Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah 0894106406, 9780894106408, 0894106414

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CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON AYI KWEI ARMAH

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Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah

edited by Derek Wright

an original by Three Continents Press

Three Continents Press 1992 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except for brief quotations in reviews or articles. ®Three Continents Press, 1992, of cover design by Soleil Associates

Library of Congress-in-Publication Data Critical perspectives on Ayi Kwei Arm ah / edited by Derek Wright, p. cm. “An Original by Three Continents Press.” Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-89410-640-6 : $30.00. —ISBN 0-89410-641-4 : $17.00 1. Armah, Ayi Kwei, 1939 Criticism and interpretation. 2. Ghana in literature. I. Wright, Derek. PR9379.9.A7Z57 1992 823—dc20 91-28952 CIP

Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction

vii 1

General Essays

Portraits of the Contemporary Artist in Armah’s Novels by Chidi Amuta Ayi Kwei Arm ah and the “I” of the Beholder by D. S. Izevbaye Literature and African Identity: The Example of Ayi Kwei Arm ah by Kofi Anyidoho Parasites and Prostitutes: The Use of Women in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Novels by Abena P. K. Busia

13 22

34

48

“The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born ”

Structure and Image in Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Gareth Griffiths

75

Pessimism and the African Novelist: Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Leonard Kibera

92

Freedom as Nightmare: Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by S. A. Gakwandi A Commentary on The Beauty ful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Joan Solomon

102 116

Motivation and Motif: The Carrier Rite in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Derek Wright

125

The Ironic Imagery of Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Harold Collins'

142

Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will: A Reading of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Neil Lazarus

157

“Fragments” and “Why Are We So Blest?”

The Human and the Divine: Fragments and Why Are We So Blest? by Rosemary Colmer The Promethean Factor in A. K. Armah’s Fragments and Why Are We So Blest? by Joyce Johnson Loss and Frustration: An Analysis of Armah’s Fragments by Kirsten Holst Petersen Why Are We So Blest? and the Limits of Metaphor by James Booth Personal and Political Fate in Why Are We So Blest? by Edward Lohh The American Background in Why Are We So Blest? by Robert Fraser

191

204 217 227 242 257

The Histories

Armah’s Histories by Bernth Lindfors Myth and Modern Fiction: Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons by Isidore Okpewho Two Thousand Seasons: Literary Ancestry and Text by Robert Fraser History and Character in The Healers by Simon Gikandi The Nature of Healing in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers by Y. S. Boafo Bibliography Notes on Contributors

267 278 298 315 324 335 351

Acknowledgments I wish to thank the following individuals, journals, and publishers for permission to reprint the essays which appear in this book. All reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders but in a few cases this has not been successful and any response will be welcomed. Chidi Amuta and World Literature Written in English for “Portraits of the Contemporary Artist in Armah’s Novels.” D. S. Izevbaye, Bruce King, Oxford University Press Ltd. (Ibadan), and Ahmadu Bello University Press Ltd. (Zaria) for “Ayi Kwei Armah and the T of the Beholder.” Kofi Anyidoho, Eckhard Breitinger, and Bayreuth African Studies Series for “Literature and African Identity: The Example of Ayi Kwei Armah.” Abena P. K. Busia, Carole Boyce Davies, and Africa World Press, Inc., for “Parasites and Prophets: The Use of Women in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Novels.” Reprinted from Carole Boyce Davies and Ann Adams Graves, eds., Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1986). By permission of the author and the publisher. Gareth Griffiths and Studies in Black Literature for “Structure and Image in Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born” Mrs. Valerie Kibera and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature for Leonard Kibera’s “Pessimism and the African Novelist: Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born” Shatto Arthur Gakwandi for “Freedom as Nightmare: Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born ”

Vll

Joan Solomon and English in Africa for “A Commentary on The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born” English Studies in Africa and the Witwatersrand University Press for Derek Wright’s “Motivation and Motif: The Carrier Rite in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” Copyright ®1985 by the Witwatersrand

University Press. Harold Collins and World Literature Written in English for “The Ironic Imagery of Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” Neil Lazarus and Research in African Literatures for “Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will: A Reading of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” Reprinted from Research in African Literatures, 18, 2 (summer 1987). Copyright ®1987 by the University of Texas Press. By permission of the author and the publisher. The version of this article that appears in this publication is shortened from the original. Rosemary Colmer and Kunapipi for “The Human and the Divine: Fragments and Why Are We So Blest?” Joyce Johnson and World Literature Written in English for “The Promethean Factor in A. K. Armah’s Fragments and Why Are We So Blest?” Kirsten Holst Petersen and Kunapipi for “Loss and Frustration: An Analysis of Armah’s Fragments.” James Booth and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature for “ Why Are We So Blest? and the Limits of Metaphor.” Edward Lobb and World Literature Written in English for “Personal and Political Fate in Why Are We So Blest?” Robert Fraser and African Literature Today for “The American Background in Why Are We So Blest?”

Bemth Lindfors and African Literature Today for “Armah’s Histories.” Isidore Okpewho and African Literature Today for “Myth and Modern Fiction: Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons.” Robert Fraser and Heinemann Educational Books, Ltd., for uTwo Thousand Seasons: Literary Ancestry and Text.” vm

Simon Gikandi, James Currey Publishers, and Heinemann Educational Books, Inc. (Portsmouth, New Hampshire) for “History and Character in The Healers.” Y. S. Boafo and Komparatistische Hefte for “The Nature of Healing in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers ” Heinemann Educational Books, Ltd., for quotations from The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Macmillan Publishing Company (New York) for quotations from The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Fragments.

IX

Introduction Derek Wright

The essays collected in this volume are intended to provide a broad and representative selection of critical responses to Ayi Kwei Armah, one of the most provocative and versatile of the post-war wave of anglophone West African novelists. In addition to short stories, journalism, and polemical essays, Armah has produced five novels in five different modes: fable, Bildungsroman, polemical roman a these, epic, and historical novel. The essays gathered here are as various as their subject, dealing with dimensions of Armah’s writing as diverse as narrative technique, symbolism and metaphor, mythology, ritual undercurrents, literary ancestry, historical background, and socio-political vision. Ayi Kwei Armah was born to Fante-speaking parents in October 1939 in Sekondi-Takoradi, a twin sea port of the then British colony of the Gold Coast. He was educated at Achimota College, near Accra, an institution modeled on the British public school and the training ground for the post-independence political leaders and elites who were to figure prominently among the targets of his fiction. Thus, from the outset, Armah’s criticism of the Ghanaian establishment was not that of an outsider but of one of the privileged—privilege from which, like the heroes of his novels, he was to opt out. Armah’s childhood and adolescence coincided with the growth of Ghana, through a combination of constitutional negotiation and violent struggle, into an independent state. Though too young to absorb the full import of his country’s wartime upheavals and post-war social unrest—the strikes, unemployment, and the shooting of demonstrating ex-servicemen back from the colonial war—he passed his most impressionable years during this period of crisis, and its violence and nationalist hopes, which caused tremors among both the Takoradi workforce and the Achimota students, clearly left their mark on him and are harrowingly documented in the retrospective sixth chapter of his first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968).

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In 1959, two years after independence and shortly before his twentieth birthday, Arm ah left Ghana, not on the usual route of Achimota graduates to an education in the former mother country but on an American scholarship, first to Groton and then on to Harvard. Most likely, he carried with him to an America caught up in the throes of Civil Rights agitation the youthful idealism of Nkrumahn socialism, and the betrayal of that idealism and the subsequent post-independence disillusionment were to color all of his early writings. The later novel Why Are We So Blest? (1972) was to draw upon his experience of America during those years of racial confrontation which saw a shift from integrationist to black separatist politics, and the germ of this novel is to be found in his first published story, “Contact” (1965),1 in which an encounter between a visiting African student and a white American girl is used to explore the subtle ways in which the race stereotypes of colonial history still penetrate the privacies of personal relationships. Worthy of special notice among Armah’s other early pieces are the story “Yaw Manu’s Charm” (1968),2 a disturbing study of the far-reaching effects of neocolonial psychology, even at the lowest level of aspiration, in the lives of Westernized clerks, and the essay “A Mystification: African Independence Revalued” (1969),3 which charts the unchanging economic flow-pattern from African province to Western metropole in the neocolonial economy. The stories and the polemical essays on African socialism, Fanon, and independence, written in the decade of post-independence disenchantment, contain in embryonic form the themes of the novels: notably, Africa’s continuing oppression under the “mystification of independence” and entrapment in a cycle of neocolonial dependency as a result of the West’s posthumous control of the continent through educational programs, economic strangle-holds, and indirect political influence, with the automatic implication that the only hope for the future lies in breaking the paralyzing grip of controlling Western values.4 Arm ah graduated from Harvard in 1963 with a degree in sociology but he left before the official end of his undergraduate program, beset as he was after the Lumumba crisis in the Congo by the dilemma of how to work for change in Africa, whether as a writer or an activist, from a privileged position among Western hosts.5 He went, by way of Mexico, to Algeria, a country which in the wake of its own violently-won independence had begun to serve as a sanctuary for fugitive Third World revolutionaries and disaffected African intellectuals, and as a base for other nationalist movements in Africa. Until the end of 1963 he worked in Algiers as a translator for the magazine Revolution Africaine and it seems safe to assume that his mixed impressions of postrevolutionary Algeria found their way into Solo’s narrative in the opening chapters of Why Are We So Blest? In December of that year Armah’s health broke down, leading to hospitalization, first in Algiers and then for five months in Boston: “It’s an understatement to say I had a nervous breakdown: it was

AYI KWEI ARMAH

3

my entire being, body and soul, that had broken down. The physical damage alone took months in hospital to repair.”6 After recovering from his breakdown he finally opted for a writing career, “not indeed as the most desired creative option, but as the least parasitic option open to me. ... I was in the position of a spore which, having finally accepted its destiny as a fungus, still wonders if it might produce penicillin.”7 In mid-1964 Arm ah returned to his native Ghana. During the next three years he worked, briefly, as an English teacher at Navrongo school and, more abortively, as a scriptwriter for Ghana television, in which post he found himself at odds with some leading Ghanaian literary and media personalities and which he quickly departed when his ambitious and idealistic screenplays fell foul of the censors.8 In addition to employment and financial problems, he appears during this generally unhappy period of his life to have suffered a psychological crisis as a result of familial pressures and demands, a trauma given fictional expression, along with the scriptwriting fiasco, in his semiautobiographical second novel Fragments (1970): “My family were unhappy because I was too full of ideas, not actions. I found it very traumatic writing this book because of my family’s attitude.”9 Though the immediate impetus to departure was employment, it is perhaps not surprising in the light of these problems that the next three years were spent abroad, first as an editor of Jeune Afrique in Paris (1967-1968), and then in the United States, working on an M.A. in Fine Arts at Columbia University and as an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts (1968-1970). The troubled years from the mid to the late 1960s, however, were also productive ones which saw the publication of his first novel, the completion of a second, and the commencement of work on a third. When The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, which quickly became a classic of African fiction, burst upon the international literary scene in 1968, its author’s talent seemed to have been sprung upon his readers fully formed and matured, without any apprenticeship, but this impression owed something to the fact that it had been a long time in the making (it was written between 1964 and 1967, a period of composition sufficiently protracted to permit the incorporation of the anti-Nkrumah coup of February 1966). The critical reception of the novel, though loud, was divided, and the division was an abrupt one: on the one hand, Western critical acclaim of its metaphorical wealth, intellectual integrity, and command of style; and, on the other, African censure of its supposedly Western formal and philosophical orientation and its savage, putrefying portrayal of corruption in post-colonial Africa. During the following decade the notion that the vision and techniques of Arm ah’s first three novels were foreign-derived or at least foreign-inspired became a commonplace in the criticism of African literature and much was written, most of it of little consequence, on their alleged indebtedness to European and

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particularly French existentialist fiction—a view of his writings which the author himself has, on two occasions, discouraged.10 No doubt the unashamedly modern urban settings of these books, together with Armah’s lengthy absences from his native Ghana, encouraged the impression that his work reveals little knowledge of or interest in traditional African culture, even though he has always repudiated the notion of “exile” and has spent his longest periods of residence abroad not in America or Europe but in other parts of Africa.11 Moreover, it is well to remember that at that time African literature existed in something tantamount to a critical police state, in which any divergence from the mainstream realism of the “school of Achebe” and any attempt to oppose a “mythological consciousness” to its own “historical” one were regarded as sufficient cause for a work to be hauled up before a kind of Un-African Activities Committee of the literary imagination.12 The divergence of Armah’s visionary, symbolic modes from this mainstream provoked charges from African critics, notably Achebe and Kofi Awoonor, of an impaired vision which depicted a falsified, unrecognizable Ghana and failure to realize local settings and even to differentiate between Ghanaian speech forms; and of a highly subjective, Westernized sensibility more at home in expatriate fiction about Africa written by Europeans than in the work of an African writer.13 For this narrowly “Africanist” school of critics, on the lookout for the documentary realism of social history, anything that was not concretely embodied in historical or geographical fact was suspected as “foreign metaphor,” and the distillation of contemporary history into myth was frowned upon as tendentiously European.14 Happily, this phase is now long past and African literary criticism, aided by the counter-influence of Wole Soyinka, has moved on, and with it Achebe’s own fictional practice (witness Anthills of the Savannah, 1987). Ironically, however, its misapprehensions may have been reinforced by Arm ah himself, who did himself something of a disservice by later deploring his first novel because of its lack of “an absolutely African focus.”15 In fact, early critical allegations that there are few “Africanisms” in the first two novels,16 and that they do not draw upon distinctively Ghanaian settings, speech, or history, have not held up under the pressures of close investigation. Moreover, these books are so imbued with surviving ritual motifs and indigenous mythologies, residual ancestral beliefs and ceremonial forms, that traditional West African culture is always powerfully, if peripherally, present, in both its superior moral imperatives and its inherent deficiencies. In both of these books the treatment of vestigial and debased ritual practices establishes a problematic continuity between a corrupt modern present and a corruptible traditional past, and more traditionally minded critics have emphasized the first novel’s indebtedness to African fable, ritual and oral traditions of characterization, as well as the fourth book’s borrowings from the oracular and editing devices of the African griot (see the present volume’s essays by Izevbaye,

AYI KWEI ARM AH

5

Okpewho, and Wright). Armah’s small body of fiction, like the Fanonian political theory that stands behind it, reveals in fact a deepening suspicion of all conceptual systems derived from Europe and their concomitant literary styles and techniques, even when these are discernible in his own work. 1970 seems to have been a turning point in Armah’s career. Eager to write from an African base and to find a more obviously African perspective for his fiction, he decided to execute a long-standing plan to travel and live in other parts of Africa. He settled in socialist Tanzania, where he learned Swahili (into which his first novel was translated) and taught African Literature and Creative Writing at the College of National Education at Chang’ombe until 1976, when he moved to the National University of Lesotho. The decentralized peasant communalism of Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa no doubt made a forceful contribution to the radical shift of perspective in Armah’s work during these years. Following the publication of second and third novels centered on the lives of alienated, expatriated African intellectuals in the contemporary period, Two Thousand Seasons (1973), the first of Armah’s books to be published in Africa before appearing in the West, focused not on individuals but, after the fashion of the African oral historian, on the life of a whole community in pursuit of its collective destiny across the centuries. In this book Armah surprisingly burst the bounds of historical realism and naturalistic narrative and, drawing upon the hypothetical race-consciousness of a fictitious panAfrican brotherhood, moved into the terrain of myth, legend, and race memory. In 1978 Armah published The Healers, a historical novel about the Ashanti wars, and in the following year took up an Assistant Professorship at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Since 1982 he has lived in Dakar, Senegal. Armah’s fiction expresses extreme views and polemical ideas in a characteristically exuberant symbolism and style, as is evident in the surreal scatology of the first book, the lurid sexual graphics of the third, and the monotonous racial chauvinism of the fourth. These features have made him a controversial figure in African literature but the controversy has been centered exclusively on the works and not on the man, about whom extremely little is known in the West. Throughout his writing career Armah has been a very private and anonymous person, giving no interviews, attending no conferences or workshops, releasing no press statements and refusing to promote or publicize his work in any way; and, as a recent essay reveals, he is fully aware of the “small reputation ... as an unfriendly, reclusive artist” that his silence has created for him.17 Only twice has Armah broken his rule of silence: first, when provoked beyond endurance by the American critic Charles Larson’s misreading of his work and falsification of his life;18 and second, in a mellower mood, when correcting an African critic’s errors about his education.19 It is to these two essays that Western critics, the present writer included, owe their

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biographical information about Arm ah. The critical response to Armah’s first novel was prolific: over the two decades since its appearance it has attracted the attention of nigh on fifty journal articles and book chapters, of which the essays within are but a small sample. The next two books, however, received a lesser amount and a more lukewarm kind of attention, while the two historical works, though enthusiastically received in Africa, were on the whole either attacked or ignored by Western critics, which perhaps partly explains why his smaH but powerful corpus of fiction had to wait until the start of the next decade for its first booklength critical evaluation: Robert Fraser’s The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah (1980). The two “histories” are an important turning point in a writing career which can be made to correspond roughly with Frantz Fanon’s tripartite scheme for the decolonized writer. If The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born may be deemed to approximate Fanon’s “assimilation phase,” insofar as it is at least partly influenced by the literary techniques and styles of the colonial power, and the next two novels are fitted into the second phase of disturbance and painful liberation, in which the uprooted and expatriated writer tries unsuccessfully to recross the gulf that has grown between himself and the African community, then these last two works are clearly “fighting books” that adopt the militant postures of Fanon’s “fighting phase,” in which the writer fashions a forward-looking revolutionary literature to address and awaken his own people and attempts, in Soyinka’s phrase, “the visionary reconstruction of the past for the purposes of a social direction.”20 The mixed reception that greeted the histories was not polarized along African-Western lines, however. Bernth Lindfors’ essay included in the present volume appeared at the time to represent a loose consensus of opinion in the West that these books show signs of flagging inspiration and waning artistic achievement, yet Robert Fraser (also included here) has since argued that their apparent radical line of departure is really a curve in an arc of natural, continuous development and achievement from the early novels; he has, moreover, defended them from the usual charge of racism by claiming that the polemical need to provide modern Africa with a strong curative mythology, as an antidote to corrosive inferiority complexes inherited from colonialism, outweighs traditional novelistic concerns such as the fair-minded openness to the complexity of experience usually sought in naturalistic narrative. Certainly, few would dispute that Armah’s search in the histories for a more overtly African focus, expressing more “authentic” African values, is marked by a corresponding loss of subtlety and complexity in both characterization and symbolism. But their communal vision was clearly an attempt to give his art a more democratic base and their polemics pointed to exciting new directions for the development of both Armah’s work and African fiction as a whole: indeed, they were hailed by some African critics as evolving what promised to be a major new style for African literature. In

AYI KWEI ARM AH

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the light of this promise, it has therefore been disappointing that since their publication Arm ah, in spite of some rumored novels, has published no more major fiction, only a single short story and a variety of journalistic pieces. The latter have, however, pushed deeper into the polemics of the histories in pursuit of their potential for creative action, investigating the practical possibilities for the reindigenization of African life in the areas of language, historical scholarship, and political ideology, and continuing to insist upon the irrelevance to the African writer of concepts of creativity that do not take into account the contemporary context of African suffering and do not incorporate some effort toward the changing of Africa’s social and political realities.21 The main influences on Armah’s writing have not been hard to identify and the essays that follow indicate that they fall into three main areas. From Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and adopted Algerian revolutionary, came the first novel’s vivid if one-sided portrait of unproductive bourgeois administrations in post-colonial states, the second’s analysis of colonial dependency complexes, the third’s figurative political theology of blest and damned, and the psychopathology of blackness which informs the racial polemics of the last three books (see the essays by Griffiths, Colmer, Petersen, and Lobb). The Black American revolution contributed something to the political and sexual polemics of African separatism, a feature of Armah’s work enhanced by the influence of the black historians Chancellor Williams and Cheikh Anta Diop on the conception of the histories (see the essays by Fraser and Booth). Thirdly, there is a debt to African ritual forms, mythology, and folklore, each of which produce some haunting and crucial secondary resonances in Armah’s prose (see the essay by Wright). But the list is not intended to be exhaustive and neither is the criticism in this volume. No anthology of criticism on a still topical contemporary novelist can presume to have said the last word. Arm ah has published no fiction over the last twelve years, but Achebe allowed over twenty years to pass between his fourth and fifth novels, and Armah’s reference in a recent essay to his M working] on notes for several novels, short stories and essays”22 indicates, together with the energy and bite of the post-1980 journalism, that the well is far from dry. Furthermore, the body of quality criticism on Arm ah is being added to daily: new essays full of original critical insights and new theoretical angles appear as I write, too late for inclusion in this volume. Finally, not everything that is desirable is obtainable: I regret especially that it was not possible to reprint Richard Priebe’s pioneering work on Armah’s ritual structures, without which no critical collection on this author can be considered complete.23 This volume aims, within these given limitations, to represent the state of debate, past and present, about Armah’s existing achievement and, by covering a wide range of interpretive approaches and emphases, to highlight both its multi-faceted nature and the areas of it about which opinion is divided.

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

8

I have tried to give roughly equal space to all of its aspects and to all interested parties: to African and Western critics, to admirers and detractors, and to both the richness of Armah’s fiction and the problematic qualities that, in the ongoing debate about it, continue to puzzle and perplex.

Notes 'Ayi Kwei Armah, “Contact,” The New African, 4, 10 (December 1965), 244-246, 248. 2

Ayi Kwei Armah, “Yaw Manu’s Charm,” Atlantic Monthly (May 1968), 89-

95. 3

Ayi Kwei Armah, “A Mystification: African Independence Revalued,” PanAfrican Journal, 2, 2 (Spring 1969), 141-151. 4

See also: Ayi Kwei Armah, “African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?,” Presence Africaine, 64 (1967), 6-30; and “Fanon: The Awakener,” Negro Digest, 18, 12 (October 1969), 4-9, 29-43. 5

Ayi Kwei Armah, “One Writer’s Education,” West Africa (August 26, 1985), 1752-1753. 6

Ibid., 1753.

7

Zbid., 1753. See: Kofi Awoonor, Panel Discussion in Issue, 6, 1 (1976), 31.

8

9

Quoted in biographical note on Armah in Cultural Events in Africa, 40 (March 1968), 5. 10

See: Ayi Kwei Armah, “Larsony, or Fiction as Criticism of Fiction,” New Classic, 4 (November 1977), 38-39; and “The Lazy School of Literary Criticism,” West Africa (February 25, 1985), 356. 1

‘Armah, “Larsony . . .,” 35-38, 43-44. 2

The terms “mythological” and “historical” consciousness are proposed by Richard Priebe in his article, “Escaping the Nightmare of History: The Development of a Mythic Consciousness in West African Literature, ” ARIEL 4 2(1973) 55-67. 13

Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day (London: Heinemann, 1975), pp. 25-26; Kofi Awoonor, “Africa’s Literature Beyond Politics,” Worldview, 15, 3 (1972), 23. See also: Charles Nnolim, “Dialectic as Form: Pejorism in the Novels of Armah,” African Literature Today, 10 (1979), 209. 14

Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day, p. 26.

^Gwendolyn Brooks, Report From Part One (Detroit: Broadside Press 1972), p. 127. 16

Charles Larson alleged mysteriously that there were “few Africanisms” in

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Armah’s first two novels, in The Emergence of African Fiction, 2nd edition (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 258. 17

Armah, “The Lazy School . .

355.

!8

Armah, “Larsony . . .,” 35-37, 41-42.

19

Armah, “One Writer’s Education,” 1752.

^Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 178-179; Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 106. 21

See: Ayi Kwei Armah, “Masks and Marx: The Marxist Ethos vis-a-vis African Revolutionary Theory and Praxis,” Presence Africaine, 131 (1984), 35-65; “Our Language Problem,” West Africa (April 29, 1985), 831-832; “Africa and the Francophone Dream,” West Africa (April 28, 1986), 884-885; “Dakar Hieroglyphs,” West Africa (May 19, 1986), 1043-1044; “The Third World Hoax,” West Africa (August 25, 1986), 1781-1782; “One Writer’s Education,” 1753. 22

Armah, “The Lazy School . . .,” 355.

^Richard Priebe, “Armah’s Mythic Hero: A Man Betwixt and Between,” in his Myth, Realism, and the West African Writer (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1988), pp. 21-46; originally published in different form as “Demonic Imagery and the Apocalyptic Vision in the Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah,” Yale French Studies, 53 (1976), 102-136.

GENERAL ESSAYS

Portraits of the Contemporary African Artist in Armah’s Novels Chidi Amuta

To be familiar with Armah’s art as a novelist is to come into sympathetic acquaintance with his visionary protagonists, who in several different ways are objectifications of the creative consciousness. Perhaps in the work of no other African novelist of English expression does the creative visionary so consistently assume such centrality in the fictional frame of things. This feature of Armah’s art assumes some measure of significance in African literary scholarship on account of the topicality of the issue of the place of the artist in contemporary African society. Much critical energy has been spent in polemical expositions and argumentation as to the status, role(s), obligations, and peculiarities of the African artist—both traditional and contemporary—visa-vis his or her Western counterpart. It is a controversy, now submerged, but no less alive, in which both African writers and their critics have had something to say. Critical examination of the contradictory relationships that exist between Armah’s visionary protagonists and their fictional social milieux contributes to this debate from another angle: the artist’s stand on the issue is revealed in the very characters he creates. In Armah’s case this critical examination is both a useful and problematic exercise: useful in the sense that to date this artist has granted no recorded and published interview that I know about, and problematic in the sense that it entices the critic to do two diametrically opposed but organically related things. First, because Armah is a manifestly committed artist who takes as his primary constituency the entire African continent and as his preoccupation the broad spectrum of Africa’s experience since its contact with aliens (Westerners and Arabs), any consideration of his art and sensibility has wider implications. In this regard, to view his artist protagonists is to attempt a critique of his perception of the contemporary African artist and his social relevance. Secondly, because his artist characters are primarily fictional creations we are confronted with the problem of dealing with characters who 1

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aspire to a heroic stature while at the same time clinging to a fundamentally artistic sensibility. The first problem belongs to sociological criticism while the second raises issues in theoretical poetics. Any valuable consideration of Armah’s treatment of the relationship between the African artist and his society must begin with his last two novels, Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers, for although published later than the rest, they precede the others in a diachronic paradigm. As novels of historical reconstruction, both attempt to re-create the essence of pre-colonial African society in the light of contemporary experience.2 “The way” in Two Thousand Seasons and the ideal society of Densu’s dream in The Healers are, therefore, quintessential versions of pre-holocaust African social formations, a social and metaphysical totality in which the immanence of natural purpose in both matter and human action was axiomatic. In the context of that totality, art was implicit in and integral to the rituals of everyday life. It was not so deified as in the modern Western sense in which its practitioners become “devotees . . . priests, urging all who are desirous to approach its altar to banish entirely from their hearts and minds such doubts and questions as ‘what use is this to me?’”3 Necessarily, the artist was organically integrated into his society; he “lived and had [his] being in society and created . . . works for the good of that society”4 and therefore the definition of what constitutes an artistic undertaking was more functionalistic and pragmatic. The confines of the artistic calling were extended to encompass all acts involving the creation of something new and socially beneficial out of what already exists. Thus, as Kofi Awoonor has pointed out, the fisherman, carver, chanter, and healer all find places in the artistic calling on account of their total involvement in the task of advancing the material and metaphysical frontiers of their community’s reality through creative acts.5 It is this conception of art and its social relevance that informs Armah’s sensibility in his historical novels. Therefore the militant Isanusi in Two Thousand Seasons conceives of his revolutionary crusade against the invading Europeans and their quislings, the kings, in terms of a contest between creativity and the forces of destruction: between the creation of life and the destruction of the destroyers there is no difference but a necessary, indispensable connection . . . nothing good can be created that does not of its very nature push forward the destruction of the destroyers. 6 In the context of this struggle, his spirit becomes a crystallization of the aspirations of his co-fighters of “the way.” They take a cue from him and, even after his death, he attains the status of a model in the revolutionary struggle to regain the society of the way,” for his words re-echo and provide the ideological guidelines for the vital struggle. A similar situation obtains in The Healers, where the mystic visionary protagonists, Densu and Damfo, are portrayed as engaged in the crucial creative task of trying to restore health to

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a society diseased with destructive influences. Although they are professional healers preoccupied with utilizing the power of roots and herbs in restoring health to individuals, they conceive of their assignment in wider terms. For them, the restoration of health to individual bodies is integral but subordinate to the healing of a whole society: “When one person in a community—body and soul—clashes with another individual in the same community, that too is disease.”7 More specifically, they address themselves to the internal disorders in the African social formation on the eve of and immediately following the colonial invasion: The ending of all unnatural rifts is healing work. When different groups within what should be a natural community clash against each other, that also is disease. That is why healers say that our people, the way we are now divided into petty nations, are suffering from a terrible disease, (pp. 100-101) The Akan community itself was just a little piece of something whole—a people that knew only this one name we so seldom hear these days: Ebibirman. That was the community of all black people. The disease—the breaking-up of that community—has taken centuries and centuries, thousands of years, (p. 102) In both novels the tenacity of the creative individual’s commitment to the immediate problem of his society as well as his immersion in the good of that authentic society constitutes his ultimate glory, for he exists in antithetical relationship to the forces that seek to destroy his people. This notion of art and the artist in society, then, provides a conceptual model against which Armah’s artist protagonists in the more contemporaneously oriented novels can best be evaluated. The social and metaphysical totality which is nostalgically remembered in Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers has largely disappeared in the worlds of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Fragments, and Why Are We So Blest?. The normal process of social fragmentation, quickened, in Africa’s case, by the twin forces of Arab and Western imperialism, have made that totality untenable. Consequently, the social formation in these novels is largely that of contemporary Africa in which all pretensions to traditionalism and cultural authenticity amount, at best, to a mockery of something dead and distant or a celebration of a pervasively obnoxious new arrangement. The gods of ritual and harvest have been sent packing by the din of maxim guns and bulldozers. Where they are still lurking in deserted groves, they are perpetually starved of appeasement by famished priests like Foli in Fragments, who drains even the last drops of spirit meant as libation to ancestors. Similarly, the

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chanters, healers, carvers, and their modern cognates have gone cap-in-hand to beg for sustenance in the new urban centers or in search of certificates in overseas institutions. Of necessity a new concept of heroism has emerged in which the warrior of hunter, unless he is in khaki and wielding a machine gun, is largely irrelevant. Money, material possessions, and political power are the real marks of social heroism. „ The artist protagonist in a novel set in such a world shares the predicament of his real-world counterpart: his life is an epic quest for relevance. This fate is epitomized by Baako, the youthful visionary protagonist of Fragments. He returns from a course of study abroad filled with idealism and enthusiasm to contribute creatively to his Ghanaian nation. Simultaneously, he wants to retain his basically artistic consciousness intact. Ironically, these are two diametrically opposed realms of existence, for the new Ghana is so immersed in soul-deadening materialism and corruption that it has little space for youthful idealists let alone creative writers of all oddities. Not even his immediate family of orientation will accommodate the luxury of having their only been-to degenerate to a devotee of an esoteric godling called creative writing. In the protracted confrontation between him and his family (and society) he is victorious only in the sense that he abandons the socially accepted standards of sanity and enters a new consciousness in which he is the sole witness to his “homecoming.” For him, this new realm of conciousness is that never-never world of creative illumination (illusion?) from which art flows in the Western sense. But to everyone else he is stark mad and must be avoided: . . . Two or three of the children . . . had followed him, . . . intent only on reaching him with new stones in their hands. But before they could get to him a frightened shout stilled them. “Stay far from him. His bite will make you also maaaaad! ” To this another, closer voice added in sage, quiet tones, “The same thing happens if he should scratch you. ”8 Like Amamu in Kofi Awoonor’s This Earth, My Brother, he relishes the accompanying illumination which this absurd drama ushers in: “What succeeded the hearing of those sounds was the clearest daylight, he thought, the neatest sunlight he had ever seen. It was as if there was absolutely nothing, not even air between him and any one, any other thing around, and all the distance to the sky was filled with light” (pp. 243-244). But deep down in his social consciousness he feels a need to relate with those he has left in the other world. The feeling of incompleteness breeds self-apprehension about the wisdom of the very choice he has made: I was thinking of it [art, writing] as a way of making my life mean something to me” (p. 114). But not to other people. His feeling of ultimate irrelevance in society is compounded by the very medium

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he chooses for expressing his art. The appeal of creative writing, he comes to realize, is dangerously circumscribed by the size of the reading public, which in his society is restricted to interested literates. Ocran, his former art teacher, drives the message home: “Words. No. Too many words are just lies. You can’t fool anyone with things that have texture. You really have to create. Too many words are just for telling lies” (p. 113). A similar loss of hope in the efficacy of the word as a factor in social change is echoed by the enigmatic Teacher in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born: “The things people want, I do not have to give. And no one wants what I happen to have. It’s only words after all.”9 Even where his medium is much more tangible, as in visual arts such as sculpture, the contemporary African artist finds himself creating works that in their intrinsic ontological contradictions orchestrate and celebrate the realities of his truncated society. In Ocran’s studio, Baako is confronted with this disturbing reality: ... the walls were lined with rows of black heads in dozens of different attitudes from sweet repose to extreme agony. They had been arranged in some kind of rough order, so that the tension captured in the heads seemed progressively to grow less and less bearable, till near the end of the whole series, when Baako had almost arrived back at the beginning, the inward torture actually broke the outer form of the human face, and the result, when Baako looked closer, was not any new work of his master but the old anonymous sculpture of Africa, (p. Ill) It is perhaps in Why Are We So Blest? that Armah confronts the contemporary African artist with a more radical conception of his place in the new social order. Solo, the central consciousness that informs and organizes the experience of this unusual novel, is an artist. He spends a good part of his time rationalizing and evaluating the consciousness and actions of Modin, a somewhat confused African student in America. Of particular interest to Solo is Modin’s bizarre love affair with the frigid American girl, Aim6e. The new pastime of watching Modin temporarily removes Solo from his creative writing, the relevance of which he has begun to doubt seriously, given his socio-historical background: Often when I have sat down and tried to write I have felt behind me presences disapproving of my unborn thoughts, harsh voices raised in contradiction of my unwritten words, and my young friends asking their lost comrade why he chooses to spend his time making such mysterious thing of love when the revolution in its making demands so much time, so much energy, so much of everything that can be given.10

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In Modin’s career he comes to the realization that the African pursuit of art, or any intellectual undertaking for that matter, within the context of the Western tradition is a way of advancing the cause of the supremacist assumptions that produced colonialism. Modin in his few moments of sober reflection also realizes this fact: “In the imperial situation the educational process is turned into an elitist ritual for selecting slave traders” (p. 222). But the stifling inertia of his affair with Aim6c ossifies this recognition. Solo on his part, however, is able to break out of the despair this realization breeds and emerge with an unambiguous stand on the irrelevance of his Western-oriented artistic sensibility in the contemporary African setting: . . . Only one issue is worth our time: how to end the oppression of the African, to kill the European beasts of prey, to remake ourselves, the elected servants of Europe and America. Outside that, all is useless; and I am outside, (p. 230) Although he is able to commit class suicide, at least conceptually, by reaching this revolutionary conclusion, he laments his alienation from the mainstream of the anti-imperialist struggle by virtue of his very training: “But how to attack oppression from outside the stream flowing to erode it? How to be a writer at a time like this, in the midst of the world’s most painful truths, a communicator doomed to silence?” (p. 230). His predicament here underlines the cardinal contradiction that defines most of Armah’s visionary protagonists, namely, the challenge to be part of the processes that will usher in the new society which they envision while at the same time remaining artists. A failure by most Armah critics to appreciate the basic theoretical dynamics of this contradiction has led to so much misreading of his works. One misgiving about his art which most critics have relentlessly re-echoed is that the very fact of creating visionary protagonists who do nothing physically about their decadent societies, especially in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Fragments, necessarily makes Armah a pessimistic African novelist.11 We ought, however, to remind ourselves that the artist as a fictional character is an essentially contradictory and even problematic phenomenon. As an artificial creation existing in a basically mimetic medium, his social relevance and, therefore, that of the work from which he derives his authenticity, is compulsorily determined by the peculiar ideological predilections of the form-giving imagination. Seen in this light, he is an attempt by the creative imagination to concretize and identify itself in the matrix of the problems in its (the creator’s) society. That society to which the author/creator seeks to relate through the characters he creates is superlatively real. Thus Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Soyinka’s Demoke, Ngugi’s Grikonyo, and Osofisan’s the Man (poet) all fall within this category. Each is either exalted or condemned by the extent

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to which he comes to identify his art with the immediate challenge of his society. Stephen Dedalus has to go “away from home and friends” in order to “encounter the reality of experience” and “learn . . . what the heart is and what it feels.”12 This monastic isolation is a prerequisite for creativity in his European society where “great art . . . may have been at best a mode of communication.”13 But it cannot serve the African artist characters because in their own society art is essentially a communal experience and “a flow of interaction.”14 Hence, in most African novels where the artist features as a character, he degenerates into insignificance the moment he tries to define himself in terms of the European tradition. The crucial choice which Armah’s protagonists have to make, therefore, is between playing Stephen Dedalus and remaining African artists, having come into contact with the two traditions. At first Baako tries to live his vision. But his abortive reformist experience at Ghanavision and the disappointment of a thievish mother and sister underline the futility of his choice. In desperation he tries to extricate himself from society. The result is equally disastrous; his subsequent yearning for a meaningful communal experience almost kills his artistic perceptions. On his part, Solo saves himself Baako’s kind of embarrassment by repudiating art in the Western sense. Although he hungers to identify physically with the revolutionary process of altering society and, therefore, the social context of art, he is bogged down by the faint echoes of his Western orientation. Baako and Solo fail because by succumbing to the twin pull of the two traditions that they have known they leave Armah’s audience with such a graphic picture of Africa’s social hopelessness that we ask, “What next?” This question does not arise in the context of Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers. Isanusi and Densu, respectively, in these novels convince us by their resolute revolutionary zeal that change is both imperative and possible. Their success as artist protagonists arises from the fact that they have the incredible capacity to play hero while seeking to rationalize their actions within the context of their basically artistic consciousness. In other words, they are able to play the part and also provide a social context within which their actions are meaningful. We can attempt to synthesize Armah’s views on art and the African artist’s social responsibility from the opinions of his visionary protagonists. This is because in his narrative method the consciousness of the narrative voice is either synonymous or coalesces with that of the central character. The collective voice of the narrator in Two Thousand Seasons is hardly distinguishable from that of Isanusi. Similarly, in Why Are We So Blest? and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, respectively, Solo and the Man are simultaneously actors and commentators. Interestingly, these characters (and voices) make some of the most unambiguous and revolutionary statements on

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art and the artist in neo-colonial African literature. Solo, at the height of his introspective self-appraisal, declares: . . . there is no creative art outside the destruction of the destroyers. In my people’s world, revolution would be the only art, revolutionaries the only creators. All else is part of Africa’s destruction, (p. 231) This unusual conception of art and the artist derives its strength from its tacit recognition of imperialism as a cancerous influence in Africa. The primary measure of all creativity in Africa becomes an unconditional commitment to the eradication of imperialism. Viewed in this light, art is not adornment and becomes relevant only in a communally beneficial context: There is no beauty but in relationships. Nothing cut off by itself is beautiful. Never can things in destructive relationships be beautiful. All beauty is in the creative purpose of our relationships; all ugliness is in the destructive aims of the destroyers’ arrangements.15 This echoes the pre-colonial African conception of art. To adopt that view of art is not to return to that society, but to distill its more positive values and transpose them into a modern potential. This, to my mind, is the greatest challenge confronting the creative intelligence of contemporary Africa. To neglect it is to become “a communicator doomed to silence.”

Notes Ayi Kwei Armah, “Larsony, or Fiction as Criticism of Fiction,” Asemka, 4 (1974), 1-14; rpt. in Positive Review, 1 (1978), 11-14. "Chidi Amuta, “History, Contemporary Reality and Social Vision in Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons,” Journal of the Literary Society of Nigeria, 1 (1980). 3

Chinua Achebe, “Africa and Her Writers,” in Karen Morell, editor, In Person: Achebe, Awoonor and Soyinka (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1975), p. 13. * 4

Achebe, in Morell, In Person . . ., p. 13.

Jn Person

Aw

1973)6ipI1^9

°^n°1^2WTradition and Continuity in African Literature,” in Morell, TW

°

Th0USa,ul Seasons

(Nairobi: East African Publishing House,

AYI KWEI ARM AH

21

7

Armah, The Healers (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1978), p. 100. Further references are incorporated in the text. 8

Armah, Fragments (London: Heinemann, 1974), p. 243. Further references are incorporated in the text. 9

Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (London: Heinemann, 1968),

p. 79. 10

Armah, Why Are We So Blest? (London: Heinemann, 1974), p. 12. Further references are incorporated in the text. n

See: Achebe, inMorell, In Person . . ., p. 13; Charles Nnolim, “Dialectic as Form: Pejorism in the Novels of Armah,” African Literature Today, 10 (1979), 207-223; and Leonard Kibera, “Pessimism and the African Novelist: Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 14, 1 (1979), 64-72. 12

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 253. 13

Ali Mazrui, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo (London: Heinemann, 1971),

p. 77. 14

Ibid., p. 77.

15

Armah, Two Thousand Seasons, p. 321.

Editor's Note: Quotations from Armah’s novels in the above essay have been shortened for purposes of this publication.

Ayi Kwei Armah and the “I” of the Beholder D. S. Izevbaye

How often the unconnected eye finds beauty in death—the women looked at . . . whiteness, saw famine where the men saw beauty, and grew frightened for our people. from Two Thousand Seasons

The theme of beauty and the “I” of the beholder is central to Armah’s fiction.1 It is the starting point for his social ideas about old Africa and contemporary Africa. In his treatment of the theme he makes a distinction between two kinds of beauty—an active, external beauty whose power makes the beholder’s eye a mere receiver of impressions, and a passive, ideal beauty hidden in nature and thus challenging the beholder to test his ability to penetrate the object to the beauty beyond. The eye of the beholder thus becomes a moral organ and an index to his moral integrity, since “the perception of beauty is so dependent on the soul’s seeing.”2 This view of beauty has strongly affected the conception of plot and incident in Armah’s fiction. Just as the strong moral tone in his writing gives his plot and incident a ritual movement, so is the text flooded with images of seeing and hearing. Even the characters are generally not whole persons but active and passive senses, like the watchers and listeners, the seers and hearers listed in the paragraphs which introduce the characters in Two Thousand Seasons. This preoccupation does not, however, limit Armah to a philosophical interest in the question of beauty and the subjective character of seeing. It is his contribution to the debate on Black aesthetics. It therefore has a political relevance for the celebration of Black civilizations which has now become a major twentieth-century theme. Both the philosophical statement and its political relevance for contemporary Africa are embodied in 44 An African Fable,”3 a story constructed after the theme of a knight’s quest for an ideal

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AYI KWEI ARMAH

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which later appears to him in the form of a grail or lady. In this complex little tale an inexperienced warrior mistakes the uncontrolled throb of his own heart for a woman’s cry of distress and, because of an imperfection in his vision, becomes a betrayer where he should have been a liberator. This tale contains the philosophical kernel of themes to bloom later in Armah’s fiction: postindependence disillusionment in Africa, the sense of the beautiful as a shibboleth for leaders and liberators, and the theme of Pan-Africanism. In the warrior’s rape of the woman we have the theme of the strong taking advantage of the weak, as a conqueror exploits a people he claims to have saved from oppression. This retold tale of disillusionment has been preceded by various versions presented in a more explicit form, from Peter Abraham’s A Wreath for Udomo through Kongi’s Harvest and A Man of the People, until we arrive at its contemporary, Bound to Violence. In the new philosophical context in which Armah places it, the story of the new African ruler betraying the people he should help is given its specific political meaning through the use of a symbolic but nevertheless identifiable landscape which the warrior traverses as he wanders south through desert, scrub, and forest, to arrive at the seashore goal where he displaces an older warrior whom he finds raping the woman. The comparable sexual license of the conquerors and kings in Two Thousand Seasons becomes a figure for the rulers’ exploitation of land and people, and the way they perceive beauty becomes a kind of moral test, as it is also in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Fragments. The two types of beauty which Armah distinguishes in “An African Fable” give us an insight into the psychological impotence of the hero of The Beautyful Ones. While “the man’s” awareness of true beauty stimulates a powerful revulsion against the corrupt path to wealth taken by the new middle class, his power of perception is nevertheless too inactive to resist the impressions of beauty which it receives from the shiny trinkets from Europe: There were things here . . . with a beauty of their own that forced the admiration of even the unwilling. ... He could have asked if anything was supposed to have changed after all, from the days of chiefs selling their people for the trinkets of Europe. But he thought again of the power of the new trinkets and of their usefulness, and of the irresistible desire they brought. . . . the thought ran round and round inside his head that it would never be possible to look at such comfortable things and feel a real contempt for them.4 What poses the social problem in The Beautyful Ones is, however, not the inability to purchase foreign trinkets but the ordinary question of daily bread. The economic gap between the minister Koomson and “the man”—between ruler and ruled, that is—prepares the way for the class conflict prescribed by

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the Marxists as a solution to social inequality. But the language in which the plight of the poor is described suggests their capacity for endurance and hope rather than their readiness for confrontation. It is still a few days to the end of the month when the novel opens, and the author sees it through the eyes of his characters as Passion Week when life is “not as satisfactory as in the swollen days after pay day.” In spite of the figure of religious suffering used here, the image of pregnancy suggests a capacity for hope on the part of the author and his characters. The beauty of the flower in the last chapter has an indirect link with the Passion Week of the first chapter, and the flower is also presented enclosed in an oval shape—an egg or ovary—awaiting the birth of beauty as the workers’ Passion Week preceded the birth of the day of comfort. Armah’s art is thus too ambiguous for us to see a simplified Marxist solution in it, and his critique of socialism in “African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?”5 is a criticism of theories built on simple Marxist oppositions. The importance of African family connections in the plot of his first two novels is an acknowledgment that there are ways in which African family interests can act against African socialism. The artless dishonesty of Koomson the minister and the passivity of “the man” in The Beautyful Ones can both be traced to family demands on the individual. Because of his loyalty to family, “the man” identifies too closely with Koomson’s motives, if not with the means he adopts, for him to have been intended as a class representative in an impending struggle. Perhaps it is this sympathy for Koomson’s motives which moves “the man” to help Koomson out of a tight spot during the coup. Fragments is essentially a representation of the themes of The Beautyful Ones, using the benefit of the author’s personal experience of the extended family. It contains basically the same cast of characters and roles that we find in The Beautyful Ones. “The man” is now named Baako Onipa (“Onipa” is Akan for “man”), and Brempong (i.e., “an important person”) is mostly Koomson re-christened, although he now trails a larger retinue of relatives and hangers-on, and is a “been-to.” His initials, “H. R. H.,” foreshadow Armah’s denunciation of all forms of African royalty in Two Thousand Seasons. Although the first two novels are similar in plot and characterization, the opposition of characters takes place at a higher social level in Fragments. In The Beautyful Ones Koomson was once an uncouth dockhand now risen to be minister, while “the man” is a secondary school drop-out denied university education by lack of opportunity. In Fragments, on the other hand, the two protagonists are equipped with their education to join the new middle class, and are equal, at least theoretically. Baako is denied entry into this class because of his refusal to accept their behavioral patterns. He discovers for himself what it is to be socially isolated when the asylum walls rise around him. And his mother’s confession now comes like a belated lesson:

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“We come to walls in life, all the time. If we try to break them down we destroy ourselves. I was wanting you to break down and see the world here, before I saw you yourself were a wall.”6 Refused entry by his own professional kind and denied emotional support by his kin, he is only let through the gates of madness. The situations developed by Armah in his novels appear to close some of the main social options for Africa. We might summarize these situations into a statement of this kind: on the one hand, the alliance between the privileged class and the poor is arranged by the extended family which ensures the flow of material benefits from rich to poor relations; this reduces the chances of class confrontation. But then family demands for a share in the rewards of individual ability and training discourage maximum fulfillment for the average gifted individual. This is a very crude summary of what happens to Brempong and Baako in Fragments. We may ignore two bits of evidence in order to develop this theme: first, there are hints within the novel that Baako had neurotic tendencies before his return to Ghana, and second, there is the important fact that to give a character in a ritual-oriented society the first name “Baako” (“lonely one”) is to encourage us to see his malady as a congenital one rather than a means devised by the author to make a social comment. Whatever the case, Baako’s progress to full madness is intensified by the family’s general lack of real regard for individual feeling. Brempong is sturdy and crafty enough to bear the weight of family demands. But an individual as sensitive and intelligent as Baako can see in these demands only his own death and the sacrifice of his personal talents. Although Juana, his Puerto Rican friend, cannot understand what Baako’s grandmother means when she tells her that the family “tried to kill” Baako, the essay draft in which Baako uses the Melanesian Cargo Cult as a model for interpreting the Ghanaian extended family institution clarifies for Baako and for the reader the ritual meaning of family expectations. The ritual death of traveling out to return with cargo for the community is successfully enacted by Brempong and Araba’s child (who, unlike Brempong, suffers actual death). The plot also provides instances when the ritual proves abortive, in the stories of Skido, the driver who brings cargo but dies in spite of fulfilling the symbolic death of traveling out, and Baako, who dies symbolically by traveling out but is rejected because he brings no cargo. This rejection by society is also ritually performed in The Beautyful Ones. Koomson, the corrupt minister, ritually repeats the public crimes he has committed by eating and vomiting what he has eaten. His subsequent escape through the latrine hole and by sea is the national penalty for his failure to distribute cargo to a wider group than his immediate relations. In other words, he is punished for an anti-social act rather than for the sin itself. The ritual

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movement of the last three chapters defines the area of social taint. Before Koomson’s expulsion, the necessity for social purification is made evident by excremental symbolism. The symbolism works with a logic that is Freudian: eating is impure, excretion is a form of purification. The result of this attitude to food and latrines is the hero’s recoil from all forms of sensuality, which gives the novel its impression of a horrifying passivity: The thought of food now brought with it a picture of its eating and its spewing out, of its beginnings and endings, so that no desire arose asking to be controlled. . . . Sometimes it is understandable, the doomed attempt to purify the self by adding to the disease outside. . . . The nostrils, incredibly, are joined in a way that is most horrifyingly direct to the throat itself and to the entrails right through to their end.7 “The man’s” oversensitive sense of smell is similar to the reaction of Soyinka’s Sagoe, another character who uses the latrine as a haven to which one may retreat from an oppressive social order. The eyes and nostrils of Armah’s hero are really moral organs, however. “The man” functions as the artistic conscience of the work, although he is not exclusively so. His obsession with corruption is obliquely commented on through various parables like those of Rama Krishna, the recluse who would escape corruption but rots before he dies, and the picture of the man-child brought to school by Aboliga the Frog. Translated into political terms, the parable of the man-child preaches cultural relativism by its insistence on the universality of corruption. Corruption is in the nature of things, and the degree of corruption is relative to the time it takes to bridge the space between the beginning of growth and its end. The insanity of “the man’s” recoil from contact appears most effectively in the scene where his wife’s Caesarean scar prevents him from making love to her. He is not therefore to be expected to read the more subtle lessons of inescapable decay and perpetual renewal written even in water: ... the water escaping through a gap made by the little dam and the far side of the ditch had a cleanliness which had nothing to do with the thing it came from. . . . Far out, toward the mouth of the small stream and the sea, he could see the water already aging into the mud of its beginning.8 In spite of these comments on the involvement of ripeness in rottenness, the man s reaction is not wholly subjective. The smell of physical corruption which Koomson brings to “the man’s” house on his second visit is noticed— significantly—by a child, but not by an adult (the watchman who “did not seem to notice the smell”). Although community is not offered as the place of

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salvation and well-being for the individual in The Beautyful Ones, we must see u the man’s” return to community, however reluctant, as an acceptance of responsibility to his family. In Fragments, individualism is not accepted as an alternative to a corrupt community, even though the talented individual who suffers in this work may not look to the group for his salvation. Of the chapter titles (which are used as comments on the action within each chapter), two, “Gyefo” (“savior”) and “Osagyefo” (“savior in war”), support the idea tentatively offered in the novel that such individuals may look for support only in the bond between one individual and another. But the idea is rejected, not developed. When Juana says that “salvation is such an empty thing when you are alone,” back comes Teacher Ocran’s reply that one would not find it in the market place. However, Baako’s madness is the author’s ironic comment on the chances of individualism. In Fragments, as in The BeautyJul Ones, the question of value is tied to the problem of seeing. The individual is imperfect, a fragment from the whole. His vision is thus subjective; it is not, however, a distortion of truth. It is a reflection of social imperfection, a mirror of that which is not beautiful. Its reflection is justified in so far as it does not invite an adjustment of the seeing lens. But its true value is not in the accuracy of the lens but in its diagnosis of the presence of rot and the need for a cure. This problem gets its sharpest focus in the scene where the stranger Juana describes Baako’s isolation as “going against a general current” and receives as a reply Baako’s ambiguously chosen substitute: “as a matter of fact it’s beginning to look like a cataract to „ ~ me. The cataract which caused the partial blindness of Naana, Baako’s grandmother, has the same source in the historical experience which brought the malady of madness to people like Baako. It also suggests that the extended family practice was never a “current” even in the past, because the cargo mentality caused the ancestors to sell their own people to any White slaver who came along. Despite her physical blindness, however, Naana’s seeing is the nearest thing to completeness in the novel because she sees not the surface gleam of trinkets, but the higher Platonic beauty described in “An African Fable.” She is not an isolated individual like Baako because she can relate to “Nananom”—the community of ancestors living underground. Her vision is complete and inclusive because it contains both the wholeness of the past and the fragments of the present: Y>

The larger meaning which lent sense to every small thing and every momentary happening years and years ago has shattered into a thousand and thirty useless pieces.9 Because Naana’s values belong to a community of the past, her voice is merely

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the voice of the singular person left over from the past, as her name, Naana, is the singular form of Nananom. Armah’s criticism of honored African institutions like the extended family and his frequent suggestion that the initiative for the slave trade came from Africans themselves are best seen against his argument in favor of a realistic appraisal of the African past and the future of Africa. Such realism is the topic of the conversation between Baako and his boss, Asante-Smith. Asante-Smith’s objection to the allusions to slavery in Baako’s film script is countered by Baako’s retort that slavery has everything to do with the African past. Behind Baako’s anger is the knowledge of a suffering community of slaves betrayed by their rulers. The true test of Armah’s attitude to the African past is his depiction of suffering as a communal experience, especially in Two Thousand Seasons. Although his first two novels deal with suffering as the experience of individuals, his heroes are individuals only because they are set against their community. Even as individuals they stand for something larger than themselves in the sense that not only does the author vest some of his themes and values in them, but he also makes them the representatives of other suffering individuals in society. Moreover, the centrality of the first person narrator in the first two novels is mainly an instrument for sounding the depths of social discord, even though the nature of the seeing by either hero is done in a very personal manner. But whatever resonances of group suffering the author manages to strike by giving his characters generic names and developing their problems through his use of social institutions, suffering is most effectively conveyed in the novels through the individual experience, as when on-coming madness is seen through Baako’s eyes. The irony in the author’s treatment of character and experience in the novels prevents us from interpreting too simply the later argument in Two Thousand Seasons that the individual is nothing, the group everything. What the argument does is to reinforce the horror of isolation which marks Armah’s works. It is only in The Beautyful Ones that we are clearly shown how close the relationship between individual suffering and a communal experience of it can be. But an author is a chameleon figure endowed with the power to assume the color of his characters’ emotions. When Armah claims and uses this privilege, he successfully focuses on the group while using the experience of the individual. He achieves this simply by leaving things unsaid and refusing to identify the actual sufferer among the group of three boys who flee from the dogs of the White man whose garden they have just raided. The outlines of the incident are clearly enough sketched to be an individual experience although it is an experience with which many African children can identify. Such a lot of mangoes and such big almonds to have to leave

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behind, and the hole is far too small and the thorns are cruelly sharp, coming through the khaki all the painful way into the flesh. The backward glance brings terror in the shape of two dogs, and they look much larger than any angry father. . . . Can a dog also roll a child over and leave it feeling thoroughly beaten by life?10 The suffering here is given wider relevance because its recall by the listening man is stimulated by the speaking teacher’s account of a parallel experience. Here we can at best only try to explain the method by seeing it as the experience of either three boys coalesced into one, or of one boy made to serve for three. A slightly different version of the method occurs in a scene in Fragments where Baako and Juana roll down the sandy beach to dry their skin. The incident is seen through Juana’s eyes alone and we feel the tactile sensation more fully than we do the group frenzy of the worshippers who roll down the beach in Chapter Two, although as far as actual sensations go, Juana’s experience should be far less intense than that of the group. The group frenzy is seen—can only be seen—mainly from the outside, and it becomes less meaningful because it invites less sympathy. In Two Thousand Seasons, as in Chapter Six of The Beautyful Ones, Armah opts for a narrator in the plural, in contrast to the personalized narrators who dominate his first two novels in the manner of the conventional novel. The plural voice is suitable for the theme of an oppressed community which he develops in the fourth novel. But it demands that the author surrender his chameleon privilege to enter into and identify with the individual when the suffering of the group is being portrayed. Here is Armah’s re-creation of a slave-branding scene: The askaris brought another captive forward and burned the mark into her flesh. When we had all been burnt the slave driver took the calabash and the horn from the woman. . . . Then walking up to each of us he dipped a piece of cloth in it and rubbed our raw wounds with the mixture.11 One cannot help noticing the hiatus in this report. The swift transition from the third person singular, “burned . . . her flesh,” to the first person plural, “when we had all been burnt,” leads us to see in the deliberate suppression of the first person singular a reluctance to identify with the individual, or perhaps even to acknowledge his existence. The reason for this is made clear not only by the chosen narrative focus but also by the credo announced at the book’s close: “There is no beauty but in relationships. Nothing cut off by itself is beautiful. . . . The group that knows this . . . [is] itself a work of beauty.” Armah is consistent in his portrait

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of the migrant Blacks in this novel. Individualism is not allowed. Even Anoa, the prophetess whose utterance defined the path to the people’s salvation, is not any one individual because “she was not even the first to bear that name.”12 If the suffering of a community is often less intense in this work than the suffering of individuals in the first two novels, it is nevertheless consistent with the function of Ann ah’s novel in showing that suffering is less unbearable when shared. In fact, in “African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?,” we come upon Armah’s definition of community as “shared suffering and shared hopes.” This is the foundation for his attitude toward individualism on the one hand and socialism on the other. Placed against this unambiguous preference for the group rather than the individual in this novel, the intensity of the focus on flawed individuals in his first two novels shows up as a call for social reform rather than a distorted view of society. This applies to the criticism of Nkrumah’s Ghana in both the first two novels and the essay, where the satirical emphasis falls on the gap between word and deed. The definition of socialism in the popular language of the latrine graffiti in The Beautyful Ones is both a criticism and a reminder: “socialism chop make I chop.” The emphasis shifts from satire in The Beautyful Ones to patriotic history and exhortation in Two Thousand Seasons. It is easy to draw a parallel between the career of a committed writer and the emphases in his writing. We would not therefore learn much from pointing out that Why Are We So Blest?, a novel in which Arm ah develops the theme of human isolation and pessimism first sketched in “Contact,”13 was published when he was in the United States as a visiting lecturer. But there must be an extra-literary significance in the East African publication of Two Thousand Seasons, a work which urges the return to true socialism on the part of all Africans, now that Arm ah is living in Tanzania, the land where Nyerere’s practical experiment with African socialism has been launched. This does not necessarily imply agreement with the policy which preceded the experiment, for Nyerere was as much a target of Armah’s criticism in the socialism essay as Nkrumah was. Published in the Year of Ujamaa, the essay is critical of the Tanzanian program for being “rich in sacerdotal sanctimonious piety as it is poor in political realism.” But the Arusha declaration has at least one realistic feature worth mentioning here: the insistence that socialism must have a local, even rural, base. This view is extended to Nyerere s stand on Pan-Africanism, an issue on which he disagrees with Nkrumah, when he insists that African political leaders must first deal with local realities as a prelude to continental unity.14 The issues of socialism, Pan-Africanism, and local realities are important in Armah s work. The satire in the first two novels begins from the confrontation between African socialist theories and the reality of national life. Theories are after all only fictions, as we infer from “African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?”:

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. . . the socialist tradition [is] ... a mytho-poetic system. The greatest source of power and influence available to the socialist tradition is its acceptance and imaginative use of the archetypal dream of total liberation, ... the thoroughgoing negation of the repressive facts of real life.15 But it is as if Armah had set his sights too low when he dealt with national problems in his first two novels, for he later adjusts the focus in Two Thousand Seasons by developing the Pan-African theme implied in “An African Fable” along the lines of earlier Pan-African novels, from CaselyHayford’s Ethiopia Unbound and William Conton’s The African to Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence. To realize the full significance of Two Thousand Seasons, it is important to see it ultimately as fiction, a mytho-poetic system accepting and making use of the achetypal dream of total liberation. And like the socialist tradition which Armah analyzes in his essay, it is constructed after a Marxist mytho-poetic model: it locates an imaginary African Eden, the Way of Reciprocity, in the pre-migrations past of the Africans in the novel, and projects a socialist heaven in its hope for the recovery of the Way. Although Armah did not approve of the name “Kenya’s Bible” given to the Kenyan document on socialism,16 Two Thousand Seasons is manifestly intended as “Africa’s Bible” because of the explicitness of its moral exhortation and the Pan-African manner in which it draws its characters’ names from all over the continent. The very thinly disguised names and the historical framework it adopts imply a denial that this work is primarily fiction, while its grave relevance for the present commits us to an ethical goal that is irresistible. But we recall that in citing the Kenyan document in support of his criticism of African socialist theories, Armah argues that socialist intellectuals are so busy condemning religion that they do not see how they are themselves creating a religious system. As the author distrusts formal religion, Two Thousand Seasons is offered as a kind of ethical manifesto rather than a bible for Blacks. Nevertheless its combination of poetic form and social theory brings us close to a magical view of art. But it is the method rather than the message which tells us how to place the novel. The style is probably its most important achievement. In this work Armah develops what promises to be one of the major literary styles in Africa, finding its base in the same tradition that encouraged Aidoo’s dramatic style. The writing is not merely oral, but oracular. Its imagery shows a preference for that which is fundamental and unchanging. The poetic effect of the prose is sustained without verbal inflation and dead metaphor. The essential simplicity of the style is sustained by calling an object by its name, not its praise name. Thus Armah avoids the convention which enables an orator to wrap his truths and untruths in mere words. Here kings are surrounded by “flatterers,”

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not “counselors,” and the recollection of the past is a remembrance rather than “history.” “Remembrance” suggests that memory fails, that only what is relevant is remembered for the present and for posterity, while history implies inclusiveness, accuracy, and objectivity. The novel is similarly stocked with folklore elements and motifs which, with the theme of Black diaspora, give pattern and direction to the work. Within the large tidal movement marked out by the theme of migrations we find the tinier waves of rhythm achieved through the use of structural parallelism, formal repetition, and the repeated return to the motif of flowing water: Springwater flowing to the desert, where you flow there is no regeneration. . . . Woe the headwater needing to give, giving only to floodwater flowing desertward. Woe the link from spring to stream. Woe the link receiving springwater only to pass it on in a stream flowing to waste . . .17 The literary model is the traditional dirge of Ghana. The function of the dirge, according to Professor Nketia, is to involve the group in the suffering of the individual, and to lessen individual grief by channeling it into collective grooves.18 The result is artistic pleasure, rather than pain, an experience of beauty which every hearer and every beholder should find in Armah’s peepshow into Africa’s past and present.

Notes 1

Armah has written four novels so far: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (London: Heinemann, 1969, first published in 1968); Fragments (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1970); Why Are We So Blest? (New York: Doubleday, 1971); and Two Thousand Seasons (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973). All quotations are from these editions. 2

Armah, Two Thousand Seasons, p. 285.

3

Armah, “An African Fable,” Presence Africaine, 68 (1968), 192-196.

4

Armah, The Beautyful Ones . . ., pp. 170, 175, 177 passim.

Armah, “African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?,” Presence Africaine. 64 (1967), 6-30. 6

Armah, Fragments, p. 253.

7

Armah, The Beautyful Ones . . ., pp. 28, 47-48passim.

Hbid., p. 27.

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33

Armah, Fragments, p. 280.

10

Armah, The Beautyful Ones . . ., pp. 79-80.

n

Armah, Two Thousand Seasons, pp. 184-185.

12

The Ghanaian legend of Anoa has been re-interpreted by another Ghanaian writer, Ama Ata Aidoo, in her Anowa (London: Longman, 1970). 13

Armah, “Contact,’’ The New African, IV, 10 (December 1965), 244-246,

248. 14

See: Raph. Uwechue (ed.), Interview with Nyerere, Africa, 21 (May 1973),

13. 15

Armah, “African Socialism . . .,” 8 (italics mine).

16

“Kenya’s Bible” is Kenyatta’s description of Sessional Paper no. 10 (May 4, 1965), African Socialism and its Application to Planning in Kenya, as Armah notes in his essay. 17

Armah, Two Thousand Seasons, p. ix.

18

J. H. Nketia, Funeral Dirges of the Akan People (Achimota, 1955), p. 8: “‘ One mourns one’s relation during the funeral of another person,’ . . . says the Akan maxim. . . . Grief and sorrow may be personal and private, nevertheless Akan society expects that on account of a funeral they should be expressed publicly through the singing of the dirge. ”

Literature and African Identity: The Example of Ayi Kwei Armah Kofi Anyidoho

One of the virtues of Creative Writing is that apart from letting us see the way things happen to be now, it also opens our vision to the way things were in the past, and the way they might be in the future. In fact, at its best, Creative Writing engages the reader in a constant interactive process between the past, the present and the future, calculated to make educated persons not passive endurers of present conditions, but active protagonists aware of past causes, and willing to use their awareness to help shape future results. That being the case, the work of creative writers is socially necessary, and a society that makes no arrangements to educate its own creative writers, condemns itself to consume the literature of alien societies as its spiritual staple diet. Such a society doesn’t create and re-create its own values. It is content to borrow those of other societies. Like all borrowers in a merciless world, it ends up paying high interest rates and exhorbitant loan service charges in the cultural form of irrational consumer habits and suicidal behaviour patterns. Ayi Kwei Armah, in West Africa (May 20, 1985), 994

The creative mind behind Ayi Kwei Armah’s work is one engaged in a continuing dialogue with Africa’s tormented history. Sometimes, it is content to merely recall the facts, however terrifying and despairing they may be. Often, it queries the facts of history, analyzing them with the careful eyes of the post-mortem surgeon. But beyond the dual role of the recorder and analyzer, there is the ultimate role of the visionary re-creator. Following the metaphor of disease so widespread in Armah’s work, the creative mind first

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concerns itself with diagnosis and then treatment of current and recurrent societal ill health. For its most vital and enduring work, however, it moves into the area of preventive medicine. To fully appreciate the transition from the one role to the other, we must take in his work as a whole. Accordingly, this paper shall examine aspects of all his five published novels and also some of his literary essays, especially the series being currently run by West Africa magazine. THE ARTIST FIGURE The relationship between literature and the search for African identity in Ayi Kwei Armah’s work may well begin with a look at the artist figure as he presents it in his writing. In The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, the artist figure appears only indirectly, mainly in the limited role of a mere recorder of history. “The sweet sadness of Congo music,” or the slow, sad highlife songs “that said too painfully much to the listening ear” may make us wonder about the “few people who are seeing things and saying them.” But the beauty of these artists’ work is marked by a sense of failure: “Poets who have failed” (p. 61). In this role of faithfully recording an unpleasant reality, the artist’s work induces despair, sometimes becoming an escape into impotence, “raising thoughts of the lonely figure finding it more and more difficult to justify his own honesty” (p. 59). In Fragments, the artist, Baako Onipa, emerges as the protagonist armed with some dream of using images of film scripts, authentic African images, to speak to and for an illiterate audience. He wouldn’t do the usual kind of writing. But this artist’s hope of doing some real life’s work is doomed to failure. From Melanesian cargo mythology, he should have learned that it is not enough to merely wait for a future fulfillment of dreams: “the phenomenon of hope is incomplete without an incorporated act of faith” (p. 228). The basic lack of faith pursues the artist into Armah’s third novel, Why Are We So Blest? The artist translator Solo Nkonam desires to dedicate himself to a life of beautiful truths, even in the midst of ugliness, but without an incorporated act of faith in himself, all he is aware of is despair, trying in vain to escape from his “guilty feeling of impotence” (p. 55). His impotence is all the more painful because he hears his call to arms so clearly: ... In the world of my people that most important first act of creation, that rearrangement without which all attempts at creation are doomed to falseness, remains to be done. Europe has hurled itself against us—not for creation, but to destroy us, to use us for creating itself. America, a growth out of Europe, now deepens that destruction. In this wreckage, there is no creative art

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outside the destruction of the destroyers. In my people’s world, revolution would be the only art, revolutionaries the only creators. All else is part of Africa’s destruction, (p. 231) *

The emphasis here is on the artist as a creator of new values. Baako and Solo remain mere recorders of our failures, and it is in this sense fhat they too fail to achieve their own chosen goals. They record and analyze their society’s and their own failures, but they are overwhelmed by a sense of terminus and futility; they lack energy to create new directions into a fruitful future. It is in Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers that the artist finally overcomes paralysis and is no longer “a passive endurer of present conditions.” Instead, we find him “intensely committed to the substitution of another view of active history, with re-creating humanistic perspectives as inspirational alternatives to existing society” (Soyinka, 1976, p. 110). NAMES AND AFRICAN IDENTITY In Armah’s work, there is a symbolic value to the use of names. Personal names, especially, frequently serve as keys to the cultural and social identity of characters. The loss or retention of a true African consciousness and identity is often indicated by the name a character bears. Isanusi in Two Thousand Seasons foretells of a time when we have lost our way completely, lost even our names; when you will call your brother not Olu but John, not Kofi but Paul; and our sisters will no longer be Ama, Naita, Idawa and Ningome but creatures called Cecilia, Esther, Mary, Elizabeth and Christina, (p. 130) All Isanusi s disciples, the children of the way, retain their African names, a testimony to their identity. Those already lost to the White man’s world come with names that testify to their alienation. Such a being is “[t]he prince Ben turn, renamed Bradford George.” Sometimes one or two such names are not enough. In Fragments we encounter “the honourable Mr. Charles Winston Churchill Kessie and Henry Robert Hudson Brempong, the “been-to” whose whole soul is blasted by an insatiable thirst for the shiny things of the White man’s world. “There is something so terrible,” Arm ah tells us in The Beautyful Ones, “in watching a black man trying at all points to be the dark ghost of a European” (p. 95). We share such terror with “the man” in The Beautyful Ones as he moves through the government residential area on the hills: ... enough names of black men with white souls and names trying mightily to be white. In the forest of white men’s names,

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there were the signs that said almost aloud: here lives a black imitator. MILLS-HAYFORD . . . PLANGE-BANNERMAN . . . ATTOH-WHITE . . . KUNTU-BLANKSON. Others that must have kept the white neighbours laughing even harder in their homes. ACROMOND . . . what Ghanaian name could that have been in the beginning, before its Civil Servant owner rushed to civilize it, giving it something like the sound of a master name? GRANTS ON . . . more and more incredible they were getting. There was someone calling himself FENTENGSON in this wide world, and also a man called BINFUL. (p. 147) With Armah’s central characters, names begin to take on special significance beyond the expression of identity. They lead us into the very center of the character’s being, his fundamental conception of the self as a basis for action or inaction. The protagonist of The Beautyful Ones bears no name; he is simply identified as “the man.” But he is no Everyman type of character. His lack of a name is more a symptom of his near-total lack of any image of himself as a being with some control over his life and the world around him. He is paralyzed by an extreme case of identity crisis. He is a sleep-walker, a walking dead, a ghost, one “whose desire has nowhere to go” (p. 41). His mother-inlaw is convinced her grandchildren have a nobody for a father: Ei, my husband, you have nobody, nobody to buy you shoes, so your little toes will be destroyed. . . .You must know you have nobody, you are an orphan, a complete orphan, (pp. 143-144) “The man” seems to be forever trapped in what Frantz Fanon (1967, p. 8) describes as “a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region.” The protagonists of Armah’s next two novels are equally caught in this “zone of nonbeing.” Perhaps they try much harder to work out a consciousness of themselves as something more than passive endurers of present conditions. But their greatest efforts only serve to deepen their sense of isolation. Their all-consuming feeling of loneliness is appropriately borne out by their names: Baako Onipa (“LonePerson”), Solo Nkonam (“Lone Orphan”), Modin (“Black Man”). In contrast to these loners, the more positive, self-assured revolutionaries of the historical novels come with such names as Damfo (“Friend”), “Master Healer,” and “Soulguide.” The typical Armah protagonists are soul-searchers, craving for things of the mind and spirit rather than the heavy things of the flesh. Not that they have no use or need for material things, things that comfort the body. Like Naana, the blind old woman of Fragments, they seek “the inward way . . . open to [the] soul looking to find its home” (p. 282); all around them, there is only “death in the hot wet embrace of people who have forgotten that fruit is not a

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gathered gift of the instant but seed hidden in the earth and tended and waited for and allowed to grow” (pp. 282-283). “The man” would like to have the good things of life for his loved ones, but he would not take anything not earned through honest labor. Baako returns from America with no more than a suitcase, a portable typewriter, and a guitar. Meanwhile his mother and sister are dreaming of him as a bearer of cargo for their flesh. SQIO is troubled by nightmares because he has too much money in the midst of a people reduced to beggars. Densu seeks to be a healer, but Damfo warns him of the innumerable things a healer turns his back upon, “things that sweeten life for men.” A people who must forever consume things they have not worked to produce themselves are an enslaved people. Isanusi in Two Thousand Seasons sums up the fundamental cause of Africa’s sorrow following contact with the Arabs and then the Europeans: Did we not learn near the desert how priests and warriors are twin destroyers, the priest attacking the victim’s mind, the warrior breaking bodies still inhabited by resisting wills? We are not a trading people. . . . The traders are creators of unreasonable desires. Where the priest fails to make his victims willing slaves, and the soldier is impotent to make living slaves ... the trader enslaves the will itself, and men are led to want their own enslavement, thinking it is only the pleasure of owning things thev want. (pp. 153-154) This being the root cause of Africa’s loss of selfhood, the artist in Armah addresses itself to the consciousness of “active protagonists aware of past causes, and willing to use their awareness to help shape future results.” This tendency in Armah partly accounts for the many extended passages in his novels where action is suspended and the narrative becomes polemical moments of soul-searching and rigorous probing of the consciousness. The focus on consciousness and soul-searching is best seen in Armah’s treatment of Western education, and the alternative system of initiations he designs for the collective survival and prosperity of all Africans. EDUCATION AS MANIPULATION AND INSPIRATION Armah presents Western education for Africans essentially as a system of manipulation carefully organized to alienate the African from himself and his people s way of life. The detailed working of this system of mental slavery is best seen in Modin’s tragic career in Why Are We So Blest? The victim himself analyzes it for us. First, the objective: “The end of Western education is not work but self-indulgence. An education for worms and slugs” (p. 161).

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Its success story: the educated Africans as “contemptible worms . . . Exceptionally uncreative people.” Hence, Africa’s continued dependence on the Western world. How is this miracle achieved? We must follow Modin, the self-critical victim, through his career. Like him we must come to the realization that “[i]n the imperial situation the educational process is turned into a ritual for selecting slave traders” (p. 222). It begins and ends as “a series of jumps through increasingly narrower gates.” The first gate, Elementary School, eliminates the millions and pushes up a few thousand to the next gate, Secondary School, where thousands are dropped to make way for a few hundred. At the Sixth Form gate, a dozen, twenty, squeeze through, leaving hundreds stranded. Then the grand finale: University: Single survivors in the last reaches of alienation. The justification: “You are the only one”; “You are not like the others”; “You are the first ...” Then the system gives these single and alienated survivors the power “to regulate the lives of the millions, thousands, hundreds.” Thus they are used to justify “the thing that destroys them and uses them to destroy [their] people.” At the end of this “academic nonsense,” what work awaits them? “No work. Just small privileges. Bungalow, car, salary, allowances. Creature comforts for a mediocre creature” (pp. 222-224). Modin’s self-denunciation is total. With his chain of degrees, he is to be no more than a privileged servant of the White empire, a factor supervising his people’s enslavement in return for small privileges. But there is a price to pay for such privileges: loneliness and a search for self-annihilation, the terrifying disease of those like Solo, Modin, and Dr. Earl Lynch, “a black man irretrievably caught in total whiteness, humanity at its most destroyed” (p. 163). Modin’s soul-searching leads him to finally repudiate the privileges open to him following his successful defense of his dissertation. But his alienation is already so far gone that his desire for a revolutionary alternative finds no fruitful direction to follow. He is so far cut off from his people’s real struggle that he is reduced to an inactive revolutionary. The soul-searcher becomes a searcher for self-annihilation, looking for a series of pleasant but futile escapes from loneliness. Symbolically, this “exceptionally uncreative” Ph.D. walks away into the desert, an “exceptionally barren space.” There he meets his bizarre and symbolic end. But the revolutionary alternative to this process of self-alienation remains viable: The revolutionary ideal is an actual, working egalitarian society.

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What existed before [the] European invasion: a whole society organized for self-defense, (p. 222) To see the actual workings of such a system of education, we must turn first to Two Thousand Seasons. The underlying principle of the system proposed here is inspiration, not manipulation. It seeks to lead the students into themselves to discover their hidden talents, cultivate these talents, and then put their skills to the service of society. Its direction is contrary to that of the system examined earlier. Rather than alienate and ultimately annihilate the self by turning it against society, the self is inspired to come to fruition within a communal context. The process itself is seen as a series of initiations. Because it is a communal enterprise, it fosters love and comradeship rather than competition, hate, and loneliness. And because it is self-discovery and self-fulfillment, there is pleasure, not pain, in tackling even the most difficult tasks. Beginning with the pleasurable and instructive games and dances of childhood, the entire age group moves on to skills of protection. Significantly, “almost all reached the beginnings of the Fundi’s mastery.” Every member of the community must be ready and able to defend himself as well as others. Successively, the age group as a whole is initiated into various skills needed for the community’s survival and prosperity: farming, hunting, fishing, rowing, building, carving, leather work, metal work, clay molding, cloth weaving, the healing arts, “each season with its riddles, its proverbs and its songs, its dances . . . pleasant seasons in which skills already learned found constant deepening” (p. 134). Such education is at once comprehensive, practical, and, above all, productive and creative. It makes allowance for specialization, but only after a general grasp of all the basic skills is achieved. With as much as a quarter of the age group settling down to deepen their skills in farming, this society should not have to depend on food aid. Two things of special significance mark this system of initiations and preparation for productive living. The first has to do with the cultivation of a sense of purpose. The teachers quietly drive the point home: They told us it would always be fatal to our arts to misuse the skills we had learned. The skills themselves were mere light shells, needing to be filled out with substance coming from our souls. They warned us never to turn these skills to the service of things separate from the way. This would be the most difficult thing, for we would learn, they told us, that no fundi could work effectively when tom away from power, and yet power in these times lived far, immeasurably far from the way . . . They told us there was no life sweeter than that of the fundi in the bosom of his people if his people knew their way. But the life of a fundi whose people have lost their way is pain. All the excellence of

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such a fundi’s craft is turned to trash. His skills are useless in the face of his people’s destruction, and it is easy as slipping on a riverstone to see his craftsmanship actually turned like a weapon against his people, (pp. 134-135) The governing aesthetic of this system of education is what I have discussed as the aesthetic of the communal ethos (Anyidoho, 1982). It is this aesthetic that is highlighted in the other, especially significant dimension to this system: the initiation beyond initiations, the difficult path that leads to “the knowledge of a craftsmanship of the soul, the vocation of those who used to be the soulguide of our people, the rememberers of the way” (p. 139). Damfo in The Healers is such a person, and, in Two Thousand Seasons, Isanusi, the lonely senior fundi of the distant grove, is the master teacher who conducts this ultimate initiation. The group of twenty—eleven girls and nine boys out of the age group—is clearly a very select group. But they are selected not for excellence, waiting for praise and for privileges. Theirs is to be a life entirely devoted to the preservation of a people’s most precious possession—their soul. It is a lonely, hazardous task, but one that must be fulfilled if a whole people are not to be forever lost, enslaved by men of power among them with rotten souls needing to use others for the comfort of their flesh. This generation is extremely lucky to produce as many as twenty candidates. Others barely yield one. The revolutionary potential of this group of devotees is proven by the decisive role they later play in the successful uprising on the slave boat and the capture and destruction of the destroyers. But their work is a life-time work; for there is no end to the greed of kings and their hirelings. ON HISTORY, MYTH, AND VISION Much of recent scholarship on Armah has focused on his peculiar dialectics of historical reconstruction and mythopoesis. Some have accused him of over-simplification, falsification of historical events resulting in “fantasy” (Achebe, 1982), or “a cartoon, comic-strip history” (Lindfors, 1980). Others have applauded his work as a much-needed and effective projection of the creative imagination from the past, through the present, into the future. The mythic value of his work receives special attention (Amuta, 1981; Fraser, 1980; Ngara, 1982; Okpewho, 1980, 1983; Soyinka, 1976). My own position is with this latter group. The argument, simply put, is that Armah’s chosen objective is a revolutionary and visionary ideal; the visionary ideal is not simply a retrieval of a past ideal but a reshaping of a future world free from the destructive factors of past and present conditions. A historian with his eyes on the future is under no obligation to merely reconstruct past events (Anyidoho, 1981).

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The value of Armah’s mythopoesis may be seen in terms of the following argument: There is some truth in the claim that change is possible only through myth, for myth can take many forms. It can reorganize the historical content in terms of modem perspectives. It can create an attractive vision defining in familiar cosmic terms the future possibilities of society. Myth can be used to celebrate the achievements of society, making them fall into an acceptable social order. (Kunene, 1980, p. 191) Chidi Amuta’s article, “Ayi Kwei Armah and the Mythopoesis of Mental Decolonization, ” addresses itself to a very central dimension of Armah’s work: his “desire to exorcise the African mind of the unsettling hangover of the phenomenon commonly referred to as the ‘colonial mentality,’ a state of mind in which the African seeks to view himself through Western eyes” (p. 45). As I have already suggested, such a desire partly explains the many polemical moments in Armah’s fiction. Most central to Armah’s vision is the mythic reconstruction of a united Africa, a vision of all people of African descent as one people. This is essentially a Pan-African vision, and it is necessary as a force to oppose and neutralize the sense of fragmentation and of weakness in the face of “world powers” which has reduced African peoples to scattered, easy prey for much better united opponents. The vision of Pan-Africa is most powerfully articulated in Two Thousand Seasons, a work defined by a largeness of scope not found in the other novels. Here, the destiny of the entire continent is called into action. The participants and their names are carefully chosen to represent the continent as a whole. Frantz Fanon (1968, p. 211) has observed that “[t]he native intellectual who decides to give battle to colonial ties fights on the field of the whole continent.” Armah’s fiction is clearly engaged in such a continental, racial battle. Modin in Why Are We So Blest? refuses to be identified with any one small country: “You didn’t say which country you were from. Were you ashamed?” It s not shame. I just think of our small states as colonial things. I’m an African.” (p. 176) After all, the name Modin” is a Ga word sometimes used to signify “Black Man or African. The Asante General Asamoa Nkwanta is led by Damfo to admit that he has wasted his life fighting for division. “These petty wars in which the [Asante] army gets sent to fight other black people is a waste.” After

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all, “the Asante are part of the Akan. The Akan in turn came from something larger” (pp. 175-183). Asamoa Nkwanta’s highest work becomes the prospect of destroying Sir Garnet Wolseley’s invading colonial forces. He fails to achieve his ultimate goal as Srafo Kra, soul of the army, but this is only because the greed of kings and queens would rather thrive on division among their people than protect them against destruction and enslavement by external forces. For the healers, as for the warrior, the strengthening of individual bodies is only a beginning: There will always be work for healers, even when the highest work is done. That highest work, the bringing together again of the black people, will take centuries . . . (p. 83) Armah’s concern with unity as a prerequisite for African identity and strength finds special expression in various departures from traditional values and ideals. Okpewho (1983, 1983a) makes a strong case for Armah’s achievements in the boldness with which he denounces certain old myths and replaces them with new ones which are in accord with his vision of a harmonious and fruitful life for his people. One of the most significant revisions of old values may be seen in what I have identified as collective heroism (Anyidoho, 1982), most fully realized in Two Thousand Seasons. The novel is clearly epic in scope and in intent, being concerned with the destiny of a whole people and making elaborate use of history, myth, and legend. But when it comes to characterization, Armah’s work parts company with the traditional epic design. There is a firm refusal to entrust the destiny of a whole people to a single person. In his communal ideal, he sees the traditional epic hero’s path as running contrary to the spirit of the way, the living way of interrelationships and, above all, of reciprocity. The traditional epic hero’s path to fame and to glory is often littered with too many corpses of too many “ordinary people.” The communal idea requires that the community at large share not only the hazards of struggle but also the fruits and glories of victory. In Armah’s visionary recreation of Africa’s history, the Mansa Musas, the Sundiatas, and all those legendary “hero” kings and emperors are vehemently denounced as “single peacocks strutting against each other’s glory” (p. 44). All the major victories for the people of the way in Two Thousand Seasons are won through collective heroism. There is the victory of the women of the harem against their “predator” lords, and there is also the victory of the revolt aboard the slave boat and the consequent capture of the enslavers’ stronghold, “the stone place.” The principle of communal heroism also translates into two very significant elements of style: symbolism and a narrative of the plural voice. Following upon the basic spring-desert symbolism in which the central confrontation in the novel is realized, Armah’s vision of an ultimate

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victory for his African people of the way reaches a symbolic climax in the following passage: Not one spring, not thirty, not a thousand springs will change the desert. For that change, the waters of the universe in unison, flowing not to coax the desert but to overwhelm it, ending its regime of death, that, not a single perishable spring, is the necessity, (p. xi) This unfailing dedication to the principle of collective heroism as the key to the realization of the ultimate communal ideal translates into what Webb (1980, 33-34) describes as “[t]he most significant formal aspect of Armah’s work”: the narrative of the plural voice. The first person singular is largely absent in the novel; on a rare occasion, it is introduced only to be immediately repudiated: “Saved myself apart from all of us?” Abena asked. Silence. “There is no self to save apart from all of us. What would I do with my life, alone, like a beast of prey?” (p. 174) Another major old myth that Arm ah repudiates and, in fact, reverses is the human value attached to the colors white and black. Traditionally, the color white is often regarded as a symbol of purity, victory, the divine, life itself, all things positive. On the contrary, there is no end to the variety of negative things painted black: blackmail, black cat, black sheep, black market, death, even the devil himself. For the Black man or woman to feel positive about him/herself, it is necessary that the mind is disabused of this widespread negative symbolic self-image. That is why in Armah ugliness and death and other negative concepts are associated with the color white, the color black transforming into the ultimate symbol of beauty and life. Every one of Armah’s ideal women is distinguished by the deep blackness of her color (Idawa in Two Thousand Seasons, p. 109; and Ajoa in The Healers, p. 64). Understandably, swift and absolute dichotomies such as the spring-desert and black-white symbolism have drawn very strong reactions to Armah’s work, including charges of anti-racist racism. It is nevertheless useful that we see such sharp dichotomies and opposing symbols and images as manifestations of a basic rhetorical stance that marks all of Armah’s work, including his literary essays. Armah almost always assumes a basic situation of conflict, a conflict situation that allows no neutral zones for the so-called impartial observer or commentator. He takes sides in this conflict, and compels his readers to also take a side, with or against him. Those who argue for a middle ground of compromise or reconciliation he denounces as pretenders. Going along with this basic assumption of opposing sides in a global

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conflict centered around racial consciousness is the feeling one gets that Armah has not only taken sides with his people, but also assumes in his writing that he is addressing his side, and for the benefit of his side of the conflict, though others on the other side may listen if they are so disposed. This audiencetargetting begins to emerge clearly in Why Are We So Blest? and comes to full realization in Two Thousand Seasons where it is subsumed under the narrative of the first person plural already discussed in this essay. This basic rhetorical stance parallels that of Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike in Towards the Decolonization of African Literature, a work whose rhetoric assumes an existing hostility which calls for a fighting posture as a guarantee to self-preservation, and the promotion of African values and identity. Such a stance is at work in Armah’s two essays dealing with the criticism of African literature: “Larsony, or Fiction as Criticism of Fiction” (1976), and the more recent “The View from PEN International” (1984). A very special aspect to Armah’s concern with African identity in literature is his concern for the language of African literature. Here too, his position is clearly Pan-African. The call for the promotion of African literature in African languages was made long ago by Obi Wali and recently taken up both in theory and in practice by such major writers as Ngugi. Fanon’s argument (1967, p. 38) that “[t]o speak a language is to take on a world, a culture” is gradually becoming a concern among various writers in and from Africa using colonial languages. Armah, following earlier calls by others with a Pan-African orientation such as Cheikh Anta Diop (1978, pp. 11-14) and Soyinka (1976), has recently called for a bold continental and unified solution to this old problem. He admits that present political arrangements such as the Organization of African Unity’s short-sightedness in holding onto the various tiny “national sovereignties” make the issue of a continental language for Africa problematic. But his long view of things does not consider the problem to be beyond solution: The problem is not insoluble. But any solution will depend on the choice of one common, central language. Once adopted, that African language will be taught as a compulsory language in all African schools, alongside the current official languages it will eventually replace. No African will be denied access to foreign languages, but all educated Africans will be competent in that one African language, so that by the time the continent is wholly literate, Africans conversing with one another will no longer need interpreters. (1985, 832) Armah, like Soyinka, advocates Kiswahili as the language currently most suited for adoption as a continental language of Africa. The achievement of such a dream would surely take the issue of literature and African identity to

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its most logical and ultimate point. And for those who despair in the face of the many current practical problems, Armah’s healer has words of courage: ... A healer needs to see beyond the present and tomorrow. He needs to see years and decades ahead. Because healers work for results so firm they may not be wholly visible till centuries have flowed into millennia. Those willing to do this necessary work, they are the healers of our people. {The Healers, p. 84)

References Achebe, Chinua (1982). An Interview, Times Literary Supplement, February 26. Amuta, Chidi (1981). “Ayi Kwei Armah and the Mythopoesis of Mental Decolonization,'’ Ufahamu, 10, 3:44-56. Anyidoho, Kofi (1981). “Historical Realism and the Visionary Ideal: Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons,” Ufahamu, 11, 2:108-130. (1982). “African Creative Fiction and a Poetics of Social Change, ” Komparatistische Hefte, 13(1986). Armah, Ayi Kwei (1969). The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Bom. London: Heinemann. (1974). Fragments. London: Heinemann. (1974a). Why Are We So Blest? London: Heinemann. (1973). Two Thousand Seasons. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. (1979). The Healers. London: Heinemann. (1976). “Larsony, or Fiction as Criticism of Fiction,” Asemka, 4:1-14. (1984). “The View from PEN International,” West Africa (November 26). (1985). “Our Language Problem,” West Africa (April 29). (1985a). “Teaching Creative Writing,” West Africa (May 20). Diop, Cheikh Anta (1978). Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federal State. Westport, Connecticut: Lawrence Hill & Co. Fanon, Frantz (1967). Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. (1968). The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Fraser, Robert (1980). The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah. London: Heinemann. Kunene, Mazizi (1980). “The Relevance of African Cosmological Systems to African Literature Today,” African Literature Today, 11:190-205. Lindfors, Bemth (1980). “Armah’s Histories,” African Literature Today, 11:85-96. Ngara, Emmanuel (1982). Stylistic Criticism and the African Novel. London: Heinemann.

