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The Palm Wine Drinkard Introduction The Palm Wine Drinkard is a unique first persons narrative debut story of the Nigerian writer and story teller Amos Tutuola that was published in the 1952 s by Faber & Faber. In this Yoruba mythological story which reads like a folk lore, the traditional elements of the Yoruba society are intertwined to unfold a fantasy experience of a palm wine drinkard's journey to the land of the dead and bring back his favorite wine-making tapster, who had died after falling off a tree. Background This story book in theme is a narrative quest in a parallel world that has full of spirits and magic and there is nothing that is trivial or tall enough in this devilish story and at the time of its publication, it was loved by its English and American leader because it had all the ingredients that could possibly emerge from the dark continent of African. It was grisly, bewitching, uncouth and had barbarous monsters and it was delightfully unexpected and odd with the naivety of child like literature, yet it was original. At the time of its publication, its readers in Nigeria were critical of the book because it seemed to them as if the Yoruba myths had been plagiarized and yet, exaggerated and furthermore, the English language used in the writing of the book was unconventionally as it was the Nigerian Style of English that was practically spoken there in the 1950 s. Storyline The Palm Wine Drinkard story is of a young man who since the age ten knew of no other work except to drink palm-wine and his father was the richest man in the and as his younger seven siblings were all hard working, his father gave him palm farm and an expert palm wine tapster.
Soon the young man became an expert at palm wine drinkard, who would not drink water at all. However, when the young mans expert palm-wine tapster accidentally dies and he is not satisfied with the quality of wine that he has himself to tap and therefore embarks on a journey to the land of the dead. He leaves his village with all of his fathers and his own juju powers and begin his journey into the mysterious jungles where he crosses over the threshold of the real world into the realm of the supernatural inhabited by the gods and ancestors, where he has to use all the magical super powers of juju to turn into a variety of things like a lizard, birds, plane and also a pebble. The storyline cleverly signifies that the crossing over of the threshold from the normal living world to the world of uncertainty and unknown dangers actually translates into a sense of freedom from everything. The fantastic story goes on being interspersed along Yoruba cultural lines such as the luring of a woman into the forest by a spirit in the form of a beautiful complete gentleman that dismembers itself to leave a skull that vibrates and there is also a monster that has thirty horns with numerous eyes.
However, the young man in the story rescues the woman in distress and marries her, while he also brings back his favorite tapster back from the land of the dead. However before all this happens, the plucky young man has to first contend with the various inexhaustible adventurous journeys amongst the gods, ghosts, ogres, midgets, satyrs, magicians and other monsters and hairy giants who all transform themselves at will in to any forms they like. Amos Tutuola's simplistic and artless style of writing has proved to be a perfect recipe to make his publication an effective and worthy reading experience even in our present times. Conclusion The Palm Wine Drinkard should therefore be taken as a Nigerian mythological story based on the Yoruba parcel of folklore characterized with the supernatural with its inventive power of peculiar horror on one hand as well as humor on the other. The story has also the inimitable style of its writer Tutuola that includes the elements of the Christian religion and the Western civilization in an exotic concoction of the African mystical fantasy world. Works Cited: Amos Tutuola (Accessed: April 28, 2007) web David Whittaker, REALMS OF LIMINALITY: THE MYTHIC TOPOGRAPHY OF AMOS TUTUOLAS BUSH OF GHOSTS (Accessed: April 28, 2007) web The Modern Library (Accessed: April 28, 2007) web
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Research essay sample on The Palm Wine Drinkard
