“I just can’t get the poetry of the trees”

So to add to this continued discussion about the rheomode, I am taking an Intro to African Literature Class in which we are reading the book below. Amos Tutuola is a Nigerian author who has been praised for bringing the rich oral-story-telling tradition to text. His book has been praised for telling the story in a way that local Nigerians would recognize, rather than in a "higher," "more formal" whatever-you-call-it type of English. That brings me back to the discussion we were having in class on Wednesday, where you @froggies315 asked why on earth anyone would want to write in an unclear manner. So what Tutuola is doing is trying to write the way the average Nigerian would speak. This makes the words recognizable and easy to read, but also does something even more important: bring an Nigerian way of speaking and of using language to non-Nigerian cultures.

So the Nigerian native language, Yoruba, emphasized time and causality. This is especially apparent in the oral-story telling, in which stories were memorized and passed down. These elements of the Yoruba language were TRANSFERRED into the way Nigerians speak English and thus, the way Tutuola writes English in his book.

Get this: Tutuola does, to a LARGE extent, what all of us were struggling to do in class, and what Bohm was theorizing in his essay about the rheomode...for an entire book!

His characters are continuously trying to show that several things are going on at once, and trying to iterate the same through their sentences. He's attempting, very valiantly, to do what I was having a hard time with in my observation at Rhoads Pond: to portray the many different things that are going on simultaneously. His sentences and language acknowledge, like Bohm does, that life is not linear, and Tutuola goes on to try to show this through language.

Some examples: Page 205; "But one day, the lady attempted to escape from the hole, and at the same time that the Skull who was watching her whistle to therest of the Skulls that were in the back-yard, the whole of them rushed out to the place where the lady sat on the bull-frog, so they caught her, but as all of them were rushing out, they were rolling on the ground as if a thousand petrol drums were pushing along a hard road."

Page 240; "After the attendants took us to the king, but as we were inside the palace, thousands of them were waiting for us at the gate of the palace, some of them held clubs, knives, cutlasses and other fighting weapons and all their children held stones."

Especially in the 2nd example, what he's basically saying is that "While we were on the way to the thing, thousands of people were waiting with weapons to threaten us." But the way Tutuola writes it instead is VERY Rheomodic; it captures the idea that there were many factors and just things going on at once. He takes his events out of the linear world and instead tries to surpass time.

When I first started reading this book, I had a hard time understanding what was going on, because of this double emphasis on time, this effort to suspend the characters in time. But it was upon reading this example that I saw that someone in an entirely different continent, and not necessarily acquainted with Bohm's work (Tutuola was a janitor at the time of writing, and later was given a place as writer-in-residence in a prominent Nigerian University) was putting in practice what Bohm is aiming for. I think this happens largely because his English is influenced by another language. Like @eetong said, it is after studying Spanish that she more deeply understood English grammar. The same way, Yoruba aspects in the English lead to an evolved understanding of English.

Tutuola's editor (or the average English teacher) wanted to "correct" his English, make it "proper". But the truth is, English has gone beyond just it's European/Western origins. It is by seeing how English is interpreted and used in other countries, by examining what lenses English is seen through (in this case Yoruba) that an evolved understanding may occur.

In making some edits, but compromising "proper" English, the editor allowed the readers to see what Tutuola was doing: representing Nigerian/Yoruban English--which happens to be doing what Bohm wants writers to do here. Perhaps then, by examining English through the lens of other languages (like srucara was starting to do in class with Telugu), we can manage to discover lots of different aspects of language? To see it in a different way, to create new case "studies" as eetong mentions?