My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola

First published: 1954

Type of work: Psychological symbolism

Time of work: The mid-twentieth century

Locale: Nigeria

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, the youngest son of his father’s third wife
• The narrator’s Brother
• The narrator’s dead Cousin
• The Smelling Ghost, the king of the seventh town of ghosts
• The Chief Ancestor, the leader of the River Ghosts
• The Flash-eyed Mother, the queen of the thirteenth town of ghosts
• The Super Lady, a “ghostess,” the narrator’s second wife in the Bush of Ghosts
• The King of the Fourth Town of Ghosts
• The Television-handed Ghostess

The Novel

Except for his entry into the Bush of Ghosts at the beginning and his return to the human world at the end, what happens to the narrator of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts seems haphazard. This impression results from the fact that the story shares with oral storytelling and with dreams a sequence of events controlled by feelings rather than logic. The narrator, for example, passes through various towns in the Bush of Ghosts, but the numbers attached to them give no clue to the order in which they are encountered, for he comes to the seventh town first and the fourth town last.

The story, however, is held together by the transformations that the narrator undergoes. These transformations tend to plot his progress from helplessness to power, both of which are summarized at the end when he reenters the human world.

The narrator’s odyssey begins when he is seven years old. A raiding party attacks his village looking for slaves; separated from his older brother, who leaves him with two pieces of fruit from a tree called the “Future Sign,” he flees into the bush and soon finds himself trapped in a world populated by ghosts and “ghostesses,” who are not the human dead (though, as he eventually discovers, his dead cousin dwells among them) but a humanlike race which often demonstrates magical powers and is impervious to death. The narrator’s first transformation occurs when the Smelling Ghost takes him to the town where he is the king. By means of a juju, the Smelling Ghost transforms him into a camel, into a horse, and back into himself by turns. Having managed to steal the juju, the narrator escapes but turns into a cow. Later, after spending some time among “burglar-ghosts” and marrying the young daughter of a wealthy ghost in the eighth town of ghosts, he continues his quest for the human world. He finds himself confined in a pitcher, his neck and head transformed to an outlandish size. He is placed at a crossroads and worshiped as a god; this worship continues when he is stolen by the River Ghosts, the “chief ancestor” of whom causes him to smoke an enormous pipe continually, which drugs him into singing—much to the entertainment of the ghosts—the sorrowful songs he remembers from his village. The pitcher breaks in a fight between a ghost who is trying to steal him and one who is guarding the gate of the twentieth town of ghosts, and he returns to normal. He spends three years in the thirteenth town of ghosts, which is ruled by the Flash-eyed Mother. Killed in a war which she fights to keep him from other ghosts, he is brought back to life by her son, the Invisible and Invincible Pawn, who transforms him into a partial ghost by replacing his head with a ghost’s head—a mistake finally rectified by the “faithful mother in the white-tree.”

During this period, the narrator has learned to hunt, and this brings him into contact with the Super Lady, who is able to transform herself into animals at will. Though their marriage ends in an argument over whether their son is to be fully human or fully ghost, the narrator acquires maturity of a sort during his mostly happy stay with her. He learns to speak the language of the ghosts and to use his wits in the face of difficulties. In short, he has been transformed into an adult, one of the symbols of which is the magical power he displays when he provides a ghost king’s daughter with an arm to replace the one she is missing, and when he wins a contest of magic with a ghost magician. Less bizarre signs of the narrator’s maturity and power occur in the tenth town of ghosts, where his dead cousin has established Christianity. With the aid of his cousin, the narrator learns how to read and write and eventually becomes a judge. His ability to learn and to think his way through problems is finally shown when, having set out once again to find his home, he encounters the Television-handed Ghostess. She promises to show him how to return home if he will spend ten years with her licking the sores which cover her body. From an image of his mother which she presents to him, he learns how to cure the sores without having to lick them.

When the narrator does return at last to the human world, his progress from helplessness to power in the Bush of Ghosts is briefly reenacted: He is first sold into slavery and later rescued by his brother who, having bought him for a sacrifice to his god, recognizes the song he sings and reinstates him to his proper position in his family.

The Characters

The narrator of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is the subject of an elaborate ritual of initiation from childhood to adulthood, from the knowledge that “bad” is “hatred,” to the knowledge of the various forms that evil can take, and finally, to the knowledge of good. The Smelling Ghost represents evil as the tyranny of animal nature, and the Chief Ancestor of the River Ghosts represents it as the tyranny of magic and superstition. Both ghosts show how merciless these tyrannies can be. The tyranny of motherhood is represented by the Flash-eyed Mother, the queen of the thirteenth town of ghosts, for she shows how grotesquely symbiotic the relationship between a mother and her children, and how selfish and stunted the children in such a relationship, can be.

As the narrator learns, life may also be good. The function of the Super Lady ghostess is to allow him to experience not only the virtue of cleanliness but also the pleasure of sex and the comfort of love. From the Television-handed Ghostess he learns the usefulness of medicine and that some dilemmas have practical solutions, whereas the king of the fourth town of ghosts provides him with an opportunity to see that some dilemmas may be solved by irrational means (in this case, magic).

Of the major human characters in the story other than the narrator, the narrator’s brother and his dead cousin demonstrate what can be done to mitigate hatred in the world. His brother is a provider of food at the beginning of the story and a savior at the end in that he puts an end to the narrator’s suffering. The narrator’s cousin, as a Methodist bishop and a humanitarian, represents the civilizing influence of religious and civil power and education.

Critical Context

Amos Tutuola has the same reputation in the literary world as “primitive” painters in the art world. His novels are “unsophisticated,” meaning that their structure is episodic and dreamlike, their syntax awkward, and their diction childlike. From a psychological point of view, however, their settings, situations, and characters are archetypal: intense symbolic evocations of the essential human experience of birth, maturity, and death. From a literary point of view, Tutuola’s work has the virtue of simplicity in that it always tells an unself-conscious story and the virtue of freshness in that it injects new life into old words. In My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, for example, “ghost” accommodates “ghostess,” and “television” becomes “Television-handed Ghostess.” In The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead’s Town (1952), the novel for which Tutuola is best known, the “dead” become the “deads” and “drunkard,” “drinkard.” Furthermore, Tutuola is unperturbed by the conflict between the folk tradition to which he is heir and the religion and technology which are replacing it, but includes the latter in the former in the same “primitive” pastiche. In his stories, Tutuola sees with the unrestrained eyes and speaks with the incautious voice of a child, and this sets them apart from much of the overcivilized fiction of today.

Bibliography

Collins, Harold R. Amos Tutuola, 1969.

Collins, Harold R. “Founding a New National Literature: The Ghost Novels of Amos Tutuola,” in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction. IV (Fall, 1960/Winter, 1961), pp. 17-28.

Lindfors, Bernth. “Amos Tutuola’s Television-handed Ghostess,” in Folklore in Nigerian Literature, 1973.

Lindfors, Bernth, ed. Critical Perspectives on Amos Tutuola, 1975.

Nyang’Aya, Elijah. “The Freakish Tutuola,” in Standpoints on African Literature, 1973.