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Okpewho, Isidore (1980). “Rethinking Myth,” African Literature Today, 11:5-23. (1983). “Myth and Modem Fiction: Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons,” African Literature Today, 13:1-23. (1983a). Myth in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Soyinka, Wole (1976). Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webb, Hugh (1980). “The African Historical Novel and the Way Forward,” African Literature Today, 11:24-38.

Editor's Note: Quotations from Armah’s novels in the above essay have been shortened and, in some cases, omitted for purposes of this publication.

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Parasites and Prophets: The Use of Women in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Novels Abena P. A. Busia

The Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah has written five novels to date: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Fragments (1970), Why Are We So Blest? (1972), Two Thousand Seasons (1973), and The Healers (1978). All but the third are set literally, or symbolically, in Ghana and in them Armah shifts between two central perceptions of women—woman as parasite, and woman as liberating prophet. Importantly, as we move through Armah’s works sequentially, the prophets eclipse the parasites. The major transition in this vision of women throughout the five novels is the concern of this paper. It must first be stated that but for the qualified exception of the female figures in Two Thousand Seasons, women in Armah’s novels never have roles independent of the novel’s hero or protagonist—always a man in a maledominated society. Women are always the lovers, wives, or blood relatives of the central male characters, and have significance in the texts only in so far as they affect those characters. Furthermore, another problem shared by prophets and parasites alike, is that these women, scattered throughout Armah’s texts, are frequently unsexed or choose to deny their sexuality. As we shall see, Armah never truly finds a resolution for the difficulty he has balancing the different forces of sex, love, and power, when exercised by women. Nonetheless, bearing these conflicts in mind, and taking the essentially secondary nature of their roles as given, we shall argue here that the roles played by women in Armah’s novels have undergone, if not a revolution, then at least a positive reformation throughout the texts. That is, Armah’s novels reveal two parallel motions concerning women, which operate in tension: on the one hand, the movement which liberates them from being predominantly symbols of oppression to being symbols of liberation; and on the other, that for the most part symbols of womanhood, perverse or idealized, are essentially all they are. Looking at the portraits of the women and the roles they play is one way of tracing the measure of resolution Armah finds in each text as he moves Reprinted from Ngambika by C.B. Davies and A .A. Graves, Africa World Press, 1986

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toward a greater understanding, or a more articulate explication, of the central problems he is exploring in all his works. For Armah, all oppression (whether social, political, or cultural), is a form of disease, and the source of all division among mankind. In each of his texts the same two fundamental problems are explored—the conflict between the private and social worlds in modern Africa and the crisis of divided loyalties this creates, as well as the difficulty, for the sensitive individual, of ordering the oppression and chaos of contemporary life into a comprehensive framework which takes account of the past as well as the present. So far as the portraits of women are concerned, in all five novels the division between parasites and prophets is stark. True to Armah’s equation of things white with evil, and black with spirituality, the parasites are either Westernized African women, or, as in the case of Aim6e Reitsch in Why Are We So Blest?, both Western and White. The prophets are those women who are seen as being true to the aspirations of Black African people, true to the ancient “way” that has long since been forgotten. In the two earliest novels, the female parasites are the mothers, wives, and sisters of the heroes. That is, they are always attached to the hearth. It is these “loved ones,” as they are called, who are portrayed as the burden on the soul of the struggling and suffering hero. They are, whether intentionally or not, seen as the oppressors. They make demands, generally material ones concerned with keeping up social appearances, which always provoke a storm of conflict in their men. Pitted against them are the liberating prophets. This conception of them springs primarily from the literal role they play in the fourth novel, Two Thousand Seasons, the only work in which women ever initiate any action. In that novel, the voices of the prophets are female, and, at several crucial moments in the history being recounted, it is the women who save the nation, often in battle against the men. Yet, though their roles are not always so prominent, the other novels do contain women who are, in great and small ways, contending with oppression—their role being to understand their men in adverse circumstances, and, wherever possible, guard them and give them solace. They are liberating prophets in the sense that, even when powerless, they have a vision which can protect their men and at least steer them in the direction of some kind of salvation. The stress in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Armah’s first novel, is on the pervasive corrosive effect of a corrupt society whose essential decay is symbolized by Armah’s much-discussed imagery of filth and dung. The central problem for the hero, simply called “the man,” is to try to reconcile his vision of a whole, healthy, and honest society with the needs of his “loved ones,” which can only be satisfied, it seems, through compromise of those very aspirations. His relationship to his loved ones then comes to represent the fundamental illness of a society based on an unacceptable conflict between

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loyalty to the family and loyalty to the community at large. The representatives of the family in the first two books are strongly female characters, and in The Beautyful Ones it is the wife and her mother who are seen as opposed to the service to the community that the man would like to be free to perform. They do not appreciate the sacrifice to their lives his refusal to become corrupted entails. They live in a world which is obsessed by the gleam 6f money, and the attendant glitter of prosperity, power, and success that it brings in its wake, no matter how the money is acquired. For example, the women see what they think will be a chance to share in this new and uncommon wealth by taking part in a fraudulent scheme concerning the ownership of a fishing boat, devised by the man’s ignorant former classmate, Koomson, now an influential Party dignitary and “Minister Plenipotentiary.” The women are to agree to the legal ownership of the boat on his behalf, in return for a share of the profits, for in the socialist republic in which the novel is set, a minister cannot own a profitable fishing boat operating under the rules of private capitalist enterprise. The women agree and are deceived. However, the man, while resisting this onslaught on his integrity, suffers nonetheless. His acute despair springs from his ability to understand and in some way sympathize with the needs and demands of his wife and family. His dilemma lies therefore in his sense of failure: he is the victim of their reproaches, which, when voiced, make him feel all the more guilty and responsible for the hopelessness of their situation. The family, not only the wife and mother-in-law but the children as well, are dependent upon him, and remain a constant burden to him. They are paradoxically passive, but oppressively prominent characters. Every aspect of daily life becomes a form of criticism of the man, and even their silence in their suffering becomes a reproach to him. His situation is not improved by the fact that his wife is not averse to undermining his position by voicing her criticism. In her philosophy, life is like a series of busy roads of all descriptions, and those who go far are those who, ignoring the possibility of accidents, learn to drive fast. It matters not to her that to “drive” means to learn to cheat the public and ride roughshod over those fellow travelers who are less capable citizens. She states in no uncertain terms that she considers her husband quite ineffectual and stupid. These unpalatable truths matter a great deal to the man, and he feels trapped. He remains trapped by his limited perception; and his feeling that it is the society, and not he, which is fundamentally wrong, remains instinctive. His spirit remains troubled and questioning, because he has no organized system of understanding. Living in his poverty, his sense of moral obligation intact, he has no faith or ideology to guide him. In this novel the only representative of the “prophets” is the enigmatic, once beautiful and hopeful Maanan, who goes mad. She is a shadowy figure said to be beautiful in body and in spirit, who haunts the painful reminiscences of the text. She is not a prominent figure, but as a friend to “the man” she

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stands in opposition to the kind of behavior displayed by his wife and her mother. Neither one of the troublesome “loved ones” nor one of those who has compromised with the corrupt power structure, she represents all those Ghanaian people at the time of Independence who followed the “leader,” were inspired by his ideals, and believed wholeheartedly that he was indeed a redeemer come to usher in a new and glorious age. It is her hopes, and through her those peoples’ hopes, which are recognized as the most betrayed. In the book it is Maanan who tries to teach the meaning of loving and communal unity, an endeavor which is to perplex all Arm ah’s central characters until he finds a way for them to express it in the social and political analysis which gives form to The Healers, the last of his novels to date. In The Beautyful Ones, it is best expressed in a scene by the waterside in which Maanan first teaches “the man” to smoke “pot,” or “wee” as it is called. The experience is a liberating one for our frustrated hero, and he learns to see many things for the first time, including Maanan’s true beauty, which becomes symbolic of the suffering of all women: It was as if Maanan’s face was all I would ever need to look at to know that this was a woman being pushed toward destruction and there was nothing she or I could do about it. She was smiling at me, but in myself I felt accused by a silence that belonged to millions and ages of women all bearing the face and the form of Maanan, and needing no voice at all to tell me I had failed them, I and all the others who have been content to do nothing and to be nothing at all all our lives and through all the ages of their suffering. So much of the past had now been pushed into the present moment at the edge of the salt water. I would have said something to Maanan if the things to say had not been so heavy, but even then I was sure she understood, that she had understood long before I had ever seen enough to ask her forgiveness, and that she had forgiven me as much as it was possible for the suffering to forgive those who only remain to suffer with them and to see their distress . . . Forgive me, Maanan, forgive us all if that is possible these days.1 Maanan, far more a symbol than a woman, prefigures the prophetic women of Two Thousand Seasons. It is she who teaches the men to try to reach out, and overcome the seemingly constricting putrefying surroundings, to see, physically and spiritually, the pure salt water away from the stagnant pools. But in the end Maanan goes mad, and is last seen wandering around the beach sifting the fine sand through her fingers in search of something inexpressibly lost. In her madness, Maanan sees most clearly that the hopes of her generation have been irretrievably lost, but “the man” realizes neither she nor anyone else can give

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him the answers, for they must come from within. He finds nothing to bridge the distances between the members of the community because he has no true understanding of the reasons for the dislocation. Only Manaan knows it is possible for the breach to be healed, but the moment to reach out was lost not only historically, but spiritually. There is a recognition that something more substantial needs to be found to bring the desired peace and enlightenment. The hopeful vision which ends the novel occurs when the man, having been cleansed by the sea, sees a legend painted on a mammy wagon which gives the title to the novel, “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Bom.” As in The Beautyful Ones, in Fragments the problem of the family being in conflict rather than in concert with the community remains to be resolved. We have again a similar division between those women who impose burdens and those who wish to bring salvation. And once again it is the two women of the household who have pinned all their hopes for the future on the return of the hero, Baako, to such an extent that their expectations become a weight upon his soul. He is required to share in all their aspirations: to make the dream of a large and comfortable home come true, and to enjoy the status of being someone who, by virtue of a Western education, is potentially a personage of much distinction. Their aspirations seem simple enough, but are therefore far more entrapping. They are presented as being based on an old and accepted tradition of the returning hero, the conquering son home from his travels bringing with him the fruits of his learning which produce miracles to bless the family. But there is a difference now: . . . We have the old heroes who turned defeat into victory for the whole community. But these days the community has disappeared from the story. Instead, there is the family, and the hero comes and turns its poverty into sudden wealth. And the external enemy isn’t the one at whose expense the hero gets his victory; he’s supposed to get rich, mainly at the expense of the community.2 The “loved ones” are not simply corrupt, but are presented as unknowingly seduced by the society in which they live. The values of this society remain firmly materialistic and pretentious. Typically the returning traveler not only generates a show of glory, but he must also enjoy the false elevation this gives him in the eyes of his family and the community at large. What matters is how ostentatious a show can be put on, no matter the impotence it hides. As is brought out most forcefully by the attitudes of his mother and sister, in the eyes of Baako’s family, the terrible failure of his foreign experience is dramatized by the fact that he returns home in shirt-sleeves rather than a suit, and carrying a guitar rather than bringing a new car, a refrigerator, or some other status object. Neither his sister nor his mother initially questions these values,

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although in the end the mother does change. One of the burdens she had placed on the back of her son was her hope that he would return to finish the grand house she had started to build for herself, in his honor. Although by her standards this would seem a reasonable expectation, she manages to understand her son and recognize that he views the world from a different perspective. She finally takes him to her half-built mansion to explain her dream, and apologize to him for having expected him to fulfill it. Thus she shows a humility and a capacity for growth which eludes her son. As the portraits of other characters indicate, her initial expectations represent the societal norm. Once again our hero, by regarding her as perverse, is demonstrably out of touch with the times. That it is the society at large, rather than the hero Baako, which is to be regarded as centrally at fault is reinforced by the crucial scene which describes the name-day ceremony of his baby nephew, the child born to his sister and her ineffectual husband. This incident is central to an understanding of the work because it dramatizes the profound spiritual dislocation of the family and the society of which it is a part, and for which it stands. This traditional ceremony, to welcome the newly arrived child and to thank the spirits of the ancestors for ensuring his safe arrival, has become perverted. In its new form it is a festive gathering during which the host family, in its quest for material goods, forces the guests to vie with each other to make the most outrageous contributions. The whole event is inauspicious; to begin with, the baby is bom premature. Then, to make matters worse, the mother and the sister move the ceremony forward three days to the fifth day after birth in order to capitalize on a pay day, instead of waiting until the eighth day, the day by which traditionally the newly arrived spirit will have decided whether he is staying, or whether he prefers to return to the world of the ancestors from which he has just arrived. The important aspect of these changes is the failure on the part of the rest of the family to learn from Naana, the grandmother, the original value of the ceremony. It is a measure of the social breakdown that even while she lives under the same roof, neither her daughter nor her granddaughter takes the trouble to consult or even to inform her of their plans. While she worries about the meaning of such a hastily called and secular gathering on the pretext of a spiritual ceremony, her daughter’s paramount concern is that the son upon whom she had placed such high hopes is refusing to wear a suit or tuxedo for the occasion. While Baako’s protest here is based on the rejection of the new forms, Naana is the one concerned with the spiritual perversion of customs. On the day itself Naana is the only one disturbed that libations are not poured for the child whose celebration it is supposed to be. For her this underscores the terrible reality that her children have forgotten the ancestors themselves. They no longer look to those gone before, and they no longer even celebrate

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the newly arrived soul. Even Baako, in his frustration and contempt, does not speak to Naana and so fails to learn from her that he cannot change the selfishness and sham of the new ways which so anger him if he does not first understand the spiritual significance of the changes. Baako himself is a man in conflict. Having brought a sense of panic and frustration home with him from abroad, he spends much of his time and energy in flight. Like Naana, he can see the disease in contemporary society, but unlike her, he is unable to articulate clearly the nature of the disease in terms which have relevance to the community. A writer, he returns home with high hopes of using the media as a means for community education, to agitate for change and social equality for the benefit of the country. However, the directors of the television and film industry seem, to him, far more interested in exploiting the broadcasting corporation’s resources for their own private needs. Baako finds the experience of being unable to do any of the creative, constructive work he had hoped to do quite traumatic. He must acknowledge first that the society has become essentially soul destroying, and, more vitally, that the desires to both please the family and to work for the larger social good have become impossibly irreconcilable. Both these verities give rise to a conflict within him that he must try to resolve. In order to do this, he has a series of therapeutic conversations and love scenes with his friend, Juana, and all his constructive insights and revelations, both personal and social, come to him through her. Juana, a psychiatrist introduced to him by his mother, has come to Ghana in search of her “roots.” She is herself a woman in flight, from the United States and her native Puerto Rico. Like Naana, she too knows that the real crime of human history is ignorance of past crimes. Having come to Ghana to find some kind of peace, she has discovered there is none to be found there. However, being stronger than Maanan, she at least manages to save herself by making a necessary accommodation. She learns to know by what visions people lead their lives, or by what vision they are led, and for her, survival becomes a matter of “adopting a narrower vision every time the full vision threatened] danger to the visionary self” (p. 46). Like all prophets, Juana does recognize this visionary self even if, rather than playing a leading role in the community, she is fighting a rearguard action. She may not be able to save society, but she does what she can to save Baako. “Like some forest woman whose gods were in all the trees and hills and people around her, the meaning of her life remained in her defeated attempts to purify her environment, right down to the final, futile decision to try to salvage discrete individuals in the general carnage” (p. 177). Like all prophets, Juana is primarily concerned with salvation and the need to purify the environment; for all prophets, salvation, and above all the salvation of the group, is of the utmost importance. Because of the dislocation between the body and the spirit which occurs

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in the powerful prophets of Two Thousand Seasons, it is notable that Juana’s role as savior seems to take precedence over her role as mate. Even at their first meeting, though her response to Baako’s overwhelming presence was as physical as it was spiritual, she spends much of her time trying to forget his physical body, thinking of him instead as “a kind of interior dome floating somewhere in her head.” But they both have bodies and he will not permit her to forget this. He controls the movements of their friendship as he is later to control the movements of her body in love-making. For Baako she is not only a psychiatrist, but a friend and lover, and her strength is the source of his strength. She is a sympathetic listener for him, because she understands his yearning to perform creative acts in union rather than alone. In the end, after his breakdown, it is she who is preparing a home for him to come back to after his discharge from the hospital. Juana and the grandmother Naana stand in opposition to the mother and sister. They are the two women who understand him and who, without his obvious personal limitations, share his vision. Naana’s observations are fundamental to an understanding of this work. Her role in the novel is very much that of the blind and impotent seer. She cannot see with her physical eyes, but her spirit comprehends a great deal which she cannot or is not permitted to communicate except in her own private thoughts. She is the closest to the protecting ancestral spirits, not only because of her age but more significantly because of her understanding, her sympathy, and her memories. Naana represents the communal memory which links the past with the future. Her powerlessness is thus a commentary on the breakdown of the society. She is not simply another old woman, she is the mother of the family, and a prophet rendered helpless. The novel opens and closes with Naana’s reflections. At the start, while awaiting the return of Baako, she establishes firmly the cycle of life—the exits and entrances, departures and returns, of which he is a part. But the journeys are not only physical but also spiritual, and the old beliefs establish a continuity between birth and death, with the movements of earthly life in between. For Naana the perversion of customs, such as the failure to pour sincere libations at life’s threshold, augurs ill, for it represents a lack of respect for the soul. She finds this attitude spiritually and physically destructive, and sinful. In those opening reflections, she foresees that the dreams of the family were no longer justified because, “woven of such heavy earth,” they would so crush Baako’s spirit he would never “fly” again. But she is unable to prevent the inevitable, and in her reflections which close the novel she again pin-points the symbolic meaning of these changes: ... I was powerless before the knowledge that I had come upon strangers worshipping something new and powerful beyond my

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understanding, which made all the old wisdom small in people’s minds, and twisted all things natural to the service of some newly created god . . . The baby was a sacrifice they killed, to satisfy perhaps a new god they have found much like the one that began the same long destruction of our people when the elders firstmay their souls never find forgiveness on this head—split their own seed and raised half against half, part selling part to hardeyed buyers from beyond the horizon, breaking, buying, selling, gaining, spending, till the last of our men sells the last woman to any passing white buyer and himself waits to be destroyed by this great haste to consume things we have taken no care or trouble to produce, (p. 284) In this reflection Naana, contemplating the madness of Baako and the death of the new-born child, waits for death. She has seen the problems extant in the society at large internalized and destroying her own family, and has been helpless. The central problems remain; the “seer” remains fundamentally alienated from the group because an oppressed people have lost themselves in chasing after “strange gods.” Her reverence for the role of the ancestors and the old ways should not however be regarded as a reactionary vision. Her last reflection shows her awareness that understanding the link with the past in the end leads to progress. Why Are We So Blest? can be considered a pivotal text. In this novel the hero, dominated by his experiences with White women, reaches the nadir of destructive experiences. His death is brought about directly as a consequence of his sexual relationship with his White girlfriend, and in this novel the gulf between devotion to a “loved one” and devotion to a cause is dramatized to an irreconcilable extreme. All relationships with women in this novel are sexual ones, and nothing good comes out of any of them. The two most destructive relationships are with White women, and they both prove dangerous and finally fatal. There are two White women of importance, and to both of them Modin, the Ghanaian hero, is ultimately the sex object Black men tend to be in relationships of imperial and cultural domination. The first is Mrs. Jefferson, the wife of one of the wealthy “philanthropists” who fund the scholarship on which Modin comes to America to study. The second is Aim6e Reitsch, Modin’s American girlfriend of German descent. It is with Aim6e that Modin finally travels to North Africa in search of a revolution to purge his soul, a journey which, for her, is just another radical escape from boredom. The relationship between them destroys Modin spiritually and he loses his sense of individual identity. The journey they jointly undertake leads only to his death in vengeance for his association with her. Although sexually the two women play diametrically opposed roles, they both use Modin to the same end. Mrs.

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Jefferson proves as insatiable as Aimee proves frigid, but they both represent his slide to degradation and destruction. Though the dramatization of this degradation is explicity sexual, the relationships with these two women are to be seen as yet another consequence of the spiritually destructive nature of the impact with the Western world, a problem addressed in all of Armah’s novels. The women do not just torture him spiritually; the kill him physically as well; and Modin, uncomprehending, participates in his own destruction. It is the tragedy of this hero that even Naita, the woman he regards as his “prophet,” though Black, is a thoroughly westernized Black American, and even she, in her long absences, cannot save him. The relationship with Mrs. Jefferson is based solely on her desire to fulfill what is presented as a White American woman’s fantasy of sleeping with a Black man, and with Modin it is all the more rewarding as he is the genuine article, an African man. Mrs. Jefferson, in her desire to live out the American racial fantasy of the Black man as a stud, initiates all the sexual contact between them. We are subjected to explicit scenes of mutual masturbation (sitting covered under a blanket in the back seat of the car with her husband and daughter in front), and graphic episodes in which she wears him out trying to make him fulfill his role as a sex object. That relationship finally ends when Mrs. Jefferson, who had claimed she could not reach an orgasm with her own husband, takes Modin out into her garden for sex in the middle of a party, and makes so much noise reaching her climax that her husband, to whom she had earlier confessed the affair, comes raging into the garden after them and repeatedly stabs Modin. Mrs. Jefferson is the beginning of his descent into degradation. Aimee Reitsch completes his fall. There is nothing good about Aimee. The portrait of her is the only extended one we have of a White woman in this or any other Armah text, and she is a frigid, voracious destroyer. She is made to carry the burden of guilt for the whole of Western civilization in all its destructive energy. As with all other information in this novel, what we learn of her we learn from her own journals, from Modin’s references to her in his notes, and from the observations of Solo, the failed revolutionary who inherits both sources. The misnamed Aim6e is revealed as a woman totally incapable of loving. Although she is unattractive, men are curiously desirous of her. The feeling is never reciprocated, however, and she abuses sexual relationships as an ineffectual antidote for boredom. Furthermore, despite her absolute obsession with sex, she is frigidly incapable of sexual satisfaction. In the sex scenes with Modin, she is even made to indulge in the grotesque fantasy of being the wife of a distant uncle in East Africa, who has successfully seduced her “boy” into copulating with her in the absence of her jealous husband, in order to sustain the energy required to reach her climax. The pivot of the relationship between herself and Modin is his desire to make it possible for her to have this orgasm.

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We are subjected to the explicit details of this odyssey, and in its progress, as Modin’s initial disgust turns to tenderness, he becomes ensnared in the trap loving her is made to represent. For her, the measure of a man lies in his ability to arouse her body, and she is shown to be pathologically incapable of physical sensation. This physical numbness is paralleled by her spiritual insensitivity. She is shown to be egocentric, narcissistic, and cruel, the incarnation of the aggressive individualism and destructiveness of the West as well as the oppressiveness of private relationships which do not take the larger community into account. The presentation of her is so manipulated as to preclude the generation of any sympathy for her within the limits of the discourse. She never becomes human, but remains the voraciously female entrance to Modin’s private hell. The association with her ultimately leads Modin, appropriately enough, to a horrifying death by castration in the deserts of North Africa. The representation of Naita, though slight, is most important. She is the only figure who comes close to being a means of salvation, but she offers a most ambiguous solace, and this can be taken as a measure of the desolation of the book. Unlike Juana, Naita is absent when the real trials come, and as the two women play identical roles, the depth of Modin’s spiritual isolation can be seen in the difference between them. The parallels between Juana and Naita are strong; they are both Black women of the diaspora, but whereas Juana comes “home” in search of her roots, Modin travels to Naita in search of enlightenment in the new world. Furthermore, where Juana was fleeing that new world in search of an older salvation, Naita is herself fully acculturated into that world and attempting to become a master of that space. Both Juana and Naita act as confessor figures to their respective men, and they both become lovers whose love-making scenes we share in explicit detail, but the differences between those scenes are significant. In Armah’s novels, important spiritual scenes, like the one with Maanan or “the man’s” last walk in The Beautyful Ones, or the scenes of love and friendship in The Healers, always take place by moving water. It is a notable contrast therefore that the love scenes with Juana take place by the sea, whereas that with Naita takes place indoors. However, in those with Juana, Baako is always the dominant teacher, drawing the woman out and controlling her responses, whereas in the one scene between Naita and Modin, Naita is the one in complete control. It cannot go unnoticed that Naita, the only woman so far in complete control of her own sexuality, disappears from the scene very quickly. Naita in this text becomes a confessional figure, and a positive force for Modin, but only after she has left. While she was with him, it was her sexuality which became for him a means of salvation. She offered him, through her body, withdrawal, peace, and release from loneliness. He desires her most

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when he wishes to forget completely the circumstances that are troubling him, and she has the power and control to make him do so. Making love to her, he feels as though she encompasses his universe and makes him all knowing, and under such circumstances he feels he cannot be lonely anymore. She represents a means of self-forgetting, as if resting in her all his problems can be solved. Unlike Juana, Naita does not believe in salvation; her approach is far more earthy and pragmatic, and represents a sort of instinct for self-preservation. Shortly after the start of their relationship, unable to tolerate any longer the hypocrisy of the White administrators for whom she works, and even more frustrated by Modin’s initial blind acceptance of their racist attitude toward him, she departs, leaving no forwarding address. Her philosophy for salvation is one of distrust and suspicion. She tries to warn Modin that no people, and in particular no White people, are worth trusting. One of her major sources of frustration is that she sees so clearly that he is being used and abused. Her knowledge of the subtleties of race relations in the United States is seen as the source of her strength. Her experience as a Black in America has taught her who are the manipulators and who are the victims in the social games they must play. She knows how to protect herself, and leaves, but this is no positive resolution, for she fails to teach Modin even to understand why such protection may be necessary. He does not comprehend enough to accept her wisdom for survival, until it is too late. Her social role is rendered ineffectual, and the gulf between personal knowledge and social wisdom remains. Naita offers only a partial private solace. This factor is emphasized by the fact that after her disappearance, when he has only her memory left, Modin confesses to her in his journal: I would have come to you; I would have asked you again had you not put a limitless distance between us. I would not have needed to ask you—I would have come to you, and these fears would have remained unknown to me.3 It is her spirit after she has left which becomes for him a source of wisdom and salvation. Modin is not having healing conversations with a visible, tangible presence; what comfort Naita brings comes only through the memory of her. He makes his confessions to her in his journal and tries to think of what advice she would give him if she were still present. Such is the role of women seen completely as functions of the man’s development, that he even writes to her about the destructive Aim6e, exactly the sort of woman Naita has tried to warn him against. The most intimate scenes between Modin and Aimee are presented as recorded by him in his reminiscences to Naita—as if she would want to know. In the end, there is no lasting understanding between them, and no saving vision shared.

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Two Thousand Seasons is a significant explication of Armah’s thesis on the origins of social malaise. The title of the novel refers to the length of time—one thousand years, each with a wet season and a dry season—covered by the prophecy narrated in the book. This is a “monochromatic” work, with the line between black and white starkly drawn. In this novel everything white is equated with decadence and terror, and Black people essentially have virtue on their side. The two groups of White people, the Muslinr, Arab “predators” of the first invasion who swoop down southward from the desert, and the Christian, European “destroyers” who strike up northward from the sea, both have the same devastating effect on the Africans with whom they have initially come into contact. The Africans get caught between two waves of invasion and are destroyed. Two Thousand Seasons is written as a mythical chronicle so that Africans may understand the history of their continent over the last thousand years; and, as is the function of myth, the novel points the way to their salvation. The most important aspect of Armah’s thesis is an understanding of “the way.” This “way” is never fully explained, because when the history begins, it is already long lost, and only a few “rememberers,” “seers,” and “hearers” are left, trying to recollect and revive a way of life almost vanished over the many generations. According to “the way,” in the beginning all Black Africans were a single, united people. Their initial migrations were motivated simply by the desire to make the most of the sheer abundance of water and fertile land bounteously alloted them. Though scattered, they remembered their original kinship, and only later forgot this essential “connectedness.” The later migrations were attempts to escape the invasion of the Arab “predators” from the north who sought to oppress them. However, their movement south and east was stopped by the European “destroyers” at that time moving north and west. Throughout Two Thousand Seasons we see at crucial moments that it is the women upon whom salvation depends. In this text all the liberating actions are initiated by women. Only in this novel do we see women who initiate action and who have the power to perform deeds to save the community. The two most powerful groups of women in Armah’s works are found in this novel. But, as we have stated, the problem here is that these female figures are more often than not simply female voices, and, as women, are unsexed. The one exception is the first group of women who early in the history act in concert to save the community from their debauched and tyrannical Arab masters. In this case the women, in a truly disgusting episode, prey on the perverted lusts of their masters and use their sex to slaughter them. Their sexuality, divorced from any sentiment of either love or individual worth, is seen and used as a powerful political weapon. The women willingly offer themselves up to be thoroughly debased in the service of the state, for the purpose of righteous vengeance. But once successful, their matriarchy fails to hold. The sexual

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strength which drives them and empowers them to resurrect their homeland, in the end thoroughly emasculates their own men; when, in desperation, strong sexual women take control of affairs, the men are rendered impotent. At the other extreme, the host of prophets who guide their people out of a succession of “Egypts” in this work seem to be simply female voices detached from their bodies and without sexuality. The only one who fleshes out into a real character is the beautiful and much-desired Abena who, despite her vaunted charm, is the most insistent on denying her individual sexuality. Abena, like the prophetic Anoa before her, spurns taking a husband. She, like all the other brave and virtuous women, performs all her deeds and channels all her desires on behalf of the group, and this exclusion of any individual sexual expression is presented as a positive and communal act. In Two Thousand Seasons the opposition is not between good women and bad women as such, but between visionary women and those who cannot see. All the prophetic voices are female, and most of the liberators, particularly the early ones, are women. The role of women as bringers of unity and healing, always present in the earlier texts, flourishes in this novel. After the carnage of the harsh and jealous rule of men, the restoration of peace is left to women. But having restored unity, the women become overgenerous and take over all the responsibilities once shared with men. The comfort and fertility of the life they establish make the men lazy and unwary, and therefore easy prey for the first group of incoming invaders, the “predator” Arabs, masquerading as beggars needing shelter and succor. This succor received, the strangers prey on the readily visible weaknesses of the society, and gain power. The people are delivered from the ensuing slavery once again by the actions of women, on “the night of the slaughter” already alluded to. Described in all the fullness of a seemingly perverse imagination, their liberation is bought at the price of a series of gruesome and brutal sexual acts in which they use the degradation to which they have become subjected to ensnare and slaughter those who have enslaved them. Those who had been debased become the debasers, but it is a false liberation. The people have been corrupted from within; the years of slavery have created a hierarchical social structure and a host of leeches—indigenous “cripples,” “predators,” and “destroyers”—upon whom the outsiders can rely to bring about the effective destruction of the societies from within, in return for material gain and undeserved social status. It is to this group of people in danger that the first strong prophecy comes, from Anoa, the female with two voices: The first, a harassed voice shrieking itself to hoarseness, uttered a terrifying catalog of deaths . . . From the same prophetic throat came a second voice. It was calmer, so calm it sounded to be talking not of matters of our life and death . . . For every

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shrieking horror the first voice had given sound to, this other gave calm causes, indicated effects, and never tired of iterating the hope of the issue of all disasters: the rediscovery and the following again of our way, the way. 4

The actual prophecy of Anoa declares that, seduced by Mthe whiteness of destruction’s slope,” the people are willingly rushing toward the period of two thousand seasons of pain and disaster terrible to contemplate, and that painful as the descent of one thousand seasons of bondage will be, the struggle out of bondage will be harder still until finally they regain the ancient way of life. The people migrate southward again, in search of freedom, and on this second migration also the women come to the rescue. Depressed by doubts and insecurities, the people despair of ever finding a new and free homeland. Agitated by just one man, they turn on their advance guard and kill them before it dawns on them that in doing so they have killed the only guides who know the terrain. Only two women, Ningome and Noliwe, had tried to help the guards, and were beaten unconscious for their pains. On reviving they repeat the ancient prophecy of Anoa with a vengeance, then find the wisdom and the heroic courage to walk their people out of the wilderness to their unknown “promised land.” On arrival, responding directly to the failure of courage and the absence of any communal spirit in the face of adversity, it is the women again who remind their people that their time—two thousand seasons—has not elapsed, and that the original prophecy had spoken of an invasion of destroyers coming north from the sea, who would be abetted by their own failure to remember their true “way” and keep to the path of “reciprocity.” The concept of “reciprocity” is an important one in this work. The tribulations begin when the people forget that for everything given, something must be received in return; “the way” teaches that those who give without receiving are the victims of their recipients, and their generosity is a form of self-hatred. This is the central concept which informs the opening words of the novel; the image of springwater flowing into the desert, without hope of regeneration, is an essentially self-destructive one. “The desert takes. The desert knows no giving,” so the future of that springwater is one of extinction. When the people settle in their new-found lands, the men behave like the desert-flowing springwater. Under the influence of the newly arrived Europeans, they forget completely all the principles of “the way” and do not hear the voices of the female prophets who remember and remind them of their doom. The men accept the new division of people into parasites and producers, masters and slaves. The most important consequence of this acceptance is that women, hitherto unquestionably social equals, have a subordinate role forced upon them by the men. To the men, it seems plain that with the hazardous migration having cost so many lives, they now must “make of every female a childbearer

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as soon as her body showed it was ready, and for as long as her body continued to turn manseed into harvest” (p. 94). It followed naturally, childrearing and housekeeping being such arduous tasks, that the women should and would be exclusively occupied. The men therefore abrogate to themselves all other powers in the community and, schooled by Europeans, begin to establish hierarchies in states where there had previously been none. The ploy succeeds because resistance would have meant further division, so the astonished women “accepted the place of childbearing bodies, in their soul wondering why the ability to do such necessary work should bring as its reward such vindictive slavery at the hands of men” (p. 94). The subjugation of women is seen as a specifically alien form of oppression which should have been resisted. Those few women who tried to do so were either annihilated, or had their sexuality denied by being “elevated” to the status of honorary males. However, as during the wandering in the wilderness, so too when settled in their new land, it is women who remain the vanguard of the forces of resistance and revolution. When the institution of kingship is still newly established it is a woman who realizes that its trappings and ceremonies are a sham to hide an inferior being and first resists its callous authority. When the Europeans first come bearing gifts and seeking friendship with their king, it is a woman who first finds her voice and speaks for the people in protest—and her words remind them of the vital need to discourage the Europeans from settling among them. But in the end, as the prophecy works itself out, these women are defeated by the league of treachery formed between the Europeans and their king. As this novel is a historical saga, it is not until the closing years of the “two thousand seasons” that we have extended portraits of any of the protagonists. But the last part of the novel deals with the last two hundred seasons, including the years lived through by the griot reciting the history. The most important woman in this section, whose spirit dominates the end of the story, is Abena, the last in the long line of liberators. Like the other women, she sees more clearly than most people of her time, yet despite this, she has faith in the human spirit. Like Anoa, Idawa, and others before her, she is physically and spiritually a beautiful person. Yet we do not actually know what she looks like. As has been mentioned, Armah’s strong, prophetic women in this text are in some way divorced from their physical bodies. Like Noliwe and Ningome, the pair who lead their people out of the desolation of the wilderness, they remain forever voices, or when they are said to be beautiful, we get no true sense of their physical presence. They are all Black beauties whose dominant characteristic is grace of movement; they are all in their age the most desired; and to a woman all have better things to do than marry, in readiness for other more grand communal purposes. Only on one occasion does this desire to eschew “the need for pairing” extend itself to the men as well. The group of twenty of Abena’s age group, when doing “the dance of love” which ends their

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initiation rites, refuse to leap into mating pairs, which is the object of the ritual. Instead, they leap together as a group, and escape to the forest together in search of a better way of life. This insistence on collective action is most fully developed in Abena, to the point where she is prepared to risk the possibility of being forced into slavery with her less perceptive friends, rather than take any action which would spare her alone, but leave her friends forsaken. She realizes, as do all Armah’s central characters, that individual salvation is of no consequence without the redemption of the group. This theme becomes prominent and is the reason why they manage to escape “the middle passage” and help each other to free themselves from slavery. In this text, the spirit of survival is a female spirit, and that of repression is male. So it is a measure of the spiritual health of this group that in the end the women not only fight, but help lead in the fighting. This dramatizes a return to the universality of roles under the old “way”; fighting for freedom is neither kept nor regarded as a predominantly male prerogative. This one factor dramatizes the fact that Armah, in his later novels, is demonstrably slowly liberating himself from some of the literary conventions followed by other male writers, Western or African, in their representations of women. There are basically two traditions of oppositions governing the portrayal of women in the novel which concern us here: women as wholesome whores or victimized or virtuous virgins, and women as nurturing earth mothers or destructive Jezebels. Armah has broken away from tradition altogether—he does not subscribe to the convention of the free-spirited harlot; there are no whores' in any of his texts, heroic or otherwise. In this he breaks from a tradition which has existed for several centuries in the West (represented by such well-known characters as Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Dickens’ Nancy), and which has also been re-created in the contemporary African novel by such writers as Ekwensi and Ngugi. As we have noted, Armah’s women are conventionally women of the household whose role is intended to be that of supporting their men, whether or not they succeed. And just as in its very form and scope Two Thousand Seasons breaks away from the conventions of the modern realistic novel, its liberating, powerful prophets are strong, public characters, who carry their societies with them rather than being carried by them. This breaks the mold of the second convention of woman as savior or woman as destroyer which Armah incorporated into his earlier novels, in which all the women either fed on the life blood of the hero or were there to try to protect him. But this dramatic break is in a sense a reaction, not a resolution, for it still restricts the women to a choice between only these two modes of being. Furthermore, in these prophets like Naana who are guardians of the collective history and prophetic memory, Armah has managed to create a body of socially active, powerful women who willingly divorce themselves from the expression of their

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sexuality in relationships with men. This is most curious as the novel contains a very powerful argument against the discrimination of women on the grounds of their necessary childbearing abilities. Yet it seems that the price of power and social commitment must be the individual sexuality of the woman concerned. The power of sex is rarely creative, and when it is, it is either not fully expressed, or it is not sustained; the women must be nurturing without actually being mothers. Finally, there are no creative mothers who are politically or socially powerful in any of these texts. There is a strange inability to reconcile virtue and any sexuality in an active, viable, and socially influential relationship. Thus the true significance of Arm ah’s latest novel The Healers, so far as the role of women is concerned, is Armah’s attempt to work toward some kind of resolution in the conflicted representation of his nurturing women. By the time we look at The Healers, one side of the equation, woman as parasite, has completely disappeared. In this novel all the women but one are positive factors, and their positiveness is rendered in conventional terms. They are gentle, consistent, and people of beauty rather than force. And although the central healer, the principle initiate, and the most influential patient are all male, to become a “healer” is to take on these quintessential^ feminine characteristics. Though this may be regarded as positive, what it means is that Armah’s women remain on the whole one-dimensional; we never find, in the same person, a true complex of both virtues and faults. However, in spite of this, the tremendous achievement of The Healers is that in this novel women, repre-sented by Ajoa and Araba Jesiwa, are at last becoming more completeincluding sexually complete—private and public persons. The Healers is a historical novel set in the closing years of the nineteenth century and recounts the history of the British imperial wars of conquest on the Gold Coast, from the point of view of the defeated Ashanti. The larger social and political concerns Armah wishes to present are woven around a domestic story of local intrigue and murder which blights the lives of a male youth, the initiate Densu, and his group of visionary medical, spiritual, and social “healers” who give the novel its title. The pattern of women as creative beings established in Two Thousand Seasons is continued in this history. Even when minor characters, women in this novel are significant because they find a kind of resolution between being women of the household and women of history, which is lacking in the earlier works. Although still associated with domesticity, they are no longer outside history, and the resolution of the home is not divorced from that of the political marketplace. Women in this novel are learning, or have learned, to occupy both private and public spaces. Their predominant function is still domestic, and they are still in the text because they are related to, or provide this service for, the important male characters. But there are important differences. In the

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first place even the minor characters are presented more as persons than as symbols; they are people with joy and tears and human frailties viewed from outside the limited perceptions of the men to whom they are attached. Furthermore, like the unfamilial prophets of Two Thousand Seasons, they have a knowledge which addresses, in some cases quite literally, the larger arena. In an elaboration of a theme also established in Two Thousand Seasons, the royal courts are in this text the center of dissension. As the catalyst for destruction, through her association with the invading British, we have Efua Kobri, the powerful queen mother who, in using her influence and the subtle force of persuasive language to protect solely her privilege and the status of her group, ensures the destruction of the kingdom she effects to save. It is important that this sole politically powerful women is also a dominating mother who acts to keep herself and her son in power. This is the preference for the “loved ones” carried relentlessly to its logical conclusion. The queen mother, in this case the mother of the chief, is a woman with the reins of power firmly in her hands. Totally seduced by power, it is she who reminds her son that it is better to be a king in a violated nation than nothing in a virgin land, and sabotages the plan to defeat the British because such a result would have rendered the heroic general more powerful than her son in the united and victorious kingdom. In the royal court, it is the king who is weak and hesitant and the queen who is strong and sure. Her voice, with all the authority of history, in an international political arena, rules the day. But this same voice, speaking against the domestic community, is in the end self-destructive; ultimately the individual has no potential for survival outside the group, however desperately she may try.5 Mercifully, however, though none has as much political power as she, there are many more creative than destructive women in The Healers. Although most of the women in this novel are associated with the sacred work of the healers, Armah gives us one other woman who can serve as a remarkable contrast to the queen mother even in her own secular world. Though she is a woman of lesser political significance, and though we see her acting in a private capacity only, the portrait of the royal grandmother of the young prince Appia is a forceful one. We see Nana Esi Amanyiwa only once, in a scene where she buries her grandson Appia, whose murder occasions the novel’s narrative. In the scene at the graveside, in the prince’s mother’s room, the quiet, dignified humility with which the grandmother expresses her grief over the loss of her favorite grandchild is contrasted dramatically with the noisy, bombastic show of mourning put on by the uncle Ababio. The old woman performs in tragic silence all the loving rituals for the burial of the dead, yielding her treasured possessions for the spirit of her child, and throwing first into the grave the customary handful of that earth which would bury his dead body. But her desire to have a speedy, yet dignified and proper

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burial is interrupted by the display being put on by the uncle (a performance confirmed as pure sham at the end of the novel when it is revealed that it was he himself who was responsible for the prince’s murder): Ababio rushed into the burial room. He came energetic, like a hurricane . . . [his] entry was not merely stormy. It was loud. “Let me go with my prince!” he shouted. “I shall not let him go alone!” So saying, he rushed past the silent Esi Amanyiwa. . . . The grave-diggers were baffled. They had been on their way out when Ababio hurled himself into the grave. Now Ababio had moved towards the corpse and, clasping its feet, had begun an incantation to the spirit of the dead prince. Uncertain about what to do, unable to force the tearful, grovelling Ababio out yet unwilling to leave him in the grave, the grave diggers stood undecided beside him in the hole. Then Nana Esi Amanyiwa’s voice was heard. “Let him go with him,” the voice said, “since that is his wish.”6 The power of the grandmother in this scene lies in her ability to recapture language, and quite simply to render it literal. The question of utterance is itself crucial to this novel, both with respect to its very structure, and as an integral theme. The ability to speak, and to speak truly, should be a prized quality in a whole, healthy society. Nana Esi Amanyiwa’s words therefore expose the hollowness of Ababio’s by turning a glare on the distance between his words and his meanings; therein lies their power. As we shall see, though her words are enclosed within a domestic tragedy and do not have much impact on the course of events, it is her daughter Araba Jesiwa who is the only other woman in this novel whose public words have consequences as far reaching as those of the queen mother. But by the time she speaks, she is no longer either a wife or a mother; the one woman who, with the help of the healers, finds some sort of resolution between love and power in her own private life has, by the time her words make public impact, lost both the man and the child who blessed that resolution. In addition to Araba Jesiwa, the group of “healers,” whose search for a private and public health is the central quest of the novel, are surrounded by a number of inspired women who support and encourage them in their work, give practical aid and succor, and sustain the hope that they will eventually win through. One of the most significant of them is the healer Damfo’s daughter Ajoa, because she is herself an apprentice healer. Ajoa is instrumental in the healing of two of the most central characters

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in the novel, Araba Jesiwa, the mother of the murdered prince, and Densu, the apprentice healer whose history the narrative traces. When her son is murdered, Araba Jesiwa, also left for dead by the roadside, is mercifully rescued by the healers, and sheltered in their secluded communal village. She is not only physically broken, but so spiritually distraught she loses the power of speech. She has to be carefully nursed so that her broken bones can mend, and so that her spirit and therefore her voice may be restored. Throughout the long months that this takes, it is Ajoa who faithfully cares for her, and notices her slow return to life. It is Ajoa also who nurses Densu to recovery when this becomes necessary. Densu suffers the trauma of being falsely charged, and almost executed by burning, for the murder of the prince. He is only rescued from this ritual murder by the sacrifice of his closest friend, Anan, who dies in his attempt to secure Densu’s escape. Throughout his convalescence Ajoa remains first his friend, then finally consummates this childhood friendship by becoming his lover. The portrait of Ajoa emphasizes the fact that, even among an enlightened group such as the healers, the sexual division of roles remains fixed. Until the closing chapters of the novel, these strong and supportive prophets never initiate any action. Ajoa remains a handmaid to her father, existing solely to follow his instructions by ministering to others. Yet though her role is practical and domestic, the first sight of her is that of an ideally beautiful, mystical being: She was a small, fragile-looking child, but already her skin had that darkness that was a promise of inexhaustible depth, and her eyes were even then liquid, clear windows into the soul within. She was beautiful. Her eyes, those eyes, were restless, full of a nervous energy. Even when they came to a momentary rest they did not rest on Densu. They looked far away. Still, those eyes did not reject him. It was just that they seemed drawn to sights far beyond the present moment. And Densu himself, drawn to those eyes, felt no need to resist the power in them, or to resent the desire that turned them away from him. It was this power of Ajoa’s over his spirit, this attraction against which he neither needed nor wanted to struggle, that had first brought Densu close to Ajoa’s father, Damfo. (pp. 63-66) We are reminded of Maanan revealing the woes of womankind on her face, only in this case the “woman” is only six years old, and Densu, over whom her eyes have this power, is eight. Ajoa’s knowledge is based on the instinct which enables her to distinguish people who operate on the basis of love and inspiration, from those who use manipulation and worldly authority. This

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knowledge at a very early age enables her to choose her humble father, the healer, over her step-father, the court physician. Years later, when Densu starts his apprenticeship with her father, it is she who first suggests, in her quiet unheard manner, the truth which will eventually solve the central mystery of the young prince Appia’s murder. It is this spiritual power of Ajoa’s which inspires Densu, and she becomes inextricably linked to the search for understanding and knowledge which drives him to become a healer. Yet, unusually in a novel by Armah, for all this spirituality Ajoa, though initially coy, is a young woman at ease with her sexuality, a sexuality not entirely divorced from her soul. Like all good women, she moves with ease and grace, yet though beautiful, unlike the prophets of Two Thousand Seasons, she does not disparage her body. Furthermore, she needs neither to be dominant, like Naita, or dominated, like Juana, before she learns to appreciate the wonders of love-making. The love-making scenes in this novel are presented as a mutually joyous experience for the young couple, and it is notable that in each of them Armah makes Densu deliberately place her so they lie side by side, a significant shift from the loves scenes of Fragments and Why Are We So Blest? Ajoa has learned the lesson it took Araba Jesiwa the better part of her life to learn, but she is not given a role that is as dramatically public as Jesiwa’s, or even as powerful as that of her own impressive but socially and politically circumscribed father. Outside the personal relationships in her limited community, Ajoa is a powerless woman. We are left with the feeling that perhaps she can blossom; the potential is there, but not the act, and it seems a peculiar factor of Armah’s novels that, even in the case of men, creative sexuality and social or political power appear forever divorced from each other. The character of Araba Jesiwa, the mother of the murdered prince, manifests the tensions surrounding the question of powerful, sexual women having the freedom to act wisely, in a larger social context. In keeping with the traditional male and female roles retained in this novel, Araba Jesiwa must find a resolution between being a spiritually whole woman and being a mother; and motherhood represents not simply her private but also her public self, as she initially perceives it. Similarly, in a story which parallels Jesiwa’s, there is an Ashanti general whose central role is to find a resolution between his private and public selves; he must learn to reconcile being a bereaved uncle with being a national warrior. He too must find that balance between the public and the private which does not threaten the spirit. Both characters dramatize the necessity for that unity between private and public sanity which has so perplexed all Armah’s earlier leading figures; but whereas the man’s story disturbs the political unity of the state, the woman’s story is initially dramatized with respect to private, domestic happiness. The story of Araba Jesiwa is centered around her coming to terms with

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her sexuality. At the request of her family she had married a man solely for the purpose of consolidating dynastic political power, and then found she could not conceive. This would be a burden intolerable enough for a private woman in a traditional society, but it is unacceptable in the woman who must bear the child who will ensure the continuation of her royal line. This burden nearly destroys her life, but she overcomes it because she finally learns that no demands, even those of “loved ones,” can be met if it costs your soul. With the help of the healers, she learns to identify her “true self,” and the creative aspect of her story is her recognition of the links between self-health and social health. She learns to recapture the true meaning of conception in both personal and social terms, and therefore finds happiness by returning to her soul-mate, the true love of her life. When her sense of social health is no longer divorced from her own sense of sexual well-being, conception becomes truly liberating. She then conceives in love and successfully delivers the child Appia, bom of love rather than convention. Yet Araba Jesiwa is a woman with social status, and the point of her story is that she must choose between a man with social status whom she does not love, and a humble carpenter whom she loves with all her soul. She chooses the carpenter, but both the husband and the child, who represent her cure, die tragically young. That is, not only is she initially punished for choosing “society” against her true self, she is also punished for choosing her sexually creative self in contravention of societal norms; apart from its literal veracity, the murdered prince is symbolically thrust back into her womb by being buried in her room, first because she cannot be allowed a private happiness in communion with a man while retaining both her power and her virtue, and second because she must learn a greater lesson and pass her wisdom to another, spiritual heir. This dilemma is partially resolved by the powerful scene at the end of the novel, orchestrated around Araba Jesiwa’s first public reappearance. Jesiwa, long believed dead herself, survives the attack which took the life of her biological son. She becomes dumb at the loss of that one son who symbolized her access to private power and sexuality, and also, by virtue of her social status, to public authority. He dies because she has to be re-bom into a new family where princes have no sway, in order to “give birth” again to another son, this time her spiritual heir, Densu. Densu is her spiritual son by virtue of their shared conversations, his experience of her life and her sufferings, and his initiation into her cause. Speechless and paralyzed for many months, she appears unexpectedly in the public courtroom, where Densu is wrongfully on trial for the murder of her dead son, to speak the words which identify Ababio as the guilty one, and bring liberty to Densu. Those words, symbolic of her restoration to health and sanity, also represent a triumph for the healers. Ultimately, Araba Jesiwa’s personal decisions do have group consequences, and her private experiences have force as public testimony. Symbolically at

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least, the influence of women is finally seen beyond the hearth, in a fashion in which the private and the public are not disparate but wedded. So far as the representation of women is concerned, the story cannot be considered complete, for we leave the women at the threshold of action. However, the triumph of The Healers is that it is a truly creative book when considered in the light of the history it is trying to restore, and the social and political health it attempts to bring. In that aspect it succeeds. The use of women is only a small part of the overall thesis of the text, and even this use, when seen in contrast to Arm ah’s earlier works, as well as in a larger context, is of itself reformative. Arm ah himself has traveled a long journey in creating the women of The Healers, who, although they pay a price to perform this function, do in the end point the way toward a society in which women themselves are healthy, fully empowered beings, in reflection of a people who are at last free, whole, and joyously united.

Notes *Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (New York: Macmillan-Collier Books, 1974), pp. 71-72. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 2

Ayi Kwei Armah, Fragments (London: Heinemann, 1974), p. 147. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 3

Ayi Kwei Armah, Why Are We So Blest? (London: Heinemann, 1974), p. 168. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 4

Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973), p. 24. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 5

For a radically different interpretation of the role of the queen mother, see: Virginia Ola, “The Feminine Principle and the Search for Wholeness in The Healers” paper submitted to the African Literature Association annual conference, The University of Maryland Baltimore County, Catonsville, Maryland, 1984. Although I share Ms. Ola’s enthusiasm for Armah’s achievement, and, like her, appreciate the overall positive and transforming roles that women have come to play in these later novels, I take issue with her over specific interpretations. Most particularly in her interpretation of the role of the queen mother, I feel she ignores very crucial scenes included in the text, and yet in her praise of the grandmother Nana Esi Amanyiwa, in which I share, she attributes much to her that is not supported by the text. 6

Ayi Kwei Armah, The Healers (London: Heinemann, 1978), pp. 58-59. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

THE BEAUTYFUL ONES ARE WOT YET BORN

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Structure and Image in Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Bom Gareth Griffiths

Kwei Armah’s first novel has made a strong impression on the growing audience for African novels. Its central themes are familiar, perhaps inevitably so, but its treatment shows a striking originality especially in the use of image and metaphor. They are employed as the main structuring device, and through an examination of their development and interrelationship the reader can come to terms with the intentions and achievements of this very complex novel and with the vision of Ghana which it sets out. The story traces the progress of a man through the corruption and political chicanery which envelops the society of a newly emerged nation. It presents a startling picture of the scramble for place and preferment, and the nauseous fear, suspicion, and uncertainty which this creates in public and private life. The novel is different from earlier studies of this theme in a number of interesting ways. It provides a totally inside view of the corrupting process. The detached stance of earlier commentators, e.g., Peter Abrahams in A Wreath for Udomo,l is replaced by a picture whose reference points are all internal. No character in the novel is allowed to rise above the confusion and impenetrability of the action. Even the narrator, although allowed the freedom to comment from time to time, has been strictly limited, indicating that the interest of the book is firmly on the existential rather than the political plane. What Kwei Armah sets out to show is the experience of living in a corrupt universe. The limitations and confusions of such distancing are overcome through the guide which metaphor and image offer the reader. The hero, unnamed and referred to throughout simply as “the man,” is an office worker employed by the State Railway. The novel centers on the daily round of routine, boring, and meaningless activity which is the “work” of the new, urban, clerical class. The messages which the man sends and receives along the telegraph wire are communications in a void:

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On the Morse machine there was a long roll that could only raise thoughts of people going irretrievably crazy at the long end of the telegraph. Maybe also the famous rattle of men preparing to die. In a while, when it was no longer possible to ignore the rattle, the man rapped back once for silence, then tapped out the message, “Shut up!” The roll came again, defiantly insistent. The maniac at the other end of the line had grown indignant. Another rap. Short silence. Then the man asked in half-conciliation, “Who be you?” A roll now, very long and very senseless. But at the very end it carries a signature. “Obuasi.” That at least was something, and should deserve a reply. The man held the Morse knob again, lightly. “Hello.” With amazing speed, an answer comes back, this time entirely coherent, decipherable at the last. “Why do we agree to go on like this?” Then again the rattle, (p. 30) The new bush telegraph raps out its message of frustration. Like communications between lost planets the messages flash across the void of Ghana, from one pointless and distressed life to another. In the offices around him men devise elaborate systems for manufacturing unnecessary work. They file multiple copies of meaningless documents. They devise elaborate rituals for the purchase of inedible food. In the center of this void stands the hero. Gradually, however, corners of the veil are drawn back from his anonymity, and we catch glimpses of his home and his family; but he is never allowed to emerge completely from the impersonality which guarantees his representativeness, and the automatic and objective tragedy of the world in which he lives. But here, in the opening sequences, the man is a mere object, not even the center of attention at first. We meet him through the eyes of the bus conductor whom he “observes” furtively smelling the money he has collected. But the “watcher” is really a “sleeper” as the conductor quickly discovers, and in an instant he is moved from abject submission to violent attack. The sleeper awakens to a stream of violent abuse, the spittle of his helplessness trickling down his face. In this world, to sleep is a crime. Men must be awake all the time, awake to a world that watches, ready to punish. Only in the cosy and secure relationship of briber and bribed can “brotherhood” exist; at all other times man is either destroyer or destroyed. The world outside the individual reflects the world within. The novel operates through a series of remarkable metaphorical links which institute a set of correspondences between the body of man, his society, and his landscape; between too, the inner processes of feeding and reproduction and their social equivalents, inheritance and consumption; and, finally, between the personal rot of conscience and ideals and the physical decay and putrescence of the

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world in which this rot occurs. Central to the exchange is the question: where does the rot begin? What is the relationship between the processes of corruption and decay in the individual and in the society around him? What, if any, are the casual relations between one and the other? Here are the narrator’s reflections on the uselessness of any effort to stop the rot in the bannisters of the railway offices by applying thick, disguising coats of polish: The wood underneath would win and win till the end of time. Of that there was no doubt possible, only the pain of hope perennially doomed to disappointment. It was so clear. Of course it was in the nature of the wood to rot with age. The polish, it was supposed, would catch the rot. But of course in the end it was the rot which imprisoned everything in its effortless embrace. It did not really have to fight. Being was enough. In the natural course of things it would always take the newness of the different kinds of polish and the vaunted cleaning power of the chemicals in them, and it would convert all to victorious filth, awaiting yet more polish again and again and again, (pp. 14-15) But, in dreadful harmony with this natural rot and decay is the conscious activity of men: And the wood was not alone. Apart from the wood itself there were, of course, people themselves, just so many hands and fingers bringing help to the wood in its course towards putrefaction. Left-hand fingers in their careless journey from a hasty anus sliding all the way up the bannister as their owners made the return trip from the lavatory downstairs to the offices above. Right-hand fingers still dripping with after-piss and the stale sweat from fat crotches. The callused palms of messengers after they had blown their clogged noses reaching for a convenient place to leave the well-rubbed moisture. Afternoon hands not entirely licked clean of palm soup and remnants of kenkey. The wood would always win. (p. 15) There is no simple relationship between the activities of man and the natural processes he aids, thwarts, or corrupts. In a real sense the physical corruption which the book details is the result of man’s conscious neglect or aid. The inadequacy of the plumbing facilities, the discrepancy between the promises of the anti-litter campaign and the implementation of it, these things are not separable from the corruption and inadequacy of the governing class which they expose and attack. But beyond this there lies a level of pre-condition, a

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level only available to symbolic exposure. Filth is, after all, also a natural and necessary condition of life. Ordure is the end-product of life, and the source from which fresh life grows. It is at the level of metaphor that this truth is exposed and contemplated. The predominant metaphor is that of eating, or rather of eating, digestion, and excretion. This metaphor is linked, as is common in African writing through oral usage, to the theme of corruption and bribery. Money is food. The metaphoric link is a graphic illustration of the primitive economic nature of even the wealthiest of the West African states.2 In this world the “consumer” society is a literal reality: “. . . I won something in the lottery,” he said. “Lucky you,” the man said, “How much?” The messenger hesitated before replying, “One hundred cedis.” “That’s not very much,” the man laughed. “I know,” said the messenger. “But so many people would jump on me to help me eat it.” (p. 21) The novel dwells obsessively on the process by which the body converts food into excreta, reflecting the obsession with which society “consumes” goods, the “shining” things which it covets. But just as food must issue in excreta, so such consumption must issue in bribery and corruption, the excrement of an aggressive drive for the new life. Each man’s bodily processes become a metaphor for the corruption in which he lives, his own body a paradigm for the landscape he inhabits.3 This metaphor helps to structure the book since it is instrumental in relating the hero’s discovery of the relationship between the bloom of life and the dung and filth which feed it. But before we examine the metaphors further, we ought to look at the way in which the narrative is structured. Basically the story is of a railway clerk who is under pressure from his society and his family to conform to the ethics of the rat-race. His refusal to do so leads to his increasing alienation from life. The ultimate end of such a stance is that of his friend, the Teacher, who has withdrawn from life, from family and work, and who advocates passivity and negation, “the mystic path,” as the alternative to the inevitable corruption which, by osmosis, must affect all those who remain in contact with life as it is. The anonymous hero rejects this solution, or rather, has no alternative but to reject it, since, as he tells Teacher, “. . . you know it is impossible for me to watch the things that go on and say nothing. I have my family. I am in the middle” (p. 109). Gradually, despite his attempt to remain as negative as possible in the transaction, he is drawn into a scheme which his wife and mother initiate, to aid a corrupt minister, Koomson, to avoid Government ownership laws. His wife agrees to act as the nominal purchaser of a

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fishing boat from which Koomson hopes to make a substantial profit. For her effort she gets little from the affair, except some free fish which the man refuses to eat. Despite his recognition that Teacher’s doctrine of withdrawal is unworkable, he continues to pretend that he can be “in the world but not of it.” The crisis comes when the regime is overthrown in a coup and Koomson arrives at the man’s home seeking help. The man helps to smuggle him from the house through the latrine hole. After getting him safely away on the fishing boat, he swims ashore and returns home to a country where, with the new government safely installed, the round of corruption has already started up again. There is almost no examination of motive, and we are given little direct help toward understanding the significance of the action of the novel, except in the sixth chapter which is pivotal to the structure and which I shall examine. But a careful reading of this difficult novel reveals that Arm ah has brought into play a pattern of images which define the issues, and complement the limited viewpoints of characters and narrators. The novel falls into three distinct sections. The first, which we have begun to examine, introduces us to the daily round of the man’s life, and to the pressure of family and friends which he feels to join in the struggle for the “good things” of life. We are introduced toward the end of this section (Chapter Four) to the figure of Koomson, the black-whiteman who is preeminently one of the “heroes of the gleam,” the possessors of the Mercedes and the new suits. . . . Outside the seller sweetens her tones. “My own lord, my master, oh my white man, come. Come and take my bread. It is all yours, my white man, all yours. ” The car door opens, and the suited man emerges and strides slowly towards the praise-singing seller. The sharp voice inside the car makes one more sound of impatience, then subsides, waiting. The suit stops in front of the seller . . . (p. 43) Arm ah dwells on Koomson’s suit, which replaces the man entirely. He is the White man because he is a white shirt, gleaming through a darkness into which his body merges. He is literally the gleaming clothes he stands up in. “The suited man looks around him.. Even in the faint light his smile is easy to see. It forms a strange pattern of pale light with the material of his shirt, which in the space between the darknesses of his suit seems designed to point down somewhere between the invisible thighs.” The black-whiteman is invisible because he is merely a caricature. He has no social or economic reality, no personal identity. His reality is defined solely by the objects with which he surrounds himself, and from which he builds a “personality.” After the meeting the man returns home to his wife, and tells her of the

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meeting. She attacks him for his inability to succeed in the same way, and fails to understand when he tells her that he cannot because the price of such “cleanness” is “the slime at the bottom of the garbage dump” (p. 52). She responds by telling him that he is like the chichidodo, the proverbial bird which “hates excrement with all its soul,” but which feeds on maggots which “grow best inside the lavatory” (p. 52). This image is one of those which will recur, and help to define the tension the novel explores. * % In the following chapter we meet the complex figure of Teacher, for the first time a juxtaposition which is significant since he represents the opposite extreme of Koomson. It is necessary to be very precise here. The figure we meet originally is not Teacher, but an extension of the role he plays in the symbolic patterning in which the book operates. When the man leaves his home to escape the nagging pressure of his wife, he begins to muse on a figure he had once known called Rama Krishna. This man, a Ghanaian who “had taken that far-off name in the reincarnation of his soul after long and tortured flight from everything close and everything known, since all around him showed the horrible threat of decay” (p. 55), is clearly related to the actual Teacher whom the man then proceeds to visit. The confusion of persona, the multiple characterization, shifting time-sequences, and rapidly alternating narrative viewpoint which this episode establishes is continued throughout the crucial Chapter Six. The effect of introducing this Doppelganger for Teacher is to prepare us for the realization that Teacher’s stance, although directly opposed to that of Koomson’s, is equally dangerous. “Rama Krishna”’s flight, we learn, has been a failure. His attempt to live outside the corrupt cycle of eat and be eaten, to supplant the killing of living things for food by a diet of honey and vinegar, to “. . . live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by light” (p. 56) has resulted not in serenity but in decay. His ultimate solution, “the one way” to salvation that he discovers “[n]ear the end” is a rejection of life. He rejects women, and through yoga attempts to convert the life-giving seminal fluid to the purpose of rejuvenation. But he is rotting inside, and when he dies his heart is seen to be “only a living lot of worms gathered together tightly in the shape of a heart.” As the man reflects, . . . and so what did the dead rot inside his friend not have to do with his fear of what was decaying outside of himself? And what would such an unnatural flight be worth at all in the end? And the man wondered what kind of sound the cry of the chichidodo bird could be, the bird longing for its maggots but fleeing the faeces which gave them birth, (p. 56) The image is clearly associated now with the man’s awareness that “there was too much of the unnatural in any man who imagined he could escape the

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inevitable decay of life . . .” (p. 55). Thus, when Teacher is finally introduced he is naked, for if Koomson’s life has reduced him to a mere suit of clothes, then Teacher’s life has had a reductive effect too. Without the guidance of the imagery we might assume Teacher’s nakedness to be a pure symbol of innocence. But in the context Armah so carefully establishes, we are able to see the extremism of his stance, to see how it too depends on a selected notion of life, a refusal to accept the inevitable relationship between maggots and excrement, between the dung and the blossom. Teacher, the naked man, is as far removed from reality as Koomson, the suit. They both represent extremes which fail to meet the requirements of reality, that the ideal and the sordid should be seen to co-exist in the same universe, and in the same compass of experience. The Africa to which Teacher is attuned is an idealized Africa, the Africa of selfconscious “purity,’’ not the teeming cess-pit of Accra from which he seeks a refuge within the castle of his skin. The music he plays is “at once very far away and very African” (p. 58). It is not the music of the here and now. When the Radio Ghana program begins “a very ordinary ‘high life’” he is about to switch it off when it is replaced with the “sweet sadness of congo music,” which makes him desist (pp. 58-59). Teacher, then, is both a figure from the past and a character existing in the novel’s “present.” He is Rama Krishna, the lost friend, and Teacher, the present comforter. To try and fit him into a realistic category is to fail to see the novel’s intention. Teacher is a symbol of a kind of African experience, a symbol of the timeless, non-technological, romantic, and anthropological African experience. He is juxtaposed to Koomson, the black-whiteman, the modern elitist, the hatchet man of the consumer revolution. But Teacher’s stance is as dangerous as Koomson’s, for his withdrawal is ultimately no answer to the challenge posed to the hero by the “blinding gleam of beautiful new houses and the shine of powerful new Mercedes cars.” Because of this, he has become a figure without hope: When you can see the end of things even in their beginnings, there’s no more hope, unless you want to pretend, or forget, or get drunk or something. No, I also am one of the dead people, the walking dead. A ghost. I died long ago. So long ago that not even the old libations of living blood will make me live again. (p. 71) Now Teacher is clearly identified with the old sources of African culture, the non-European, the non-technological sources, the world of the dead gods where spirit and matter are interfused. But in him they are separate. He is dead. His only answer now is withdrawal and death. In a gesture of resignation he turns on the radio, and the voice of the opponent is heard, loudly and

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clearly: “The naked man turned on his bed. He turned the left knob on the radio till it would go no farther, and then gave the tuning knob an inward pull that slid the red line smoothly across the glass face. When it stopped a male voice, huge like a eunuch amplified, burst the air with a hollered sound that kept its echo long afterwards, a vibrating ‘. . . ericaaaaa!’ . . (p. 71). We are reminded of Sartre’s comment that The European elite undertook to manufacture a native elite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of western culture; they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to their teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home white-washed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed. From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words “Parthenon! Brotherhood!” and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would open “. . . thenon! . . . therhood!” It was the golden age.4 What Teacher has not learned, in the style of the above critique, is that “No one has clean hands; there are no innocents and no onlookers. We all have dirty hands; we are soiling them in the swamps of our country and in the terrifying emptiness of our brains. Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor.”5 The pivotal Chapter Six explores this issue in depth. We are presented with a symbolic history of the childhood and youth of a man which embodies the history of the liberation movement itself. As Eldred D. Jones said, reviewing the novel, “sometimes it is difficult to tell whose mind we are being shown.”6 The narrative viewpoint moves between Teacher and the hero. The confusion of the two is deliberate since later, in the final chapter, we note that the hero inherits memories (the figure of Manaan) which belong to the portions of Chapter Six narrated by Teacher. This confusion merely stresses once again that we have to frame demands other than those satisfied by conventional novel structure. The figures and events are not merely aspects of an autobiography, but aspects of a historical process and a general cultural experience. Each section of the chapter is introduced by the printed device of a flower, recalling our attention to the central metaphor of the entanglement of growth and decay in the organic world, reminding us that “out of the decay and the dung there is always a new flowering” (p. 100). The chapter begins with an image of birth, but a strangely ambiguous one. “Why do we waste so much time with sorrow and pity for ourselves? It is true that we are men, but not so long ago we were helpless messes of soft flesh and unformed bone squeezing through bursting motherholes, trailing dung, and exhausted blood” (p. 72). It is a birth which is described in terms of an ending. We come into the world like dung.

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Our birth is like the end of the chain of life, the excretion that follows the eating of food. The end of sexual love is this squalid and undignified entrance into the world, an entrance which reminds us forcibly that in our end is our beginning, and that in dung and blood we must go out again. To be born is to commit oneself to a process over which one has no control. Our adult pretentions to direction and choice are illusions. Our dreams of withdrawal and security, of the ability to remain still above the flux are illusions. “We could not ask then why it was necessary for us also to grow. So why now should we be shaking our heads and wondering bitterly why there are children together with the old, why time should not stop when we ourselves have come to stations where we would like to rest?” (p. 72). This inevitable aging and decay is the fate of movements and ideals as well as individuals. The birth and the youth of the liberation movement seemed to offer a new beginning, but that too was subject to decay. The story of a life and the story of a nation are fused in the imagery. The man struggling in the squalor of compromise and disillusion is a vision of Ghana itself, and its whole people. The reminiscences and memories of Chapter Six are not merely flashbacks in the story of a life, they are also images of the pilgrimage of the colonized through oppression to liberation and independence and on into disillusion and decay. Ayi Kwei Armah’s debt to the acute analysis of Fanon is clear to any reader of this section of the novel. Armah reflects the same interest and concern for the effect of the colonizing process on the psychic life of the African. But he reflects too, with more precision, the striking images of Fanon’s prose. Here is Fanon’s definition of the “progress” of the nation under the leadership of the new elites. In the colonial countries, the spirit of indulgence is dominant at the core of the bourgeoisie; and this is because the national bourgeoisie identifies itself with the Western bourgeoisie, from whom it has learned its lessons. It follows the Western bourgeoisie along the path of negation and decadence without ever having emulated it in its first stages of exploration and invention ... it is in fact beginning at the end. It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness or the will to succeed of youth.7 In a striking way Armah’s image of the “man-child” parallels this analysis, reducing Fanon’s rational insight to a vivid symbol. “The manchild looked more irretrievably old, far more thoroughly decayed, than any ordinary old man could ever have looked. But, of course, it, too, had a nature of its own, so that only those who have found some solid ground will feel free to call it unnatural” (p. 73). Fanon’s analysis is objective, detached. It operates with an intense concern, but from above the disillusion, probing the roots and causes.

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Armah as novelist has dramatized the experience of the people themselves, their own tangled and confused hopes and their feeling that, perhaps, such decline and such premature destruction of their dreams is natural and inevitable. Throughout Chapter Six Armah dramatizes by image and scene Fanon’s analysis of bourgeois corruption and psychic disturbance. This is the view from beneath the corruption, on the receiving end of the ordure and filth which the leadership pour down onto the shoulders of those who lifted them up (pp. 95-96). The novel pictures vividly the process by which in the colonial period the envy and aggression of the colonized people finds expression in a selfdestructive process in which each turns upon his fellow. The war acted as a catalyst, revealing to the African that the White men were not always and everywhere the tin gods of the colonial landscape, and that he too was a potential source of power and force, that he too could move mountains and change the conditions of his life. Upon their return the soldiers find no outlet in the colonial situation for their new confidence and aggressiveness, and find it impossible to live happily under the old dispensations. The aggression released by war is in a heightened form the continual aggression bred by colonialism in the subject people, an aggression founded in envy, and in the desire to appropriate for themselves the status of the White settler, to win back the enchanted garden guarded by force and cruelty which they now see as their lost inheritance. Here is Fanon on the suppressed aggression of the colonized: The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people. This is the period when the niggers beat each other up, and the police and magistrates do not know which way to turn when faced with the astonishing waves of crime . . .8 And here Armah: Their anger came out in the blood of those closest to themselves, those men who had gone without anger to fight enemies they did not even know; they found anger and murder waiting for them, lying in the bosoms of the women they had left behind ... the time of the jackknife and the chuke, the rapid unthinking movement of the short, ugly iron points that fed wandering living ghosts with what they wanted, blood that would never put an end to their inner suffering, (p. 76) Again, as Fanon had noted, this world is dual, it has two sides. It is not only “ponderous and aggressive because it fends off the colonized masses with all

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the harshness it is capable of, not merely a hell from which the swiftest flight possible is desirable, but also a paradise close at hand which is guarded by terrible watchdogs.”9 It literally depends on which side of the fenpe you are born. Thus, the growing child of Chapter Six is aware not only of the violence and hostility of the world he shares, but also of another world which co-exists with this from which he is debarred, an Eden from which he has been driven out. Fences and hedges. Fences white and tall with wooden boards pointed and glinting in the sun, hedges thick and very high, their beautiful greenness not even covering their thorns. Looking for almonds, the white man’s peanuts. Almonds big as mangoes, and some so ripe they had grown all red. Mangoes hanging big and gold, and outside eyes looking and longing. The third boy finds a hole down on the ground, underneath the hedge. Small hole, three boys, three khaki uniforms ruined with thorns and dirt. It seems it may be true that the white men are living ghosts themselves. For a place where people live, there is no sound at all. But it is impossible to see inside, beyond netting at all the windows. Nothing like a long pole lying around. Never throw stones round a white man’s bungalow. So three little boys turn their back to the white man’s bungalow and bring down ripe mangoes with unripe ones fallen on the ground before. Keeping quiet. The white man, in case he exists, must not be waked up. Then sudden noise of footsteps within, moving out. Such a lot of mangoes and such big mangoes to have to leave behind, and the hole is far too small and the thorns are cruelly sharp, coming through the khaki all the painful way into the flesh. The backward glance gives terror in the shape of two dogs ... (p. 78) Against this background of images which communicate the fears and repressions of the colonized, Armah traces the historical process of dream and betrayal. These scenes appear to be recollections of Teacher rather than of “the man,” and they center on his realization that the struggle of the Black leadership has not been for “ liberation” but to get into the big castle that the White man has been forced to vacate. Even the young man who has been at one with the people (Nkrumah), and who has inspired Maanan, the bringer of dreams, to believe in reality again,10 eventually declines into the decay and the falsity. Through this examination of the past in the sixth chapter, this history of disillusion and lost hopes, we are shown the source of the hero’s morbid sensitivity to corruption and filth which has dominated the first section of the book. Any notion of gratuitous obsession is no longer tenable. Armah has demonstrably integrated his images to the most important topics of his time and place.

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He is investigating the most serious question at issue in his society: “How could this have grown rotten with such obscene haste?” (p. 103). Where does this process begin? How then is one to act? If corruption is so general, so natural a condition of life, what use is struggle? It is the air we breathe. The nostrils, incredibly, are joined in a way that is most horrifyingly direct to the throat itself and to the entrails right through to the end. Across the aisle on the seat opposite, an old man is sleeping and his mouth is open to the air rushing in the night with how many particles of what? So why should he play the fool and hold his breath? (p. 48) For “the man,” ascending from the filth of the office latrine, corruption is now part of his own flesh. “On the climb up the man feels his nostrils assailed by something he is carrying within himself, the smell of the latrine” (p. 125). Action taken against the process of corruption and bribery is meaningless. To refuse a bribe is not to foil corruption; there is always another waiting eagerly to take it. Despite such reflections the man cannot take the leap toward the gleam. But he is increasingly aware that in not doing so he is behaving unnaturally, that he is out of joint with his time. As he reflects, “It is so normal all this, that the point of holding out against it escapes the unsettled mind” (p. 127). However, in the transactions between his wife, her mother, and Koomson, he remains passive. But he is aware of the complicity which this action implies. We are aware of the limitations and sources of his indecision and disillusion. We have lived through their history. Now, as he walks through the world, the landscape reflects with precise symbolism the society in which he lives. “A dead fish floated in the water at the edge, the silvery flesh of its belly dancing violently up and down with the little waves. When he looked closer he saw a whole lot of little fishes eating the tom white body, breaking the water’s surface at a dozen points” (p. 146). Like the fish, the blackwhitemen feed off the decayed carcass of White colonialism. “This was what it had come to: not that the whole thing might be overturned and ended, but that a few black men might be pushed closer to their masters, to eat some of the fat into their bellies too” (pp. 147-148). There is no longer the possibility of dreaming. Wee has lost its potency. To sit and dream under a palm tree, to listen to the music of the Congo, all are irrelevant in a world in which corruption is the condition of life, to imbibe which is coincidental with the act of living and breathing. To have believed otherwise was always an illusion. When, lulled into security by Maanan’s dreams, they had sucked greedily at contentment, they had not shut out the rot they had been forced unknowingly to swallow. Below the wee-smokers is the breakwater “used by everybody else as a lavatory . . .” (p. 83).

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When the new regime comes there is no false optimism. “New people, new style, old dance” (p. 185). The net of reform will once again be “made in the special Ghanaian way that allowed the really big corrupt people to pass through it” (p. 180). The cloak of anonymity has been allowed to drop to a marked degree. This is Ghana, this is Nkrumah, this is the actual and the here and now. The wheel has turned full circle. From the anonymous corrupt universe of “the man’s” private life, of his body and his immediate surroundings, the metaphors have circled out like stones dropped into a pond, extending the pattern of images until now the body of Ghana and that of the man are continuous, his landscape the landscape of the nation, his sufferings the sufferings of the Ghanaian people. In a corrupt universe the only reality is one’s own consciousness. Nkrumah is only a name. He represents nothing. To name him is merely to reinforce the sense of namelessness, the falsity which such particularization reinforces in a world where overthrower and overthrown are engaged only in a formal reversal of role. “Look, contrey, if you don’t want trouble, get out.” “If two trains collide while I’m demonstrating, will you take the responsibility?” “Oh,” said the organizer, “if it is the job, fine. But we won’t tolerate any Nkrumaists now.” “You know,” said the man slowly, “you know who the real Nkrumaists are. ” (p. 186) This increasing sense of the universality and the inevitability of the corrupting process culminates in the third section of the book in the visit of Koomson, now deposed and fleeing arrest. Koomson, terrified and broken, is a literal body of corruption: “. . . Koomson’s insides gave a growl longer than usual, an inner fart of personal, corrupt thunder which in its fullness sounded as if it had rolled down all the way from the eating throat thundering through the belly and guts to end in further silent pollution of the air already thick with flatulent fear” (p. 192). The military arrive to arrest him, but “the man” decides to help him. The only way of escape with the soldiers already knocking on the front door is through the latrine hole and so into the maze of back alleys through which the latrine-men carry away the filth of Accra. This escape provides a return to the initial birth image of Chapter Six. The two men must force their way through the latrine hole, “trailing dung and exhausted blood,” to re-enter the world. This second birth ironically mocks the first, when it was still possible to believe that “growth” from youth to age, from purity to decay, might be arrested by choice. This second birth is a deliberate acknowledgment that all life is caught in the tension between vigor and decay, between the symbolic blossom which has appeared time and again in the narrative and the hidden dung which sustains it and to which it must ultimately return. The

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agonizing paradox of the chichidodo bird is the condition of existence. This has been the fearful realization toward which the man groped earlier, that his own feelings of envy and his sense of a potential fruitfulness in the greed and aggression of his world are signs of the necessity of such things. Having the whiteness of stolen bungalows and the shine of stolen cars flowing past him, he could think of reasons, of the probability that without the belittling power of things like these we would all continue to sit underneath old trees and weave palm wine dreams of beauty and happiness in our amazed heads, (p. Ill) In the first instance disillusion had followed immediately, when he realized that work was not the currency of his time, and that only through corruption could the cars and bungalows be obtained, by “one bold corrupt leap that gives the leaper the power to laugh with contempt at those of us who still plod the daily round, stupid, honest, dull, poor, despised, afraid” (p. 113). But now he realizes that for Koomson too, even for the “successful,” the end of the cycle is destruction, disillusion, and the inevitable acknowledgment of the relationship between gleam and filth. The shock and horror of Koomson’s decline opens even his wife’s eyes to the full truth of the relationship between maggots and ordure which she has so glibly assumed. “He went back into the hall and stood quietly beside Oyo. She held his hand in a tight grasp. Then in a voice that sounded as if she were stifling, she whispered, ‘I am glad you never became like him’” (p. 194). The birth struggle and the excretory struggle are only foci for a universal action, a mastering peristalsis by which the world digests the human aspirations which each birth renews and each old age destroys. Questions of individual motive are again irrelevant in such a context. The issue of why the man saves Koomson is not answerable, except perhaps in terms of a recognized kinship of all those who experience rebirth. The latrine episode draws together the metaphorical skeins of the book, and insists vividly on the structural identity of birth, excretion, copulation, and death. Metaphorical theme has become the immediate tool of insight and compassion. Following their escape, Koomson and the man bribe their way to the fishing boat and make their way out to sea. Koomson will now be able to rejoin his family in a neighboring country. But the man has decided to return, and swims ashore. The sea is described as a purifying bath, washing away stench and corruption. But the purification is ultimately unsuccessful. The only escape of that sort would be through death, and this the man rejects. He held his breath so long that he began to enjoy the almost exploding inward feeling that he was perhaps no longer alive. But then it became impossible to hold on any longer and involuntarily he gasped and let in a gulp of water that tasted unbelievably

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salty. The surface seemed so far up that he thought it would never come, but suddenly the pressure around his neck and in his ears was no more and he opened his eyes again, (p. 210) When, later, he awakens on the beach, he sees the lonely figure of a woman approaching across the sands, and as she draws nearer he recognizes her as the Maanan of his past life, mad now with disappointment and disillusionment. Like the confusion of identity between Rama Krishna and Teacher, Maanan’s role is also deliberately obscure. She is and she is not a figure from memory. The woman laughed at the name, with a recognition so remote that in the same cold moment the man was certain he had only deceived himself about it. Then she walked away towards the distant town, away from the sun with her shadow out in front of her coloring the sand, leaving the man wondering why but knowing already that he would find no answers from her, from Teacher, or from anyone else. (p. 212) The past which the man has searched to discover reasons for the present has failed him. He knows with certainty that corruption will always renew itself, indeed that this is a condition of the renewal of all things, and inseparable from it, the paradoxical “promise of rot” (p. 146). When he returns to the highroad the new state has already begun the old process of bribery. “The policeman who had spoken raised his right hand and in a slow gesture pointed to his teeth . . . the driver understood. Without waiting to be asked for it, he took out his license folder from his shirt pocket, brought out a cedi note from the same place, and stuck it in the folder . . .” (p. 214). The cycle has turned fully. The old waste expelled, the “eating” process must begin again. As the bus drives slowly away it reveals on its back “an inscription carefully lettered to form an oval shape: THE BEAUTYFUL ONES ARE NOT YET BORN In the centre of the oval was a single flower, solitary, unexplainable, and very beautiful” (p. 214). The flower is unexplainable as far as the man is concerned. From his viewpoint, the events of the book are still confused and arbitrary. Armah does not allow us any neat extension of viewpoint, any convenient and sentimental notion of an “educative process” at work. But the issues of the book are explainable, or at least are more coherent and interrelated than the man knows, and through image and metaphor the reader has been exposed to these connections. The mystic and apocalyptic message of the mammy-wagon reminds us forcibly that there is a muted hope even in this world of the unbeautiful ones, and that the unity of dung and blossom is a

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radical and healthy reality. But for the man, walking away, there is truthfully limited insight. He has learned enough to survive on the minimum of hope and confidence; that is all. But it is enough, for he will plant a fresh seed. The beautiful ones may yet be born, one day. In the meantime, “Over the school latrine at the bottom of the hill a bird with a song that was strangely happy dived low and settled on the roof. The man wondered what kind of bird it could be, and what its name was” (p. 215). Unknown to him, his question has been answered, the question he asked so much earlier, when he “wondered what kind of sound the cry of the chichidodo bird could be ...” (p. 56). The cry of the chichidodo is not agonized or distraught but “strangely happy,” recognizing, if not entirely resigned to, the fact that its tantalizing paradox is rooted in the nature of living itself.

