(toc) #title= (Table of Content)
BIOGRAPHY
Ayi Kwei Armah was born in 1939 in Takoradi, then the only deep-sea harbor on the Gold Coast. He is descended on his father’s side from a royal family in the Ga tribe inhabiting the environs of the present capital of Ghana. During the nineteenth century there arose a conflict within the royal family over succession to the royal stool as a result of which the ancestral family withdrew into exile to settle in Dahomey.
When the Takoradi harbor was built and the town became the hub of inter- national trade on the Gold Coast, many people, including the father and relatives ofAyi Kwei Armah, moved there in search of a job. The father must have been prosperous, because he married into the Fante tribe inhabiting the western sec- tion of the country where Takoradi is located. Aspects of the family life are presented in the semibiographical Fragments.
Ayi Kwei Armah had his secondary education from 1953 to 1958 at the Prince of Wales’s College, now better known as Achimota School, the most prestigious secondary school in Ghana, established by the colonial administration to provide education for the middle class. On account of his outstanding academic perfor- mance he was awarded a scholarship for further studies in the United States, where he studied between 1959 and 1963 and obtained a degree cum laude in social studies from Harvard. Later, between 1968 and 1969, he went to Colum- bia and obtained a graduate degree in fine arts, a feat that was unusual in those days and is rare in Africa today.
From his parentage, upbringing, and education, Ayi Kwei Armah was well marked for a comfortable situation in life as an establishment figure. However, his exposure as a teenager from Africa to the liberal culture of America and also to the radical politics of African Americans, culminating in the street and campus riots of the late 1960s, must have profoundly affected his temperament. The 1966 Ghanaian coup d’e´tat that toppled Kwame Nkrumah from power must also have confirmed him in his views about the corruption of privilege and power. As is shown in Fragments, he therefore opted out of the privilege that would have been his into an austere way of life as a writer living by his pen.
Upon graduating from Harvard, he went to work as a translator in Algeria, then, thanks to the polemical writings of Frantz Fanon, one of the most pro- gressive decolonized countries. He soon returned to Ghana, where from late 1964 until September 1967 he worked first at the then newly established Ghana Television as a scriptwriter under the authority of George Awoonor Williams, now known as Kofi Awoonor. After the 1966 coup d’e´tat, he became a teacher at Navrongo Secondary School in the far north of the country, as if to go as far as he could away from the capital of the country.
He left Ghana in 1967 for France, where he worked briefly on the staff of Jeune Afrique. From there he returned to the United States, where between September 1968 and June 1970 he remained at Columbia as a student and later as a lecturer of fine arts. From August 1970 to June 1976 he taught at the Tanzanian College of National Education of Chang’ombe. He went south in 1976 to teach for the next two years in the Department of English of the National University of Lesotho. In the first half of 1979 he taught as a visiting professor in the Department of African Languages and Literature of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Since then he has been living in Dakar, Senegal, where he has been working as a French and English translator, a job with which he started his working life.
It would appear from his sojourns that Ayi Kwei Armah has planned to live and work in the different cultural zones of Africa so as to become truly pan- African in his outlook. His experience in each significant cultural area is re- flected in specific novels giving the perceptive reader a comprehensive account of his outlook on Africa since the colonial era.
MAJOR WORKS AND THEMES
Ayi Kwei Armah’s first major work, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, was published in 1968. Set in Armah’s hometown of Takoradi, the novel deals with postcolonial life in Ghana under the supposedly egalitarian government of Kwame Nkrumah. By focusing on three characters in differing circumstances, the novel presents a cross-sectional description of life in Takoradi, Ghana’s gateway then to the world.
