My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (5 points)

     The most striking thing to me about My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is the language. Amos Tutuola writes these strangely structured sentences that took me a while to get used to. There were points where I had to go back and reread sentences to get what was being said. I resisted the temptation to just say that it was poorly written and asked myself why he chose to write in this way. There was very clearly a method to the madness; many sentences were structured in a similar way. A common thing Tutuola did was start a sentence with "but" and then continue the sentence in a way that didn't require it to start with but. This is hard for me to describe, so I'll provide an example here: "But when they came and met them how they were pulling me about in the room with much argument then they told them to leave me and they left me at once." If a western writer were to write this sentence, it'd be more along the lines of, "When they came and saw how they were pulling me about in the room and arguing, they told them to leave." Maybe a Professional Writer TM would do something fancier with it, but this is closer to what I'm used to. However, Tutuola lived in Nigeria, not Europe or America. While the official language of Nigeria is English, it is far from the only language spoken, with over 500 languages (https://translatorswithoutborders.org/language-data-nigeria/). Based on the little bit of research I did on him, I'm not sure if English was his first language, but it definitely wasn't the only language he spoke. His parents were Yoruba Christian cocoa farmers, so it's very likely he spoke at least Yoruba as well. It's also likely that the way Nigerian people speak English differs from how we speak it; I mean, if there are huge differences within America, I think it's fair to assume there are huge differences between America and Nigeria. So, I think the way Tutuola wrote the book either reflects how he spoke or reflected how people he knew spoke. The novel is told in the first person from the perspective of a young West African child, so it could be that he doesn't have a tight grasp on English. Or, that's just how his tribe speaks English. I want to stress that I'm not saying the way the book is written is wrong, it's just different and not something I'm used to. English is a complicated language with many variations depending on the culture, this was just a variation I hadn't encountered yet.


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