ENGLISH 125D Lecture Notes - Lecture 26: Long Dark Night, Chinua Achebe, Carnivalesque
Document Summary
Amos tutuola"s my life in the bush of ghosts (1954) Tutuola"s idea was to translate yoruba folktales for heterodox nigerian population, who were pouring into cities together. Written for a new nigeria takes structure/cadence of storytelling/oral lit -> novel form, episodic. Allegorical elements; ghost world = parallel world fantastic elems of modern world rendered here, common practices rendered in carnivalesque descrip. Ppl aren"t given time to get used to aspects of the modern -> can seem phantasmagoric. Some ppl read tutuola as naive - oh the nigerians don"t understand the br way - they did, they understood how ignorant and absurd some british impositions were. Creative/productive misreading - took things out of context, b/c for nigerians the imposition of these br things really are out of context. Popular text w/ ribald underpinning; trying to disseminate the folkloric to other nigerians two narrative poles in the canon, presentations of afr that tfa attaches itself to.
