And Ms. Emecheta’s prose, like Amos Tutuola’s though to a much smaller degree, has a shimmer of originality, of English being reinvented. At an early meeting with Nko, Ete Kamba “stood there slouching around, somehow refusing to sit down, and noticing that people around him were leaving him completely alone and not bothering to pressurise him to sit down. He followed Nko’s busyness with the corners of his eyes.…” Contemplating taking her virginity, he yearns to inflict “a pain that would uninnocent her.” And the confusions of crowded traffic are conveyed: “Impatient taxis in their yellow colouring with a splash of blue in the middle would meander in between the cars in a hurry to get on first.” Such pleasant expressionism brings us close, perhaps, to the spoken Nigerian English that, while the main characters speak with ungainly and unlikely correctitude, is transcribed from the mouth of a cleaning girl, accused of not cleaning a toilet: “Watin’ you wan make we do, when we no geti water, whey we go use for flush, abi you wan make ago geti water from me mama well?” This accent is imitated, in foolery, by the male students, as they discuss love. “A no de for disi una sweety belle stuff,” one says, and another answers, “Na so for me ooo. One women be like anoder. Why ago go kill myself for one chick, that wan pass me.” To this reviewer’s previous knowledge that a Lagos traffic jam is called a “go-slow” he was delighted to add the information that a “been-to” is a Nigerian who has been to England and that female sexual charm can be called “bottom power”—“It is easier to get a good degree,” one female undergraduate assures another, “using one’s brain power than bottom power. They may try to tell you that your bottom power is easier and surer, don’t believe them.”