Notes All inset page references are to the following edition: Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (London: Heinemann, 1969). The novel was first issued in both the United States and Great Britain in 1968. ‘Peter Abrahams, A Wreath for Udomo (London: Faber, 1956). 2

“Wage employment in West Africa is characterized by three marked features—the smaller number of persons involved in it; the dominance of employment in construction, transport and commerce at the expense of manufacturing; and the high proportion of employees in the public section. ... [in Ghana] less than 25 percent of the adult men are in wage employment.” P.C. Lloyd, Africa in Social Change (London: Penguin African Library, 1967), pp. 119-120. 3

The paradigmatic relationship between body and landscape, and vice versa, is a widespread feature of African and West Indian writing. See, for example, Aim6 C6saire’s Return to my Native Land and Wilson Harris’ Palace of the Peacock. For an interesting discussion of this, see: Gerald Moore, “The Negro Poet and His Landscape, reprinted in Ulli Beier, editor, Introduction to African Literature: An Anthology of Critical Writing from Black Orpheus (London: Longman, 1967), pp. 151-164. 4

Sartre’s introduction to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 1969). 5

Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 161.

6

Eldred D. Jones, editor, African Literature Today, 3:56.

7

Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 123.

Hbid., p. 40.

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9

Ibid., p. 41.

10

Maanan is another of those complex figures, like Teacher, the permanence and objectivity of whose character is called into doubt as the novel unfolds. Maanan is the bearer of dreams and visions, the wee-peddlar who can open up the sordid landscape into a clarity of anger and perception; but she is also a complex symbol of loss and betrayal, especially for Teacher, for whom she is a lost lover.

Pessimism and the African Novelist: Ayi Kwei Armah’s #

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born Leonard Kibera

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born' is, like Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died, a work of vengeance. Armah does not seek to understand why independent Africa has been so corrupted. It is assumed throughout this novel that decadence has eaten into our very bones, and history. The Ghana coup of February 1966 was a changing of the guard which merely completed one more vicious circle. This preconceived judgment of our morality becomes the starting point of the novel. Consider, for a moment, our encounter with the old regime as the bus conductor savors the ancient stink of the newly issued note: Fascinated, he breathed it slowly into his lungs. It was a most unexpected smell for something so new to have: it was a very old smell, very strong, and so very rotten that the stench itself of it came with a curious, satisfying pleasure, (p. 3) Given this view where society gains nothing from past experience, no change is possible. History stands still. Or, at best, Armah’s bus which is the microscopic view of the country at large disappears at the beginning of the novel, only to reappear with another regime, in the old mood. The Beautyful Ones is, therefore, not part of that literature which probes below the obvious at critical moments in history—the preoccupation of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat or Conrad’s Nostromo—but rather the unyielding statement that the world remains static, unfeeling, and that the hopes of the early 1960s have given way to pessimism and death. We have become in this novel walking corpses. Dead because we have chosen, by our inactivity, to die. In the post-independence writings of Chinua Achebe and Okot p’Bitek, there still remains, at least, some kind of hope which leaves room for possibilities, however thin the cure:

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Take courage, Take a small amount of millet porridge, Let them prop you up, Drink some fish soup Slowly, slowly You will recover. Song of Lawino2

But Armah is not just disillusioned. Here man’s tragedy is that he hopes at all. The novel opens with the symbol of a sick country bogged down in indistinct goals. We see Nkrumah’s Ghana jerking into the future “in an endless spastic shudder ... as if held together by too much rust ever to fall completely apart.” Decayed beyond redemption, the country has been long due for the garage. But life will go on, palsied. For the nuts and bolts—those unhurried leaders who sit on the country with their legs dangling and enjoying their tobacco—will ensure that the taxes, and bribes, will come in. The setting is Passion Week, that week of suffering. The average citizen can hardly meet his bus fare and is, therefore, annoying since he cannot be adequately exploited: Much better the days after pay day, much, much better. Then the fullness of the month touches each old sufferer with a feeling of new power. The walkers sleep still, but their nightmares in which they are dwarfs unable to run away and little insects caught in endless pools, these fearful dreams are gone. (p. 2) The workers are almost made to feel guilty, as if they owe an apology for their poverty. But the exploiters, of course, show no feelings. Caught in the act of enjoying the stink of the note by what he senses is a higher conscience, the conductor is embarrassed. But because he is incapable of recognizing his sin against the country, he can only offer to make a deal, for no other reason than that he can afford it: The soul of a man was waiting to be drawn. An important bargain was hanging in the air. The conductor cleared his throat and ate the phlegm, (p. 6) But the man, that indecisive citizen who drifts through the novel in fits of selfpity and moral uprightness, has not been watching the conductor; he is, naturally, asleep. Thrown out of the bus and spat on by the driver, the man can only quicken his pace somewhat. This, then, is the mood of Armah’s fine book. It is not a moral fable in which the good could remain good or even triumph where Love has pitched his

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mansion in the place of excrement, but a comment that the good are not even good since they are so devoid of a concrete emotion. Theirs will always be a half-hearted attempt to clean the country of filth and corruption. Deciding, for example, that if we are to start anywhere we might as well begin by installing waste boxes on the streets, the pillars of the community achieve an impressive farce: ■%

The radio had run a program featuring a doctor, a Presbyterian priest, and a senior lecturer brought down from the University of Legon. The three had seemed to be in agreement about the evil effects of uncleanliness. People were impressed ... it was . . . the most magnificent campaign yet. (p. 9) A doctor to diagnose what is already known, a priest to repeat something about the corruption of the spirit, and an intellectual to rationalize, like the Teacher later in the novel, the suffering of those most affected. We are soon back in the muck. But, of course, we have never really been out of it. For no attempt has been made to see beyond the streets, beyond the “slanted” petals of the hibiscus flower imprinted on the houses of corruption (p. 13), beyond each new layer of dirt where “the central rubbish heap . . . has fused with the earth underneath” (p. 47), beyond all this and into the very banisters polished with our own slime, greed, and decadence. The Beautyful Ones can never be borne by a generation which so soon after independence becomes so myopic. But, again, this in Arm ah’s view is precisely the point. The continent never had men of vision, not even in those days when our leaders shouted for freedom. So it should be easy to take the rot of the promise. It should be easy now to see there have never been people to save anybody but themselves, never in the past, never now . . . (p. 106) In this Wasteland what rises out of the stony rubbish is more stony rubbish. “Everything grows old . . . encrusted with green and yellow muck” (p. 99). The very title of the novel is ironic since the smallest moment of possibility, especially the last moment of the novel, is denied us by the extreme anxiety: After a while the image itself of the flower in the middle disappeared, to be replaced by a single, melodious note. Over the school latrine at the bottom of the hill a bird with a song that was strangely happy dived low and settled on the roof . . . But then suddenly all his mind was consumed with thoughts of everything he was going back to ... (p. 215)

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It is not surprising, then, that with this desperate view of the world, the place of the writer should be with Jonathan Swift. Overburdened with great contempt for human activity, both writers are convinced that we are all Yahoos, soiled, continually soiling, and deserving no better judgment than Caelia. Consider the beginning of Chapter Six: It is true now that we are men, but not so long ago we were helpless messes of soft flesh and unformed bone squeezing through the bursting motherholes, trailing dung and exhausted blood. Here is none of that Wordsworthian delight at birth, none of those infants “trailing clouds of glory.” With Arm ah we come into the world doomed, catalogued. His youth in retrospect is one of betrayal. “There was the violence, first of all” (p. 74). Maanan, who hungers after a plastic beauty, betrays him with wee which introduces him not to life’s complexities but to escapism. Kofi Billy fails to direct his might at cleaning out the country. Instead he turns hermit. Finally he commits suicide, while Egya Akon is murdered by the greedy world. Armah’s technique is one that confirms his prejudices. We hate that which he hates because it is not allowed to speak for itself. Here, for example, is the timber contractor condemned before he actually appears: In through the door came a belly swathed in Rente cloth. The feet beneath the belly dragged themselves and the mass above the little arcs, getting caught in angular ends of heavy cloth, (p. 31) Then, The visitor’s mouth was a wolf shape and when he spoke the reason appeared. Children had a name for such teeth which come in rows, a second and even a third set pushing impatiently out against the first. The road for the good, suffering pilgrim is full of wolves conveniently placed to test us, bribe us, at the very moment when we are so needy. And they do not even come in sheep’s clothing. Armah’s approach is caricature, that refuge of the cartoonist who is pressed for time. Thus we meet Koomson whose very name dooms him: Koomson himself looked obviously larger than the chair he was occupying. The man, when he shook hands, was again amazed at the flabby softness of the hand. Ideological hands, the hands

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of revolutionaries leading their people into bold sacrifices. (p. 153) In an Africa where a political cartoonist would be in detention before the ink dries, it is understandable that we delight in this picture. At the same time, of course, it is easy to expose evil characters, to call the devil a few names. Koomson is double-chinned, greased, and uses Right Guard. We remember him in school as irredeemable, and he probably never mastered his alphabet. His wife we cannot stand. We know her all too well as that product of independent Africa, unthinking and hollow, surprised overnight into a stone house and long cars. This local beer, she moans, does not agree with my constitution. The writer has little difficulty with her, and neither do we. But the test comes when we stop using the moral fable as a convenient mask and begin exploring the depth, and the anxieties. This Armah is generally not able to do. For the road between him and that which needs to be explored already sloshes with human excrement, which is seen, not as part of normal human function, but as that which degrades us. In Armah, as in Frantz Fanon, man will always be defined by that which he hates. Thus the use of “loved ones” in this novel is ironic because the man’s emotion, if it exists at all, is elsewhere. The man belongs to that group of existential characters who wish to make some kind of meaning in a world which has lost direction. His is an almost religious search. We sympathize with the need to remain simple, to re-establish contact with his family. But there is a sentimentality about his plight, his own acute awareness that he is so suffering, so patient, that we object to. In Camara Laye’s romantic hero, Clarence, this leads to a total inability to communicate with those around him, for the “I” is so self-centered and the goal so pure. Clarence seems to enjoy his painful journey and refuses to seek liberation since the end is what matters. But “the man” does at least turn to the teacher in painful moments, however fruitlessly, about his problems with those other human beings who are not at the center of his anxiety. We find him also more admirable than Wole Soyinka’s Sagoe precisely because in a world of corruption Armah does not seek liberation in bohemian decadence. There is a concern also in “the man” which one finds lacking in Gabriel Okara’s Okolo who, drunk on an important madness in a corrupted society, runs around largely in pursuit of his own navel. This is to say, then, that we experience a sense of loss as the man wastes away in a very real political dilemma. Like Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Mumbi, but lesser than she, he is the intelligent conscience of the novel. Through him we are better able to examine others. Nevertheless, the man is judged. For it is not enough that he is good. One must act since a Christian who goes through life merely pained by events

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belongs in hell. It is not enough, either, that we see the man as one of those in Africa who are aware of corruption but find themselves incapable of acting when faced with the might of the well-armed regimes. He is unable to take a stand not because he is convinced it is useless to try but because he lacks a concrete attitude toward it. He is unable to put his foot down firmly at home simply because he walks so softly. True, the loved ones are beginning to destroy him. But such is his fate precisely because he does not have a moral point with which to confront others: “I have looked, Teacher,” said the man. “I only wish I could speak with your contempt for what goes on. But I do not know whether it is envy that makes me hate what I see. I am not even sure that I hate it, Teacher.” (p. 109)

And then, a little later, accepting imposed guilt and others’ definitions of humanity, “How can I ever feel like a human being?” And yet, of course, the man does give in—concretely—to corruption. He allows his wife to sign for the boat in a house where Koomson “lives in a way that is far more painful to see than the way the white men have always lived here” (p. 104). After the coup, he is among the first to make a deal. As he and the boatman save Koomson, the watchman stands in the way demanding a bribe: The boatman hesitated. But the man turned to him and said, “Give it to him, if there’s another one.” (p. 207) It is irrelevant that the wallet comes from Koomson’s pocket. The man has always resisted bribery. Now he is taking part in it. He could never be one of the “Beautyful Ones.” As the man participates in bribery, ironically only a few hours after the coup, he thus adds momentum to another vicious circle. When, therefore, the novel closes with a bus conductor bribing the army, the man, hidden and watching, is actually looking at himself. We have lost all sympathy for him. It could be argued that he has chosen to save one man’s life, however depraved Koomson is. And of course we are not always certain how we will act in a crisis. But such arguments are easily dismissed. That he has no feelings at all as he saves Koomson shows, in fact, what his attitude as a human being has been all along. And we inevitably remember at this point the night he touches his wife and goes cold with disgust at the ugliness of her childbirth marks—surgery he had a lot to do with—and, in contrast, the day he shops for special food for Koomson and gets a very warm feeling. The point is emphasized in Koomson’s house:

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The man closed his eyes, and like a piece of twine the thought ran round and round inside his head that it would never be possible to look at such comfortable things and feel a real contempt for them. (p. 177) He must in the end accompany Koomson down the latrine, reduced to the image of a cockroach. To say that the man is one of us to hunger after sentimentality. Teacher is not easily judged. Like the man he is depersonalized. Safe from commitment, he is connected to society only by cynicism and crude mechanics—that radio with the smooth dial. He is dipping into a Greek writer as we encounter him on the bed, naked, transparent.3 What he gains out of such education, apart from guilt, nobody knows. But rationalization is his metier since he has deserted all relationships. To judge him we have to see him as the eunuch who hollers meaninglessly, . ericaaaa!,” the hermit who has become irrelevant. And it is fitting that faced with the desperate need of the man who cried for salvation he should only mock, “Remember me when the fish comes.” If the man’s self-pity is at times understandable, that of Teacher provokes contempt. The discussion between the two men is not used as a moment of selfexamination but as a sort of affirmation by both that the man is intrinsically good. That the man keeps going back to Teacher indicates an interesting attitude in common. At one point in the office, the man is himself seen indulging in a long series of telegrams claiming the death of one after another of a whole clan of relatives.* Just as the man is to be judged with Koomson, Teacher is to be equated with that other man who stands on his head so his own semen can rejuvenate his brains. When, in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Pip has his world turned upside down at the Churchyard, it is not by choice but by the powerful and the corrupt. Pip spends his life rectifying this view of the world. Similarly, the choice of Ralph Ellison’s protagonist in Invisible Man to alienate himself from society is probably more understandable since he has striven so hard to be part of his society. But Teacher only luxuriates in his irresponsibility* The Beautyful Ones is a significant and very necessary exposition of prevalent values. But the criticism we make of V. S. Naipaul’s attitude toward Trinidad and India must be made here. Satire and cynicism when not tempered with sympathy—and humility—refine into mere technique, and not as a dis-

*Editor’s Note: In fact, it is the filing clerk, not the man, who does this (p. 155).

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covery of truth which is constantly eluding us as in Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat, but as a justification of a pre-selected truth or idea. What is constantly elusive in A Grain of Wheat is the very complex truth behind Mugo’s alienation. In unraveling this Ngugi has to keep re-examining, through the technique of flashback, Mugo’s past experience and that of the community which is continually demanding his involvement and with which he must inevitably interact. Most of the characters in this novel are complex precisely because the nature of betrayal is complex, but mainly because as an exploring novelist Ngugi does not limit the personalities of his diverse characters by imposing his own prejudices on them. The impression is that Ngugi wants to find out the “truth” as much as we do. In this he displays great respect for those men and women struggling against colonial oppression. And this, ultimately, is our quarrel with Armah. There is a kind of disaffection with the men and women of Ghana which seems to aim at total dissociation from them and which runs the risk of self-righteousness. In fact our quarrel may be less with the one-dimensional characters than with Armah’s view of Africa. For it is possible to accept Koomson, his wife, and the timber contractor in the biased way we accept Kafka’s bureaucratic figures or even Conrad’s malevolent characters. But it is hard to accept Armah’s contempt for Africa. In judging his society disgusting, Armah goes further than almost any other writer. Swift, at least, had his Houyhnhnms along with the Yahoos, whatever we may make of Gulliver’s rejection of both. But Armah’s great style lives fervently for the present in cyclic anger and fastidious guilt. As he remarks in Why Are We So Blest?, a largely autobiographical novel, On the way down and on the way back up, the world shows me its face. It is not beautiful. After I have been forced to contemplate it, I am overwhelmed first by a disgust I cannot help, and then by guilt.4 This is the preconceived view of the world which limits involvement and which is, in the end, rather academic. Now, in God's Bits of Wood, Semb&ne Ousmane of Senegal, a trade union man of action turned novelist, sets out to recapture a workers’ strike in which the hopes—and lives—of oppressed Africans are at stake. Ousmane displays the faith in the continent which can only arise out of intimate involvement in the welfare of a particular group of its peoples. This is no mere idealism, whatever the artistic weaknesses of the novel. For something has been learned and, if necessary, we can be tested again. Unlike Armah, who cultivates a pessimism as meticulously as the undertaker touches up a dead face for the viewing procession, Ousmane is a pragmatist first and an optimist—or even novelist—by coincidence:

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The men and women who, from the tenth of October, 1947, to the nineteenth of March, 1948, took part in this struggle for a better way of life owe nothing to anyone: neither to any “civilizing mission” nor to any parliament or parliamentarian. Their example was not in vain. Since then, Africa has made progress.5 What we expect of Armah, however, is not necessarily thjs kind of moral reassurance as we grovel in the muck, nor an indication of hope contrived in desperation. Indeed we expect the African writer to expose our failings. But those toiling millions oppressed by White regimes and African dictators owe him nothing. Thus in castigating us, the writer should not be shy of possibilities even though in the end he may find none. As a novel, The Beautyful Ones lacks in development and significant plot. No one changes on this excremental quest. Koomson will continue his corruption elsewhere, since he regrets nothing. Teacher will stay naked on the bed where, presumably, the coup has left him. There is of course a moment of realization by Oyo, after the coup, when Koomson becomes the hunted animal. His mouth full of the “rich stench of rotten menstrual blood”—a remarkable comment on the mind behind the novel—Koomson sits farting and eating: “I am glad you never became like him.” In Oyo’s eyes there was now real gratitude, (p. 191) Gratitude, not love; thanking others, not one with them. Perhaps for the first time in their married life the man could believe that she was glad to have him the way he was. (p. 194) Doubt remains. Nothing is solved. And the final image of the book is, appropriately, that of Oyo and “the eyes of the children after six o’clock” continuing to destroy the man.

Notes 'Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (London: Heinemann, 1968). 2

Okot p’Bitek, Song of Lawino (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1966), p. 210. 3

See also: Ayi Kwei Armah, Why Are We So Blest? (New York: Doubleday, 1972), pp. 18-19.

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4

lbid.y p. 15.

5

Sembene Ousmane, God’s Bits of Wood (London: Heinemann, 1970), author’s note.

Freedom as Nightmare: Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet_ Bom Shatto Arthur Gakwandi

By far the bleakest picture yet painted by a novel about the sourness of African independence is that in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born} So overwhelming is the sense of decay which is created in the novel that the death-cycle of life becomes the reflecting medium in which everything is observed. The vision of the author comes dangerously close to the edge of despair. We are presented with a world in which the sewage pipes of history have exploded and everything is polluted. The senses of the reader are vigorously assaulted to the point of being numbed by the persistent imagery of decay, putrefaction, and death. We meet a child, its nose overflowing with mucus and its mother sucking it with her mouth; we meet a young woman, her body disfigured by “creases of a prematurely tired skin.” We are not sure whether she is a horse or human, dead or alive. Streets are littered with rubbish that overflows from dustbins onto the pavements, banisters on building stairs are coated with vast accumulations of dirt, and lavatory walls are streaked with organic brown matter “about the level of the adult anus.” Everybody is described as sweating, coughing, spitting. “All around decaying things push inward and mix all the body’s juices with the taste of rot” (p. 40). The stench of putrefying matter becomes one with the stench of despair in the men who are walking about. The sounds, smells, the sights and the thoughts of the people all mingle into a single rhythm of decay and death. Irving Howe said of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four: About some books we feel that our reluctance to return to them is the true measure of our admiration. It is hard to suppose that many people go back, with spontaneous desire, to read Nineteen Eighty Four: there is neither reason nor need to, no one forgets it. The usual distinctions between forgotten details and a vivid general impression mean nothing here, for the book is written out

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of one passionate breath, each word is bent to a severe discipline of meaning, everything is stripped to the bareness of terror.2 One only need substitute “horror” for “terror” and the remarks become appropriate to The Beautyful Ones. There is an acute similarity in the way both novels are organized with “a severe discipline” to evoke a reality which to many readers must appear distinctly one-sided. They share a terrible frankness which often becomes a severe strain upon the senses. Orwell employs the symbol of dust to conjure up a sense of desolation and the erosion of the human spirit. Armah uses excrement and putrefaction to conjure up a specter of life as a death-cycle. The effect of the novel is achieved through a gradual build-up of detailed symbolic descriptions of isolated objects and situations so that each description in some way reflects an aspect of the decaying process with which the world of the novel is cluttered. At the beginning we follow the headlights of a bus as they sweep around in a curve until they come to rest on a specific object. The same cinematic technique is used throughout the novel. The author gives us a rapid impression of place and events and then concentrates our attention on specific details. In the opening episode of the novel we are rushed through an account of incidents at a bus stop before attention is focused on the inside of the bus where the conductor and one passenger are sitting, together but unaware of each other. The conductor is gloating over the contents of his collecting bag. The careful attention which he pays to the different forms of currency betrays a strange perversion. He regards the physical form of money as an object of pleasure. He not only examines the different colors of the various currency forms, he feels their texture and sniffs them affectionately, then he checks the earnings of the evening against the tickets so that he can appropriate the surplus. The passenger, who is throughout the novel referred to as “the man,” is fast asleep though his eyes are wide open. This sleep and loneliness are symbolic of the man’s isolation and withdrawal from his social world. His financial deprivation is made apparent by his lack of a handkerchief. Every physical detail and gesture has a symbolic value. As the man moves through the town toward his office through the littered streets our attention is focused on the overflowing dustbins surrounded by piles of rubbish. By this skillful selection of incidents and objects, within relatively few pages, the author has established a social and physical world which is completely encased in dirt, and threatened by death. The bus in which the man is traveling moves with “an endless spastic shudder, as if its pieces were held together by too much rust ever to fall completely apart,” the people are coughing and spitting out blobs of mucus, and even the bank notes have a rotten smell. Bodily excretion, rust, decay—both physical and moral—work in

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mutual conspiracy to imprison the man and the world in which he lives. Anything that is clean appears like an anomaly in this environment. Thus the multistoried hotel, the Atlantic Caprice, stands out on top of the hill as “an insulting white.” The name of the hotel has clear association with exploitation. The people who move in this death cave are described as sleep-walkers. “The walkers sleep still, but their nightmares in which they are dwarfs unable to run away and little insects caught in endless pools, these fearful dreams are gone” (p. 2). Thus only the man is continually aware of his nightmare. The rest of the people have learned to adapt themselves to their condition and to regard their polluted environment as a natural one. The early part of the story has a haunting power which derives from its allegorical character. The people have no names and places remain unspecified. The man becomes the Everyman of folk literature. The story also borrows additional power from the modernistic technique of fusing mental and physical descriptions so that they dissolve into one cathartic movement. However, later in the novel things begin to become more particular and characters are more individualized. We are made aware that the events relate to Ghana. This creates unease in the mind of the reader because it demands a different level of response from him. We are unwilling to accept the story at the level of social realism because that would call for a more balanced portrayal of life than the author affords us in the novel. This creates conflicting demands upon the reader’s sensibilities and thus diffuses the power of the story. It is difficult to find the basis for R. W. Noble’s response to the novel when he writes: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born unites, with striking effectiveness, qualities of technique and form from three different traditions of fiction. The tone of style of the pithily imagined dialogue between the universally designated characters, “the man” and “the teacher,” are evolved from the African oral tradition of story-telling, and similar qualities are present in some recent writing such as Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure. The literary tradition of realism is reflected in the plausible pattern of social, political, and physical detail. Deriving from the modernist movement is the minute exploration of the timeless motion of the individual mind: its fears, temptations, uncertainties, sufferings, guilt and loneliness. Ayi Kwei Armah thus achieves a complex style which aptly conveys the inner moral and outer social conflicts of West African reality.3 Even if we accept the superficial designations and glib comments on the various elements of style, Mr. Noble’s conclusion appears too voluble. There is no harmonious synthesis of the various narrative styles. The generalized qualities of folklore and the modernist symbolic descriptions work together

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quite effectively as long as we do not expect social plausibility. The attempt to fix the story and to weave it into recent Ghanaian history appears to be an intrusive urge on the author’s part to release his rage and disgust at his country’s politics. There are too many passages which one could not take at face value as “the inner moral and outer social conflicts of West African reality.” Here, for example, is a description of the physical atmosphere inside the office where the man works: The wetness within came partly from the sea which was only a little way away. Sometimes it was possible to taste very clearly the salt that had been eating the walls and the paint on them, if one cared to run one’s hand down the dripping surfaces and taste the sticky mess. Partly, too, the wetness came from people, everybody who worked in the office. Everybody seemed to sweat a lot, not from the exertion of their jobs, but from some kind of inner struggle that was always going on. So the sea and salt and sweat together and the fan above made this stewy atmosphere in which the suffering sleepers came and worked and went dumbly back afterwards to homes they had earlier fled. There was really no doubt that it was like that in all their homes, (p. 20) Even the most one-sided indictment of Nkrumah’s regime can hardly justify the claim that under the regime most people were suffering sleepers who had to flee from their homes because they were too deprived to fulfill family obligations, and that they sweated permanently “from the exertion 6f an inner struggle that was always going on.” What makes it even more difficult for the reader to accept these intrusive comments is the lack of identity of the speaking voice. In the first five chapters the story is told by a third-person narrator who generally follows the main character and interprets the world from his point of view. Then suddenly, in Chapter Six, a first-person narrator takes over. And yet, throughout the novel, we never discover what relationship this UI” narrator has with the third-person narrator. Later the two narrators merge but a certain ambiguity remains as to whether we are seeing the world from the point of view of the man or from the point of view of the indeterminate narrator. The very complexity of the narrative style and the multiple characters of the speaking voice seem to weaken the story by confusing levels of response in the reader’s mind. One can’t help agreeing with Eldred Jones when he says of the novel: The earlier vagueness and anonymity combine to give the earlier part a peculiar effectiveness. If this was a deliberate effect sought by the author it is difficult to see why he chose to become increasingly particular. The character of the novel changes as a result, without seeming to gain much from the change.4

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It would appear that the occasional switch from allegory to social realism comes from the author’s impulse to use the novel as a platform for denouncing Nkrumah’s regime. Apart from the fact that Nkrumah’s fall is a very risky subject for fiction because of its political currency, if it were to be used at all then the artist would have to afford us a special insight into the political and social issues which led to the downfall. Merely to say that the regime was corrupt is to oversimplify by adopting second-rate opinions, between 1963 and 1973 there were well over 30 military coups d'etat in Africa. The events of the continent seem to be following a pattern, so that the explanation of any one coup in terms of the personality of one leader appears inadequate, even in so far as specifically political issues are concerned. Besides, it appears arrogant for the artist to set himself apart and to denounce sections of the community as if he himself were above all of them. Very often the outbursts against Ghanaian leaders are charged with personal bitterness and self-righteous indignation. The novel dismisses the Black elite as slaves of the colonial boss and their only ambition to take over the privileges of their former masters. The tendency to generalize figures may also be seen at its weakest here: These men who were to lead us out of our despair, they came like men already grown fat and cynical with the eating of centuries of power they had never struggled for, old before they had even been bom into power, and ready only for the grave. They were lawyers before, something grown greasy on the troubles of people who worked the land, but now they were out to be our saviours. Their brothers and their friends were merchants eating what was left in the teeth of the white men with their companies. They too came to speak to us of salvation. Our masters were the white men and we were coming to know this, and the knowledge was filling us with fear first and then with anger. And they who would be our leaders, they also had their white men for their masters, and they also feared their masters, but after the fear what was at the bottom of their beings was not the hate and the anger we knew in our despair. What they felt was love. What they felt for their white masters and our white masters was gratitude and faith. And they had come to us at last, to lead us and to guide us to promised tomorrows, (p. 81) It is not surprising therefore than an African reviewer reacted to this kind of writing in these terms: So why this artistic arrogance? It seems to me that the author had worried himself sick before he wrote the novel: all right, I’m African, but what have I to show for it? All right, Ghana is my

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country, but what has she given me, to make her presence a reality? All right, THEY are my leaders, but what sort of people are they? All right, I should be a man of THE PEOPLE (that mythical entity!) but what have they done to me? All right, I should speak to my people in their own language, but when did they encourage me to do so?5 When in the middle of the narration we suddenly read: “How long will Africa be accursed with its leaders?” we cannot help thinking that the narrator is merely being used as a mouthpiece for recrimination. Nkrumah himself has blamed African political instability on the collaboration between “the African foreign-dominated middle class” and external agents.6 The military elite and the intellectual elite are seen as part of this middle class. Nkrumah himself evidently sees himself as much outside this class as does Kwei Armah, and attacks basically the same group of people. The murky ambience of the novel, both physical and moral, is only valid when it is distanced as allegory or when it is presented as an aspect of the man’s mind. It is indeed at this level that we accept the novel. Fortunately, the interruptions of the seemingly objective first-person narrator remain limited so that we can disregard them as intrusions of propaganda. The more universal concerns of the novel are the effects of human lust for power and money when these are given free rein in a society. Then the sense of community and mutual respect is shattered and every man relies on the self-seeking unscrupulous aspects of his nature to secure his position in that society. How was it possible for a man to control himself, when the admiration of the world, the pride of his family and his own secret happiness, at least for the moment, all demanded that he lose control of himself and behave like someone he was not and would never be? Money. Power, (p. 115) In the world of the novel, wealth and power have become the principal pursuits, and the inevitable result of the situation is a complete disregard for any moral or social considerations in the drive to satisfy individual desires. But it is not man’s nature which is at fault—this is how the novel escapes being negative—it is the nature of the society which calls into service the baser part of man’s nature, which in a normal situation is restrained by social sanctions, human affections, and responsibilities to one’s community. But when the balance is disturbed society unleashes man’s savagery upon himself. In this context the rise and fall of Nkrumah is seen as part of a complex process of social decay, and the personal decline of the statesman is fitted into the rhythm of a wider process of disintegration. The decline of society is traced far back into the colonial period. We are told of the general suffering and social misery

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which characterized this period of history. Worst of all is the fact that the exploited people were forced to fight in the White man’s war. This war affects the lives of the characters in a tragic manner. Kofi Billy loses his leg in the war, finds that he cannot be accommodated in the misery of post-war society, and is eventually driven to take his own life. In the crime wave which is the concomitant of the post-war economic depression, Agya Akon, because he is quiet and generous, is suspected of having a lot of money and is murdered by robbers. It is against this background that the new leader rises to power. He too finds himself unwittingly collaborating with the process of general disintegration. When he comes to power he has the best intentions for his society. But power corrupts him. Had he followed the path traced out by his youth and kept to it, what would have prevented a younger man, one more like himself in the purity of his youth, from coming before him as more fit to keep to the path? A youth who could have lived the way he himself had lived at first, the way he never could have lived again when he became the old man and shiny things began to pull the tired body toward rest and toward decay. But that would have meant another kind of death for him, this death of which he had begun to walk in daily fear. And so his own end had also to be the end of all he had begun, and if another promise comes it cannot be the continuation of the promise he held out but which he himself consumed, utterly destroyed. Perhaps it is too cruel of us to ask that those approaching the end of the cycle should accept without fear the going and the coming of life and death. (p. 88) The mawkish language attests to the shoddiness of Armah’s political sentiments. But the passage makes it clear that although the leader is not completely exonerated, he is only partly responsible for the situation in which he finds himself trapped. He accedes to power in a society which has been built on exploitation and in which men set money and power as the highest goals. His rise to power is thus doomed from the beginning to follow the cyclic pattern which leads toward decay. Nevertheless, he cannot escape blame for not having tried to change things. When he is canvassing for support before he comes to power he is astute enough to humble himself; but then he too grows “fat” with power and distances himself from the people who elected him. Occasionally the narrator indulges in simplistic moralizing, but as long as he does so without overtly trying to woo our support for a political opinion we are willing to accept his way of seeing—that is, watching from a distance— and the oversimplification of his vision can be accepted as a particular personal view.

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He was good when he had to speak to us, and liked to be with us. . . . Now all we do is sit and wait, like before he came. It must be power. I say this because he is not the only one whom power has lost. It has happened to those around him, those who were not always there for the simple sake of the power they could find. (p. 88) It is passages like this one which redeem the story by widening the horizons of social exploration which the novel is attempting. The problems of Ghana or any other African country cannot be simply explained in terms of the selfishness of the leaders who took over from the colonial administration. Explanations must lie deeper in the complex process of history, and in man’s perennial effort to keep in balance the interests of individual men who make up a society, and the collective interests of that society. The problem is an eternal one though it may wear different faces in different places and at different times. The novel’s principal weakness is that it is only really effective when it confines itself to the plane of allegory, and it is unable to assimilate its social and political assertions at this level. Okara’s The Voice1 is a novel which limits itself to this plane and avoids direct social comment, with the result that it has a more powerful effect on the mind of the reader than The Beautyful Ones. And yet the social message of The Voice is not any less clear to us. It is a forceful political fable, illuminating the inevitable sterility of a totalitarian nationalist state in which free thought is suppressed. The Beautyful Ones employs archetypal imagery to convey the universality of its theme. The sea symbolizes freedom, but, simultaneously, its bareness and monotony is also sometimes used to stand for deprivation. On the other hand, the land, which is the region of man’s life and activity, has been polluted. The narrator recounts that often in his youth he had spent many hours on the beach with his sister and friends smoking wee. Often they had to spend nights there, trapped between the two elements, shunning death and yet wishing to escape from life which has been fouled by man. It was a desperate time, still, and it was not only Kofi Billy who thought of hiding forever from the alien world impossible to hold. (p. 78) “The man” is often attracted to the silence and the withdrawal of the shoreline where his loneliness can merge with and get absorbed into the larger loneliness of space. His search for calm recalls Singh’s search for escape from the restlessness of his world in Naipaul’s The Mimic Men} Like the man’s, Singh’s search for peace is futile. The beach is used as an image of shipwreck where Singh is trapped between the loneliness of the sea and the restlessness of his native island. The man’s feelings while he is walking along the edge of the

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harbor suggest the same sense of being lost: The sounds of violent work grow fainter as the wind rises past him, and keeping to the edge where he can see quite far down into the sea, he walks without any hurry, not having to think about time or going back, feeling almost happy in his suspended loneliness, until he comes to a flight of stairs built into the side of the breakwater, leading down into the sea. He leans over and looks at the steps. They descend in a simple line all the way down, dipping into the sea until they are no longer visible from above. The man sits down, and, feeling now a slight pain at the back of his neck, throws back his head. Small clouds, very white, hold themselves, very far away, against a sky that is a pale, weak blue, and when the man looks down again into the sea the water of it looks green and deep. A sea gull, flying low, makes a single hoarse noise that disappears into the afternoon, and the white bird itself flies off in the direction of the harbour and its inaudible noise, beautiful and light on its wings, (p. 113) The man’s mood, thoughts, and movements have completely merged with the elemental rhythm of the afternoon. When he holds his head back, small clouds correspondingly hold themselves against the faraway sky. The steps on which he is sitting descend down into the sea until they are no longer visible. This rhythm of descent is suffused in everything. The sea below is a symbol of beckoning death. This is only one example of a persistent identification of shapes, colors, and sounds of natural objects as well as atmospheric moods with the moods and thoughts of the characters in the novel. The deep dive which the man takes at the end of the novel is a symbolic act of self-cleansing. It also signifies surrender and acceptance of himself. After the swim the man lies on the sand to dry and after a long sleep beholds the apocryphal image of Maanan. When we last met Maanan she was shaking with enthusiasm about the promise of a new leader. Now she is broken with despair. She is searching for something which has been lost in the sand and crying “with all the urgency in her diseased soul”: “They have mixed it all together! Everything! They have mixed everything. And how can I find it when they have mixed it all with so many other things?” (p. 180). The search in the sand marks the impossibility of the task and the repetition of “it” recalls Okolo’s search for the unidentified “IT” in Gabriel Okara’s The Voice in a world where it is impossible to find it. But whereas Okolo’s search is a positive process which shakes the foundations of society, Maanan’s is hopeless. There is no hope for her. She will die of despair, like many other characters in the novel. The man’s act of cleansing is necessitated by his contamination through contact with Koomson. This latter is the incarnation of all forms of social

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pollution from which the society needs to be saved. This is why his escape has to be made through the latrine hole. In social terms he is fit only for the sewage channel. The man brings himself very close to trouble by helping Koomson. This is the price the man has to pay for having let his family get involved in Koomson’s boat business. Although the man refuses to have his named used in the business, he refrains from any active opposition to his wife’s involvement. He is too doubtful about his own moral position to oppose her or Koomson. I find it difficult to accept John Povey’s view when he says of the man that: His strengths are a tough, rational certainty and a defiant morality that remains impregnable, even to the nagging of his covetous wife.9 Indeed the whole story is built around the conflict within the man, his struggle to resist temptation. His instinct for survival often threatens to conquer his moral integrity. Every moment in the novel leads him further and further into loneliness and self-doubt until the military coup affords him relief. However, if he had been simply defiant, as Mr. Povey suggests, he would have been a much happier person. But his happiness is undermined by uncertainty and selfdoubt. He often has to go to the teacher to seek comfort and assurance. At their last meeting, he finds that the teacher has sunk into despair and can provide no comfort for others. While he is listening to music in the teacher’s room, self-doubt fills his mind: For the man sitting on the deck opposite, all the cool sadness seemed able to do was raise thoughts of the lonely figure finding it more and more difficult to justify his own honesty. How could he, when all around him the whole world never tired of saying there were only two types of men who took refuge in honesty— the cowards and the fools? Very often these days he was burdened with the hopeless, impotent feeling that he was not just one of these, but a hopeless combination of the two. (p. 51) The conflict of his mind is fanned by thoughts about his family. The conflict with his wife threatens to lead to a separation from his family as is the case with the teacher. But the man loves his family too much to sacrifice it for honesty. He is saved by the coup when his endurance seems to be cracking. It would not be accurate to describe the man as a hero without defining the term. In the world of this novel traditional heroism is not possible. The man does not believe that the human condition in which he is trapped can be changed. He therefore makes no effort to change the system—which is the only

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thing that could constitute what we might call “social heroism.” His “heroism” is more ambivalent. He struggles against himself, against temptations, both from his wife and his own self, to take a short cut to success as everybody else seems to do. He has to contend with his secret envy for those who have succeeded by taking the path of corruption which he has resisted. We hear him telling the teacher: “They are using this boat thing, Teacher,” he said. “They are using it to hit me on the head every terrible day, to make me feel so useless. And the bad thing is I know they have succeeded. I am asking myself what is wrong with me. Do I have some part missing? Teacher, this Koomson was my own classmate. My classmate, Teacher, my classmate. So tell me, what is wrong with me?” (p. 57) One is inclined to think that in fact the novelist has overstated the moral weakness of the man without a counterbalancing emphasis on the qualities of mind which enable him to hold out to the end. However, by his stoic endurance, the man does achieve a kind of heroism. By the end he has been reconciled to his family, more important to him than public attainments and financial success. His manhood had been seriously challenged in his home by his failure to justify his own way of life. Now justification is provided for him by the coup. But in the social and political life of the country nothing changes. As soon as the man has undergone his symbolic cleansing he returns to the road only to witness another incident of corruption. The narrator intrudes to add a superfluous comment: It would be wrong, very wrong, to think as he was already thinking, that the change would bring nothing new. In the life of the nation itself, maybe nothing new would happen. New men would take into their hands the power to steal the nation’s riches and to use it for their own satisfaction. That, of course, was to be expected. New people would use the country’s power to get rid of men and women who talked a language that did not flatter them. There would be nothing different in that. That would only be a continuation of the Ghanaian way of life. But here was the real change. The individual man of power now shivering, his head filled with the fear of the vengeance of those he had wronged. For him everything was going to change. And for those like him who had grown greasy and fat singing the praises of their chief, for those who had been getting themselves ready for the enjoyment of hoped-for favors, there would be long days of pain ahead. The flatterers with their new white Mercedes cars

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would have to find ways of burying old words. For those who had come directly against the old power, there would be much happiness. But for the nation itself there would be only a change of embezzlers and a change of the hunters and the hunted. (p. 162) This then is the dark reality which the novel paints as man’s condition. The explicit comment says even more than the action of the novel gives us reason to concern ourselves with. The novelist fears that he has not sufficiently hammered home his disgust with humanity, especially the African part of it and in particular Ghana. So wicked, so dirty and so corrupt is humanity that there is no point in the individual’s trying to change it. The individual has got to learn to live in the midst of the filth and must try to secure his own private salvation, through endurance. In this unalterable situation the artist’s position is like the position of the teacher in the novel. He is compared to one of the inmates of Plato’s cave who at last manages to turn and get a glimpse of the light outside the cave. When he turns back and tries to tell the other inmates about what he has seen outside, they respond by saying that his long absence has made him mad. The end of the novel confirms the title, that the beautiful ones are not yet born. Those who are already born are corrupt, greedy, selfish, and dishonest. But within the statement of the title itself is implied some kind of hope—that the beautiful ones might be born. But this is uncertain. Hence the ambiguity of the very beautiful flower in the middle of the oval inscription: THE BEAUTYFUL ONES ARE NOT YET BORN The flower is “solitary, unexplainable, and very beautiful.” In terms of the vision which the novel presents, the meaning of this flower remains obscure. But earlier in the novel the third-person narrator whom we identify with the author has already said: Yet out of the decay and the dung there is always a new flowering. Perhaps it helps to know that. (p. 85) The reader is simply asked to imagine that there might be a flowering in the future, that all the filth and decaying process which is described might form manure for a new healthy growth. “The man” contemplates the meaning of this disturbing image until it is imperceptibly replaced by the melodious note of a bird singing on the top of a latrine pit. That is how life should be taken, so the experience seems to suggest. The sound, like the lonely flower, is isolated, surrounded by a hostile

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element. Man too is a stranger in this hostile and ugly world. But the alienation which the man experiences is not that of the hero of Camus’ L'Etranger.10 In Camus’ novel the hero cannot find a sense of purpose in the universe, while in Ann ah’s novel the protagonist sees a moral pattern which is clear but impossible to live by because the political and social set-up denies it. “The man” is a symbol of the alienation of the individual in an authoritarian state. There is no hope of his asserting his individuality in society and therefore no possibility of social heroism in the novel. The man remains anonymous, obscure, and insignificant, walking to his clerical desk in the early morning, strolling behind buildings during the lunch-hour, and slipping quietly into his bed in the middle of the night when he is on shift duty. He is despised by his family and ignored by the world. He is a modem man who has been turned into a slave of bureaucracy. The job was a filing job, and he had discovered that there were only about thirty letters a day needing to be put away, most probably never to be looked at again in one human life when one file was completed, (p. 155) To this morally disarming knowledge that his life is being spent on the repetitive and insignificant business of carefully putting away useless letters is added the boredom and the emptiness of compulsory idling because there is only enough work for about three quarters of an hour each day. He has to accept his condition mutely and at the end is able to come to terms with the shrinking of human possibilities within the system. Men like Koomson discover that the desire for greatness which drives them is self-destructive. They are “mimic men” who wallow in an imaginary sense of power and apprehend the reality only when it is too late.

Notes ‘Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (London: Heinemann, 1969 [1968]). Page references are to the reset 1975 edition. 2

R. W. Noble, “A Beautiful Novel,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 9 (July 1970), 117. 3

Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (New York: Horizon Press, 1957), p.

235. 4

Eldred Jones, “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” African Literature Today, 3 (1968), 56. 3 J. Kariara, “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” Zuka, 4 (December 1969), 57.

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6

Kwame Nkrumah, The Class Struggle in Africa (London: Panaf Books,

1970). 7

Gabriel Okara, The Voice (London: Heinemann, 1970 [1964]).

8

V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (London: Andre Deutsch, 1967). 9 John Povey, uThe Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” Africa Report (February 1969), 60. 10

Albert Camus, L’Etranger (Paris: Gailimard, 1942).

A Commentary On Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Bom Joan Solomon

Ayi Kwei Armah’s book The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born portrays the independent state of Ghana, revealing a society whose aspirations have slid into disillusion. In place of the “greatly beautiful” things expected from independence we are shown the stark and ugly reality that is embarrassingly far from those former ideals. Leaders who shouted against the “enslaving things of Europe” used the “same power for chasing after the same enslaving things.” It is shown that only disillusion is to be had from faith invested in leaders, and condemnation reaped for despising greed and possessiveness: . . . there will never be any saviors if each will not save himself. No saviors. Only the hungry and the fed. Deceivers all. Only for that is life the perfect length. Everyone will tell you, pointing, that only the impotent refuse. Only those who are too weak to possess see anything wrong with the possessing fashion. Condemnation, coming from those who have never had, comes with a pathetic sound. Better get it all first, then if you still want to condemn, go ahead. But remember, getting takes the whole of life.* The protagonist of Armah’s book will not give up his life to “getting.” But how does a man live without compromise in a society where men are valued only “as high as the cost of the things they could not buy”? This is the great question the novel asks. The book is centered in the conscience of a man

*Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (London: Heinemann, 1969), p. 106. Further page references will be cited in the text.

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who has chosen, in a corrupt society, to retain his moral nature. It reveals the abrasive confrontation with the implications of that choice which leaves him lonely and deeply turbulent. Lost goals cut the cords of that purpose that anchors him to his society and he is set adrift fearing the loss of his identity and unable to throw himself into life. Unlike Okolo in Okara’s novel The Voice, he is not the “bringer of unwanted light”; he wants simply to live as a good man. His struggle is to justify this moral position which seems to be harming those closest to him. He had been mistaken in expecting that Oyo, his wife, would concur in his outlook, and from this arises his turbulence and sadness. She is in harmony with the prevailing values of the new Ghana, longing for what is to be gained and despising her husband for not being an opportunist and making these things available to her. She is explicit about a man’s duty to “get far” and to “learn to drive fast,” but it is all in a direction in which he has no desire to go. But does he have no desire for the things she values so deeply? At various points in the book we are made aware of the ambiguity of his feeling toward the “gleam,” a symbol for materialism: The gleam, in moments of honesty, had a power to produce a disturbing ambiguity within. It would be good to say that the gleam never did attract. It would be good, but it would be far from the truth. And something terrible was happening as time went on. It was getting harder to tell whether the gleam repelled more than it attracted, attracted more than it repelled, or just did both at once in one disgustingly confused feeling all the time these heavy days. (p. 12) Oyo assumes that he wants what everyone wants and is just too self-righteous to take. She accuses him of being a chichidodo, the bird which “hates excrement with all its soul. But the chichidodo only feeds on maggots, and you know the maggots grow best inside the lavatory.” Yet unlike Macbeth, accused of resembling the “cat in the adage” by a wife urging him to fly in the face of his own deepest sanctions to come by ends he himself covets, the man’s desire for the “gleam” is not overpowering. In spite of his admission that he could never look at comfortable things and feel real contempt for them, “[e]nvy, certainly, but not contempt,” one never feels that his need for them, even on behalf of his children who have already imbibed their value, is so strong that he would get them through immoral means. He is too conscious of their worthlessness when measured against a man’s integrity, and understands too clearly that to get material comfort in Ghana at this time “where no amount of hard work would make a month’s pay last a month,” a man must compromise his values and destroy himself. Yet turning his back on these desires means turning his back on the desires of his wife and children, and losing their

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respect and therefore his own self-esteem; and he is belittled to a point where he can no longer even approach his wife with a man’s desire. The substance of the book is the man’s direct look at the quality of existence around him and his struggle to come to terms with it without doing violence to his moral nature. With the “loneliness of a mourner at a festival of crazy joy,” his alienated vision sensitively penetrates and dissects. The opening pages of the book take us to the center of this vision in an Recount of the new trash cans provided by the big shots of the city at great cost; to rid the place of filth. Gleaming white when first installed, with an impressive flourish of words in the papers explaining their purpose and costliness, they degenerate in no time at all to oozing overfilled bins of filth. The attraction and repulsion imaged in the gleaming filthy cans, their rapid degeneration to what is repulsive, their firm connection with empty words, and money—this is the underlying truth of Ghana. All his energies are thrown into trying to understand the nature of corruption and his mind revolves on thoughts of filth and decay. A descriptive passage like the following gives the dramatic setting and reveals “the man’s” dominating preoccupation with thoughts of unconquerable dirt, which becomes an analogue for corruption: The banister had originally been a wooden one, and to this time it was still possible to see, in the deepest of the cracks between the swellings of other matter, a dubious piece of deeply aged brown wood. And there were many cracks, though most of them did not reach all the way down to the wood underneath. They were no longer sharp, the cracks, but all rounded out and smoothed, consumed by some soft, gentle process of decay. In places the wood seemed to have been painted over, but that must have been long ago indeed. For a long time only polish, different kinds of wood and floor polish, had been used. It would be impossible to calculate how much polish on how many rags the wood on the stair banister had seen, but there was certainly enough Ronuk and Mansion splashed there to give the place its now indelible reek of putrid turpentine. What had been going on there and was going on now and would go on and on through all the years ahead was only a species of war carried on in the silence of long ages, a struggle in which only the keen, uncanny eyes and ears of lunatic seers could detect the deceiving, easy breathing of the strugglers. The wood underneath would win and win till the end of time. Of that there was no doubt possible, only the pain of hope perennially doomed to disappointment. It was so clear. Of course it was in the nature of the wood to rot with age. The polish, it was supposed, would catch the rot. But of course

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in the end it was the rot which imprisoned everything in its effortless embrace. It did not really have to fight. Being was enough. In the natural course of things it would always take the newness of the different kinds of polish and the vaunted cleaning power of the chemicals in them, and it would convert all to victorious filth, awaiting yet more polish again and again and again. And the wood was not alone, (pp. 14-15) He makes the point that decay is natural to wood. Man’s effort to arrest decay is mocked through the use of the trade names “Ronuk” and “Mansion”—evocative of products which suddenly seem so trivial in this context. Corruption has become natural to Ghana and as polish cannot hinder organic rot, so no attempt at cleanliness will hinder moral rot. Much of the book’s meaning is expressed in images of this kind which grow from superbly realized actuality. It is as if the writer in observing things accurately is able to see through them into their meaning. Take the moment at which the man crosses the bridge and sits down on the flanking embankment: Where he sat on the right, a hunk of heavy cement had parted from the whole and fallen leaning into the thick stream coming out from under the bridge and formed a kind of dam. Behind it, all the filth seemed to have got caught for a hanging moment, so that the water escaping through a gap made by the little dam and the far side of the ditch had a cleanness which had nothing to do with the thing it came out from. Even from the small height of the dam, the water hit the bottom of the ditch with sufficient force to eat away the soft soil down to the harder stuff beneath, exposing a bottom of smooth pebbles with the clear water now flowing over it. How long-lasting the clearness? Far out, toward the mouth of the small stream and the sea, he could see the water already aging into the mud of its beginnings. He drew back his gaze and was satisfied with the clearness before the inevitable muddying. It was the satisfaction of a quiet attraction, not at all like the ambiguous disturbing tumult within awakened by the gleam. And yet here undoubtedly was something close enough to the gleam, this clearness, this beautiful freedom from dirt. Somehow, there seemed to be a purity and a peace here which the gleam could never bring, (pp. 26-27) The real concern of this passage is with the nature of purity. The man sees that purity can emerge from filth, but returns quickly to the “mud of its beginning,” and yet the moment of clearness is deeply satisfying. In spite of his admitting to envy of the comforts of the gleam, his felicity comes other-

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wise; borne out, apart from this explicit statement, by moments of peace and happiness, fleeting though they are, that have nothing to do with bought glamor. In spite of its undeniable attraction this glamor will never bring peace because “getting,” which “takes the whole of this life,” is ultimately spiritually empty. This is the root of the ambiguous feeling aroused by the “gleam.” But there is enveloping the man a far deeper feeling of confusion which he carries to the Teacher in his search for clarification. Ghana’s betrayal which made victory after the war an illusion, his rejection of corruption, and—most crucially—Oyo’s total withdrawal from his moral position, all cause a confusion through which the man must struggle to find equilibrium. In a general collapse of values, how does a man make any firm judgments? The Teacher can help him only indirectly, and Armah’s protagonist forges his own standard for testing experience. Living in a slum he is already very close to the experience of dirt and decay, and the Teacher’s words about “the cycle of life and death, youth and age, newness and decay” fall on ready ears. How often had he not said it—that this was the way with all of life, that there was nothing anywhere that could keep the promise and the fragrance of its youth forever, that everything grows old, that the teeth that were once white would certainly grow to be encrusted with green and yellow muck, and then drop off leaving a mouth wholly impotent, strong only with rot, decay, putrescence, with the smell of approaching death. Yet out of the decay and dung there is always a new flowering. Perhaps it helps to know that. Perhaps it clears the suffering brain, though down in the heart and within the guts below, the ache of the sinking fear are never soothed. The man uses this concept of natural physical process to judge human behavior, attempting, through it, to get moral issues into focus. Looking at Ghana he sees something growing and falling immediately into decay, like the freakish “old manchild” whose picture he had seen at school, irretrievably old while chronologically young, decayed before ever ripening. “What is painful to the thinking mind is not the movement itself, but the dizzying speed of it.” The idea of time is an important one in this book, signifying two different kinds of commitment. Structurally the book moves through a few days in the man’s life, but all connected with this life seems draggingly slow. Images like that of the fan “which travelled with such a tired slowness that it made more noise than air” evoke the feeble depressed lives of men who are rendered impotent by their moral commitment. On the other hand, speed is always connected with lack of commitment, connected with the “hard heroes of the

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dream.” Taken up early in the novel, this idea is expressed through images like that of the broken pencil-sharpener whose “handle sped round and round with the futile freedom of a thing connected to nothing else. ” It is an idea embodied in Koomson. Senseless haste defines this politician, and in his overthrow the ideas of dizzying speed, purposelessness, and decay are firmly welded. It is the Teacher who comments on the futility of Ghana’s leaders, saying that “if we can’t consume ourselves for something we believe in, freedom makes no difference at all.” Returning to the concept of natural physical process as the yardstick of human behavior, we find the man contemplating the story of his Ghanaian acquaintance, Krishna, who had sought release from mortality. “Everywhere he wore a symbolic evergreen and a faraway look on his face, thinking of the escape from corruption of immortality. It was of consumption that he died, so very young, but already his body inside had undergone far more decay than any living body, however old and near death, can expect to see.” Fatuous to flee from a life principle, fatuous to seek detachment as a means of survival in an environment of natural corruption, Krishna futilely seeks immortality in a life subject inexorably to time and decay. The intensity of “the man’s” effort to understand corruption and his own moral position in relation to it reaches a climax in Joe Koomson’s house where he is surrounded by all that Oyo longs for: . . . Men have thought they had no use for the sweetness, their own personal selves. But for all such men there have been ways to get to the rotten, sweet ways. For the Children. Like a sidelong refrain that phrase jumped to mind, a remembrance of past conversations with men who had eventually come to the end of their resistance. For the children. Supposing Deede also could have beautiful clothes with their beauty crossing the seas from thousands of miles away, and supposing Adoley could have a machine to ride around on, to occupy her attention while she was growing up, what would they know about ways that were rotten in the days of disappeared parents? What would they care? What, indeed, would anybody care? For the little children. In the end, was there anything done for the children’s sake which could really be seen as a crime? Anything that could justify their condemnation to pain when all that was required was the sacrifice of something which would turn out in the end to be merely a fraction of life? After all, the people’s acceptance of all these things was from a certain knowledge of what life itself is. Was there not some proverb that said the green fruit was healthy,

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but healthy only for its brief self? That the only new life there ever is comes from seeds feeding on their own rotten fruit? What then, was the fruit that refused to lose its acid and its greenness? What monstrous fruit was it that could find the end of its life in the struggle against sweetness and corruption? (pp. 170-171) It is not his unwavering moral rectitude that he looks at in the light of the natural phenomenon that has become his measuring principle, but at what Oyo has made him perceive as a moral stubbornness. “What then, was the fruit that refused to lose its acid and its greenness?” He perceives so clearly all the attitudes of compromise; from those who plainly found it worthwhile, to those who wanted what compromise brought and in yielding to it hid behind the easiest of all excuses. “For the children.” “For the little children.” “For all such men there have been ways to get to the rotten sweet ways.” If he was expected to relinquish moral standards in this way, ignore his spiritual center and behave simply as growing matter, then by the natural law of growth and decay his own moral position was clearly unnatural: “a monstrous fruit” struggling “against sweetness and corruption.” The short chapter following the one in which this monologue appears quietly affirms the beauty and attendant loneliness of the man’s inviolate morality. Every time he saw it, he could not help thinking how very beautiful the boat was. Then he would come home with the desire to talk to Oyo about the beauty of the day and all the boats in the harbour growing strong in him, but he knew it would bring her more pain and disappointment than happiness, so in the end he never said anything about his feelings and his thoughts, (p. 178) This detail, beautifully controlled, conveys the man’s feeling of peace which opens him receptively to aesthetic satisfaction and at the same time reminds one of Oyo’s interest in the boat in her attempt to get rich. Representative of the new rule, Koomson has been presented as the smooth possessor of all that Oyo desires and as the embodiment of the corruption the man detests—the alternative to his own moral commitment. In the terrible picture he paints of Koomson’s escape after the coup, Arm ah shows the consequences of this alternative. He presents Koomson’s corruption in terms of a stench which emanates from him and embodies his utter degradation in his need to escape literally through a latrine. All questions of Koomson’s “rotten ways” being a feasible avenue to the “sweetness of life” is put beyond consideration and the possibility of a fatalistic acceptance of corruption in himself is taken out of the man’s reach.

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Yet the question still remains: how can a man who refuses to compromise survive in a corrupt rule, live his daily life with those who yearn for comforts only possible through immoral means, and live with the core of his self-esteem intact? After Koomson’s ignominy there is one important change in the man’s life. Oyo’s insight into the rottenness of Koomson’s ways brings her to respect her husband, rekindling him as a man. But there is no reason to suppose she will support him fully in his lonely stand. A woman who goes so far as to spin fantasies of material wealth and social status to impress strange taxi drivers will never concur emotionally in a view such as her husband holds. His equilibrium must come independently of her. His position at the end of the novel is one of total isolation. Having resisted the temptation to die in the sea, his emergence conveys a sense of purification. His tire floating out to sea and his sandals sinking beneath it, he comes up onto the beach with nothing. A woman, perhaps Maanan, who had once taught him things about being human, is on the beach “letting sand drop fine and free through her fingers to drift away with the soft breeze in the clear sunlight. And as the sand fell she was saying with all the urgency in her diseased soul, ‘They have mixed it all together! Everything! They have mixed everything’” (p. 212). He can make no contact with the crazed woman whose message seems to be that purity is not to be found and he knows that he will “find no answers from her, from Teacher, or from anybody else.” A sense of freshness and freedom flows through the last chapter, which opens on a note of quiet spaciousness. The whole chapter is a combination of vitality and evidence of human imperfection. There is the road, excitingly warm underfoot, the coarse grass, the coconut trees, the brown earth and the gravel, and there are the policemen, the barriers, and the guns. There is a new little bus with its neat young driver and there is the bribe he offers to get his bus through. Has anything really changed since the first scene on the bus with its hint of corruption and the man watching? He is a watcher now, but his turbulence has gone, replaced by a feeling of freedom, as he watches what must be, and a feeling of pleasure in self-mastery. He has refused to immolate himself and now knows the rightness of having never sacrificed personal integrity. But man is a gregarious animal; it is a “strong and ancient thought that there [is] nothing in loneliness but pain” and the sense of release at being freed from the oppressiveness of alien values which he knows will not change in his life-time, must always co-exist with “this aching emptiness [which] would be all that the remainder of his life could offer him.” The man’s steadfastness sounds the deepest note of optimism in the book, substantiating his own yearning: “Surely, something could still be done by a good man.” He remains true to his moral sense that there is hope that others, “when the festival of crazy joy” is over, will achieve a balance; that they will

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become numerous enough for their personal morality to permeate a state. Was it not Plato who said, “justice in the state is modeled upon justice in the soul and is dependent on the latter”?

Motivation and Motif: The Carrier Rite in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Bom Derek Wright

A massive emphasis on image and reference in Armah’s first novel conveys a single impression of things running entropically down to a point of stoppage: the sporadically mobile goods trains circling between Takoradi and Kumasi, the decrepit fan decelerating through “long, slow waves of time,”1 the flying ants and clerks going round and round in endless pools and aimless routines, the defunct pencil sharpener in the railway office, and the dim orange-yellow light which “came dully, like a ball whose bounce had died completely” (p. 14). There is a clear link in Armah’s imagination between the clerks and commuters waiting for the end of the month and the mood of many traditional West African coastal communities at the year’s changing. In Robin Horton’s words, “the end of the year is a time when everything in the cosmos is run-down and sluggish, overcome by an accumulation of defilement and pollution.”2 The implication is that Armah has chosen to see the last weeks of the accelerated but now torpid cycle of the Nkrumah regime in terms of the traditional year-end, when the old year’s lethal burden of pollutive sins and resulting misfortunes is ritually borne away by a “carrier” in a ceremony which, in Van Gennep’s scheme of classification, would fall into the category of “pre-transitional rite” or “preliminal rite of separation.”3 The carrier rite discharges, does not recharge: its removal of impurities enables the new year to go forward by the merely negative, cathartic evacuation of the old one’s waste, not by any positive re-infusion of energy; it prepares for but does not enact transition. The aim of this article is to show that Armah’s very detailed figurative exploration of the carrier’s purification not only limits it narrowly to its proper preparatory status, thus denying it any regenerative power of transition, but also attaches ironically to it a formalized fear of failure which haunts many communal expulsion rites and which publicly marks the limited efficacy and relevance to reality of all ritual process. The resulting implications for the novel’s action and moral vision are overwhelmingly negative. ®Witwatersrand University Press 1985

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During the course of the novel “the man,” who is its true but unacknowledged carrier, is continually “pressed down with burdens other than his own” (p. 46). Physically he carries his daughter, furniture, and drinks for Koomson’s visit, and finally Koomson himself; metaphorically he bears the weights of accusing silences and empty hours, and carries inward the anger and anxiety of his family, the insults and unadmitted guilt of the corruptly prosperous few, and the anguished misfortunes of the many. His ritual statuses established in the first chapter, where the prose is saturated by the doom-laden, entropic atmosphere of a community at the traditional year-end, burdened by an accumulation of pollutive decay and awaiting rejuvenation. The monthly cycle of debt and spending is exhausted and already, in imagination, “the fullness of the month touches each old sufferer with a feeling of new power” (p. 2). The feeling of irrevocable decline and decay is stronger, however, than the suggestions of deliverance. Above the “death-rattle” of the rusty old city bus, abuse is screamed at the man, soaked in his own saliva, by a conductor for whom the new month means only the “marvelous rottenness” of a new cedi note and whose nostrils perversely itch “to refresh themselves with its ancient stale smell” (p. 3). Ghanaian society, represented microcosmically by the bus, has no use for purification because it does not perceive its own decay; the symbolism of water-borne expulsion is thus precluded by streams clogged with “unconquerable filth” (p. 23), blocked drains which accumulate the dirt they should expel, and seas almost “solid” with the dumped refuse of ages (p. 176). The mountains of waste to which the drivers and conductors add their spittle and urine refer, like Amankwa’s antiquity of corruption and the ancient smell of the cedi, to unpurged pollutions much older than the Nkrumah regime and its colonial predecessors. Like the hotel-worshippers who lovingly hunger after what should attract their anger, the conductor is so steeped historically in the national infection and so in love with his own corruption that, anticipating Koomson’s boatman and watchman, he has become immune to its “most unexpected smell” (p. 3). His initial fears of the entranced man, asleep but with his eyes open and mistaken for a silent watcher, imply that the end of his corrupt personal regime on the societal bus is not far away. He imagines the watcher to be “the bringer of his doom” (p. 5) and hears the god-like voice of apocalyptic judgment: “I have seen you. You have been seen. We have seen all” (p. 4). It seems for a moment that guilt is about to be confronted, confessed, and unloaded upon the waiting carrier, the burden of the social organism lightened: Only his eyes continued their steady gaze, and the conductor felt excruciatingly tortured as they drilled the message of his guilt into his consciousness. Outrage alternated with a sweaty fear he had never before felt. Something, it seemed to him, was being

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drained from him, leaving the body feeling like a very dry sponge, very light, completely at the mercy of slight toying gusts of wind. (p. 4) But then the conductor abruptly changes course and shatters the ritual mystique. He perversely chooses to feed upon the decayed issue instead of expelling it—“The conductor cleared his throat and ate the phlegm” (p. 5)— and compounds his corruption by offering the man a share of his fraudulent takings. Once the mistake is realized and corrected, the imaginatively acknowledged agent of expulsion is himself violently expelled from the miniature society of the bus and, with the aid of a demonic taxi, jerked from the trancelike “long half-sleep” of his ritual condition back to ordinary consciousness. The spray of the spittle which pursues him confers not the sympathetic blessing on the carrier of recognized, admitted guilt—spitting often connotes blessing in the Akan tradition4—but the dissociative curse on the scapegoat which disclaims their common identity. This sets the pattern for the man’s treatment in the novel. The characters in turn alienate their various iniquities to the man, vicariously making him guilty of their own evils and then hypocritically defining themselves in opposition to him. Adopting a facade of moral uprightness, Amankwa affects to judge him as “a very wicked man” (p. 107), and Oyo’s viciously acquisitive materialism leaves him with the fear that his own honesty is really a vice. The man’s martyred interiorization of accusations allows the guilty deceit of the Koomsons to reduce his idealism to an ashamed folly and even the conductor, in this prelusive and premonitory scene, evasively shifts to his passenger the embarrassed excremental base of his infatuation with the odorous money: “Are you a child? You vomit your smelly spit all over the place. Why? You don’t have a bedroom? ... Or were you waiting to shit on the bus?” (p. 6). Taboos, in Steiner’s words, “guard the body’s orifices”5 and the excrementalizing of the carrier’s burden of corruption in the novel contributes to the man’s double-edged taboo status: he is involved in processes of contagion and decontagion and is both ritually “dangerous” to the corrupt and endangered by them. Prior to and during the epochal moment of change-over at the coup, the man appears to inherit the honest plain speaking that traditionally went with ritual role reversals at New Year ceremonies.6 His interjections embarrass the modern praise-sung chief Koomson and his direct looks and comments frighten the messenger and the “old-new union man” whom he informs thus: “You know who the real Nkrumaists are” (p. 158). This catalytic honesty is dangerous to the corrupt as it steers their attention toward the taboo subjects of legality, probity, and justice, and is thus taboo in the Freudian sense: “Anything that directs the patient’s thoughts to the forbidden object, anything that brings him into intellectual contact with it, is just as much prohibited as

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direct physical contact.”7 But this modern sense is allied to the carrier’s ritual untouchability and the fear of recovering ills formerly alienated to a conveyor and forgotten. The man becomes the metaphorical carrier of the guilt-probing disease of integrity which causes the Koomsons to regard him not only as invisible and inaudible—he is the “invisible man of the shadows” (p. 37) whom they are afraid to see or hear—but also as untouchable. Estella’s handshakes are swiftly withdrawn “in an insulting hurry” (p. 130) and “as if contact were a well-known calamity” (p. 38). People desire to touch the man only when they wish to transfer a shared corruption in which it has become necessary to implicate him, as with the conductor’s proferred cigarettes and the timber trader’s tainted money, or when, as in the case of the fallen Koomson, they wish to unload their misfortunes on to him as a prospective savior: he feels “a certain resentment . . . that in all his prosperous moments it was only now that the Party man should really want to get close to him” (p. 164). But the Koomsons and their kind are reciprocally dangerous to the purity of uncorrupted men. Teacher speaks of the blighting touch of materialism: “I have not stopped wanting to meet the loved ones and to touch them and be touched by them. But you know that the loved ones are dead even when they walk around the earth like the living . . . and their embrace will be a welcome unto death” (pp. 55-56). The man’s fanatical bathing rituals before and after contact with the Koomsons indicate the need for constant purification from their polluting presence and the strengthening of his own purity, rendering him least infected and so best fitted for the decontamination of his society. At one of these lengthy lustrations Oyo asks him if he has “become a leper” (p. 128), sparking a connection with his boyhood ablutions in streams also used by lepers and adding to his figurative status of social leper an idea of physical contagion consistent with his ritual identity. The man’s parallel, and apparently paranoid, identifications with the shadowy, downtrodden figures of the commuter’s twilight world are suspect at the level of psychology. His feeling for the young clerk who has yet to learn “that everyone before him had crawled with hope along the same unending path” (p. 33), looks like so much patronizing, self-gratulatory wisdom, used to project his own complacent despair: “He will one day wish he had never seen the Block. He will one day wish he had never been born, but not yet” (p. 111). His sympathy with the night sweeper reads like disguised self-pity: “Someone so much worse off. Christ! Someone actually worse off” (p. 33). His detection of domestic persecution in the lot of the night clerk, the coded confessions of the morse-interlocutor, and the shadowed faces of two northerners at the station looks like sheer paranoia: “What kind of misery was here that they could not have found at home? Or could it be the same escape for them also? Possible” (p. 103). The paranoid vision is established quite close to the beginning—“There was really no doubt that it was like that in all

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their homes . . .” (p. 20)—and is seldom critically placed and judged. This system of arbitrary identifications and self-projections has, however, less to do with the man’s individual psychology than with his ritual role. Paranoid selfprojection needs to be read as ritual introjection, correspondent to the drawing of society’s ills into the carrier’s effigy. Even in terms of sheer psychology, Arm ah seems to have more success with his ritual stranger than Awoonor: the man’s tortured interiorization of both accusations and anxieties is a more intimately anguished and painfully realized process than the detached, merely intellectual assumption of the “burden of the terrible truth” by Amamu, who is altogether a more abstract observer.8 Where the man’s paranoia is ironically located—the Space Allocations Clerk is not fleeing from loved ones at home but is at the office for the early bribe—the misplaced sympathies serve to telescope the carrier’s dual burden of sin and suffering, instanced here by the clerk’s corrupt motives and the persecuted sorrows which the man mistakes them for. Ritual ambiguity emerges from the man’s psychological confusion, a multiplicity of meaning from mental muddle. On a note of deeper personal relevance, two of these twilight creatures who are targets for the man’s appropriative empathy—the sweeper and the latrine man—are precisely proleptic versions of his own cleansing role and gather in advance the threads of his ritual functions. Both of these figures are caught between the ending and the renewal of cycles, carrying away at each new dawn the dirt which is the end-product of society’s day. Tired “at the beginning of the night” (p. 33), the sweeper, like the year-carrier, starts at the end. His sleep-walking delirium, gyratory dragging of cleaning utensils larger than himself, and “strange dance on the lower stair” acquire peculiar resonances in the light of his introduction as a “lost man from distances far off . . .” (p. 33). Amankwa looks at the sweeper “with hostility” and goes out as he comes in: the implication is that the trader, who is endowed with a legacy of ancient corruption and is elsewhere likened to a “forgotten bundle” (p. 107), is part of the uncontrolled refuse of ages, symbolically swept away by the cleaner’s giant brush. In the figure of the latrine man, the carrier-prototype is revealed with a more detailed precision: There is not much light, but not much light is needed to tell one that the man with the shitpan heavy on his head has an unaccustomed look of deep, angry menace on his face, and his eyes are full of drunken fury. Perhaps the smell of akpeteshie would be bathing him if he were not carrying this much stronger stench with him. Surely that is the only way for a man to survive, carrying other people’s excrement; the only way must be to kill the self while the unavoidable is being done, and who will wish to wake again? It is not such a usual thing to see the shit man coming at this hour of the morning. The shitman is a man of the

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night and the very early morning, a man hidden completely from the sight of all but curious children and men with something heavy on their minds in the darkness of the night. And it is not such a usual thing to see a latrine man up close. The last shall be the first. Indeed, it is even so. (pp. 103104) Many of the classic ingredients of the carrier, as outlined in Soyinka’s portrait of the Eyo Adimu for example,9 have been graphically transposed to this apocalyptic figure. The physical heaviness of the head-borne burden of human detritus is made to correspond rhetorically with that of the psychological burden of the troubled souls who share with him the day’s threshold. A drunken delirium must be induced for the performance of the carrier’s unavoidable and enervating task; the self-negating, slowly killing sacrifice from which no permanent re-incorporation into the waking world will be possible.10 The man who carries off the corrupt issue of his guilt-soiled, anxiety-ridden society is a distant outcast, a taboo figure secluded from the sight of all except his fellow carriers and “curious children”; such a child, at the end of the novel, gives “a long disgusted shout” from “a safe distance” and runs away as the man half-carries the stinking Koomson from the shitman’s circuit. In the person of the man the ritualized seclusion and stigmatic estrangement of yearcarrier, shit-carrier, and sweeper are brought together: imaged repeatedly as stranger and shadow, he is another “lost man from distances far off”; “. . .he felt like a stranger from a country that was very far away, seeing everyone and himself also involved in a slow, sad game that would never end” (p. 131). Finally, Armah’s droll and cryptic Biblical tag energizes a pun which signals the carrier’s ambiguous status. “The last” become “the first” has the endproduct of the human physiological circuit and social body carried mockingly before, like the symbolic shit truck riding at the head of Nkrumah’s motorcade in Awoonor’s novel.11 But coupled with this is the ironic hint and wan hope of some revolutionary or messianic reversal following upon the expulsion of the old order’s dirt. In fact, the coup effects no such change in stations but merely reshuffles power into the hands of men not very different from the ones they supersede: “Now other men, with the help of guns, had come to this same power . . . New people, new style, old dance” (p. 157). The man shares with these figures an anonymity which marks their common social invisibility. The novel’s carriers have little affinity with Soyinka’s special “strong breed” or the priestly carriers and visionary liminars conceived by Awoonor12 and Richard Priebe.13 This does not mean, however, that the man’s anonymity and impersonality have anything to do with an everyman typicality, after the pattern of Western allegory, as some commentators have assumed.14 It is not merely that the human being who carries the conscience of

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a wholly corrupt society must be untypical of it. In the novel’s society of Westernized go-getters with extraordinary whitewashed Anglo-African names— “Whatever happens to the soul of a little African child who grows up thinking of himself as Mike?” (p. 121)—the man’s traditional ordinariness finds its special and peculiar expression in anonymity. In a world where naming is itself inauthentic the man, whose communal representativeness lies in his task and not his occupational or class identity, is marked out as different and unrepresentative by not being named. At the same time, his anonymity mechanically identifies him with two groups of peripheral characters who are designated only by their occupations: the office’s oppressed menials and its corrupt managers and clerks. Coupling the carrier’s familiar double burden of the nation’s sorrows and sins, the man’s task is to relieve the suffering of one by bearing away the corruption of the other. “It is nobody, just the Minister,” the man tells the wary boatman during the escape. Fallen from fame, Koomson becomes another “nobody,” the term reserved for the man by his mother-inlaw, and joins the ranks of the other nameless people on whose behalf the man is seen to act. In the novel’s ritualistic finale the vestigial carrier motif, which has moved with quiet insistence through the entire metaphoric structure, begins to take control of the action, while the correspondences between human and ritual properties become particularly marked. With all of the African oral tradition’s vividly concrete force of personification, the fugitive Koomson is materialized into a bag of decayed body wastes to be evacuated down the national latrine hole. Exuding “flatulent fear,” excremental “smell waves,” and “the rich stench of rotten menstrual blood” (p. 163), he has become the residual filth of both the exhausted, moribund regime toppled at the coup and, by dint of his repeated comparison to slave-chiefs, a much older legacy of corruption. The debris-heaped shoreline at the end of the latrine circuit surrounds Koomson with an imagery of material deadness, and the politician himself is “like a man at his own funeral” and “completely doomed, unable to help himself” (p. 175). For the second time in the novel, the man enters his own house to encounter Koomson, signifying his estrangement even in his own home, his necessary seclusion and separation from the pollutive object until the start of the ritual passage, and the entirely active nature of his role. From this moment on Koomson assumes the passive, inert status of the object of contamination which must be collected, insulated, and maneuvered into position in ritual preparation for its conveyance. Helplessly refusing the man’s invitation to use bath or latrine, the Party man is unable to purge and purify himself but has to have these things done to him: “Koomson walked like a man without a will of his own” (p. 166). The meal given him may suggest the fattening of a sacrifice but this does not mean, as Terry Goldie concludes, that “Koomson becomes the scapegoat, the sacrifice.”15 If caught, Koomson would doubtless be made into

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a scapegoat for the crimes of the regime; as it is, he is, in literal terms, not the scapegoat but the escapee and, in metaphoric terms, does not carry its ills but is himself the ills which are carried. More interested in his object-status as ritual property, Armah reductively depersonalizes Koomson into the symbolic dirt mound or wooden.figurine in the carrier’s model canoe: the man leads him across a landscape of “stumps and holes and mounds” and the politician is even described as “walking stiffly,” “momentarily rigid,” and “like some wooden thing, not seeming to care where it was he was going, like a being for whom the world had ceased to exist” (pp. 170-171). He is now almost inanimate, a dead weight which is pushed, pulled, held, rammed, gently drawn, steered, and dragged by its carrier who, after partly denuding the contamination source during the latrine passage, no longer troubles to keep “a fruitless distance between himself and the other” (p. 163) and thus avoid contagion. Finally, Koomson is “half-lifted” in the narrow lane behind the latrine, in readiness for the carrier’s dash to the sea, and the man stoops under his burden, “walking painfully in the curve” of the sea-wall to avoid detection. Throughout the passage the man’s dealings with his charge are, like the boatman’s greeting, marked by an appropriately impersonal, ritual formality. Up to the moment when he is put to sea Koomson, as taboo-object, is “a dangerous person to be with” and the “stranded debris” in the boatman’s soup, like the junked shoreline, hints at the familiar risk of missing the ebb-tide, with the disastrous consequence that the pollutive ills will be swept back to land on the next flow: “There is not much time,” says the man. “There is no time at all, in fact” (p. 174). Here is the Ijaw carrier in Robin Horton’s account: As the signs of possession appear, a ragged exhortation breaks from the crowd: “Time to go down, it is time to go down!” . . . As the carrier reaches the waterside, helpers take the load from his grasp and set it down in a waiting canoe. No sooner is this done than he becomes himself again: his possessors’ work is finished, and they have gone their way. For a few seconds he stares dazedly down at the boat, wondering where he is and how he got there. Then he pulls himself together. Lifting from his neck a length of palm-frond with a small chick attached to it, he circles it three times around his head and throws it into the miniature canoe. By this, he rids himself of any residue of the destructive forces with which he has been in such close contact . . . Then one of them stands up, heaves the miniature canoe and its figurine into the waters, and mutters for the last time: “We have taken you down. Do not come again and worry us. Let evil go out. Let sickness go out!”16

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The man, as carrier, undergoes a similar derangement and mystical selfestrangement which leaves him unable to explain why he is on the boat at all. He hears himself distantly repeating Koomson’s words “as if he were not himself but someone completely different.” The stigmatic passage of the exorcism, through delirium and possible madness, brings the mixed relief of social liberation and estrangement: “. . . the receding town, with its weak lights, now seemed to be something apart, something entirely separate, from the existence of the man . . . Now the town looked very far away, and the man felt achingly free of everything in it” (pp. 176-177). But the returning stench of Koomson and the boatman’s warning, with its echo of the ritual exhortation—“The bay is out there if you want to go down”—call the man back to himself. “Then the smell of shit which had never really left him, became even stronger, and when he turned he saw Koomson next to him. ‘You are going back,’ the Party man said, against the engine noise” (p. 177). To return to the community, the man must rid himself of the smell still clinging to him, or he must remain with his charge in polluted exile. The ritual immersion which follows matches the model of the coastal carrier, cleansing the man of the contagious, destructive forces which are felt to physically “get out from him, from the endings of the nerves and the fingertips, from every part of his body” when he reaches the shore. In Armah’s version the saving rubber inner tube does the work of the palm fronds: it insulates the man from the water’s previous pollutions—“the night sea looked thick and viscous, almost solid”—and, like the fronds, is finally thrown back into the current in the direction of Koomson’s tainted boat, carrying with it the last vestiges of pollution. Barely has the man emerged from the ritual process when its tribulations begin to take their physical and psychological toll. In the water he has “the almost exploding inward feeling that he was perhaps no longer alive” and is left with the marooned carrier’s peculiar stigma of alienation—the “cold feeling” of “vague freedom” and “untroubled loneliness.” As he reaches land the world is “so very far away from the welcoming sand of the beach beneath him” and in the last chapter he observes the brand-new societal bus and its lubrication by ageold corruption with the spectatorial detachment of one who is now far outside it. Although a depressingly complete re-incorporation into family and community, not permanent exile or isolating stigma, is envisaged in the last paragraph of the novel, there are lingering intimations of the carrier’s return to an impaired existence and slow entropic decline17 in the man’s continuing estrangement: “. . . above all the never-ending knowledge that this aching emptiness would be all that the remainder of his life could offer him. He walked very slowly, going home” (p. 183). Such systematic tracking of behavior to ritual source gives the impression that, from the coup onward and in selected earlier instances, the man merely goes through a series of mechanical metaphoric motions in which psychology

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is overridden by ritual pattern, motivation clouded by motif. For example, the man’s presence on the escape boat after aiding the boatman with the starting mechanism makes no sense except in terms of ritual metaphor: the ceremonial pattern demands that the ills of the old year are actually carried a little way out to sea before the carrier endeavors to purify himself of their enervating influence. There is no evidence in the text for Margaret Folarin’s idea that the man attempts a half-hearted “escape from everything that lies in darkness at home” and then, too “tied to his domestic commitments,” apparently changes his mind.18 The man’s apprehension of the sea as thickly “viscous” prior to his immersion in its “unbelievably salty water” (p. 178) derives less from his immediate sense-impressions than from the image of an expelled pollution still sticking to the agent of expulsion, about to be ritually cleansed. Motivation is never a strong feature in Armah’s novel. The man is unable to give a convincing explanation of why he refuses to take bribes—“I don’t know,” he answers Amankwa (p. 31)—or why he saves Koomson. In the latter action, however, Armah’s selection and emphasis of motivation tie it to his ritual motifs with a remarkably logical consistency: the one does not detract from but crucially confirms the other. It has become commonplace in critical commentary on the novel to assume that the man helps the Party man to escape because he is already corrupt like him or is as least tainted by earlier contact with him,19 or, alternatively, if this is not so, that he becomes corrupt in the process of saving him.20 All of these explanations are less than the truth. Firstly, in the matter of the boat deal the man simply remains aloof from what he cannot prevent and what little pleasure he takes in the boat is purely aesthetic, not acquisitive (p. 152). He does not capitulate but holds out against heavy temptation until his temporary vindication by the coup and his pollution behavior is consistent with his uncompromising integrity’s ability to withstand pressure: at the last meeting with Koomson he holds his breath against the politician’s “pollution of the air” (p. 163) as he had earlier held his breath to keep out the stench of the public lavatory (p. 41) and the fetid wood of his shower door (pp. 101-102, 119) and as he will do again in the water when departing from him. Secondly, the man is not necessarily relegated to Koomson’s level because he is forced into Koomson’s element—the bribe to the watchman—in order to save him. Corruption becomes a way of saving life, not a way of life as it is for Koomson. In the former, one corrupts to live; the latter lives to corrupt. The minimal taint of the carrier, whose own nature is a stranger to what he carries and who does not embody the impurities he conveys, is compatible with the honest individual’s inescapable contact with corruption in an excrementalized universe where “all around decaying things push inward and mix all the body’s juices with the taste of rot” (p. 40). The man is forced to wade through Koomson’s vomit in the latrine and carries his smell home with him, as he had earlier taken home the scent of Estella’s perfume. The carrier’s own inevitable

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infection is instrumental in the restoration of the community’s health. But the dissociative phrases and metaphors constantly differentiate between the man and his pollutive burden: in the converted lavatory where the boat deal was finalized the man, now in the role of national latrine man, stands “a little apart from the party man and his boatman” (p. 174). What precipitates the man into effecting Koomson’s escape has passed largely unnoticed, even though Arm ah hammers it home on every page. Panter-Brick is half-way there: “More out of disgust at the change in the Party man’s appearance—physical deflation matching at last the inner moral decay— than out of any sense of duty, the man helps the wretched Koomson to escape in a fishing trawler.”21 The immediate impulse to get Koomson away is overwhelmingly physical in its origin: the man simply cannot stand his smell. He can be rid of the unbearable only by bearing it away: The man himself was filled with only one thought now: to get out of this room ... he would surely vomit if he did not get out from this foul smell. Hoping to steal a breath of uncorrupted air, he moved toward the window . . . There was only the awareness of his own acute discomfort. . . And the stink was unsupportable ... he was about to die of this smell . . . The smell was truly unbearable . . . Even a sigh from him [Koomson] spoiled the air some more. The man tried again, looking for a way out, any way out. (pp. 163-164) Faithfully following the pollution behavior of his ritual model, Arm ah has graphically corporealized corruption into a grotesque and obscene physical phenomenon, an all-pervasive rottenness whose pollutive presence cannot be endured and so must be expelled. The hyperbole insists on the sheer material urgency of expulsion, to the exclusion of abstract moral significations either of the man’s capitulation to corruption or of his upholding of it as a moral necessity. Brute physiology prevails at the expense of moral allegory; ritual meaning effaces the ethical one. There is neither guilty lament over his taint nor moral defense of it; he is not the chichidodo singing happily over the latrine on the last page. His task is simply something that has to be done. Arm ah is, of course, alert to the complementarity of contraries in ritual forms which invests corruption with positively life-giving and life-saving elements. The daily “kola” of the bribe feeds families, oils into motion Amankwa’s logs (also put to sea by a tainted carrier), and keeps energy alive by lubricating the otherwise stagnant economic and commercial life of the nation. Seeds feed on rot; flowers grow from dung and maggot food from excrement. But the element of personal humanitarianism and the general respect for human life are subdued, if not suppressed, in the severely formalized rescue of the fugitive politician. Where a saving regard for life should be, there is only physical

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disgust and moral indifference: “He thought with some surprise of his complete inability to get affected by the feelings and fears of the figure next to him. There was only the awareness of his own acute discomfort...” (pp. 163-164). On the boat he is moved by a strange quirk of impersonal compassion for “the strange emptiness of two lives spent apart” (p. 177); his feeling is for the situation of Koomson and Estella, not the persons themselves. At the rescued man’s parting thanks, “the man heard the words, but he felt nothing for Koomson.” It is the distanced neutrality of formal ritual, in Which the disinterested performer has no personal or human feelings toward his task. This impersonal spirit of ritual formality gives to Armah’s principal motif a problematic status: from it is derived an apparently fatalistic acceptance of corruption as the total condition of reality, something which is stronger than individual honesty and through which everything that happens is expressed. His patience and resistance worn down by the cumulative force of latrine slogans, the example of fellow-clerks, and the general ubiquity of bribery and fraud, the man decides that “there was no more point in his continuing his efforts to keep the rot out of himself” and persuades himself that the slippery growth on the bathroom floor was “almost comfortable if one forgot to think about it” (pp. 101-102). Weary capitulation informs his behavior after the first meeting with Amankwa: “In his tiredness it did not matter that his thumb and the balls of his fingertips were being clammily caressed by the caked accretions on the banister” (p. 34). This symbolic action is duplicated after the second meeting: “The man goes down the stairs, and this time he has not the energy to keep his hand off the dirt-caked banister, and he lets it slide greasily down” (p. 111). On both occasions there is a formal acceptance of the carrier’s token taint by the unavoidable touching of the pollutive substance which, in a world where dirt replaces air, has spread itself throughout the environment. The ritual gesture is made at the moment of submission and the abandonment of struggle; ritual action, by implication a kind of literary last resort, is taken up and marks the moment when real action in the world becomes futile or impossible. Arm ah negatively equates actual compromise, resignation, or outright capitulation with a ritual tokenism which does nothing physically about evil. In the last third of the novel there is a self-conscious shifting of the novel’s frame from realism to ritual and myth. This deliberate and most probably ironic transposition makes defilement a sign not of defeat but of ritual destiny, half-heartedly disguises escape as expulsion, and opens up wider speculative fantasies of the panoramic cleansing of history right back to pre-colonial times. Armah uses ritual in ways which explore its limited relevance and turn its inefficacy to ironic effect. He refuses to let ritual action pass for the main event (as it does in Soyinka). It is never anything but secondary and substitutive in nature and Armah is perhaps the only West African writer to deny the carrier motif its usual accretions of radical and regenerative change and to restore it to the

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merely cathartic mode which is its true status.22 Going further than Awoonor, Armah’s treatment of time in this novel effectively assigns to its carrier figure the disposal of the whole of African history.23 The author toys with this idea as a historical necessity: Africa’s future may demand a total break with the past; a new start is dependent upon a thorough sweeping away of anciently corrupt heritages. But the historical magnitude of such a cleansing, extending to mythic proportions, is of the impossibly idealistic and apocalyptic order of the novel’s many millenarian faiths in messiahs and beautiful saviors, the “future goodness” (p. 160) and “the destroyed people waking up and wanting to make themselves whole again” (p. 90). The only practical possibility envisaged is a break with the immediate past of the Nkrumah regime, but the inveteracy of corrupt traditions prevents the nation from availing itself even of this limited opportunity. History in Arm ah is encycled continuity, not a series of Eliadean explosions, apocalyptic annulments, or revolutionary restarts.24 In Armah’s first novel the carrier has come full circle to his original position in a pre-liminal rite of discharge and separation, no more than preparatory to the liminal rites of transition. His figurative removal of the Koomsons and Nkrumahs is one of “the things in the present which would prepare the way” for the “future goodness” like the coastal carrier rite through which pollution is “cleansed from the village, and way made for new life to come in.”25 The rite merely clears the path for the new by evacuating the waste of the old; it admits passage to renewal through negation and entropy. Armah extracts a grim exhilaration from the cathartic release which is the rite’s main feature. In the symbolic latrine where the nation is to be delivered from the costive stagnancy of the Nkrumah regime, Koomson stares at the ceiling “with something like relief” and the powerful smell makes the man imagine “particles of shit doing a wild, mixed dance with drops of stale urine” (p. 166) as if in joyful release at Koomson’s evacuation. But the dynamic complementarity of opposites which Richard Priebe, following the models of Victor Turner, discovers in liminality and transition is largely inapplicable to the narrowly pre-transitional rite which Armah scrupulously limits to its original purpose and effect.26 “Undoing, dissolution, decomposition,” writes Turner of liminal rituals, “are accompanied by processes of growth, transformation, and the reformulation of old elements in new patterns.”27 In Armah’s choice of ritual form, however, the New Year’s fruitful binary equivocalities—for example, dirt, water, and menstrual waste—are largely dormant. Excrement is narrowed to deathly waste and decomposition and even the saving implication of cathartic release fails to reaffirm the vigor of a healthy organism. The latest order’s renewed bribery, following hot upon the escape bribe, indicates that the evacuation of the regime’s decay has not restored the social body to a more normal functioning. The clogged currents of baths, streams, and seas marginalize the purificatory and regenerative potential of water; only the “brief

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gust of wind still lifting off the sea” and “deep breaths of the air” fascinate the man with their “freedom from decay” during the ritual sea passage. The “tired and menstrual” polish which the* man uses on the floor takes its place in an unproductive “senseless cycle” which leaves “everything the same” (p. 118), and Koomson’s valedictory stench of “rotten menstrual blood” implies no complementary opposition of fertility and generation. Koomson’s excretory “rebirth” through the latrine hole, symbolically naked and pushed “head first” by the man as midwife, is the purest parody, the culminating mock ritual of passage; the irony which attends it is too deliberately droll and overtly selfconscious to admit the latent suggestive inevitability of subconscious, subtextual ritual patterns. In his last words Koomson ironically echoes the parting formula addressed to the year’s ills—“Do not come again and worry us”28—and the man repeats them: “We shall meet again.” This, and the debris heaped by the returning tide, imply that they will not be washed very far away. In Armah’s totalitarian environment, bribery is banished by a bribe; corruption, perpetually self-repeating, must be expelled by more of the same. Like the novel’s many personal and communal purifications in private showers and public baths, the cleansing rite creates the dirt it is meant to discharge and there remains only “the doomed attempt to purify the self by adding to the disease outside” (p. 40). Armah’s figurative version of the rite, like Soyinka’s dramatization of the debased actuality,29 has the last purgative act of the old order undermining itself by triggering the first guilt of the new one. The natural cycle of guilt, expiation, and redemption is not allowed to run its full course but is viciously truncated and abridged at its inception. Armah’s ending does not even permit the customary short-lived rejoicing of the New Year, for the forced celebrations of the coup are tainted by fear and suspicion, and the regime is only a few hours old when the bribes begin again. In the novel’s final chapter the unburdened carrier returns from the delirium of his sea-purgation to the unredeemed world which he left and meets Maanan, here an ironic Mammy Water whose power of madness in her seaelement is not the traditional healing, regenerative process but an affliction beyond cure and recovery. It is implied that what is expelled or “gets out” from the man at this meeting is the illusion that there can be permanent expulsions of ills of the kind managed by the ritual task which his own act has just simulated. The man’s awakening is to the reality that there are no revolutionary awakenings or annulments of history, “no saviors” and “no answers” (pp. 90, 181). There is no mystical transference of this limited personal renewal to the community as in Awoonor’s novel: it is a solitary release. Koomson’s womb-ward reverse rite of passage carries him temporarily back to a world left behind but is not paralleled by a progressive return of the community to normality. The man’s personal rebirth from something “no longer alive” in the sea and his ability to “forget everything as he looked at the

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strange, soft, watery light,” leaves an impression of the initiate or neophyte caught between identities and lives in an individual rite of passage rather than the carrier caught between years or eras in a communion rite. In the work of Soyinka, Awoonor, and Okara30 an individualization of the carrier rite has inevitably proceeded from its metaphoric allocation to Westernized, expatriated, or otherwise estranged outsiders in preference to “ordinary” and indigenous members of the community. Armah’s novel, it appears, is no exception to this trend.