The main character, an insignificant clerk working in the nation’s railway office and finding it hard to make ends meet, is revealed in his social anonymity by the nondefining name of ‘‘the man’’ that he bears. He is the representative of the ordinary person that the nationalist government of the Convention Peoples’ Party (the CPP) under Kwame Nkrumah had claimed to be helping. ‘‘The man’s’’ predicament as a poorly paid worker living in the slums is both de- pressing and desperate because nobody sees his plight as a product of the na- tion’s economic malaise. He is despised by his wife and close relatives as a lazy person and loathed by the more affluent as an informer of the government. In his abject situation, he symbolizes the wretchedness of the ordinary Ghanaian in the post-colonial era.
The second major character in the novel is also portrayed as an insignificant and anonymous social being through the nondefining name of ‘‘the Teacher’’ that he bears. As his name suggests, he is the educator and the mentor of the society, the type that in the Far and Near East countries is revered as a guru. The point of the novel is that in the Ghanaian society this guru is marginalized and ignored. The society shuns the ethic of reflection that he seeks to introduce and prefers the ‘‘fineries’’ of the West.
The last major character, Koomson, is the symbol of the desire for materi- alism. It is part of the message of hopelessness in the novel that it is rather this representative of the negative influences on society who has a significant status and is even, rather cynically on Ayi Kwei Armah’s part, the party man of the CPP, the party of the ordinary person. It is no wonder that when the coup d’e´tat occurs toward the end of the novel and the old political and economic guards are swept away, the impression persists that the saviors of the society ‘‘are not yet born. ’’
Ayi Kwei Armah’s next major work, Fragments, was published in 1970. It is set in Accra and deals with the homecoming of Onipa Baako, the main char- acter, from his studies in the United States. In terms of subject and treatment, this second published novel rather predates The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Indeed, it is much more conceivable that Ayi Kwei Armah would start his major works with the homecoming of his hero and then follow him in his actions and reactions in his country in subsequent works. It would seem that the two works were handed to the publishers at the same time with Fragments as the first novel and The Beautyful Ones as the sequel, but that the publishers, naturally interested in a hot sell, chose to publish the sequel first.
As in The Beautyful Ones, Fragments focuses on certain significant characters in presenting a picture of a postcolonialist African society: the main character, Onipa Baako, his foil Brempong, his grandmother Naana, his mother Edin, and his girlfriend Juana, the psychiatrist. Onipa Baako, like ‘‘the man,’’ ‘‘negates the negative’’ drive for Western materialism, although unlike ‘‘the man’’ he has a higher social status. Brempong and Edin are like Koomson in the sense that they symbolize the drive for materialism. Naana and the Teacher are alike in that they represent the saner but despised voice in society. Juana, the Puerto Rican psychiatrist who works in one of the state hospitals and who treats Onipa Baako later in the novel when he breaks down and then befriends him, is to be seen as the doctor in the country madhouse. The author uses Juana’s perspective for the greater part of the novel because it is she who, by her training and situation as a concerned foreigner, poses the question: what has caused this malaise?
Ayi Kwei Armah’s third novel, Why Are We So Blest?, was published in 1972. Set in the progressive decolonized country of Algeria, it, like the previous novels, focuses on the perspectives of certain characters: Modin Dofu, a Ghan- aian who had abandoned his studies at Harvard on principle, his white girlfriend Aimee, and Solo, the eventual keeper of his diary, which is the substance of the novel.
In this novel, Armah gives himself a larger canvas in which he surveys the predicament of the entire decolonized continent of Africa. Solo, the represen- tative of ‘‘freedom fighters,’’ has been sidelined by his own comrades and now keeps a menial office job. In that sense, he is like ‘‘the man’’ in having been betrayed by his country’s politicians. Unlike ‘‘the man,’’ he is intelligent enough to understand the larger national and international forces at work against him and his continent. As if to take up the question posed by Juana in Fragments, he has found the answer but feels impotent to arrest the situation. At least, he feels impotent to warn Modin.
