THE BRAVE AFRICAN HUNTRESS - AMOS TUTUOLA

Finishing up a few small books before the end of the year, just to pad the end-of-year book count total, since I think I’ll concentrate on some longer things next year. Tutuola is great for this, his books are all short and punchy, wildly imaginative and one-of-a-kind. His stuff is very grounded in particular, Yoruba, folk-milieu but very much its own thing, in some ways, I think of him as Nigeria’s Calvino. Like the other novels of his I’ve read, this one is outside of typical novel structures. Nominally, it tells the story of Adebisi, the titular brave African huntress, who journeys into the jungle to prove her might and rescue her brothers who have gone missing in the preceding years on hunting trips. In practice the story is very episodic and strange. Each chapter is a sort of mini-adventure or set-piece. Like his other books, which also typically follow this same format of someone traveling to a strange land (like the Bush of Ghosts) and having weird adventures and meeting strange people and creatures, this one feels like the episodes and creatures in this book could have been put in basically any order and/or swapped out with chapters from other books of his. None of that’s to say that this book wasn’t exciting or fun to read. There’s a talking gourd (spelled “guord” in the book, is that a British/Nigerian thing?) and a creature with lights coming out of its eyes that Adebisi kills, decapitates and then uses the head as a sort of flashlight for the rest of the novel. There is the signature Tutuola style where he twists standard English into a more Nigerian shape, with lots of unusual usages and constructions (lots of -ing verbs, repetition, understatement, a very colloquial style that mimics being told this story in person, etc.). It is somewhat unique how aggressive and violent this protagonist is compared to the other Tutuola books I’ve read. Typically, in his stuff, the main character is sort of detached and, even if they have a quest, they sort of float by and take in these experiences and have things happen to them. Adebisi in this book, being a brave huntress, is constantly fighting and killing people and animals. By the end of the novel she has killed as many animals as she possible could have in this forest and almost totally whipped out the pigmies (spelled like that, without the “y,” also, some of them are described as quite tall, so perhaps pigmy in this sense means “person who lives deep in the forest”) in a borderline genocidal rampage. These pigmies were holding her brothers hostage and had killed others that had wondered into their forest, but still, it struck me as a bit of an overreaction. Overall, excellent, a great end-of-the-year read. Tutuola remains undefeated. I’ll get through his oeuvre at some point. 4 dark jungles.