Notes ‘Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (London: Heinemann, 1969). Further references are given in parentheses in the text of the article and are taken from the 1975 reset Heinemann edition. 2

Robin Horton, “African Traditional Thought and Western Science,” Africa, 37 (1967), 177. 3

A. Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London, 1960), pp. 11, 21.

4

Eva Meyerowitz, The Akan of Ghana: Their Ancient Beliefs (London, 1958),

p. 94. 5

Franz Steiner, Taboo (Harmondsworth, England, 1967), p. 116.

6

Eva Meyerowitz, The Sacred State of the Akan (London, 1951), p. 153.

7

Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (London, 1950), p. 27.

8

Kofi Awoonor, Interview, Bemth Lindfors (editor), Palaver (Austin: African Research Institute, The University of Texas, 1972), p. 62. In conversation about his novel This Earth, My Brother (London, 1972), Awoonor refers to his “theme of the priest, the carrier, the man who bears the burden of the terrible truth. ” ^Wole Soyinka, Interview by Louis S. Gates, Black World, 24, 10 (1975), 40-41. 10

Ibid. “The individuals who carry, who serve as carriers for the rest of the community, are not expected to survive very long. The whole demand, the stress, the spiritual tension, as well as the forces of evil which they trapped into their own person are such that after a few years they either go insane, or they catch some mysterious disease, or they simply atrophy as human beings and die. Their lifespan is very short, they cease to be useful members of the community quite early. This is recognised, and the Eyo Adimu in particular is exposed to a very lingering illness of the sort that incapacitates him completely after one or two journeys of this nature, journeys on which he saves society. ” n

Kofi Awoonor, This Earth, My Brother, p. 122.

,2

Kofi Awoonor, Interview by John Goldblatt, Transition, 41 (1972), 44.

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,3

Richard Priebe, “Demonic Imagery and the Apocalyptic Vision in the Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah,” Yale French Studies, 53 (1976), 110. 14

Emile Snyder, “New Directions in African Writings,” Pan-African Journal, 5 (1972), 257. 15

Terry Goldie, “A Connection of Images: The Structure of Symbols in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” Kunapipi, 1, 1 (1979), 104. 16

Robin Horton, “New Year in the Delta,” Nigeria Magazine, 67 (1960), 273-274. 17

Wole Soyinka, Interview by Louis S. Gates.

18

Margaret Folarin, “An Additional Comment on Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” African Literature Today, 5 (1971), 122. 19

Leonard Kibera, “Pessimism and the African Novelist: Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 14, 1 (1979), 69. 20

Richard Niemi, “Will the Beautyful Ones Ever Be Bom?,” Pan-Africanist, 3 (1971), 22. 21

S. K. Panter-Brick, “Fiction and Politics: The African Writer’s Abdication,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 13 (1975), 80. ^For example, the radical effect of the sight of the crucified Eman on the villagers at the end of a perverted carrier rite in Soyinka’s early play The Strong Breed suggests that, within its local context, a world-changing act has taken place and an established order shaken. The debasement of a rite meant to rescind mechanically the time of a single year may thus have effectively wound back the clock on decades of corrupt malpractice. Eman’s name and the many parallels between his own torture and death and Christ’s Passion also hint at the messianic permanence of some ultimate change. In Soyinka’s adaptation of Euripides’ Bacchae, the carrier rite which is used solely as an instrument of political repression by Pentheus’ brutal regime is refashioned and mobilized by the revolutionary god Dionysos into an instrument of insurrection. See: Wole Soyinka, Collected Plays, Vol. I (Oxford, 1973). 23

“It seemed suddenly that the centuries and the years of pain of which he was the inheritor, and the woes for which he was singled out to be the carrier and the sacrifice, were being rolled away, were being faded in that emergence.” Kofi Awoonor, This Earth, My Brother, p. 179. Specifically, Amamu carries away the century of colonial rule. ^Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, 2ndedn. (Princeton, 1974), pp. 62-68. 25Robm Horton, “New Year in the Delta,” p. 274. ^Richard Priebe, “Demonic Imagery . . .,” 106, 113-114. 27

Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, New York, 1970), p. 95.

^Robin Horton, “New Year in the Delta.”

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In Soyinka’s The Strong Breed, the rite is similarly locked into a vicious and futile cycle of repetition, meaninglessly expiating guilt by an act which amasses more; the last expiation of the old year is also the first blood-guilt of the new one, thus undermining itself before it can purchase even a temporary cleansing. ^Gabriel Okara, The Voice (London, 1970).

The Ironic Imagery of Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born Harold R. Collins

In her admirable introduction to the Collier-Macmillan edition of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Christina Ama Ata Aidoo objects that “perhaps Mr. Armah has allowed his revulsion at all this [the political betrayal of the Ghanaian people] to influence his use of visible symbols to describe the less visible but general decay of the people and the country.” She does not see “the necessity of hammering on every page” the excrement and smells of Ghanaians and Ghana. After all, Ghana is not all that nasty and dirty: “One has encountered similar and even worse physical decay in other parts of the world.” In any case, better Ghana’s dirt than Santa Monica’s “cold, sterile cleanliness” like “an expensive mortuary.” And Armah doesn’t allow his reader to imagine that anything is nice in Ghana: “What is clear, then, is that whatever is beautiful and genuinely pleasing in Ghana or about Ghanaians seems to have gone unmentioned in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.”1 As we shall see, a careful reading of the novel will not sustain this critic’s generalization that there is Ghanaian excrement, filth, and stink on every page, not even if we expand the disgusting objects to include other kinds of painful and ugly sights and unpleasantness of various sorts. And it is not clear that “whatever is beautiful and genuinely pleasing in Ghana or about Ghanaians seems to go unmentioned.” Granted, the overall impression is overwhelmingly scatological, and the mind of the central character often almost gives the impression of being obsessed by images of nastiness. Well, the imagery of filth, excrement, bad smells, and painful and depressing objects and processes of various sorts, all this is sufficiently striking and puts criticism on her mettle. But perhaps Aidoo’s essentially biographical explanation of the imagery is not the right one. Perhaps the appraisal of the degree of dirtiness of Ghana and its people and its realistic accuracy, whatever that may be, is completely irrelevant. Perhaps it is a question of the literary

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mode that Armah is practicing, the artistic structure which requires a certain kind of imagery. Just as a given set of episodes might be structured into either a tragic or a comic fiction, the same might be done to produce what Northrop Frye calls ironic fiction. Northrop Frye, we may recall, has classified fiction according to the “hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours [the readers’], less, or roughly the same. ... If superior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is the typical hero of the romance, whose actions are marvelous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended. ... If superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment,” the hero is a leader with “authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature.” This hero is the hero of the “high mimetic mode, of most epic and tragedy. ... If superior neither to other men nor to his environment, the hero is one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity, and demand from the poet the same canons of probability that we find in our own experience. ” This hero is the hero of “the low mimetic mode, of most comedy and of realistic fiction.” And now we approach our quarry. “If inferior in power or intellect to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode.”2 Surely any reader of Armah’s The Beautyful Ones who is familiar with Frye’s account of the ironic mode of fiction will be struck by the appropriateness of the ironic mode as a description of the fictional approach, the focus, and the manner of Armah’s novel. We do indeed look down on the fictional Ghana delivered by Armah. That fictional Ghana, not necessarily to be equated with the real Ghana, is full of human beings under severe constraints: the characters of the novel are all in bondage. The not-too-honest wheeler-dealer Koomson is the most enslaved of all the characters at the end, when he is being hunted by the soldiers of the new regime, enslaved by terror. “The man’s” discontented wife and his bad-tempered mother-in-law are enslaved by their envy of their luckier and less honest neighbors, their rising expectations about their standard of living, and their crazy illusion of sudden wealth fostered by Koomson’s scheme to register his fishing boat in their names. The beautiful Maanan is caught in a downspiraling plunge of the “lengthening bottle” and the ephemeral loves which lead to the ultimate enslavement of madness. Kofi Billy, besides losing his leg in the war and being murdered for his money, is caught up in his deepening depression because of his personal misfortune and because

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of the corruption and the depressed economy of Ghana.* But the hero—if the word is appropriate, since he is so badgered and so put upon—“the man” lives most of all in “a scene of bondage, frustration, and absurdity.” He is a train dispatcher, though he most certainly should have gone on to college and become a professional man. (A pregnancy had got him into marriage and out of school.) Apparently he has reached a ceiling in his employment opportunities. He is perhaps happiest in his routine work in the dispatching office, or smoking “wee” (marijuana) in his youth. At home his unhappy wife either gives him the “heavy quiet” or, worse, ridicules him for not getting ahead in the world, for having integrity, because he’s an “Onward Christian Soldier,” a “chichidodo bird,” which “hates excrement with all its soul” but feeds on maggots, which “grow best inside the lavatory.” His formidable mother-in-law makes remarks about his own children going without shoes and hints very strongly that he is indeed starving them. Even the innocent children distress him by innocently admiring some of the Western comforts that they have to do without. He goes to his old teacher for comfortable words, but his old teacher has the same problem in perhaps a more dire form. He can’t get ahead honestly; he won’t get ahead dishonestly; so he maintains his spartan kind of freedom, his dropping out, as it were, and avoids the pressure from “the loved ones” by being very lonely. He lives a life of reading and listening to South African, Congo, and African-American music on the radio. Then there is the man’s country—where the get-ahead gospel is rampant, where cheating and bribing are almost universal, where the economy is badly depressed, where nothing works very well, and where the politicians are heartless and hypocritical thieves, a mixture of slogan and grab. The fabulously successful Koomson was a not-so-very-bright schoolmate of “the man’s,” and some of the teacher’s old schoolmates have become “big men” also, by a kind of upward mobility that seems to reward mainly brassiness and crookedness; and such an inequity might qualify as an absurdity.3 So “the man” lives in “bondage, frustration, and absurdity.” There are a considerable number of explicit expressions of this sense of “bondage, frustration, or absurdity.” We will glance at some representative examples. The passengers in the bus in which we first meet the man give the conductor the exact fare rather than the more impressive currency, not looking into his face with “its knowledge of their impotence.” These passengers, called “walking corpses,” feel a factitious power after payday; they no longer have their nightmares in which they are “dwarfs unable to run away” and “little insects caught in endless pools.” When the bus conductor humiliates the man,

*Editor's Note: In fact, Kofi Billy commits suicide; it is Egya Akon who is murdered for his money (pp. 75, 77).

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“shame [dwarfs] him inside.” The clerks in the railway office are called “suffering sleepers” who go “dumbly back afterward to homes they had earlier fled.” On his walk outside to buy some lunch, the man reflects on those Ghanaians “deep in despair” who have convinced themselves of the “futility of efforts to break the mean monthly cycle of debt and borrowing, borrowing and debt.” Meeting a nightwalker “suffering through her Passion Week,” the man tells himself that there are many of the “walking dead,” Ghanaians worse off than he is. The man recalls the Teacher’s myth of Plato’s cave, related to explain the Ghanaians’ hatred for “bringers of light,” “a story of impenetrable darkness and chains within a deep and cavernous hole ...” Remembering Abednego Yamoah’s “corrupt leap” after the “gleam” of worldly success, the man thinks how such a “corrupt leap” gives the power to “laugh with contempt at those of us who still plod on the daily round, stupid, honest, dull, poor, despised, afraid.” In his nightmare the man dreams that he is blinded by the “brutal lights” of a motorcade of big American cars moving toward the “shining white towers” and that his sweetheart gets in one of the cars and leaves him to “the cold and loneliness that corrodes his heart with its despair.” Thinking of a corrupt investigation of corruption in trade and the emptiness of all the brave slogans, the man resolves that “a man would just have to make up his mind that there would never be anything but despair, and there would be no way of escaping it, except one. And that could wait.”4 Another argument for reading this novel as fiction in the ironic rather than the low mimetic mode can be based upon the universalizing and nonrealistic effect of calling the hero “the man” throughout the novel, even though his wife and children are given Christian names. The man’s mother-in-law is called “his mother-in-law” or “the old woman,” generally the latter. His only consoler, or would-be consoler, is simply “Teacher,” “the Teacher,” or “the naked man” (he is lying naked on his bed when the man visits him). The man’s family are usually referred to as “the loved ones,” and the term is ironic, not because the man doesn’t love his family, for he does, but because they cause him a great deal of distress and it is always painful for him to think of them. The lure of material success is often referred to as “the gleam” ; and the term seems ironic, for that kind of light usually lures one on to a more idealistic quest, as Wordsworth’s “visionary gleam” in his “Intimations of Immortality”, or Tennyson’s “Merlin and the Gleam.”5 Northrop Frye calls the imagery appropriate to the ironic mode “demonic imagery,” the presentation of the world that desire totally rejects: the world of the nightmare and the scapegoat, of bondage and pain and confusion; the world as it is before the human imagination begins to

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work on it and before any image of human desire, such as the city or the garden, has been solidly established; the world also of perverted or wasted work, ruins and catacombs, instruments of torture and monuments of folly. And just as apocalyptic imagery in poetry is closely associated with a religious heaven, so its dialectic opposite is closely linked with an existential hell, like Dante’s Inferno, or with the hell that man creates on earth, as in 1984, No Exit, and Darkness at Noon, where the titles flf.the last two speak for themselves. In his survey of demonic images in the human, spiritual, erotic, animal, vegetable, inorganic, fiery, and watery worlds, Frye does not mention Armah’s principal demonic images, images of excrement, mucus, and filth of various sorts, but he might well have done so. The traditional hell of Stephen Dedalus’s retreat master has its awful smells and its filth: “All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer ...” And, indeed, any objects that are suitably repugnant would serve to suggest the world “that desire totally rejects.” Armah’s scatological-fetid vision will seem to at least some readers nightmarish; certainly it is a “world of bondage and pain and confusion.” The apocalyptic visions of “the city” and “the garden,” which accompanied the independence movement, have passed away; they were not “solidly established.” There are no “ruins and catacombs,” because Ghana had no great stone buildings. There are no “instruments of torture” in Armah’s fictional world, though the marching jack boots and Koomson’s terror hint at them. For “perverted and wasted work” we might mention the mismanaged railroad; the polluted “cleanyour-city” cans; the Senior Service men with their “leftover British craziness” wearing long white hose or colonial “white White”; the beat-up, windowless buses; and perhaps even the outlandish Europeanized names: Attoh-White, Kuntu-Blankson, Acromond. A symbol of “monumental folly” might well be the huge, posh hotel with its anomalous and ironic name: Atlantic-Caprice. And the title, “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” just as much as those mentioned by Frye, certainly speaks—demonically—for itself.6 But Armah’s most important imagery is imagery of excrement and imagery of filth. We turn now to a detailed examination of this imagery. Before considering Armah’s particular kinds of images in the ironic mode we must be clear about what we mean by an image. In this paper an image will be any fairly conspicuous evocation of any one of the senses: sight, of course; smell, very much so; taste, though rarely; sound; touch, including pressure, hot and cold, and pain; and some of those left out of the traditional five, such as the sensation of retching and what Shakespeare once called the “torsion of the small gut.” Unlike some stylistic analyses, this paper will not restrict itself to figures of speech which make such an appeal to our senses; we will note all

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kinds of evocations of sensations, whether they appear as figures or descriptions of settings, actions, or characters, or appear in the commentary from the mind of the central character or in the conversations of the characters. Even without considering the excremental imagery, the demonic imagery of Armah’s novel goes far beyond anything mentioned in Frye’s very full account of such. For instance, under the heading of noxious and noisome bodily emanations, unmentioned by Frye, we have mucus from the throat and the nose, vomit, sweat (including sweat around the anus), under-arm odor, saliva (including yellow saliva), open sores, the “exhausted blood” of childbirth, menstrual blood, and the “rich stench” and the “smelly waves” of Koomson’s halitosis-cum-flatulence. The images of rottenness, decay, wornoutness, degeneration, again not mentioned by Frye, are particularly conspicuous (the words rot and rotten appearing at least nine times): we have the rotten smell of an old cedi note,* offal around a trash can, the smell of putrid turpentine, the murky yellow of a peeling exterior wall, rust, ashes, the smell of rotten vegetables and stale soapsuds, yellow “muck” on teeth, rotting pits in the teeth, the slimy growth and scum in the shower room, upholstery full of holes, dark-brown, worn-out furniture, the cracked boards of railroad cars, the dead fish in the lagoon, and the dead-looking hedge and withered sunflower by the mother-in-law’s house. Frye speaks of the imagery of torture and mutilation often associated with images of cannibalism; in this novel we have Kofi Billy’s leg sheared off by a steel cable, the several appearances of “the man’s” wife Oyo’s scarred belly reminding her husband of the “exposed flesh” in her cesarean, and with the cannibalism explicit, the little fishes tearing apart the dead fish in the lagoon. Perhaps we might add the simile describing Estella Koomson’s hard voice, “thin as long wire stabbing into the eyes,” or even the “spastic shudder” of the bus in the first chapter and the young girls’ wigs from dead White women.7 Images of greedy eating, again not mentioned by Frye, are fairly common and of course obviously appropriate in portraying Ghana’s moral condition: we have the food morsel popping out of the bus conductor’s mouth, the “paunches” of the corrupt Party men, the “greedy noises” of Koomson eating, and his “wet belches.” Frye mentions the monsters and beasts of prey of the demonic imagery of the animal world. Armah’s monstrosities are human: the bribing merchant with the “wolf mouth” or double row of teeth, named after one of Frye’s beasts of prey, and the mongolian monster child, explicitly used as a figure for Ghana’s rapid decline into corruption. Frye speaks of the “demonic erotic relation [that] becomes a fierce destructive passion that works against loyalty or frustrates the one who possesses it.” In

*Editor's Note: The cedi note, though it has “a very old smell,” is in fact a new note (p. 3).

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this novel loveless fornication is simply one more of the pleasures of life enjoyed by the greedy Party men; they put on the bought vaginas like clean pants and pay off with small luxuries from abroad. The last category of repugnant images we notice are the images of hostility: the peculiarly aggressive obscenities of the bus conductor and the taxi driver, the brawls in the street as the man remembers them, and the “suspicious sniffs, the flaming look, the face contracting with shame and hate,” the “subdued growl” of the old woman, who is rather like Frye’s beasts of prey. Finally, m Armah’s rich and lively wasteland that makes Eliot’s look so pale and anemic, we have images not readily classifiable: dust, “accumulated dirt,” grease, greasy lawyers, oily politicians, mud, “filth,” cockroach and gecko droppings, and the particles of food left on the boatman’s plate when his meal is interrupted by the fleeing Koomson. They are all ironic in effect; we can readily say that.8 Before we examine Armah’s excremental images, let us consider for a moment the appropriateness of human excrement as a symbol of mankind’s fall from grace. Does it not make the imagination fairly boggle to think of the saint and the hero—going to the latrine? In the symbology of American folk, human excrement has long been used to put down the pretensions of high-sounding pronouncements and of high-sounding persons. Sham pronouncements are called shit; high-sounding persons are said to be full of the same symbolic material. The folk describe a stupid situation as a crock of the same. Of all man’s works and creations, his excrement is the most disgusting, in appearance and in odor. So what could be more appropriate to represent man’s corruption, his fall from grace, his selfishness, his greed, his calloused unconcern for the weak and the helpless? A literary work which violates a language taboo like this releases a good deal of literary shock power; that is to say, it does so if the violation doesn’t spoil the work completely for the reader. It seems likely that an ideal reader should give a novelist the benefit of the doubt in a matter of this sort and, no matter what his own standards of taboo maintenance may be, let himself feel the shock, the explosive power of the violated taboo, without allowing himself to be overpowered by feelings of disgust or social horror. It might be objected that if Armah and other novelists, not to mention the general population, use these taboo words too freely, they will themselves be dissipating their shock power, so that in the future that power will not be available for literary effect. Well, sufficient to the day is the evil thereof. The taboo word for excrement, together with several compounds containing it, appears at least sixteen times in this novel of 180 pages, together with several instances of anus, several of anus's mildly vulgar counterpart arse, several of urine and of its vulgar counterpart, and several of the taboo term for flatulence. There are, as every reader of the novel is likely to recall, very full, some

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would say fulsome, descriptions of a latrine in the man’s office building as well as the man’s latrine at home, once from the outside while a man is having his troubles inside and once during the smelly escape of Koomson through the latrine hole and all its mess. The first four chapters, which produce a great many repugnant images, are fairly mild in the excremental line. There are only the bus conductor’s rough accusation, in the vernacular, that the man thinks of defecating in the bus; the man’s reflection on the “hasty anus” and the “after piss” and their contribution to the filth on the banister; the conductor’s urine hitting the “clean-your-city” can; and the big public lavatory whose “stench claws inward to the throat,” caked human excrement “split by afternoon’s baking sun, now touched by still-evaporating dew.”9 Chapter Six, which contains the long flashback on the deplorable war conditions in Ghana and the destruction of the man’s friends, starts with an excremental image and is fairly strong throughout in such imagery. The chapter begins with the meditation on the futility of self-pity, alluding to the “dung and exhausted blood” of human birth. The memory of the discourse on wee elicits the epithets “lying shit” and “dog shit”; the judges “flatulated through their mouths for hours” on the dangers of wee. Smoking wee on the breakwater, Maanan, Kofi, and the man have to leave the spot because of the “mixed shit” contributed by the many people who used the breakwater as a lavatory. Also in the flashback on post-war conditions, in a passage describing the Ghanaian politicians with their fancy clothes, their legal English, and their ways of imitating the White men, we have a quaint folklike figure: when these politicians are climbing up to “shit” in their people’s faces, the people see their “arseholes” and are “drawn away in disgusted laughter.” The man notices that the Teacher himself needs “soothing words,” he who had so often helped the man with his “patient talk of the cycle of life and death, youth and age, newness and decay, the good food we eat and the smelly shit it turns into.” Another internal outburst on the corruption of Ghanaians, one near the passage with the “horribly young” women and their wigs of dead White women’s hair, is a despairing prediction about the corrupt poet of the future: he will no doubt “fit his tongue into new arses” when the new men spring up to “shit” on the people.10 Chapter Eight, in which the man returns to his office and works there half a day, includes the early morning encounter with the “latrine man,” with the heavy “shitpan” on his head, the “unaccustomed look of deep, angry menace on his face,” and his eyes “full of drunken fury.” The man thinks to himself that that is the only way to survive in his day, by “carrying other people’s excrement” and by killing the “self while the unavoidable is being done.” The man uses a vulgar word for the “latrine man.” In the morning the man’s bowels, with a “terrible pulling pain,” force him to go to the toilet,

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which he had avoided doing at his filthy latrine at home. Locked out of the Senior Service men’s lavatory, he hurries to the downstairs latrine, which must be filthier than the one at home,- though it is better ventilated; this latrine has organic brown stains all over the wall, an erotic drawing of an “impossible Indian posture,” and some entertaining if cynical graffiti: “VAGINA SWEET . . . MONEY SWEET PASS ALL . . . YOU BROKE NOT SO?” The vulgar word is used twice in this elaborate excremental scene. When the man goes out for lunch, he eats a cheap meal of gari and beans and worries about the constipation it will give him. Chapter Nine, dealing with the preparations for the party with the Koomsons, has a striking excremental simile: the Black golfer aping White man’s ways with his “Jolly good shot, Jimmy. Jolly good,” reminds the man of a “constipated man, straining in his first minute on top of the lavatory seat. ” Chapter Ten, which describes the dinner party for the Koomsons, includes the memorable outside-the-door view, or sound and smell, of the man’s latrine, when Koomson needs to go but decides not to. While Koomson waits outside, he and the man hear “the agony and the struggle of the man inside,” “long intestinal wrangles leading to protracted anal blasts,” and finally the “harsh sound of old dry newspaper being softened” and “a long tearing unambiguous sound.” Koomson is being exposed to the life “he had leaped beyond.” The stench that trails the small boy as he comes out of the latrine is the last straw: Koomson decides to put it off. This is a fitting climax to an anomalous dinner party and a foreshadowing of Koomson’s fall from good fortune. Later he will go into this latrine and even through it. Chapter Thirteen, in which the coup takes place and Koomson comes to the man’s house for refuge and then escapes through his latrine, is dominated by Koomson’s awful smelliness of fear and his fearsome excremental escape. But before we meet the terrified Koomson, we observe the men in the railroad office go out in the street to “show their loyalty to the new men of power,” just as they had previously “gone out in fear” to hear the flatulence of the Party men, the flatulence called by its vulgar name. Koomson’s smelliness is almost obsessively described: “as if some corrosive gas, already half liquid, had filled the whole room.” Koomson is so terrified that his internal machinery has gone haywire, with “half-audible rumblings from his belly” and full, loud flatulence from below, which fills the room with “smell waves” that are unbearable; at one point Koomson’s insides give “a growl louder than usual” and a flatulence of “personal, corrupt thunder,” which in its fullness sounds as if it had rolled all the way down from the throat through the guts to pollute the air below. The vulgar word for flatulence is used repeatedly. Koomson’s escape through the latrine is described with merciless nasty exactitude: we are not spared the “caked excrement” of the vulgarly named latrine hole, the smell as of “dead mud” from the hole, the shiny, deep-brown cockroach, Koomson’s

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“powerless loathing,” his vomiting down below, the “human stench,” or the “icky wetness.” Throughout the scene the vulgar word for excrement is used freely. All in all, this incident is a powerful symbol for Koomson’s corrupt way of life.11 But what keeps this novel, with its sad action and its multitude of images of excrement and nastiness, from giving an overall impression of disgust, or depression, or even from seeming ridiculous or incredible? Well, there are a number of qualifying elements in the novel, elements which strike a chord with the sad events and the more repugnant images, which help to make much beauty out of the ugliness. First, there is the gentleness, the kindness, the selfcritical lovingness of “the man,” at once the main character of the novel and its central intelligence and reflector, in whose mind we stay continually throughout the novel. His reflections on the comforts and good things that corruption has brought to the Koomson house are representative of this particular qualifying element: “For the children. Supposing Deede also could have beautiful clothes with their beauty crossing the seas from thousands of miles away, and supposing Adoley could have a machine to ride around on, to occupy her attention while she was growing up, what would they know about ways that are rotten in the days of disappeared parents? What would they care? What, indeed, would anybody care?” Some men of integrity would be selfrighteous about their honesty, but the man sees the cost of it for those he loves and pities those who must pay the cost. The man’s forgiving thoughts and his self-criticism at the sight of his wife’s cesarean scar are typical of his pitying view of the faults of others: “If now it [her love for him] could not come out, perhaps the fault was not with the woman herself. Perhaps the fault was with the soul born without the luck of other souls? No. With the mind unable to decide to do what everyone was saying was the necessary thing, what everyone was doing.” But perhaps the man’s restraint with his harridan of a mother-inlaw is the supreme example of this gentleness, which is so important as a qualifier of the harshness of the novel. When the old woman puts him down in a remark ostensibly addressed to his child, the man ruefully reflects how often this trick has been worked on him, “the tender heads of children serving as things on which adults could bounce their bullet words into the hearts of their enemies”; but though he is naturally angry, he merely wonders if his mouth will be too dry for speech and speaks with “the politeness of deliberate effort,” delivers his message, and walks away quickly.12 Another qualifier of the harshness of the events and the repugnant images is the style of the novel. It is not a colloquial style, as might seem appropriate for the low-colloquial level of the vocabulary. Neither is it a harsh, bare, staccato style, which would perhaps seem to fit some of the excremental and nasty language. It is a style of high rhetoric, fairly formal, a distinctly literary style, with a rhythm that swells and soars a bit. It is a style with language

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generally elevated, with allusions and referents of considerable portentousness. Dialogue, which would almost of necessity be more colloquial, is at a minimum: the long conversation with the Teacher is not particularly informalsounding, and the talk with the wife and with the Koomsons is brisk and witty but not particularly extensive. The novel is mostly made up of the meditations, reflections, and reminiscences of the man. We don’t have to hunt around for illustrations. Here is a passage selected at random, part of^a description of Ghana after the war: There was the violence, first of all. If that was not something entirely new, at any rate the frequency and the intensity of it were new things. No one before had told me of so many people going away to fight and coming back with blood and money eating up their minds. And afterward, those who might have answered me if I had asked them before would not take any notice of me, so busy were they all with looking and wondering what it was all about, and when it would end, and if it would end at all. There were no answers then. There never will be any answers. What will a man ever do when he is called to show his manhood fighting in alien lands and leaving his women behind with the demented and the old and the children and the other women? /

We could proliferate such samplings of the high-rhetorical style of the novel, but it is not necessary, since illustrations of other points are bound to illustrate the style as well.13 Another qualification is that the images of excrement and filth always cluster around the corrupt Ghanaians, the bribers and the crooks, the Party men and the White men’s apes, the calloused and the brutal. His wife, for all the trouble she gives him, and his children are not besmirched with these images; neither are his friends Kofi Billy and Maanan and the Teacher. Even his mother-in-law gets gentle handling! Still another qualifier of the tone established by the depressing events and the excremental and fetid images is a series of notations and images of good cheer. The lyrics of a mournful song from Radio Ghana heard over the Teacher’s radio have some consoling power with the man: “Those who are blessed with the power / And the soaring swiftness of the eagle / And have flown before, / Let them go. / I will travel slowly, / And I too will arrive.” The Teacher’s ironically sympathetic comments on the man’s situation, though not practically helpful, have some mollifying effect; remarks such as “Besides you are exaggerating things. After all, for a married insult, this chichidodo proverb was very mild” have a calm stoicism about them. In the flashback embedded in the long conversation with the Teacher, conveying the survey of

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Ghana’s sorry condition after the war, the man admits that “I know it is like a lie for me to talk like this, remembering only these things that were so hard. ... I know. There were calmer things, many of them when you think back and bring them up from down below, things that were sometimes good, sometimes beautiful.” There was, for instance, the fine camaraderie of the weesmoking on the beach at night. When the naive young dispatcher makes it possible for him to take off for the afternoon, the man experiences a welcome relief that he had badly needed; walking by the seashore he notes with gratitude the cleanliness of the ocean, has for the moment the sensation “that comes when one rides on the back of a motorcycle,” and after some thoughts of “painful hopelessness” “rising from the sea,” begins “feeling almost happy in his suspended loneliness.” The description of the seascape, reminiscent of Joyce’s description of the scene of Stephen Dedalus’ epiphany with the Bird Girl, qualifies some of the harshness of the novel: Small clouds, very white, hold themselves, very far away, against a sky that is pale, weak blue, and when the man looks down again into the sea the water of it looks green and deep. A sea gull, flying low, makes a single hoarse noise that disappears into the afternoon, and the white bird itself flies off in the direction of the harbor and its inaudible noise, beautiful and light on its wings. Lying in bed the Sunday before the party for the Koomsons, the man enjoys not having to get up and go about the daily grind and thinks about the pleasures of spending money for the party: he remembers “the uncontrollable feeling of happiness and power he felt buying the costly American rice, the tinned cake from Europe, the New Zealand butter, even when he knew in the back of his mind that he would suffer financial distress for such extravagance later.” He has always felt this “very strong happiness whenever he found himself able, no matter for how brief a spell, to do the heroic things that were expected all the time ...” Koomson’s fishing boat, from which Oyo and her mother expect so much, actually and ironically gives pleasure only to the man: “Every time he saw it he could not help thinking how beautiful the boat was. Then he would come home with the desire to talk to Oyo about the beauty of the day and all the boats in the harbor growing strong in him ...” The man has some pleasure in his work: “At least the job itself was one of the few around which did not have a killing dullness. There really was a definite kind of beauty to the growth of the daily maze on the graph sheet” with its “red lines for passenger trains, lead pencil lines for goods trains, blue for manganese. ”14 When the man comes home on the day of the coup he is happy, not because he hopes for much from the coup, but because he suddenly thinks of

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his happy youth and perhaps because he feels a certain liberating detachment from these events, perhaps also because he enjoys the excitement and the feeling of superiority in not having high hopes. At this auspicious time it is easy for him to enjoy his wife’s sudden respect for him, his own tenderness for her, and his desire for her. For the first time in Oyo’s married life she is satisfied to have her husband just the way he is. On the way to the boatman who will, for a price, help Koomson to escape, the man breathes deeply of the sea air which “now fascinated him with its freedom from decay.” When the man floats on an inner tube onto the shore from the rescue boat, his arms are sore and he is very cold, but he also feels free: “But at the same time, even the cold feeling gave him a vague freedom, like the untroubled loneliness he had come to like these days, and in his mind the world was so very far away from the welcoming sand of the beach beneath him.” The man takes a nap on the beach, and when he wakes up the sun is up, “its rays coming very clean and clear on the water; and the sky above all open and beautiful.” A woman approaches on the beach, with a face that looks like “something that had been finally destroyed a long time back,” but he finds the face beautiful. Our fiction anthologies urge our students to pay particular attention to the ends of novels and stories in their search for the full meaning of the fiction. This novel ends with an interesting bittersweet image: on the rear of the little green bus being held up at the police barrier for a bribe-taking, “the green paint was brightened with an inscription carefully lettered to form an oval shape: THE BEAUTYFUL ONES ARE NOT YET BORN In the center of the oval was a single flower, solitary, unexplainable, and very beautiful.” As the man gets up to go back to the city he has left, he keeps thinking of the painted words. He sees them in his mind’s eye moving around their oval. After a while the flower in the center of the oval disappears, and a “single, melodious note” takes its place. Reinforcing the tone evoked by the motto and the flower, a bird “with a song that was strangely happy” settles on the roof of a school latrine. For a moment the man wonders what sort of bird this could be. “But then suddenly all his mind was consumed with thoughts of everything he was going back to . . . above all, the never-ending knowledge that this aching emptiness would be all that the remainder of his own life could offer him.” The last words don’t quite cancel out the import of the ineffably beautiful flower, but they do bring us back to the stem stoicism of the novel’s general line on life: “A man could learn to live with many, many things before the end. Many, many things.”15

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Every reader must decide for himself about the total effect of Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born in accordance with his literary intuition, his taste, and his reading experience. For one reader at least the novel is splendid, one of the two or three best to come out of Africa, one worthy of a place of honor among the novels of its time in the entire world. And the images of excrement and nastiness, which are so conspicuous in the novel, find their justification in the mode of fiction Armah has chosen to write in and in the fact that they are skillfully qualified by other elements. This novel reminds us again of the artistic paradox by which literary elements, in themselves ugly or repugnant, may make up an artistic whole which is more satisfactory than one made up of sweet and pleasant things, making a richer orchestration, as it were, or a chiaroscuro more appealing than a patch of bright sunshine. Even if “the beautyful ones” are never born in his country, Armah has made from the dirt and the despair, from the corruption and the foulness of all sorts, a beautiful work of art.

Notes !

Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (New York: Collier Books, 1969), pp. xi-xii. 2

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 33-34. 3

Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones . . ., pp. 116-117, 41-44, 121, 129, 120, 52-60, 19, 75-83, 108-109. 4

Ibid., pp. 2, 6, 20, 35, 78, 95, 99-100, 152.

5

Ibid., pp. 121-123, 128-138, 49-60, 90-93, 44, 35, 152.

6

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 147-150; Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones . . ., pp. 163, 17, 108, 125, 10, 99; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1956), p. 120. 7

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 147-150. A demonic image of the animal world would be the White men’s “apes” (Black lawyers and merchants) (Armah, The Beautyful Ones . . ., p. 88). Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones . . ., pp. 1, 5, 13, 34, 102, 166, 20, 153, 36, 40, 28, 21, 61, 161, 117, 159-162, 3, 8, 12, 11, 25, 22, 40, 41, 84, 100, 101, 117, 25, 123, 121; 65, 47, 127, 123; 36, 1, 88. 8

Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones . . ., pp. 39, 79, 163; 27, 62; 88; 6, 9, 65, 128-130; 11, 21, 14, 22, 79-80, 23, 116, 171. 9

Ibid., pp. 6, 12, 39, 40.

l0

Ibid., pp. 61, 68-70, 80, 69, 87.

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"Ibid., pp. 102-103, 104-105, 109, 124, 133, 156, 159-162, 164-166. The man’s latrine calls up in this reader’s mind nostalgic memories of the clean, limesmelling privies of an older and better America, with their carved seats with papa-, mama-, and junior-sized holes, their Sears & Roebuck catalog, their stars and moons cut in the door, and perhaps even little windows with curtains. n

Ibid., pp. 144, 97, 121-123.

n

Ibid., p. 63.

"Ibid., pp. 50, 53, 111-112, 114, 150, 153. l5

Ibid., pp. 158, 169, 176, 180, 152.

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born: Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will Neil Lazarus

There is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

At the beginning of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,1 the central protagonist (who is referred to throughout the novel only as “the man”) is encountered at dawn sleeping aboard a bus on his way to work. At the end of the novel he is seen walking “very slowly, going home” (p. 183). In the space between these two points, the reader witnesses what Georg Lukacs, speaking of the novel form at large, has styled “the adventure of interiority”: “the content of the novel is the story of the soul that goes to find itself, that seeks adventures in order to be proved and tested by them and, by proving itself, to find its own essence.”2 The Beautyful Ones, which is couched as a voyage of discovery, is preeminently a dialectical work. Its reciprocity is first heralded in the resonant “not yet” of its title and is most clearly demonstrated in the complex relationship between the affirmative vision which is implicit in “the man’s” search for authentic values, and the blasted landscape within which the novel’s action is staged. Critics of the novel have not found it easy to describe this relationship between affirmative vision and degraded reality. At the center of their difficulties, it seems, has been an inability to reconcile the two dimensions. Contemplating the bleakness of the material universe that the novel postulates, many commentators have struggled in vain to retain their grasp on the work’s vision of regeneration. They have been led to argue either that the novel’s Reprinted from Research in Africa Literature 18/2 (Summer 1987; ® 1987 by University of Texas Press.

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pessimism is absolute, or that its affirmatory aspect is abstract and utopian. Some critics have even expressed the view that the novel is ultimately unbalanced. There is, however, at least one interpretation of the novel that, avoiding these tendencies, seems to me to have succeeded handsomely on its own terms. This is the interpretation advanced by Wole Soyinka. In a remarkable essay on the social vision in African literature, Soyinka has had this to say of the refusal, on the part of a select few African writers, to compromise their art’s “secular vision” with apocalyptic resolutions: The secular vision in African creative writing is particularly aggressive wherever it combines the re-creation of a pre-colonial African world-view with eliciting its transposable elements into a modem potential. The process may be explicit. . . or . . . may rely on the reader’s capacity for projection. The shared knowledge of what now exists and the prior assumption of a readership subjectively attuned to the significations of posed comparisons is part of the armoury of the novel which, depending on the moralities of the conflicts and events, does away with the need for utopian presentations.3 Particularly important here for our purposes, I would argue, is the emphasis upon the projective capacity that this type of fiction both assumes in and demands of its readers. For while the narrative focus of The Beautyful Ones falls unremittingly upon the existing social order, the inner gaze of the text seems to me to be directed beneath and beyond the surface.4 And, applying Soyinka’s argument, my feeling is that Armah’s readers are called upon to be alert to the special reality of this inner gaze, which haunts and even subverts the bleak surface of everyday life in The Beautyful Ones, urging upon us the realization that the shape of tomorrow’s world is embryonically borne in the contours of today’s. This preliminary consideration already introduces us to the nature of the dialectic that lies at the core of The Beautyful Ones. In terms of this dialectic, the cardinal categories of concrete and abstract, latent and manifest, presence and absence, are transformed from logical into ontological opposites. Such a transformation, as Fredric Jameson has observed in a different context, allows for the evolution of a comparative, or indeed dialectical, mode of thinking such that every perception of a given experience ... is at the same time an awareness of what that experience ... is not. It is clear that the feeling of concreteness, of filled density of being, or that of abstractness and impoverishment of experi-

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ence, are essentially derived from just such implicit comparisons between one experience and another, one work and another, one moment of history and another.5 The Beautyful Ones depends for its effect upon the reciprocity of its ordering categories. The brave new world of the “beautyful ones” is implicit in the degradation of the real world in which “the man” lives. This is so, even though it is precisely the harsh reality of the world as it is that stands in the way of the emergence of the world of the “beautyful ones.” As readers, we are meant, I believe, to appreciate the potency of the titular “not yet” of the novel; for in The Beautyful Ones what could be exists as a fundamental threat to what is. The social environment of “the man” is profoundly unrevolutionary, but the specter of revolution figures in its margins nevertheless. In fact, it is present there as nothing less than a promise. In this sense The Beautyful Ones might be compared to Brecht’s epic theater in scope and intention—not at all, as Henry Chakava has supposed, because in it the novelist “is wondering why the world cannot be changed,”6 but, just the reverse, because in it Armah tries to describe the preconditions of and prevailing constraints to change. The novel is formulated upon the premise that it is only by knowing one’s world, by seeing it for what it is, that one can ever genuinely aspire to bring about its revolutionary transformations. The narrative, circumstantial dimension of The Beautyful Ones has a double resonance. Every detail in the novel is important both for what it is—a detail, a sociological fact—and for what, in terms of the novel’s own immanent rationality, it comes to symbolize. “The deliberate sensuosity of [Armah’s] style,” Kolawole Ogungbesan has written, “has no aesthetic value in itself; its values lie in the subtle means by which sensuous details become symbols, and in the way the symbols provide a network which is the story, and which simultaneously provides the reader with a refined moral insight by means of which to evaluate it.”7 The cumulative effect of this “network” of details and symbols in The Beautyful Ones is to present the reader with a harrowing and relentless vision of Ghana as a neocolony. The novel’s “Ghana” is a society that seems bent on self-destruction. Crippled, both materially and psychologically by its recent and not-so-recent history, it is perversely engaged in the process of entrenching the divisions and systematic brutalities wrought by this history. As though primed by some monstrous and self-maintaining logic, it continues to maim itself in a futile effort to satisfy an insatiable, alien master. It is sick to the very core, rotten with the congealed decay of centuries of domination, capitulation, and betrayal. The society limps into tomorrow, riven, bereft, dependent, its citizens engaged in a ceaseless, debased, and dehumanizing struggle simply to eke out their lives from day to day, from Passion Week to Passion Week.

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There is nothing gratuitous about Armah’s presentation in all this. His portrait needs to be as graphic, as comprehensive as it is, in order to disclose roots and causes; in order, ultimately, to be productive of the type of knowledge that must accompany decisive social action.8 From the first sentence of The Beautyful Ones, a composite picture of Ghana as a post-colonial African state begins to be sketched. Though painted evocatively and with great aesthetic sophistication, this picture sacrifices little by way of penetration for its artistry. In the world of the novel the aspect of post-colonialism is disturbingly reminiscent of that of colonialism proper. The new seems to have taken after the old so thoroughly, and in such indecent haste, that it is as though the old had never gone away at all. These “sons of the nation” (p. 10) presiding over the newly independent state of Ghana are portrayed as men with the stench of centuries of betrayal and compromise upon them. The elite that such individuals make up is described as contributing directly to the squalor and deprivation of the community at large. It is not only that the bankruptcy and exocentrism of the society’s economy have resulted in a situation in which, as a taxi driver in the novel puts it, “it seems everybody is making things now except us. We Africans only buy expensive things” (p. 140). It is also that the “men of substance” (to adopt Basil Davidson’s felicitous phrase)9 are living on the backs of their fellow countrymen. Their wealth is built upon their countrymen’s poverty; their power is the corollary of the powerlessness of their countrymen; their ease is the product and the enduring cause of the degradation that surrounds but does not touch them. Armah returns again and again to this point. He insists that for every bottle of White Horse, Black and White, Seagrams, or Gilbeys that is imported to cater to the elite’s ethic of conspicuous consumption, ten, twenty, or a hundred individuals like “the man” are deprived of the wherewithal to purchase even the most basic of foodstuffs. The contrasts in this vein in The Beautyful Ones are telling. The “men of substance” emerge merely as the new wielders of old, corrupt power. Independence has given Africa not its freedom, but only “a change of embezzlers” (p. 162). The new leaders are the direct heirs of the chiefs of the past, concerned always with privilege and the consolidation of their power rather than with progressive leadership and public accountability. The moral intensity of The Beautyful Ones, however, is fueled not simply by this insistence that Ghana’s post-colonial rulers are as corrupt and selfserving as previous rulers had been. Rather, the novel gains its distinctive moral flavor from Armah’s additional insistence that in the decolonizing years there had existed the real potential for radically transforming Ghanaian society. Speaking in this instance for Armah, “the man’s” friend and mentor, Teacher, observes of these years both that “we were ready here for big and beautiful

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things,” and that “the promise was so beautiful. Even those who were too young to understand it all knew that at last something good was being born. It was there. We were not deceived about that” (pp. 81, 85). The embodiment of this promise, and of these general aspirations, had been Kwame Nkrumah, the man who had risen to power on the basis of massive popular support in the decolonizing years and who had led Ghana to independence in 1957. In Teacher’s esteem, Nkrumah had been unique. Far from being a “typical” leader, born into wealth and power and regarding social division as nothing less than the sine qua non of his own elite status, Nkrumah had been a popular hero, a “man of the people.” In The Beautyful Ones the authenticity of Nkrumah’s public stance in the decolonizing years is repeatedly emphasized: his campaign speeches are described as reflecting his private passions, and their felicity is seen to have rested in the fact that they tapped exactly the mood of the masses. But it is for this very reason that when Teacher comes to contemplate the dissolution of Nkrumah’s promise in the era of independence, he presents it as something sickening, something more truly obscene than any “conventional” political betrayal, of the type that one might have expected from a more “typical” leader at a less resonant time. For in Teacher’s eyes, Nkrumah and his Party have taken Ghana through a full circle: from hardship and disaffiliation, through the promise and even the beginnings of real change, to hardship and disaffiliation once more. In recounting the promise of Nkrumah, Teacher goes to great lengths to differentiate between him and the “nationalist agitators” of the years preceding independence. He gives us an unambiguous picture of the nationalists, describing them as members of a political elite that owed its exalted position to its cooperation with, and deference to, the colonial administration. The portrait is of “Black Englishmen,” of a small group of “yes-men,” “trying at all points to be the dark ghost of a European” (p. 81). The nationalists, Teacher explains to “the man,” were motivated above all by greed for power. Opportunism was their pre-eminent political characteristic. Ignorant of and indifferent—not to say hostile—to the aspirations of the general population, they nevertheless sought to assume governance over them. Armah’s historical analysis in The Beautyful Ones really commences here, for, speaking through the character of Teacher, he suggests that increasingly, as the struggle for independence gathered momentum in the years following the Second World War, the nationalist elite found themselves confronted in the population at large not by the admiration and sense of loyalty they had hoped— even expected—to command, but by disgust and outrage. This messianic suggestion that “the masses” rejected the nationalist leadership in the decolonizing years is absolutely central to the mood of The Beautyful Ones. Quite clearly, it implies the existence of a raw arid precious level of political awareness on the part of “the masses.” These were times, the novel avers, in which “the

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masses” were beginning to find and test their strength. They were beginning to entertain thoughts about shaping their own future. Indeed, they were beginning to put these thoughts into practice, secure in their unity and in the felt justice of their cause. Still more than this is entailed in the masses’ supposed repudiation of the nationalist elite, however. In The Beautyful Ones Teacher recalls that this repudiation paved the way for Nkrumah’s decisive intervention onto the political stage, since it created a breach, a “crisis of leadership,” into which Nkrumah was able—and ready—to step. Nkrumah is thus presented as a leader who captured the people’s hearts and minds by speaking directly to them, without patronization, about their responsibility to free themselves, about strength, solidarity, and action. As Teacher reflects: “It is so simple. He was good when he had to speak to us, and liked to be with us” (p. 88). It is Teacher’s charge that this spirit which Nkrumah seemed to embody during the decolonizing years was subsequently betrayed by Nkrumah himself, once independence had been won. Teacher thus accuses Nkrumah of having failed his people in their hour of greatest need. For in his vision it was Nkrumah who had roused the mass of the population, organized them, taught them to feel the power in their numbers, molded them into an unstoppable political force, and then betrayed them abruptly by turning the central thrust and logic of the revolutionary movement in upon itself. The trajectory sketched out here is identical to that outlined by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth: Before independence, the leader generally embodies the aspirations of the people for independence, political liberty and national dignity. But as soon as independence is declared, far from embodying in concrete form the needs of the people in what touches bread, land, and the restoration of the country to the sacred hands of the people, the leader will reveal his inner purpose: to become the general president of that company of profiteers impatient for their returns which constitutes the national bourgeoisie.10 In The Beautyful Ones the passage of Nkrumah’s political career is traced through the moral filter of Teacher’s consciousness; and it is apparent that it is the thought of the disparity between what might have been and what is that obsesses Teacher and those like him in the novel who try to comprehend the significance of Nkrumah’s “Judas kiss” of Africa. Nkrumah’s failure to lead the people of Ghana out of the wilderness of foreign domination (indeed, his increasing complicity with the agents of this domination) is thus not simply documented as fact. Rather, it is invested by Teacher with ethical significance and cast as an act of world-historical enormity:

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Here we have a kind of movement that should make even good stomachs go sick. What is painful to the thinking mind is not the movement itself, but the dizzying speed of it. . . . How horribly rapid everything has been, from the days when men were not ashamed to talk of souls and of suffering and of hope, to these low days of smiles that will never again be sly enough to hide the knowledge of betrayal and deceit, (p. 62) Teacher’s feeling is that the Nkrumaist Party men, such as “the man’s” acquaintance Koomson, who once seemed to be fired with revolutionary zeal, have latterly become indistinguishable from the pre-independence elite, who never bore about them the stamp of sincerity in the first place. Koomson, the representative of the “new” Ghana, has assumed a life-style identical to the life-styles of generations and generations of powerful men: “He lives in a way that is far more painful to see than the way the white men have always lived here . . . There is no difference then. No difference at all between the white men and their apes, the lawyers and merchants, and now the apes of apes, our Party men” (p. 89). Koomson names his daughter “Princess,” the name embodying the twin dimensions of Anglophilia and governance, both important. It comes as no surprise to discover that the little girl has about her “the fearless, direct look of a white child,” and that she refers to her father as “Daddy” (p. 144). In the officially preserved serenity of what used to be known as the “white men’s hills,” far from the squalor of his own neighborhood, “the man” encounters further evidence of Black men “fleeing from [themselves] into whiteness” (p. 82). In these hills are the opulent “Estates,” still looking exactly as they had done in colonial times—and yet: Not everything was entirely the same . . . Here and there the names had changed. True, there were very few black names of black men, but the plates by the roadside had enough names of black men with white souls and names trying mightily to be white. In the forest of white men’s names, there were signs that said almost aloud: here lives a black imitator. MILLSHAYFORD . . . PLANGE-BANNERMAN . . . ATTOHWHITE . . . KUNTU-BLANKSON. Others that must have been keeping their white neighbors laughing even harder in their homes. ACROMOND . . . what Ghanaian name could that have been in the beginning, before its Civil Service owner rushed to civilize it, giving it something like the sound of a mastemame? (p. 126) The transition from colonialism to neocolonialism, thus perceived, has served to punctuate Africa’s degradation only to underscore it. The unfree

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“masses” are first afforded a vision of freedom, and are exhorted to move toward it; then, once they have wrestled themselves to within touching distance of it, it is snatched from their grasp, and unfreedom is cynically reimposed in its stead. Finally, adding insult to injury, this humiliation is compounded by the official rhetoric, Which in celebration proclaims Africa’s independence. In independence, according to The Beautyful Ones, the “masses” are still unfree. Yet now they are expected to bear their destitution and suffering not with bitterness, as their parents had done, but with exaltation, as though it were a great reward that they had won for their exertions. The authorial voice in The Beautyful Ones unifies the novel’s plethora of heterogeneous details by filtering them through the web of its moral intelligence. The commentary thus provided structures the political vision of the work as a whole. Perhaps because they do not appreciate this, some critics have interpreted Armah’s expose and repudiation of the Eurocentrism of Ghana’s elite as the expression of a misanthrope’s disapproval of people in general. S. A. Gakwandi, for instance, seems to have misunderstood the basic thrust of Armah’s anger. Where the novelist condemns the elite’s active participation in the neocolonial complex, Gakwandi sees only arrogance and self-righteousness. He charges Armah with exhibiting a profound “disgust [toward] . . . humanity, especially the African part of it and in particular, Ghana. So wicked, so dirty and so corrupt is humanity that there is no point in the individual’s trying to change it.”11 This is very far from being accurate. A close reading of The Beauty ful Ones reveals that the author’s contempt is reserved exclusively for the Koomsons or would-be Koomsons of his novel’s world: the wealthy, the powerful, those engaged in corrupt practices, and those who look at the world through Western-tinted eyeshades. Critics of The Beautyful Ones seem in general to have been much too eager to dismiss Armah’s hatred of crass materialism, conspicuous consumption, and neocolonial thinking as a loathing of mankind in general. They have tended to ignore the mass of evidence that suggests very clearly that characters like Koomson and his wife Estella are condemned for what they represent as Eurocentric Africans in a neocolony, rather than for what they represent as members of the abstract universal class of human beings. The Beautyful Ones is transparently a moral work, whose prevailing tenor is subjectivistic. This sense of moral earnestness ought not, however, to be interpreted as idealistic. For it stems not from any abstract consideration as to how the “good” or the “just” life might be led, but rather from an appraisal of what was actually possible in Ghana after decolonization—of what seemed, indeed, to be prefigured in the style of the decolonizing movement itself. Armah’s vision may be subjectivistic, even messianic, but it derives from a historical assessment and not from a contemplation of ideal, transhistorical

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forms. In this respect it is reminiscent of much of Fanon’s work. Above all, it seems to me, The Beautyful Ones needs to be read in light of Fanon’s classic essay on “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” in which Fanon had mounted a stinging critique of bourgeois nationalist ideology in Africa, describing it as parasitic, unimaginative, and wholly lacking in energy or initiative. Fanon’s essay was written at the time of independence, and was intended to serve as an admonition. The end of colonialism was in sight, but Fanon wanted to show that if the places of the departing colonial officials were filled by members of the national bourgeoisie, national liberation would not have been won. Armah’s presentation in The Beautyful Ones proceeds directly from this analysis. However, there is one crucial difference: The Beautyful Ones was first published in 1968, ten years after Ghana’s acquisition of political independence. What Fanon had posed as a potential threat is taken by Armah unambiguously to have come true. And even more than this is involved for Armah: for what Fanon had spoken of as “national consciousness,” the ideology of a small, if powerful, elite within the wider society, seems to Armah in the years since independence to have imprinted itself hegemonically upon society at large. In The Beautyful Ones, Armah offers us a picture of this hegemonic ideology at work. His chief device in this presentation is the metaphorical construct of “the gleam.” The reader is introduced to the gleam near the beginning of the novel. As “the man” walks to work in the early morning, the dark shape of Yensua Hill is beginning to be visible against the background of the dawn sky: On top of the hill, commanding it just as it commanded the scene below, its sheer, flat, multistoried side an insulating white in the concentrated gleam of the hotel’s spotlights, towered the useless structure of the Atlantic-Caprice. Sometimes it seemed as if the huge building had been put there for a purpose, like that of attracting to itself all the massive anger of a people in pain. But then, if there were any angry ones at all these days, they were most certainly feeling the loneliness of mourners at a festival of crazy joy. Perhaps then the purpose of this white thing was to draw onto itself the love of a people hungry for just something such as this. The gleam, in moments of honesty, had a power to produce a disturbing ambiguity within. It would be good to say that the gleam never did attract. It would be good, but it would be far from the truth. And something terrible was happening as time went on. It was getting harder and harder to tell whether the gleam repelled more than it attracted, attracted more than it repelled, or just did both at once in one disgustingly confused feeling all the time these heavy days. (p. 10)

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The Atlantic-Caprice is a tourist hotel and the venue of elaborate social functions attended by all of the local “big men.” To those aspiring toward the status of these “big men,” “all roads lead to the Atlantic-Caprice.”12 The hotel’s gleaming spotlights speak of success, and thoughts of success consume the waking minds and haunt the sleeping thoughts of almost everybody in The Beautyful Ones. People are attracted to the gleam because of its brilliance. Its sparkle seems to promise splendor, power, prestige, and luxury. Within the massively deprived universe of the novel, such a promise is not lightly to be ignored. The fact that certain individuals have managed to “arrive” at the gleam serves to strengthen the belief of the thousands aspiring toward it, that their desires are capable of fulfillment. The power of the gleam is such that every human action is judged less in terms of social utility or even its legality than in terms of its efficiency. The sole criterion of judgment is whether or not the action in question has propelled its instigator closer to riches or ease. The society has become fetishistic in its obsession with ostentation and gratuitous consumption, in its eschewal of all principles except those related to materialism and accumulation. What is at issue here is not simply “false” consciousness. Armah’s account is sharpened by his stress upon the scarcity of commodities. In the universe of the novel, the passion with which commodities such as television sets or long-grained rice are sought is inversely proportional to their availability. The entire society has internalized the imperatives of the gleam, and yet a life of luxury is well out of reach of all but an infinitesimal fraction of the whole population. It follows from the social obsession with the gleam and the near impossibility of its ever being reached that “alternative” methods of approaching it are everywhere attempted. One discovers very early in the novel that corruption is so rampant as to be positively conventional; it is not only resignedly accepted as a “fact of life” but actively endorsed as a way to “get ahead.” The all-consuming but invariably fruitless and self-torturing quest after luxuries that only the gleam can bring is such as to transform the end of reaching it into a matter of far greater significance within the public consciousness than the mere means of doing so. The gleam is regarded as a stage or condition to be sought and gained at any cost. Qualitative distinctions between means and ends are first blurred, then eroded, and come finally to be envisaged only as hindrances to success, rationalizations of failure, the trademarks of cowards and fools. This is precisely how “the man’s” wife, Oyo, reasons, for example, when she heaps scorn upon him for having been so abstractly righteous as to refuse a bribe. She accuses him of having acted like an “Onward Christian Soldier,” and when he demurs she asks: “Why pretend? Everybody is swimming toward what he wants. Who wants to remain on the beach asking the wind, ‘How . . . How . . . How?’” (p. 44).

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“The man” appreciates that the repulsion he feels toward the expensive commodities that constitute the external manifestations of the gleam derives from his prior recognition that in an underdeveloped society it is only ever the dishonest or those prepared to manipulate others who can hope to acquire them. In themselves diamond earrings and imported bone china tea sets are things of great beauty, and innocent. But it is not so much their beauty as their value, their glitter, that drives despairing people to fraud as a means of obtaining them. Contemplating the sumptuousness of the furnishings and appointments in Koomson’s home, “the man” tries to put his thoughts about having and getting into some sort of perspective: There were things here for a human being to spend a lifetime desiring. There were things here to attract the beholding eye and make it accept the power of their owner . . . How could a man be right in the midst of all this, wanting these things against which the mind sought to struggle? It was not the things themselves, but the way to arrive at them which brought so much confusion to the soul. And everybody knew the chances of finding a way that was not rotten from the beginning were always ridiculously small, (pp. 144-145) The pursuit of the gleam has become the sole preoccupation of the general society in The Beautyful Ones: outside of this cut-throat and selfdepleting pursuit there is, as “the man” surmises, nothing left “worth pursuing, nothing at all worth spending life’s minutes on” (p. 47). Respect, admiration, and trust seem to have been voided out of society, and replaced by sycophancy, covetousness, and callous manipulation. It is “only the heroes of the gleam who [do] not feel that they [are] strangers” even in their own homes (p. 35). These changes are reflective of the ordering rationality of the gleam, which seeks to impose an ethos of instrumentality upon the ground where a system of humane values ought to stand. Kolawole Ogungbesan has demonstrated that if light is one obvious attribute of the gleam, speed is another. Those who have arrived at the gleam are invariably presented in the process of fast movement. Metaphorically and literally they are “jet setters”: “Usually we see them in their cars. Their speed is so great that the words ‘leap’ and ‘soar’ are used to describe it.”13 Just as ostentation or high visibility becomes both means to the end of reaching the gleam and an end in itself, so too does speed or “fast living.” For those like “the man’s” wife, Oyo, who have become “slaves” to the ideology of the gleam, living well appears to revolve around the twin principles of “learning to drive” and “driving fast.” As “the man” explains to his friend Teacher: Teacher, my wife explained to me, step by step, that life was like

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a lot of roads: long roads, short roads, wide and narrow, steep and level, all sorts of roads. Next, she let me know that human beings were like so many people driving their cars on all these roads. This was the point at which she told me that those who wanted to get far had to learn to drive fast . . . Accidents would happen, she told me, but the fear of accidents would never keep men from driving, (pp. 58-59) Ogungbesan fails to point out, however, that it is only within the circle of the gleam’s sway that Oyo’s rationalization seems definitive. In Oyo’s eyes it is speed and speed alone that has the capacity to render life enjoyable. She has a vision of salvation firmly within her sights. Her vision is of “the blinding gleam of beautiful new houses and the shine of powerful new Mercedes cars . . . the scent of expensive perfumes and the mass of a new wig” (p. 56). As Oyo understands the matter, the gleam is arrived at only after a journey. Those who arrive first will be those who have driven the fastest. This schema lacks the fundamentally qualitative consideration of direction; Oyo reckons only with the quantitative aspects of speed and distance. For her there is only one place to go, and that is: far. For “the man,” by contrast, the mere search after speed or distance is an occupation futile at best and, at worst, dehumanizing. This is why he refuses to be drawn into “the national game” (p. 55), the free-for-all for material possessions. Oyo’s vision is fetishistic, but it would be misleading to describe it as “false.” The gleam is neither the negation nor the antithesis of the reality it purports to represent. Nor, for that matter, is it but a reflection of this reality. Rather, it corresponds to a simulation of reality. And in these terms its terrible power consists in its ability to convince its subjects not only that it is itself real, but that it represents “all there is.” It thus contrives at one and the same moment to misappropriate reality and to convince its subjects that it has not done so. To an “outsider,” a consciousness outside the influence of the gleam, this misappropriation looks like what it is, a misappropriation. But to an “insider,” a “slave” to the gleam, it seems as though no misappropriation has taken place at all. Indeed, to an “insider” the gleam is envisioned not even as an “adequate” representation of reality but, on the contrary, as reality itself. The overlapping processes of representation and misrepresentation are equally invisible to the “insider.” This state of affairs is metaphorically enacted as the man walks pensively through the desolate streets to Teacher’s house: Outside, the night was a dark tunnel so long that out in front and above there never could be any end to it, and to the man walking down it it was plain that the lights here and there illuminated nothing so strongly as they did the endless power of the night,

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easily, softly calling every sleeping thing into itself . . . Around a street lamp high over the coal tar, insects of the night whirled in a crazy dance, drawn not directly by the night from which they had come, but by the fire of the lamps in it. Their own way of meeting the night, and it was all the same in the end. (p. 47) “The man” finds himself alone in not capitulating to “the call of the night,” just as he is one of the isolated few in The Beautyful Ones with conviction enough to resist the lure of the gleam. Because his inner mind is fixed upon a creative vision of social integrity, he regards his community’s frenzied pursuit of the gleam as a hopeless quest after a delusory prize—and such is also the nature of the night insects’ “crazy dance” around the street lamps. There can, however, be no doubting the “sincerity” of the insects being drawn to the light that emanates from the lamps. The flickering of the lamp may in actual fact be nothing more than degraded representations of sunlight (the “true” light), but to the insects this does not seem to be the case. To them there is evidently nothing artificial about these lights that attract them, and they do not even begin to notice that in their weakness the lamplights serve more to confirm the effortless dark of the night than to challenge it. Similarly, to Oyo, the life that Estella Koomson is living seems clean even though, as “the man” observes, “some of that kind of cleanness has more rottenness in it than the slime at the bottom of a garbage dump” (p. 44). Although the representation of reality that issues from the gleam is bound to reality itself, it possesses the power to displace reality in the minds of its subjects. Resembling reality closely enough to pass casual muster, it scarcely needs to concern itself with the reservations of individuals like “the man” who feel uneasy about the brash artificiality of its glare. For “the man” is in a tiny minority. His feelings of unease stem from precisely the type of moral intelligence that the gleam works hardest to erode—and the overall success of this eroding operation can be gauged from the fact that “the man” is so isolated. Once within the orbit of the gleam’s influence, escape is rare. This is because all manner of experience becomes grist to the gleam’s recuperative mill, even those that one might suppose would undermine its credibility. In Teacher’s rendition of Plato’s cave allegory, the wanderer who finds truth outside the cave and who then comes back inside “with the eagerness of the firstbringer” in order to share his discovery with his fellows, finds himself being mocked by them. They see in his revelations not the deluded nature of their own understandings hitherto, but the incoherencies of a lunatic. So it is with regard to the gleam. Those solitary wanderers who resist its advance to hegemony and even beyond, to total instrumental control, are rewarded for their pains with ostracism and social obloquy rather than respect and acclaim. The gleam’s rationality is purposive. If it were not, indeed, the gleam

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would be incapable of achieving dominance as an ideological configuration. One might suppose from the fact that it has presided over a grotesque ethical inversion, in terms of which humane values have been cast as weak or obsolete, and displaced, that its modality is anarchic or unstructured. Nothing could be further from the truth. The gleam operates in highly organized and meaningful fashion. Consider for example the way in which it contrives to perpetuate the historical pattern of African subordination: individuals under its influence actively resist efforts to cut them loose from the chains of foreign dependence binding them. It is not, obviously, that they relish the constraints to their own freedom provided by these chains. Rather, Armah suggests that they continue in bondage because the gleam now prevents them from seeing their manacled condition for what it is. Because their understanding has become mediated through the gleam, they are open to its persuasion; ultimately they will accept as true even the fabrications that they are not slaves at all, but free agents. The gleam also promises the growth of a sort of sublimated social aggression, “victim anger” (p. 69), in terms of which its subjects—aware of their suffering but not its underlying cause—turn against their fellows by way of releasing their pent-up frustration and rage. It is never the material causes of misery that are addressed by victim anger, but only surrogate agencies at most tangentially involved in contributing to the climate of impotence and fear. Teacher recollects that in the years after the Second World War, the market women in Ghana became victims of the aggression of desperate people searching to give their inner rage an outlet. Similarly, when Oyo’s mother finally accepts that no advantage is going to accrue to her as a result of her participation in a fraudulent venture, initiated by Koomson, to acquire a boat, she cannot draw the logical conclusions from her belated realization. The old woman finds it impossible to direct her grievances against Koomson, their instigator and cause. Instead—and such is victim anger—she chooses to blame “the man,” as though he were somehow responsible for ensuring that the enterprise would prove profitless to herself. The gleam has imposed itself upon the world as reality. Its social symptoms of corruption and illicit, garish success now appear so incontrovertibly “natural” in the public eye that to seek to resist them is conceived as a deviant aim: Was there not some proverb that said the green fruit was healthy, but healthy only for its brief self? That the only new life there ever is comes from seeds feeding on their own rotten fruit? What then, was the fruit that refused to lose its acid and its greenness? What monstrous fruit was it that could find the end of its life in the struggle against sweetness and corruption? (p. 145)

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The gleam’s ultimate tendency is to impose its own imperatives upon the world absolutely. It operates, accordingly, to reduce the social centrality of its antagonists, to isolate them from one another, and to try to tempt, entreat, trick, or, finally, coerce them into submission. At the very least it gears itself to so cripple its opponents with self-doubt and irresolution as to keep them perpetually on the defensive, incapable of working constructively toward its overthrow. Its success in this operation can be measured through the fact that of the two “enemies of the gleam” that we get to know well in the novel, one, Teacher, is plunged into an obsessive and fathomless introspection, while the second, “the man,” is racked by uncertainty and is sadly lacking in selfconfidence. As far as Teacher is concerned, he discovers that the gleam plays a disproportionately large role in his life even though he has managed to desensitize himself to the desires and longings whose satisfactions could only be found within its orbit. For he has chosen a life-style or, as he puts it, a “half-life of loneliness” (p. 56), whose massive inauthenticity, disclosed in its every phase, reflects the informing negative presence of the gleam. Though not a recluse as Teacher is, “the man” too is consumed by the gleam. He finds that it lacerates his intellect with anxiety and assaults his moral sensibility. Above all, it causes him to feel like a criminal for having done no wrong in a society in which the failure to avail oneself of dishonesty where all are busy committing brazen crimes in broad daylight is perversely considered the height of immorality. He puts it to Teacher that at the end of all his arguments with Oyo, it is he who feels guilty: “I feel like a criminal. Often these days I find myself thinking of something sudden I could do to redeem myself in their eyes. Then I sit down and ask myself what I have done wrong, and there is really nothing” (p. 54). In the deepest recesses of his mind, “the man” realizes that his opposition to the gleam is fundamentally justified. He has it on the fringes of his consciousness “that it should not really be possible for the guiltless to feel so beaten down with the accusation of those so near” (p. 49). But these feelings are inarticulate, and they do not assist “the man” in his day-to-day struggles against the gleam. Specifically, they do not assist him in defending his own honesty against the demands and expectations of his family: indeed, what defense could there possibly be against those who perceive honesty as foolishness, perversity, or cowardice?14 “The man’s” sensation of criminality is compounded by the fact that, unlike Teacher, he is often strongly drawn by the lure of the gleam. He is very far from being resolute.15 The invitation to corruption rings enticingly again and again in his mind, saturating him with doubt and crippling him with the expenditure of nervous tension that it occasions. It is not incidental that in the rare moments when life affords “the man” the opportunity to answer the call

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of the gleam and to meet the expectations and demands of his family without betraying his principles, he finds himself feeling peculiarly light-headed: Going into the shops with his new money in his pocket, he had ... the uncontrollable feeling of happiness and power, even while knowing somewhere in the back of his mind that the expensive things he was buying would deepen the agony of his next Passion Week ... yet he could not help the smile that came to his lips and spread this feeling of well-being over all his body ... It was not only because of the admiring glances of the people in the shops, for whom a man’s value could only be as high as the cost of the things he could buy . . . There was also, inside the man himself, a very strong happiness whenever he found himself able, no matter for how brief a spell, to do the heroic things that were expected all the time, even if in the end it was only himself he was killing, (pp. 114-115) There is no way of avoiding the gleam. Those who struggle to withstand its siren-call find themselves harassed by it all the long days of their lives. Teacher is very conscious of the fact that he spends so much time and energy fleeing from the gleam that he has neither the time nor the energy left to devote himself to more creative pursuits. “The man” is incapable of ridding his mind of the torturing presence of the gleam even for a moment. The gleam plagues his waking hours and returns to torment his dreams at night. In one such dream, “the man” imagines that he is walking with an unidentified companion toward “a group of shining white towers” reminiscent of the Atlantic-Caprice Hotel: “They are going there, the two of them, the man and his companion, happy in the present and happy in the image of the future in the present” (p. 100). In his dream “the man” is transported back to a time of hope, when it seemed that Ghana and Africa had only to hold fast to their aspirations in order to realize them. It is the time of decolonization: the whiteness of the building before them is sharp but not harsh, sheer but not forbidding, and “the man” and his companion evidently regard the tall structure—hotel, government offices, university towers?—as a logical and harmonious embodiment of their future. But then, suddenly, the dazzling brightness of the gleam intrudes upon the scene and all is changed in an instant: But brutal lights shine and cut into the night with their sudden power, rushing with their harsh rhythm toward the happy pair, now so confused. The lights move forward, smooth and powerful. The man, blinded by a cutting beam, covers his downcast eyes with his hands, and in the movement lets go of his compan-

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ion’s waist. But she is not blinded. Through the insufficient protection of his fingers he can see her, her eyes shining with the potent brightness of huge car lights, returning the power of the oncoming lights. They come, the lights, with the noise of the cars bringing them . . . [The cars] go off in the direction of the towers, leaving the man behind. The white towers gleam with a supernatural radiance as the cars get closer to them, then everything penetrates slowly, smoothly into darkness as they enter. Every shining thing goes out when only the man is left, and the darkness turns keenly cold. Looking for warmth, he lies down, but the ground is also cold and very hard. The man tries to find his way back into the old warmth of the hovels he has left behind, but looking back, he finds he can never again know the way back there. All he can feel now is the cold, and a loneliness that corrodes his heart with its despair, with the knowledge that he has lost his happy companion forever, and he cannot ever live alone, (pp. 100-101) In this dream16 the gleam is not engendered by the tall buildings emblematic of Africa’s future. But no sooner has it established its potency and voided the vision of an authentic future from the minds of its victims than it co-opts all of the symbols and icons of the “new,” or “emerging” Africa. The result is that the whiteness and austerity of the modern buildings begin to seem to reflect its glare. Although in his dream “the man” sees the gleam in the process of converging with the clean new building, in his waking life the convergence is rooted in the relatively distant past: for, thinking back, “the man” recalls that even during his school days the “white beauty” of the university had already stamped itself upon his consciousness with an ambiguous, clinging sort of ache and longing (p. 117). “The man’s” companion in the dream responds to the gleam so readily, reflecting its brilliance in her answering eyes, that it is impossible to determine in retrospect whether its harsh brightness was what she had had in mind from the outset, or whether, starting out with quite different intentions, her will had simply been destroyed by the brutal, penetrating rays of the gleam. The same is true of many of those whom the gleam has colonized. Individuals like “the man,” possessed of a vision of social integrity, can only look on it in confusion as the radiance of the gleam captures the attention of their fellows. “The man” is left in his dream with the impression that his loss is irrevocable. He has lost his companion, the cohesion of the past seems beyond retrieval, the historical meaningfulness of the present seems to have been fractured, and even the future appears to promise only further capitulations to the ruthless, alien glitter of the gleam. Inasmuch as the gleam is the prevailing form of reality in The Beautyful Ones—and the mentality which it instills is borne as nothing less than

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“common sense” by the huge majority of the novel’s characters—it follows that its power and persuasiveness must be overturned as a precondition, not as a consequence, of resistance to neocolonialism. The gleam is, of course (as The Beautyful Ones clearly recognizes), underpinned by a vast political, military, and economic ensemble whose cohesion is strengthened by the relative disorganization of the anti-imperialist elements and movements throughout the post-colonial world. It is, however, a measure of Armah’s unquenchable commitment to the cause of African liberation that, contemplating the potency of the neocolonial apparatus, he still chooses to direct his attention in The Beautyful Ones to the matter of resistance. In the novel, a variety of strategies for opposing and combating the gleam are debated. If, ultimately, Armah rejects all but one of these strategies as unviable, and refrains from making extravagant claims even for this one, this is presumably because he feels that it would be both too late and too early to speak to his readers of revolution. Revolutions are forged by mass action, mass involvement, and leadership which is perceptive of, and receptive to, the needs and aspirations of its movement’s rank and file. Thus conceived, revolution cannot be imposed on a people from above. Indeed, The Beautyful Ones suggests that Nkrumah’s administration succeeded only in alienating “the masses” whose activism had brought it to power. The general populace is presented in the novel as being thoroughly disillusioned with the political process. Even when, toward the end of the work, Nkrumah is toppled in a coup, the response of the workers in the city is portrayed as one of non-involvement. To start advocating revolution in these circumstances, in the total absence of a revolutionary situation, would, the novel implies, be both naive and irresponsible. The men who succeed Nkrumah at the end of The Beautyful Ones are no social saviors, no heroes of the people. On the contrary, they come from exactly the stratum of society that has most to lose from an overturning of the status quo—and as the narrative voice in the novel scathingly observes: Someday in the long future a new life would maybe flower in the country, but when it came, it would not choose as its instruments the same people who had made a habit of killing new flowers. The future goodness may come eventually, but before then where were the things in the present which would prepare the way for it? (pp. 159-160) It is by way of answering this question, and not by way of promoting false hope, that The Beautyful Ones takes up the matter of living, as it were, against the gleam. Armah’s aim in the novel is to discover a means of keeping open the possibility of future transformation, of retaining an affirmative vision for the future in the degraded reality of the present.

