Published in 1954, "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" is Amos Tutuola's second novel. When you read the book, you will understand why David Byrne and Brian Eno used this very title for their ground-breaking album - because it stimulates your imagination.
The book narrates a young boy's adventures who tries to escape an army of slave traders along with his brother. However, Fate separates him from his brother and takes him into a wilderness, which transports him to an entirely different world inhabited by ghosts and spirits.
He is too young to understand the perils that he, as a mortal he will have to endure and all by himself. He is also too young to discriminate between "good" and "bad." In a series of unprecedented encounters, the boy hops from ghost town to ghost town - getting transformed into a cow, buried alive, is web-wrapped to become a spider's food, among other things.
In this twenty-four year journey, he is ridden in chaos. In time, he accepts his Fate, learns to outwit his adversaries and even gets married - twice.
He has finally accepted his Fate that there is no escape route from here. However, he ends up coming across the television handed Goddess, who does show him a way out.
The novel is an unusually striking one - a story situated outside the boundaries of time in a different part of the world. For an American or any reader in the western world, it is hard to tell whether these are figments of imagination or beliefs of Yoruba culture. The book is a reflection of the amalgamation of Yoruba and Christian cultures. The book opens a window into the beliefs in the Yoruba tradition about the afterlife.
The Bush is essentially where the dead reside until judgement day and where the narrator, the seven-year-old boy, is unwittingly trapped. The story's setting is in a land where everything seems unreal, and there is no instruction manual. Specific details, like a hierarchy, a church, a hospital, schools, money and the part where the boy meets his dead cousin, make the reader wonder if this is a parallel world.
This homegrown African adventure has an entirely different way of telling a story. It is a broken narrative where many stories keep appearing out of sequence. Also, the style in which the narration takes place is closer to African storytelling rather than composition. One may even argue that the writing follows no syntax. As unsophisticated as the language is, it indeed calls for a second read.
Moreover, the boy is stuck with grotesque other-worldly beings who do not speak his language. Hence, speech is impossible, and the narration is episodic rather than spontaneous. It smoothly conveys African myths naturally and conversationally, presenting facts in the most bizarre way that makes them sound believable.
The book begins with a young boy being abandoned by his step-mother in the face of war - managing to have the reader side with him immediately. With fantastic imagery that captures one's imagination, the book offers a refreshing change of thought.