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Ethics, Maya, and The Skull: Amos Tutuola Meets Online Fragmentation
An ethical allegory from Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard on the Illusion of digital selves
Amos Tutuola’s narratives do not merely recount; they evoke, tearing veils over other realities, operating in a liminal space between ancestral Yoruba myth and an almost surreal sensibility. The elemental, stark English he employs becomes a vehicle for visions of unsettling power, capable of resonating far beyond their cultural context. In The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), perhaps his most iconic and hallucinatory journey into the Town of the Deads, we encounter a figure condensing profound physical and existential horror: the so-called “Complete Gentleman.” His appearance and, more crucially, his methodical disintegration, stand as one of literature’s most potent allegories for the precariousness of form and identity, finding unexpected echoes in the depths of Vedantic thought and the illusions of our fragmented digital present.
Before delving into analysis, let Tutuola himself, in his unique original English, describe the unfolding scene — the horror of a beauty built on borrowed substance, seen through the eyes of the woman who, captivated, follows…