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Strictly speaking, there are only two ways of living against the gleam. The first of these is to concede the central province of reality to it and to retreat into marginality. In the novel, this is the strategy which Teacher, Maanan, and Rama Krishna all adopt, each in his or her own particular way. The second way of living against the gleam is to refuse to accept its dominion over social reality, to campaign against it on its own purloined ground, to set oneself to defeat it by living positively in the face of its negative imperatives. This is the strategy that is adopted by “the man,” and that is ultimately endorsed in The Beautyful Ones. The idea of fleeing from the degraded world is demonstrated, in the novel, to be both futile and self-destructive. This is the case irrespective of where the soul in flight is attempting to flee toward: whether to asociality (as with Teacher), madness (Maanan), or spirituality (Rama Krishna). It is through the last mentioned of these characters that the reader is first introduced to the motif of flight. Walking through the streets one night, “the man” recalls Rama Krishna, a Ghanaian friend of his who “had taken that far-off name in the reincarnation of his soul after long and tortured flight from everything close and everything known, since all around him showed him the horrible threat of decay” (p. 48). Obsessed by the gleam’s tentacular purchase upon the material world, Rama Krishna had progressively sought refuge in immateriality, eschewing first what he took to be the tangible, then the intangible, social agencies of corruption. Eventually, this procedure led him to abstain from all sexual conduct: “He would not corrupt himself by touching any woman, but saved his semen to rejuvenate his brain by standing on his head a certain number of minutes every night and every dawn. Everywhere he wore a symbolic evergreen and a faraway look on his face, thinking of the escape from corruption and of immortality” (p. 48). The terrible futility of this posture is then driven home through the irony of Rama Krishna’s sudden death: It was of consumption that he died, so very young, but already his body inside had undergone far more decay than any living body, however old or near death, can expect to see. It was whispered—how indeed are such things ever known?—that the disease had completely eaten up the frail matter of his lungs, and that where his heart ought to have been there was only a living lot of worms gathered together tightly in the shape of a heart. And so what did the dead rot inside the friend not have to do with his fear of what was decaying outside of himself? And what would such an unnatural flight be worth at all, in the end? (pp. 48-49) Maanan is another who feels compelled to seek flight from the material world, because she finds herself being dehumanized from the outset by the

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rationality of the gleam. As a woman in a patriarchal and fetishistic society, she is treated as an object very similar to one of the commodities in Koomson’s house: an object to be pursued; bought, and consumed. The narrative voice refers to the “women, so horribly young, fucked and changed like pants, asking only for blouses and perfume from diplomatic bags” (p. 89), who become the disposable objects of desire and possession of men who can afford to buy them. Maanan struggles to resist this aspect of the gleam, which would deny her her creativity and ability to contribute to the social well-being of her community. But her struggle is a hopeless one. Progressively she abandons the arena of social action for more derealized and derealizing pursuits: she smokes wee, finds “refuge in lengthening bottles,” and accepts the “money and sometimes even love” of foreign sailors (p. 66). Like her friend Teacher, Maanan had perhaps staked too much of herself on Nkrumah’s integrity and promise. The first to hear Nkrumah, it had been she who recommended him to Teacher and she who prevailed upon her friends to go and listen to him talk. Having thrown herself wholeheartedly into Nkrumah’s cause, she is left without resources as a result of his unforeseen and, from her perspective, unimaginable capitulation to the gleam. She succumbs to the accumulated agony of the suffering and humiliation, personal and political, she has been forced to endure. She is last seen wandering purposelessly along the shoreline, mad perhaps beyond retrieval and muttering frenziedly to herself: “They have mixed it all together! Everything! They have mixed everything. And how can I find it when they have mixed it all with so many other things?” (p. 180). Her search, as Ogungbesan has observed, is “for the impossible; for the past, the present, and the future are inextricably mixed together. The loss of our illusions is the only loss from which we never recover.”17 The most important advocate of flight from the gleam in the novel is unquestionably Teacher. Accordingly, it is in the implicit comparison between his existential strategy and “the man’s” that the novel’s debate about different ways of opposing the gleam is most rigorously posed. At first sight it might appear that of the two blueprints, Teacher’s is by far the more satisfactory and effective. After all, he is possessed of a degree of intellectual certainty about the viability of his own position and stance, where “the man” is constantly racked by doubt and insecurity about the morality of his. Furthermore, however inauthentic his freedom might be, Teacher is free where “the man,” wage slave and family member, is not. And thirdly, although both he and “the man” suffer the depredations of acute loneliness, Teacher has at least chosen his lifestyle of aloofness and asociality, while “the man” is more acted upon than actor in this regard, being ostracized by a society at large that regards his integrity as antisocial and even, possibly, threatening.18 Some commentators have, indeed, suggested that Teacher serves as a foil

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for Armah’s own opinions in the novel. Kofi Yankson, for instance, has argued that the novel’s central inference is that escape, not combat, is the only practical means of living against the gleam.19 But a careful examination of The Beautyful Ones is enough to dispel this impression that it is Teacher’s policy of self-imposed internal exile rather than “the man’s” strategy of resolute struggle with the here and now that is ultimately vindicated in the novel. For not only, as Robert Fraser has pointed out, does the novel consistently endorse “the man’s” “stubborn refusal to compromise on basic principles” and “his decision to put into practice the official [Nkrumaist] Party ideals of ‘hard work and honesty and integrity,’”20 it also comes very close to an explicit repudiation of the fundamental futility of Teacher’s life. Such a repudiation is metaphorically presaged early in the novel, as “the man” goes to sharpen his pencils in the sharpener at the office: When he stuck a pencil into the sharpener and turned the handle, the handle sped round and round with the futile freedom of a thing connected to nothing else. The man stopped trying and went back to his seat. Searching deep inside the drawer, he found an old blade. He began to sharpen the pencils at the same time reading over the night clerk’s log, just checking, (p. 17) Teacher is like the pencil sharpener in that his “freedom” has been won at the cost of his life’s meaning and purpose. He is free, but his liberty is unconnected and has no substance. In the past, Teacher has been “the man’s” friend and mentor, helping to sustain his awareness and satisfy his thirst for knowledge. But now, when “the man” goes to visit Teacher, he finds his friend’s spirit “so full of fear for itself, and full of a killing anguish at what this fear makes impossible,” that it is “almost destroyed” (p. 78). Teacher is unable to help “the man” any more. Just as, sharpening his pencil, “the man” needs to use an old blade, so too in his life is he obliged to make do with the limited means he has at his disposal, patiently, resolutely, with no great hope of ever succeeding fully, but with even less intention of ever ceasing to try. Teacher’s flight from the world is the indirect consequence of his commitment to Nkrumaism. The extent of his present anomie is inversely proportional to the intensity of his past allegiance. As with Maanan, too much of Teacher had been caught up in Nkrumaism to enable him to recover from the disillusion which attended its collapse. The bitterness of the experience now makes it impossible for him to see in Nkrumah’s career anything less than an eternal African sequence of hope, betrayal, and despair. Teacher’s alienation is comprehensive. All meaning and purpose have been drained from his existence, and the universe seems to him bound by the irresistible natural cycles of birth and decay, life and decomposition. Even the social process is

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now cast in his eyes as entropic. Hope gives way inevitably to disillusion, and disillusion is made all the harder to bear by the lingering memory of the hope in whose ashes it has arisen. For Teacher there is no lasting hope to be found anywhere. He adopts this conviction as though it were an incontrovertible metaphysical principle: “It is not a choice between life and death, but what kind of death we can bear, in the end. Have you not seen there is no salvation anywhere?” (p. 56). Applying this dissipative philosophy to social reality, Teacher concludes that although situations inspiring hope might arise in the world, the hope thus aroused would best not be trusted, being transient in its very nature and containing its endings and the threat of its decay in its beginnings and its first, embryonic promises of things to come. In Teacher’s eyes, there is nothing in social reality upon which to ground a public morality. Time passes, whisperings swell into movements, into mass activity, and then subside, decay, and dissolve: “So much time has gone by, and still there is no sweetness here” (p. 67). Such changes as do occur appear to be synchronized by an inexorable logic forever beyond the control of human action, a logic which stamps its processes of life and death upon natural and social realms alike. This metaphysical outlook on events is not to be confused with cowardice, as Ogungbesan seems to have imagined.21 Nor is Teacher’s inactivity to be regarded as the outcome of an over-intellectualization of the problems of commitment. His is a post- and not a pre-commitment mentality. His inactivity derives from his conviction (which in turn derives from his own personal experience) that political action is futile and that all hope is doomed to betrayal. Dialectically speaking, as he well appreciates, despair entails hope, and hope constantly speaks of renewal. But he is resolved never again to heed the inspirational voices of hope: “I will not be entranced by the voice, even if it should swell as it did in the last days of hope. I will not be entranced, since I have seen the destruction of the promises it made. But I shall not resist it either. I will be like a cork” (p. 63). Teacher understands that this resolution condemns him endlessly to a life of emptiness. Perpetually on the run from the gleam, he is incapable of raising his hand to assist those combating it and dreaming of the construction of a new order, however far in the future this might be. He knows that in one sense he is as dead as the loved ones trying to welcome him into a different type of death. He has chosen one type of death, they another. He has no beliefs and if he is still left with desires, they are useless since he will not allow them conscious expression. He has his freedom but it is a freedom whose exercise is indistinguishable from its non-existence: It makes no difference. If we can’t consume ourselves for something we believe in, freedom makes no difference at all. You see,

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I am free to do what I want, but there is nothing happening now that I want to join ... I don’t feel any hope in me any more . . . No. I also am one of the dead people, the walking dead. A ghost. I died long ago, so long ago that not even the old libations of living blood will make me live again, (p. 61) In contrast to Teacher, “the man” is unfree. But, also in contrast to Teacher, he chooses life rather than a form of living death as his personal stance. The quality of his “life,” as one might have expected from Armah’s description of the debased environment within which it is conducted, is impoverished to the extreme. As Fraser has observed, “the man” is caught in the trap of a mundane and unremunerative occupation, he is subject to all those petty, debilitating pressures from which a more dignified status might have exempted him. His work is dull and unrewarding. His family, frustrated by poverty and deferred expectations, are pinched and resentful ... he drags himself through each working day with little to anticipate in the evening but the accusing eyes of his wife and children, their nagging envy of those whose financial situation is happier.22 “The man’s” domestic and material circumstances are squalid and miserable. Furthermore, they are highly unlikely to improve significantly during his own lifetime. Yet within the context of these demeaning circumstances, “the man” manages to invest his struggle for bare existence with great dignity, and to wrench from this struggle a hope for the future. As Richard Priebe has noted, the man actually carries a tragic potential, for we are made to feel the dignity of his struggle with forces that overwhelmingly contrive against human dignity. He is not a man or every man, but the man, the only human being, the only person in the context of the novel who is struggling to maintain his humanity.23 Besides his moral perspicacity and social integrity, “the man’s” cardinal virtue consists in his self-discipline. His is not an easy existence. It is one that, if it is to be borne long and in sanity, requires a level-headed abandonment of false optimism. The world must be taken and grappled with as it is found. It will not help to pretend that its transformation is imminent if it is not, for such a pretence can only lead to subsequent disillusion. Individuals are obliged to live their lives from day to day, not from revolutionary conjuncture to revolutionary conjuncture. “The man” realizes this. He moves toward the realization, too, that with social revolution seemingly not a viable proposition for the time being, progress has to be assessed negatively, in terms of resistance to the

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hegemonic order, rather than positively, in terms of the construction of a new one. It is only at the end of the novel that he learns to rest content with his existential stance in the face of the appalling near-certainty that his generation will not live to celebrate the birth of the “beautyful ones.”24 Up until this point in the novel, “the m&n” can find no means of defending his own convictions against the charge that it is ultimately absurd or, worse, perverse, to uphold a principle or set of principles whose immediate social relevance is nil and whose direct usefulness to posterity is at best massively problematic. “The man” has to learn to accept that none of the victories that he might be capable of forging from everyday life can possibly be world-historical ones. Many of these victories, indeed, will not even seem to be victories at all. To the mind anxious for results and for clear indications that its judgments have been sound, this knowledge, that all that can be expected from the present is that it will not foreclose every single one of the future’s progressive options, is difficult to bear. For in such a context success is unheralded and carries with it no banners of glory. “The man” struggles toward an awareness that his strategy for living is justified even though it might never be hailed as such. The understanding that he might well die without ever seeing so much as a single brick laid toward the concretization of his dreams calls upon “the man” to exercise tremendous self-control in sustaining himself upon his course of action. His resistance of corruption exhausts him. The utmost vigilance is needed merely to keep the gleam at bay, and so much strength is sapped in each encounter with it that nothing remains with which to begin the task of reconstruction. All of “the man’s” victories, hence, are small (imperceptible, in fact, from any macro-sociological viewpoint) and desperately hard in the earning. They are nevertheless indisputably victories—and in a novel in which every other strategy for resistance is shown to result in a form of living death, “the man’s” small triumphs against the forces of degradation stacked against him are sufficient to occasion the reader’s great admiration. In his unquenchable determination to make his life yield a positive meaning and purpose, “the man” approaches heroic stature. His denial of the gleam is creative, for it leaves the way open for the “beautyful ones” of the novel’s title. Theirs will be the future—and theirs also must be the task of revolution, for the hands of the present generation are constrained by the limits of social and personal possibility. “The man’s” life may well continue to be harsh and excruciatingly painful, but it will possess none of the inauthenticity that characterizes Teacher’s. As such, it would seem to be vindicated where Teacher’s is not. For while Teacher’s strategy of escape leaves him feeling forever marginalized, “the man” discovers that his policy of dogged refusal offers him moments—no matter how qualified—of satisfaction. “The man’s” small triumphs invariably result from his perseverance in

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the face of adversity. Sometimes he is granted an instant’s awareness of the validity of his stance, just as he approaches the edge of despair. In this event, the moment serves, for all its fleetingness, to strengthen his flagging resolve. At other times he is able to find a sort of heightened sensitivity in the loneliness to which his uncompromising social bearing condemns him. This allows him to project himself in his imagination beyond his own straitened circumstances toward a vision of harmony. He is helped in this in possessing the inclination (unlike Teacher) to contemplate the natural and social worlds as distinct. Where Teacher tends to place a naturalistic rationality upon society, and to conflate the instances of decay (natural) and corruption (social), “the man” seems to identify a reciprocal tension between the two realms: the natural universe is entropic and its patterns are ceaseless and repetitive, but it has about it on occasion a simple, unfraught, and uncluttered beauty that impresses itself deeply upon “the man”; the social world, on the other hand, is massively oppressive in its present (and historical) form, but it bears within itself the only viable means of transcending the circularity of nature’s processes. “The man’s” strategy of absolute resistance to the gleam eventually regains him the respect of his wife. Oyo’s conversion to “the man’s” cause ranks as his most tangible triumph in the novel. This is not only because Oyo has hitherto been among “the man’s” harshest and most articulate critics, but also because as his wife, she is the foremost representative of the “loved ones,” from whom he has often felt a particular need to flee. Throughout The Beautyful Ones, there are indications that Oyo’s capitulation to the gleam has been a source of special unhappiness to “the man,” who discovers himself somewhat lost without her qualities of strength, intelligence, and loyalty. Accordingly, the reconciliation between husband and wife serves to give the novel an immediate and potent edge of optimism which it could not otherwise have realized. The reader cannot help being encouraged by the thought that, however difficult their lives will continue to be in a material sense, Oyo and “the man” will be considerably happier in their shared future than they have been in their divided past.25 Although it presents “the man” as a heroic and Oyo as a fallen character, The Beautyful Ones scrupulously resists casting the wife as unworthy of her husband. It is true that “the man” had once entertained hopes of going to university (a move which would in all probability have secured his future financially) and had been disappointed when Oyo’s unwanted pregnancy had forced the abandonment of this pleasing dream. But he implicitly acknowledges now that he was not as distressed about the course of events leading to his marriage as he had pretended to be at the time: Another path was open before him. He would have liked to think that he had not chosen that path, that the daily life of a struggling

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railway man was merely something that had been forced on his unwilling soul. But in truth he could never believe this of himself. Oyo’s pregnancy had not pleased him, but he could remember clearly now that the anguish he had expressed when her parents had come with their long story of their daughter ruined had not been entirely genuine. And the marriage ceremonies had actually left him feeling quite happy, with the sense that something important had happened to him. (p. 117) ' * Robert Fraser has argued that “the man’s” marriage to Oyo is the sorry outcome of an “amorous misadventure” which, “continually tortured by thoughts of the future he might have had,” he has not yet stopped ruing.26 It seems to me, however, that Fraser has drastically underestimated the extent to which “the man” looks to Oyo for love and approval and feels himself bereft when he can no longer reach her. Throughout the novel there are intimations that the relationship between Oyo and “the man” has been a close one in the past and carries the potential to be so again. In these terms, the real measure of “the man’s” success in restoring his relationship with Oyo to its erstwhile situation of mutual love and respect can be gleaned through a simple juxtaposition of descriptions from the middle and the end of the novel. In the former, husband and wife seem to have drifted irretrievably far apart. In the latter, the distance between them appears to have been bridged: . . . there was nothing the man could say to his wife, and the woman herself did not look as if she thought there could be anything said to her about what she knew was so true. But inside the man the confusion and the impotence had swollen into something asking for a way out of confinement, and in his restlessness he rose and went out very quietly through the door, and his wife sat there not even staring after him, not even asking where he was going or when he would come back in the night, or even whether he wanted to return at all to this home. (p. 47) And: [Oyo] was standing just outside the hall door, and when he could see her face properly the man judged that she was confused. She was looking as if something tremendous were disturbing her, but at the same time the man could see in her eyes something he could only think of as a deep kind of love, a great respect. He continued his forward movement until he had pushed his wife back very gently against the wall to the side of the door. Though the movement and the sudden tenderness in himself surprised

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him, he knew it was true, and he put all his fingers deep into her hair and held her head, pressing against her and letting her feel his desire for him. She raised her eyes in a motion of soft unbelief, and she looked like a young girl afraid she may be doing something wrong, (p. 160) “The man’s” perseverance not only wins him back his wife’s respect, it also prompts the re-emergence of his own self-esteem: “In Oyo’s eyes there was now real gratitude. Perhaps for the first time in their married life the man could believe that she was glad to have him the way he was” (p. 165). Ultimately, however, The Beautyful Ones is less concerned with what “the man” achieves for himself through his strategy of confrontation with the gleam than with what his strategy appears to retrieve (or, at least, to be capable of retrieving) for the future in social terms. In this regard “the man’s” primary victory lies in his managing to transform Oyo’s charge, that he resembles a chichidodo bird, from an insult into a statement of positive value. The chichidodo is a bird that loves maggots but despises excrement. Oyo levels her accusation in the course of reproaching her husband for being too fastidious in his rejection of crooked means to arrive at the gleam; she argues that he appreciates the “good things” of life but scorns all of the effective means of acquiring them. Certainly, there is considerable substance to this charge. For most of the novel, “the man’s” resistance to the gleam, laudable though it is in general terms, is marked by a certain moralism and aloofness. His repudiation of corruption is disdainfully articulated, as though he despised corruption not merely on political but equally on aesthetic grounds, because it was “dirty.”27 In this context, the circumstances of his “purification” at the end of the novel emerge as decisive. In helping Koomson to escape arrest in the aftermath of the coup, “the man” is forced to lead the compromised politician through the latrine hole beneath his house. He is forced, in the words of the colloquial expression, to “get down and dirty,” and to overcome his aestheticist finickiness in the process.28 Only once he has done so, and once he has been subsequently cleansed by a plunge into the ocean, is his resistance to the gleam able to lose its ethically superior tone and become, finally, politically principled and resolute. The distance that “the man” travels in The Beautyful Ones can be measured by comparing the first and last scenes of the novel. As the work opens, “the man” is discovered asleep aboard a bus on his way to work. To the extent that the bus in its wheezing decrepitude serves as a microcosmic representation of Ghanaian society,29 “the man” himself is both a representative and an exceptional figure. He is representative inasmuch as he is asleep in a Ghana of whose sovereign citizens Kwame Nkrumah had declared at independence that they would “no more go back to sleep.”30 If decolonization

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was marked by “the waking of the powerless,” it is clear that in the short years since independence there has been a reversion to the status quo ante. But “the man” is simultaneously different from his compatriots: although he is asleep, his eyes are open. Since he is asleep, he does not in fact see what is going on around him, but because his eyes are open, he is seen by others as seeing. When, at the beginning of the novel, the conductor of the bus looks up from his counting of the day’s takings—a task that he has been performing somewhat fetishistically, luxuriating in the smell of the money—he is met by the staring eyes of “the man” asleep, and feels himself judged by their implicit address: “the conductor felt excruciatingly tortured as [the eyes] drilled the message of his guilt into his consciousness” (p. 4). Throughout the novel, as, more characteristically, “the man” finds it impossible to shut his eyes to the goings-on around him, others experience him as an uncomfortable, judging presence, and it is difficult not to feel that they are at least partially right. For in his moralism “the man” emerges not only as a righteous judge of the corruption of others, but also as himself judgmental, dismissive, and disrespectful of others’ motives and actions. In these terms, the “purification” at the end of the novel is notable inasmuch as it frees him of his lingering ethical arrogance. Walking along the shore after his cleansing swim in the ocean, he witnesses a policeman extorting a bribe from a bus driver. The regime of Nkrumah may have been overthrown, but the business of corruption continues as usual. What is crucial about this episode is that although “the man” is once again presented—as he has been throughout the novel—as “silent watcher,” observing corruption from a distance, he now neither moves to judge, nor is perceived as sitting in judgment of, the bus driver. In the novel’s opening scene, “the man’s” stare had fixed the bus conductor’s actions as morally reprehensible. Here, however, at the novel’s end, the bus driver sees the watching “man” not as a stem figure of conscience, calling him to account, nor—of course—as a partner in crime, but as one who understands: “The driver must have seen the silent watcher by the roadside, for, as the bus started up the road and out of the town, he smiled and waved to the man” (p. 183). It is not so much that “the man” recognizes the humanity of the bus driver. It is rather that he recognizes the driver’s/^Z/ow-humanity, which is to say, his own as well as that of the driver—indeed, his own through that of the driver. The upshot of the exchange is a sense of renewal on the part of “the man,” who no longer feels quite as isolated as previously. The hand-lettered inscription on the side of the bus—“THE BEAUTYFUL ONES ARE NOT YET BORN”—speaks directly to this sense of renewal. By virtue of his late “purification,” therefore, “the man’s” dogged refusal to abandon either his principles or his dream of a better society is able to emerge as a potent source of value in the novel. As Henry Chakava has written, “the man’s” “determination to continue to live in this society and

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endure public disgrace, family abuse and mental conflict, without being defeated, is the greatest sign of hope in the whole book.”31 “The man” learns that it is only by continuing his struggle, by resolutely opposing the pull of the degraded reality all around him, and by holding fast to a vision of future social transformation, that he is able to invest his life with a constructive purpose. It is his discovery that one has to live within one’s society and not beyond it. Reality has to be borne. The definitive insight offered by The Beautyful Ones, in these terms, consists of the prospect of “the man’s” unyielding and heroically brave resistance to the dominative aspects of an unpalatable reality. At the end of the novel, “the man” goes home knowing that his own material circumstances are unlikely ever to be changed, and that he is unlikely ever to see his socialist dream for Ghana realized: . . . but then suddenly all his mind was consumed with thoughts of everything he was going back to—Oyo, the eyes of the children after six o’clock, the office and every day, and above all the never-ending knowledge that this aching emptiness would be all that the remainder of his own life could offer him. (p. 183) Yet he goes home. He chooses to re-enter the world that will never offer him any substantial rewards. And he does so, finally, for two reasons: because it is the only world there is; and because he has come to understand that the value of a life can only be judged in terms of its social morality. Taking his individual stance in the present against the gleam, “the man” elects to live for the “beautyful ones” of the future. That way, and that way alone, lies freedom.

Notes 1

Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968; London: Heinemann, 1969). Page references in the text are to the 1981 Heinemann edition. ^eorg Luck£cs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1983), p. 89. 3

Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 115. 4

A similar general point is made, though substantially put to different usage, by Richard Priebe in his article “Demonic Imagery and the Apocalyptic Vision in the Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah,” Yale French Studies, 53 (1976), 102-136. 5

Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 163-164.

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6

Henry Chakava, “Ayi Kwei Armah and a Commonwealth of Souls,” in C. Wanjala (editor), Standpoints on African Literature: A Critical Anthology (Nairobi: East African Publishing Bureau, 1973), p. 197. 7

Kolawole Ogungbesan, “Simple Novels and Simplistic Criticism: The Problem of Style in the African Novel,” Asemka, 5 (September 1979), 35. 8

In his Tasks and Masks: Themes and Styles of African Literature (London: Longman, 1981), Lewis Nkosi locates this resistive ethic even in Armah’s language: “[Armah is] a novelist . . . who knows how to make language work for rather than against him . . . Often what Armah is forcing us to observe is ugly, repulsive, ramshackle, mutilated; but his language can describe defeat without yielding to it” (p. 65). 9

Basil Davidson, Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah (London: Allen Lane, 1973), passim. 10

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 166. See also: Chinua Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria (London: Heinemann, 1984), on the Nigerian nationalist leader, Nnamdi Azikwe: “Here was an eloquent revolutionary who inspired a whole generation of young idealist activists in die Zikist Movement to the high pitch of positive action against colonial rule and then, quite unaccountably, abandoned them at the prison gates” (p. 58). n

Shatto Arthur Gakwandi, The Novel and Contemporary Experience in Africa (London: Heinemann, 1977), p. 97. 12

Kolawole Ogungbesan, “Symbol and Meaning in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, in E. D. Jones (editor), African Literature Today, No. 7 (London: Heinemann, 1975), p. 96. 13

Ibid., pp. 94-95.

l4

Cf. Derek Wright’s suggestive reading of “the man” as a scapegoat whose “martyred interiorization of accusations allows the guilty deceit of [others] to reduce his idealism to an ashamed folly.” In “Motivation and Motif: The Carrier Rite in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” English Studies in Africa, 28, 2 (1985), 121. Reprinted in Derek Wright (editor), Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1992), pp. 125-141. * 15

As I read it, there is little in the text to support either John Povey’s contention that “the man’s” “strengths are a tough rational certainty and a defiant morality that remains impregnable” (Review of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Africa Report, 14, 2 [February 1969], 60), or Charles Larson’s that “Armah’s Man knows all along that this society has lost its values and that he is the lone center of value in a society that has long traded its soul to the devil” (The Emergence of African Fiction [Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1972], p. 259). 16

For a sympathetic reading of this dream sequence in the novel, see John

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Coates, “The Mythic Undercurrent in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, World Literature Written in English, 28, 2 (1988), 166. 17

Kolawole Ogungbesan, “Symbol and Meaning . .

107-108.

18

Richard Priebe, “Demonic Imagery . . .,” 110-111.

19

Kofi Yank son, “ The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born: An Anatomy of ‘Shit,’” English Department of Workpapers, University College of Cape Coast, Vol. 1 (March 1971), pp. 27, 29. ^Robert Fraser, The Novels ofAyi Kwei Armah (London: Heinemann, 1980), p. 16. 21

Kolawole Ogungbesan, “Symbol and Meaning . . .,”98.

^Robert Fraser, The Novels ofAyi Kwei Armah, p. 16. ^Richard Priebe, “Demonic Imagery . . .,” 112-113. ^One is reminded here of the character of Ramono in Mongane Serote’s novel, To Every Birth Its Blood (London: Heinemann, 1983). Like “the man,” Ramono also has to learn that although his personal acts of resistance are indispensable, he himself will very likely not live to see their fruition: “It took some years for Ramono to realise one of the truths about working towards the oasis: that one may reach it, or one may never see it” (p. 126). 25

This reading of the reconciliation between “the man” and Oyo at the end of the novel is supported by Coates (“The Mythic Undercurrent . . .,” 167). But see also Derek Wright’s altogether bleaker interpretations in two articles, “Saviours and Survivors: The Disappearing Community in the Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah,” Ufahamu, XIV, 2 (1985), 139; and “Ritual Modes and Social Models in African Fiction: The Case of Ayi Kwei Armah,” World Literature Written in English, 27, 2 (1987), 203. In a third article, “Flux and Form: The Geography of Time in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” Ariel, 17, 2 (April 1986), 63-77, Wright extends his bleak interpretation to the novel as a whole, reading it against the grain of the utopian dialectic that, in my view at least, constitutes the touchstone of its radicalism. ^Robert Fraser, The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah, p. 16. 27

One is reminded here of Theodor Adorno’s comment about culture: “[i]t abhors stench because it stinks.” In Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 366. *1 am grateful to Professor Peter Nazareth for suggesting this line of explanation to me. ^erek Wright, “Motivation and Motif. . .,” 120. ^Kwame Nkrumah, 1 Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology (New York: Praeger, 1962), p. 107. 3

‘Henry Chakava, “Ayi Kwei Armah and a Commonwealth of Souls,” p.

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FRAGMENTS and

WHY ARE WE SO BLEST?

The Human and the Divine: Fragments and Why Are We So Blest? Rosemary Calmer

Ayi Kwei Armah’s second and third novels, Fragments' and Why Are We So Blest?,2 are essentially statements about the alienation of the educated elite from the people, and the sens** of dissociation and personal dissolution which this induces in those of the elite who feel that their place is among the people. Fragments and Why Are We So Blest? are both strongly influenced by Fanon’s study of the psychology of the African bourgeoisie and of the process by which the colonial power attracts the aspirations of the bourgeoisie.3 Both novels are studies of men who have recognized the fatal nature of the processes acting upon them, but who have been unable to escape the psychological dissolution which comes with their realization of the futility of any gesture in another direction. Why Are We So Blest? goes further, to explore the place of the intellectual in the African revolution, and reaches an ambiguous conclusion. Armah’s first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,4 also examines the post-colonial situation in Africa, and it has been noted that the imagery of The Beautyful Ones is reminiscent of turns of phrase found in the political writing of Fanon.5 Certainly, Armah’s treatment of the Black/White men, the members of the new Black elite who ape their former colonial masters, resembles Fanon’s observations of the behavior of the colonized Black bourgeoisie. Fragments picks up many of the ideas of The Beautyful Ones, and some of the images in which these ideas are expressed are the same.6 As in The Beautyful Ones, the novel focuses on a man’s refusal to tread the dishonorable path which would give his family the material things they desire, and again his refusal seems to make him abnormal in the eyes of others and even to himself. In Fragments, Baako’s assumption of guilt for his refusal to behave in the normal, acquisitive manner leads to a mental breakdown when he is unable to resolve the conflict between his own expectations and those of his family. Far more than in The Beautyful Ones, however, Arm ah develops in

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Fragments the dichotomy between the material world and the spiritual one. The central images of the novel, the cargo cult and the mame water, involve the idea of a communication between the mundane and the divine realms. Similarly, in Why Are We So Blest?., the central image from which the novel draws its title is of a dividing line between human and divine. Those who cross it are the “Blest” of the title; those who fail to do so are Fanon’s “Damnes de la terre.” Those elevated to the status of the Blest are acclaimed as heroes, but they are alienated from the wretched, perhaps permanently. * In The Beautyful Ones, life is perceived as an unending state of entrapment: the cycle of birth and death is represented as a physical cycle occurring only for objects in the material world. In Fragments it is the human essence which enters upon the cycle of life, and death is merely a stage on the journey, welcomed by the dying as being itself a birth into a spirit existence. The new emphasis on the spiritual in Fragments and the novels which follow it is the major difference between the later novels and The Beautyful Ones. In Fragments, there is hope that Baako’s acceptance of the false values of his family may be countered by the arguments of his friends. The novel is not wholly pessimistic, and the fact that the closing words are a reaffirmation of the cyclic nature of spiritual life does much to counter the despair of the central character. In Why Are We So Blest? the note of despair dominates at least half of the novel, and its pessimistic narrator-editor allows it to end with the callously naive voice, a voice “like a retarded child” (p. 267), of the woman who has helped to destroy the hopes and the life of the central character, Modin. In this novel there is no sense of a spiritual life cycle continuing after death; instead, the death of the spirit precedes that of the body. If there is any hope in the novel it lies in the early pages, which set up the myth of Prometheus’ defection from Olympus to aid man as a model for Modin to follow, but the myth is concluded in the novel not with a Prometheus unbound but with Modin’s death. Fragments is the story of the return of a been-to to his home in Ghana and his reluctance to conform to his family’s expectations of him. Baako’s mother, sister, and acquaintances are disappointed when he does not return from the United States laden with the wealth of the West. Baako, who has had a nervous breakdown overseas, finds a true friend and lover in his psychiatrist, Juana, a Puerto Rican who has come to Africa in search of a struggle to share in. His work as a scriptwriter is rejected and ignored, and when Juana goes home on leave he is overcome with guilt at having disappointed his family and has a second breakdown. In the last section of the novel, we learn that Baako’s mother has been unable to build her big new house because he has not returned wealthy, and that his sister’s greed for money has contributed to the death of her newborn baby. At the end of the novel it seems that Juana will be able to rescue Baako from the asylum and relieve him of his crazy guilt, with the help of his former teacher.

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The novel is framed by chapters in which Baako’s grandmother, Naana, reflects on “the circular way” (p. 5), as she calls it. In the first chapter she is concerned with the completion of a ritual circle of events and observances which will ensure the return of the departing son. She recognizes Baako’s departure as a kind of death, but in the circular way death leads to rebirth. In the last chapter, while she herself is moving gladly toward death, she is thinking of the hurt inflicted on her grandson Baako, and on the newborn great-grandchild who died, at the hands of those too eager for power and goods. Their materialistic vision has resulted in a loss of connection with the spirit world which can only be deleterious to those modern Ghanaians who are losing their way and misdirecting their journey. Naana’s framing vision provides a sane view of the world against which we can measure Baako’s vision as he moves toward the insanity of believing that he is wrong and the people who surround him are right. Where Naana and Baako concur in dissenting from the common view we can be reasonably sure that their vision is more valid than that of Baako’s demanding relatives. Why Are We So Blest? also contains two important points of view: those of Solo and Modin; but in this novel Solo’s pessimism and “sense of terminus” (p. 113) prevails over Modin’s early hopes. Naana is a vital figure in Fragments. It is her emphasis on the spiritual which changes the focus of the novel from the mundane and temporal despair of The Beautyful Ones to a positive affirmation of a cyclic world. Much of the meaning of the novel rests on our appreciation of cyclic relationships.7 Through Naana we see that the cycle of night and day can be upset by modem technology, with street lamps replacing the sun (p. 14), and that the modem set of priorities which emphasizes material goods can interfere even in the cycle of life and death—for the death of Naana’s great-grandchild is a result of the premature ceremony of outdooring (pp. 283-284) which threw it, “like forced seed,” into the world before the proper day in order to catch the guests with money in their pockets. Baako’s journey to the United States was a cycle. It is seen in different terms by Baako and by Naana. For Naana, his departure is a death which will lead to a rebirth. For Baako, too, his departure from Ghana is like a death, but his return is the ghostly return of a spirit who should bear gifts for the living, but who in Baako’s case comes home empty-handed. The reaction of Baako’s relatives when he arrives home without so much as a car to show for his years in the United States makes him think about his own situation in metaphorical terms, and he comes to see in it a parallel to the Melanesian cargo cult. This cult arose out of brief European trading contact with a people who conceived of the spirits of the dead as White. When the source of goods, the White trader (or in Baako’s colonial context the colonial power) withdrew, it was identified with the spirit world, and the cargo cult

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arose. In its best known form it is a millennial cult, and rests on a belief that on some future day the spirits of the dead will return in an airplane, bearing wonderful gifts from the spirit world for the living.8 Armah uses this deification as the source of worldly goods after their withdrawal as a metaphor for the colonial experience in Africa. In the post-colonial world all things Western are exalted; the man who has been to Britain or the United States has a special status and brings with him the magical gifts which fulfill the dreams of those left behind. In his confusion Baako comes to believe that in returning from this magical ghost world without the appropriate treasures9 he has not only failed to fulfill the anticipations of his family but has broken the proper cycle of events. To him it seems that the modern “cargo cult” of Ghana is validated by the African tradition of seeking the mediation of an ancestor when requesting the favor of a god. To have failed as a cargo bearer comes to seem a genuine failure of vocation. From this conception of what his proper role ought to have been springs the guilt and distress which lead to his nervous breakdown. Naana recalls a vision of Baako’s departure for the United States which is similar in interesting respects to his own later articulation of the cargo expectations: I closed my eyes . . . and I saw Baako roaming in unknown, forbidding places, just bom here again after a departure and a death somewhere. . . . All the people were white people all knowing only how to speak the white people’s languages. Always, after saying anything, however small or large, they shook their white heads solemnly, as if they were the ones gone before. Some touched hands, slowly. But Baako walked among them neither touched nor seen, like a ghost in an overturned world in which all human flesh was white. And some of the people bore in their arms things of a beauty so great that I thought then in my soul this was the way the spirit land must be. (p. 15) This pre-vision of a world of White ghosts bearing beautiful objects suggests Baako’s use of the cargo cult parallel much later in the novel. But Naana’s vision of Baako ’ s return is not that he has come back as a ghost. Rather, she sees him as a child reborn, a “new one” (p. 4), entering afresh on the cycle of life, and asking the questions before which her weak spirit fails. Hers is the more positive interpretation and the one which ultimately prevails, since it is her thoughts which end the novel. Baako’s pessimistic view is a way of describing the expectations of others. Baako’s relatives, once their fear that he might remain in the United States forever has been allayed, expect his return to conform to the pattern of other such returns. He will bring with him at least one car, and other shiny

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trinkets from the ghost world. To return, as Baako does, without tangible proof of his been-to status, is unheard of. Baako’s perception of this attitude as a cargo cult mentality is valid; his error lies in deciding that their assumptions are correct. The gifts which Baako bears with him when he returns to Ghana are not material ones. The only tangible signs of his status are his certificates and diplomas, which prove to be totally valueless when he tries to get a job. His training is ignored, and his personal gift of creative vision is rejected by the bureaucrats who run Ghanavision, where his former teacher has found him a job. The relatives want material gifts, not gifts of vision, nor even certificates of qualification. Yet these are the gifts which Baako brings from overseas; and at the end of the novel his former teacher is trying to make him understand that what he has offered his people is important, although they have rejected it. Baako’s guilt at his inability to provide what his family wants can only be countered by the realization that he has fulfilled the cycle by bringing spiritual gifts from his experience of the ghost world, even if these are not appreciated by the earthbound ones to whom he has brought them.10 The image of the cargo cult is not the only one in the novel which involves the idea of contact between the mortal and the non-mortal worlds. Baako’s account of himself as a ghost returning with gifts is echoed in his sister’s account of Naana’s teaching about the nature of man: “You men are not supposed to be concerned with these things of the earth . . . Has Naana never told you what a man is? . . . Man is pure spirit and should be free and untouched, and it is only for a little while that he comes down to live in a body borrowed from us women, the females of the race, living trapped like sunlight that goes into a house through a window or into the earth through a hole ... So men should be spirits, ghosts, according to Naana.” (p. 124) Men are ghostly by nature; it is women who provide them with their earthly bodies, and women who provide them with their mundane desires for material wealth. Women have the power either to save or to destroy (p. 257). Set against the materialistic model of contact between mortal and nonmortal provided by the cargo cult, with its gift-bearing ghosts passing between the dead and the living, is the idea of the mame water. In the terms in which Baako explains the legend to Juana, the psychiatrist who becomes his friend and lover, the mame water is a goddess who comes from the sea at long intervals to meet her lover, a musician. The musician, knowing he must one day lose her entirely, is torn by the pain of love and longing, and from this pain produces his richest music. Both the cargo cult and the mame water are images of a kind of gift

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passing from one world to another, but in the former the gifts and the passage between worlds are conceived of in mundane and material terms, while in the latter they are spiritual: gifts of vision and the power to express this vision. In the novel, Baako has received these gifts during his training in the United States, but his family rejects such spiritual offerings. To a certain limited extent Juana herself takes over the role of the mame water. Juana comes from that ghostly land across the sea. Her affair with Baako begins by the sea (they even make love in the sea), and he feels for her an intense emotion “like a growing happiness” (p. 175) which he tries to take hold of. It is to her that he explains the myth of the mame water which is a metaphor for the painful nature of his artistic inspiration.11 During her absence overseas he has his second nervous breakdown. Her presence has been an assurance to him that he is not alone, and in her absence he has no confidant or sympathizer except his teacher. She relates to the spiritual part of him, and in her absence he becomes subject to the guilt which is brought on by his failure to perform the mundane functions expected of him by the earthbound women of his family. The mame water myth is the spiritual equivalent of the materialistic cargo cult mentality, and is thus a more precise reflection of Baako’s real position than the cargo idea which leads him into self-destructive feelings of guilt. The airplane from the ghost world and the tangible gifts of the cargo-bearers are the warped, misunderstood notions of greedy people. The spiritual reality is expressed both in Naana’s sense of Baako’s return as a rebirth in which, like the baby introduced to the world of the living too soon, he is at hazard; and in the mame water myth. As Baako says, the myths are good (p. 172). Only their use is degenerate. The transformation by a Ghanaian poet of the legend of the mame water and her gift of vision into a story of the bringing of electricity reflects in miniature the kind of distorted interpretation of which Baako becomes the victim. His studies overseas have given him the power to express his expanded vision12 as he tries to do through his film scripts. But in the estimation of the world his vision is irrelevant and his gifts intangible and therefore valueless. When he accepts the judgment of the world his guilt and the mental strain caused by his attempt to deny his own way of seeing bring on his mental collapse. That he is in fact insane, not sanely visionary, at this point is made clear by his insistence on his own fault and the correctness of the cargo mentality. This is insanity. It is for Juana and his former teacher to help him regain his real spiritual vision and reject the worldly view. Baako’s film scripts reflect a true vision. In the United States he attained the expanded consciousness which separates him from other “been-to”s. It is his experience of the ghost world across the sea which is the source of his artistic inspiration, which proceeds from the clarity of his newly expanded vision. Like Modin in Why Are We So Blest?, Baako has found that separation

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from his people enables him to see them more clearly. Like Solo and Modin, he suffers for his knowledge, but Arm ah seems to be using the myth of the mame water to suggest that Baako’s experiences overseas have been beneficial to him. Although his situation is one of acute alienation from the people at home, although he briefly accepts the false aspirations of the colonized bourgeoisie as correct, although his personal distress brings on a psychological dissolution, Baako is nevertheless a man who has been granted vision. He is an artist: and it seems that this, though it causes him great pain, saves him from being utterly condemned. If Juana can save him he may even live to write the truth again. Why Are We So Blest? goes even further than Fragments in its study of the futility of effort and its picture of the African intellectual as radically, intolerably, and inescapably alienated from the people. Yet still, I would suggest, the metaphor on which the novel is based suggests that to have vision is worth something, that to make the futile gesture is better than not to make it. In Why Are We So Blest? the United States, now not simply a ghostly world but the Land of the Blest,13 is a destructive world. Yet only by passing from the world of the wretched to the world of the blest does the hero gain the vision which enables him to choose to cross back again and rejoin the wretched. Whether, having separated himself from his people, he can again rejoin them is the question raised by the novel. But it appears that however pessimistic Armah may be about the role of the intellectual in Africa, the man who has joined the blest but attempts to rejoin his people has a vision which is valuable, and which can never be attained by those who have never escaped their wretchedness. Why Are We So Blest? explores the fate of an African intellectual, Modin Dofu, who realizes that the West is destroying him and returns to Africa in search of an opportunity to make a revolutionary commitment to the people from whom he has become estranged. He is accompanied by his White American girlfriend, Aimee Reitsch, whose predatory nature ensures that the destruction begun by the impersonal West is completed through her personal agency, first through the soul-destroying nature of her love, and finally wheh Modin is sexually tormented and left to die in the desert by a group of White men. This ill-assorted pair of lovers is observed by Solo Nkonam, an intellectual and writer who has already tried to regain his sense of identity with the people by involvement in the “Congherian” revolution, and failed. Every thought, every utterance, every relationship in the novel is presented only as evidence for the operation of the polar opposites, Blest and Damned, on those who are moving between them. The image of Blest and Damned is Modin’s. It is he who reads a complacent newspaper editorial written for the Fourth of July and entitled “Why Are

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We So Blest?” in which the author congratulates Americans on being among the blest (pp. 98-99). The terms in which the editorial is couched have a bearing on the metaphor which Modin has already been using to distinguish his own position: that of one who has attained a lonely eminence from which he can see farther than can the mass of people, but which denies him their companionship. The editorial extends this metaphor to apply to the separation between the sacred and the profane, and in the discussion which follows Mike the Fascist (the student who has shown Modin the editorial)'tells Modin that the eminence which he has attained above his people is equivalent to his having crossed from the profane world to the sacred one. Modin is already acutely aware of his own separation from his people. The educational system which selects and promotes progressively fewer people has finally selected him as the only one on a scholarship to Harvard. Modin’s metaphor for the loneliness and spiritual dislocation which this separation causes is similar to Solo’s. Solo sees it in terms of climbing a hill, from which one can see humanity below as a pattern, not as a collection of suffering individuals (p. 47). Modin sees it as a movement toward the “central heights” (p. 33), that “lonely eminence.”14 Once he has been exposed to the Thanksgiving Day editorial this idea of an estranging, alienating distance between the educated African and his people is converted into a new dimension, the distance between lowly humanity and the semi-divinity of the Blest. The writer of the editorial sees the United States as another Eden. The crucial factor which makes the American Way paradisal is its separation from the rest of the suffering world. The editorial suggests: “The myth of Paradise finds its full meaning here in the New World. Paradise is a state of grace, and grace is space—the distance that separates the holy from the merely human, the sacred from the profane, separates and protects” (p. 98). That separation which for Solo leads to a shameful ability to forget the pain of the masses below the hill, and which for Modin is itself a painful alienation and an agonizing loneliness, is for the complacent American a matter for self-congratulation. Mike the Fascist will not allow Modin to reject the premises of the article. When Modin protests, Mike retorts by pointing out that Modin himself has attained the Olympian heights of the system. He has made the crossing from the outer darkness of the mortal, non-American world to the divine realms of the Ivy League elite. Mike says, “In the Greek tradition you’d be a crossover. One of those who rise from the plains to live on Olympus. A hero. Part man, part god. Therefore more interesting than either” (p. 101). In this image the lonely mountains on which Solo and Modin stand have become sacred mountains, and the separation from the world below is a complete change of existence, from mortal to divine. The heroic transition from mortality to divinity is seen by all the mortals below as a desirable change; only to reluctant heroes like Modin does it become a nightmare of loneliness.

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Modin asks Mike about the possibility of the reverse transition: the Promethean change from divine allegiance to a compassionate descent to man, bearing the stolen gift of fire from heaven.15 Mike scoffs at the idea, but in Modin’s return to Africa, looking for a revolution to give his life to, we see his attempt to make the Promethean crossing. The punishment for the attempt is Prometheus’ punishment.16 Modin finds that his education dooms him to a lonely elevation above the people; his loneliness is shared only by Aimee, harpy daughter of a race of destroyers. At the end of the novel he is tied to a jeep by a group of White men with wild, predatory eyes, and his penis is severed while Aim£e fellates the bleeding stump. Clearly the punishment of Prometheus is suggested, in a particularly gruesome variant form, in this scene, but the situation of Promethean punishment is presented in the whole of Modin’s alienated existence and relationship with Aim6e, not just in the final scene. His isolation on his separate, lofty peak of education parallels that of Prometheus, chained to his crag, and the whole of his relationship with Aimee is an intimate and totally destructive torture masquerading as love. Modin’s phrase for what is omitted in Mike’s theory, “the Promethean factor,” is one of many puns in the novel on this word and others.17 The Promethean “factor” refers both to the notion of the reverse crossing from human to divine forgotten by Mike and to the slavers’ agent with whom Modin associates Africans received into the ranks of the blest. Modin wants to serve the revolution but he ends by destroying himself without any assurance that his gesture has borne fruit. Herein lies the pessimism of the novel. Prometheus was punished for successfully providing man with fire, formerly the exclusive possession of the gods; Modin is doomed to die without having succeeded in communicating to his people the gifts of education, vision, and hope which he has gained during his sojourn among the blest. Solo sees that Modin’s chief weakness is his love for Aimee. In seeking White companionship as a way out of his loneliness Modin has completed his alienation from Africa. He has embraced the very race which has engineered his alienation in the first place. Solo feels that Modin’s death was a wasted one. For life to have been worthwhile there must be some point to death. Solo clearly wants to see death as an investment in a better future for others. He faces this problem while he is in the hospital with “mental problems” (p. 53). He is approached by an old man who has lost a leg in the revolution. Now he spends all his time reading about the French Revolution in an attempt to find out who benefitted, who gained. In response to the old man’s appeals to Solo to explain why, if “1’essence de la revolution, c’est les militants,” the militants do not gain from the revolution, Solo is forced to evolve a metaphor which relies on a second meaning of “l’essence”: “You are right,” I said. “The militants are the essence. But you

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know, that also means they are the fuel for the revolution. . . . The truck represents society. Any society. Heavy. With the corrupt ones, the opportunists, the drugged, the old, the young, everybody, in it. And then there are the militants, pushing the whole massive thing from the lower to the higher level. But they themselves are destroyed in the process.” (p. 27) If we can allow Modin’s attempt to return to Africa and* identify with the people to have been a Promethean crossing, even though he is not permitted to join the revolution, we might enroll him honorarily among the militants. Certainly his Promethean crossing has shown the way for other Olympian “heroes” to follow. There may be only one Promethean crossing in the GrecoRoman system, but, as Modin says, there are other myths, elsewhere in the world, involving the crossing from divine to human.18 Perhaps Modin’s effort alone could have been a sufficient gesture. Like Promethean fire, “something pure, light, even spiritual, which consumes itself to push forward something heavier, far more gross than itself,” he tries to become fuel for the revolution. He has descended from his lonely height in order to help push society upward. In Solo’s opinion, Modin’s actual death is an unproductive one. As far as Solo is concerned, Modin’s fine fire of revolutionary purpose was consumed before he went out into the desert to meet his death. Yet the thrust of the imagery in the early part of the novel, and particularly the use of the Promethean myth, pushes the reader toward the view that Modin’s Promethean crossing is a positive gesture, and that his death is the punishment for daring to attempt such a return. It is Solo’s negative interpretation of his death which colors the end of the novel with despair, as Naana’s view suggests hope at the end of Fragments. Solo’s view is that Modin’s death is “useless, unregenerative destruction” (p. 263), a sign of the futility of a failed gesture. The parody of Promethean punishment in the novel leaves no room for a Prometheus unbound. Solo finds literary inspiration in Modin’s journals, making of the pieces of his life “that most important first act of creation, that rearrangement without which all attempts at creation are doomed to failure” (p. 231), but it would be too optimistic to suggest that Solo is left carrying the Olympian flame. Solo recognizes that in his attempt to present Modin’s experiences he is “a mere parasite, feeding upon spilt entrails” (p. 232).19 Solo’s interpretation of Modin’s end is the interpretation of a man whose own life is a failure and who is unable to see beyond his own despair. We need not accept Modin’s death at Solo’s valuation. The man who attempts the Promethean crossing is more admirable than the man who does not, and Modin has the grace to see that life is not worth living once the spirit is dead. There may be a man who is strong enough to endure the pains of the crossing and keep his dreams, but Solo’s analysis of mankind in the opening

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pages of the novel suggests that the visionaries are automatically “the losers, life’s failures” (p. 14), while those who are tough enough to survive the Promethean torment are less than admirable in Solo’s eyes: . . . Their entrails have an iron toughness mine do not have ... To live well now means to develop as highly as possible the ability to do one thing while saying, and preferably also thinking, another thing entirely. The successful livers are those with entrails hard enough to bear the contradictions and to thrive on it. (pp. 13-14) The fact that Solo sees all effort as futile does not make Modin’s effort valueless. Attempts to push the state uphill may be Sisyphean, but this is no reason to cease trying. The commitment of despair may be as effective as the commitment of hope, and the belief that one is inevitably doomed to suicide need not prevent one from dedicating one’s death to a good cause. Nor is the intellectual hopelessly removed from the revolution while he may bring the fire that will light the fuel. In both novels, Fragments and Why Are We So Blest?, Armah considers the aspirations of the bourgeoisie toward a Western model in terms of the communication between a mundane African world and the essentially dead, destructive world of the West, and explores this in terms of the psychology of individuals. Yet one must recognize that Armah uses the myths of transition and communication between the two worlds to express a beneficial form of contact as well as a deadly one. Against the acquisitive cargo cult mentality in Fragments are set Naana’s view of Baako’s sojourn in the ghost world as one which precedes his return in newborn form, and the mame water myth of ecstatic, potentially destructive inspiration. And, while aspiring to a position in the land of the blest may lead to a lonely alienation for the harpy-ridden “hero” in Why Are We So Blest?, it also offers the possibility of a reverse crossing back to the people, bearing Promethean fire.

Notes ‘Ayi Kwei Armah, Fragments (Boston, 1970). Page references in the text are to the Heinemann edition of 1974. 2

Ayi Kwei Armah, Why Are We So Blest? (New York, 1972). Page references in the text are to the Heinemann edition of 1974. 3

Armah’s interest in Fanon appears in his non-fiction also, for instance, Ayi Kwei Armah, “African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?,” Presence Africaine, 64 (1967), 6-30.

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4

Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (Boston, 1968).

5

Gareth Griffiths, “Structure and Image in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Studies in Black Literature,'ll, 2 (Summer 1971), 1-9. Reprinted in Derek Wright (editor), Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1992), pp. 75-91. 6

For instance, the image of the eating of ripe and unripe fruit.

7

These are discussed at some length in B. J. Barthold, “Three West African Novelists: Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Ayi Kwei Armah,” unpublished doctoral dissertation (University of Arizona, 1975).* 8

See: Kirsten Holt Petersen, “Loss and Frustration: An Analysis of A. K. Armah’s Fragments,” Kunapipi, I, 1 (1979), 56-57, for a fuller explanation of the cult in New Guinea (reprinted in Derek Wright [editor], Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah [Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1991], pp. 217-226). See also: Ron Rassner, “Fragments: The Cargo Mentality,” Ba Shiru, V, 2 (1974), 55-64. "But note, Fragments, p. 224, that Armah sees the been-to as an intermediary, definitely not a creator of goods. In this respect he is like the factor of Why Are We So Blest? 10

Edward Lobb, “Armah’s Fragments and the Vision of the Whole,” Ariel, X, 1 (January 1979), 25-38, deals with the ideas of seeing and understanding in the novel. I would suggest that Baako sees, but needs Juana and Ocran to help him understand what he sees. n

She herself does not provide him with artistic inspiration, and he uses her typewriter only for his letter of resignation from Ghanavision. l2

His first nervous breakdown is the result of an “overexpansion of consciousness.” His second is caused by his attempt to limit his mind to the cargo consciousness of those around him. 13

The word is carefully chosen by Armah: on the one hand the Blest are mortals beatified and raised to the status of demigods as Mike suggests; on the other the Isles of the Blest are the Western lands of the dead. 14

Edward Lobb, “Personal and Political Fate in Armah’s Why Are We So Blest?,” World Literature Written in English, XIX, 1 (Spring 1980), 5-9, points out some of the many references to the separation between high and low in the novel. Reprinted in Derek Wright (editor), Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1992), pp. 242-256. 15

The gift to the people is represented in the novel by the vision seen from a lonely height, by hope, and by life which is the fuel of the revolution.

*Editor's Note: Barthold’s dissertation has since been incorporated into her book, Black Time: Fiction of Africa, the Caribbean & the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).

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16

Prometheus was chained to a lonely crag, where a predatory bird daily devoured his liver. ,7

Edward Lobb (“Personal and Political Fate . . .,”6) draws attention to the pun on “factor” at this point. Such word play is common in the novel, for instance the use of the words “blest,” “eminence,” and “essence.” 18

At least one such myth involves sacrificial death as well, but to suggest a parallel between Modin’s death and the crucifixion would be to take the analogy too far. 19

Edward Lobb (“Personal and Political Fate . . .”) has an interesting argument about the parasitic nature of Solo’s literary efforts. In connection with the Promethean parallel in the novel, Solo’s emphasis on his position as the scavenger of “spilt entrails” is worth noting.

Editor’s Note: Quotations from Armah’s novels in the above essay have been shortened for purposes of this publication.

The Promethean “Factor” in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments and Why Are We So Blest? . Joyce Johnson

. . . have thine eyes not seen how In vain, unavailing dreamlike impotence, the purblind peoples Of the earth are imprisoned eternally? Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound1

In Western literature, Prometheus has traditionally symbolized the “perfection of moral and intellectual nature,” creative revolutionary purpose directed against the forces which oppress mankind and the motive force of technological development that has enabled man to control his environment.2 More recently, Prometheus has also been seen as the prototype of the alienated intellectual whose concern for humanity leads him to offend the ruling power structure.3 His role as a go-between renders him suspect both by the gods, with whom he has a natural empathy, and by oppressed humanity, for whom he feels great sympathy. The Promethean hero, Wole Soyinka has observed, has specific reference in ex-colonial societies.4 In ex-colonial Africa, Prometheus is important first as the prototype of the revolutionary intellectual. In the classical myth, Prometheus, a Titan, allied with Zeus to overthrow the unimaginative rule of his brother Titans, but was later forced by Zeus’ uncompromising exercise of power against mankind to rebel against him. Prometheus’ situation, as E. A. Havelock has commented, can be taken as typical of the alienation of the intellectual in any society, so far as the power structure . . . tends to develop its own laws of self-preservation, which operate within a short term

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at the expense of those long-range insights which the intellectual feels called upon to furnish.5 For those African intellectuals who welcomed the new order of political independence in various African societies and who became increasingly alienated from their political regimes, the myth of Prometheus supplies an appropriate symbolic structure for depicting the opposition of forces in contemporary African societies.6 This is one of the ways in which Ayi Kwei Arm ah has used the myth in Fragments and Why Are We So Blest? In both novels, Arm ah depicts the attempt of a conscientious intellectual to dissociate himself from the new political elite that emerged during the struggle for independence in African societies and to serve the interests of the ordinary people whose lot remained unchanged in the post-independence era. An important point in the myth of Prometheus is his gift to mankind of fire stolen from the Olympians. In modern interpretations of the myth the fire symbolizes the power to reflect upon experience, to acquire knowledge and use it to improve human existence.7 The relevance of this aspect of the myth to the situation of the African intellectual is clear. Just as control of the tools of Western culture has placed Western-educated Africans in privileged positions within their societies, so control of technology by developed Western societies has placed them ahead of African societies in economic affairs. The result is a chasm between rich and poor nations. An important question for the African intellectual, Arm ah suggests in Fragments and Why Are We So Blest?, is the nature of the transfer of knowledge and “ technique” that should be made from the West to Africa. In these novels Arm ah compares the relationship that existed between the Olympians and humanity in the myth of Prometheus and that existing between rich and poor nations and between the political elite and the masses in contemporary African societies. The heroes of both novels are concerned about the situation of ordinary individuals in the ex-colonial society and the lack of self-direction in the society as a whole. Second, Prometheus has a specific reference to ex-colonial Africa because he is a hero who attempted to bridge two worlds. This aspect of the myth, relating to Prometheus’ attempt to cross over from a position of privilege to the side of oppressed humanity, is especially relevant to the situation of the Western-educated African who is attempting to re-establish links with his traditional cultural background or to identify with the ordinary people. In Fragments and in Why Are We So Blest? the heroes are shown attempting to give up social privilege available to them because of their Western education. They offend the privileged class, whose principles they reject, but are isolated from the masses because of their special abilities. In the world of the privileged they are regarded as betrayers of their own kind; in the world of the oppressed they are regarded as strangers. As a result they are isolated figures between two worlds.

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Armah’s interpretation of the myth of Prometheus differs from the traditional Western one. Where in the European context the myth has served to confirm the idea of mankind’s progress toward a new and better world, in the African context, Arm ah suggests, it has quite a different application. Arm ah interprets the myth to show the futility of endeavor for the African intellectual who is attempting to discover a model of progress for his society and emphasizes the extent to which “the arrangements for fighting privilege were themselves structures of privilege.” In both Fragments and Why Are We So Blest? the Promethean hero’s attempt to intervene on behalf of the oppressed reveals the ineradicable patterns of dominance and dependence in the society. Armah’s most specific reference to the myth of Prometheus is the metaphor of the “Promethean crossing.” This metaphor is directly introduced in Why Are We So Blest?, which was written after Fragments, in a conversation between the hero, Modin, and a fellow student at an American university to which Modin has been given a scholarship. The American student, Mike, attempts to justify the existence of social gradations and inequality by comparing the classes in contemporary society to the levels of existence described in the Greco-Roman view of the cosmos: “There’s Olympus. Below' that are the plains of mediocrity. Then Tartarus” (p. 100). Modin, Mike observes, because of his special abilities, has moved beyond the limitations that cultural background or social class might impose upon the individual in Western society. He should therefore accept as earned the privileges he enjoys as an intellectual. He tells Modin: You belong here. The arrangement that brings you here has to be a good arrangement. In the Greek tradition you’d be a crossover. One of those who rise from the plains to live on Olympus. A hero. Part man, part god. (p. 101) Modin reminds Mike of the existence of “the Promethean factor,” that is, the willingness of a member of the privileged class to cross over to help the oppressed. Mike replies: I guess that’s a reverse crossover. No. I didn’t want to shut it out. But it’s unique. Besides, who has the idiotic ambition to go through the crossing twice: first a heroic, then a Promethean crossing? That’s insane, (pp. 101-102) The idea of the Promethean crossing is also present in Fragments, but is introduced less directly. In a film script which the hero, Baako, submits to Ghanavision, he attempts to convey in visual images his perception of the gap between the elite and the masses. The first sequence of images shows the progress of the hero who rises “from the plains to live on Olympus”:

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SINGLE DARK CIRCLE FILLING SCREEN, REPRESENTING THE WEAK PERIPHERY, LARGE ENVIRONMENT, HABITAT OF THE OPPRESSED. ON WHICH A SQUARE IS SUPERIMPOSED, WHITE, THE TOUGH CONCRETIZED FORTIFICATION PAN TO SIDE ELEVATION, SAME. LS:

LADDER LEADING FROM WEAK CIRCLE TO STRONG SQUARE CU: THE LADDER IS MADE UP OF THE SHOULDERS OF INHABITANTS OF THE LOWER LEVEL, THE OPPRESSED. MS: HERO ... IS SEEN MAKING THE CLIMB. AT EACH STEP HE HAS TO JUSTIFY HIS CLIMB TO HIMSELF, AND TO THE SHOULDERS UNDER HIM.

This idea of a society composed of two orders is sustained throughout the novel. Arm ah also refers to the assimilation of the climbers into Western culture and their co-optation by Western interests: 1. 2.

THE INHABITANTS OF THE CIRCLE, A CHORUS OF QUIET, DENSE DEFEAT, AND ABOVE THEM THE SQUARE PEOPLE IN WHITEWHITE LOOK LIKE PERENNIAL COLONIAL SCHOOLBOYS, HARD WITH AN EXTERIOR SHINE, EXHIBITIONISTS, SELF-CONGRATULATING. SOME OF THESE ROAM THE CIRCLE IN COMPACT CORPS, SELECTING AT INTERVALS PROSPECTIVE CLIMBERS, ISOLATING THEM WITH A REPEATED RITUAL OF CONGRATULATIONS AND SUSTAINED PRAISE, (p. 215)

The theme of the divided worlds and of an elite above the masses, which is further developed in Why Are We So Blest?, is clearly one which underlies the structure of Fragments. So too are the ideas of the crossover and the picture of an elite formed by individuals who “rise from the plains” to enjoy extraordinary privilege. Baako, with his desire to see the oppressed break out of the circle of oppression, his rejection of privilege, and his “foolhardy” attempt to defy an entrenched power structure, is clearly a hero in the Promethean mold. Why Are We So Blest? may therefore be seen as a further attempt to deal with a theme previously introduced in Fragments.

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Fragments is the story of Baako Onipa, who leaves Ghana to be educated in the United States. During his stay in America, Baako learns to see his society differently, and he returns to Ghana believing that he has certain “longrange” insights which he can communicate to society. These insights relate in particular to the need to close the social gap between the elite and the masses and to help the latter to conquer the habit of dependence which, Baako perceives, is encouraged by the elite in order to perpetuate their own power. Significantly Baako, unlike other returning travelers, brings no gifts for his family on his return to Ghana. He finds himself out of sympathy with the ruling elite and is unable to collaborate with them. His family, who hope to benefit from the privileges available to him, are disappointed at his unwillingness to promote his own interests. As a result, Baako is isolated from both his family and from the wider community. He is, as it were, caught between two worlds, neither of which he can fully identify with. The first chapter of Fragments is narrated by Naana, Baako’s grandmother. The chapter contains Naana’s recollections of Baako’s departure for America and her anticipations of his return. Naana’s imaginative projections about Baako’s departure and return are important to the overall structure of the novel. Arm ah uses them as a means of relating the elements of Western myth and African folklore that have been incorporated into the novel. In Naana’s imagination, Baako is associated with beings who live in the sky. As she sits outdoors just before nightfall thinking about Baako, Naana, who is blind, has the illusion that she is sitting in the sunshine. She recalls Baako’s departure when he was “taken up into the sky to cross the sea and to go past the untouchable horizon itself” (p. 14). She imagines him arrived at the end of his journey, roaming in unknown unforbidden places, just bom there again after a departure and a death somewhere. He had arrived from beneath the horizon and standing in a large place that was open and filled with many winds, he was lonely, (p. 24) Several images converge in the second picture. There is the image of “the departed one” entering the world of the spirits,10 the initiate in the rites of passage “entombed at a place where the sky meets the earth,”11 and Prometheus on his rock exposed to the elements.12 All three images are of individuals placed between two worlds. Through this convergence of images, Armah associates Prometheus, who rescued mankind from the persecution of the Olympians, with the departed ancestor who, in African religious belief, acts as an intermediary between the worlds of the living and of the ancestors and ensures the well-being of the former. The imaginative projection of Baako as the departed one elevates him to

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the status of an ancestor and places him, like a god, above the people he has left behind and who look to him for help. It also leads to a further perception of Baako as one who is transformed by his separation from his society and who, like Prometheus, may be regarded as a stranger among those on whose behalf he feels compelled to intervene. The reference to the initiate in the rites of passage emphasizes the notion of transition by relating the situation of Baako, who is separated from his society in order to acquire new knowledge, to that of the member of the traditional society who is moving between the “structure of positions” in the society.13 In Baako’s case, the acquisition of a new knowledge is a disturbing process which makes him uneasy in his situation of privilege. This idea is further developed in the novel when it is disclosed that during his stay in America Baako suffered from an illness which was diagnosed as “consciousness expansion” (p. 149). The reference to Prometheus is clear. As a Promethean, Baako cannot remain safe within a circumscribed area of consciousness, for “Prometheus” means “forethinker.”14 In fitting his perception of the relationship between the elite and the masses in Ghana into the framework of the myth of Prometheus, Armah depicts a society composed of two orders. In the words of the popular song which Armah uses to reiterate the idea of the division in the society: Some were bom so low flat down on their backs so cool night and bright morning they can see their god up there in his sky. Some were bom on stilts placed on strong rooftops so where do you find the wonder that they don’t take so long to look tall in this life. (p. 113) The first five lines of the song refer to the oppressed group who remain in the circle. The last five refer to the inhabitants of the square who correspond to those in Why Are We So Blest? who rise “from the plains to live on Olympus.” In Fragments, the Olympians include Africans who are senior civil servants, professional people, and “cultural commissars.” They include also the expatriates, described as “imprisoned in their little blind incestuous groups” looking on at the “damnation of the ones outside their bored circles” (p. 44). In Fragments, the airplane which takes the traveler to and from the West is a visible symbol of the knowledge and technique the Olympians possess. Metallic, luminous, and white, it is associated with the realm of the gods, the world of technology, and the realm of death.15 Flying in an airplane to the West expresses in a concrete way the idea of moving between two worlds.

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Those who have flown to the West in an airplane acquire a god-like status in the society. For example, Efua, Baako’s mother, tells Juana, the Puerto Rican psychiatrist, that she is expecting her son to appear either out of the sea or “out of the sky, in a plane” (p. 58). In other words, he will be coming out of another world. This implication becomes clearer when Efua, who is disappointed at Baako’s refusal to avail himself of the privileges the society offers him, takes him to see her unfinished house. While they are there, an airplane passes overhead. Armah’s description of Efua’s reaction to the sight of the airplane passing above suggests that flying has become a metaphor for describing the relative positions of the two groups in the society: Efua stood completely still, her face raised after the plane. “That always made me think of you,” she said after the plane was gone. “It must make you so different to have flown, looking at us all crawling down below. I used to think of your coming when I saw a plane. Now all I think is that I won’t ever fly.” (pp. 255-256) Efua, whose ambition is to “rise from the plains,” cannot understand Baako’s “idiotic ambition” to make a second crossing to join those without privilege. We may compare her attitude to that of Mike in Why Are We So Blest? who tells Modin that “nobody goes through the struggle to get here so they can fall back into communal dirt” (p. 101). The deference shown to those who fly to the West is further demonstrated in the scene of Baako’s arrival at the airport in Ghana. Baako returns to Ghana on the same flight with H. R. H. Brempong, another Ghanaian who is greeted by his relatives. Baako looks on at a parody of an apotheosis. Brempong’s sister bathes his feet in champagne—a libation to the “god” who has just descended from the sky. She restrains the throng of worshippers: “Move back, you villagers,” she said, pushing hard against those in her way. “Don’t come and kill him with your TB. He has just returned, and if you don’t know, let me tell you. The air where he has been is pure, not like ours. Give him space. Let him breathe!” (p. 92) This reference to the “god” descending from the skies is again combined with a reference to the ancestor who, in traditional African belief, returns as a child and to the initiate in the rites of passage who is regarded as dead when he is separated from the society and is symbolically reborn when he re-enters the society.16 Like Baako’s mother, Brempong’s sister regards her relative who has traveled to the West as someone coming from a higher sphere. Unlike Baako, Brempong is a true “Olympian.” He accepts the honors offered him and is

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willing to shower gifts upon the important ones. In these respects, Brempong is typical of those who “fly.” Such characters show a capacity to forget “the ugliness below” (p. 46) as soon as they are physically removed from it and the ready opportunism of those who enjoy power for its own sake. Through Baako s reflections on the scene which he witnesses at the airport, Arm ah further reinforces the distinction between the sky-dwellers (the potent ones) and the impotent ones who look to them for gifts. He also shows the extent to which the masses are responsible for perpetuating their own servile condition, as he describes Baako’s reflections at the airport: He had seen this first thing; an invitation into a pretended world, happily given, happily taken, so completely accepted that there had hardly been any of the pretenders to whom it could have seemed unreal. What power would Brempong find to sustain such a dizzy game? Or perhaps he had found as much of this power as was necessary. After all, the crowd around him had been just as willing to raise him skyward as he had been willing to let himself be lifted . . . like all the eager ones around him he had found in the game itself an easy potency he had not had to struggle for, to create, (p. 95) The Ghanaian masses, Arm ah suggests here, need to be rescued not only from the abuses of those with power but also from the destructive tendencies within themselves. Throughout the novel he contrasts the people’s idea of their needs, material goods brought back by travelers returning from the technologically developed societies, with their real need, which is to develop their own potential for progress. This contrast between what the people desire and what they need is brought out, for example, in the description of Juana’s drive through the outskirts of Accra. Armah’s description of the incidents Juana witnesses not only illustrates the plight of the society but also reinforces the classical associations of the novel. The people express themselves mainly through violent action directed at the weakest among them. Juana witnesses a debased form of the hunt on the outskirts of Accra when a ragged band of men kill a dog. She is caught up in a modern chariot race on the highway and she looks on at Dionysian orgies on the beach—“a mass of human flesh and limbs rolling in sand and sending cries up toward the sky” (p. 52). In Fragments there is, as we have seen, a clear analogy made between the situation described in the myth of Prometheus in which the Olympians dominated an “impotent” and “blind” humanity and a contemporary situation in which privileged individuals dominate an unenlightened community. These privileged individuals are further associated with Western societies which have developed a knowledge and a control of technology which make them rich and powerful and enable them to dominate poor and technologically underdevel-

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oped societies. Armah’s allusions to the myth of Prometheus give the seemingly commonplace events of modern Ghanaian family life strong impact and give point to the resolution of events in the novel, for reference to the myth explains Baako’s inability to act effectively. Although Baako decries the social fragmentation which has resulted from his society’s interaction with the West, the power which he has to adjust the balance comes, like that of Prometheus, from the knowledge and technique he shares with “Olympians.” Baako’s understanding of the irony of his situation weakens his capacity for confident action. In Why Are We So Blest?, the situation of the Promethean hero is touched with even deeper irony. Like Baako, Modin is pulled in different directions by his intellectual involvement with Western civilization and his emotional involvement with his own people. He experiences extreme anguish which he attempts to channel to creative purpose when he gives up his scholarship at an American university and returns to Africa to enlist in a people’s revolutionary movement. Moving further out into the combative sphere than Baako, Modin is “searching ... to find a world in whose creation he should share.”17 In Congheria (the name suggests both the Congo and Algeria) he meets Solo, who observes and comments on Modin’s experiences in the light of his own past.* At the beginning of the novel, we see Solo disenchanted with Western society but cynical about the revolutionary commitment which aims to change the balance of power between dominant and oppressed groups. Solo’s disillusionment with the West is a consequence of his experiences as a student in Portugal, where the break-up of his love affair with the Portuguese girl Sylvia had heightened his awareness of his limited acceptance as a Black colonial in a White society. In the context of the novel, Portugal is representative of the old imperialism, as America is of the new. Solo’s experiences in Portugal and Modin’s in the United States thus complement each other and suggest the continuity between old and new forms of colonialism, which is one of Armah’s fundamental themes. Solo’s presence in Congheria, the country in Africa to which Modin goes, is the result of his withdrawal from revolutionary activity. Having accepted his own powerlessness to change anything, he is attempting to lose himself in artistic activity. Solo can both understand Modin’s need to involve himself in revolutionary activity and anticipate the course of his disillusionment. He perceives that Modin harbors illusions about the nature of the revolutionary struggle in which he is seeking to participate and is uneasy about Modin’s attachment to the American girl, Aimee.

* Editor's Note: Modin and Solo meet in the former French North African colony of Afrasia, where half of the novel is set, not in the Portuguese colony of Congheria which is Solo’s and Jorge Manuel’s native land.

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Solo first observes Modin when, accompanied by Aimee, Modin enters the Bureau of the People’s Union of Congheria to volunteer for service in the revolutionary movement. Modin’s journey to Congheria and his relinquishment of the opportunities for personal advancement offered to him in the United States are symbolic when considered with reference to the myth of Prometheus. Modin leaves a situation of privilege to associate himself with those who in his view are oppressed. He leaves a rich industrialized nation to involve himself in a liberation struggle in a poor underdeveloped one. The parallel with the Promethean or “reverse crossover” is clear. In Why Are We So Blest?, as in Fragments, Armah depicts two opposed worlds. The separation of the elite and the masses obtains even within the revolutionary movement, which had developed its own hierarchial structure. Seen in a wider context, the opposed worlds of the “Olympians” and the “plain dwellers” correspond to those of colonizers and colonized, European and African societies, and rich and poor nations. The events of the novel show that the Promethean hero who attempts to intervene between the two worlds is doomed to futility and despair. Where Baako’s situation in Fragments may be associated primarily with that of Prometheus on the rock and his descent to Tartarus,18 Modin’s situation in Why Are We So Blest? recalls Prometheus’ later punishment by the eagle daily devouring his liver. This association arises especially from Armah’s description of Modin’s relationship with Aimee. Modin’s spiritual and physical resources are drained by his continued intercourse with her. The dominant image of such a relationship, Solo reflects, is that of “carrion—fastened onto by a beast of prey” (p. 269). The image of Aimee as a predator remorselessly consuming experience at the cost of Modin’s suffering is sustained throughout the novel. It becomes very evident in Armah’s description of the final scene in which Modin is brutalized by the Frenchmen and Aimee drinks hifc blood. It is clear that although Modin becomes increasingly aware of Aimee’s predatory nature, he is incapable of breaking up the relationship. Like the eagle in the original myth, Aimee is a source of pain and her effect is to drain Modin’s creative energies. In Why Are We So Blest?, Aimee clearly embodies the decadent aspects of Western civilization. Modin’s situation thus reflects the predicament of the African intellectual who is involved with Western civilization but is, at the same time, attempting to develop a commitment to his own people. Aimee is presented both as an exploiter and as someone needing to be rescued. As the entries in her diary show, she is seeking a source from which to enliven an existence which is daily becoming more futile and boring. As in the original myth, Armah uses fire to symbolize the creative energy which can give meaning to existence. “There is no fire anywhere here” (p. 143), Aimde complains about her life as a student at Radcliffe before she meets Modin. She tells

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herself when she goes to Africa on a summer research project, “If there is any fire left anywhere that should be the place” (p. 143). After a series of escapades there she observes, “the fire doesn’t exist anywhere—I’ll always be bored” (p. 145). Aimee sees Modin as the holder of the fire that can revitalize her existence. Armah uses the term “fire” here to convey a double meaning. Fire is, of course, an agent for purifying and transforming things, but it is also, Monica Wilson has observed, a symbol for sex in Africa.19 As Armah shows throughout the novel, the stimulation which Aimee seeks is largely sexual. Her involvement in revolutionary activity satisfies a craving for excitement. Using Aimee as a representative of Western culture, Armah suggests that there is no longer any relationship between the Western idea of progress and the sense of moral achievement which is emphasized in the interpretations of the myth of Prometheus. Aimee’s view that Africa or the African exists as a source of regeneration for her is, Armah shows, self-centered. His descriptions of various sexual encounters between Modin and Aimee reveal the forced and unnatural aspects of their relationship. Modin’s belief that he can exert a humanizing influence on Aimee is clearly self-destructive,20 and his relationship with her weakens his revolutionary commitment. Like Baako in Fragments, Modin achieves nothing by his act of rebellion. His awareness of the equivocal nature of the role of the revolutionary intellectual in Africa renders him ineffectual. In Modin’s case, as in Baako’s, the inability to develop a clear purpose or to influence events is due to his recognition of the strange inconsistency in the Promethean role when it is viewed in relation to the situation of the ex-colonial. In this situation, one cannot ignore the point that although Prometheus’ intervention started mankind on the path to progress, it introduced progress on a model developed by the Olympians, since it was their fire which he stole and gave to mankind. By comparing the relationship which existed between Olympians and humans before Prometheus’ intervention with that which exists between dominant and oppressed groups in contemporary society, Armah highlights the problems of ex-colonial societies which seek to become self-directing. In Fragments and Why Are We So Blest?, he shows no hope for adjusting the balance of power between the two worlds and between the two levels of society which he has depicted. Armah’s interest in exposing the inadequacies of the Western myth of progress accounts for the pessimistic outlook of his heroes and their general ineffectiveness. The Promethean hero in the African context, Armah suggests, is inevitably the vector of a “foreign” culture. Although he makes the “descent from Olympus,” he cannot become part of the lives of the people whom he attempts to serve. Having voluntarily left the “realm of the gods,” the hero becomes trapped within the gulf which lies between two worlds.21

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Notes ‘Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, ed. and trails. George Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), p. 89. 2

The quoted phrase is from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Preface to his Prometheus Unbound, ed. Lawrence Zillman (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1959), p. 121. See also: Denis Donoghue, Thieves of Fire (London: Faber, 1973), pp. 15-25, and Karoly Kerenyi, Prometheus: Archetypal Image of Human Existence, trans. R. Manheim (New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 88-89. Note also such titles as David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), and Gerald Feinberg, The Prometheus Project: Mankind's Search for Long-Range Goals (New York: Doubleday, 1969). 3

See, e.g., E. A. Havelock, Prometheus (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1968). 4

See: Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 117. 5

E. A. Havelock, Prometheus, p. vi.

6

See, e.g., Mokwugo Okoye, The Board of Prometheus (Ilfracombe, Devon: Arthur H. Stockwell, 1965), p. 56. Wole Soyinka, writing of his imprisonment during the regime of General Gowon in Nigeria, observed: “My liver is mended. I await the vultures for there are no eagles here!” The Man Died (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 187. Note also the title and content of Vincent Ike’s The Naked Gods. 7

See, e.g., Denis Donoghue, Thieves of Fire, pp. 25-26.

8

Ayi Kwei Armah, Why Are We So Blest? (New York: Doubleday, 1973), p. 114. Further page references are incorporated in the text. 9

Ayi Kwei Armah, Fragments (New York: Collier Books, 1969), pp. 213214. Further page references are incorporated in the text. 10

Naana refers to Baako as the “departed” or “departing” one several times. See: Ayi Kwei Armah, Fragments, pp. 14, 15, 21, 24. “Benjamin C. Ray, African Religions: Symbol, Ritual and Community (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1976), pp. 92-93. ,2

As in the opening episode of Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound.

13

Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 93. 14

On the meaning of the name “Prometheus,” see: Gilbert Murray, Introduction to Prometheus Bound: The Complete Plays of Aeschylus (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1952), p. 9. See also: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, rev. edn. (New York: Penguin, 1960), pp. 1, 148-149. Graves makes a connection between Prometheus as fire-bearer and the Akan goddess Ngame.

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l5

In Fragments, whiteness is associated with an alien and ghostly world. The connection made between these worlds parallels an earlier one made between the god, the been-to, and the departed ancestor. 16

See, e.g,, Geoffrey Parrinder, Religion in Africa (New York: Praeger, 1969), pp. 84-87. ,7

Ayi Kwei Armah, Why Are We So Blest?, p. 85. Modin’s perspectives are racial where Baako’s are rational. * *

18

Baako’s ending up in a lunatic asylum may be considered an equivalent in contemporary terms. At the end of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Hermes announces that Prometheus will be cast down into Tartarus and later be returned to the rock for punishment by the eagle. 19

Monica Wilson, Religion and the Transformation of Society: A Study of Social Change in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 57. 20

Armah seems to be responding here to the view expressed by writers who felt that Africa might exert a humanizing influence on the West. See, e.g., Leopold Sedar Senghor, “Prayer to Masks,” in Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier (editors), Modern Poetry from Africa (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), pp. 49-50. 21

See: Joyce Johnson, “The Transitional Gulf: A Discussion of Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy,” World Literature Written in English, 18, 2 (1979), 287-299.

Loss and Frustration: An Analysis of A. K. Armah’s Fragments Kirsten Holst Petersen

On a first reading Fragments may appear confusing because of the broken time sequence, but looked at more closely this feature gives the clue to the significance of the main metaphor of the book and thus to its meaning. The time pattern falls into two distinctive groups: a circular and a linear one. The first group comprises the first and last chapters of the book, the end meeting the beginning and forming a circle; the second group consists of the remaining ten chapters, arranged in a broken sequence. Chapters Two and Three, which introduce us to the two main characters, occur at approximately the same time, but in two different places; Chapter Six generates a memory which is contained in Chapter Seven; and Chapter Nine prompts two flashbacks which take up Chapters Ten and Eleven. The time sequence could be summarized in the following simple diagram: ch. 2 ch. 3

4 - 5 - 6 - 8 - 9 i i 7 10-11

The action of the main section of the book takes just over one year. As friends and neighbors are escorting Baako to the mental hospital, one of them says, “a been-to, returned only a year ago.”1 It seems fitting that just as the year has come full circle Baako has reached the logical end of his development. This mechanical arrangement of chapters into two time sequences coincides with the two major, and opposing, world views in the book, which could be described as the traditional African and the modem Western outlooks. The form of the book can therefore be said to not only reflect, but be an integral part of its message or meaning. I shall deal with these two movements separately, starting with the circular aspect and then continuing to discuss areas of overlap between the two and what possible conclusions can be drawn.

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The circular movement is represented solely by Baako’s grandmother, the old blind woman Naana. She is firmly rooted in traditional African thinking which is essentially a religious mode of perception, rejecting rational, scientific explanation of phenomena in favor of a transcendental, mythical system which defies logic and operates through ritual. The circular movement of this part of the book is not just in space (the shape of the book) but in time as well, which is of much greater significance. A circular concept of time is possible when death is not considered final, and thereby ending a sequence of time, but is looked at rather like a change in the mode of being in which the essence of the deceased continues in some form or another. Naana’s main concern in life is to keep her circles unbroken; her most important circles are those of life and death and initiation, and her means of keeping them unbroken are sacrifice and prayer. The life and death cycle is discussed in terms of Naana’s own imminent death and the birth and outdooring of Araba’s son. When Naana dies she will become an ancestral spirit. These spirits are as real to the clan or family as its living members. They are supposed to be imbued with more wisdom and power than mortals, and sacrifices are made to them to ensure their guidance and protection. Parrinder says about the ancestors and their relationship to the living: The ancestors . . . have life and power in themselves, they are dead persons who have survived as real and immortal beings. The profound conviction of the vitality and continuity of the dead as a “great cloud of witnesses” cannot be explained as ... a simple experience of the survivors.2 Death is thus an elevation into a higher state of being, but one which has close connections to this life and which in many ways resembles it. Naana shows her expectancy of the familiarity of the spirit world when she says: My spirit is straining for another beginning in a place where there will be new eyes and where the farewells that will remain unsaid here will turn to a glad welcome and my ghost will find the beginning that will be known here as my end. (p. 280) This certainty of the nature of her new mode of life excludes all fear and explains the absence of fear of death in many African communities. The remark “And what is an old woman but the pregnancy that will make another ghost?” (p. 10) shows her confidence in the cyclical movement of her existence, and she is already anticipating her role as a guarding spirit on a higher level in the African chain of being: “When I go I will protect him if I can, and if my strength is not enough I will seek out stronger spirits and speak to their

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souls of his need of them” (p. 283). Just as Naana must die in order to be reborn a spirit, so babies must die in the spirit world in order to be born as human beings. This explains the meaning of the outdooring ceremony: You know the child is only a traveller between the world of spirit and this world of heavy flesh. His birth can be a good beginning, and he may find his body and this world around it a home where he wants to stay. But for this he must be protected. Or he will run screaming back, fleeing the horrors prepared for him up here. (p. 139) The first eight days of the baby’s life are considered an interim period in which spirits and human forces are fighting to keep the baby among their number. “There is often fear of supernatural trouble in the early days of a baby’s life when it is still a visitor from the spirit world.”3 Another Ghanaian writer, Kofi Awoonor, gives a dramatic description of the ancestors battling for the new-born baby: Seventh night at deep night when man’s mouth has closed the law when they say the terrible god Sakpana will walk, sometimes covered with sores followed by barking dogs, sometimes the rich owner of land in velvet and a king’s sandals shining on his feet dropping benevolence where he goes. The seventh night, deep deep night of the black black land of gods and deities they will come out ... If they insist then I shall die the death of blood I shall die the death of blood.4 Another important ceremony in Naana’s life is the one connected with initiation. Initiation in this context is closely connected with the journey metaphor and Jung’s ideas of the archetype of the new birth. Initiation is described in terms of a departure, a death often in the shape of a visit to the land of the gods (Tutuola’s “Dead’s town” or Bunyan’s “Celestial City”) and a return with a “divine boon,” a new insight which the quest hero can use to solve his own or his community’s problems. The journey always includes a symbolic death of the old personality of the hero so that his new self can be born. On a psychological level it becomes the Jungian individuation process; on a mythical level it is the initiation rituals which occur at the onset of adolescence in most traditional African societies; and in philosophical terms Mircea Eliade has called it “an ontological mutation of the existential condition.”5 Naana sees Baako’s journey to the White man’s land in terms of a quest journey and an initiation. Using the analogy of the life/death cycle she says, “All that goes returns. He will return” (p. 1). The analogy is very apt;

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initiatory death is often symbolized by the initiate being swallowed by a monster and remaining in its belly until he is reborn like Jonah in the whale’s belly. On seeing Baako walking into the airplane Naana says, “We saw the line of people ... go like gentle ghosts into the airplane. When it swallowed Baako in his turn, I could look no more” (p. 16). She visualizes him in the land of the dead (in Africa ghosts are White), “roaming to unknown forbidden places, just born there again after a departure and a death somewhere” (p. 15). Just as she knows that he will return she also knows that he will be different, reborn into a new state of awareness. Straining across an immense cultural gap, Baako’s vision of his studies abroad coincide with Naana’s, even though he does not share her religious beliefs. He wants to use the knowledge he has gained abroad to widen the consciousness of his fellow Ghanaians, and it is when this hope is thwarted that his disillusionment sets in, resulting in another and more final death, symbolized by his madness. Naana keeps her circles unbroken by means of “the words and actions they have left us to guide us on the circular way” (p. 5). The words arrange themselves into prayers, and here Naana’s insistence on keeping strictly to the formula is interesting. In his book Muntu, Jahnheiz Jahn maintains that words are imbued with a power of their own, irrespective of who utters them. The prayer which Baako’s drunken uncle says at his departure are “perfect words, even coming from a man himself so blemished” (p. 9). Words can create a reality simply by being spoken, a concept which is also present in the Old Testament in the phrase “In the beginning was the word.” From this belief springs the use of magical formulae, which are strings of words that have a certain desired effect when spoken, and this is essentially how Naana views her prayers. She remembers how perfect the words spoken at Baako’s departure were, and this reassures her that he will return. The action that guides Naana are sacrifices, in this case libation: “The schnapps she pours on the ground at Baako’s departure is a sacrifice of propitiation, which tries to remove sin, obvert danger or obtain a blessing.”6 Again, the ritual itself is important as a reality, not a symbol, and when Foli does not pour enough drink she rectifies this by pouring an extra drink herself. Naana represents true spirituality, the seeing blind eye as opposed to the blind seeing eyes that surround her. The unity which is essential to her vision is, however, slowly being destroyed, a fact that she laments. “The larger meaning which lent sense to every small thing and every momentary happening years and years ago has shattered into a thousand useless pieces” (p. 280). Arm ah is concerned with retrieving lost African values which could bring back to modern Ghana some of the spirituality it lacks. This is a concern he shares with many African writers, including the Sierra Leonean poet Lenrie Peters:

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HOMECOMING Our sapless roots have fed The windswept seedlings of another age Cultivated weeds have grown where we led The virgins to the water’s edge. There at the edge of town Just by the burial ground Stands the house without shadows Lived in by new skeletons. That is all that is left To greet us on the home coming . . ? The circular aspect of the book has been explored through time and space (arrangement of chapters), but Armah adds yet another media, that of visual impact. This is achieved through the somewhat contrived description of Baako’s television scripts as he is burning them. A TV script is itself of mixed media in so far as it is ostensibly a piece of descriptive writing, which is, however, meant to be translated into visual images. Baako’s script gives a concrete image of the twofold pattern into which the book falls, and so helps to fix this in the reader’s mind. The circular movement in the TV script represents “recipients of violence, vague fluid forms filling screen, circular yielding, soft, all black” (p. 20). The setting is a “coastal village, quiet, circular and dark” (p. 20). This ties together many strands of Armah’s vision of Africa. It is exploited, oppressed, and peaceful, unable or unwilling to fight back. In his next book, Two Thousand Seasons, Armah deals extensively with this theme, postulating a Garden of Eden existence in Black Africa before the coming of the White man.8 To return to the TV script, superimposed on the circular pattern are “long, severely linear, sharp-edged pillars, shafts, all white like rows of soldiers at attention” (p. 207). These images represent “the agents of violence,” and they translate easily into their emotional equivalents, representing an aggressive, insensitive hard and cold culture; in other words, Europe. This severely linear pattern is elaborated upon in the second movement of the book, that which deals with the modern Western outlook. Even though the aggressors in Baako’s script are White, the main target of his, and Armah’s, criticism is the Black bourgeoisie, a fact which rubs salt into an already very painful wound. In general, the criticism is directed at the various aspects of corruption and nepotism which are so much a part of life in West Africa. Baako has difficulties in getting a job, due to his reluctance to “dash” the “junior assistant

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to the secretary of the Civil Service Commission” (p. 110), even though he is given a clear indication of what the clerk wants when he says, “come and see me . . . you want me to help you.” “If you help me, I’ll help you” is the current euphemism one uses when offering a bribe, but Baako ignores even this clear hint. The incident where the hospital refuses to admit Araba because she is not the wife of a V.I.P., even though her condition is critical, is significant because it reveals the vehemence of Armah’s revulsion. The uncompromising nature of Armah’s vision has earned him critics and enemies among the established literary elite in West Africa, including Chinua Achebe who writes that “Armah is clearly an alienated writer” and that “there is enormous distance between Armah and Ghana.”9 Against the background of the general decay, Armah focuses on one aspect which he treats in depth, that of the role played by the “been-to.” This creates an alternative vision of Baako’s homecoming and highlights the difference between the two views. A “been-to” is a person who has been to Britain or America, usually to study, and who is expected to return laden with all the wonders of Western technology: radios, stereo equipment, refrigerators, deep-freezers, and cars. Brempong is the perfect “been-to.” “Every time I go out I arrange to buy all I need suits and so on. It’s quite simple. I got two good cars on this trip” (p. 65). He states categorically that “it is no use going back with nothing” (p. 76), and his family gives him an ecstatic welcome in anticipation of the presents he is going to hand out. Armah chooses to discuss this phenomenon in terms of the Cargo Cult. The Cargo Cult was a socio-religious movement in New Guinea between 1870 and 1950. It was the result of colonial interference with a traditional system which resembled West Africa in economic and social structure as well as religion: The function of religion was to explain, through myths, how the deities and, in one recorded case, totems (but never the spirits of the dead) originally brought the cosmic order into being, and to give man the assurance that, through ritual, he was master of it.10 The socio-political organization was almost as changeless as the cosmic order, and the body of knowledge which consisted of the magical formula necessary to influence the gods was therefore also static. Necessity had given the culture a materialistic direction, and most rituals were directed at obtaining material gains such as crops, pigs, wives, etc. The idea of good was based on materialism; “what furthers wealth is good.” When the White man appeared on the scene the traditional way of life was disturbed, but the need for material necessities obviously remained the same. However, the variety of material goods that could be obtained was widened considerably by the presence of the

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colonial powers, and with supreme logic the people of New Guinea adapted their traditional belief to the new situation and arrived at a belief whereby European goods [cargo] ships, aircraft, trade articles, and military equipment were not man-made but had to be obtained from a non-human or divine source,”11 through familiar means such as sacrifice and prayer. Although supremely logical and also reasonable in its attempt at sharing wealth on a more equal basis, the movement became bizarre and ultimately destructive. It included the burning of crops and the worship of airplanes, and resulted in the killing of missionaries (for withholding cargo) and war. What connection does this system have with the role of the “been-to” in modern West Africa? Armah sees the “been-to” as the modern equivalent of the spirits who were supposed to produce the cargo. The living equivalent only “fleshes out the pattern”: The main export to the other world is people. The true dead going back to the ancestors, the ritual dead ... At any rate it is clearly understood that the been-to has chosen, been awarded, a certain kind of death. A beneficial death, since cargo follows his return, (p. 223) The emphasis on the importance of the been-to in terms of what cargo he brings is brought out in the reception which both Baako and Brempong receive. When Baako’s uncle tells his mother on the phone that he has returned he uses the phrase “I have a huge present waiting for you here” (p. 98), and one of the first things Baako’s mother says to him is, “When is yours coming, Baako?” (p. 101). Brempong’s sister even calls him “our white man” (p. 81), thus unconsciously echoing the allusion to spirits or ghosts. Armah is not the only writer to take up this theme; it occurs in West African literature with a regularity which one suspects reflects the writers’ own disillusionment at the welcome they had when they returned from overseas. The closest parallel to Baako is Obi in Chinua Achebe’s second novel, No Longer At Ease. The following quotation is part of the welcome address to Obi on his return to his village: We are happy that today we have such an invaluable possession in the person of our illustrious son and guest of honour ... He traced the history of the Umuofia Scholarship scheme . . . and called it an investment which must yield heavy dividends.12 Western education replaces magic as the force which can produce the cargo, but it is noticeable that the been-to only conveys the goods, he does not produce them. He is “not a maker, but an intermediary”:

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... It is presumably a great enough thing for a man to rise to be an intermediary between other men and the gods. To think of being a maker oneself could be sheer unforgivable sin. (p. 224) This idea was originally put forward by Frantz Fanon in his book The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon sees the national bourgeoisie of the newly freed nation as a major impediment, not only to socialism but to eponomic growth as such. He argues that it is a decadent class which can only imitate its European counterpart. “It follows the Western bourgeoisie along its path of negation and decadence without ever having emulated it in its first stages of exploration and invention.’’13 It has no interest in national development, neither does it possess any technical knowledge despite its university education. “The national bourgeoisie of the underdeveloped countries is not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor in building, nor labour; it is completely canalized into activities of the intermediary type.”14 Armah has even picked up Fanon’s keyword and made it his own. Fanon says, “The national middle class discovers its historic mission: that of intermediary.”15 This hatred of the Black bourgeoisie is one of the motivating forces behind Fragments. It explains the characters of Ashante Smith and Akosua Russell, and the savage parody of pseudo-traditional poetry. The fact that Ashante Smith is said to be a caricature of Kofi Awoonor and Akosua Russell of Efua Sutherland only emphasizes the loneliness of Armah’s position and his alienation from the social class which produces most of West Africa’s writers. Needless to say, they do not share his vision themselves. Kofi Awoonor says, “I particularly think that Armah is much more concerned with the degree of despair, which at times is very relentless, much more relentless than is warranted by the conditions.”16 A society that regards a class of people as a conveyer belt for cargo is an alienated and dehumanized society, and this alienation on an economic level is bound to be reproduced on a personal level in the lives and relationships of the people who live in it. The result is that “Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions.”17 As a logical correlative to the cargo cult, the characters in Fragments deal mainly with each other in this fashion. The most obvious case is Baako’s sister, who refuses her husband sex to make him agree to outdoor the baby too early because “[a]n outdooring ceremony held more than a few days after payday is useless” (p. 125). Armah creates an image to symbolize this kind of relationship: “the killing embrace of enemy insects crushing each others’ exoskeletons and squeezing out the pulp of life within in the unending destructiveness of life” (p. 128). The image is in fact an apt portrayal of all aspects of life as it is

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conceived within the linear movement of Fragments, thus affording maximum contrast to the cyclical movement. The two movements not only contrast, they also overlap, and when this happens the linear pattern always gains at the expense of the circular. This is symbolized visually in Baako’s TV script by the fact that the “white square is superimposed” upon the “single dark screen” (p. 210, my italics). In terms of the plot this is seen as a perversion of once meaningful rituals. At Brempong’s arrival, instead of the traditional gesture of washing his feet, his sister pours champagne over his shoes, and the gesture wins approval precisely because it is a waste. It proves that there is “more beyond” (p. 83). The most important example of this, however, is the outdooring of the baby. The original meaning of the ceremony is lost, the two most important factors, the timing and the libation, being ignored; and instead the baby becomes a money-making object in the brashest fashion imaginable. The symbolism is very carefully sustained throughout the description of the ceremony: the baby is put “on the porch, a square of the morning sunlight falling on one side of a wide brass pan next to him. The fan stood behind the cradle” (p. 258). The fan is one of Araba’s most valued possessions and ironically it is the very thing that kills the baby. With its circular form and destructive function it becomes a symbol of the perversion of the ceremony itself, a white circle. Its destruction of the baby also marks the breaking point for the hero. When he hears the baby crying, Baako “took the thing by its stem and yanked it in anger once. Sparks flew out in a small shower where the cord snapped at the base of the fan, and the clown let the heavy thing drop into the brass pan, still turning, scattering the gathered notes” (p. 266). Baako and the baby are in fact the same. In the hospital Baako muses that “there had been the other, the child that was to have grown to become him, but they had killed him” (p. 258). They are the family’s investment in the future. The child is bom soon after Baako’s arrival, and it only survives because he rushes its mother to the hospital, thus saving both mother and child. Araba says, “Now see, it is such a good thing, your coming. Already you have brought me this, the baby. Other blessings will follow, that I know” (pp. 121122). The other blessings, the cargo, do not follow, and when at the outdooring ceremony they try to extract it they go too far and cause Baako’s total rejection of them, symbolized by the death of the baby and Baako’s madness, which is a symbolic death. In a discussion about the feelings of Africans who try to assimilate into White culture and fail, Armah says: The resulting sense of despair ... is excruciatingly keen. The vision is of the annihilation of the self, the feeling is that the subject has striven so valiantly only to become nothing. The deathwish is a natural consequence, probably resolving itself in most cases into a suicidal depression.18

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In Fragments, Armah has vented his anger on the native bourgeoisie rather than the White foreigners, but the feeling of alienation and bitterness created in Baako by that class is' obviously no less vehement. Fragments is to a very large extent autobiographical, and it did not surprise anyone that Armah himself chose to leave Ghana as a gesture of final rejection.

