William Shakespeare used the forest as a place of escape in his plays, a world where the conventional rules of society had broken down and anything could be possible. So did the writers of countless classic fairy tales. Even Tolkien and George R.R. Martin deployed forests in their sprawling fantasy narratives.
Ainehi Edoro-Glines, a Mellon-Morgridge Associate Professor in the Humanities, has always been fascinated by the forest, as well. She’s drawn to unusual stories with creaturely characters who are forced to exist in the spaces between defined worlds, like the forest. So much so that she made this the subject of her latest book, a love letter to African storytelling called Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think.
“For me, the question is, ‘Why do storytellers all over the world, all through time, keep returning to the forest?’” asks Edoro-Glines, who teaches in the Department of English and the Department of African Cultural Studies. “They love showing us how the world as we know it literally doesn’t make sense in this space. This book is my attempt to investigate that space and see why storytellers like it.”
As a native of Nigeria, Edoro-Glines wanted to explore the different ways that African writers have deployed the forest in their work. She found that while classic European novels shifted to focus on urban environments and industrialization, African fiction, like the Indigenous storytelling that often inspired it, became bound up in colonialism.
“African and Indigenous African storytelling examines the ways that the forest organizes the world, and uses it to ask questions about power,” Edoro-Glines says. “The forest in European thought is made to represent what is outside of structure, outside of the system.”
While Europeans often viewed the forest as a space that can be defined and exploited — both in real life and in literature — African storytelling sees the forest as something that cannot be owned and marks the limits of the world as we know it.
“We can enter and come back in, enter and come back in,” she explains. “And when we develop a relationship with that space, we can find radically new knowledge to reimagine our world. From a storytelling perspective, it is essentially a kind of laboratory where a storyteller can break down a world and show us ways that we can rebuild it.”
Edoro-Glines points to The Palm-Wine Drinkard, the 1952 experimental fantasy novel written by Nigerian author Amos Tutuola. It tells the tale of a man who visits the land of the dead to recover the man who taps the trees that provide his daily wine. The book chronicles the man’s quest through the towns that occupy the massive forest that stands between him and Death Town. It incorporates fantastical creatures, a magical egg and metaphors about quarrels between the earth and the sky.
“If we think about the forest in the book, what is it? What is it doing?” Edoro-Glines asks. “This is an entire story about how this character cannot stay in one place. There’s something about his world that is always pushing him to butt up against limits and to overreach for all kinds of different reasons. Here, the forest is essentially a place where you learn what it means to overreach formal limits.”
Many of the books Edoro-Glines discusses in Forest Imaginaries are grappling with problems that are cosmic in nature, in no small part because the worlds of the African writers in the mid-20th century were shifting around them due to colonial incursions.
Writers like Chinua Achebe, the author of the famous 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, which tells the tale of a late-19th century Igbo warrior’s struggle against the incursion of Christianity and its attempts to reshape his world. Within the book, an evil forest becomes a flashpoint metaphor for the clash of warring cultures — a theme Edoro-Glines sees echoed in our modern struggle to come to terms with digital technology and artificial intelligence.
“There is this sense that there is some kind of deep, structural thing that is giving way, that our world is taking forms that we cannot recognize,” she says. “The knee-jerk reaction is to reassert the world as we know it, go back to the familiar. Forest logic says you should enter the disruption. Let go of the world as you know it, and in the process, you can find some type of otherworldly knowledge that you can use to reconstitute your world.”