Modin, also intelligent enough to appreciate what is wrong, fails to understand that he is gradually compromising his principles to be of service to his people by his continued association with Aimee, who throughout the novel is presented as a symbol of the all-enticing West. The point is later made crystal clear in Two Thousand Seasons in the image of the ‘‘Springwater’’ flowing generously to the desert, which in turn gives nothing but destruction.
Aimee, in her frigidity, is like the barren desert. As Modin increasingly tries to arouse her and teach her the need for a warm relationship, he is forced to forgo his own inclinations and do things her way, and that becomes the message of the novel. Modin’s life and death, as Solo explains in his footnotes to the diary, become the symbol of the entire Africa’s progression from independence, ‘‘so woefully assimilated’’ (56) to the West.
The first three novels were first published by American companies. As Ayi Kwei Armah consistently dealt with the theme of Africa’s identity and predic- ament in his novels, it was to be expected that he, like his fellow writers Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, would turn his attention also to the question of publication.
In East Africa in the 1970s, there was a publishing company, East African Publishing House, devoted to the dissemination of local texts for the populations. Ayi Kwei Armah went to the company for his next novel, Two Thousand Sea- sons, which was published in 1973, obviously to show that Africa is the center of his reading public.
The novel takes an extensive and epic canvas for its setting, ‘‘two thousand seasons’’ of the development of the entire black continent. The reason is to answer the question posed by Fragments: what has caused the malaise? As the full meaning of Why Are We So Blest? is explained in this novel, so also is the title of Fragments clarified: ‘‘Pieces cut off from their whole are nothing but dead fragments’’ (1). Armah’s contention is that Africa’s present malaise is the symptom of a thousand-year exploitation by foreigners and their African accom- plices addicted to the fineries of the foreigners. To break the vicious cycle, he proposes comradeship: ‘‘There is no beauty but in relationships’’ (206).
Armah’s next novel, The Healers, also first published by the East African Publishing House in 1978 and set in the Asante Empire late in the nineteenth century, attempts to show how a nation can be lost through greed and selfishness and won through comradeship. The healers are some of the traditional medicine practitioners. They take very little reward or none for their healing because greed and selfishness are anathema to their calling. In contrast are the power seekers who destroy rather than heal life. Such are most of the traditional leaders and chiefs.
As in his previous novels, Ayi Kwei Armah uses certain characters as rep- resentative viewpoints in this novel. The main character, Densu, loathes violence and greed and aspires to become a traditional medicine man. His foil, Ababio, is so ambitious that he destroys life in order to win power. Significantly, upon the coming of colonialist rule, Ababio hoists himself up as an ally of the co- lonialists in order to consolidate his power. As Ababio explains to Densu, ‘‘Those who take care to place themselves on the right side of big changes, when the big changes have taken place, become big men’’ (29). Reminiscent of Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence, Ayi Kwei Armah seems to be saying, through Ababio, that such are Africa’s present traditional leaders and politicians. No wonder, then, that in the postcolonial era Africa has become the place of the ‘‘wretched of the earth. ’’
Ayi Kwei Armah has been working on his latest novel, Osiris Rising, which, judging solely from the title, promises to deal with the renascence of Africa as a result of the ‘‘healing’’ administered by the beneficent ‘‘healers’’ following ‘‘two thousand seasons’’ of her dark ages. Ayi Kwei Armah is also a literary critic with a number of outstanding articles to his credit. Most of his critical essays have been on essentially the same concerns as his novels: the identity and predicament of Africa. His main concern is for the establishment of a pan- African agency that will rope in all the diverse cultures and languages of the African continent. He calls, for instance, for the adoption of Kiswahili as the continental language of Africa. He expects that the adoption of a continental language will lead to the establishment of a continental publishing house to correct the present intolerable situation: ‘‘There is not a single African publish- ing house capable of printing works, distributing them throughout the continent, exporting the surplus and bringing home the profits, to plough them back into the further development of African literature’’ (‘‘The Festival Syndrome,’’ 727). There is ample evidence, therefore, in Ayi Kwei Armah’s creative works and critical writings that his primary subject is the situation of Africa at the present time.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Ayi Kwei Armah’s first published novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, was rapturously received in Ghana, the writer’s native land. Outside Ghana, it was also received with considerable interest as an indication of the sophistication of the African novel. The editor, Eldred Jones, of African Liter- ature Today, an authoritative critical journal of African literature, concluded an informative and sympathetic review thus: ‘‘Armah has taken the predicament of Africa in general, and Ghana in particular, and distilled its despair and its hope- lessness in a powerful, harsh, deliberately unbeautyful novel’’ (57). Fragments confirmed Ayi Kwei Armah’s reputation as a major African writer. He has often since been regarded as belonging to the next generation of African writers after Chinua Achebe. Indeed, his first two novels have been consistently on the read- ing lists of all departments of English in Ghana’s universities and on the list of most departments of literature in Africa.