Notes 1

Ayi Kwei Armah, Fragments (London, 1969), p. 248. All further references are to this edition and are included in the text. Geoffrey Parrinder, Religion in Africa (London, 1969), p. 171. 3

Ibid., p. 25.

4

Kofi Awoonor, This Earth, My Brother (London, 1972), p. 13.

5

Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History (New York, 1959), p. 83.

Geoffrey Parrinder, Religion in Africa, p. 73. 7

Lenrie Peters, Satellites (London, 1969), p. 39.

8

Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons (Nairobi, 1973), p. 53.

*Karen L. Morell (editor), In Person: Achebe, Awoonor and Soyinka (Seattle, 1975), p. 14. i0

Peter Lawrence, Road Belong Cargo (Manchester, 1971), p. 13.

u

lbid.y p. 1.

12

Chinua Achebe, No Longer At Ease (London, 1972), p. 52.

13

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London, 1970), p. 123.

x

* *Ibid., p. 120.

is

lbid.y p. 122.

16

Karen L. Morell, In Person . . ., p. 147.

17

Eric Fromm, The Sane Society (London, 1973), p. 63.

18

Ayi Kwei Armah, “African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?,” Presence Africaine, 64 (1967), 17.

Why Are We So Blest?

and the Limits of Metaphor James Booth

In a recent lecture, Chinua Achebe made a distinction between “beneficent fiction” and “malignant fiction.”1 The former he characterized as a means of experimenting with and exploring reality in ways which are seldom possible in life itself. It never loses sight of the fact that it is fiction and never presumes to impose a preconceived interpretation on experience. Malignant fiction, on the other hand, mistakes itself for reality. It takes the attractive neatness and absoluteness of an imaginative pattern and applies it wholesale to experience, thus distorting reality. Malignant fiction may be extremely powerful but it is fundamentally destructive and negative. Racism, according to Achebe, is such a simplificatory malignant fiction. What Achebe is pointing to in this distinction is the way metaphor may encroach on reality in improper or inauthentic ways. Metaphor is the life-blood of literature. But its relationship to life, the way it embodies experience, is subject to all kinds of dangers. In D. H. Lawrence’s famous words: Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside of its own place, time, circumstance. If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.2 In my view Ayi Kwei Armah’s Why Are We So Blest? is a fascinating illustration of such an attempt to nail the novel down. It is a malignant fiction—a particularly complex one, since on one level it comprises an analysis of the malignant fiction of racism, while at the same time it erects on a deeper level just such a fiction itself. Its symbolic pattern is brilliant and compelling. The basic structure of relationships between the central characters embodies with great skill the tensions between White and Black, tensions generated by a neocolonialism not only on the socio-economic but also on the cultural level. But

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however plausible Armah’s explorations of these particular characters’ relationships may be, and however much light it may throw upon the wider Black/ White situation, it cannot be said to give the whole picture. And the problem is that Armah seems to insist that it does. Why Are We So Blest? is not only an analysis of the psychological effects of racism, it is itself a racist book. This needs to be said since the fact that it is also the most powerful work of a novelist of genius may make the humane critic reluctant to admit the fact—even to him- or herself. But racism is a subtle and infinitely varied phenomenon, the understanding of which is not helped by reticences and taboos which oversimplify it in the minds of those who wish to feel themselves above such things. Any student of African literature will be familiar with the supple contortions of the southern African White liberal imagination in its unsuccessful struggle to throw off the racism embodied in the prevailing social structure. Cry, the Beloved Country, Too Late the Phalarope, and The Grass is Singing seem almost deliberate illustrations of Armah’s conclusion that Whites, however “unprejudiced,” cannot help but cast Blacks in roles dictated by the White “culture’s basic myths”3 which, whatever subtle disguise they take, are racist and ultimately destructive. However well-meant the attack on the cruder forms of oppression may be in these novels, their Black characters, the Kumalos, Stephanie, and Moses, are the symbolic figments of a racial myth. They possess no autonomy, existing only in their relations with Whites as objects of pity or fear. The Black is a projection (or to use Armah’s word, a “shadow”) in the White imagination and conducts himor herself in accordance with the complex demands of a White myth, in this case a liberal White myth. The common humanity which Blacks share with the White author is subsumed in archetype or lost in fantasy, fantasy the more powerful for its explicit opposition to racism. At this point it is necessary to clarify a fundamental confusion in the way the term “racism”4 is used. The word has in fact two related but different meanings which are frequently confounded together. On the personal, subjective level “racism” presents itself to the individual as a matter of personal choice. A person is either racist or not depending on the level of his or her moral development or sense of common humanity. The true liberal5 will see little beyond this meaning. It may, however, tend to obscure the social and economic determinants of racism. As has frequently been remarked, racism follows and justifies social and economic oppression in those parts of the world where the exploiting class happens to be different in color from the exploited. On this wider level the individual seems to have no real choice whether to be racist or not. Racism is an unavoidable communal reality and all his or her relations will be affected by it. As Marx put it:

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It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.6 On the crudest level the laws of a society may compel racism by force as is the case in South Africa with its notorious pass regulations and Immorality Act. But on every other level too, even in matters apparently in the realm of individual morality or taste alone, racism, in some form or another, will be inevitable. Hence the contradictions of an Alan Paton. The disturbing power of Armah’s novel is that it confronts this individual/communal dichotomy in racism and ruthlessly insists that there is no personal or individual escape. The liberal White illusion of a personal escape from racism, attainable through “love” or ‘‘humanity,” for Armah reveals a misunderstanding of the nature of racism. Indeed, such liberalism is itself merely an inverted form of racismone which attempts to obscure the objective situation under subjective good will. This is the lesson we are meant to draw from Armah’s Aimee, whose apparent lack of personal racism in her love affair with Modin and her enthusiasm for the liberation struggle reveal themselves in the end to be a mere veneer covering the fundamental viciousness inherited from her colonial background. It is also the lesson of Modin who, deluded into thinking that a personal relation with a White can transcend the cultural norm, is drawn by this relation to humiliation and death. This pessimistic view of the inevitability and ubiquitousness of racism is reinforced by the strange power which the White liberal myth exerts even over some Blacks. There exist, for example, many novels written by Blacks which ingeniously embody the liberal myth of the transcendence of racism by individual virtue. William Conton’s The African1 is such a book, as Wole Soyinka has pointed out.8 It also presents fascinating parallels with Why Are We So Blest? in structure and theme. In both novels the protagonist is referred to with symbolic simplicity as “the African.” In both a sexual relationship between the African and a White woman is destroyed by White brutality. In both novels much of the action takes place in a recently independent African state with a symbolic name (“Songhai” in Conton, “Afrasia” in Armah), and concerns also another African state not yet liberated (South Africa in Conton, “Congheria” in Armah). In both novels the protagonist sets out at the climax for the still White-dominated state. The themes of the novels are the same: on a personal level, the relationship between a Black man and a White woman, and on a public level, the problems of political opposition to colonialism and neocolonialism. For all the similarities, however, the version of these themes which we find in The African lacks all the complexities of that in Armah’s work. Conton’s hero, “a glutton for humiliation,”9 acts out the liberal White

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stereotype with the full and enthusiastic cooperation of his Black creator. He remains a child of Rousseau throughout, innocent, noble: a ridiculously harmless projection of the White liberal myth. Any complications which might arise from his love affair with the White girl are conveniently solved by her elimination at an indecently early point in the plot, at the hands of his White rival. The “African,” having proved his own personal lack of aracism” by this affair, is thus left free to go into liberationist politics, unembarrassed by a White wife. And the author is freed from the artistic problems of portraying a developed Black-White relationship. Eventually the “African” becomes the prime minister of his newly free nation. His hands remain spotless during his rise to political power since his opponents are all, fortunately, rogues. But the prime minister is still haunted by the White man’s destruction of his youthful Black-White idyll, and finally determines to travel incognito to South Africa and seek out the murderer. He traces him (with astonishing facility) only to find that the racist’s wickedness has been its own punishment and he has become a drunken sot. On the last page the African demonstrates his humanity by forgetting his vendetta and lifting his White brother, with mixed contempt and compassion, out of the gutter, before returning to the duties of high office. As Soyinka remarks, an equally likely conclusion would be for the prime minister to be discovered by a White policeman while holding the unconscious White man in his arms. What then? But this would be too close to reality. It would disrupt the enjoyable flow of subjective good will with objective probabilities. The novel is in fact myth, a myth in which the protagonist acts out his appointed role as an innocent victim so imbued with African ingenuousness that he magnanimously forgives his White oppressor—to the satisfaction of liberal readers, Black and White alike. It might seem a little strange, however, even to a White reader, that in the logic of the book the political and social responsibilities of the premiership of a nation should so easily, and without a real qualm on the author’s part, take second place to a personal vendetta. He or she might also wonder whether such an odd notion of priorities could be made to seem at all humanly acceptable were not the protagonist Black and his antagonist White. Conton then, under cover of a universal humanism which transcends race, contents himself with a racial myth. He is not the man to break the silence which the narrator of Why Are We So Blest? reads symbolically into the notice on the wall of his hotel: 10

LE SILENCE DE CHACUN ASSURE LE REPOS DE TOUS.

11

It is no part of Conton’s purpose in this novel to disturb the repose of either Black or White. In Armah’s novel, in contrast, a quite different treatment of a similar

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basic situation forms the basis for a ruthless attack on this repose. No personal, individual escape from the racism of the community as a whole is allowed in the novel. What subjective escape there is turns out to be tragically illusory. The characters seem compelled to play their pre-ordained parts in a macabre and morbid drama dictated by their race. Armah thus avoids the easy sentimentality of Conton, and his novel is infinitely more powerful and moving as a result. The question arises, however, as to whether Armah’s version of interracial relations is ultimately more convincing than Conton’s. It may avoid the naivetes of the liberal myth, but is it not itself just as open to the charge of being blinkered and one-sided? It may be agreed that the “social being” of a man or woman governs his or her consciousness. But is this “social being” to be conceived of as an automatic product of objective forces quite beyond the individual’s control? Is it not just as much of a simplification to imagine that life is so nailed down as this, as to imagine that there is total free will? Such an objection may be interpreted as an attempt to restore a discredited liberal subjectivity. But we need I think to distinguish between liberalisms here. On the one hand there is the self-deluding liberalism of the privileged bourgeoisie, which disregards social and economic reality by pretending that values are personal possessions transcending such material circumstances. This may be labeled “vulgar liberalism” or “soft liberalism.” But there is also the very different attitude which, while fully acknowledging the primacy of the substructure of social and economic forces in determining the superstructure of cultural and individual consciousness, still has confidence in the ability of people—sometimes (let us say it) of the mere individual—to analyze and reject these forces, even if only subjectively. This may be termed “hard liberalism.” Such a personal rejection may not in itself count for much in the struggle against racism or the neocolonialist structure which generates it. But it is an objective fact. And objectivity is, after all, merely the concurrence of many individual subjectivities. What is more, such a rejection does count for a great deal with the individual, and on some essential level we are all individuals, to whatever various collectives we may belong. To the “hard” liberal, then, Armah’s vision will seem too ruthlessly reductive. And it is here that Achebe’s insistence on the provisionalness and caution essential to “beneficent fiction” seems relevant. Armah has trespassed across the border into the attractive imaginative simplifications of malignant fiction. That this is the case reveals itself, as it did with Conton, in the uneasy relationship between realistic narrative and the larger metaphorical or symbolic dimension. In The African the disjunction is easy to see. Realism is ditched when the compulsive logic of the myth becomes too strong for it. And the alert reader quite simply refuses to “believe” it. When relations between Black and White become too complex or too disturbing the author steps in with soothing simplifications. This does not happen so obviously in Armah’s novel, and the

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problem is on a deeper, less easily analyzed level. Indeed, in many ways the novel represents a triumph in its subtle interweaving of realism and symbolism. Apart from a practical awkwardness now and then (in Aimee leaving the journals with the narrator, for instance), the story is quite plausible in realistic terms, and moreover is psychologically very subtle. It will be useful to summarize here briefly before continuing. Modin, a lonely African studying in the United States and disillusioned by Western culture, falls in love with Aimee, a White American girl. She is neurotically frigid and yet at the same time sexually aggressive. Her uncle was, she discovers, a soldier who had taken part in massacres in colonial Africa. She herself conceives of sex in racist and sadistic terms, only approaching orgasm by concentrating on a fantasy in which she is the wife of a colonial officer, seducing her houseboy, Mwangi, while expecting her husband’s return from the bush at any moment. Sometimes she imagines watching her husband aiming a gun at Mwangi’s head through the window as they make love. Modin, despite his knowledge of Aimee’s origin and of her fantasies, cannot overcome his “love” for her, and they both travel to Africa to take part in the liberation struggle in “Congheria,” she exhibiting an ominously hectic intensity in her desire to be a “revolutionary.” At the end of the novel she acts out a version of her fantasy in grim reality. Before even reaching the scene of action they are set upon by a group of Frenchmen who tie the African to their car, use her (half-willing) to produce an erection in him, then rape her and cut off the end of Modin’s penis. They leave him to die while returning her to “civilization,” upon which she uses the “bourgeois money,” which she had before refused on principle to touch, to escape back to Denver. The characterization is a subtle and compelling blend of naturalism and symbol. On the level of realism Aimee is clearly portrayed as a psychopathic sado-masochist. More symbolically she derives from the femme fatale of Romanticism, but brilliantly reinterpreted in the modern American context. The loves scenes are masterly in the indefinable uneasiness and distrust which they evoke in the reader through an ostensibly frank and naturalistic portrayal of a difficult human relationship. Throughout, her symbolic dimension as the agent of White rapacity and destructiveness is firmly rooted in realistic psychology and description. Even the apparent implausibility of her entrusting Modin’s and her own journals to Solo after Modin’s murder could be interpreted as a realistic psychological subtlety, the result of her subconscious wish to boast about her destructive handiwork. Modin is treated in more detail, and at first his experiences resemble those in a novel of a much more conventional kind of social satire on race relations: his argument with his fellow student, jokingly called “the Fascist,” for example, over the Thanksgiving-day newspaper article,12 or his experience with the Oppenhardts who take offense when he fails to show the correct syco*

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phancy, the wife calling him a “naughty boy” for upsetting her husband.13 Modin’s meeting with the “Africanist,” Jefferson, could have come from a book like Clark’s America, Their America. I asked him what exactly an Africanist was. He laughed . . . “One who specialises in Africa,” he said. “Africa is now an area justifying advanced study, you know.”14 But Modin is much more than a Clarkian ingenu against whom Western hypocrisy is measured. Armah goes beyond the easy attitudinizing of other writers. It is not in this social-satiric aspect but in Modin’s own prolonged self-analysis that his full symbolic significance emerges. He begins to realize that his life is totally a creation of the Whites, and that his independent identity is an illusion. Economically, socially, culturally, he is dominated. He sees himself as like the “factors” of the colonial period, Black employees of the Whites who handled Black slaves for them. As an educated modem Black, spirited away by an arbitrary scholarship from his own culture, he is being trained to plunder his own people on behalf of his masters, as did his factor predecessors. His soul, he slowly realizes, has become the property of the Whites; he has been subsumed in their rapacious search for material wealth and spiritual domination. Even his spontaneous emotions are all White-dictated, and his wish to assimilate himself into Whiteness, like some morbid disease, begins to involve the destruction of his Black self—in reality his only self. . . ?. My friendships have been different invitations to different kinds of death, calls to spiritual disintegration far beyond the merely social disintegration Africa has suffered since how many centuries? . . . Europe has no need to destroy us singly any more. The force of our own death is within us. We have swallowed the wish for our own destruction.15 The treatment of Modin’s relations with women reverses the usual White stereotype which opposes a purely physical Black virility to the greater spirituality of Whites. Here it is the Whites who, having crushed their own spirit under a crude physicality, are turning their sexual rapacity on the souls of Blacks. The only people who survive here are white, and they have accepted themselves as mere bodies, killed the spirit in them, or put it at the service of insatiable bodies.16 Similarly Europe is seen in terms of a bright fiery sun, consuming Africa in its “hell,” reversing the Western stereotype of cool dispassionate Europe as

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against hot demonic Africa: “The whole world is covered over with the hell of Europe. . . . we . . . integrate into the center of the European sun.”17 All this adds up to a brilliant counter-myth to that of Europe. And again its symbolic force grows out of the novel’s realism. The conclusions of this inward self-exploration are corroborated by Modin’s experiences with particular Whites. His own re-interpreted myth of the relations between the races seems grounded in the reality he encounters. As a study in neocolonial psychology he is only too believable. On the realistic level of the novel, then, we find two characters compulsively acting out racially predetermined roles which deform their humanity. So far the novel is masterly. And so far it might be construed as an attack on the racial myth-making process itself and its destructiveness of human values. However it early becomes clear that this is not Armah’s intention, and it is here that one begins to feel uneasy with Armah’s deductions. It is one thing to portray the tragedy of two particular individuals dominated and spiritually destroyed by the cultural stereotypes which history has imposed on them. It is one thing also to go a stage further and imply, as Armah does, that such tragedies are inevitable, given the brutal socio-economic realities—that theirs is a typical, symbolic case. But it is quite another to imply that this symbolic relationship is the key to all personal relations between Black and White. And this is what the novel attempts to do. This is to push the metaphorical dimension too far. The organization of the narrative insistently suggests that this is not simply one typical, significant, even symbolic case-history. It is intended as a paradigm, as an alternative myth to that of the White culture. For all its insight and psychological truth it is ultimately as much racial propaganda as Conton’s novel or those of Alan Paton. One of the most formidably persuasive elements in Armah’s attempt to elevate this case-history into a universal metaphor of relations between White and Black is the novel’s narrative strategy. The entire story comes to us through Solo Nkonnam, either in his own words or through passages from Aimee’s and Modin’s journals edited by him. He is a brilliant narrative device. As a would-be revolutionary who has traveled the same road as Modin, he is ideally placed to reinforce and generalize the lessons of the African’s fate. He persistently parallels Modin’s experiences with his own. Modin finds, as Solo had found before him, that “the arrangements made for fighting privilege were themselves structures of privilege.”18 Solo’s own abortive love affair with Sylvia, a Portuguese girl, is likened to that of Modin and Aimee. “What is this love we suffer from, impelling us to embrace our own destroyers?”19 Solo exclaims. He parallels Modin’s self-analysis in his journals with his own and draws universal lessons. He, too, cannot find any identity apart from that of a “factor” for, or a “lover” of, the Whites.

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What is ordained for us I have not escaped—the fate of the evolue, the turning of the assimilated African, not into something creating its own life, but into an eater of crumbs in the house of slavery . . ,20 So not only are the two main Black characters in the novel illustrations of the paralysis of their race, but the outermost narrative voice with all its impressive authority belongs to one of these characters and controls our response to the entire story. The reader is allowed no avenue of escape. Nor can the reader easily find refuge in simply doubting Solo’s authority, as he doubts that of the narrator in Conton’s The African. Many readers might like to feel that for all the massive rhetorical certitude of his tone Solo is not wholly trustworthy. He is, like Modin, simply an illustration of a particular perversion of mind due to colonialism. But the whole posture of the novel attacks such relativism. The characters in it seem somehow permanent: realistic but also larger than life. They have symbolic names to imply their universality: “the African,” Solo, Aimee (“beloved”). The man who first meets Modin in the United States is named Blanchard (“whitener”). And more disturbingly, Armah has already anticipated his readers’ rebellion and attempted to counter it within the book. Solo himself is continually doubting his own objectivity within the novel itself, thus adding authority to his final conclusions. It is indeed only with pain and anguish that Solo is reluctantly compelled to draw his racist deduction about Aimee, and through her about all Whites. Even now, after his destruction, I catch myself struggling to limit what my mind knows, searching for ruses to justify my unwillingness to achieve the rational, ultimate rejection of her destructive race. I want to say this kind of destructiveness is in her alone, a personal evil which should not interrupt thoughts of possible harmony with her people.21 But however much he “wants to say” this, the evidence of the book leads to only one “rational” conclusion. Aimee is inevitably destructive because she is “a daughter of a race of destroyers.”22 Most subtly and persuasively of all, Solo’s personal reluctance to draw the “rational” racist conclusion is seen as only another aspect of his own enslavement to sub-White status. He has been corrupted to the point where he cannot hate Whites, however much cause they give him to do so: “What would I not give to attain the healing simplicity of hatreds unmixed with love.”23 Even the form of the novel itself which he has created shows his enslavement. It is a masterly exercise in the modernist techniques of the “European” novel with its multiple centers of consciousness and artful manipulation of disjointed narrative sequence. Solo is, as he himself tells us, caught and lured by Western

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art, which entrances him, robbing him of the strength to resist his spiritual enslavement.24 And later he expresses contempt for himself for composing the book at all, for speculating, arranging and rearranging these notes to catch all possible meaning. Is this creation? How could any exercise so useless, so clearly of no help to any destroyed being, be called creation? It is a useless rearrangement.25 European aestheticism, in which he is hopelessly ensnared, is an atrophy of vision that can see beauty in deliberately broken-off pieces of a world sickened with oppression’s ugliness. I hear the call of that art too.26 And what else is this novel itself but the creation of aesthetic harmony out of the chaos? Solo would dearly like to reject this art of the “destroyers.” In my people’s world, revolution would be the only art, revolutionaries the only creators. All else is part of Africa’s destruction.27 By Solo’s own account, then, the writing of the novel itself is a destructive act. Western artistic form is Solo’s own personal “love,” his equivalent to Modin’s Aim£e, and is as destructive of his African soul as Aimee is of Modin. Armah’s narrative strategy is thus designed to allow the reader no alternative but to accept the universality of his conclusion. It must surely be admitted, however, that these conclusions are not in the final analysis supported by adequate evidence. What the novel shows is a plausible single relationship between members of different races; but then, as it were, it tries to sell this to the reader by masterly technical manipulation as a universal law of such relationships. Common sense and one’s knowledge of the flexibility and relativity of all human experience should tell one otherwise. At one point Solo exclaims of the love of White women for Black men: What is this love of their people’s creatures but a love for the manipulable, the already manipulated, open to further shaping? What is this love but hate smilingly embraced by the hated?28 The answer cries out to be made: it is all kinds of things, true as this analysis may be in some cases. To mention only one example: do we not find plausible the relationship between the sensitive, long-suffering, White Monica and her

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boorish, social-climbing, Black husband, Faseyi, in Soyinka’s The Interpreters, a relationship about as far from Armah’s pattern as could be imagined? A reader unwilling to accept Armah’s emotive generalizations might speculate on the validity of some of his self-comparisons with Modin. Sylvia, the Portuguese girl, for example, is unable to free herself from the cultural prejudice of her people as embodied in her friends, and breaks off her relationship with Solo. Surely the psychopathic viciousness of Aimee is of a different order of “destructiveness” from this! It is significant that neither Solo nor Modin rails at the destructiveness of Black women when (the of course “vaginal” as well as Black) Naita leaves Modin abruptly to his loneliness and desperation, impatient with his compromises over (“clitoral”) White women. They are clearly operating a double standard. But perhaps even more powerful than its narrative voice in compelling the reader’s imaginative assent to Armah’s racism is the novel’s metaphoric power. The harrowing end of the book must serve as our focus here. The symbolism is shockingly explicit and resonant, and brilliantly consummates the psychological realism we have already examined. Several European men use the American girl to arouse the helpless African, who has been tied to a car. The wider racial implications about the relations between the three continents are almost diagrammatic; even the car might be thought to have its significance as representative of dominant Western technology. The woman, in accordance with her culture’s myth, is desperately eager to reach Modin and sate her lust for sexual domination on his captive and defenseless body. At the same time she is the more profoundly roused by the White men’s restraint upon her and their contempt of her for her sexual desire for the Black man. Modin’s own erection shows that, however involuntarily, he too cannot help but continue to play his part as “lover” and servant of the Whites. On the realistic level the action fulfills Aimee’s Mwangi fantasy (which explains her strange eagerness and exhilaration); and it also echoes Modin’s previous experience with the Jeffersons, when he was similarly sexually used by a White woman and assaulted by a White man. The final twist to the symbolism comes when the men finally mutilate the African. It is significant that they cut off only the tip of his penis, since this makes possible the most appallingly symbolic act of the novel, when Aimee kneels before him, drinking the blood pulsing from his penis in a parody of orgasm and asking him, “Do you love me?”29 No more horrifying concrete and appropriate embodiment than this could be imagined of Solo’s verdict on the relations between Africa and the West. Of what other use have Africa’s tremendous energies been these many centuries but to serve the lusts of the whites.30 Here, quite literally, “Africa’s” creative life blood flows to satisfy the destructive and sterile lusts of “Europe” and “America” combined.

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But surely the exquisite appropriateness of all the details at this point, though it makes the scene nightmarishly unforgettable, is in itself suspect artistically. Is there not a cynicism (or is it sentimentalism?) in the aesthetic completeness and appropriateness of it all? Real life would surely be messier and more ambiguous. Aimee’s parody of fellatio would not be possible, for instance, if the men had castrated Modin more crudely (which would surely be more likely on a realistic level). More radically, one might ask whether Armah seriously wishes to imply that all White women are sado-masochists like Aimee, as Solo’s comments and her resonant symbolic qualities seem to suggest. In my view Armah is attempting here by careful simplification and dazzling symbolism to shock his readers into accepting a crude and subjective deduction from the dubiousness and relativity of real individual experience. Armah’s work gains much of its distinctive power from such emotive symbolism. He sees life instinctively in terms of brilliant, resonant images, which usually express a moral or spiritual attitude in shocking physical terms. In this he resembles Dickens. In Two Thousand Seasons, for example, the first agents of the predatory Arabs are “ostentatious cripples” whose bodies express the twisted ugliness of their souls, and later Koranche’s wickedness expresses itself in the fatness of his body. Idawa says, “everybody knew a fat body was always the house of a rotten soul.”31 (Does Armah himself believe this?) At their most artistically successful, his symbols embody complex and subtle ideas inexpressible perhaps in any other form: Koomson farting in fear in a darkened back room at the end of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, for instance, or the axing of the mad dog at the beginning of Fragments. Such images are compulsive and unforgettable, especially when, as is the case with the final scene of Why Are We So Blest?, the concrete action is in terms of something so emotion-laden and set about with cultural myths as race, rape, and murder. But they can also mislead. Hitler may have imagined that his disgusting imagery of maggots in Mein Kampf was a means of informing his readers as to the objective nature of the Jews. In fact, the metaphorical tenor has escaped its vehicle and all it tells us about is Hitler’s own subjective emotions. Armah’s work represents a peculiarly sophisticated version of the familiar dangers of theoretical commitment to “Black consciousness” or “negritude”: dangers which, ironically, he himself has clearly analyzed, in their political manifestation, in his article “African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?”32 Like the programmatic negritudinist attacked by Soyinka in Myth, Literature and the African World,33 Armah asserts against the European “I think, therefore I am,” an “African” “I feel, therefore lam.” The protagonists of his first three novels are all desperately, wincingly sensitive beings. His original variation is to substitute for “Hurrah for those who never invented anything!,” “Alas for those who are being prevented from inventing anything!” His characters possess a crushing negativity and passivity, surpassing even that of Stephen

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Kumalo, that creation of an essentially similar impulse. The authorial or quasiauthorial voices in these works are voices of despair. There is no sense of positive or active identity, except that gained through suffering and attempting to understand and live with inevitable suffering. When Solo laments Modin’s love for Aim6e, How indeed, except through confusion, could that African soul love an American?34 the thoughtful reader is at a loss to comprehend from the evidence of the novel what this “African soul” consists of. In the book its only distinctive qualities are quite negative: self-absorbed passivity and a victim-status in relation to Whites. When Modin tries to assert himself against the confident arrogance of the Whites in his discussion with his fellow students, he takes exactly this false ground, suggesting lamely that “America may have been a paradise when the Indians ran it,”35 and then immediately reverts to the surer ground of an attack on destructive Europe. This is to oppose against “the Fascist’s” reasoned if shallow apologia for White civilization a flimsy ideal civilization which can never have existed. The problem becomes even more acute in Armah’s next novel, Two Thousand Seasons, where he attempts to throw off his previous passivity by imaginatively realizing this non-European “paradise” in the form of “the way.” But the only inherent qualities of “the way” which convey themselves are a kind of puritanical lack of sexism and a grim and humorless communalism. Otherwise “the way” seems rather anti-European than nonEuropean, defining itself mainly in terms of its opposition to, and grimly brutal killing of, “the destroyers.” Armah then becomes in his later work a figure of negativity in African literature. Even his first novel struck Ezekiel Mphahlele as too uncompromising in its grimness. I felt something missing . . . Something that may be related to Armah’s apparent lack of love for people . . . All is hopeless. His stance is authoritarian—more than he would like to admit. Because he is impatient, intolerant, indignant.36 But in The BeautyJUl Ones Are Not Yet Born and Fragments a certain dignity and human warmth does occasionally invest the protagonists, making the pessimism of Armah’s vision doubly poignant. In Why Are We So Blest? this human warmth is quite overwhelmed by pathos and bitter despair. At the bottom of Why Are We So Blest? lies the ultimately sentimental desire to blame all the problems of the contemporary African on the Whites. And the fact that, instead of the usual gentle and innocent African victim beloved of the soft

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liberal imagination one finds in Armah a powerfully evoked self-disgust, should not blind us to this. Why Are We So Blest? is in the end just such a “justificatory hallucination” as Solo sees in all self-images created by Blacks, if a subtle one, one even half-aware of its own hallucinatory quality. As a cry of resentment and suffering the book is unparalleled. As a universal myth of race relations it is deceptive.

Notes l

Chinua Achebe, “The Truth of Fiction,” University of Ife Convocation Lecture, December 15, 1978. Not yet published. 2

D. H. Lawrence, “Morality and the Novel,” in E. D. McDonald (editor), Phoenix (London: Heinemann, 1936; rpt. 1961), p. 528. 3

Ayi Kwei Armah, Why Are We So Blest? (London: Heinemann, 1972), p.

157. 4

The word “racism” is a recent one and is to be found neither in the O.E.D. nor in the 1928 Supplement. The Supplement includes “racialism,” however, giving the definition: “Tendency to racial feeling; antagonism between different races of men.” The Revised Addenda (1956) to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary do include “racism,” dating it to 1942 and giving the definition: “The theory that fundamental characteristics of race are preserved by an unchanging tradition. ” They also remark of “racialism”: “Used esp. of antagonistic or provocative emphasis on race.” Clearly in current usage the words are not usually distinguishable and antagonism or provocation is generally implied by the term “racism.” 5

Ezekiel Mphahlele drily remarks: “To be a liberal you have to be white” {The African Image [London: Faber, 1962; rev. edn. 1974], p. 50). He is speaking primarily of South Africa, but perhaps his comment has wider application. ‘Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). Quoted in T. Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1976), p. 4. William Conton, The African (London: Heinemann, 1964). 8

Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 67-70. 9

Ibid., p. 67.

l0

Ibid., p. 70.

n

Ayi Kwei Armah, Why Are We So Blest?, pp. 230, 262.

n

Ibid., pp. 97-103.

12

Ibid., p. 127.

l4

Ibid., p. 119.

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l5

Ibid., pp. 158-159.

l6

lbid., p. 159.

xl

Ibid., p. 160.

x

*lbid., p. 114.

l9

Ibid., p. 150.

20

Ibid., p. 84.

21

Ibid., p. 230.

22

Ibid., p. 149.

23

Ibid., p. 231.

24

Ibid., p. 68.

^Ibid., pp. 231-232. 26

Ibid., p. 231.

21

lbid.

^Ibid., p. 208. 29

Ibid., p. 288. p. 208.

31

Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973), p. 161. 32

Ayi Kwei Armah, “African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?,” Presence Africaine, 64 (1967), 6-30. 33

Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature . . ., pp. 126-129.

^Ayi Kwei Armah, Why Are We So Blest?, p. 139. 35

Ibid., p. 100.

^Ezekiel Mphahlele, The African Image, p. 270.

Editor's Note: Quotations from Armah’s novel in the above essay have been shortened and, in some cases, omitted for the purposes of this publication.

Persona! and Political Fate in Armall’s Why Are We So Blest? Edward Lobb

Why Are We So Blest?, Ayi Kwei Armah’s third novel, represents a distinct shift of emphasis from the author’s previous work. His first two novels, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) and Fragments (1970), dealt in different ways with a man’s attempts to maintain his integrity, and ultimately his sanity, in corrupt societies. Although Ghana was obviously the setting of both works, they were novels which portrayed the contemporary scene without much reference to the past which shaped it. Why Are We So Blest?, published in 1972, is an ambitious and largely successful attempt to probe the complex relation of colonizer and colonized—a relation which is seen as historically past but psychologically present in any relationship between an African and a European. Armah is concerned with personal relationships, particularly love relationships, because it is these which show most clearly the tensions and myths of race in all their complexity. The central character in the novel is Modin Dofu, a West African student who, like Armah himself, had studied at Harvard. It is Modin who, in a series of journal entries, explains the course of his alienation, the ways in which the educated African is made to feel the distance between himself and his people: Elementary School. First gate, the millions already eliminated, leaving thousands. No justification. Just the way things are. The way things have been. Secondary School. Second gate. The thousands dropped, leaving hundreds. The justification: the exams. A lucky few get in because their relatives push them through in spite of everything. Sixth form. The hundreds forgotten. A dozen here, twenty there. Small groups getting absorbed deeper into European ways. The justification: a higher quality.

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University. Single survivors in the last reaches of alienation. The justification: “You are the only one”; “You are not like the others”; “You are the first . . .”! There is, naturally, a great temptation to succumb to this flattery, to accept creature comforts and privileged status. One of Modin’s Harvard acquaintances, a character known only half-jokingly as “Mike the Fascist,” suggests that the process is a kind of apotheosis: “The arrangement that brings you here has to be a good arrangement. In the Greek tradition you’d be a crossover. One of those who rise from the plains to live on Olympus. A hero. Part man, part god. Therefore more interesting than either” (p. 101). Modin counters by suggesting “the Promethean factor,” the descent of the demi-god to aid mankind in his struggles, but he is aware that Olympus has its attractions. “I feared the urging to isolate myself, to cut myself off from where I came, forget my origins and make the thinly gilded present all my history” (p. 162). The real significance of the demi-god image, however, suggest the nature of Modin’s alienation. The demi-god is not man and god; he is in fact neither. Modin discovers that his education has served largely to make him a double exile: he is separated from his own people by his education, but will never be perceived in Europe or America as an educated man, but simply as a Black—a category which, in White society, obliterates any finer distinctions. The African has been educated by the White man only to fill a particular need, and is therefore in the position formerly occupied by “factors” in the slave trade. The factor was a Black slave trader, a man who had slaves brought from the interior and who bargained with the Europeans for their sale. His modem successors, “the privileged servants of white empire,” govern Africa by proxy for the Whites. The factor’s pay is now given in advance, and sold men are not mentioned, not seen in any mind. Their price is given the factor for some mythical quality of his dead spirit. His murdered intelligence is praised. The easier for the givers of these scholarships, this factors’ pay, to structure the recipients’ lives into modem factorship, (p. 161) Like the demi-god, the modem factor occupies a place between two clearly defined groups and belongs to neither. The educated African can attempt to overcome his alienation by reaching in either direction: he can try to re-establish contact with the people by using his education to overthrow colonialism or neocolonialism in his homeland, or he can attempt to enter and become part of White society as an evolue or “assimilated” African2 The particular form which this latter desire assumes is summarized by Frantz Fanon in an overwritten but effective passage from Black Skin, White Masks:

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Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white. I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white. Now—and this is a form of recognition that Hegel had not envisaged—who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man. Her love takes me onto the noble road that leads to total realization . . .3 The process is seldom consciously articulated, of course, but Fanon asserts that it is widespread in the psychology of colonized peoples; and Modin, after various sexual experiences in America, acquires a White mistress, an American girl named Aimee Reitsch.4 The reasons for this relationship are far from simple. Modin is not motivated merely by the desire to incorporate Whiteness magically through the love of a White woman. It is, after all, Aimee who takes the initiative in beginning the affair, and Modin probably acquiesces because of what he calls “the need to work out new ways of containing loneliness” (p. 167). Aimee has similarly complex motivations, the depravity of which Modin does not at first perceive. Armah’s portrayal of her is devastating: it is at once the most persuasive and most appalling portrayal of the ambiguities and contradictions of American liberalism to appear in fiction. Aimee is a Radcliffe student, the daughter of a wealthy family, bored by her courses and the ease with which she gets good grades. She first goes to Africa on a summer program—not out of any interest in Africa, but in the hope of finding excitement. “The offerings included ten African countries, all relatively tame,” she records in her diary. “I chose Kansa. If there is fire left anywhere that should be the place. The African Research people say the Moja Moja rebellion is not really ended” (p. 143). In Kansa she sleeps with any man who asks her, but decides that she will “always be bored” and returns to Radcliffe for the fall term. Aimee’s problem is an inability to feel. Even physically she is insensitive: she takes part in a psychology experiment on pain thresholds which shows hers to be twice as high as anyone else’s. She tells Modin, whom she first meets in the lab, that she went “for the experience.” “What experience? There was only pain. ” “I wanted to feel.” I was surprised at her stopping there. “Feel what?” I asked her. “Anything. Just to feel.” “You feel nothing at all, normally?”

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She hesitated before answering, “No.” I laughed. “That’s a funny thing to say.” “It’s the truth. I feel it when I cut myself, but that’s not the kind of feeling I was talking about. Even that leaves me feeling kind of dissociated. The other feelings I’ve never had.” (p. 177) Aimee represents a particular kind of danger. Bored and insensitive (and, we discover, frigid), she is desperate to feel anything that will break the tedium of her existence. Her outlook does not include beliefs in the usual sense, since her ideas are worked out with the subconscious desire for intense feeling. She becomes a “revolutionary” because revolutions are supposed to be dangerous and exciting; her Marxism is ridiculous not because of her upbringing—though her trust fund remains comfortingly in the background—but because it is simply an excuse for thrill-seeking. Modin does not at first look too closely at Aimee’s attachment to him. He thinks only that he does not “feel lonely any more” (p. 181). But he is warned twice by Black Americans of his folly. One, a secretary, says bluntly, “There’s nothing like friendship possible between us and them. You get involved with them, you’re just dumb, that’s all. They’ll mess you up” (p. 123). He has already acknowledged that “involvements here are destructive” (p. 156), but is inevitably faced with the counter-proposition, “So is withdrawal anywhere.”5 He therefore overlooks Aimee’s perversity for as long as possible. Aimee’s interest in Modin is, like her radicalism, part of her search for new sensations. Having an affair with an African is a novelty, and Modin remains essentially anonymous, an African, to her. Like the other Europeans and Americans Modin has encountered, she is incapable of seeing his individuality, his personality. She therefore quite innocently aggravates his alienation and constantly misreads his character. “He was cautious. He was bourgeois. He was conservative. He was not male enough. He was not male, stop. He was slow to embrace revolutionary experiences” (p. 138). Worse still, she is intrigued by Modin because of old taboos against interracial sex. In bed with him, Aimee imagines herself a memsahib whose husband, a repressive colonial administrator, comes home to find her making love with the houseboy. I’m looking over Mwangi’s head. He’s been silent a long time, moving in me. The Kapitan Reitsch is coming back, along the path. He’s very big. His face is red. Mwangi knows nothing. His head is turned away from the window. My husband has no shirt on. He still has his gun. I am forced to look at the gun. From that distance he’s aiming into the room, at Mwangi’s head. I say nothing to Mwangi. He feels so good in me. He has a smile. He moves silently. I have a happy feeling, rising, (pp. 188-189)

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The educated and articulate Modin is replaced in Aim^e’s imaginings by a boy who speaks pidgin, a figure more exotic, more primitive, and therefore more thrilling in Aimee’s murderous fantasy. One’s first impulse is to object that this situation is not representative or inevitable, that perceptive people can establish some kind of human connection across arbitrary barriers, however established those barriers may be. But the situation of Modin and Aimee is not the only case of interracial disaster in the novel. Solo, who pieces together their story from their journals and his few encounters with them, has also studied abroad, and was abandoned by his Portuguese mistress, Sylvia: “She had gone back to something she could be sure of, so sure that even if she strayed from it, it would come after her, offering her the uncompromising protection of the group” (pp. 67-68). The Africans who do maintain relationships with White women are seen as spiritually compromised. Ndugu Pakansa has a White mistress and refuses to join the Kansan fight for independence; a modern factor, he nevertheless is made his country’s head of state when independence comes. Jorge Manuel, leading the movement for Congheria’s independence from Portugal, has a White mistress and has already begun to set up a class system in his government-inexile; he cannot even speak the country’s chief language with any fluency. His revolution, when it succeeds, will simply replace White masters with Black factors; it will not alter the fabric of colonial relationships in the least.6 The situation in America is the same. Modin meets a Black American academic, Dr. Earl Lynch, who has married a White woman, gained a secure academic post, and who continues to believe, pathetically, that he is a revolutionary. All of these men (Modin, Solo, Pakansa, Manuel, and Lynch) act out what Armah apparently sees as the central drama of African relationships with the White world on the personal, political, and cultural levels: the divorce of the Black man from his own people and culture and his half-absorption into an alien culture which is essentially corrupt and death-dealing. Lynch is not named Lynch for nothing. These encounters are fatal in two senses: they are deadly and they are also apparently inevitable. Their deadliness is clear in the figure of the Kapitan in Aimee’s fantasy; their inevitability is suggested by the fact that her fantasy is twice acted out in real life. Modin, before he meets Aim6e, becomes involved, passively and rather comically, with a White woman, Mrs. Jefferson. As they make love in the garden one night, Modin is attacked from behind by Mr. Jefferson and is nearly killed (p. 156). In the last scene of the novel—a scene as horrifying as anything in modern literature—Aim6e is used to arouse Modin before he is sexually mutilated by a group of Frenchmen and left in the desert to die (pp. 283-288). Aim^e’s fantasy, with its juxtaposition of personal and colonial situations, suggests that the personal relationships in the novel are symbolic of the larger

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historical encounter between Africa and Europe. The repetition of the scene I have described, and the ways in which Modin’s situation is paralleled by that of other characters, reinforce the idea. The affair of Modin and Aimee presents in personal terms the larger problem of civilized contact between societies separated by culture and race. Armah’s portrayal of that contact is unsparing, suggesting that it is hopelessly compromised from the beginning by “the level of [White] culture’s basic myths” (p. 157). The fact that White people are agents of destruction throughout the novel is ominous, and Armah has, predictably, been attacked as a racist. Such criticism is beside the point. Armah is not making a racial generalization, but a cultural one: the distinction is critical, and becomes clearer when we look at the narrative structure of the novel. The internal coordinator of the novel’s vision, the only man who knows the stories of all the characters, is Solo Nkonam. It is he who “arranges” the novel, presenting sections from Modin’s and Aim^e’s diaries interspersed with his own memories and reflections. Solo is an artist figure whose various failures (as a revolutionary, a writer, a lover) have left him disillusioned and near despair. He has parallels in Armah’s earlier novels: the nameless protagonist in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Baako in Fragments share certain of his qualities. As an artist, Solo seems specifically concerned with the relationship between Modin’s story and the history of Africa. What draws a white woman to any of us, lonely results, creatures of her people’s destructive thrust against ours, against the world? What kind of love fires the white-haired American, sucking life that cannot fertilize her dryness, from sources already several times desiccated? What is this love of their people’s creatures but a love for the manipulable, the already manipulated, open to further shaping? What is this love but hate smilingly embraced by the hated? But what else could we the hated do in our loneliness? Go with our love aching inside our isolated bodies, go searching after contact with our people whose life of pain we have fled? Easier to let white females absorb the loving impulse, use the accumulated energy within our black selves to do work of importance to their white selves. Of what other use have Africa’s tremendous energies been these many centuries but to serve the lusts of whites? Sucked-out men, should our bodies survive our murdered souls, we float between the blessed and the damned, attached to none but our specific murderers, caught in their deephating embrace. Ah, Africa, (pp. 208-209) In this world of damned souls, it is Solo’s particular torment to see what is happening without being able to prevent it or to help any of the people

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involved. He has the artist’s ability to perceive, but also the artist’s separation from other men: his very name suggests his isolation. Like Marlow in Heart of Darkness, he can only tell th6 story of the fatal encounter. Conrad’s fable suggests, in fact, a particular tradition to which Armah’s novel belongs. Stephen Dedalus sounds, in Ulysses, the characteristic modem note in his description of history as “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”7 But it is Eliot’s Waste Land, published in the spe year (1922), which provides the most striking parallels to Why Are We So Blest? Like Armah’s novel, Eliot’s poem presents history in a series of disastrous sexual encounters between alienated and unfeeling people. Tiresias, like Solo, presents a sequence of illuminating fragments: he “can perceive but cannot act . . . can understand and remember but cannot communicate” with the participants in the drama.8 I mention these parallels not to establish Eliot’s influence on Armah, though that influence is discernible throughout Armah’s work, but to provide a context in which to interpret the relation of personal to cultural issues in the novel. Conrad and Eliot both portray Western civilization as savage and decadent at once, and we see their portrayals as cultural generalizations; there is no need, then, to call the same sort of portrayal “racist” simply because Armah focuses on the depravity of European and American treatment of Africa—particularly when the evidence is, historically speaking, incontrovertible. Armah is not making a simple division between a corrupt White Europe and an innocent Black Africa; he is rather commenting on the nightmare of modern history, in which the effects of the past, particularly in mythologies, conspire to deprive individuals, Black and White, of any significant freedom. The educated African, as Solo and Modin admit, flees the misery of the masses and is scarcely distinguishable, morally, from the White exploiter. The reality of history impinges upon even the smallest encounters, pushing the actors toward the destructive pattern of Aimee’s fantasy. The central opposed images of the novel—those of center and periphery, or higher and lower levels—make clear the appalling alternatives faced by the African characters. Modin describes his life as “a search for the centre, away from the periphery of the world I found,” and goes on to explain the image and the alienation it represents: Because of the way information is distributed in the total structure-high information in the centre, low information on the peripheries—overall clarity is potentially possible only from the central heights. The structures in the peripheral areas are meant to disperse low, negative or mystificatory information. The choices are clear. Those who stay in the peripheral areas intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, totally, are not lonely. They are in touch with home, not cut off. The price they

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pay for not being lonely, however, is that they suffer the crudest forms of manipulation, mystification, planned ignorance. Those who escape from the periphery to the centre can hope to escape some of these cruder forms of manipulating But the price they pay is loneliness, separation from home, the constant necessity to adjust to what is alien, eccentric to the self. (p. 33) Solo, too, has seen uthe debilitating struggle to climb into easier stations in a world built on injustice” (p. 83); The New York Times, on the other hand, uses the same image in a Thanksgiving Day editorial which provides, in its innocent American smugness, an awful insight into the moral indifference induced by life on the heights. The writer is thankful for “the steeps of that spiritual excellence without which all this wealth would be common dross” (P- 99). These images are subtly invoked throughout the novel. We have already seen the use of Olympus as a symbol of privilege and isolation, and the image of a high retreat occurs in the physical landscape of the novel as well as in the figurative. In the days of the slave trade, Modin learns, the factor made his deals in a room high up in a castle on the coast (p. 78); it is no coincidence when Solo observes that the offices of the People’s Union of Congheria are divided into two levels. The upper, better furnished than the lower and decorated with a picture of “a Parisian scene,” is reserved for Jorge Manuel and the other leaders of the revolution: “. . .the lighter brother drank spirits upstairs with suave travelers, while down below the black one licked the tasteless backs of stamps” (p. 51). Solo is beyond being outraged by this inequality, for he sees himself as similarly hypocritical. Early in the novel, he recalls seeing an African town at night from the top of a hill, its buildings lit from within: “It’s beautiful!” I exclaimed. “Yes,” said my companion. “It is beautiful. It is very beautiful when you are so high above it, looking down.” (p. 46) This scene, surely meant to recall Christ’s hilltop temptation by Satan, embodies Solo’s dilemma and his guilt at being an artist. He lives on a hill in Laccryville, too, and descends daily into the world of beggars and fatherless children, then flees, accompanied only by his guilt, back to his life of relative ease. It is the final irony of this recurring image that Aimee, “with her immaculate trust fund waiting for her in the land of the blest,” manages to look down on Solo as a failed revolutionary (p. 140). The characters’ lack of freedom is embodied in the image of the circle, which we have already seen implied in the recurrence of Aimee s fantasy in

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real life. Solo is trapped in the cycle of work, the daily movement from home to office and back, and Modin, too, sees his actions as cyclical:9 This arrangement is a cycle, a repeated in-out design. First a time of quiet rest. Then a manic surge. Then satiation, exhaustion. Another period of self-isolation, the period of rest. The dispersed self comes together again. After dissipation I collect myself, draw in the wandering portions flung out into my .weird friendships here. Some of the pieces have to travel far indeed to get back. I have come close to losing myself completely. This is not merely unwise. There is a self-destructive impulse in me that comes out in these patterns, (pp. 157-158) Modin has the intelligence to see the danger, but the forces at work within him are so strong that he continues in the same path even after he discovers Aimee’s true nature. Like Solo, he sees a parallel between his personal crisis and that of Africa. Both involve “a spiritual disintegration far beyond the merely social disintegration Africa has suffered [for] centuries” (p. 159). So thoroughgoing is the alienation, so powerful the influence of the past, that “Europe has no need to destroy us singly any more. The force for our own death is within us. We have swallowed the wish for our destruction” (p. 159). The last sentence is particularly interesting, for the idea of ingestion, of swallowing, is the novel’s chief image of White destructiveness. Solo refers to Aimee as “a devouring spirit, more than egotistic” (p. 116), and a Black American warns Modin about her, using a different vocabulary but the same metaphor: “I’m not fighting you, brother. We don’t fight the lost. But hear me. Blue eyes here love you. Sure . . . Like a blue-eye baby love a chock-lit candy bar. Blues eyes gon eat you, brother. Blue eyes gon eat you for soul food . . . Blue eyes had all them special things her people set aside for their own selves. Blue eyes still not satisfied. Blue eyes greedier than the greediest white folks. Now she ready for them hog maws and chit’lins too . . . Blue eyes gon eat you, brother, blue eyes gon eat you dead.” (p. 200)10 This prediction is symbolically fulfilled when Aimee fellates Modin (p. 95), who later comments that he was not afraid, “even when I saw your sickness” (p. 276). But he thinks of her action in connection with a remembered newspaper picture “of the Boston girl who cut off her man friend’s testicles with a nail clipper, put them in her handbag, then tried to disappear southward . . .” The nail clippers become, in Modin’s mind, part of the woman’s genitalia, and

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the classic male fear of the vagina dentata is thus associated, through Aimee, with the historical emasculation of the Black man; Modin’s thoughts also, of course, prefigure his own mutilation. Once again, personal details refer as well to the novel s larger frame of discourse. The image is a particularly good one, since the idea of eating can be worked unobtrusively into the language of the novel and Arm ah s use of it neatly reverses the European stereotype of the African as cannibal. The true savagery is that of Europe; during the torture of Modin, Aimde experiences only sexual longing. I mentioned earlier that the fatalism of Armah’s vision of Black-White relations as permanently damaged by colonialism is difficult to accept. We naturally want to believe that there is a means of breaking the cycle, a way of waking up from the nightmare of history. The later work of Frantz Fanon suggests such a means. Given the shared ideas of Fanon and Arm ah, not only about colonial psychology but about the new class of factors in African leadership, any solution Fanon proposes is likely to be part of the economy of Armah’s novel. Fanon’s solution was revolutionary violence, not so much as a political necessity—for many African states were achieving independence peacefully during the late 1950s and early 1960s—but as a means of psychological liberation. The appearance of the settler has meant in the terms of syncretism the death of the aboriginal society, cultural lethargy, and the petrification of individuals. For the native, life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler . . . But it so happens that for the colonised people this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upwards in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning . . . At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.11 For Fanon, as for Armah, personal fate reflects political realities. In The Wretched of the Earth, revolutionary violence is seen as creative, socially unifying, and individually therapeutic: it is what David Caute describes as “existential therapy within the context of Marxist class categories.”12 But there are problems in asserting violence as a value or even as a necessary evil. It is one of the great themes of tragedy that all violence is ultimately violence against the self, that man brutalizes himself when he hurts

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or destroys others. And, as Caute points out, Fanon was well aware of the fact: His psychiatric case histories concern not only the victims but also the perpetrators of violence . . . An Algerian whose own mother had been wantonly murdered himself wantonly killed a white woman who was on her knees begging for mercy. As a result, he suffered what Fanon calls an anxiety psychosis of the depersonalization type. Fanon’s own close involvement with and understanding of such cases makes his theory of renovating violence more difficult to understand.13 If Fanon was able to overlook the contradiction, Armah is not. The violence of the real and imagined characters in the novel (Mr. Jefferson, the Kapitan Reitsch of Aimee’s fantasy, the Frenchmen who kill Modin) make monsters of them; Aimee’s inability to feel becomes, on the thematic level, symbolic of what Europe has done to itself through its violent colonial adventures. Her quest for sensation through revolution is therefore not only political dishonest but likely to lead merely to further insensitivity. The strangely remote account of Modin’s death in her diary confirms that she is, if anything, less responsive than at the beginning of the novel. She seems to have one terrifying moment of self-awareness, during which she tries to recover her notebook from Solo; but her encounter with him (during which she calls him a “nigger”) is only further proof of her depravity. Modin’s motives for trying to join the revolution are more complex and sympathetic. To begin with, he has genuine political convictions of a kind that comes from experience, while Aimee can only mouth Marxist slogans. But, like Aim£e, he has personal reasons for political engagement—the desire, mentioned above, to overcome his alienation by identifying himself with the people. In existential terms, he will create himself through action, and in traditional African terms he will define himself through the communal group. His attempts are, of course, hopeless from the start. Despite his desire for a “revolutionary commitment to Africa” (p. 31), he is essentially a gentle, introspective man; furthermore, the attempt to overcome his alienation politically is at odds with the attempt to overcome it personally with Aimee. Modin is attempting to go in two directions at once, and realizes from the beginning that “the directions made available . . . within this arrangement are all suicidal” (p.31). Esteban Ngulo, Manuel’s secretary, likewise sees that Modin is “one of those intellectuals who wants to die” (p. 255). Modin’s attempts to join forces with the rebels in Congheria is not an endorsement, on his part or Armah’s, of revolutionary violence: it is a private choice of a way to die. Modin himself rejects the Marxism which influenced Fanon and which justifies violence in the name of national liberation. He notes that Earl Lynch,

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caught in the white net of minds . . . had sought a break for his spirit and found the whitest of philosophies, Marxism (p. 163). The comment is in part a criticism of those theoreticians of the left who apply to Africa terms which have little or no meaning in many African societies, such as “proletariat” or “class struggle.” But it is also, I believe, a criticism of the Hegelian and Marxist concept of dialectic, by which . . . contradictions are seen to merge themselves in a higher truth that comprehends them” (O. E. D.). In the simplified form, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, the idea is generally familiar. Dialectic is not explicitly referred to in the novel, but it appears to be one way of reconciling the great contraries of the novel—Africa and Europe, colonized and colonizer, Black and White. Thus, in a 1948 article which influenced Fanon profoundly, Sartre had argued that the subjective, existential, ethnic idea of Negritude passes, in the Hegelian sense, into the objective, positive, exact idea of the proletariat. The affirmation of white supremacy provides the thesis; Negri tude as an authentic value was the moment of negativity; the creation of a humanity without “races” would be the synthesis.14 In less political terms, this synthesis is clearly an ideal. If “a humanity without races” is not possible on the level of individual relationships, it remains a sort of dream for Solo, whose phrasing suggests that the imagination of the artist may be the synthesizing force: I dreamed of a destination for the spirit. The best that is absent from this heavy, mediocre world would be its mark: community. In place of isolate bodies, greedy to consume more privileges to set us above, apart from others, there would be community: sustenance, suffering, endurance, relief, danger—all shared, (p. 114) He discovers, however, that the attempt to effect a synthesis is simply an invitation to despair: “. . . there are those who for some inexplicable reason want to bring what they do and what is done around them into the same territory as what they think and what they dream. These are the losers, life’s failures” (p. 14). Worse, he realizes that the distinction between opposites is sometimes impossible to make: that love partakes of hate (see above, p. 246) and may be, in fact, no more than “a confusion of self with another self” (p. 139).15 Modin, in similar fashion, comes to realize that the things which tempt him to suicide in one form or another “have always looked like extreme pleasure offered, taken, tasted” (p. 158). Solo’s sense of ambiguity of things presents him with particular problems and opportunities. It prevents him from being a committed revolutionary, for

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one thing; his failure, as we come to understand, is not so much a loss of nerve as a loss of faith, a recognition of the distance between revolutionary idealism and the cynical realpQlitik of Jorge Manuel and other factors— contraries which no dialectic can reconcile. Like Modin, he longs for the usand-them simplicity of the barricades, but as an artist he knows that the world is more complex: “What would I not give to attain the healing simplicity of hatreds unmixed with love?” (p. 231). In Fragments, various images suggest the possibility of. giving artistic shape to the disorder of contemporary life—a task which takes a fearful toll on the artist, but which is possible. In Why Are We So Blest?, Solo’s desire to be an artist is, as I suggested earlier, simply a source of guilt: “To be an African now, and a mere artist: to choose to be a parasite feeding on spilt entrails” (p. 232). Solo attempts the artist’s task regardless, but declares himself defeated: I try to fit the pieces of [Modin’s] life together, hoping—to understand? That hope too is dead in me. I arrange the pieces, rearrange them. My impotence simulates omnipotence. Often, what seems a reasonable arrangement I know is false. It is not understanding I am reaching for. I have time to kill—an infinity ahead of me, and these notes are reduced to something to help a defeated man survive empty time. I arrange them, rearrange them. (p. 232) For Solo, the three journals are a sort of pointless jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces, when fitted together, do not form a design. But this is not, clearly, Arm ah’s own view. The novel itself stands as proof that the vision is possible. Solo is defeated, and Arm ah disturbed, by the fact that the picture offers no hope; but the rendering itself is evidence of a stubborn desire to portray reality even when it appears contradictory, absurd, or maligned. After he has abandoned his own dreams of artistic creation, Solo continues to translate articles for the People’s Union of Congheria, and the idea of translation appears to be the novel’s metaphor for modem art. The good translator does not try to impose a shape on his material: he simply renders what he finds as accurately as possible in another language, another medium. Understanding and communion (“people’s union” in a non-political sense) may or may not be possible. If they are, they surely depend upon a meticulous account of what actually happened. Violence, intellectual synthesis, and the ideal visions of traditional art may be unavailing; in the relatively humble task of transcription, Arm ah suggests, lies more hope for the personal and political futures of African and European than in any revolution fired by naive slogans of brotherhood.

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Notes [

Ayi Kwei Armah, Why Are We So Blest? (London: Heinemann, 1974), p. 224. All further references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text. 2

The French, in decrying American racism, have long maintained that French society is open to anyone who has mastered its language and culture. But the term evolue, suggesting that the African or West Indian has evolved or risen in learning about French culture, indicates not only ethnocentrism, but—since the term is applied only to Blacks—a racism as hypocritical as that of America. 3

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 63. 4

Aim£e’s name is, of course, symbolic. She is loved, aimee, but she is also, as Solo points out, the “daughter of a race of destroyers” (p. 149). Her last name is close to the German Reich, and we discover that one of her forebears was a notorious German colonial officer, the “Kapitan Reitsch” to whom she later imagines herself married. The other names in the novel, including place-names, are similarly suggestive. Laccryville, for example, suggests Accra, lack, and lacrimae (tears). 5

A dilemma explored at length in Armah’s first two novels.

6

The address of Manuel’s organization is, ironically, “1 rue Frantz Fanon” (p. 48). Stephen’s statement is a paraphrase of Laforgue: “La vie est trop triste, trop sale. L’histoire est un vieux cauchemar bariole ...” See: Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, Notes for Joyce: An Annotation of James Joyce's “Ulysses ” (New York: Dutton, 1974), p. 26. 8

A. Walton Litz, “The Waste Land Fifty Years After,” in A. W. Litz (editor), Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Fiftieth Anniversary of “The Waste Land” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 21. There are several African examples of works which symbolize the action of historical forces through personal relationships, the best known being Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de Violence (1968). I mention European examples simply because the Western reader is more likely to be familiar with them, and to suggest that the novel itself reflects the literary encounter of Africa and Europe. 9

Here, too, the influence of Eliot may be present: the circle is one of The Waste Land's images of bondage to time. But Eliot himself was not, of course, the first to use the image, and it recurs in Armah’s novels with a resonance of its own. 10

It is interesting that Armah, whose command of everyday Ghanaian English has been criticized (e.g. by Emmanuel Obiechina in Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975], pp. 191-192), should have written a passage which captures one form of Black American English quite convincingly.

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1

‘Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 72-73. 12

David Caute, Frantz Fanoh (New York: Viking, 1970), p. 93.

13

Ibid., p. 95.

“Ibid., p. 23. 15 Solo has already mentioned (p. 56) that Modin and Aim6e dress almost identically. „

The American Background in Why Are We So Blest? Robert Fraser

The interplay between Africa and the Americas has left us not only a historical, but also a plentiful literary legacy. Since the horror of the forced migration and the slave trade ceased at the beginning of the last century, a growing flow of visitors, first a trickle and now a steady stream, have crossed or recrossed the Atlantic in both directions seeking various sorts of experience. American writers such as Hemingway, Bellow, and Theroux have borne witness.1 On their side, African writers have not been slow to state, sometimes trenchantly, the impact which the New World has made on them. From Senghor’s “New York”2 to John Pepper Clark’s America, Their America,3 the views expressed have often been controversial in tone. Increasingly these visitors have been students, more recently on the trail of some sort of postgraduate study; for—and it is a point to watch—beginning with Doctors Aggrey and Azikwe, the decision to study in the States rather than in Europe has often been as much a political as an academic one. It has been one way of avoiding the colonizing grasp of either Britain or France. We should not, therefore, be surprised if America often finds itself confronted by scholars of markedly radical awareness, or if the perspective on American life encountered in the books they may come to write should be shaped by a polemical vision. These remarks prove illuminating when we come to consider the work of the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah. Armah’s third published novel Why Are We So Blest?* is a work of stark insights and brilliantly deployed multiple perspectives. It differs from his other books, however, in that, although its two principal characters are Black Africans, very little of the story is set in sub-Saharan Africa. Rather, it is polarized between two distant locations: the east coast of America and the Muslim Maghreb. This geographical breadth involves Armah in a considerable feat of balance, which he is not uniformly successful in maintaining. The problem is not so much one of physical, as of moral equilibrium. For, although

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the plot is brought to a climax in the torrid vastness of the Saharan wastes, the ethical judgments brought to bear on it derive from America in the years of racial confrontation. The book opens in Laccryville, the bedraggled capital of a newly independent Arab republic, a rather thin disguise for Algiers. The dilapidation of the city is evoked, but more pertinently the degradation of the population, reduced it would seem to begging an odd dinar from every passing stranger. Among these is Solo, a refugee from one of the Portuguese territories, who has fled here for safety after an abortive attempt to abet the guerrilla forces in his own country. Solo is tortured by a sense of failure which is heightened by the evident futility of the revolutionary legacy around him, a point poignantly expressed by a mutile de guerre he meets in the hospital library: “Who gained? That is what I want to know. Who won?” (p. 24). Saddened by such reflections, Solo is left with a niggling dilemma, common to so many of Armah’s characters: how to bear his failure, his contradiction with integrity. Into this bleak environment wander two improbable creatures, exiles in a different sense. These are Modin Dofu, a gentle, soft-mannered Ghanaian, and Aimee, his lean and restless White American girlfriend. Aimee’s name is chosen advisedly, for her entire nature is consumed by the need to be loved, to suck others dry, a fact which Solo soon discerns with uncanny insight. In Dofu he immediately recognizes an earlier version of himself, a puzzled, questioning self with a desperate need to justify itself through some act of definition. But the definition he seeks is the one which Solo cannot provide: he wants to enlist in the guerrilla army in Solo’s home country, to become that anomalous and pathetic creature, an intellectual revolutionary. As Solo informs him with a shrug: “I cannot help you. I went and failed.” He is condemned to watch and wait while Dofu’s formal applications to enter the maquis are turned down. The lovers sit in their grimy pension and bicker constantly about the causes of their frustration. (Aimee has insisted on staying in what she somewhat risibly calls “a revolutionary hotel” [p. 60]; as Dofu wryly remarks, that simply means the dirtiest joint in town.) Eventually, their slender savings exhausted, they come to share Solo’s own tiny flat. The toughest strand in the novel is the intractable relationship traced out between the two Africans: the ardent young Dofu, and the older and sager Solo. They hardly speak to one another face to face, since Aimee’s watchful jealousy comes like a knife between them. But then Solo gets his hands on Dofu’s journal, and through his emphatic reading of it their eerie dialogue commences. As Solo reads on, he discovers more of himself, yet, paradoxically, realizes precisely why he is impotent to help the writer. Dofu writes: “There is no sanctuary. I have known periods of spiritual death when I have shut myself off from the world. There is loneliness that is a kind of death” (p. 159). And Solo, in thought, answers: “Where he hoped to go I have already

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been. I had run back with a spirit broken with real arrangements, my mind howling for peace, any mediocre peace. What help had I to offer him?” (p. 83). The axis of the novel changes, however, when it comes to Aimee, because, for Solo, Dofu s love for his hysterically demanding mistress is a symptom of a fatal weakness. He is confirmed in this impression, not simply by the stormy futile passages of wrath he witnesses between them, but by the genesis and gradual growth of the relationship in America as evidenced by the papers in his possession. For he has access, not only to Dofu’s diary, but to the disjointed, histrionic notes that Aimee herself has collected over the same period. Extracts from both of these are interpolated into Solo’s own monologue, which forms the framework of the narrative. And from these jottings Solo is able to piece together bit by bit the path of their passionate mutual destruction, the neurotic demands of one exploiting ruthlessly the loving kindness of the other. Aimee is not merely demanding however; she is also frigid. Her rapturous response to Dofu is partly gratitude for his being the first man able to arouse her. And this frigidity is construed as but one aspect of the sexual illness of White America. Professor Jefferson, the Africanist scholar who takes a patronizing interest in the young Dofu on his arrival in the States, is impotent. Consequently it is left to the abashed and confused student to satisfy his nymphomaniac wife. When the professor discovers the betrayal, he comes after the copulating couple with a loaded shotgun, and dispatches Dofu to the hospital with multiple wounds. Such incidents would be palatable if they were sprinkled with the slightest spice of humor. Of humor in this sense—generous, forgiving humor—however, the American scenes are almost innocent. The racial imbalance is all too obvious. Naita, Dofu’s Black secretary girlfriend, turns out to be a tender and expert lover. Dofu himself seems to be gifted with almost endless virility. With increasing disdain he blunders through this sexual Disneyland, servicing females in every direction. Bereft of the self-respect he so earnestly seeks, he is left to play out the role of the Black buck familiar to Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” but with little of the latter’s perspicacity or panache.5 The Dofu we meet in the American sequences seems to have little in common with the haunted, sensitive creature which Solo later encounters. Here instead we have a weak, vain, vacillating youth playing out extravagant adventures because they are there, rather than in any joyful sense of self-discovery. His social reflexes have all the gaucherie one finds portrayed, with all too little irony, in John Pepper Clark’s America, Their America.6 A direct parallel, of course, is impossible, because one is fiction, the other autobiography. But what they do share is a certain pinched emotional tone, a sullen bragging at victories won at the expense of White hosts, on account of being lacking in either

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charity or self-knowledge. It is difficult to square this Dofu, albeit younger, with the delicately contemplative creature manifested in the more introspective passages in the journals, or to believe that Solo, whose faculty of self-doubt amounts to total paralysis, should see anything of himself in him. In criticizing the novel, therefore, we have a problem. The moral focus, which is so finely tuned to the subtlest shades of moral consciousness of Solo’s world, seems incapable of illuminating the depths of Dofu’s American predicament. Moreover, though there is an undeniable causal connection between these two phases, at times the American portions do appear to be awkwardly integrated into the whole. Armah attempts to relate the relationship with Aimee to Solo by paralleling it with a relationship he himself had previously experienced with a White girl in Lisbon. But Solo’s Sylvia is another thing altogether: a flower-like waif who succumbs to the pressure of her own society in leaving him, rather than hurt either him or her friends. One has the impression that she would be incapable of destroying anything or anybody. Indeed Solo himself admits that the parallel is weak: “The American girl, for some reason I could not precisely grasp just then, had reminded me sharply of Sylvia. And yet, thinking of her, I realized that she was not at all like Sylvia” (p. 62). What the elusive “reason” for the mental connection is never becomes apparent. There is, of course, one very blatant connection: both Aimee and Sylvia are White. And, despite the “inhibiting traces” of his love for Sylvia, it becomes increasingly evident that Solo regards this as being the source of all her failings. Indeed, there are moments when he talks of the mere fact of attachment to a White woman as if it were part of a larger racial betrayal. Describing the European mistress of Jorge Manuel, the mulatto director of the Bureau of the People’s Republic of Congheria, he asks “What is her species of love but the same ancient white hatred of Africa, taking rotten form in her dry, decayed body?” (p. 229). Again, of both Dofu’s love and his own, he agonizes, “What is the root of this fatal attraction, this emotional fixity drawing us to these daughters of our white death?” (p. 230). For Solo, then, the price which Dofu must pay for this ill-advised alliance is his own self-destruction. This sentiment is prominently endorsed by the novel’s denouement. Tired by the constant delays, Aimee and Dofu decide to trek across the desert so as to enter the maquis by the back door. This leads them into the heart of the unpoliced Sahara region. Realizing the uselessness of the expedition, Dofu pleads with Aim6e to turn back. She, frightened at the thought of the public ridicule with which their failure will be greeted, persuades him to continue. Eventually, they are picked up by a gang of marauding OAS terrorists. Aim6e is forced to watch Dofu’s torture and castration, before she herself is ravished and released, leaving Dofu to bleed to death in the desert. Irrationally she returns with Manuel’s mistress to accuse Solo, and

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demand her notebooks. When he refuses to hand them back she devastates his room. His reaction is characteristic of his harsher assessments: “I have never seen humans look so predatory,” he says (p. 269). The implication would seem to be that Aimee has lured Dofu on to his death, a conclusion which picks up clues dropped throughout the novel. Yet there is a softer note in Solo’s voice, a mood which carries us back to the mournful, vulnerable personality suggested by the opening sequences of his narrative. In his sense of the loss of Dofu’s presence, the feeling that with his death something has gone out of himself: there we have a moment of authentic elegy. This retrospective tenderness balances the bitterness, holds it in check, so that we are left with a final impression, not of stridency, but of pathos. Yet the harsh undercurrent cannot be ignored because there are occasions on which it threatens to undermine the whole novel. One becomes increasingly aware that one is faced with a dialectic which would force all of the characters in the work into irreconcilable camps. Indeed Solo, whose voice is the most insistently hard, suggests such a scheme when he says, “Only one issue is worth our time: how to end the oppression of the African, to kill the European beasts of prey, to remake ourselves, the elected servants of Europe and America.” The answer to oppression is simply segregation, a political premise which seems to underlie the whole book. As such the proposition is purely political, and does not concern us critically. Where the polemic interferes with the art is the point at which political segregation becomes segregation of sympathy. Arm ah is not humanly affected by his White characters since he is interested only to mark them out as agents of destruction. Thus Aimee, for instance, is almost an allegorical figure: she exists simply to demonstrate the rapacious main chord of her personality. The other White characters are distinctly shadowy, flitting around Dofu and torturing his spirit: they have no other function. From where in the book does this kind of distortion receive its inspiration? A great deal of the earlier Dofu sequences are concerned with a radical criticism of America. In one notable episode Dofu visits the college refectory for breakfast, where he meets a Republican-minded fellow student called Mike. Mike is so brimming over with his complacent sense of the all-sufficiency of his country’s way of life that he insists on squatting next to him and reading out at length from a Thanksgiving Day editorial from one of the Sunday newspapers, the headline from which—“Why Are We So Blest?”—gives the novel its title. The sheer dexterity of the parody of its swelling apologetics suggests strongly the way it must be taken. In it the element of flatulence, of sheer deception in the self-defensive rhetoric of White America, is ruthlessly exaggerated and hence debunked. The fact which riles Dofu is that the vision of American life here proposed is obsessively, willfully, exclusive of all that might threaten its vision of paradise gained: “Anyone who can write a whole

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article on Thanksgiving and leave out the mass murder of the so-called Indians is a street-corner hustler, nothing better” (p. 99). Mike’s answer is glib and straightforward: they are outside the scope of the article. When Dofu asks what place the struggling Black masses have in this idyll, Mike replies with a model of the social universe derived from the Greeks: We took their savage paradise and made it complex. It has two poles now, and many gradations and permutations in between. It’s got heavens—and hells, as you say—built into it. After all it wouldn’t be Graeco-Christian if it didn’t. There’s Olympus. Below that there are the plains of mediocrity. Then Tartarus . . . (p. 100) Dofu’s reaction to these sentiments is tight-lipped and curt, but he is clearly disturbed by them. Shortly after this he vomits, and in his nausea the headline “Why Are We So Blest?” keeps on running through his head like an idiotic refrain. His sense of dislocation here is due to the fact that Mike, in his apathetic blundering, has touched a sore spot. Dofu himself is increasingly worried by the anomaly of his position as one who, having been drawn into a metropolitan center of supposed learning, will eventually be sent back to exploit his advantages over his people. Remarks to this effect smother the earlier passages in his journals, for instance: Those who stay in the prosperous areas intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, totally are not lonely . . . The price they pay for not being lonely, however, is that they suffer the crudest forms of manipulation, mortification, planned ignorance . . . Those who shift from the prosperity, can hope to escape some of these cruder forms of manipulation. But the price they pay is loneliness, (p. 33) It is in an attempt to relieve this fundamental sense of isolation that Dofu cultivates Aimee’s friendship, and hence, by implication, his own destruction. For him, however, and for Solo reading the journal, this represents a compromise of all that is finest within him. In his commentary, Solo amplifies the references to salvation and damnation: “the blessed wave us in front of the damned. We the desperate, are made symbols of hope. Filled with the stupid, puffed-up pride of the impotent, we acquiesce” (p. 108). Dofu and Solo both see themselves as members of a distinct class, a set of individuals Solo himself calls “assimilators,” torn from their roots and condemned to a life of solitary self-communion, eternally eating themselves up with the regret of their selfbetrayal. It is evident here that both Dofu and Solo subscribe to a certain historical and political case, which may be expressed in the form of a loose syllogism:

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The influence of White civilization on African people has been, and must perforce ever be, entirely corrosive. We, the evolues, have been induced into a position of acute dependence on the White world. We therefore owe it to ourselves and our people, to destroy this dependence, by force if necessary.

The minor premise in this argument corresponds fairly closely to the theories of neocolonialism advanced by francophone thinkers such as the Martinique psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon.7 But the major premise, with its outright and total dismissal of any recognition of European worth, comes, I would suggest, from a different source. It is a seminal proposition of extreme Black American apologetics, especially of that brand of it which flourished in the years of racial confrontation in the early 1960s. And the conclusion of the syllogism, the invocation to violence, is strongly redolent of the aims of radical sects such as the Black Muslim movement. It will be instructive here, I think, to take note of the period in which Armah’s own period of residence in America fell. The years between 1959 and 1965 were years of crisis for the Black movement, the years of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the Civil Rights movement, and Black Islam. To a politically minded student, fresh from Nkrumaist Ghana, the appeal must have been irresistible. The notion that Black salvation could only be sought in dogged separation was basic to much of the most challenging thinking of that time. It has a long and respectable history in Black polemics, going back ultimately to the writings of Marcus Garvey, and became a cornerstone of the Black Muslim movement. Garvey had sought to apply it to the planned return in glory of the Negro race, to their African motherland, the Black Muslims to their demand for a Black Zion in the southern United States. For Arm ah, it seems to have been adopted as a basis for an analysis of the contemporary African situation itself, and, by extension, the global confrontation between the races. One can best, I think, illustrate Armah’s relationship in this respect to the Afro-American movement by examining where he stands in relation to that highly ambivalent figure, James Baldwin. With the mellow Baldwin, the compassionate humanist with his conviction that Black Americans must work out their destiny by persuading White men to come to terms with themselves, that, in Baldwin’s own words, “the murder must be understood,” Arm ah has almost nothing in common. Of the occasional fire-and-brimstone Baldwin, the impassioned preacher, however, there are, in this book, many echoes. Listen to this from My Dungeon Shook: “this is the crime of which I accuse my countrymen, that they have destroyed hundreds and thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.” 8 If you substitute the word Europe in the

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first part of that sentence, then you have Solo or Dofii at their bitterest. The only question which remains is whether these torn characters can be seen as subscribing to the conclusion of the syllogism itself, namely, the sacred efficacy of violence. The drab and hopeless picture drawn by Solo at the beginning of the novel of post-revolutionary Algeria would seem to negate this possibility. Indeed the question aired by the war cripple, “who gained?,” which hangs like a murky cloud over the entire work, appears to be a direct challenge to it. An eight-year war with France has brought the Algerians neither prosperity nor self-respect. In this light, I would contend that the many references in Dofu’s diary to the urgency of conflict must be seen as suggestive of a prolonged inner struggle of mental emancipation rather than a call to arms.

Notes x

Cf Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953); Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1939); Paul Theroux, Fong and the Indians (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969). 2

Leopold Sedar Senghor, Ethiopiques (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1956).

2

Cf John Pepper Clark, America, Their America (London: Heinemann, 1964). ' 4

Ayi Kwei Armah, Why Are We So Blest? (London: Heinemann, 1974). All references in this essay are to this edition. s

Cf Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952).

6

John Pepper Clark, American, Their America.

7

For an adumbration of this argument, see Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire, Masque Blancs (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1952), and Les Damnes de la Terre (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1961). 8

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: The Dial Press, 1963), p.

