LESSONS FROM AMOS TUTUOLA by Erin Honeycutt
A5, 14 pages, Risograph printing, Staple bound, Softcover, 2023
Amos Tutuola (1920, Abeokuta – 1997, Ibadan) is a Nigerian writer. His novels are based on Yoruba mythology. When I first came across his first novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard, I was convinced that the nature of his lists were not flippant. Perhaps it was more my relationship to numerical facts within a narrative that made me feel convinced that there was a mapping taking place within the story. But the mapping does not simply chart a landscape geographically, it also oscillates between the quantifiable and the completely unquantifiable. It is a map of the possible ways to measure a novel. Tutuola has markers for time, lengths of time, distances traveled, lists of measurements from beginning to end: the more specific, the more incalculable. I took notes as I read the map.
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