Amos Tutuola (1920, Abeokuta – 1997, Ibadan) is a Nigerian writer. His novels are based on Yoruba mythology. When Erin Honeycutt first came across Tutuola first novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard, she was convinced that the nature of his lists were not flippant. Perhaps it was more her relationship to numerical facts within a narrative that made her feel convinced that there was a mapping taking place within the story. But the mapping does not simply chart a landscape geographically, it also oscillates between the quantifiable and the completely unquantifiable. It is a map of the possible ways to measure a novel. Tutuola has markers for time, lengths of time, distances traveled, lists of measurements from beginning to end: the more specific, the more incalculable. Honeycutt took notes as she read the map.