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Armah’s Histories Bernth Lindfors

When Ayi Kwei Armah went to live in Tanzania in 1970, some readers wondered what effect this move might have on his fiction. He had already registered his revulsion against human corruption in his native Ghana in the two anguished novels that had established his reputation as a significant writer, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Fragments, and in his next and perhaps most cynical work, Why Are We So Blest?, published in 1972,1 he broadened the scope of his satire to include mortals elsewhere, particularly the featherbedded leaders of the revolutionary movement in Algeria and the naive, misguided, racist liberals, White and Black, in the United States. It was clear that the attitudes informing these misanthropic narratives had been shaped by his own experiences in the three societies depicted: his years at Harvard, his return to Ghana, and his months in Algiers lay reflected in the background like subterranean raw material out of which valuable gems of social insight had been mined and brought to light. The question was: what would he dig up in Tanzania? What could he find to be disillusioned about there? What targets would he choose for his next attack? There had been some concern expressed by African intellectuals that Armah’s vision was warped, that his stony view of African society, though brilliantly lucid, perpetuated the kind of distortion of reality that had existed throughout the colonial era and could ultimately prove harmful to the African revolution. Ama Ata Aidoo, in the preface to an American edition of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, complained that “whatever is beautiful and genuinely pleasing in Ghana or about Ghanaians seems to have gone unmentioned”; some of Armah’s countrymen, she said, “could find it difficult to accept in physical terms the necessity for hammering on every page the shit and stink from people and the environment.”2 Ben Obumselu, commenting on the same novel, suggested that in his reaction to the offensive sights and smells of mother Africa, Armah was expressing “the aesthetic discomfort of an

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American tourist” and a “misanthropic neurosis” that was characteristic of an “exiled imagination.”3 Chinua Achebe said that he had found the first novel “a sick book”4 and the second “worse than the first and the third . . . worse than the second”;5 he described Armah as an “alienated native . . . writing like some white District Officer.”6 Toward what kind of social transformation, he asked, could a writer overwhelmed by such existential despair and projecting such destructive, negative images of Africa be committed?7 Armah has now answered some of the questions raised* about his art by writing two novels which attempt to put the accent on the positive. To do this, he has had to retreat into history, first into a figmental past stretching back a full millennium in Two Thousand Seasons * then into the well-documented events a century ago that led to the downfall of the Ashanti Empire, as recreated in The Healers.9 At a moment when other African writers were insisting that the creative artist come to terms with contemporary African realities, Armah appeared to be swimming against the tide by immersing himself in times gone by. Yet his was a Janus-like view for it looked forward at the same time as it fixed its gaze on the past. In fact, these novels are really more concerned with tomorrow than with yesterday or today. They are visionary myths rather than historical chronicles. It is tempting to read current Tanzanian political ideology into such fictions because the emphasis in both is on brotherhood, sharing, self-reliance, and unity. Basic to the argument of each are certain philosophical assumptions: that wealth should be distributed equitably in a society, that the welfare of the community as a whole is more important than that of any single individual in it, that institutions of kingship, chieftaincy, or any other arbitrary forms of hierarchical social order that place one man above others are unnatural and exploitative, that true socialism is, always has been, and ever shall be a guiding principle in indigenous African life. It looks almost as if Armah were trying to justify the ways of TANU to man by creating a legendary prehistory of Ujamaa. The events recorded do not take place in East Africa, however. Both novels are set in West Africa, The Healers quite specifically in nineteenthcentury Ghana, Two Thousand Seasons more generally in a green area bounded on one side by a great desert and on the other by a great sea. The peoples living in this peaceful sub-Saharan haven are subjected to attacks from hostile strangers who invade their territory, taking advantage of their trustfulness, generosity, and the internal political divisions that make them vulnerable to foreign aggression. In other words, both books present Africa as a victim of outside forces that it resists but cannot contain. These depredations of the past are responsible for the chaos one sees in Africa at present, and only by properly understanding that past and present will Africans collectively be able to tackle the problems of the future: how to get the victim back on its feet,

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how to raise the materially oppressed and down-trodden, how to heal the spiritually sick. Instead of merely cursing various symptoms of the colonial disease, as he had done in his first three books, Arm ah now wants to work toward effecting a cure. The strategy in Two Thousand Seasons is to take the longest possible view by moving backward in time to that distant point when an alien civilization first impinged upon African existence. According to Arm ah, this would have been the period of the Arab incursion into the Sudanic grasslands, the aboriginal home of happy, self-sufficient African communities. Armah calls the Arabs “predators,” saying they first came out of the desert in the guise of parasitic beggars and then, after being sustained and nursed to greater strength by their African hosts who were by nature noble, hospitable, and far too charitable, they turned their innate fury against these very benefactors, massacring and enslaving them. The predators, their minds debased by a perverted religion, their bodies yearning for every variety of sybaritic selfgratification, were capable only of depravity and destruction. Whatever they touched, they maimed or killed. The Arab way was the way of annihilation, of absolute obliteration of all that was good, wholesome, and creative. . . . They plant nothing. They know but one harvest: rape. The work of nature they leave to others: the careful planting, the patient nurturing. It is their vocation to fling themselves upon the cultivator and his fruit, to kill the one, to carry off the other. Robbery with force: that is the predators’ road, that is the white destroyers’ road. (p. 63) Contact with so pathological an evil inevitably led some susceptible Africans to follow the predators’ road. This they did by becoming devotees of the new religion, or by trying to raise themselves above others through displays of impressive splendor, or simply by enforcing the slave laws of the conquerors. Armah has a name for each traitorous group: the first he calls “zombis,” the second “ostentatious cripples,” the third “askari zombis.” The initial schism in African society thus developed as a consequence of the Arab invasion and the concomitant spread of Islam. Africans who had been won over to the new faith or who had chosen to serve the conquerors turned against their own kith and kin. The more resilient Africans, those who steadfastly refused to be converted or corrupted by the new forces in their world, decided that the best way to counter such disintegrative pressures was not to confront them in a suicidal counter-attack but rather to remove themselves from the sphere of their harmful influence. So a migration took place—long, arduous, lasting many seasons, covering great distances. Grassland gradually gave way to forest and

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swamp, and the pilgrims', archetypal refugees from religious and political oppression, finally reached their promised land a short distance from the sea. Here they hoped to be left undisturbed by marauders, but almost immediately they met a new alien force—the White invaders from the sea. These European “destroyers” turned out to be even worse than the Arab “predators,” for their unlimited greed was backed by a technology of death more devastating than anything Africa had previously known. At one point a spokesman summed up the base desires of these monsters: % *

The white men wish us to destroy our mountains, leaving ourselves wastes of barren sand. The white men wish us to wipe out our animals, leaving ourselves carcasses rotting into white skeletons. The white men want us to take human beings, our sisters and our sons, and turn them into labouring things . . . (pp. 130-131) To accomplish these goals the White men offered African kings and their courtiers worthless, glittering gifts, thereby bribing them with trinkets to collaborate in the enslavement of their own people. The rest of the novel focuses on one small band of Africans who get sold to European slave traders but stage a successful shipboard revolt and then form themselves into a pioneer liberation army which wreaks vengeance against the White destroyers and their Black lackeys. This group of guerrillas, self-trained and splendidly disciplined, dedicates itself to the destruction of Africa’s enemies, the most creative vocation possible for freedom fighters intent on purging their world of the debilitating malignancies inflicted upon it by European and Arab imperialism. It is an interesting scenario and a fascinating contrast to Armah’s earlier fiction. Instead of watching one man struggle fruitlessly to maintain his purity or sanity in an atmosphere of rank corruption, we see a communal group, activated by the highest ideals, actually succeed in their military maneuvers against extraordinarily powerful antagonists. Instead of witnessing the anguish of a doomed, fragmented individual, we are shown the joy of a mini-tribe united in the struggle against evil. Instead of existential despair, there is revolutionary hope. Instead of defeat, victory. But the optimism in Armah’s new view of man and society in Africa is predicated on certain assumptions which it is difficult to credit as reasonable. Foremost among these is the belief that Africa, before being polluted by contact with the outside world, was a Garden of Eden, at least in terms of social organization. People lived in harmonious communities, sharing the fruits of their labor and never striving to compete against their neighbors for the acquisition of superior status or material goods. Rulers did not exist; the

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communities were acephalous, completely democratic, and devoted to the principle of reciprocity. This principle was the very essence of what Arm.ah calls our way, the way.” Africans were a creative, productive, hospitable, non-oppressive, healthy, and sharing people—until the invaders came, Africans should now strive to return to our way, the way” by destroying the destroyers of their former paradise. The villains in this stark melodrama are portrayed as the obverse of the heroes. This may be a dramatic necessity, in as much as one needs very potent Manichean forces to overwhelm such a superabundance of virtue as is said to have existed in prehistoric Africa. But it also assumes that entire races of people can be reduced to the level of primal forces, that one can be characterized as inherently predisposed toward good, another addicted to evil. This kind of xenophobic oversimplification used to be found in B-grade films manufactured in Hollywood during the Second World War, in which fanatical kamikaze pilots and fat, stupid, goose-stepping German generals represented all that was reprehensible in the world. The “Japs” and “Krauts” in such celluloid fantasies performed essentially the same function as the “predators” and “destroyers” in Armah’s fiction: they were crude, simplistic symbols toward which a chauvinistic audience could direct the energy of its hatred while waiting for the satisfying denouement in which vice would be vanquished and virtue rewarded. The good guys might lose a few battles, but they always won the war. The trouble with Armah’s cartoon history of Africa is that it ultimately is not a positive vision, even though it promises future happiness. All it really offers is negation of negation. The most creative act imaginable is destruction of the destroyers. The last pages of Two Thousand Seasons reiterate this theme with evangelical fervor: . . . Nothing good can be created that does not of its very nature push forward the destruction of the destroyers . . . Whatever thing, whatever relationship, whatever consciousness takes us along paths closer to our way, whatever goes against the white destroyers’ empire, that thing only is beautiful, that relationship only is truthful, that consciousness alone has satisfaction for the still living mind. (pp. 319-320) This is a philosophy of paranoia, an anti-racist racism—in short, negritude reborn. In place of a usable historical myth, Two Thousand Seasons overschematizes the past, creating the dangerous kind of lie that Frantz Fanon used to call a “mystification.” Compare, for example, Armah’s treatment of history with Chinua Achebe’s. In Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Achebe shows us complex human beings entangled in a web of circumstances that ultimately brings

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disaster to rural Igbo society. The individuals portrayed cannot be divided into two camps—the saints versus the sinners—but rather can be recognized as quite ordinary people motivated by fairly commonplace ambitions and desires. Moreover, the communities in which they live are not perfect or even remotely perfectible; they are rife with conflicts ranging from the petty to the profound, conflicts which are exacerbated when an alien civilization intrudes into their relatively encapsulated world. The ensuing interaction between Europe and Africa is not really a species of all-out war but rather an uneasy, and at times unpeaceful, coexistence of differing world-views in which the inability of one side to comprehend the perspective of the other precipitates tragedy. Achebe perceives that it was a failure of communication, not an absence of humanity, that was responsible for certain of the catastrophes of the colonial period. In documenting the numerous ironies of this confused era with such compassion and lucidity, Achebe proves a more convincing historian than Armah. Achebe deeply understands ethnocentrism, whereas Armah shallowly advocates it. In his latest novel The Healers, Armah moves a step closer to fleshing out his nightmare vision of the past by substituting concrete substance for abstract symbol. If Two Thousand Seasons was his theory of history, The Healers is an adumbration of the theory using actual recorded events as proof of the hypothesis advanced. Armah takes the fall of the Ashanti Empire as emblematic of Africa’s destruction, and he attributes the calamity not only to the rapacity of the West but also to the disunity within Africa itself. It is toward the reunification of Africa tomorrow that Africans must work today if they wish to repair the damage done yesterday. History is again seen as a guide to a better future. The novel itself is unified by the imagery of disease. Africa has been prostrated by a foreign plague against which it has no natural immunity, and some of its members, infected beyond all possibility of recovery, have turned against the parent body itself, spreading the disabling disorder still further. Any manifestation of division in society is regarded as a symptom of the malady, a crippling indisposition requiring a cure. Notice how smoothly this imagery of illness is employed to elucidate Armah’s underlying political philosophy in the following passage: Healing an individual person—what is that but restoring a lost unity to that individual’s body and spirit? A people can be diseased the same way. Those who need naturally to be together but are not, are they not a people sicker than the individual body disintegrated from its soul? Sometimes a whole people needs healing work. Not a tribe, not a nation. Tribes and nations are just signs that the whole is diseased. The healing work that cures a whole people is the highest work, far higher than the cure of single individuals . . .

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The ending of all unnatural rifts is healing work. When different groups within what should be a natural community clash against each other, that also is disease. That is why healers say that our people, the way we are now divided into petty nations, are suffering from a terrible disease, (pp. 100-101) Fortunately, there are a few remarkably perceptive hermits living a pure life on the fringes of this sick society who are devoted to the art of healing. They function simultaneously as physicians, psychoanalysts, and social theorists, for they are committed not only to restoring the physical and mental health of ailing individuals but also to purging the body politic of all its ills. Because they possess the ability to see, hear, understand, and act more truly than ordinary human beings, they are the seers and prophets who can lead Africa back to wholeness: A healer needs to see beyond the present and tomorrow. He needs to see years and decades ahead. Because healers work for results so firm they may not be wholly visible till centuries have flowed into millennia. Those willing to do this necessary work, they are the healers of our people. Naturally, Densu, the hero of the novel, is one of these, or rather is an idealistic young man who, aspiring to join this elite fraternity, begins to undergo the long process of initiation and apprenticeship required. Certainly he seems to have all the necessary qualifications. Intelligent, sensitive, honest, courageous, hardy, persevering, self-sacrificing, totally dedicated, yet becomingly modest about his many prodigious achievements, he is the model “pre-med” student, the pluperfect seer-in-training. One searches in vain for the tiniest flaw in his character. At this point one is tempted to pause and ask why so many of Armah’s heroes are of this saintly breed. Why does he feel compelled to make his protagonists supermen? Are such beautiful ones ever born? Is Arm ah bent on creating a new type of utopian fiction? Or is he merely rewriting a modern secular version of The Pilgrim's Progress in which an upright un-Christian soldier, beset by numerous temptations, goes single-mindedly marching on to social salvation, never veering from the straight and narrow path, uour way, the way”? Densu, a bit younger than most of Armah’s puritanical protagonists, is introduced to us as an unsullied boy scout. In village games testing physical and mental prowess, he invariably is the overall champion, losing only when he defaults by refusing to participate in wrestling and pigeon shooting—violent sports that violate his higher moral principles. It is true that he is beaten in a few short sprints by a more muscular Adonis, but he reigns supreme in the

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long-distance races demanding greater stamina and controlled efficiency of effort. However, even though he is a consistent winner, he dislikes such competitions because they set one individual against another—indeed, against his whole community. Densu, you see, believes in equality, brotherhood, and reciprocity, not in individual achievement. But Armah lets us know that there is no prize, no merit badge that this paragon, born of noble blood, could not win if he really wanted to. Some socialists, as Orwell pointed out long ago, are more equal than others. * Densu serves his apprenticeship under Damfo, a master healer and supreme scoutmaster who lives, significantly, in the eastern forest. Damfo teaches him the seven commandments of the healer’s faith and helps him to distinguish between two crucial concepts: “inspiration” and “manipulation”: *

The healer devotes himself to inspiration. He also lives against manipulation [which is] a disease, a popular one. It comes from spiritual blindness. If I’m not spiritually blind, I see your spirit. I speak to it if I want to invite you to do something with me. If your spirit agrees it moves your body and your body acts. That’s inspiration. But if I’m blind to your spirit I see only your body. Then if I want you to do something for me I force or trick your body into doing it even against your spirit’s direction. That’s manipulation. Manipulation steals a person’s body from his spirit, cuts the body off from its own spirit’s direction. The healer is a lifelong enemy of all manipulation. The healer’s method is inspiration. The major manipulators, of course, are the local court politicians and foreign imperialists whose greed is dividing Africa against itself. Discord and disunity are seen as by-products of the kind of political system that sets one man above others, that concentrates power in the hands of a few. Even the healers themselves are cautioned by Damfo against the dangers of elitism and power politics in their own work: We healers do not fear power. We avoid power deliberately, as long as that power is manipulative power. There is a kind of power we would all embrace and help create. It is the same power we use in our work: the power of inspiration. The power that respects the spirit in every being, in every thing, and lets every being be true to the spirit within. Healers should embrace that kind of power. Healers should help create that kind of power. But that kind of power—the power that comes from inspiration—can never be created with manipulators. If we healers allow the speedy results of manipulation to attract us, we

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shall destroy ourselves and more than ourselves, our vocation . . . Are we forgetting that for healers the meaning of the span of life takes in our whole people, not just our single separate lives? (p. 329) So the struggle continues, not just here and now, but for generations to come. It may take another two thousand seasons for Africa to be healed through the power of inspiration. It is clear that Arm ah himself wants to assist in the healing process. The role of the writer, he seems to be saying, is to inspire Africa to be true to its own spirit so it can be reunited as the harmonious community it once was before the predators and destroyers came. This is a noble goal, even if the “paradise lost” theme is rather naive as an interpretation of human history. Arm ah evidently is trying to do something constructive in his fiction, something far more positive than he had done in his first three novels. Giving Africa a new, clean image of itself is a much more wholesome occupation than rubbing its nose in dung. And, indeed, The Healers is a better-balanced book, a saner piece of fiction, than Two Thousand Seasons. Gone, but not totally forgotten, are the Arab and European demons who were objects of such intense hatred in Arm ah’s earlier venture into history. Gone, too, are the scenes of sexual perversion and the almost Homeric descriptions of bloodshed, gore, and corporeal mutilation, descriptions which told in gleeful, gloating detail exactly where a bullet or blade entered an enemy’s body and where it exited. Gone as well is the over-idealized band of forest guerrillas, those glamorous outlaws descended from a romantic blend of Mao, Mau Mau, and Robin Hood, who, instead of offering the reader some semblance of fidelity to African life, gave imaginary life to African fidelity. Gone, in short, are the delirious fantasies that pushed Two Thousand Seasons beyond the dimensions of viable myth into the wilder liberties of nightmare. The Healers, it must be admitted, also has its good guys and bad guys, its heavy-handed moralizing, and its propensity to force history to fit a predetermined ideological paradigm, but it is not a harmful book to put into the hands of young people. For one thing, it does not encourage xenophobia. For another, it emphasizes creativity (“inspiration”) rather than destruction. And by concentrating on real events and weaving fiction into the fabric of fact, it could help young Africans to reshape their perspective on the past and come to a better understanding of the world in which they currently live. In other words, it offers an interpretation of human experience that seems valid because it is rooted in an imaginable reality. Yet it is still a cartoon, still comic-strip history. It will not persuade many adults because it falsifies far more than it authenticates and in the process fails

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to avoid the pitfalls of oversimplification. Nevertheless, some grown-ups will be able to enjoy it at the level of popular fiction, for it is good cops-androbbers, cowboys-and-Indians stuff. It even includes a murder mystery to bait the reader’s interest. But basically it is juvenile adventure fiction of the Treasure Island or King Solomon’s Mines sort, the only major difference being that it is thoroughly African juvenile adventure fiction. Densu is the new Jim Hawkins or Allan Quatermain, the young man with whom generations of schoolchildren will readily be able to identify. And he is a fine model for them, a decent and wholesome youth who, as Mark Twain is alleged to have said of James Fenimore Cooper’s heroes, never gets his hair mussed and never farts. If the mission schools could somehow manage to forgive or forget Densu’s tumbles in the grass with Ajoa, sales to high schools could be quite brisk. It might even become a set book for school certificate exams. I am not saying this to belittle the novel’s importance. Obviously, The Healers is a major attempt by a major African writer to reinterpret a major event in African history. But I think it will have its major impact on young people, and this is as it should be in any remythologizing of Africa. One must aim at winning the hearts and minds of the young, imbuing them with the highest ideals and making them proud and happy to be Africans. This The Healers does better than any other novel Arrnah has written. And this is why it is potentially his most important book and certainly his healthiest. One can no longer complain that his vision is warped or his art sick. So the Tanzanian years have been good ones for Armah, helping him to emerge from the destructive negativeness of cynicism and despair, turning him in a more confident, affirmative direction. This would-be healer gives signs of having himself been cured. One waits now to see what the Lesotho years will bring.

Notes ‘This novel, which Armah started writing in Ghana in the mid-1960s, was not completed until after he had arrived in Tanzania in August 1970. Since it was published in 1972, and since Armah began writing Two Thousand Seasons in October 1971, one can assume that much of Why Are We So Blest? had been written in the 1960s and that Armah was able to finish it during his first year in Tanzania. In other words, it does not owe its inspiration to his Tanzanian experience in quite the same way as the next two novels apparently do. Biographical information on Armah can be found in his essay “Larsony, or Fiction as Criticism of Fiction,” First World, 1, 2 (1977), 50-55. This essay has been reprinted in Asemka, 4 (1976), 1-14; New Classic, 4 (1977), 33-45; and

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Positive Review, 1 (1978), 11-14. The period during which Two Thousand Seasons (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973; London: Heinemann, 1979) was written is recorded on page 321 of that novel. 2

Ama Ata Aidoo, Introduction to The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1969), p. xii. 3

Ben Obumselu, “Marx, Politics, and the African Novel,” Twentieth Century Studies, 10 (1973), 114-116. 4

Chinua Achebe, “Africa and Her Writers,” in Morning Yet on Creation Day (London: Heinemann, 1975), p. 25. The same essay appears in a slightly different form in Karen Morell (editor), In Person: Achebe, Awoonor and Soyinka (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1975), pp. 3-23. 5

“Class Discussion,” in Karen Morell, In Person . . ., p. 52.

6

Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet. . ., p. 26; Karen Morell, In Person . . ., pp.

15-16. 7

Chinua Achebe, “Panel on Literature and Commitment in South Africa,” Issue, 6, 1 (1976), 37. 8

Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973; London: Heinemann, 1979). All quotations are taken from the 1973 edition. 9

Ayi Kwei Armah, The Healers (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1978; London: Heinemann, 1979). All quotations are taken from the 1978 edition.

Editor's Note: Quotations from Armah’s novels in the above essay have been shortened and, in some cases, omitted for purposes of this publication.

Myth and Modern Fiction: Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons

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Isidore Okpewho

In a recent article I recommended what may be called a qualitative definition of myth. I chose to see the tales of the oral tradition as belonging in a continuum in which they enjoy various degrees of contiguity one with the other. One side of the continuum is marked by the element of fact, the other side by the element of fantasy or fiction. Every tale will be located on this continuum depending on the proportional relationship that it demonstrates between one element and the other. It soon becomes clear that the further away a tale moves from the world of real-life experiences into that of fantasy, the more it liberates itself from the bondage to historical time and thus addresses itself to larger philosophical questions of existence. Myth, therefore, I have argued, is that quality of fancy that informs the symbolistic or configurative powers of the human mind in varying degrees of intensity. In that sense we are free to call any narrative of the oral tradition a myth, so long as it gives due emphasis to fanciful play.1 If a myth is a quality that marks tales of the oral tradition in proportion to their liberation from the constraints of time and experience, then surely we can identify this mythic quality in modern fictional works according as they are indebted to the received material of the oral tradition in content and/or in form? A number of African writers have shown a certain Proustian nostalgia for roots, and a review of the various uses they have made of the oral narrative traditions of the continent would reveal the following tendencies. The first may be labeled tradition preserved in the sense that the writers concerned have done little more than translate the indigenous tale into a modern European language like English with few liberties, or at most restructured the tale into what they consider a more representative (formally or stylistically) mode. Examples are J. P. Clark’s two presentations of the Ozidi tradition,2 Taban lo Liyong’s “The Old Man of Usumbura and His Misery,”3 and Bessie Head’s “The Deep

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River. A second tendency may be called tradition observed in the sense that the writers have simply woven the themes and techniques of the oral narrative tradition around the experiences of protagonists created by them; their stories, that is, are little more than a pastiche of folk tale episodes built around a more or less contemporary hero. Examples are the tales of Fagunwa’s hunternarrator Akara-Ogun5 and Tutuola’s drinkard.6 The above two tendencies reveal a marked bondage to tradition. Here and there we may find a technical or idiomatic device that strains to appeal to modern educated taste or else a moralistic outlook and contextual references that advertise a relevance to contemporary society. But on the whole the writers have not allowed themselves much imaginative freedom from the received material of the oral narrative tradition. The writers in our next two categories, however, are as marked by a sense of present-day socio-political imperatives as the writers in the above categories are by their archival awe, so to speak, for the time-honored ways. We thus come to a third tendency which may be called tradition refined. The classic example in this regard can be seen in the creative work of Wole Soyinka. Here the tales in their old forms are gracefully abandoned and, by some process of creative alchemy, drained of their enduring essences. One major reason for this is that the tales of the oral tradition are told largely to delight the audience: traces of this element of entertainment can be seen in Fagunwa’s Ogboju Ode, where the author at the start invites his readers to see the tale in the light of a veritable agidigbo musical performance, and the narrator concludes the tale by hoping that it has delighted the audience. But Soyinka conceives his creative work against the background of the painful socio-political morass of his African society and indeed the world at large. His work is imbued with a certain revolutionary spirit; the element of idyllic delight has had to give way to a tone of painful criticism. Soyinka has therefore scoured the Yoruba oral narrative tradition to derive a figure who would represent the painful dualities of existence and the revolutionary urge to grapple persistently with the mess of society and menace of existence. In the creative output of Wole Soyinka the revolutionary essence of the Ogun figure has spanned both those works that are more or less intended for local cultural consumption (for example, A Dance of the Forests) and those that embrace a larger cultural universe, as in his novels7 and The Bacchae of Euripides. However far afield Soyinka strays in his mythic vision of the human predicament, he is nevertheless firmly tethered to a recognizable body of traditional tales that constitute his solid guide. This body of tales defines or is defined by an integral world-view which is distinctly Yoruba though it may have parallels across the world. There is first a local ethnic vision, which is then projected on the world or humanity at large. But what happens when the ethnic base is not as limited as that from

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which Soyinka takes off? What happens when the writer’s sensibility is guided not so much by a cultural outlook defined by a known setting and an equally known body of tales, as by the vision of a culture yet to be evolved or in the process of evolving? In the absence of any definitive body of tales, will the writer not be forced to create a new mythology to suit the new cultural outlook? Even when the writer is dealing with the mythology of a known group of people, will he not engage in a programmatic rejection of its well-advertised ideas if he finds they do not suit the new vision of society that he advocates on the basis of urgent social imperatives? These are the kinds of questions we have to confront in dealing with the younger generation of African writers who are guided by a certain revolutionary conscience and do not think the old mythology provides sufficient answers for the problems of contemporary African society. In their works we find an intensification of the critical spirit, an urge to overhaul the foundations on which the old social outlook was erected, and consequently an energy directed at creating a new mythology that would offer for the projected or emergent society a firmer road to selfrealization than could be found in the older traditions. We may therefore wish to call the tendency here revealed tradition revised. Perhaps no recent work better demonstrates this urge to review the old mythic tradition and furnish new hopes than Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons.8 It must be admitted right away that so far as revolutionary zeal is concerned Soyinka precedes and has in many ways inspired the new generation of writers. In embracing the figure of Ogun rather than Chaka as the true guide in Africa’s confrontation with the menaces of racialism and other forms of domination,9 Soyinka demonstrates a firm awareness of the needs and aspirations of contemporary African society, whether or not all Africans are prepared for a physical confrontation. And in dismissing as shortsighted the Obatala view of life as a sacrosanct whole or harmony,10 Soyinka reveals a willingness to question some of the premises of the traditional mythology. But he nevertheless continues to revere that tradition and to use it as the basis for his recommendations on contemporary life and his proposals for contemporary action. The new radical writers simply do not think Soyinka has gone far enough. Some of them have embraced the Marxist-Socialist outlook as the only real solution to Africa’s present socio-political problems. From this point of view, the old tales are dismissed outright as indices of the intellectual infancy of the race—where the oppressors of the race would like it to remain—or else as devices by which the ruling class of the traditional society perpetually kept the masses in servitude. What is needed now is a programmatic replacement of these tales and their symbols by new ones, or at least a thorough reassessment of the parameters of the old mythology so as to reassert the rights and claims of elements of the society who have been for too long dispossessed. Whether as whole tales or as metaphors, therefore, tales about gods and heroes

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and other superior beings have no room in the new radical outlook, because they help to perpetuate an unjust order and do not take due account of the urgent problems ot contemporary society. Something else must be put in their place without, to be sure, abdicating any of that imaginative power on which their system was founded. In a large sense this radical quest for a new order of reality and a new direction for the old imaginative energy recalls the efforts of certain American writers who saw themselves very much at a similar turning point in cultural and political history to that at which the present generation of African writers clearly finds itself. Vv alt Whitman accepted the fundamental imaginative fire that inspired the myths of the Old World, but rejected the tales themselves as well as the figures who people them (gods, nymphs, and what-not) because they did not go very well with the emerging democratic and pragmatic outlook of the America of his time. In his recent book, Richardson tends to underestimate the mythic impulse and to exaggerate the religious fervor in Whitman’s poetry, but he clearly grasps the essence of the poet’s attitude to the old tales when he says: In place of myth Whitman gives us symbols, images of man himself, a new religion of humanity, and prophecy. It is hard to see how any poet could make a greater or more affirmative use of myth than Whitman did by the very process of abandoning it.11 William Faulkner was forced to make a similar adjustment in his relationship to the older mythic tradition, which, to counter the feeling of degradation resulting from defeat in the Civil War, saw the old South as essentially noble in spirit and the martial defeat itself as a vindication rather than a condemnation of a just ethical code. Living in an age when the South needed badly to open its eyes to the social picture that was slowly but clearly emerging, Faulkner found he could not accept unconditionally the old illusions about fundamental nobility; in his novels he has created the mythical society of Yoknapatawpha in which the genteel morality of the Sartorises competes on equal terms with the amoral pragmatism of the Snopeses, both classes huddled inextricably together in a melting pot simmering with a sense of guilt from the systematic dehumanization of Indians and Negroes. For Faulkner, the Yoknapatawpha myth is a more realistic picture of contemporary Southern society. In response to critics who have continually seen Faulkner as a fervid defender of the old Southern tradition, Irving Howe has rightly pointed out: The truth is that he writes in opposition to this myth as well as in acceptance of it, that he struggles with it even as he continues to acknowledge its power and charm. As he moves from book to book, turning a more critical and mature eye upon his material,

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the rejection of an inherited tradition acquires a much greater intellectual and emotional stress than its defense. At no point, neither in his early romanticizing nor his later moral realism, is Faulkner’s attitude toward the past of the South a simple or fixed one.12 In Two Thousand Seasons Arm ah gives due acknowledgment to the power and charm of the African oral tradition; but he will have none of that social stratification that the tales put forward. What we have in the book is a tale in the oral style all right, but one that is intensely critical rather than eulogistic or designed to please, one that rejects the present social history of Africa as unrepresentative of its true character and so projects us, in true prophetic fashion, to a vision of an Africa that is free of its shackles and guided by an ideology or religion—“the way”—on which the race was nurtured from time immemorial. The tone of the novel is nasty and for the most part downright intemperate—as Soyinka himself has observed, “the humane sensibility tends to recoil a little”;13 but nobody who has encountered the flagellating prose of the classic Faulkner will pretend that the language of such intense selfreassessment can be anything like good music. Two Thousand Seasons is a rolling survey of the history of Africa (here given the name of one of its mythical ancestors, Anoa) from a nebulous past to a visionary future. It tells of a people tormented every step of the way by the menace of the “white death,” which is Armah’s standard phrase for the various shades of colonial domination—religious, cultural, economic, and what have you. The story starts with a wistful memory of a peaceful and congenial land, so welcoming and “giving” that it is totally unaware of the demonic intent of the Arabs (here called “predators”) who come seeking hospitality. With the Arab conquest comes the alien god of Islam and a growing threat to the cherished ways of the people—a “way of death” steadily infiltrating the traditional “way of life.” After a bitter confrontation the people of Anoa weigh their chances and decide to leave their original home (somewhere on the fringes of the Sahara). But in their new land the people begin to realize that the Arabs have indeed infiltrated the traditional outlook. For there now grows an uncharacteristic hunger for privileges and social prestige, as demonstrated by the rise of the institution of monarchy; the old way of reciprocity is now being supplanted by a selfish instinct for absolute power and exclusive authority. A certain divisiveness thus comes upon the people, which makes it easy for the next group of colonizers (White hordes from over the seas whom Arm ah calls “destroyers”) to entrench themselves. Under the notorious and damnable king Koranche, the people begin to lose every shred of liberty they ever had, the White men ensuring the continued cooperation of the king with gifts of worthless jewelry and alcohol as well as armed protection against the growing

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resentment. The end of all this is the enslavement of the people; a spiritual process materializes into a physical reality, as the traditional rites designed to usher the flower of Anoa s youth into full social maturity succeed only in conducting them to the slave ships of the White destroyers. But there is, in spite of all this, a handful of citizens who still remember “the way,” whose vision and sanity have not totally succumbed to the menace of “the white death. One of these is the wise councillor Isanusi, who is forced into exile by the overwhelming degeneracy of the land and its leaders but whose apostasy ultimately yields good results. For the enslaved youths, now on their voyage to the land of the destroyers, combine courage with imagination to overpower their slavers and Black stooges (“askaris”) and so turn the ship back toward home, with a handy store of ammunition won in successive confrontations with hordes of slavers. The struggle for the total liberation of the land of Anoa has effectively begun. The youths finally link up with Isanusi in his jungle hideout, and after a series of lightning operations the land is firmly rid of the White destroyers and the puppets they have propped up for their advantage. The story ends with an appeal to future generations for continued watchfulness and an exhortation to that reciprocity and communalism that will ensure the permanence of “the way” long after the chroniclers of it have passed away. Two Thousand Seasons is a racial epic. In tracing the mythic quality of the novel, we may best begin by discussing Armah’s debt to the oral tradition from which the narrative genre of the epic ultimately derives. The narrative voice of the novel is that of “remembrance” or chronicling; so to a large extent we are right in seeing the entire performance (such as it is) in the light of the classic legends of the Sunjata type. But we soon realize that the two lines run only parallel to one another, largely because many of the stylistic techniques that Arm ah borrows from the oral tradition are far less attuned to delight than they are to sadness and criticism: instead of a historical song of glory, that is, what we get is a song of sad condemnation—though it ends with the promise that better days await the race with the elimination of the troubles plaguing it. We have a good deal of repeated phrases, but whereas in most oral traditions there is a lyrical feeling to these repetitions and an urge to please the ear, in Armah’s novel there is either a condemnatory ring to them (“Woe to . . .,” “Prince Bentum, renamed Bradford George”) or else a harsh admonitory din so as to burn the message indelibly into the reader’s mind (as in the interminable repetition of “our way” and “the way” throughout the book). The rhetorical flavor of several passages in the book also leans only faintly toward the oral tradition. The numerous exclamations of “Hau!” recall analogous instances in the heroic narrative of what may be called a sense of moment, by which the narrator highlights the magnitude of a spectacle or the significance of an event.14 But here in Armah the alert seems restricted to a painful emphasis on the immensity of the horrors or tragedies that the Black

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race has experienced at successive stages of its history. The novel is indeed strikingly economical in its eulogistic use of the rhetorical voice. Where the oral narrator would with all due rhetorical Sian dwell at considerable length on events that call for glorification, Armah’s narrator dismisses such events with only a flourish of rhetorical questions so that the reader is not diverted by cheap adulation from the urgent task that lies ahead.15 There are many occasions when our narrator’s spirit is tempted to seek release in an extended lyrical flourish, but it is sternly checked because the job needing to be done is an arduous one and all that is permitted is a handful of wistful lines. “The promise of a praise song,” we are told, “will pass swiftly; we shall not halt the main remembrance long” (p. 56). But nothing in the entire narrative marks its departure from the style of the oral tradition quite as much as the narrative voice and the nature of the empathy that it allows itself. One of the notable marks of the oral narrative is the prominence of the single artistic personality, the manner in which the narrator assumes a certain proprietorship over the events that he recreates and seeks full recognition, from the audience, of his merits as a performer. The various versions of the Sunjata legend show the narrators making every effort to let us know who they are and what their backgrounds are. In the Innes collection,16 Bamba Suso lets us know that it was his grandfather who brought the kora (harp-lute) from the land of the spirits and introduced it to Mandinka culture, and Banna Kanute would have his unappreciative host understand “that an ordinary narrator and an expert singer are not the same.” In the Malian epic Kambiliy{1 the narrator Seydou Camara brags that the art of performance “is not easy for all.” But there is never, in Two Thousand Seasons, the self-consciousness of the singular creative personality. What we have instead is the collective voice (“we,” “our”) of a people united in a common historical experience; thib entire account is presented as “our remembrance” inspired by a “connected consciousness” and a thorough sense of commitment to a cause, not the occasional art of a paid performer. The narrative voice does come close to a personal reference, but even this is presented in collective terms. Introducing us to the stage in the painful history of the Black people marked by the entrance of the “white destroyers,” the voice tells us: “It was in Koranche’s time as king that the children of our age grew up” (p. 74). We are also told—with an underlying touch of sadness, it must be admitted—that at the time the people were beginning to be robbed of every measure of freedom they once had, the collective narrator was too young to appreciate the loss: All this was done before the time when we of our age began our initiations—for us a beautiful time, time of friendship, time of learning, when in the blindness of childhood we knew only of

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our own growing powers but of the weakening, the destruction of the power of our people we were completely ignorant, (p. 85) An interesting moment also occurs in the account of the youths’ fight against their captors on the slave ship. Even though the names of these youths are given, the collective voice of the narrator is so pervasive that it is here shifted onto the youths themselves; One of the white destroyers and askaris came to us . . . (p. 113). In the oral tradition the narrator frequently allows himself the liberty of infiltrating the world of his tale but it is usually to the exclusion of his audience and never with the kind of communalistic conscience that we find in Armah’s novel. It is thus inevitable that Arm ah should turn his back on much that constitutes the oral tradition as known today. His novel is largely a condemnation of the system of privileges that has infiltrated traditional African society under corrupt foreign influences. With the death of the old classless society and the emergence of social stratification, the free poetic spirit that moved men to tell the truth gave way to a tradition that served the interests of the overlords of the system. This anti-elitist reading of the oral tradition in Africa no doubt owes a great deal to Marxist thought. We may recall Caudwell’s analysis of the degeneration of the oral tradition from a people’s metaphysical enquiry (undertaken in an honest collective spirit) into the nature of things (mythology) to a base superstitious adoration (legends) of a god-king beneath whom the exploited and dehumanized folk grovel: This superstition is simply the mythology of the people, playing its old collective role, but now regarded as something vulgar and ungentlemanly by the ruling class. This superstition itself bears signs that, although collective, its collectiveness is the emasculated homogeneity of an emasculated class. It has a childishness and servility which distinguishes it from the barbarian simplicity of the creations of an undivided society. Sometimes tolerated, sometimes condemned, this superstition shows the adaptation to the role of an exploited class and is tainted with the idiocy of exploitation. It is full of luck and gold and magic meals and lucky sons—all the fortune this class so conspicuously lacks. But it is genuine, and believed without the need for Faith, precisely because it is not coercively enforced but is the spontaneous production of a collective spirit, and, if not an undivided society, at least of an undivided class. It is the poetry of religion at a time when religion itself ceases to be poetic. It is the art of the oppressed. Though it fulfills the function of poetry in adapting man’s instincts to social life, it cannot be great poetry, for it is no lie that great poetry can only be written by the free. This

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poetry moves within the boundaries of wish-fulfillment. Its creators have too little spontaneity in their life to be greatly conscious of necessity. It is not therefore ever tragic poetry.18 0 »

Arm ah does come down heavily on the legend tradition in Africa. Nothing can be more Contemptuous of the artistic traditions inspired by figures like Sunjata than the picture of African leaders and kings like “Bulukutu, he who gave himself a thousand grandiose, empty names of praise yet died forgotten except in the memories of laughing rememberers” (pp. 63-64), or “Kamuzu [who engaged] an old singer with a high, racing voice to sing for him, and a hireling drummer brought from Poano beat out the words on mercenary skin for his flattery” (p. 172). The idea that there is a touch of mockery in the glorification of potentates surely contradicts the wistful pride with which present-day griots recall the privileged position enjoyed by their predecessors,19 and in a large sense Arman underestimates the seriousness these chroniclers attach to their art. But his critical attitude is in tune with his ideological view of a traditional African outlook corrupted by the emergence of a class of privileged men. For a truly damning attack on an African ruler glorified by the oral tradition, we may consider the following portrait of a figure who can be no other than Mansa Musa I of Mali: Have we forgotten the stupid pilgrimage of the one sumamed—o, ridiculous pomp—the Golden: he who went across the desert from his swollen capital twenty days’ journey from where we lived; he who went with slaves and servants hauling gold to astonish eyes in the desert? . . . We have among us even now humans with a reputation for wisdom in the knowledge of our people who yet remember that journey of an imbecile as if its gigantic wastage meant some unspoken glory for our people. The aftermath of that moron journey was the desert white men’s attack on us. (p. 62)20 It is not only acknowledged historical figures that Arm ah divests of the false glory that the traditions have put upon them. He also directs his attack on the heroic stereotype of the figure credited with superhuman powers and achievements that can be conceived only in the “idiocy”—to borrow Caudwell’s sneer—of the Active imagination. Arm ah dates such a tradition to the infiltration of Black culture by the Arabs and their agents: Children walked among us believing secretly there had been an age of giants and doers of great deeds now gone, and that these doers of great deeds had been their fathers’ fathers. They heard secret, nostalgic tales of a time when a brave man had no need

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to do the careful, steady work of planting, watching, harvesting, but could in one sudden, brilliant flash of violent energy capture from others all the riches he craved, then like a python lie lazy through the length of coming seasons, consuming his victim profit, (p. 32) The treatment of the development of Anoa, the female ancestor from whom the race takes its name, gives us a good instance of the divergence between Arm ah and the oral tradition in the portrayal of the heroic personality. What we see in Anoa is little more than a realistic picture of a child prodigy—nothing of that fanciful language that surrounds the figures of Sunjata, Kambili, and so on. Here too is a character shaped more by a communal instinct than by the selfish urge for self-glorification, attuned more to peace than to the clamor of heroic action. Thus, when she does master the art of hunting: She further discomfited her teachers by reminding them that aggressive hunting was against our way, that the proper use of hunting skills should be for halting the aged lion seeking human prey in its dangerous impotence, for stopping the wild hog prowling about the growing farm, for teaching his sidelong hyena to keep its distance, not for wanton pleasure, (pp. 14-15) We may wonder how honest such a picture is; but anyone who can perceive the heavily Islamic flavor in the Mandinka epics will scarcely wonder why Armah is convinced that the indigenous African view of personality must be different and that such exaggerated portraits of heroism must date from foreign contact. Any theory of diffusion of tales and their motifs will naturally run against the counter-theory of the psychic unity of mankind. In the light of his general condemnation of the corruption, by the foreign White elitist culture, of the healthy communalism of Africa, Armah will be the last to put the indigenous Black mind on a level with that which conceived the “grotesque” images of Arab culture. But it is in his attack on Christian theology that Armah reveals his summary rejection of the supernatural community or machinery on which much traditional African mythology and religion rest. Speaking of the missionary who comes to Anoa as the third in the line of “white destroyers,” the collective narrator mocks his Christian doctrine as fables fit only for juvenile, uninitiated minds: We told the white missionary we had such fables too, but kept them for the entertainment of those yet growing up—fables of gods and devils and a supreme being above everything. We told them we knew soft minds needed such illusions, but that when

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any mind grew among us to adulthood it grew beyond these fables and came to understand that there is indeed a great force in the world, a force spiritual and able to shape the physical universe, but that that force is not something cut off, not something separate from ourselves. It is an energy in us ... (p. 96) In espousing the animistic basis of the African world-view Armah seems closer to the sage Ogotemmeli21 than to Soyinka, who clq^rly accepts the hierarchical relationship between divinity and humanity as a first principle in his derivation of the essences guiding the Yoruba world-view. We may recall that terrible moment in the battle of Ire when the frenzied pleas of the people are unable to stop the bloodthirsty god from his indiscriminate carnage: “Too late came warning that a god / Is still a god to men.”22 However, Ogotemmeli incorporates his animistic logic within a broad mythological sketch of the creation of the universe and the emergence of Dogon religious ideas. But even such traditions of origin, presented in a scheme of images that have no basis in objective reality, Armah would dismiss as the product of the “idiocy” of foreign sanction: What we do not know we do not claim to know. Who made the earth and when? We have no need to claim to know. Many thoughts, growing with every generation, have come down to us, many wonderings. The best have left us thinking it is not necessary for the earth to have been created by any imagined being. We have thought it better to start from sure knowledge, call fables fables, and wait till clarity, (p. 3) In abjuring the fanciful imagery of traditional mythology and embracing objective reality, Armah is at pains—very much like Walt Whitman—to stress the urgency of historical experience and the contemporary scene in shaping the density of the race. In a more recent publication of his, a sympathetic review essay on Thomas Mofolo’s “historical epic” Chaka, Armah tries very hard to excuse the fanciful language of that classic but does not hesitate to be critical where he thinks “the author has twisted historical fact.”23 There is a certain naivete in any attempt to separate “poetry” from “history” in the material of the oral narrative tradition (on which Mofolo’s Chaka has been constructed), but Armah is anxious here to see the cultural progress of the Black race conducted only by recognizable historical figures. Accordingly, Two Thousand Seasons is peopled by characters (both good and evil) taken mostly from contemporary African culture and political history as well as (understandably) such African “historical” classics as Chaka. On the positive side we have the following figures leading the struggle for Black liberation (no doubt the conjectures have the support of Armah’s historicist conscience): on page 155,

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(Wole) Soyinka, renowned creative writer and essayist; Kimathi and Dedan, from the struggle for Kenyan independence as celebrated in Ngugi’s novels; (Abiola) Irele, Nigerian scholar; (Atukwei) Okai, Ghanaian poet; and so on. From the historical traditions of the Zulu of southern African Armah has also taken the names Isanusi (p. 73 and passim), the witchdoctor in Mofolo’s Chaka, Chaka’s mother Nandi (p. 125), Noliwe (p. 54), Chaka’s beloved whom he had to sacrifice for power, and so on. On the negative side we have characters—the “ostentatious cripples” and stooges of the White men—who dangerously echo the names of present-day African leaders with whose policies and lifestyles Armah obviously does not agree: Bokasa, Senho (p. 28), and, most prominent of all, Kamuzu (p. 155 and passim). There are also terrible portraits of figures who invite uneasy connections with contemporary leaders from the Arab world: Hussein, Hassan, and Faisal (pp. 21-22). The recourse to “history” in this work is overwhelming, and that leads us to a significant question: is it possible for a work that deliberately renounces the major techniques as well as the premises of traditional mythopoeia to achieve a mythical character? One way to answer this question would be to identify the fundamental means of myth-making. It should be clear than an attachment to historical, time-bound reality robs a tale of its chances of yielding an abstract, transcendent message, and that the true mythic quality of tales of the truly fanciful kind lies in their flight from time-bound circumstances and their employment of the mediums of symbol and mimesis. By his attachment to history, therefore, Armah, may seem to have given up any need or desire for a symbolic reading. This would have been true but for the amazing scope that he has given to this historical survey, in creative art, of the Black experience—and scope is one of the real mainstays of myth-making. What Armah has done in his book is to identify one transcending concept—“the way”—and stretch it over a massive landscape of time, within which the various stages of the Black historical experience can be seen only as symbolic illustrations of the imminence of “the way.” To be sure, the slave trade was a real historical experience; but within the massive canvas of the story it serves primarily as one in a series of pointers to the superior claims of “the way” over the horrors of the “white death.” So, too, with the initiation ceremony. It is a cultural fact in traditional African society; but when characters chosen from diverse ethnic communities are put through the ceremony in one community, then obviously the ceremony has only a symbolic value as a preparation for coping with one of the series of struggles that will confront the citizens in this society out of time and place. A single historical moment or cultural act has achieved a semiotic value in the illustration of a chosen idea. Two Thousand Seasons thus fulfills one of the fundamental functions of myth, which is to transmute reality into fancy through the medium of symbolism. In the larger ethnic setting he gives to the story Armah has combined his

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sense of scope with another important element in mythopoeia: escape from the limitations of contemporary reality by the creation of a different and higher order of reality. This must sound paradoxical, considering the effort that Armah makes here to identify closely with objective or historical reality and eschew the fantastic imagery of the oral narrative tradition. But it is quite clear to Armah that the socio-political realities of contemporary Africa are deplorable and unreflective of what he considers to be the indigenous way of life. Something must be done to correct that fragmentation which has caused the Black race to lose grasp of its traditional sense of values. As a solution, Armah has created a fictional Black society embracing as many ethnic groups as possible from the plethora of peoples in sub-Saharan Africa: among the band of liberators, Isanusi is Zulu, Kimathi is Gikuyu, Soyinka is Yoruba, and so on. Besides, most of these characters come from different walks of life; but no matter, since the liberation of the race is a mass struggle requiring the participation of everyone whatever his ethnic or occupational background. Armah’s political vision here is no different from that of those who have espoused the concept of an “African personality” or of a brand of socialism that makes full use of the communalistic outlook of traditional African society. Each of these apologists is convinced that Africa would be much better off psychologically and gain a more meaningful place in the international community if it were to recover and affirm the collective conscience on which its traditional code of values was built. Again, how feasible or honest is such an effort, given the tremendous changes that have taken place over time, changes that the Marxist-Socialist, with his diachronic view of social reality, is not the least qualified to appreciate? The question was perhaps better put by one recent critic of African socialism, whose reservations may be used as a valid comment on the vast ethnic geography that Armah has subsumed for his fiction: For the important question here is, how are we to integrate the traditional system within a social structure which has been transformed? Is African socialism meant to be village communalism “writ large” or some new system that will take into account the complex nature of the modem state, and the fact that the citizen belongs no longer to a restricted community held together by blood ties and religious sanctions, but to a secular and more embracing social system?24 Whether or not we agree with Armah’s socialist recommendations in this novel, it seems clear that he has achieved by a new medium and within a new context what traditional mythology has constantly done, which is to transport the society that supports it away from the painful constraints of the present into a happier state of affairs. This of course makes nonsense of Caudwell’s con-

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demnation of the motivations of those oral artists who will themselves into a more comfortable existence. For as long as that “connected” will which Arm ah belabors in the story has not materialized, the vision of the Black race he projects into the future is no less a product of wish-fulfillment than the portrait of a privileged existence that temporary griots project into the past. Here as in the oral narrative tradition the sensitive use of language aids the force of suggestiveness and projection in the myth-making process. As the revolutionary zeal of the liberators grows, the word “connected” is repeated at an ear-splitting pitch and a frequency that aptly matches the intensity of that growth. Against such a force of connectedness the efforts of the White destroyers and their agents among the people can be seen to be thoroughly doomed. We can thus imagine what chances a handful of slavers stand against their numerous captives, as in the following account of the five slave-trading boats going up the river Osu: . . . Only the captives worked at the oars. The predators stood over them and swung their whips at them as the spirit moved them, whips made of iron chain, not leather; or they simply rested in the shade of shelters on the boats. Each boat carried ten predators. Only ten . . . (p. 176) What can ten men do against a hundred men who though held down in body are filled with a fierce sense of “connected” purpose? By dressing his projective vision in such sensitive language, Armah makes the prospects of Black liberation that much brighter. The visionary quality of Armah’s tale is also reinforced by the fact that his concept of “the way” is unlocated in any specific time or place. It is unlocated in time because the narrator knows only that it has been a living heritage of the race from an indeterminate past, a past that it is pointless to probe (p. 1). It is also unlocated in place because the builders of the race have had to be constantly on the move from one abode to another, preferring to sever their all-too-tenuous link with a narrow piece of earth than lose the enduring virtues of “the living way” to the soul-destroying tendencies of “the white death.” In this Armah’s ideology bears a strong kinship with “destroyer” evangelism. The final chapter of the book—entitled “The Voice”—is a veritable appeal from a voice in the wilderness25 exhorting the race to embrace a way of life that ensures for them the only true salvation. Very much as Christ urged his followers, the voice here exhorts all Black men to abandon all family ties and all sentimental connections with home in favor of something more rewarding and more enduring. Whether he likes it or not, the socialist vision that underlies the concept of “the way” bears a strong relation to JudaeoChristian myth and dogma.

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Armah takes his visionary program one step further, and in this way perhaps he gives us something a little more than traditional myths do: the potential for victory over the forces of destruction is actually realized. The children of Anoa—the Black race—are not simply promised liberation; they are given, or rather they actively win, effective liberation from all forms of enslavement and are then exhorted to keep the faith. This is clearly as revolutionary as a writer can be in his portrait of the predicament of his people: he not only offers the program for effective revolution but he actually presents the goal as won. “Do something, sir,” the griot Dembo Kaunte tells the host of his performance of the Sunjata tale. “Life consists of doing something.”26 What we have here is simply the promise that action will win contemporary society everlasting glory and immortalization in song. True, the ideals are timeless, but the griot’s mind operates against the background of a bygone era whose glories contemporary society has only a fighting chance of matching. There is something equally tentative in Soyinka’s bringing together of the figures of Chaka and Ogun in Ogun Abibiman. President Samora Machel of Mozambique declares a state of war against Rhodesia: Soyinka’s sketch of the meeting of the figures of history (Chaka) and myth (Ogun), and the consequent ascendancy of the latter, is simply a reification of the belligerent posture assumed by Machel and does no more than offer us a prospect of victory. In constructing his vision with figures consciously chosen from present-day society as well as from the past, Armah shows the goals of self-realization and victory to be far more attainable than Soyinka and traditional mythology seem to do. We can thus clearly appreciate Armah’s relation to the oral narrative tradition: it is essentially one of a combination of respect and irreverence. He accepts the stylistic and mythopoeic apparatus of the oral culture, but demonstrates that its attitude is considerably inadequate for coping with the problems of contemporary society. Traditional mythology seems to do no more than wistfully recall the ideals on which society could draw for a meaningful selfrealization; but Armah pushes the projection further by presenting society in the actual process of realizing its desired goals with the human as well as ideological resources at its disposal. If we may once again echo Richardson’s assessment of Walt Whitman, it is hard to see how a writer could make a greater or more affirmative use of traditional myth than Armah does by the very process of abandoning it. The aim of this essay has been to measure Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons against the record of modern African writers who have tried to incorporate the African oral narrative legacy into their creative thinking. If we can see a correspondence between the modern writer’s flight from bondage to the received material of the oral tradition and the traditional narrator’s flight from the constraints of time and experience, then we shall to a large extent have grasped the meaning of that quality of fancy which we have earlier

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identified as myth: the mythical force of a creative work which looks to tradition depends essentially on the degree to which it embraces the spirit of fanciful play encouraged by the tradition with the consequent attenuation of the stuff or material provided by that tradition. We can see the progressive growth in this freedom of the fancy. Even in Clark’s play Ozidi, which may be taken as an epitome of the cosmetic job on tradition, the weakness of the imaginative freedom can be seen in the fact that, fourteen years after the publication of the play, no producer has had the courage to put it on. This is because the play makes certain technical demands that evoke an affecting picture in the oral narrative performance but are simply impossible to execute within the terms of practical dramaturgy: for instance, the scene in which the old wizard Bouakarakarabiri is shown standing on his head and gripping Ozidi with his feet (pp. 41-43) is no mean threat to the actor’s life and limb! In Fagunwa we can acknowledge a greater element of imaginative license. He has made a random selection of elements of the oral tradition and rechanneled this selection into the scheme of experiences of a fresh personality, Akara-Ogun; with him, therefore, the myth-making legacy does enjoy a certain increase and we may even agree with Irele in putting him in the company of contemporary writers like Kafka who put a primacy on the larger metaphysical context in which human character operates.27 But that his work is still firmly bonded to tradition is shown by its rather episodic structure: the career of Akara-Ogun is simply a string of experiences that recalls more the oral narrator’s emphasis on independent narrative incidents than the modern writer’s oppressive endeavor to paint a monolithic picture of character. Fagunwa’s work may therefore more usefully be seen within the context of the oral tradition than of modern efforts in creative writing.28 A very different picture emerges when we move to Soyinka. Here the presence of the contemporary socio-political scene is as overwhelming as it is subdued in both Ozidi and The Forest of a Thousand Daemons. Here too we take leave of the tales in their old forms, because the writer is thoroughly attached to the more contemporary modes of creative writing. So the tales in their old forms are dropped; only their figures are adopted for the essences or values that they embody. With these new writers the creative imagination is allowed far more freedom. New tales are told—not the old ones in new arrangement—though the old messages endure. And with this imaginative license goes a new temperament suited to the painful socio-political climate: the urge to please, which is the mark of the traditional performer, now gives way to the compulsion to disturb the conscience of the reader/audience so that he/she may be enlisted in the painful duty to change society. The mythopoeic art in its old form cannot help contemporary society to achieve these goals. The inadequacies of the oral tradition are more fully highlighted by

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Armah. In Soyinka, we still feel a comfortable attachment to the tradition. The myth-making imagination is still not quite free, because everything continues to be seen within the recognized parameters of a few mythic figures if not one (Ogun). What is more, in Soyinka we feel a certain despair in the knowledge that man is doomed to an irredeemable cycle of errors. The disposition here is nearly a closed one; there is room for continued struggle, but all we can achieve is a painful awareness of our limitations as men. This is so because the entire human experience is seen through the eyes of a given mythic figure (Ogun) who embodies the essence of continued strife and tragic wisdom. But Armah creates his own myth of a society with an undifferentiated ethnicity working toward a goal that is presented as won; he has been able to do so because he has taken full leave of the old tales and the prejudices they embody, thus bestowing on the new myth a character as prospective as the old myth was wistful. This point was well grasped by Professor Michael Echeruo when, in his inaugural address at Ibadan, he declared that “Armah is to us what Faulkner was to the American South: a Jeremiah without Jehovah.”29 Though the prospective vision respects the deep-seated religious conscience and metaphysical urges of the race, it is not pronounced on the authority of any welladvertised pantheon. Here the fancy is at its freest. At this point we may wish to expand the definition of myth which we gave earlier. It is that quality of fancy that informs the symbolistic or configurative powers of the human mind at varying degrees of intensity; its principal virtue is that it tends to resist all constraint to time and experience to the end that it satisfies the deepest urges of a people or of mankind. Such a definition helps us to unite the kind of imaginative effort that goes on in oral narratives like the Sunjata legend with that in a novel like Two Thousand Seasons. Our emphasis on the aesthetic element of imagination or fancy is significant. In concrete terms, of course, a myth will continue to mean a tale of the oral tradition that lays stress on imaginative play. But when we identify a work as a “mythical novel,” it need do no more than employ the mythopoeic technique and ends characteristic of the oral tradition; it does not necessarily have to attach itself to recognized mythic figures, because such a dependence immediately limits the possibilities of meaning or critical interpretation. This is perhaps the major difference between Soyinka on the one hand and writers like Armah on the other who have chosen to stand back somewhat from the known figures of traditional mythology. Soyinka has defined for us the seminal qualities of the god Ogun and has declared his attachment to this figure; the result of this is that every time we read a work by Soyinka we immediately begin to look for the Ogun sensibility behind it—especially the opposition between creation/life and destruction/death, and the way in which this may be mediated. The same may be said of James Joyce, John Barth, and other writers who have openly modeled various characters in their works after well-worn

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mythical figures and motifs. There may be a complexity in the texture of such works; the pieces may be thrown about. But once they are reassembled the key to the puzzle has been found and the possibilities of interpretation and debate are severely limited if not entirely closed. This is apparently what Richard Chase means in his use of the term paramyth: The danger is to seize upon one facet of the myth, one ghost precipitated from the artistic whole, and suppose that this is the myth or the explanation of the myth. A philosophical concept, a moral allegory, a symbol seized upon, cut off from the living whole—this is what I should call a paramyth ... To see one form in the whole to the exclusion of others is to see a paramyth.30 This is essentially what Soyinka has done in his reduction of Yoruba mythology under the overriding personality of Ogun. Though we applaud the ingenuity with which he transmutes the facts of contemporary life within the symbolic parameters of traditional mythology and the intellectual excitement that we get from deciphering his references, we can say no more for his career in this connection than is contained in the following judgment from Chase: We should rather say that a poem which out of present emotional necessity . . . becomes mythical and then fuses itself with an old myth is a truly mythological poem—but that it does not need the old myth to become mythical.31 There can be no greater endorsement of that metaphysical quality which Armah shares with traditional mythology: a power of projection that bestows a sense of fulfillment and reassurance. Beyond Armah, what? With a writer like Armah in Two Thousand Seasons we come to the end of works that may be broadly described as ‘"mythical,” in so far, that is, as there is no projecting beyond the future. Now, the counterpart of, say, the mythical novel, is the realistic novel. Here the pressure of historical reality or contemporary experience is so strong that the sense of projection steadily gives way to the urge toward documentation even with the utmost figurative skill. The mythic quality does not, of course, entirely disappear. For even though we miss the recourse to personalities and stylistic devices characteristic of the oral narrative tradition, we may still discover the odd (archetypal) motif, as Charles Nnolim does in Oyono’s Une Vie de Boy;32 or the mission of collective self-fulfillment, as in the fiction of Ngugi; or perhaps the phenomenon of opposition and mediation which Levi-Strauss has recognized as the mythic mind’s peculiar way of gaining self-reassurance.33 The mythic quality ultimately reduces to a minimum with those writers (for

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example, Ekwensi, as some have established) in whom the imaginative power does not rise to appreciable configurative heights and whose works are consequently not far from bland naturalism or the journalistic report. This is perhaps as far as the writer can go in his bondage to historical reality. There may be such a thing as imaginative journalism, but that is only the phantom of myth hovering insecurely in an atmosphere dominated by time-bound reality. With journalistic literature we re-enter that zone of constraints which we have seen as characteristic of (a) the oral narrator’s bondage to historical fact, and (b) the modern writer’s loyalty to the well-worn material of the oral tradition.

Notes Isidore Okpewho, “Rethinking Myth, ” African Literature Today, 11 (1980), 5-23. 2

J. P. Clark, Ozidi: A Play (London: Oxford University Press, 1966); and The Ozidi Saga (Ibadan: Ibadan and Oxford University Press, 1977). Eaban lo Liyong, Fixions and Other Stories (London: Heinemann, 1969), pp. 2-10. 4 Bessie Head, The Collector of Treasures (London: Heinemann, 1977), pp. 1-6. 5

D. O. Fagunwa, Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale, trans. by Wole Soyinka as The Forest of a Thousand Daemons (London: Thomas Nelson, 1968). 6

Amos Tutuola, The Palm Wine Drinkard (London: Faber, 1952; Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1953). Especially Season of Anomy (London: Rex Codings, 1973). 8 Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973; London: Heinemann, 1979; Chicago: Third World, 1980). 9

See: Wole Soyinka, “And After the Narcissist?,” African Forum, 2 (1966),

53-64. l0

See: Wole Soyinka, The Interpreters (London: Andre Deutsch, 1965), p. 155. (London: Heinemann, 1970; New York: Africana, 1972.) Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 164. ,2

Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study (New York: Vintage Books, 1951), p. 26. For one of those views of Faulkner as a traditionalist, see: George Marion O’Donnell, “Faulkner’s Mythology,” in Robert Penn Warren (editor), Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 23-33. 13

Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge Umversity Press, 1976), p. 111. Isidore Okpewho, The Epic in Africa (New York: Columbia University D J Press, 1979), pp. 212-220.

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15

Even when our “rememberer” dwells at length on the account of an achievement—as in the destruction of the lecherous Arabs (Chapter 2)—it is usually with a touch of tragic awareness rather than of celebration and self-congratulation as in the oral tradition. 16

Gordon Innes, Sunjata: Three Mandinka Versions (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1974). 17

Charles Bird, et al., The Songs of Seydou Camara, Vol. I: Kambili (Bloomington: Indiana University African Studies Center, 1974). 18

Chistopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1946), pp. 41-42. (Woodstock, New York: Beckman, 1973.) 19

See especially the last two versions of Innes’ Sunjata.

^On Mansa Musa I’s journey to Egypt and the spread of Islam, see: Nehemiah Levtzion, “The Early States of the Western Sudan to 1500,” in J. F. Ade Ajayi and Michael Crowder (editors), History of West Africa, Vol. I (London: Longman, 1971), pp. 152-153. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976, 2nd edn.) 2y

See: Michael Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmeli (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). 22

Wole Soyinka, Idanre (London: Methuen, 1967), p. 78.

23

See: Ayi Kwei Armah, “The Definitive Chaka,” Transition, 50 (October 1975-March 1976), 10-13. ^Frank Niger, “Reflections on the New African Myths,” ibid., 72. ^Notice we are told that “in the best darkness of that night a voice crossed Anoa, a voice clear, unhurried yet secret still, and untrappable. It was a voice speaking to the people . . .” (p. 297). Gordon Innes, Sunjata . . ., p. 269. 21

See: Abiolalrele, “Traditionand the Yoruba Writer,” Odu, 11 (1976), 83\ff. ^For Fagunwa’s shortcomings as a novelist, see: Abiodun Adetugbo, “Form and Style,” in Bruce King (editor), Introduction to Nigerian Literature (Lagos: Evans Brothers and University of Lagos, 1971), p. 174. 29

M. J. C. Echeruo, Poets, Prophets, and Professors. Inaugural lecture delivered at Ibadan University, Ibadan, 29 October 1976, mimeo., p. 17. 30

Richard Chase, Quest for Myth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949), p. 106. 31

Ibid., p. 112.

32

Charles Nnolim, “Jungian Archetypes and the Main Characters in Oyono’s Une Vie de Boy,” African Literature Today, 7 (1975), 117-122. 33

Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (London: Allen Lane, 1968), pp. 220-229. (New York: Basic Books, Vol. I, 1963, Vol. 2, 1976.) Editor’s Note: Quotations from Armah’s novel in the above essay have been shortened and, in some cases, omitted for purposes of this publication.

Two Thousand Seasons:

Literary Ancestry and Text Robert Fraser

The reader who turns straight from Why Are We So Blest? to the opening pages of Two Thousand Seasons,1 Armah’s fourth novel, is immediately struck by a crucial difference. Where before there was a clear narrative structure which, though flexible and involved, moved between fixed and definable points, here we are treated to a fictional panorama which apparently recedes into the far distance. Where before we enjoyed a highly distinctive evocation of a particular historical period, normally the late 1960s, here we are confronted with immense and almost immeasurable tracts of time. Where before our attention was arrested by specific and intriguing personalities, here we are obliged to make our way through many pages before happening on a use of the third person singular, let alone a proper name. Most importantly, where before we searched in vain for an instance of recognizable authorial intervention, here we find the writer taking upon himself a role of obtrusive commentator from the very first sentence. Those familiar with the three earlier novels are likely to be not merely surprised, but also alarmed. While there was plenty in those previous works to challenge one’s social and cultural complacency, there is nothing in their technique to disorientate someone versed in the development of twentiethcentury fiction. Fragments, for instance, is technically a work of immense resource; yet the devices on which the author draws in both this and Why Are We So Blest?—flashbacks, the stream of consciousness, renderings of psychotic states—are none of them strictly innovations. Since the time of James Joyce they have been employed time and time again. They are common in contemporary American fiction, and have heavily influenced—and in turn been influenced by—the techniques of the cinema. None of this, however, can be said of the peculiar handling of the intractable material of Two Thousand Seasons which, to the reader conversant with modern naturalistic fiction, seems to mark an entirely new departure.

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For these reasons, the initial critical reaction to the work on its first appearance was decidedly mixed. To start off with Armah clearly had some difficulty finding a publisher. When eventually it was published in East Africa, The Daily Graphic, one of Ghana’s major daily newspapers, decided to call attention to this literary event and honor one of the now most celebrated of the nation’s literati by serializing it in successive issues. Public reaction, however, was not good, and the serialization dried up after a few installments. To this day the work remains comparatively unknown and unconsidered outside a small circle of those professionally concerned with African literature and, even there, the critical coverage it has received has been small. All of these instances of resistance are in effect symptoms of the same underlying cause: a deep anxiety and puzzlement as to the novel’s form. Indeed even the term “novel,” though it appears clearly on the title page, sits oddly on a book so apparently remote from existing novelistic models. Even in the context of contemporary African literature where formal dissension from the European fictional mode has been a key factor, the book looks decidedly odd. Wole Soyinka’s difficult and convoluted study of urban mceurs, The Interpreters,2 seems almost tame and conventional by comparison. It is not that the book is hermetic or difficult to understand. Indeed, it is by far the easiest of Armah’s books to grasp, and complaints about its intellectual level are more likely to center on the issue of banality. The problem is that it is so unlike anything which the general reader has ever approached before, that at times one is almost tempted to think of it as a “chronicle” rather than a novel proper. The question of nomenclature, however, is only significant in so far as it serves to attract our attention to a more seminal topic of debate: in what tradition, if any, is Armah here writing? Are we here confronted with a throwback to the tradition of pure folk tale? Is Armah attempting something analogous to parable or emanating from myth? Is the author trying to manufacture or re-make a body of legend, or is he pointing forward to some quite new and as yet unperceived form? All of these possibilities crowd into the mind as one reads the story and tries, desperately at first, to “place” the writing in some literary or oral current with which one has some familiarity. There are, however, precedents for this kind of writing, though they are not easy to locate for readers whose literary experience is confined to the English language tradition. As has been noted before, Armah’s intellectual allegiances are often more nearly akin to francophone writing than are those of most other writers from English-speaking Africa. The literary provenance of Two Thousand Seasons is a clear case in point. If one wishes to place it in any defined novelistic tradition, one has to look back into the history of recent French language fiction, and in particular two works: Andre Schwartz-Bart’s Le Dernier des justes (1959),3 and the Malian novelist Yambo Ouologuem’s notorious tour de force, Le Devoir de violence (1968).4

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LITERARY ANCESTRY Andr6 Schwartz-Bart’s book, Le Dernier dejustes, won—deservedly—the Prix Goncourt in 1959. It is an immense historical chronicle taking in several hundred years of European history and encapsulating the experience of the Jewish race from the early Middle Ages to the Second World War in a saga which takes them from the famous York massacre in the twelfth century to the gas ovens of Auschwitz. The geographical breadth of the narrative is also impressive, following as it does one particular Jewish family from the north of England to France, Spain, Russia, Poland, Germany, back to France, and then, finally, through deportation, back to Poland. Through all these migrations one central notion and hope binds the people together, the belief that in each generation God will provide for them a sacrificial, saintly figure to bear the weight of their tribulation: a “juste.” As the generations go by, we watch this sacred trust being carried on from individual to individual as gradually the will of Jaweh is made manifest. The pace of the narrative gradually slows down until we find ourselves in Poland at the outbreak of the First World War, where to a poor Yiddish couple is born a frail and querulous son, Ernie Levy, the eponymous “dernier des justes.” Ernie is in some ways a surprising heir to the tradition, and it is only gradually that his vocation reveals itself. We watch him grow up in a provincial German town against the growing threat of racial persecution and the increasing harassment of the Nazi authorities. Eventually, as war breaks out again, he is evacuated with his family to the outskirts of Paris, where he achieves momentary happiness with a crippled young Jewess named Golda, before he is induced to give himself up to the occupying forces of the Reich, and eventual extermination, by the news that his own parents have been incarcerated. Thus, at the very end, he fulfills his sacrificial function, becoming the last of the paschal line. Andr£ Schwartz-Bart’s is a moving and, despite the horrors of the circumstances that it describes, an in some ways idealistic book. Its theme is racial memory and the inherited trust of communal integrity. As such it is an unlikely progenitor of the next book in our series, Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence, published in 1968 and winner of the coveted Prix Renaudot. Nevertheless, the links between the two books are well attested and, even if the second novel was not deliberately commissioned by the publishers as has been claimed as some sort of sequel, yet the affinities are many and not difficult to trace. To begin with, the two novels cover an approximately equivalent period, from the early Middle Ages to the mid-twentieth century. The opening section heading of Ouologuem’s work, “La tegende des Saifs,” echoes the first chapter of Schwartz-Bart’s, “La tegende des justes.” Both project the unitary notion of some sort of spiritual ancestry or principle running across the centuries. More importantly, though Yambo Ouologuem’s work is

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slimmer, the narrative shape of both books irresistibly recalls one another. In both there is an opening headlong rush through the centuries, slowing down at some point shortly before the Second World War, when to an impoverished and obscure couple is born a son who will in some sense inherit the burden of his race’s suffering. Ouologuem’s Raymond Spartacus, like Ernie L&vy, comes to Paris, where after an incongruously lyrical homosexual love affair with an Alsatian by the name of Lambert, he is enticed back to his own country of Nakem and the unscrupulous hands of its rulers, the rapacious Saifs. Thus Ouologuem’s work concludes with the supremacy of the named bearers of the “legend,” where Schwartz-Bart’s ended with their extermination. The different twist given to the endings of these two works in some sense distills the overriding difference in tone throughout. For though Raymond is, like Ernie in the earlier book, also quintessentially a victim, Ouologuem’s narrative focus fastens not on these, the losers of history, but on the forces and agents of oppression. Le Devoir de violence is set in a legendary kingdom called Nakem, existing somewhere in the savannah and desert regions of the western Sudan and owing, perhaps, some of its inspiration and detail to Ouologuem’s own Dogon people. The history of this part of West Africa is portrayed as one long night of depravity, lust, and oppression, presided over by its bizarre and venal overlords, the Saifs themselves, half-Negro, half(pace Schwartz-Bart) Jew. By a process of systematic wheeling and dealing, the Saifs have managed to maintain their grisly supremacy through various phases of political development (though the phrase is made to seem singularly inappropriate, since very little progresses): inter-tribal warfare, Arab domination, and finally French imperialism. At each stage, Saif technically succumbs, but in practice remains on top of the heap, dispatching in turn each of his enemies, from the inconvenient servant Sankolo to the lecherous French commandant Chevalier. Saif proceeds through many incarnations and embodiments, and yet remains immutably the same. It is he who, for his own devious purposes, dispatches Raymond Spartacus to France for higher studies, yet he too who then calls him back to assume the position of French deputy, in fact merely to act as his latest and most gullible instrument. The tone of Ouologuem’s book is thus predominantly dark, yet it is enlivened by snatches of grim humor, and under it all one senses the rumble of a hollow, satirical laughter. The basic question raised by the novel is not that of its literary genesis—too much paper has already been wasted on that score—so much as the problem of precisely placing that tone. Wole Soyinka has probably come closest to defining it when, in his critical work Myth, Literature and the African World, he comments: Is there a touch of self-hate in Ouologuem’s “dispassionate” recital? The intensity of contempt for the victims is clearly

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intended to reflect the alienation of the torturers from the concept of the victims as human, to reflect their religious-imperial justification for acts of barbarism, yet beneath this device there lurks, one suspects, the discomfort of the author himself. The epithets are spat through gritted teeth, the antidote for victim-identification appears to be a deflective masochism— Ouologuem has been accused of an alienation technique; the opposite seems truer—such a level of inventive degradation suggests that Ouologuem is practising some form of literary magic for the process of self-inoculation.5 Self-inoculation maybe, but Ouologuem’s work was not addressed to himself, but to an audience whom he wishes to persuade. That he had a very special audience in mind became very obvious when, in the very next year, he published his open prose epistle, Lettre a la France negre,6 a spontaneous and explosive document in which he took the whole French-speaking world, Black and White, to task for the besetting sin of Negro worship, the “mauvaise conscience” which is so ungainly a cultural reaction from earlier colonial simplifications. The whole of this prose letter is in effect a set of variations on Frantz Fanon’s well-known dictum that “he who loves the negro is as sick as he who hates him,” and an expanded comment on the phenomenon of historical distortion and over-idealization which he had, in Le Devoir de violence, castigated under the name of “Schrobeniusism.” The point perhaps needs a little expanding. In any post-colonial state, the way that the future of the nation is envisaged is inextricably bound up in the particular construction put on the past. Given the fact that strict historical objectivity is impossible, the past of any country is liable to biased interpretations by those who wish to persuade the population to think of themselves in specific ways. In the nationalist or early post-independence stage, the most tempting tendency will be to glorify the past so as to make up for the systematic denigration of it by the old imperial government. It was to this pressing danger that Wole Soyinka himself called the Nigerian people on the eve of their independence in his play A Dance of the Forests (I960).7 Ouologuem too has recognized this danger, but instead of, as in Soyinka’s play, establishing a mechanism for the redemption of the past, he has fallen prey to selfmockery, and, in an attempt to dissuade himself and others from this kind of oversimplification, has “inoculated” himself with a heavy dose of cynicism so as to attain resistance to the prevailing bug. But there is more than one way in which history may be distorted. Until recently European historians have been content to dismiss all of African history as a bottomless, and possibly unsavory, abyss. The over-correction of this misunderstanding to which more recent African apologists have been prone may in itself constitute a vice: but it has been one of very short duration compared

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to the previous centuries of racist historical contempt. A polyglot intellectual of Ouologuem’s stature may feel a need to inoculate himself against an overcompensating reaction, yet to the majority of his countrymen together with the beleaguered masses of the Third World the fresh emphasis is still news. Ouologuem’s enterprise only possesses cogency within the charmed circle of the over-informed: to the average reader his book is more likely to cause confusion, even anger. It is to this neglected intellectual proletariat that Ayi Kwei Armah, a more democratic writer than the brilliant and waspish Ouologuem, addresses his novel Two Thousand Seasons. Indeed, almost the first thing one notes about it is that the audience at which the writing is aimed is envisaged very carefully. The third person, singular or plural, does not come easily to Armah’s pen here, being more or less reserved for those with whom he is out of sympathy, the “destroyers” or the “predators” ; nor has he much recourse to that constant stand-by of the “romantic” European artist, the first person singular. In fact, the verbal forms of the prose style in this book are reserved almost exclusively for the first and second person plural. By and large, the first person plural is used to denote the “people,” an entity synonymous with the book’s audience, a group moreover with which the narrator strongly identifies. By implication, the writer further seems to claim membership in a more select group, the “hearers” invoked by the use of the second person plural. These “hearers, seers, imaginers, thinkers” at first seem barely defined, until one recalls the fact that they possess a discernible ancestry in Armah’s work, being none other than the “lunatic seers” referred to in the long balcony passage from The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. They form in effect a sort of revolutionary vanguard, and consist of all those whose gifts are predominantly artistic, spiritual, or intellectual. The relationship between these and the wider community, the “we” of the text, is hence that between a responsible intellectual elite and the mass toward whom their whole obligation lies. This relationship is conceived of as being direct and vital, in contrast to Armah’s previous works, where it is seen as impervious and moribund. The culminating impression of all three of Armah’s earlier novels was that of an immense and irredeemable loneliness. The tortured and self-aware artist, unable to communicate either his ideals or his creations, dwelt in an intense and brooding void. The primary reason for this is that, in those books, the artist figure was conceived in entirely European terms. Though fired with a sense of social mission, in practice he was as cut off from the rest of the community as Byron’s Childe Harold or Goethe’s Werther. Solo in Why Are We So Blest? and Baako in Fragments are both heirs to the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition of artistic isolation. In Two Thousand Seasons Armah has resolved this difficulty by envisaging the social contract of the artist in terms more appropriate to a traditional African community. The “hearers, seers,

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imaginers, thinkers” form in effect a class of griots, poet-historians whose vision of their role has far more in common with that of the Yoruba Ijala singer or Ewe lyricist than with the self-conscious angst of many a Western artist. That even they are perceived as living in relative isolation—the sacred groves beyond the clan’s confines—is no reflection on the way in which they view themselves, but simply a measure of the advanced process of dissolution to which the community itself is portrayed as having been exposed during the core of the narrative. To each artistic tradition there pertains not only a social role, but also a distinctive mode of expression. The European novelist until comparatively recently tended to approach his material by means of a consecutive, naturalistic story line. There are exceptions to this—and in this century the tradition has, as we have already noted, been subject to certain modifications—yet the basic orientation remains constant, the author’s country being plot, character, theme, and situation.8 To traditional African artists such as the Senegalese griot, for example, most of these technical devices are profoundly alien. He deals not with a realistic story line held tightly in the dimensions of time and space, but with the longer perspectives of legend and myth. This is not to say that his visions are any less true than those of his European counterpart: in fact, in one sense they are truer, since his emanations have less to do with the Imagination in Coleridge’s sense of the word9 than with the communal memory, a certain conception of history. Both Andre Schwartz-Bart’s Le Dernier de justes and Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence are, in some sense, historical works. Yet Schwartz-Bart’s work is decidedly a product of the conscious imagination; Ouologuem’s, to keep Coleridge’s terminology, a product of the acrobatic fancy. Ouoioguem tosses up facts, names, rumors, and the occasional outrageous invention with the dexterity and self-mocking charm of an extravagant juggler. There is a certain glibness about his novel, and the level of his seriousness is constantly suspect. None of this can be said about Armah, whose fourth novel, deeply committed to its subject matter as it is, provides us with an instance of litterature engage at its most earnest. Yet it owes nothing to the modern existentialist mode of writing, being attuned to something much older, far more grounded in the realities with which it deals: the plural voice of the traditional artist, whose instruments are myth, legend, folk-tale, and proverb. There are several African novelists who have attempted to integrate folklore material into their books. The story of the tortoise and the birds in Chapter Eleven of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart10 is a case in point, as is the use of the proverb in both that novel and Arrow of God.11 Yet precious few of them have attempted to structure a whole work around certain key myths. One exception would be the various embodiments of the Yoruba pantheon that make up the artist Kola’s canvas in Wole Soyinka’s The Inter-

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preters. Yet even here the mythological framework is set off against the satirical flow of a lively naturalistic narrative. In Two Thousand Seasons, however, we are confronted with myth in a raw, compelling shape. Specifically, Armah has drawn on two legendary sources. The historical experience of the whole African people from the dawn of remembered history to the present day has been localized in terms of the migrations and tribulations of the Akan people, which over the centuries have brought them from the fabled glories of the early medieval Sudanic empires to the forest and coastal settlements which are their present abode. This source of inspiration, part recorded history, part myth, has an appealing epic shape to it, which serves to suggest the ample motions of historical development. The specific claim of a historical origin in the western Sudan has great cogency: powerfully employed by J. B. Danquah in the 1940s as a rallying point for nationalist agitation, it was the major reason why the modern nation state of Ghana was given the same name as the tenthcentury African empire described by Arab chroniclers. It has already provided the imaginative framework for one work of literature: Edward Braithwaite’s epic poem of historical confrontation, “Masks.”12 The other myth upon which Armah draws here is the story of Anoa, the young Akan girl, granted disturbing reveries of the future enslavement of her people, visions which she in vain attempted to communicate to a complacent populace. This again is a legend of immense poetic force which has also inspired a previous off-shoot: the play Anowa by Armah’s contemporary and compatriot Ama Ata Aidoo.13 THE TEXT It is the opening prelude of Two Thousand Seasons which sets the tone. In its evocation of endlessly shifting time, it is very like the first section of Fragments, “Naana,” only here the motion is, if anything, even less definite. An impression is created of vast numinous forces moving in an opaque and drifting mist, with only the sensation of continual, intermittent conflict to give direction to the whole. The “drugged somnambulistic flow” which Gerald Moore finds to be characteristic of Armah’s prose style here reaches its apotheosis, and though, as Wole Soyinka notes, the writing at this point occasionally “creaks,”14 the aesthetic impact is undeniable. It is also, significantly, here that the connection between Armah’s prose style and his conception of history becomes most evident, the ambling pace of the sentences evoking a circular notion of time. The emphasis, however, does not stop short at evocation: essentially this opening prolegomenon or preface constitutes a kind of appeal or apostrophe to the toiling millions who have borne the brunt of history’s oppression, and to the “hearers, seers” who are their spokesmen. The entire purport of this kind of artistic project thus becomes clear: a purpose not exhausted by narrative or description, but proceeding to prescription and prognosis.

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The prelude also introduces us to the work’s main image patterns. The first and most prominent of these is the image of springwater flowing into an endless desert in which it is parched to the point of extinction. The idea clearly has geographical pertinence in view of the many northward-flowing tributaries of the rivers Niger and Volta: its rationale, however, does not originate in climatology. In order to detect the source of this symbolism we have to look back to Armah’s first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, in which the idea of a persistent current, woefully polluted at its wellspring despite its constant efforts to clear itself, is envisaged in a powerful passage in Chapter Three. The implication is the same in both instances, the stream serving to represent the original integral thrust of a united people, the elements of pollution, here the sand, clearly representing the historical factors which compromise that. In Two Thousand Seasons, however, the element of sand is inextricably intertwined with another interlocking image pattern, that of color. Two Thousand Seasons is a book set in stark monochrome. Gone are the milling shades of the earlier books, the tinctures and tints that come from a mellow vision. By contrast we are here presented with two colors: black and white. It is pointless, I think, to beat about the bush by talking of racial “overtones.” This is not a novel which deals in harmonics of any order, but in an overriding central melody. Black clearly stands for the African people, bold and unambiguous; white for all those forces which have over the centuries crushed and repressed them, be they Arab/Muslim or European/Christian. Armah’s point is that the effect, and much of the technique, was the same; both groups are therefore represented by the single color white, the white of parched sand. It is here—at the outset—that many of Armah’s readers will lodge a fundamental objection. It will be said that this novel is evidently racialist, and therefore, as art, invalid. The first part of that claim strikes me as true; the rest here not to follow from it. That Armah’s point is a racial one there can be no doubt. In the context of a naturalistic narrative, such divisiveness is evidently a decisive flaw, and hence must be criticized. In Why Are We So Blest?, we see how the restriction of sympathy allotted to the White characters has the effect of overbalancing the work. In an artistic enterprise where one expects a rich ambivalence or generosity, such willful blinkering strikes one immediately as unacceptable. In Two Thousand Seasons, on the other hand, these objections do not apply, for the paradoxical reason that Armah carries his condemnation that little bit further, so that it no longer occupies the domain of realist art. We are on an altogether different terrain now, that appropriate to myth, legend, and racial memory. Ambivalence is not to be expected because we have transcended it; we have either surmounted or side-stepped its possibilities in the necessary effort to provide a strong, healing mythology. We have already noted that Armah’s art possesses a strongly curative

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aspect: the comparison with medication is one which naturally occurs. “See the disease, and understand it well,” decrees the seer Isanusi at the end of Two Thousand Seasons (p. 201); we might add that the entirety of the novel itself provides a contribution to that undertaking. Armah has addressed his work unambiguously to a certain audience, the throng of the oppressed, the victims of the historical processes which he is elucidating. The object is to provide self-illumination—since to undergo one’s past is necessarily to understand at least part of oneself—and, through it, therapy. In the context of a massive communal inferiority complex, there is only one antidote: a heightening of selfrespect, and we need fear no over-dosage. Armah’s concern is to provide an overwhelming counteraction to the colonialist distortion of history. If, in the process, individuals other than the patients themselves are to be slighted, this has to be accepted: indeed, the wholesale condemnation of certain groups or classes is clearly permissible if from it there results an access to health and hope for those languishing under such a corrosive misunderstanding and mistrust of their own past. It is thus that the incidental exaggerations of the work justify themselves, as part of what, in a clinching phrase, Soyinka calls “the visionary reconstruction of the past for the purposes of social direction.”15 Despite the explicit racial logic of the work, it is important not to oversimplify by interpreting it in terms of a straightforward distinction between indigenous virtue and foreign vice. While it remains true that the narrative edge cuts mercilessly against all extraneous influences, the cause of the initial disruption of the people’s original cohesion is firmly located within the community itself. Against the natural and steadying social norm—“our way, the way”—are pitted, from the outset, the disorganizing forces of greed and cupidity. These become manifest well before the arrival of the Arabs at the beginning of Chapter Two. Their first appearance coincides with a dislocation of the essential reciprocity of the marital relationship. Women, at first partners in the family enterprise, come increasingly to be regarded as servants, later to be used as mere objects, vehicles for utility and pleasure: The men, at length announcing a necessity to nurse their strength for the work of elephants, with the magic of words made weightier with furrowed brows successfully pulled themselves out of all ongoing work, leaving only phantom heroic work, work which never found them, while generously they welcomed the women into all real work, proclaiming between calabashes of sweet ahey how obvious it was that all such work was of its nature trivial, easy, light, and therefore far from a burden on any woman . . . The women were maintainers, the women were their own protectresses, finders and growers both. (pp. 10-11)

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It is this growing imbalance within the social texture of the tribe which stimulates the young prophetess Anoa into her forecast of two thousand seasons of spiritual and physical enslavement, an intimation based on her estimate of the people’s present state of mind: Reciprocity, that is the way you have forgotten, the giving, the receiving, the living alternation of the way. The offerers, those givers who do not receive, they are mere victims. That is what in the heedless generosity of your blinding abundance you have turned yourselves into. (p. 17) It is this pronouncement which issues in the major historical sweep of the work: a vast dipping span of a thousand years, consisting of a thousand seasons of increasing enslavement followed by a thousand seasons of resistance, which, in accordance with the method of calendar computation adopted in the book— wet season, dry season, wet season, and so on—gives us exactly the millennium between the people’s first encounter with alien forces and their eventual reinstatement. The inception of this process is not so much the arrival of the Muslim overlords, as the abject manner in which they are welcomed by those elements already estranged from the communal life of the people. Here too lay the beginning of our long bafflement at the heavy phenomenon of the slave forever conditioned against himself, against our people. With such never will there be any possibility of creation, never will new communities of the way be bom within their presence. Such contain even in times of liberation’s sweetest possibility an undying nostalgia for the worst times of the oppressors’ domination over us, the times of suffering for the shattered community, because for such those are times of ease, times of prestige, times of privilege . . . (p. 26) After the arrival of the Arabs, this penchant for dependence reveals itself in evident and alarming ways, the major impact taking place within the social structure of the tribe itself. No model of African political stratification is actually proposed in the work, but the implied suggestion is that, in the first instance, all power and responsibility was shared, status groups as such being unknown. The social scientist might well find this naive, yet it does serve as a hypothetical extreme pole to the institution of privileged kingship which the community develops under the tutelage of a foreign hierarchy. Kingship is here presented as an institution utterly alien to indigenous ways of thinking, a form of ascendancy immediately appealing to those who, like the idiot Koranche, are unable to sustain self-respect within the mutually rewarding give-and-take of normal social interaction. It is true that chieftaincy, as understood and en-

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couraged by Lugard-inspired British imperialists, was unknown to certain African ethnic groups before the colonial period, the Igbo people being a notable case in point. The importance of this absolute polarity between alternative political systems lies, however, not in any supposed fidelity to anthropological fact, but in the analysis it provides of the emergence of certain oppressive power groups: the way that they form, the mentality that they encourage, and the debilitating habits they induce within the body politic. Armah’s analysis of kingship substantially anticipates his understanding of the colonial and neo-colonial elites, both of which are held as being largely implicit within the pre-colonial set-up. Colonialism proper, however, is not itself far off. In an effort to evade the disastrous clutches of the Arab “predators,” the people migrate southward through the savannah region, into the rainforest and then on to the coast. Their efforts prove in vain, since on their arrival they discover that they have walked into the hands of a foe far deadlier than the Arabs: the Europeans with their guns, guile, and seductive material enticements. It is predictably the king who is the first to succumb: From the white missionary a message came. It said it was an incontrovertible teaching of the white religion that a king had a right, a duty in fact, to impose his will strongly on his people, for to the white men the king was always the head, the people merely the body. Replied the king: I do not have the strength. Said the white trader: We can help with that if you will be a faithful friend of ours, for that is what friends are for. The king said secretly: Yes, but let us act in secret . . . (p. 99) The complicity between the commercial interest, herald of a future colonial administration, and the indigenous leadership thus supplies us not merely with an understanding of the mechanics of imperialism itself, but also with a glimpse of the combination of spiritual and secular leverage which was the Africans’ undoing. This sort of inducement works to distort the matrix of social relationships at every level: organizational, religious, even personal. It is this last twist of the knife which finally sets off the resistance campaign. At the point when Koranche starts to use his secular power to force the hand of the unwilling Abena, it is time for the committed younger members of the clan to take up the challenge, spear-headed by the older yet still defiant seer Isanusi. In the customary “dance of love”—the dance of marital selection which marks the end of puberty—the members of that year’s age grade deliberately choose to link themselves together into a corporate grouping, avoiding the closer involvement of pairing, so as the better to prepare themselves for the task of liberation that lies ahead. Thereafter, they retreat to the groves of initiation for a period of apprenticeship, forming themselves under Isanusi’s

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guidance into a close-knit revolutionary cabal, a kind of embryonic Maquis ready to purge their society’s growing injustices. Their eager-eyed naivete, however, proves their undoing, since it is not long before they are tricked into slavery by the corrupt collaboration of Koranche and his White mentors. Lured to the coast, they are clapped into irons, dispatched on board ship, and, after a brief detention in one of the coastal forts (it could be Cape Coast or more probably Elmina) for the purpose of branding, sent out on the long and gruesome middle passage to the Americas. The story of the prisoners’ transportation and eventual escape is perhaps the weakest part of the work. It is here that the necessary divisiveness of moral vision forces the characters into two irreconcilable camps, according to a simple formula: Black = good; White = bad. As such we may justify the simplification as part of the total healing enterprise; yet, when combined with the element of combativeness and scheming, the resulting narrative texture has much in common with a cops-and-robbers episode, or a saga of cowboys and Indians. As Wole Soyinka has also noted, “This weakness often tends to make the book read like an adventure story.”16 We might add that this is the inevitable result of slinging a fictional work around a straightforward Manichean metaphysical divide: it is a fault that one strangely finds repeated in one of Soyinka’s own works, his second novel, Season of Anomy.V] Yet to say this is not to account entirely for the episode. The emphasis, after all, is not so much on the facts of the plot as on the interpretation of those facts. What enables the Blacks to break free against such fantastic odds? The answer to this question is intimately related to the whole conceptual fabric of the work. It is something to do with a vestigial unity of spirit, a survival from the lost “reciprocity” that the worst efforts of the traders cannot destroy. Arm ah gives it the term “connectedness,” and it will prove instructive to contrast his description of it with the discovery of something not dissimilar among the shackled slaves in that other saga of transportation, Alex Haley’s Roots. Here is Haley’s description of the moment at which his slaves happen on the possibilities of inter-linguistic penetration: The steady murmuring that went on in the hold whenever the toubab were gone kept growing in volume and intensity as the men began to communicate better and better with one another. Words not understood were whispered from mouth to ear along the shelves until someone who knew more than one tongue would send back their meanings. In the process, all of the men along the shelf learned new words in tongues they had not spoken before. Sometimes men jerked upward, bumping their heads, in the double excitement of communicating with each other and the ?ai.i that it was being done without the toubab’s knowledge.