Although his reputation rests mainly on his first two novels, his later works have also been remarkably well received. Their style is much more oral, sug- gesting the presence of a traditional tale-teller. The critic Robert Fraser has sought to provide the following explanation for the more direct obtrusion of traditional techniques in those novels: ‘‘Armah has evidently become increas- ingly concerned with the democratic basis of his art. There has been a marked effort to reach out beyond the confines of the literati . . . to recapture some of the wider ancestral appeal of the oral artist’’ (Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah, x).
Ayi Kwei Armah’s novels have a certain air of totality about them that would lead one to speculate that the writer imitates the French novel. However, Armah seems to warn such a possible speculator in his novels and essays that his style is all completely African. As presented in The Healers, his is the ‘‘tongue of the story-teller, descendant of the masters in the art of eloquence’’ (2).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Ayi Kwei Armah
Major Novels
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968; London: Hei- nemann Educational Books, 1969. Translated into Swahili as Wema Hawajazal- iwa. Nairobi: Heinemann East Africa, 1976.
Fragments. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970; London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1974; Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1974.
Why Are We So Blest? New York: Doubleday, 1972; London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1974; Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1974. The page reference in the text is to the Heinemann edition.
Two Thousand Seasons. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973; London: Hei- nemann Educational Books, 1979. Page references are to the Heinemann edition.
The Healers. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1978; London: Heinemann Edu- cational Books, 1979. Page references are to the Heinemann edition.
Major Articles
‘‘African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific.’’ Pre´sence Africaine 64 (1967): 6–30.
‘‘The Caliban Complex.’’ West Africa March 18 and 25, 1985: 321–322; 570–571.
‘‘The Festival Syndrome.’’ West Africa April 15, 1985: 726–727.
‘‘Dakar Hieroglyphics.’’ West Africa May 19, 1986: 1043–1044.
Selected Studies of Ayi Kwei Armah
Achebe, Chinua. Morning Yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1975; Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1976.
Dseagu, Samuel. ‘‘The Nature of Oral Influence on the African Novel.’’ Diss. University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1987.
Folarin, Margaret. ‘‘An Additional Comment on Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. ’’ African Literature Today 5 (1971): 116–128.
Fraser, Robert. ‘‘The American Background in Why Are We So Blest? ’’ African Liter- ature Today 9 (1978): 39–46.
——— . The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah: A Study in Polemical Fiction. London: Hei- nemann Educational Books, 1980.
Jones, Eldred Durosimi. ‘‘Review: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. ’’ African Lit- erature Today 3 (1969): 55–57.
McEwan, Neil. Africa and the Novel. London: Macmillan, 1983.
Ogungbesan, Kolawole. ‘‘Symbol and Meaning in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. ’’ African Literature Today 7 (1975): 93–110.
Sackey, Edward. ‘‘The Relevance of Oral Traditions in the Novels ofAyi Kwei Armah. ’’ M. Phil. diss. University of Ghana, Legon, 1990.
SAMUEL A. DSEAGU
Leave a comment behind