The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola, 1952 - Part 5
The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola, 1952 - Part 5
Three good creatures took over our trouble – They were:- Drum, Song and Dance to “No Road” – “Ought to travel from bush to bush to the Deads’ Town”
Welcome to Seventy years of books, where I’m blogging my way through the seventy titles originally compiled for the Big Jubilee Read. The week I’m continuing with the first book, Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard.
Content warning: There are some references to diet culture and an example of 1950s diet based advertising in the sections referring to life in 1952.
Three good creatures took over our trouble – They were:- Drum, Song and Dance
The palm-wine drinkard and his wife are rescued from the half bodied baby by Drum, Song and Dance, but left penniless. The palm-wine drinkard is transformed into a canoe so his wife is able to make money ferrying passengers across the river.
They worry about travelling with their new found wealth however, as the road is threatened by highwaymen and the bush by wild animals.
“To Travel by Air”
To travel safely, the palm-wine drinkard is transformed into a bird the size of an aeroplane so he can transport his wife and their belongings. I love this image, which reminded me of Orville in Disney’s The Rescuers. It’s interesting to see him become a living airborne type of transportation following his experiences as the inanimate canoe.
At last, the palm-wine drinkard and his wife reach the town where his wife’s father said the tapster was, only to find that the tapster left two years ago and is now living with the dead in Deads’ Town.
“No Road” – “Ought to travel from bush to bush to the Deads’ Town”
There are lots of specific references to the times things are happening which creates a sense of the passing of the journey. The palm-wine drinkard and his wife encounter many threatening creatures and turn into fire at one point to save themselves.
Luckily they are able to escape the final adversary, the gods of war, as the palm-wine drinkard is the father of gods and knows their secrets, so they are safe to have more adventures yet!
This week in 1952
On 2 February courtier and fashion designer, Hubert de Givenchy presented his first collection in Paris. The following year he met and developed a close friendship with Audrey Hepburn and he is credited for creating her minimalist style and, of course, designing the infamous little black dress she wore in Breakfast at Tiffany’s which sold for a record £467,200 in 2006.
On 22 February, Dylan Thomas recorded a collection of his poetry and his short story, ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ for Caedmon Records. Although “talking books” had been produced for some years for blind and visually impaired readers, Caedmon Records were the first company to market audiobooks to the general public and are therefore considered a pioneer of the audiobook format. Thomas’ recording was their debut release of what would end up being an eclectic and successful catalogue of beloved recordings.
On 23 February, Aerosmith guitarist Brad Whitford was born and cricketer, Viv Richards, was born on 7 March.
On 8 March, future US President Ronald Reagan married Nancy Davis. Nancy became known for her “Just Say No” campaign which aimed to highlight the dangers of recreational drug use.
1952 song of the week: Wheel of Fortune, Kay Starr
This is a powerful song with a big band opening which begs for good fortune and luck. The use of repetition and rhyme give the song a spell-like feeling with the incantations increasing in potency right up to the dramatic close. It was also briefly used as the theme for the short-lived game show of the same name, where everyday heroes were awarded for their good deeds – not the more commonly known Wheel of Fortune game show featuring a big spinny wheel and hangman style rounds of guessing various word combos.
1952 film of the week: Hans Christian Andersen
This film brings back lots of fond childhood memories, as we used to watch this with my Mum, who is a big Danny Kaye fan, when we were kids. Hans Christian Andersen is loosely based on the life of the Danish storyteller whose best known works are his extensive collection of fairy tales. I’m very fond of Andersen’s stories and love how these align with the folktale themes of The Palm-Wine Drinkard.
Many of Andersen’s tales are reflective of the themes in the novel of things not being what they seem, particularly highlighted in the musical retellings of The Emperor’s New Clothes and The Ugly Duckling.
I had forgotten the story of two numbers getting married early in the film, which really made me smile as maths being taught up to eighteen has been in the news recently and I have been reflecting a lot on my experiences of dyscalculia and ordinal linguistic personification. My dyscalculia made maths at school very difficult, particularly as it was undiagnosed at the time – I didn’t even know what it was! – and I think the assumption that we just accept as a society it’s OK to be bad at maths and forcing people to continue with it until eighteen will solve a lot of problems is a dangerous oversimplification that, as is often the case in our education system, takes no account whatsoever of individual strengths or the best ways to educate different people.
Back onto the film and novel, Andersen in the film has an adopted child, Peter, who is definitely much less trouble than the Palm-Wine Drinkard’s demanding baby! Like the Palm-Wine Drinkard, Andersen leaves his village with Peter on his own quest, journeying to Copenhagen to see what the big city has to offer. Andersen finds is own damsel in distress when he assigns himself a mission to rescue the ballerina, Doro from her (he thinks) tyrannical husband.
There are some lovely appearances from Andersen’s different characters in the film, such as the little matchgirl and the steadfast soldier and it also explores the joy of achieving your first publication, though finding your work in print for the first time while it is also being debuted in a theatre, particularly by a royal ballet company, seems like a fairy tale ending even beyond that of Andersen’s imagination!
1952 product of the week: No-Cal ginger ale
No-Cal ginger ale was the first zero calorie diet drink available and was initially marketed to people living with diabetes. The ginger ale was sweetened with sodium cyclamate, and root beer, black cherry, lemon, cola, coffee and chocolate flavours of the drink followed, with black cherry becoming the most popular. The drink took advantage of growing diet culture in the USA and began marketing the drink to the general public, focusing on housewives, and was eventually worth millions. The development of “diet drinks” by major soda producers such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Co and an FDA ban on cyclamate sweeteners in October 1970 caused the company’s decline and eventual disappearance from the market.
I found this product really interesting as I have very strong memories of my great-aunt eating a variety of “diabetic” foods when I was a child, but now know several people living with the condition who don’t rely on these products, so I’m going to be exploring the history of diet and specialist foods in the treatment of diabetes more in the next issue of Sea Invisible.
You can find all of the Seventy Years of Books archive here.