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Muttering among themselves for hours, the men developed a deepening sense of intrigue and of brotherhood. Though they were of different villages and tribes, the feeling grew that they were not from different people or places.18 Here, by contrast, is Armah: Of unconnected consciousness is there more to say beyond the clear recognition this is destruction’s keenest tool against the soul? That the left hand should be kept ignorant of what its right twin is made to do—who does not see in that cleavage the prime success of the white destroyers’ road of death? That the heart detached should beat no faster even when limbs familiar to it are moved to heinous acts—is that not already the severed atrophy of connected faculties, the white method of destruction? (p. 128) Granted that Haley is writing firmly within the convention of naturalistic narrative while Armah is engaged in the construction of myth, the drift of Armah’s prose here provides us not only with a philosophical context in which to view the ensuing action, but furthermore with a whole critique of a certain civilization. A marked interpretational thrust also illuminates the next phase of the story: the return to Anoa and a rearguard campaign against the forces of complicity in the by now severely compromised community. Armah’s attention is here focused on the weak spots implicit in any such project, the areas of sensitivity in the underbelly of the committed, unsteeled by resolve. Explicitly it is a longing for family life, and a simple clannish tenderness, that drives those such as the sentimental Dovi back into the bosom of a corrupted society, leading eventually to his betrayal of the cause and of his former associates. The case of kinship does not appeal only to him—hardly a member of the beleaguered group of rebels fails to feel the seductive pull. Yet, so the implication goes, it is an attraction that must be resisted at all costs if the insurgents are to retain any integrity of purpose. One remembers in this connection Teacher, the solitary seer of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, and his stout resistance to the claims of “the loved ones,” which have so wretchedly undermined the purposefulness of his friend, “the man.” One finds here then further evidence of the consistency of thinking in all Armah’s output, which, despite a hefty shift in novelistic method, has retained its grasp on certain salient tenets of analysis and belief. Increasingly, toward the end, though the historical period envisaged is presumably comparatively remote, the situations described appear to be contemporary. The megalomaniac Kamuzu, for instance, whom the rebels unwittingly back as a counterweight to the “white destroyers” and who in style and

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mannerism seems to belong to the late eighteenth century, comes to represent a sort of stereotype of modern neo-colonialist dictatorship, such as that associated with the last days of Nkrumah. The sustained ahd on-going guerrilla campaign, moreover, with which the book ends, has much more in common with the small-unit scale of recent terrorist warfare than the drilled, flag-waving nature of earlier colonial conflicts. Indeed, what seems to be envisaged is a prolonged civil war, a sustained campaign to purify national life of undesirable elements, rather than an attack waged on any external foe. Is Armah then advocating violence within the modern African nation state? One strongly worded passage would seem to negate this construction: We do not utter praise of arms. The praise of arms is the praise of things, and what shall we call the soul crawling so low, soul so hollow it finds fulfilment in the praising of mere things? It is not things we praise in our utterance, not arms we praise but the living relationship itself of those united in the use of all things against the white sway of death, for creation’s life. (p. 205) The emphasis here as throughout the closing pages is on the necessary effort to rid the culture of its debilitating material dependence on “things”— objects valued for their own sake—and on the international community which provides them. The antidote is not primarily bloodshed—though certainly the phrasing does not exclude that—but an access of confidence and the creative security that comes from cultural assertion. A necessary concomitant of this process is a willful damaging of the image and prestige of those who, by their financial and political influence, inevitably impede this kind of national growth. It is in this context that the concluding call to arms has to be seen, as an extended metaphor for the cultivation of self-understanding and the autonomy of social and artistic life. The very last paragraph of the text conjures up a glowing picture of an infinitely receding and glorious future/ Thus the central image of dammed and clotted headwaters, which has been used all along to suggest the inhibition of natural health and progress, finally accumulates to power a vision of a destiny strong in resilience and selfreliance. There is nothing naive in this conclusion, nothing to contradict the mournfulness of the opening passages, for example, since all the qualifications and reservations have already been put. The brisk confidence and optimism of this close does, however, serve to re-adjust the impression of the much

Editor s Note: Here follows, in the text of this essay as originally printed, the last paragraph of Two Thousand Seasons (p. 206).

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commented-on “disillusionment” in Armah’s earlier writing, or rather to help us see it for what it is, a sad recognition of the distance that the evolving national spirit has still to go. The “beautyful ones” may not yet be born, but the seed is already firmly planted in the soil, if only the waters of the people’s neglected genius would combine to water it. The end of the book also serves to contest impressively the bleak version of African history presented by Yambo Ouologuem in his earlier work. Whether or not Two Thousand Seasons was deliberately written as an answer to Le Devoir de violence—and, going on internal evidence, there would seem to be some justification for saying that it was—the heartening tone of voice with which it concludes, and the democratic appeal which pervades the whole, goes a long way toward negating Ouologuem’s cynicism. It is thus nonsensical, despite the formal similarities in the two books, to credit them with the same point of view or, as at least one commentator has done, to see them as exemplifying the same novelistic tendency: The contemporary novel in Africa seems to be locked in an agonized search for a vision of political excellence on that continent. But this is merely a reflection of the social realities on the politics of Africa. Perhaps the African novelist has not yet been able to break from the cycle of angst and frustration. The Malian novelist Yambo Ouologuem and the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah seem to epitomize this era of intense despair.19 In order to correct this sort of critical short-sightedness, a cursory glance at Two Thousand Seasons, extended by a patient and careful re-reading of the earlier books, is all that is needed.

Notes !

Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973; London: Heinemann, 1979). Page references in the text are to the Heinemann edition. ^ole Soyinka, The Interpreters (London: Heinemann, 1970). 3

Andr6 Schwartz-Bart, Le Dernier des justes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1959).

4

Yambo Ouologuem, Le Devoir de violence (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968).

5

Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 101. 6

Yambo Ouologuem, Lettre a la France negre (Paris: Editions Edmond Nalis,

1969).

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314

7

Wole Soyinka, A Dance of the Forests (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1963). s

See, for instance, the account of the form given in E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (London: Edward Arnold, 1937; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). 9

See: S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: Dent, 1967), Chapter XIII, p. 167. ,0

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1971). “Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (London: Heinemann, 1966). 12

From Edward Braithwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 13

Ama Ata Aidoo, Anowa (Harlow, England: Longman, 1970).

14

Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature . . ., p. 114.

l5

lbid.y p. 106.

l6

Ibid.y p. 114.

17

Wole Soyinka, Season of Anomy (London: Rex Collings, 1973).

l8

Alex Haley, Roots (London: Hutchinson, 1977), p. 168. Kofi Awoonor, The Breast of the Earth (New York: Doubleday, 1975),

19

p. 304.

Editor’s Note: Quotations from Armah’s novel in the above essay have been shortened and, in some cases, omitted for purposes of this publication. The original essay also contained references to the East African Publishing House edition of Two Thousand Seasons, which have been omitted in this reprinting.

History and Character in The Healers Simon Gikandi

The position of the narrator in relation to experience is central to the form, value, and meaning of the historical novel. The narrator is the link between characters, their individualized experiences, and the larger historical event which is being dramatized in the novel. As Georg Lukacs has observed in The Historical Novel, “if the historical novelist can succeed in creating characters and destinies in which the important social-human contents, problems, movements of an epoch appear directly, then he can present history ‘from below,’ from the standpoint of popular life.”1 The narrative voice in The Healers functions as a link between one event and another, between moments of time, and even the pattern of ideas being explored in the novel. The narrator is also what I will call an agent of particularization. He is the person who pins the events of the story down to a particular period (the British invasion of Asante), and a specific geographic area (the stage of the drama is Esuano, situated between the Nsu Ber and Nsu Nyin rivers). In spite of its particularization, The Healers shares a common vision with Two Thousand Seasons—a. belief in the eventual unification of African peoples, symbolized by the ritual games: They were not so much celebrations as invocations of wholeness. They were the festivals of a people surviving in spite of unbearable pain. They were reminders that no matter how painful the journey, our people would finish it and thrive again at the end of it, as long as our people moved together.2 The drama is, however, set in a period of disruption when the dream of wholeness invoked by the ritual games is threatened by internal and external factors, and the narrator is keen to underline the gap between the desired dream and historical realities: “The hard realities of our scattering and our incessant

315

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wandering had long disturbed the oneness these festivals were meant to evoke, to remember, and to celebrate" (p. 5). The narrator’s act of remembrance is characterized by a duality: memory of a past of oneness and fears of a fragmented present. In The Healers, as in Two Thousand Seasons, the narrative moves from a distant ideal, through a contemporary state of fragmentation, toward a future recapitulation of the first ideal. The community’s movement away from its ideals is characterized by the changes that come over the ritual games: Time passed. Circumstances overwhelmed meaning. At Esuano the ritual games continued. But their meaning was no longer what it had been meant to be. In the circumstances of fragmentation, the meaning of unity had not been destroyed, perhaps. But it had been tom to shreds, (p. 5) Throughout the novel, then, the ritual games and how different classes perceive them are an important yardstick of the people of Esuano’s deviation from the ideals of their ancestors. The games also function as a medium of selectivity, setting the heroes apart from the villains, as it were. Densu, who is opposed to the competitive spirit of the games, prefers to keep out of the violent wrestling match; his friend Appia refuses to press his advantage against Kojo Djan because of the brutality this would entail. For both boys, the price of victory is too high in social and human terms; the very idea of competition enhances social divisions by setting one individual apart from the rest. Change is a significant theme in The Healers. As the manipulator Ababio aptly notes, Esuano is in the throes of a moment of great change, the kind of change that comes only once in several generations. “The world," he tells Densu, “has changed in ways some people do not yet understand" (p. 29). This is also the moment when the people of Esuano must make choices about the future development of their society. What makes this moment of change particularly dramatic, though, is the introduction of an external force in the form of the White invaders; this factor makes the need for making choices more urgent, since the people themselves are no longer solely responsible for the tempo and pace of historical change. The choice, as Ababio observes in an incisive discussion of the mechanics of colonialism, is between collaboration and resistance. He has chosen the former course of action because it provides him with an easy path to power and privilege. “If we help the whites get this control [over the land], we stand to profit from the changes," Ababio tells Densu, trying to sell him the line of collaboration. “Those foolish enough to go against them will of course be wiped out" (p. 31). But Ababio also knows that resistance, which is tortuous and lacks many material benefits, has a lasting appeal to many people because it is the only

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guarantee against subjugation and the loss of human dignity. Densu typifies this appeal: his wish to join Damfo and the other healers in the eastern forest is almost as intuitive as is his revulsion at Ababio’s manipulative tactics. Because Densu is forced to make his choice by historical events, without reflecting on their implications, The Healers becomes, in the end, the story of his growing consciousness against the background of events central to the evolution of his community. Densu makes the appropriate choice, but until much later in the novel he does not know why he makes this choice. When Ababio asks him if he would accept power if it was offered to him, Densu has a gut feeling that he wouldn’t—something inside him rejects the notion of power as an instrument of manipulation—but he is not able to articulate this feeling. Soon after, when Ababio suggests that the boy has compromised himself by listening to the manipulator’s plans, the boy is confused: “What is it I must do?” he asks his would-be mentor. Ababio’s insinuations pain him, but he cannot provide a well-argued rejoinder; the only thing he is really sure about, at this stage, is that he would like to be different from Ababio and the other manipulators in Esuano. To his credit, Densu understands the limits of his understanding; he spends sleepless nights trying to pattern his disparate thoughts, aware, like most Armah characters, that he can only be whole if he understands himself within his socio-political context. The issues that trouble him at this stage in the narrative are not new: “In the past they had been confusing, a mixture of feelings and thoughts, hard to grasp completely” (p. 39). The games function as an instrument of self-search, of reaching into the heart of his community and the values that inform it: . . . The ceremonies, rituals, and games that could satisfy the yearning inside him would have to be ceremonies, rituals, and games of cooperation, not of competition. The present games made him uneasy. Nothing they offered gave an answer to his soul. (p. 39) An understanding of the wide gap between historical realities (as represented in the ritual games) and the yearning of the character’s soul provides the key motives to Densu’s thoughts and actions. He seeks to break away from the acquisitive society in the belief that there “should be something better” (p. 40). One of the interesting questions about character and historical movement in The Healers is the narrative function of Densu. Does he exist merely as a character of thought, an instrument of comprehending the issues and ideas that concern Armah in the novel, or is he the Lukacsian hero of the historical novel, who raises common experiences “to a higher level of historical typicality by concentrating and generalizing them”?3 The former role suits Densu

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better: he is not a historical figure in the sense that he does not overtly determine the movement of historical events in the same way as Asamoa Nkwanta; his contemplative nature, on the other hand, places him in the center of the movement of thought in The Healers. Ordinary human experiences are seen, and acquire greater meaning, through Densu, but the problem of placing a contemplative character as the moving consciousness in a historical novel is obvious: the ruminations of this type of character, and the subsequent internalization of his experiences, are always in danger of diverting attention from the central historical conflict in the novel. Because Densu is not drawn into the center of the historical conflict between the forces of Asante and the foreign invaders until late in the novel, his presence tends to draw the reader’s focus from the major historical movement, although the character’s thoughts are themselves always being drawn into the meaning of experiences. Densu’s character does not, however, connote a passive role as an agent of fictionalization: he tries to transcend limited experiences, to place himself in an appropriate historical context, and to fuse the past with the present and future. Ultimately, Densu is not so important for what he does, but for what he thinks: his thoughts and actions seem significant to the extent that they trigger, shape, or control the readers’ perception of the events in the novel. There is of course a strong conflict between Densu and his social/historical context. Densu’s loneliness and distance from the ethos of his time has a significant bearing on the nature of Armah’s narrative: because he is not socially active or involved in Esuano, he cannot, in the tradition of the prototype historical figure, carry his community with himself toward the ideal of unity which constitutes the leitmotif of The Healers. He is an alien in the Esuano court, repulsed by the antics of the ruling class, clamoring for “distance, great distance” from Ababio and his creed. But Densu’s desire to get away from Esuano does not imply a rejection of the community and its values. Beyond his immediate repulsion of the manipulators is a great desire—“a potent urge to seek people whose ways were an antidote to all the petty poisons which were food to the men of power he had known” (p. 49). Understanding the motives behind Ababio s actions offers Densu “good possibilities” for further growth. Densu’s meeting with Ajoa reinforces his sentimental attachment to the ideals of the healers. Ajoa’s character is realized in almost mythical terms. When Densu first meets her, she is a small, fragile child, “but already her skin had that darkness that was a promise of inexhaustible depth, and her eyes were even then liquid, clear windows into the soul within” (p. 63). The power of her eyes beckons Densu to the eastern forest “with a strength whose source he felt within himself” and she functions as the instrument of his “sights far beyond the present moment.” Densu’s relationship with Damfo, the healer, begins through Ajoa, in an accidental way which, on closer examination, seems to reach deeper into himself and his quest for understanding:

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Deeper than the surface he could see connections; he could sense natural links between his love for Ajoa and his long search for understanding and knowledge, the search that brought him, all alive with conscious purpose, to Damfo. (p. 66) In Armah’s histories, there are natural links and historical connections, but never accidents. The inter-relationship of characters helps them illuminate one another as they move toward total understanding. Densu’s relationship with Araba Jesiwa brings out other aspects of his character. She typifies the kind of transformation that makes a person whole, and serves as an exemplar of what the healers can do to a maimed body and soul. In this respect, the role of the healer is to help a character discover his, or her, truest self; healers function as agents of seeing, hearing, and knowing on both an individual and social level. Healing is hence a commitment to “wholeness” and a special kind of universal knowledge: Those who learn to read the signs around them and to hear the language of the universe reach a kind of knowledge healers call the shadow. The shadow, because that kind of knowledge follows you everywhere. When you find it, it is not difficult at all. It says there are two forces, unity and division. The first creates. The second destroys; it is a disease, disintegration, (p. 82) As Densu learns later, the healers’ art goes beyond the fusion of the body and the soul, toward a larger task—“the bringing together again of the black people” (p. 83). It is his understanding of this dimension of healing that finally convinces Densu that his life has changed. His long dialogue with Damfo brings out the range, and the full implications, of the division between his inner self and the creed professed by the court at Esuano. But in spite of the changes that come over him, he is not yet able to understand the changes taking place outside himself fully, nor find “a welcome into the world his soul desired” (p. 83). He is trapped in a double vision which is, nevertheless, important to the movement of his thoughts; it gives him “a strange kind of heightened consciousness of his own actions, and an increased sensitivity to the how and why of everything he found himself doing” (p. 86). From this point onward, he feels he can question his motives and actions and “the ways of Esuano and the wider world it belonged to” (p. 87). The third and fourth sections of Part Three of The Healers weaken the dramatic movement in the novel considerably. After the stages of growth Densu has been through so far, culminating in his conscious decision to break from the court at Esuano, his long, discursive conversations with Damfo do not advance the narrative. Having developed the kind of consciousness which these dialogues are intended to trigger, these sections cannot be anything but

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redundant. They are at best an interlude between the main narrative (Densu’s movement of thought) and the trials and tribulations of Asamoa Nkwanta, which constitute a tertiary narrative. There is an extent to which Densu’s journey back to Esuano (which leads to his capture by Ababio and the death of his friend Anan) defeats the purpose of Damfo’s dialogues. After the death of Anan, Densu’s relationship to the real world becomes imbalanced, his body is detached from his mind, and the universe that imposes itself on his consciousness is described as “chilly” with “no refuges he could recognize” (p. 131). This state of mind eventually verges on despair. Even when Ajoa’s beckoning—“it was a beckoning that said life should be worth surviving for, in spite of everything” (p. 133)—eases his doubts, Densu’s mind does not acquire equilibrium for a long time. Thoughts of death come over him with a devastating effect because they seem to indicate the futility of a life which only a while ago offered him great possibilities. What worries the youth after the discovery of Araba Jesiwa’s body is not whether she is alive, but if her body contains conscious life. “I don’t understand anything,” he tells Damfo later; and this inability to understand is symptomatic of his lack of the kind of inner thought which, in the healer’s view, can come only from absolute belief. There is, of course, another source of power in The Healers: the natural environment, especially the trinity of the river, the forest, and the sky, which symbolizes the wholeness of life. When he goes out into the fields of Praso to work for the female healer Nyaneba, Densu’s mind is moved back to an infantile past when he could barely understand what was happening around him. Contrasting that time of limited knowledge and now, Densu has hopes and fears for the future, especially a future that transcends a single lifetime. The healer’s ultimate objective—the unification of all Black people—is terrifying in its magnitude, he reckons: The vision was terrifying even in its hopefulness, but with greater understanding the terror of his own impotence dissolved in the knowledge that if he worked well he would be part of the preparation for generations which would inherit the potency that should bring people back together, (p. 159) Densu’s fear of death remains central to his growth as a character. Death is a powerful image that looms in his mind, sometimes driving him into reckless actions (such as when he goes to the rescue of the victims of the Asante ruling class s ritual murder). In the latter situation, he does not reflect on the viability of his actions; all he was aware of was the unbearableness of what was happening (p. 167). Damfo predictably sees this irrational act as a weakness which Densu must overcome in his quest for full understanding, for the healers

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operate in a world in which the best ideals are not always realized. Thinking, Damfo argues, can reconcile Densu to what is real and attainable. When Densu asks the healer whether being realistic (accepting that we cannot stop men from being brutes because there is an element of evil embedded in their characters) means there is nothing we can do to stop the manipulators, Damfo replies that we have to be reflective first, “find out what can be done, how to do it, how long you’ll have to work in the direction you see, and how paltry the results will look to your impatient eves” (p. 171). Densu’s consciousness thus demands focusing. As the water-gazing ritual makes it clear to the youth, the image he has of himself and the world is confused; he can only attain full growth of mind by entering into relationships with people of a similar orientation, which will carry him beyond present historical realities (and imperfect images) to a utopian world yet to be bom. Ironically, since the character’s mind seeks symmetry with a world that is “not yet entirely present” (p. 229), full consciousness cannot be achieved. In this respect, as Densu learns when he returns to Kumase with Asamoa Nkwanta, doubts have a positive effect on the growth of character. The boy is no longer troubled by his ignorance: “Knowing he would be seeing and hearing things he had never in his life heard nor seen gave him a keen, anticipatory thrill” (p. 236). This new state of mind prepares the youth for his painful exodus through the Asante country after it has been devastated by the colonial invaders. Hope does not, however, preclude his sense of bitterness— “He had seen so much destruction” (p. 297)—which is contrasted with Ababio’s dance of joy, typifying, at least in the present time, the triumph of brutal power, manipulation, and the slave mentality. But the ending of The Healers is deliberately ironic: Ababio is destroyed by the forces he so eagerly served, while the Black people brought from other parts of the world help the colonizer dance a new dance. The dance signals the end of an era, but as the old healer Ama Nkroma notes, it also offers new possibilities for the healers’ ultimate dream—the unity of all Black people. One of the major criticisms made against Armah’s characters is that they are too elitist, that they stand above the very people they are supposed to serve. This is ironic in view of the motive force behind Armah’s novels: the novelist believes that individuals are only relevant within the group. As we have already observed, Densu does not find his true self until he is co-opted into a community that shares the ideals of wholeness which he finds lacking in Esuano. And yet the youth, like the other healers, is set apart from the mainstream of the community to which he ministers, isolated like a high priest. These characters are saintly, aloof, solitary, and misunderstood. They do not seem to live the lives of common men. The most apparent contradiction in a novel like The Healers, which lays claims to historicism, is the detachment of its characters from the vagaries of common experience. Characters like Densu

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and Damfo are thus cast more in the fabular mode than the historical one; they are righteous men, and as Walter Benjamin has aptly noted, “the righteous man is the advocate for created things and at the same time he is their highest embodiment.”4 There is one character who comes closest to functioning as a conventional figure of the historical novel in The Healers—the Asante general Asamoa Nkwanta. He is the symbol of a power which can be enhanced for the advancement of historical ends, but when we meet him, he is a rebel against such power. He is relevant to the historical movement in the novel not because he functions as any kind of central consciousness, but as a character whose personal feelings and grievances affect the future of his people. He thus offers the healers what Damfo calls “great possibilities.*’ The general’s search for understanding under the tutelage of the healers is an attempt to distinguish between a power that is committed to the self-aggrandizement of one social class, and another form of power that is in the service of communal ideals. “I’ve spent my life fighting to make Asante strong,” Nkwanta tells Damfo. “If the past was a time of unity, then must I see my entire life as wrong?” (p. 177). By the time he resumes his command, the general has been made to understand the difference between the needs of the Asante nation and its royals. The irony, of course, is that once he leads the Asante army into war against the colonial invaders, the general finds himself serving royalty once more. In this respect, his function as a healing force is limited; he is a servant of an infrastructure and class that stands in the way of African unity, a point confirmed by Nkwanta’s betrayal and irreversible despondency. Finally, a comment on Arm ah’s treatment of the colonial invader Glover in The Healers. Glover is a real historical figure who is cast in a mock-heroic mode to expose the vanity of the imperialist. He stands for, and represents, racial arrogance and paternalism which, together with greed, are the motive forces for the colonial invasion of Africa. In the following mock-heroic presentation of the colonial frontiersman at work, the presumptions of the invaders of Asante are indicated as much as the man himself.* The satire here is double-pronged: it is directed both at Glover and his pretentiousness, and those Blacks who allow themselves to be used as tools of pacification.

Editor s note: Here follows in the original text of the essay the account of Glover quoted from The Healers, p. 255.

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Notes 'Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hanna and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), p. 285. 2

Ayi Kwei Armah, The Healers (London: Heinemann, 1979), p. 4. Further references to this edition are cited in the text. 3

Georg Lukdcs, The Historical Novel, pp. 285-286.

4

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1973), p. 104.

Editor's Note: The above notes are numbered 23-26 in the original text of this essay. Quotations from Armah’s novel have been shortened and, in some cases, omitted for purposes of this publication.

The Nature of Healing , In Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers Y. S. Boafo

Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers is a fictional re-creation of the state of Akan society at a point in history, a state so dispiriting for the author that he is obliged to call for a change by enunciating what could be described as a veritable philosophy of political and social action. The action, wishfully corrective but idealistic, is undertaken by a group of saintly illuminati—the healers—whose aim is to instill an awareness of the need for correcting society, to prepare exceptional individuals to restructure society’s political base, and to re-create a new life for the Black race. Healing is the process by which this aim is to be achieved. Basically, healing in the novel is curative and creative, whether its object is the individual or the collectivity. It is directed at restituting equilibrium (psychological or physical) to an organic body or structure that has lost its balance. Its ultimate goal, however lengthy and tedious the healing process, is the restoration of wholeness in place of fragmentation, of unity in lieu of division. Understandably, healing involves the practitioner in two major interrelated roles: medical/psychological/sacerdotal and socio-political. He is at once a doctor, a priest, a sage, and a reformer. Evidently, the exercise of the complex functions of a healer entails a long period of preparation or apprenticeship. Indeed, the “preparation is endless,” and the vocation is not meant for all and sundry: “Can everyone become a healer?” “Few ever want to be healers.” “But could everyone be a healer?” “No.” “Why not?” “The healer must first have a healer’s nature.”1

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Only special individuals2 qualify for this very arduous profession which requires that the candidate be gifted and “inspired.” For Mallarme, any amateur of poetry wanting to decipher his “hermetic” and recondite verse could be initiated into his poetic religion. For Armah, interest in healing alone is not sufficient. The professed zeal and initial enthusiasm of the renegade apprentice healer, Esuman, turns out to be a camouflage for his search for personal grandeur. Real healing is at variance with his innermost wishes. The genuine would-be healer must not only have consummate interest in the job; above all, he must be blessed with the capacity for constant “inspiration”: his nature, temperament, disposition, nay, his soul must issue from a mysterious, enigmatic source which even the master-healer, Damfo, cannot define: “What gives the healer his nature?” “The same that gives him life,” the healer said. “What is that?” “I do not know, ” the healer said. Densu looked at his face and knew he was telling the truth. (p. 81) Undoubtedly, Armah’s depiction of Anan, Densu, Araba Jesiwa, and (to a lesser extent) Appia and Asamoa Nkwanta indicates their preparedness (at different levels) for “inspiration.” That is why they are eligible candidates either for the vocation or for cure.3 They are privileged individuals who, in their own ways, demonstrate their willingness to re-establish contact with a healthy life-giving force which seems to be severed from the daily world of “manipulation.” “Inspiration”—broadly, the possession of a healer’s nature—is necessarily followed by initiation, an indispensable aspect, a sine qua non of healing: “It is not enough for the one who would be a healer to have a healer’s nature. Beyond that he needs training, preparation” (p. 81). Therefore, to say that healers are different from other mortals is to make an understatement. They are a talented elite endowed with uncanny powers of intuition and cognition. Their work, healing, consists of seeing, hearing, and knowing, and not the kind of simple seeing that an Ezeulu (the Chief Priest in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God) perfunctorily does to announce the new moon as soon as it appears. That is just staring. “Idiots can do that,” chides Anan. “If you look at things that way they’re always separate and you never see any sense in what you see ... I always want to see what brings them together so they make sense. Then I understand” (p. 20). Seeing, like hearing, leads to greater knowledge: “The healer,” says Damfo, “hears and sees more.” This greater knowledge is not based on any superficial or rational analysis of data. It is a combination of the profound Socratic self-knowledge by participation in the natural universe and,

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more strikingly, of Baudelaire’s synesthesia. Says the poet in “Correspondences”: La nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles. 4

In the poet’s universe, man walks through a forest of symbols which observe him with familiar looks, and “perfumes, colours and sounds harmonize with each other.” The master-healer echoes: In the universe there are so many signs . . . But most signs mean nothing to us because we aren’t prepared to understand them. The healer trains his eyes—so he can read signs. His training is of the ears—so he can listen to sounds and understand them . . . He sees signs others don’t see. He hears sounds others don’t hear. The same tree that just stands there dumbly to everyone, to the healer its leaves have things to say. The healer learns the meaning of the river’s sound, of the sounds of the forest animals. (p. 80)

In his search for knowledge, the healer is invested with a faculty which is at once human and superhuman. Like a botanist, he recognizes—thanks to painstaking research—different types of leaves and knows how they function. But, like the traditional herbalist whose pharmacology and therapeutics are grounded in super-reality, he can recognize the different spirit in each kind of leaf. There is no doubt that Armah’s healers and would-be healers belong to the good side of a Manichean world which he has purposefully created in the novel. They stand for truth, harmony, and justice while the others detract from these qualities. Even his portrayal of them—physical and moral—is pleasant and captivating. He emphasizes the delicacy, grace, and delightful strength of the bodies of Densu, Anan, and Appia in the wrestling arena. Already, he focuses attention on their inner well-being and their propensity to moral loftiness. Anan’s highmindedness is implicit in his way of seeing things; it emanates from his frequent contemplation of nature. Densu has a soul that yearns for new paths to tread. Like Anan, he has a natural aversion for “manipulation,” the devilish art of extracting advantage from situations through force, fraud, and deceit. Not surprisingly, he resists with effortless ease the egoistic exhortations of Ababio to win the ritual games whose original spirit, to him, has lamentably vanished. In short, Armah paints his healing brotherhood very favorably, for they are society’s only hope for peace and progress, the beautyful ones” now being born. In contrast, he stresses very graphically the ugliness and “crude mass” of Buntui, the fatuous plaything of that compulsive manipulator Ababio, a power-drunk criminal devoid of any compunc-

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tion in his insatiable craving for worldly authority and recognition. The royals themselves are a contemptible group of opportunists; some are shamefully dipsomaniac. These are the fiends, the impediments to healing work, those to whom Anan will refuse, with a tinge of arrogance, to talk about communion with nature: “I know about madness. It’s when you insist on talking to people who can’t understand you” (p. 19). “The healer is a life-long enemy of manipulation,” says Damfo. The objective of healing is therefore to create a society not based on manipulative power. More concretely, it is to reform Black society and, in the long run, to bring all Black people together again, a people presumed to be scattered throughout the world through manipulation. If healing is directed in the first place against royal power (or for that matter any oligarchy), it is because the latter represents manipulative power; it thrives on divisiveness, fruitless competition, and exploitation. The narrower the framework within which power is exercised, the stronger, it seems, the power that is wielded, and greater will be its concentration. Hence, royalty’s infatuation with fragmentation. It is its life-blood: divide and rule! Even the ritual games which “had celebrated the struggles of a people working together to reach difficult destinations” (p. 6) had been craftily turned into “trials of individual strength and skills.” In the end, the victor, a single winner riding over a multitude of losers, would be isolated for the admiration of spectators and the envy of defeated competitors. The royals—Asante, Fanti, or any others—are belligerent for their own selfish ends. Whereas the healer works at “ending all unnatural rifts,” that is, ensuring that “different groups within what should be a natural community” (p. 183) should not clash with each other, the royals, without any regard for cohesion and unity, engage in intertribal wars or perfidiously ally themselves (as with the royal collaborators at Cape Coast) with a destructive colonial power. Were manipulation restricted to royalty, the healing of society would be relatively easy: it could then simply be directed against a small, privileged class. Sadly, the “disease” is a popular one. It has permeated all levels of society. Royalty is itself a disease that has affected the people. Densu realizes that “everyone at court, and most of the people he had come to know outside the court also, seemed able to act only in manipulative ways . . . This was the way of the world” (p. 27). Exploitation, reification, spiritual blindness, divisionism—these are the hallmarks of a manipulative society which healers are slowly but indefatigably working to eradicate. The healer’s longing for harmony, unity, and wholeness is a vital one, a longing fed from his inner setup, life-style, and whole being, all of which are naturally geared to the construction of a better society. In his attempts to re-create, the healer is guided by a “healing catechism,” a modus operandi. Assiduity in the vocation, asceticism, and self-

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discipline are indispensable tenets. Respect for life is cardinal. Though manipulation is a most “dangerous poison,” to combat it the healer spurns violence . that is, as far as such is humanly possible. Only in an extreme case, when killing is directed against a force that destroys life, is the act permissible. It is a “dirtying of the hands” in a manner that is absolutely unpreventable.5 Again, the healer “should never call upon his god to destroy anyone.” However sound his ideology or beliefs, he must not be intolerably dogmatic, for his method is that of persuasion. This principle is perhaps less quixotic than the one that says that power should be based on respect and not force. It is certainly a commendable proposition, but then is it not difficult to imagine an eventual end to the unscrupulous world of Ababio and the powerful royals if one resorted to the ultra-peaceful methods envisaged by the master healer? As Densu rightly foresees, “it will take ages [if ever]6 for the kind of power healers want to grow against what is there now” (p. 94). Even so, the healer should at all times guard against going to “the centres of power to flatter those already powerful in order to catch droppings from the powerful.” Nor should he attempt to “work with royal power” (p. 95). Whatever the circumstances, he should never be despondent—which pushes another healer to ask rather disquietingly: “Is it not possible that we healers are suffering from a disease—the fear of power, that will forever keep us impotent?” (p. 270). Damfo’s answer (and presumably Armah’s recommendation to Africa’s contemporary political messiahs) offers an interesting escape from a possible impasse, but it is hardly reassuring: We healers do not fear power. We avoid power deliberately as long as the power is manipulative power. There is a kind of power we use in our work. The power of inspiration. The power that respects the spirit in every being, in everything, and lets every being be true to the spirit within, (p. 270) The power that the master healer seeks is willfully abstract, insubstantial, and difficult to grasp mentally. Without doubt, it is some ideal power that is hopefully attainable in a truly democratic world without class or sectional interests. Not surprisingly, Armah’s healer is not sustained in his efforts by the thought and prospect of immediate successes. Possessing enormous reserves of patience and hope (a world of advice to nation builders), he knows that his major task of reuniting all Black people cannot be accomplished in his lifetime. In the meantime, the healer attaches himself to the healing of individuals although the highest healing work is curing people of the Black diaspora. It would, however, appear to be more realistic, in Armah’s desire to see oligarchical power destroyed, for him to posit another kind of power—that derived from a larger group, to wit, the people—which is not inspired by

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“manipulation. ” His flight into the realm of the abstract in search of a special power with which to combat the powers-that-be seems rather fanciful and romantic. One observes, curiously, that the individuals that Damfo chooses to heal belong to the highest echelon of society. Araba Jesiwa is born into royalty. Asamoa Nkwanta, by virtue of his enviable military-cum-socio-political position, is considerably respected and even feared by royals. One is really intrigued by this extravagant passion for privilege and position in the novelist’s choice of individuals. It looks as if a person has to have a certain social standing and to possess some uncommon personality to be able to simulate any healing interest since only such individuals seem capable of influencing or appear to have the wherewithal to attract a sizeable following. Is it not, for the healer, simply a question of making the most profitable investment? The venture has to be promising and the ground has to be fertile. Hence, the choice of Araba Jesiwa whose spirit is, in some mysterious way, opposed to that of the court. Hence also the acceptance of the God-sent extraordinary commander of the powerful Asante army, Asamoa Nkwanta. The healers already “see the future in Asamoa Nkwanta. They believe that the man could be the start of something new among our people” (p. 146). Damfo’s treatment of Araba Jesiwa’s almost irreparable broken bones is a masterpiece of traditional healing. It is a medical molding of fragments into a single whole; that is what healing is about. In his treatment of her psychological malady, Damfo reveals himself, within the context of Akan society, as a pioneer of a new method of healing. Where others failed, Damfo’s unusually patient and friendly approach is incredibly successful. The innumerable therapeutic concoctions of other doctors and their countless promises to restore to her “the key that would unlock her love-gift and open her to fruitful life” (p. 20) had all been to no avail. Damfo, on the other hand, “had never made her false promises. He had never spoken mere empty words to her. His words, all ordinary, possessing none of the flashy fire she had come so bitterly to associate with doctors and priests” (p. 72) are very soothing and comforting. His method is what has come to be known as psycho-analytic; his treatment, psychotherapeutic. Freudian resonances are heard in Damfo’s plunge into the depths of Araba’s subconscious mind; he “asked Araba Jesiwa to talk to him of something she had forgotten ... he reminded her to understand it was not really her body that needed healing work . . . but her violated soul” (pp. 7172). In consonance with the customs and morals of the court, Araba Jesiwa had given up her natural love for a contrived, shallow one dictated by the exigencies of royalty. “Noblesse oblige!” But no matter how hard she tried to believe in the normalcy of her princely demeanor, she was always haunted by the nightmare of a false equilibrium. Her personality had consequently become

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double. Damfo’s healing therefore relies on Araba’s dreams and hallucinations, the domain, it is claimed, of authentic reality. The healing consists essentially in making her realize the falsehood of her present existence which she alone can change: “He held open to Jesiwa the knowledge that she could change the direction of her life ... if she decided to do so.” Araba had behaved like the bourgeois of Bouville, Sartre’s “salauds” in La Nausie. She had masked her real self, projecting instead a personality which corresponded to royalty’s expectations and wishes. “Jette ton livre, Jesiwa,” Damfo virtually recommends in the manner of Gide. A recommendation, mark you, not a command! Damfo never “pushed Jesiwa to a decision” (p. 76): “In time,” admits Jesiwa, “I understood what to do. I had been false to myself. I had to start being true to myself. I had embraced false selves and set them up to dominate my real self. They were pieces of other people, demands put up by others to whom I used to give respect without stopping to think why ...” (p. 69) She consequently releases herself from the stranglehold of the court and of manipulative society: an existentialist solution, no doubt. It works marvelously in Armah’s novel. There is no feeling of anguish after the self-discovery. In other novels elsewhere, the desire to live sincerely and the concomitant refusal to yield to the dictates of society leads to persecution. Meursault is a case in point. But perhaps Meursault lacks the prerequisites of a candidate for healing. He is egocentric, and there is a certain unconsciously nihilistic tendency about that “absurd hero.” His nature may not be as good as Araba Jesiwa’s. That is why La Peste is an improvement, in terms of human relationships, on L ’Etranger. The point is that when Damfo helps7 Araba gain a realization of her true nature, he expects her to apply her discovery magnanimously to society. Damfo believes that through the avoidance of force, deception, and manipulation, the original, unitary, and altruistic nature of Akan society can be revived. If the society needs healing, it is because living therein has been insincere, and its true nature distorted. Society’s disease lies in the collective psyche, in the convenient forgetfulness, to the advantage of royalty, of a past in which Black people were one; original Black society is supposedly characterized by unity, integration, and democracy. Negritude’s “paradise lost” all over again! It is toward the recovery of that lost paradise that the healer expends his energies. “His real work,” intimates Araba to Densu, “is not the healing of sick individuals” (p. 78). The destruction of Araba’s second and borrowed personality is parallel to the desire to restore to Akan society (given out in the novel as the microcosm and the cradle of the Black world) its primitive, non-manipulative purity and wholeness before the disintegration.8

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Herein lies the importance of the attempt to heal Asamoa Nkwanta. The essence of his healing is to infuse in a powerful individual (“Srafo-Kra,” the soul of the Asante army) an acute awareness of the true state of his society so as to induce him to change that state. “Healers are just awakeners of people who have slept too long” (p. 83). Here again, healing becomes an instrument for extricating the individual from the shackles of stereotyped thinking and inauthentic behavior. Though the undertones are political, the method is still psychological. The healer is only a helper: “Medicine could do nothing if a human being was making war on his own natural self” (p. 173). The success of healing depends on the response of the patient. It is a function of one’s readiness to help oneself, that is, to react generously to the help that the healer offers. In short, it is a choice that one is prepared to be healed. This, in a way, signifies one’s free acceptance of Damfo’s subtle indoctrination.9 What he really does with Asamoa Nkwanta is to play on the painful loss of his nephew and to extract any but egoistic sense from the brutal assassination of the promising boy, with the intention of striking a rebellious chord in the commander. Significantly, he invites his patient to concentrate on “ways to make such loss of life impossible” (p. 178). He advises him to go beyond a mere contemplation of his loss and to seek fresh energies in what the future can offer. He opens his eyes to the disturbing contrast between the previous oneness of Akan and all Black people and the present conflicts and divisions. No wonder the General asserts in the course of time: “these petty wars in which the army gets sent to fight other Black people are a waste” (p. 183). The political indoctrination gains ground when he ventures to assert what in other circumstances would have been heretical, blasphemous, and treasonable: When I think that the result of all my work, the best that is in me, is simply to give power to people who only know how to waste power and waste life, my arm grows weak and I feel all the forces of life and will deserting me. (p. 180) And when he admits: “It never has been my aim just to serve royalty . . . The royals these days only serve themselves . . . [and the army is] a plaything the royals indulge themselves with” (p. 180), his evolution nears the desired end. Since Nkwanta confesses that his spirit has always requested him to work for the army and the people, it is conceivable that he could seize power from the Asante royals. If he should stage a military coup d’etat for his personal aggrandizement (a remote possibility judging his nature and his utterances), it would make complete nonsense of his healing: “The worst kinds of power grow most easily,” and healers abhor these. What they expect of him is the use of power so seized for the emancipation of the people. But, though he knows that the royals do not respect human life (hence the numerous human sacrifices

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in the name of national, royal security); though he realizes, belatedly, that they will not hesitate to destroy all ostensible pockets of rival power (whether it be an aristocracy of healers or a very popular war lord) even at the expense of a portion of their own power, he is not the type to carry his realization to its logical conclusion. The fact is that he has served royalty for too long and he is trapped in his service of it The healing of Asamoa Nkwanta is not ultimately successful because his is linked to that of the society—and that is too arduous a task for its success to be certain or predictable. Healing of individuals is necessary but insufficient. Its anticipated impact might be chimerical. It is therefore somewhat relieving when Damfo admits finally that the healing work of reuniting the Black race involves community work. “It cannot be done by an individual. It should not depend on any single person, however heroic he may be” (p. 270). Damfo’s admission of the inadequacy of the healing of individuals undermines the necessity to over-emphasize the need to possess special qualities. To insist on such qualities is to greatly limit participation in community work which alone gives real meaning to healing work. Indeed, there must be an oddity, even a flaw, in a system which, in its operation, claims to exclude untalented, non-gifted individuals and yet at the same time counts heavily on the cooperation of such individuals for any significant results. More concretely, Arm ah’s vision of political salvation for the Black race through the activities of privileged individuals shows its shortcomings when measured against the possibility of its being accomplished. His pan-Africanist idea—a veritable orchestration of a generation’s best hopes and fondest dreams—is laudable, but it is difficult to be confident about his path to its achievement. His method is, generally, suspect in that it relies considerably on the readiness and goodwill of well-meaning, exceptional persons whose persuasive, gradualist, and Gandhist approach to their work makes any positive gains derivable from their enormous task too much of a gamble. It fails to utilize to its advantage a great lesson of history: namely, the possibility of reducing progress time through an enlightened comprehension of events and knowledge of power structures, and an enhanced ability to tackle problems. Weighed against the calculated pragmatism of the manipulators such as Ababio and his ilk, the healers’ endeavors appear to be too idealistic to be worthy of practical consideration. Though their approach constitutes a fitting safeguard against the deliberate abuse of power, it is nonetheless unthinkable to expect saints to triumph over power that is well entrenched and ever ready to defend itself tenaciously against all odds. Armah’s healers are, unquestionably, saints; there is something divine about them. For effective healing work, is one not supposed to be rigidly ascetic? Says Damfo: “Whoever wants to be a healer must take leave of the world he’s grown up in before his mind is free for learning” (p. 90). Among the innumerable things on which a healer must turn his back are “things of the

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world. Not only things of the flesh, but also things touching the spirit. There’s comfort, wealth. There’s also love, the respect of close ones. Even fame, the respect of distant people. Power among men. The satisfaction of being known wherever you go” (p. 90). Admittedly, a healer’s work is no entertainment, and certainly it is only a Christ-like figure who can genuinely heed such a call, which is an astonishing reminder of Christ’s words to would-be disciples: If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26) The healer’s bearing is too exemplary to warrant any effective emulation by community workers. Attraction to a cause is made easy through exemplary actions but certainly not through a “holier than thou” posturing. The corollary is that it is pointless—if events in the novel are to be given a contemporary slant (as indeed they should)—to condemn pan-Africanists to date on the basis of Armah’s healing prescription because these are difficult to translate into meaningful action (in terms of their practicability). But, of course, as an artist in a so-called “free” world, Armah is entitled to his hopes, wishes, and dreams. Armah’s optimism in this novel is a welcome change from the pessimism of the earlier novels save Two Thousand Seasons. His indictment of contemporary “manipulative’’ society and the disunity that characterizes the Black world projects the author’s new vision of the world. In a world of antagonistic interests, salvation for the Black race lies in its unity, itself dependent on a remodeling of the power structures prevailing in each Black area. His view of the “harvest time” for political action has the merit of insulating political actors from despair. His insistence on hope and on the need to regard the “seed time” as necessarily lengthy in view of the difficulties attendant on any political action aimed at the liberation of a people, is worthy of attention. On the one hand, it brings into relief the importance of forbearance and level-headedness in dealing with human beings; on the other hand, it shows his concern for the frustrations and inner misery that political liberators experience in the face of possible failures. Armah tells them to labor on patiently but assiduously, while others come to continue with their good works. The novelist’s forceful emphasis on the necessity for the reunification of Black people, however utopian it might sound to cynics, is perhaps not shallow. Having traveled widely, he could not have turned his eyes off the plight of his Black brethren who, though born free and united, are scattered everywhere and in chains. Happily, the White man, by his ambition to dominate the world, is unwittingly helping to bring them together again.

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Notes >Ayi Kwei Armah, The Healers (London: Heinemann, 1978), p. 80. All further page references are incorporated into the text. 2

In his review of The Healers which he read in typescript, Atta Britwum describes the healers as “a caucus of special individuals,” an expression which embraces the “superb individuals” of Annah’s earlier works. Asemka, 5 (September 1979), 137. 3

In Armah’s description of the healer, it is clear that the successfully healed person qualifies to be a healer himself. 4

Free translation: “Nature is a temple in which living pillars sometimes allow indistinct words to emerge. ” 5

“How can you kill out of respect for life,” asks Damfo. “If what I kill destroys life,” Densu replies (p. 92). ’The brackets are mine. 7

Damfo is a helper, as his name implies. When pronounced without any stress, “Damfo” means “a friend.” But, not surprisingly, Ababio considers him as demented. That view of him is also conveyed by a second meaning of the name (or term). If the first syllable is stressed (“dam”), then Damfo becomes a madman, as indeed he is to manipulators. 8

One cannot help feeling that Araba Jesiwa’s dual personality before her first healing corresponds to the split in Akan society and the aberrant life at Esuano. ?

In his conversations with the General, Damfo leaves little doubt as to his real motive to turn the General’s mind away from his support of the Asante royals; because he sees “possibilities of a new kind of power growing” through the healing of the General, he seems to overstep his own bounds by pushing a bit harder than usual.

Editor s Note. Quotations from Armah’s novel in the above essay have been shortened and, in some cases, omitted for the purposes of this publication.

Bibliography WORKS BY AVI KWEI ARMAH 1. Novels The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968; London: Heinemann, 1969, reset 1975; Nairobi: Heinemann, 1976. Translated into Swahili as Wema Hawajazaliwa. Fragments. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970; London: Heinemann, 1974; Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1974. Why Are We So Blest? New York: Doubleday, 1972; London: Heinemann, 1974; Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1974. Two Thousand Seasons. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973; London: Heinemann, 1979; Chicago: Third World Press, 1980. The Healers. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1978; London: Heinemann, 1979.

2. Short Stories “Contact.” The New African, 4, 10, December 1965, 244-246, 248. “Asemka.” Okyeame, 3, 1, December 1966, 28-32. “Yaw Manu’s Charm.” The Atlantic Monthly, May 1968, 89-95. “An African Fable.” Presence Africaine, 68 (1968), 192-196. “The Offal Kind.” Harper's Magazine, 1424, January 1969, 79-84. “Halfway to Nirvana.” West Africa, 24 September 1984, 1947-1948.

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3. Poem “Aftermath.” In Awoonor, Kofi, and G. Adali Mortty, eds. Messages: Poems from Ghana. London: Heinemann, 1970, pp. 89-91.

4. Essays

“La mort passe sous les blanc.” L’AfriqueLitteraire et Artistique, 3, February 1960, 21-28. “Pour les ibos, le regime de la haine silencieuse. ” Jeune Afrique, 355,29 October 1967, 18-20. “African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?” Presence Africaine, 64 (1967), 6-30. “A Mystification: African Independence Revalued.” Pan-African Journal, 2, 2, Spring 1969, 141-151. “Fanon: The Awakener.” Negro Digest, 18, 12, October 1969, 4-9, 29-43. “Sundiata, An Epic of Old Mali.” Black World, 23, 7 (1974), 51-52, 93-96. “Chaka.” Black World, 24,4 (1975), 51-52,84-90. Reprinted as “The Definitive Chaka.” Transition, 50 (1976), 10-15. “Larsony, or Fiction as Criticism ofFiction.” Asemfoz, 4, September 1976,1-14. Reprinted in New Classic, 4, November 1977, 33-45. “Masks and Marx: The Marxist Ethos vis-a-vis African Revolutionary Theory and Praxis.” Presence Africaine, 131 (1984), 35-65. “Islam and ‘Ceddo.’” West Africa, 8 October 1984, 2031. “The View from PEN International ” West Africa, 26 November 1984, 2384-2385. “The Oxygen of Translation.” West Africa, 11 February 1985, 262-263. “The Lazy School of Literary Criticism.” West Africa, 25 February 1985, 355-356. “The Caliban Complex.” West Africa, 18 & 25 March 1985, 521-522,570-571. “Our Language Problem.” West Africa, 29 April 1985, 831-832. “The Teaching of Creative Writing.” West Africa, 20 May 1985, 994-995. “One Writer’s Education.” West Africa, 26 August 1985, 1752-1753. “Flood and Famine, Drought and Glut.” West Africa, 30 September 1985, 2011-

2012. “Africa and the Francophone Dream.” West Africa, 28 April 1986, 884-885. “Dakar Hieroglyphs.” West Africa, 19 May 1986, 1043-1044. “Writers as Professionals.” West Africa, 11 August 1986, 1680. “The Third World Hoax.” West Africa, 25 August 1986, 1781-1782.

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WORKS ABOUT AYI KWEI ARMAH 1. Biographical Anon. Biographical Note on Ayi Kwei Armah. Cultural Events in Africa, 40, March 1968, 5. Brooks, Gwendolyn. Report from Part One. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972, pp. 127-128. Herdeck, Donald. “Armah, Ayi Kwei. ” African Authors: A Companion to Black African Writing, Volume 1:1300-1973. Washington, D.C.: Black Orpheus Press, 1973, pp. 43-44. Vinson, J., ed. Contemporary Novelists. London & New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976, pp. 53-54. Zell, Hans, Caroline Bundy, and Virginia Coulon, eds. A New Reader’s Guide to African Literature. New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1983, pp. 352-354.

2. Selected Reviews of Armah’s Novels Anon. Review of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Bom. The Times Literary Supplement, 27 March 1969, 333. Anon. “Parable of Yearning: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” Time, 30 August 1968, 70-72. Cheatwood, K. T. H. Review of Why Are We So Blest? Black World, 23, 5 (1974), 85-90. Colmer, Rosemary. Review of The Healers. Kunapipi, 2, 1 (1980), 164-165. Gaffney, James. “An African in Exile, Camelot Revisited and Espionage Uncloaked: Why Are We So Blest? by Ayi Kwei Armah.” America, 126, 22 April 1972, 434-445. Grant, Stephen H. Review of Fragments. Africa Report, 15, 7 (1970), 40-42. Irele, Abiola. Review of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Okyeame, 4, 2 (1969), 125-127. . “A New Mood in the African Novel.” West Africa,20 September 1969, 1115. Jones, Eldred. Review of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Bom. African Literature Today, 3 (1969), 55-57. Kariara, Jonathan. “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born: A Study in Artistic Arrogance.” Zuka, 4 (1969), 57-58.

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Kisogie, Bai. “A Plague on Both Your Houses: Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons.” Transition, 45 (1976), 75. Komolo, E. “Ayi Kwei Armah’s Cargo Mentality: A Critical Review of Fragments.” Dhana, 4, 2 (1974) 88-90. K. W. “The Uses of Nausea: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” West Africa, 28 December 1968, 1540. Larson, Charles. Review of Why Are We So Blest? Saturday Review, 53, 18 March 1972, 73-74. Mahood, Molly. Review of Fragments. Saturday Review, 53, 17 January 1970, 40. Miller, Charles. “The Arts of Venality: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born” Saturday Review, 51, 31 August 1968, 24. Moore, Gerald. “Armah’s Second Novel. ” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 9, 1 (1974) 69-71. Noble, R. W. “A Beautyful Novel.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 9, 2 (1970), 117-119. Nyamfukudzwa, S. “Drought and Rain: Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers. ”New Statesman, 99, 1 March 1980, 362. Obiechina, Emmanuel. Review of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Okike, 1, 1 (1971), 49-53. Omotoso, Kole. “Mere Mirrors of Annihilation: A Review of Season ofAnomy and Two Thousand Seasons.” Afriscope, 4, 7 (1974), 42-43. Povey, John. Review of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Africa Report, February 1969, 60. Thomas, Peter. Review of Why Are We So Blest? African Arts, 6, 3 (1973), 81-82. Tucker, Martin. “Tragedy ofaBeen-to: Fragments.” The New Republic, 162, 31 January 1970, 24-26. Yankson, Kofi. Review of Two Thousand Seasons. Asemka, 1, 2 (1974), 111-113. Zirirnu, Elvania. Review of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Mawazo, 2, 1 (1969), 68-69.

3. Literary Criticism Abrahams, Cecil. “Perspective on Africa.” Canadian Journal of African Studies, 11, 2 (1977), 355-359. Achebe, Chinua. “The Novelist as Teacher.” Commonwealth Literature. Ed. John Press. London: Heinemann, 1965, pp. 202-205.

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. “Africa and Her Writers.” Morning Yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann, 1975, pp. 19-29. Also in Morell, Karen, ed. In Person: Achebe, Awoonor, Soyinka. Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1975, pp. 13-15, 50-53. . Discussion with Kofi Awoonor, Ali Mazrui, and others. Issue, 6, 1 (1976), 37. Adeyemi, N. A. “The Major Artistic Achievements of Armah in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” Shuttle, 8 (1980), 46-48. Aidoo, Ama Ata. “No Saviours.” Killam, G.D., ed. African Writers on African Writing. London: Heinemann, 1973, pp. 14-18. Amuta, Chidi. “History, Contemporary Reality and Social Vision in Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons.” Journal of the Literary Society of Nigeria, 1 (1980). . “Ayi Kwei Armah, History and the Way: The Importance of Two Thousand Seasons.” Komparatistische Hefle, 3 (1981), 79-86. . “Ayi Kwei Armah and the Mythopoesis of Mental Decolonization.” Ufahamu, 10, 3 (1981), 44-56. . “The Contemporary African Artist in Armah’s Novels.” World Literature Written in English, 21, 3 (1982), 467-476. Amuzu, Koku. “The Theme of Corruption in A Man of the People and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” Legacy, 3, 2 (1977), 18-23. Anozie, Sunday. “Le Nouveau Roman Africain.” Conch, 2, 1 (1970), 29-32. . Structural Models and African Poetics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Anyidoho, Kofi. “Historical Realism and the Visionary Ideal: Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons.” Ufahamu, 11,2 (1981-1982), 108-130. . “African Creative Fiction and a Poetics of Social Change.” Komparatistische Hefle, 13 (1986), 67-82. . “Literature and African Identity: The Example of Ayi Kwei Armah.” In Eckhard Breitinger and Reinhard Sander, eds. Literature and African Identity. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies Series 6, 1986, pp. 23-42. Ashaolu, Albert Olu. “The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah.” In S. O. Asein and A. O. Ashaolu, eds. Studies in the African Novel. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1986, pp. 124-140. Awoonor, Kofi. “Africa’s Literature Beyond Politics.” Worldview, 15,3 (1972), 21-25. . Interview in Bernth Lindfors, Ian Munro, and Richard Priebe, eds. Palaver. Austin: African & Afro-American Research Institute, University of Texas, 1972, pp. 47-64.

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. “Voyager and the Earth.” New Letters, 40, 1 (1973), 85-93. . “Tradition and Continuity in African Literature.” In Karen Morell, ed. In Person: Achebe, Awoonor and Soyinka. Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1975, pp. 133-145. . Discussion in Issue, 6, 1 (1976), 5-13, 22-40. Ayuk, G. Ojong. “The Lust for Material Well-Being in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Fragments by Ayi Kwei Armah.” Presence Africaine 132 (1984), 33-43. Balogun, A. “The Contemporary Stage in the Development of an African Aesthetic.” Okike, 19 (1981), 15-23. Barkan, Sandra. “Beyond Larsony: On the Possibility of Understanding Texts Across Cultures.” World Literature Today, 57, 1 (1983), 35-38. Barthold, Bonnie Jo. Black Time: Fiction of Africa, the Caribbean and the U. S.A. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. . “ AyiKwei Armah: An Akan Story-Teller. ” InHedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim, eds. Essays on Contemporary Post-Colonial Fiction. Munich: Max Hueber, 1986, pp. 67-80. Bishop, Rand. “The Beautyful Ones Are Born: Armah’s First Five Novels.” World Literature Written in English, 21, 3 (1982), 531-537. Boafo, Y. S. “The Nature of Healing in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers.” Komparatistische Hefte, 13 (1986), 95-104. Booth, James. uWhy Are We So Blest? and the Limits of Metaphor.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 15, 1 (1980), 50-64. Britwum, Atta. “Hero-Worshipping in the African Novel.” Asemka, 3 (1975), 1-18. Busia, Abena. “Parasites and Prophets: The Use ofWomen in AyiKwei Armah’s Novels.” In Carole Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves. Ngambika: Studies ofWomen in African Literature. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1986, pp. 89-113. Case, Frederick I. “The African Bourgeois in West African Literature.” Canadian Journal of African Studies, 1 (1973), 257-266. Chakava, Henry. “Ayi Kwei Armah and a Commonwealth of Souls.” In C. Wanjala, ed. Standpoints on African Literature. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1973, pp. 197-208. Chetin, Sarah. “Armah’s Women.” Kunapipi, 6, 3 (1984), 47-57. Coates, John. “The Mythic Undercurrent in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” World Literature Written in English, 28, 2 (1988), 155-170.

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Collins, Harold. “The Ironic Imagery of Arm ah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born: The Putrescent Vision.” World Literature Written in English, 20 (1971), 37-50. Colmer, Rosemary. “The Human and the Divine: Fragments and Why Are We So Blest?” Kunapipi, 2, 2 (1980), 77-90. Dailly, Christophe. “The Coming of Age of the African Novel.” Presence Africaine, 130, 2 (1984), 118-131. Dathome, O. R. African Literature in the Twentieth Century. London: Heinemann, 1976. Echeruo, Michael. Interview. InBemthLindfors, ed. Dem-Scty. Austin: African & Afro-American Research Institute, University of Texas, 1973, pp. 12-15. Evans, Jennifer. “Women of‘The Way.’” ACLALS Bulletin, 6,1 (1982), 17-26. Fenton, Leslie. “Symbolism and Theme in Peters’ The Second Round and Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” Pan-African Journal, 6 (1973), 83-90. Feuser, Willfried. “Reflections on History in African Literature.” World Literature Written in English, 24, 1 (1984), 52-64. Folarin, Margaret. “An Additional Comment on Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” African Literature Today, 5 (1971), 116-129. Fraser, Robert. “The American Background in Why Are We So Blest?” African Literature Today, 9 (1978), 39-46. . The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah: A Study in Polemical Fiction. London: Heinemann, 1980. Frederiksen, Bodil Folke. “‘ The Loved Ones’: Racial and Sexual Relations in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Why Are We So Blest?” Kunapipi, 9, 2 (1987), 40-49. Gakwandi, Shatto Arthur. The Novel and Contemporary Experience in Africa. London: Heinemann, 1977. Gikandi, Simon. Reading the African Novel. London: James Currey; Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Nairobi: Heinemann, 1987. Goldie, Terry. “A Connection of Images: The Structure of Symbols in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” Kunapipi, 1, 1 (1979), 94-107. Greene, Sue. “Hearts of Darkness: The Depiction of Madness as a Colonial Condition in Some Anglophone African Novels.” ACLALS Bulletin, 7, 4 (1985-1986), 1-22. Griffiths, Gareth. “Structure and Image in Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” Studies in Black Literature, 2, 2 (1971), 1-9. . “The Language of Disillusion in the African Novel. ” In Anna Rutherford, ed. Commonwealth. Aarhus: University of Aarhus Press, 1971, pp. 62-72.

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. A Double Exile: African and West Indian Writing Between Two Cultures. London: Marion Boyars, 1978. Hagher, I. “The Place of Home in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born” Mirror (1973-1974), 17-20. Ikkideh, Ime. “Ideology and Revolutionary Action in the Contemporary African Novel.” In S. O. Asein and A. O. Ashaolu, eds. Studies in the African Novel. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1986, pp. 37-56. Iyasere, Solomon O. “Oral Tradition in the Criticism of African Literature.” Journal of Modern African Studies, 13, 1 (1975), 107-119. Izevbaye, D. S. “Ayi Kwei Armah and the T of the Beholder.” In Bruce King and Kolawole Ogungbesan, eds. A Celebration of Black and African Writing. Ibadan: Oxford University Press Nigeria; Zaria: Ahmadu Bello Press, 1975, pp. 232-244. _. “Naming and the Character of African Fiction.” Research in African Literatures, 12, 2 (1981), 162-184. . “Time in the African Novel.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 17, 1 (1982), 74-89. . “Cultural Formalism and the Criticism of Modem African Literature. ” Journal of Modern African Studies, 14, 2 (1976), 322-330. Johnson, Joyce. “The Promethean ‘Factor’ in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments and Why Are We So Blest?” World Literature Written in English, 21, 3 (1982), 497-510. Johnson, Lemuel A. “Ideology, Art and Community: African Literature and the Issues. ” In Richard Priebe and Thomas Hale, eds. Artist and Audience: African Literature as a Shared Experience. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1979, pp. 181-203. . The Middle Passage in African Literature: Soyinka, Ouologuem, Armah.” African Literature Today, 11 (1980), 62-84. . “Safaries in the Bush of Ghosts: Camara Laye, Saul Bellow and Ayi Kwei Armah.” Issue, 13 (1984), 45-54. Jordan, Jennifer. “Blackstage Looks at Ayi Kwei Armah and the God of Mamon.” Blacks tag e, 3 (1974), 4-6. Kibera, Leonard. “Pessimism and the African Novelist: Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 14, 1 (1979), 64-72. Kronenfeld, J. Z. “The ‘Communistic’

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Lang, G. “Text, Identity and Difference: Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence and Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons.” Comparative Literary Studies, 24, 4 (1987), 387-402. Larson, Charles. The Emergence of African Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971; rev. edn., London: Macmillan, 1978. . “Ayi Kwei Armah’s Vision of African Reciprocity.” Africa Today, 21, 2 (1974), 117-119. Lasker, Carroll and Kwaku Amoabeng. “Titles, Names and Themes in African Literature.” Queen's Quarterly, 91, 2 (1984), 282-300. Lawson, William. The Western Scar: The Theme oftheBeen-To in West African Fiction. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1982. Lazarus, Neil. “The Implications of Technique in The Healers.” Research in African Literatures, 13, 4 (1982), 488-498. ______ “Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will: A Reading of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyjul Ones Are Not Yet Born.” Research in African Literatures, 18, 2 (1987), 137-175. Lindfors, Berath. “Armah’s Histories.” African Literature Today, 11 (1980), 85-96. . “Xenophobia and Class Consciousness in Recent African Literature.” ACLALS Bulletin, 7, 6 (1985-1986), 54-65. Lipenga, Ken. “Malignant Readings: The Case of Armah’s Critics.” Journal of Humanities, 1, 1 (1987), 19-21. Lobb, Edward. “Armah’s Fragments and the Vision of the Whole.” ARIEL, 10, 1 (1979), 25-38. . “Personal and Political Fate in Armah’s Why Are We So Blest?” World Literature Written in English, 19, 1 (1980), 5-18. Lurie, Joseph. “Fragments: Between the Loved Ones and the Community.” Ba Shiru, 5, 1 (1973), 31-41. Mamadu, Ayo. “Making Despair Bearable: Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Fragments.” Neohelicon, 10, 2 (1983), 231-249. . “Reflections in a Pool: Armah’s Art on Artists and the Arts. ” Research in African Literatures, 16, 4 (1985), 514-524. Massa, Daniel. “The Post-Colonial Dream.” World Literature Written inEnglish, 20, 1 (1981), 135-149. Maugham-Brown, David. “Interpreting and The Interpreters.” English in Africa, 6, 2 (1978), 54-60. McEwan, Neil. Africa and the Novel. London: Macmillan, 1983. McKinley, T. R. “Griotature in a Book: Two Thousand Seasons.” Tanzanian Notes and Reviews, 77-78 (1976), 109-111.

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Mensah, A. N. “The Crisis of the Sensitive Ghanaian: A Review of the First Two Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah.” Universitas, 2, 2 (1973), 3-17. . “Style and Purpose in Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons.” African Literature Today, 17 (1989). Moore, Gerald. “Action and Freedom in Two African Novels.” Conch, 2, 1 (1970), 21-28. . “The Writer and the Cargo Cult.” In Anna Rutherford, ed. Commonwealth. Aarhus: University of Aarhus Press, 1971, pp. 73-84. . Twelve African Writers. London: Hutchinson, 1980. Mutiso, G. C. M. “African Socio-Political Process: A Model from Literature.” In A. Gurr and E. Zirimu, eds. Black Aesthetics. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1973, pp. 143-168. Nama, Charles. “Ayi Kwei Armah’s Utopian World.” World Literature Written in English, 28, 1 (1988), 25-35. Nazareth, Peter. “Africa under Neo-Colonialism: New East African Writing.” Busara, 6, 1 (1974), 19-31. Ngara, Emmanuel. Stylistic Criticism and the African Novel. London: Heinemann, 1982. Art and Ideology in the African Novel. London: Heinemann, 1985. Nicholson, Mary. “The Organization of Symbols in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” Asemka, 1, 2 (1974), 7-16. Niemi, Richard. “Will the Beautiful Ones Ever Be Bom?” Pan-Africanist, 3 (1971), 18-23. Niven, Alastair. “Exile and Expatriation in African Literature.” Literary Half-Yearly, 21, 1 (1980), 167-180. . ‘Wars, Skirmishes and Strategies in the Criticism of Modem African Literature.” World Literature Written in English, 19, 2 (1980), 144-151. . “The Family in African Literature.” ARIEL, 12, 3 (1981), 81-91. Nkosi, Lewis. Tasks and Masks: Themes and Styles of African Literature. Harlow, England: Longman, 1981. Nnolim, Charles. Dialectic as Form: Pejorism in the Novels of Armah. ” African Literature Today, 10 (1979), 207-223. . Letter to the Editor. Research in African Literatures, 14, 4 (1983), 567-570. Nwoga, D. I. “Alienation in Modem African Fiction.” Muse, 5 (1973), 23-27. Obiechina, Emmanuel. Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

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. wPost-Independence Disillusionment in Three African Novels.” In Bemth Lindfors and Ulla Schild, eds. Neo-African Literature and Culture: Essays in Memory ofJahnheinzJahn. Wiesbaden: B. Heyman, 1976, pp. 119-146. Obumselu, Ben. “Marx, Politics and the African Novel.” Twentieth Century Studies, 10 (1973), 107-127. Ogunba, Oyin. “The Politics of Poverty: Two Novels on Political Independence in West Africa.” Oduma, 2, 1 (1974), 24-27, 30-33. Ogungbesan, Kolawole. “Symbol and Meaning in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” African Literature Today, 7 (1975), 93-110. . “Simple Novels and Simplistic Criticism.” Umoja, 1,3 (1977), 31-42. Okai, Atukwei. “Vision, Image and Symbol in Ghanaian Literature.” Pacific Quarterly, 6, 3-4 (1981), 51-61. Okpewho, Isidore. “Myth and Modern Fiction: Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons.” African Literature Today, 13 (1983), 1-23. Ola, Virginia U. “The Feminine Principle and the Search for Wholeness in The Healers.” Ufahamu, 14, 3 (1985), 73-82. Omotoso, Kole. “Trans-Saharan Views: Mutually Negative Portrayals.” African Literature Today, 14 (1984), 111-117. Palmer, Eustace. “Social Comment in the West African Novel.” Studies in the Novel, 4, 2 (1972), 218-230. . An Introduction to the African Novel. London: Heinemann, 1972. . The Growth of the African Novel. London: Heinemann, 1979. . “Negritude Rediscovered: A Reading of the Recent Novels of Armah, Ngugi and Soyinka.” International Fiction Review, 8, 1 (1981), 1-11. Panter-Brick, S. K. “Fiction and Politics: The African Writer’s Abdication.” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 13 (1975), 79-86. Peck, Richard. “Hermits and Saviors, Osagyefos and Healers: Artists and Intellectuals in the Works of Ngugi and Armah.” Research in African Literatures, 20, 1 (1989), 26-49. Peplow, Michael W. “The ‘Black White Man’ in African Protest Literature.” Lock Haven Review, 13 (1972), 3-14. Peterson, Kirsten Holt. “The New Way: Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons.” World Literature Written in English, 15 (1976), 330-335. . “Loss and Frustration: An Analysis of A. K. Armah’s Fragments.” Kunapipi, 1, 1 (1979), 53-65. . “West African Politics and Politicians from a Literary Point of View.” In Dieter Riemenschneider, ed. The History and Historiography of Commonwealth Literature. Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1983, pp. 176-188.

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“First Things First: Problems of a Feminist Approach to African Literature.” Kunapipi, 6, 3 (1984), 35-47. Povey, John. “Africa Through African Eyes.” Intellect, 104 (1976), 323-326. . “The Political Vision of the West African Writer.” English in Africa, 5, 2 (1978), 51-56. Priebe, Richard K. “Escaping the Nightmare of History: The Development of a Mythic Consciousness in West African Literature.” ARIEL, 4, 2 (1973), 55-67. . “Demonic Imagery and the Apocalyptic Vision in the Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah.” Yale French Studies, 53 (1976), 102-136. . “Popular Writing in Ghana: A Sociology and Rhetoric.” Research in African Literatures, 9, 3 (1978), 395-422. . Myth, Realism and the West African Writer. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1988. Rassner, Ron. “Fragments: The Cargo Mentality. ” Ba Shiru, 5,2 (1974), 55-64. Ravenscroft, Arthur. “An Introduction to West African Novels in English. ” Literary Criterion, 10, 2 (1972), 38-56. . “African Novels of Affirmation.” In Graham Martin, ed. The Uses of Fiction: Essays in the Modern Novel in Honour of Arnold Kettle. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1982, pp. 171-180. Sabor, Peter. “Palm-Wine and Drinkards: African Literature and its Critics.” ARIEL, 12, 3 (1981), 113-125. Sekyi-Otu, Ato. “Toward Anoa . . . Not Back to Anoa: The Grammar of Revolutionary Homecoming in Two Thousand Seasons.” Research in African Literatures, 18, 2 (1987), 192-214. Shehu, Emman Usman. “A Blessing of Contradictions: A Reading of Why Are We So Blest?” Kakaki, 1 (1980), 25-52. Shyam, Jai. “Plights of Contemporary Life in Recent African Fiction.” Arizona Quarterly, 42, 3 (1986), 248-260. Simonse, Simon. “African Literature Between Nostalgia and Utopia.” Research in African Literatures, 13, 4, (1982), 451-487. Snyder, Emile. “New Directions in African Writings.” Pan-African Journal, 5 (1972), 253-261. Sole, Kelwyn. “Criticism, Activism and Rhetoric, or Armah and the White Pumpkin.” Inspan, 1, 1 (1978), 129-141. Solomon, Joan. “A Commentary on Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born” English in Africa, 1, 2 (1974), 25-31. Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

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Staudt, Kathleen. “The Characterization of Women in Soyinka and Amah.” Ba Shiru, 8, 2 (1977), 63-69. Steele, Shelby. “Existentialism in the Novels of Ayi Kwei Amah.” Obsidian, 3, 1 (1977), 5-13. Stewart, Daniele. “L’etre et le monde dans les premiers romans d’Ayi Kwei Amah.” Presence Africaine, 85 (1973), 192-208. . “Ghanaian Writing in Prose: A Critical Survey.” Presence Africaine, 91 (1974), 73-105. . “Disillusionment among Anglophone and Francophone African Writers.” Studies in Black Literature, 7, 1 (1976), 6-9. Todd, Jan. Notes on “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. "Harlow, England: Longman, York Press, 1982. Urena, C. P. Letter to the Editor. Research in African Literatures, 14, 2 (1983), 269-273. Vincent, Theo., ed. The Novel and Reality in Africa and America. Lagos: University of Lagos Press, 1973. Washington, Clifton. “Two Thousand Seasons: An Essay Review.” Black Books Bulletin, 7, 1 (1976), 20-24. Webb, Hugh. “Literary Fom and Ideology: The African Counter-Attack.” New Literatures Review, 3 (1977-1979), 16-22. . “The African Historical Novel and the Way Forward.” African Literature Today, 11 (1980), 24-38. Wright, Derek. “Ayi Kwei Amah’s Early Writings.” Literary Half-Yearly, 25, 2 (1984), 65-81. . “Amah’s Ghana Revisited: History and Fiction. ” International Fiction Review, 12, 1 (1985), 23-27. . “Fragments: The Cargo Connection.” Kunapipi, 7, 1 (1985), 45-58. . “Love and Politics in the African Novel: Ayi Kwei Amah’s Why Are We So Blest?” ACLALS Bulletin, 1, 1 (1985), 13-27. . “The Metaphysical and Material Worlds: Amah’s Ritual Cycle.” World Literature Today, 59, 3 (1985), 337-342. . “Tradition and the Vision of the Past in the Early Novels of Ayi Kwei Amah.” English in Africa, 12, 2 (1985), 83-97. . “Motivation and Motif: The Carrier Rite in Ayi Kwei Amah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” English Studies in Africa, 28, 2 (1985), 119-133. . “Saviors and Survivors: The Disappearing Community in the Novels of Ayi Kwei Amah.” Ufahamu, 14, 2 (1985), 134-156.

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. “Method and Metaphor: A Note on Armah’s First Novel.” New Literature Review, 14 (1985), 42-46. . “The Early Writings of Ayi Kwei Armah.” Research in African Literatures, 16, 4 (1985), 487-513 (an expanded version of the article published in Literary Half-Yearly). . “The Chaka Syndrome: Armah and Mofolo.” Literary Criterion, 20, 2 (1985), 42-47. . “Flux and Form: The Geography of Time in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” ARIEL, 17, 2 (1986), 63-77. . “Ritual and Reality in Four West African Novelists.” Literary Criterion, 21, 3 (1986), 72-90. . “Ritual Modes and Social Models in African Fiction: The Case of Ayi Kwei Armah.” World Literature Written in English, 27,2 (1987), 195-207. “Fragments: The Akan Background. ” Research in African Literatures, 18, 2 (1987), 176-191. . “Scapegoats and Carriers: New Year Festivals in History and Literature.” Journal of African Studies, 14, 4 (1987), 183-190. “The Well-Worn Way: Armah’s Histories.” Wasqfiri, 6/7 (1987), 11-13. . “Critical and Historical Fictions: Robert Fraser’s Reading of The Healers.” English in Africa, 15, 1 (1988), 71-82. . “Orality in the African Historical Novel: Yambo Ouologuem’s Bownd to Violence and Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 23, 1 (1988), 91-101. . “African-American Tensions in Black Writings of the 1960s. ” Journal of Black Studies, 19, 4 (1989), 442-458. • “Totalitarian Rhetoric: Some Aspects of Metaphor in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” Critique, 30, 3 (1989), 210-220. • “Requiems for Revolutions: Race-Sex Archetypes in Two African Novels.” Modern Fiction Studies, 35, 1 (1989), 25-38. • Ayi Kwei Armah's Africa: The Sources of His Fiction. London, Munich, and New York: Hans Zell, 1989. Wright, Edgar. “The Bilingual, Bicultural African Writer.” In Alastair Niven, ed. The Commonwealth Writer Overseas: Themes of Exile and Expatriation. Brussels: Didier, 1976, pp. 107-119. Yankson, Kofi. uThe Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born: An Anatomy of Shit.” University of Cape Coast English Department Workpapers, 1 (1971), 25-30. ——“Fragments: The Eagle That Refused to Soar.” Asemka, 1, 1 (1974), 53-59.

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4. Theses Adelugba, F. “The Point of View in Two West African Novels: A Comparison of Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born with Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood.” Master’s thesis, University of Texas, 1976. Crewe, Adrian. “ Ayi Kwei Arm ah and the Mirage of African Socialism: Problems of Ideology and Literary Production in Post-Colonial Africa.” Master’s thesis, University of Sussex, 1976. Ezugu, Amadihe M. “The Influence of Theme on Technique in the Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah.” Master’s thesis, University of Nigeria (Nsukka), 1982. Lurie, Joseph. “Neo-Colonialism, the Individual and Conflict: A Study of Thematic Development in the Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah.” Master’s thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1973. Umukoro, S. O. “Isolation in the Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah.” Master’s thesis, Ahmadu Bello University (Zaria), 1979.

5. Dissertations Atangana, Charles. “Aesthetics and Ideology in African and Afro-American Fiction: Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ayi Kwei Armah, Toni Morrison and Richard Wright.” DAI, 45, 4 (1984), 1110A. Barthold, Bonnie Jo. “Three West African Novelists: Achebe, Soyinka, Armah.” DAI, 36 (1976), 4473A-74A (Arizona). Bengu, S. M. E. “African Cultural Identity and International Relations: An Analysis of Ghanaian and Nigerian Sources, 1958-1974.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Geneva, 1976. Champion, Ernest A. “The Contribution of English Language and West African Literature to the Rise of National Consciousness in West Africa.” DAI, 35 (1975), 6659A (Bowling Green). Colmer, Rosemary. “The Development of the Sub-Saharan Black African Novel.” Ph.D. dissertation, Macquarie University, Sydney, 1979. Davenport, Randall Louis. “The Bourgeois Rebel: A Study of the Been-To in Selected West African Novels.” DAI, 11A (1978), 6712 (Northwestern University, Illinois). Jackson, Tommy Lee. “Ayi Kwei Armah and French Existentialism: A Comparison.” DAI, 46, 10 (1986), 3029A-3030A (Nebraska). Lawson, William Vincent. “The Western Scar: The Theme of the Been-To in West African Fiction.” DAI, 36 (1976), 6084-6085A (Stanford). Lipenga, Ken D. “Alienation in the Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah.” DAI, 46, 8 (1986), 2292A (New Brunswick).

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Okonkwo, Juliet I. “Visions of Stability: The Novel in the African Revolution.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, 1980. Priebe, Richard K. “The Development of Mythic Consciousness in West African Literature.” DAI, 34 (1973), 5987A (Texas). Saber, Ahmed. “Political and Social Thought in the West African Novel: Mongo Beti’s Perpetue, Ousmane Sembene’s Xala and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers.” DAI, 46, 9 (1986), 2686A-2687A (Georgia). Spencer, Norman A. “Political Consciousness and Commitment in Modem African Literature: A Study of the Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah. ” DAI, 47,2 (1986), 527A-528A (State University, New York). Walker, William A. “Major Ghanaian Fiction: A Study of the Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah and Kofi Awoonor.” DAI, 36 (1976), 2816A (Texas). Wright, Derek. “A Study of the Ritual, Mythological and Political Contexts of the Early Writings of Ayi Kwei Armah. ” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Queensland, 1986.

Notes on Contributors Chidi Amuta has taught African Literature at the Universities of Ife and Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and has recently been Director of Rural Development in Imo State. He is currently on the editorial board of The Guardian newspaper in Lagos. He has published, along with several articles, two books on African literature: Towards a Sociology of African Literature (1986) and The Theory of African Literature (1988). Kofi Anyidoho is a Ghanaian poet and a Lecturer in English at the University of Ghana. He has published the poems Elegy for the Revolution (1978), later incorporated into the larger volume A Harvest of Our Dreams (1984), and journal articles on African writing. His poetry has won several literary awards, including the Davidson Nicol and Langston Hughes Prizes and a BBC “Arts and Africa” Poetry Award. Y. S. Boafo is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, and General Editor of the journal Asemka. He has published articles on Achebe, Sembene, Oyono, and Mariama Ba, and is currently preparing a book on Sembene Ousmane’s fiction. He was a member of the Ghana Book Development Council from 1976 to 1982. James Booth is a Lecturer in English at the University of Hull, where he teaches an M.A. course in African Literature in English. He is the author of Writers and Politics in Nigeria (1981) and various articles on English and African literature. Between 1985 and 1987 he was responsible for the African section of The Year’s Work in English Studies. Abena P. K. Busia, a Ghanaian by birth, is an Associate Professor in English at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and has been a visiting lecturer at Yale University and a post-doctoral Fellow at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, and the Center for Afro-American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her poems have appeared in Summer Fires: New

351

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Poetry from Africa (1983) and in literary magazines. She has published essays in books and articles in journals on Black and African writing and is currently preparing two books, Song in a Strange Land (1990) on contemporary African and Diaspora Black women’s novels, and another on the colonial discourse of contemporary British fiction. Harold Collins was, until his retirement in 1980, Professor of English at Kent State University, Ohio, where he taught Modem English, Victorian, and Commonwealth Literatures. He has also taught at the University of Connecticut. He has published articles on Conrad, Joyce Cary, Roy Campbell, Alan Paton, and Amos Tutuola, and a number of essays on educational topics. Rosemary Colmer is a Lecturer in English at Macquarie University, Sydney, and is Convenor of the Macquarie Unit for the Study of the New' Literatures in English. She has published articles on Armah and Kofi Awoonor. Robert Fraser has held academic appointments in Britain, Africa, and the Middle East. He is the author of several books, including The Novels of Ay i Kwei Armah (1980) and West African Poetry: A Critical History (1986), and is currently working on a study of James Frazer and the mental genesis of The Golden Bough. Shatto Arthur Gakwandi is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at Makerere University, Uganda, and has also been a visiting lecturer and scholar at the University of Nairobi, Bayero University in Nigeria, and Connecticut College in the United States. He is the author of The Novel and Contemporary Experience in Africa (1977) and is co-editing A Critical Introduction to East African Literature. Simon Gikandi, a Kenyan by birth, is the author of Reading the African Novel (1987) and of numerous articles and essays on African and Caribbean literature. His forthcoming works include Reading Chinua Achebe and Modernism and Caribbean Literature. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and was a 1989/1990 Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard University. Gareth Griffiths, bora in Wales, has taught at universities in Britain, America, and Australia, and is currently Professor of English at the University of Western Australia, Perth. He has published widely in scholarly journals on post-colonial literatures and on modern theater, and has written two books: A Double Exile: Africa and West Indian Writing Between Two Cultures (1978) and (with W. D. Ashcroft and H. M. Tiffin) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice of Post-Colonial Literature (1989).

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D. S. Izevbaye is Professor of English at the University of Ibadan. He has contributed many scholarly articles on African literature to journals and essay anthologies.

Joyce Johnson currently lectures at the College of the Bahamas in Nassau, where she teaches courses in African and Caribbean Literatures. She has also taught at the University of the West Indies. She has published several articles on African writers, including Soyinka, Arm ah, Ngugi, and Bessie Head.

Leonard Kibera, who died in 1983, taught at Kenyatta University College in Nairobi. He published a novel, Voices in the Dark (1970), and, with Sam Kahiga, a collection of stories, Potent Ash.

Neil Lazarus is an Assistant Professor in English and Modern Cultures and Media at Brown University and has previously been an Assistant Professor at Louisiana State University and a post-doctoral Fellow at Wesleyan University. He has published in the areas of African literature and social and cultural theory. His book on Ayi Kwei Arm ah is forthcoming.

Bernth Lindfors is Professor of English and African literatures at the University of Texas at Austin and the editor of Research in African Literatures. He is the author of Folklore in Nigerian Literature (1973) and numerous bibliographies on African writing. He has also edited and co-edited interviews (Palaver, 1972; Dem-Say, 1974) and many essay collections, including Research Priorities in African Literatures (1984). He is a Senior Editor of Three Continents Press’ “Critical Perspectives” series, and has edited three volumes in the series, on Amos Tutuola (1975), Nigerian Literatures (1976), and, with C. L. Innes, Chinua Achebe (1978).

Edward Lobb was born in Toronto and is currently Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University, Ontario. He is the author of T. S. Eliot and the Romantic Critical Tradition (1981) and of articles on English, American, and African literature.

Isidore Okpewho is a classical scholar who teaches English at the University of Ibadan. He is the author of two novels, The Victims (1970) and The Last Duty (1976), and two critical works, The Epic in Africa (1979) and Myth in Africa (1983).

Kirsten Holst Petersen is Danish Research Fellow at the Scandinavian Institute for African Studies in Uppsala, Sweden, and poetry editor and African advisor for the journal Kunapipi. She has published, in addition to numerous

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articles on African writing, John Pepper Clark (1981) and is co-editor (with Anna Rutherford) of Cowries and Cobos: The West African Oral Tale and Short Story (1981) and Enigma of Values (1982). Joan Solomon grew up in Johannesburg and has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand and at the Open University in London as well as running her own publishing company. She now lives in Bristol, where she writes children’s books and works as a freelance photographer. Derek Wright, the editor of this volume, has taught at universities in Australia and Africa and is currently Senior Lecturer in English at the Northern Territory University, Darwin, where he teaches courses in Modem English, American, and Post-Colonial Literatures. He has published widely in academic journals and is the author of two books: Ayi Kwei Armah fs Africa: The Sources of His Fiction (1989) and Wole Soyinka (forthcoming). He is currently working on a study of the Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah and a long-term project on narrative forms in American literature.

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