The Creaturely Modernism of Amos Tutuola Matthew Omelsky (bio) Rarely is the work of Amos Tutuola described as modernist. In fact, his work is most often portrayed as modernism’s inversion, as premodern, or “traditional.” In J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003), the character Emmanuel Egudu outlines the literary reception of the early Nigerian novelist. Africans initially rejected Tutuola’s work, Egudu explains, for its “broken” English prose, for perpetuating the continent’s “primitive” image. Europe, by contrast, was infatuated with the exotic imagery and language of his work. Egudu concludes that while Tutuola is an important writer, he is, ultimately, an “oral writer” whose work is “very simple” (40–51). Indeed, in Coetzee’s novel we find a rendition of the all too trite appraisal of Tutuola’s place in African literature. His work is often thought of as derivative of Yoruba folklore, as severed from the outside world. Underneath this cloak of the premodern, however, lie traces of the modern. For Simon Gikandi, the apparent celebration of the premodern in much early African literature is paradoxically “a witness to its loss”—a loss that, Gikandi suggests, stems from the anxiety of the modern (2007, 12). But the modern in Amos Tutuola’s work is not merely a pervasive sense of anxiety. Behind his borrowings from Yoruba oral tradition, Tutuola presents a global constellation of objects and goods—from radios to footballs to televisions—that rupture the conventional notion of an insular, primitive Africa. In Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), we find figurations of capital in the many creatures and monsters that pervade his fantastical landscapes. The bodies of these curious and haunting beings are literally composed of commodities, technologies, and tropes of exchange. These creatures and their modern appendages gesture toward [End Page 66] a vastly expanded lifeworld that extends to the farthest reaches of empire—indeed, to the farthest global reaches of capital. Amos Tutuola’s creaturely modernism, I contend, lies principally in the ontology and materiality of these creatures. Each is a freakish, worldly multitude, a melding of bacteria, television screens, maggots, and flashing lights. These creatures descend from the fantastical aesthetic tradition of West African folklore, yet the diverse objects and beings that compose their bodies mark them as part of a global system in perpetual motion. His creatures give life to the global flows of capital presupposed by their organlike commodities. Pivotal, too, is the biopolitical terrain these curious beings inhabit. They live in a world of seemingly inescapable terror, exploitation, and surveillance. The aesthetics and materiality of the creaturely body cannot be separated from the politics of modernity in which populations are controlled, ordered, and put to work. And, finally, any examination of Tutuola’s modernism must attend to the question of style, to the aesthetic mode in which he articulates his creatures and their folkloric biopolitical world. His use of syntax, diction, and narrative form not only destabilizes linear time and space, but it vivifies his haunting creatures, bringing them to the fore of his fragmented episodic narratives. Amos Tutuola’s creaturely modernism becomes fully apparent only when we examine the creature situated in its biopolitical environment, and when we consider the language through which this creaturely world is brought to life. To read Tutuola in such a way is meant to redirect Africanist discourse toward a more explicitly global and phenomenological conception of West African experience and aesthetics at midcentury. This notion of African modernism is not at all new; it has been in Tutuola’s fantastical writing for more than half a century, shrouded under the veil of the “premodern.”1 In the early 1950s, when Tutuola’s first two novels were released, much of West Africa was embroiled in anticolonial struggle, which, in many instances, insulated these emerging nations, culturally, economically, and politically, from the rest of the world. The publication of The Palm-Wine Drinkard in 1952 could be said to mark the opening up of West Africa to the world at a moment when so much African cultural production and political rhetoric turned inward in search of nationhood. Palm Wine, in other words, was ahead...
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Dec 21, 2021
Mackenzie Finley 
Open Access
