Ayi Kwei Armah 1939-

Ghanian novelist, essayist, poet, and short story writer.

INTRODUCTION

Armah is recognized for essays and fiction that examine the effects of colonialism on the people of contemporary Ghana and Africa. His novels explore life in contemporary, urban Africa; reflect on Africa's colonized past and the challenges of the continent's present; and urge a return to traditional African values and culture as a way to unite the region and propel it forward into a new era. Although his work is viewed as controversial and provocative in both African and Western circles, Armah is regarded as an important African writer and intellectual with a bold vision of Africa's future.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Armah was born in 1939 in Sekondi Takoradi, Ghana. His father is descended from the royal family of the Ga tribe and his mother was a member of the Fante tribe. As a young man, Armah was educated at the Achimota School. In 1959 he left Ghana to attend the Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts. After graduating, he attended Harvard University, receiving his bachelor's degree in sociology in 1963. That same year he moved to Algeria to work as a translator for the magazine Révolution Africaine. When he returned to Ghana in 1964, he became a scriptwriter, working for several years under the supervision of George Awoonor Williams (later known as Kofi Awoonor) at Ghana Television. In 1966 a coup d'état toppled the government of Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian leader who held power since Ghana gained its independence from England in 1957. After the coup, Armah worked as a teacher at the Navrongo Secondary School in northern Ghana. In 1967 he moved to France, where he worked on the staff of Jeune Afrique. The 1966 coup significantly influenced Armah's views about corruption in politics, and he harshly criticized Nkrumah's administration in his 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born. The novel was published to laudatory reviews and has been established as a classic work of African literature. Armah returned to the United States in 1968 and received a degree in fine arts from Columbia University in 1969. He returned to Africa to teach, working at the College of National Education in Tanzania and at the National University of Lesotho during the 1970s. In 1979 he accepted a position as associate professor at the University of Wisconsin. He has lived in Senegal for many years, where he was instrumental in developing his own publishing house and a collective that houses writers' workshops and classes.

MAJOR WORKS

Critics often group Armah's first three novels together, asserting that they are unified by their symbolic representations of life in contemporary Africa. The first, The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born, chronicles the story of a railway clerk during the regime of Kwame Nkrumah. The protagonist, known only as The Man, acts as a representation of the common man Nkrumah has promised to represent. The novel dramatizes the conflict between hope for change and the betrayal of that hope by the nation's leaders and serves as a stinging indictment of the Nkrumah regime. Fragments (1970) recounts the story of Baako, who returns to Ghana after studying in New York for five years. His family expects him to flaunt his Western education to gain prestige and wealth for the family. Baako, however, rejects what he sees as the corrupt values of the new Africa and only wishes to live a quiet life. In the end, Baako becomes so alienated he undergoes a breakdown and ends up in an asylum. Why Are We So Blest? (1972) narrates the story of Moden Dofu, an African student studying in the United States who decides to return to Africa after becoming disillusioned with his experience with Western education. He also brings his white lover Aimée Reitch. The return to Africa proves disastrous when the conflict between his rejection of Western values and his involvement with Aimée eventually destroys him. The novel is complex in structure, abandoning the linear progression of Armah's previous works.

Armah's later novels explore the idea of returning to traditional African culture as a model for the future. Two Thousand Seasons (1973) covers one thousand years of African history and approaches epic proportions in its compressed meanings, descriptions of battles, and use of folk mythology. Armah condemns the Arab "predators" and European "destroyers" and calls for the reclamation of Africa's traditional values. The Healers (1978) is a fictionalized account of the fall of the Ashanti empire to the British. The novel drama- tizes the struggle for African unity. The colonial invaders' attempt to manipulate Africa's divisiveness, while the healers in the novel attempt to strengthen Africa through inspiration and unity. In Osiris Rising (1995), Armah's narrative is informed by the Isis-Osiris myth. The protagonist of the novel, a respected African American scholar named Ast, travels to Africa to aid in the continent's resurgence. There she meets with two former students: one is a corrupt, ruthless government security official; the other is a committed community activist and organizer. Ast must confront challenges to her own values as well as her hopes for a strong, vibrant, and independent Africa. Armah's latest novel, KMT (2002), follows the quest of Lindela, a young African scholar, to translate a series of secret hieroglyphics with the help of an Egyptologist and two experts on traditional African culture. In the process, Lindela reflects on Africa's past, present, and future, as well as aspects of her own life.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Armah's literary work has garnered a mixed critical reaction. Many reviewers have commended him for his artistry and innovative style as well as his bold vision of Africa's problems and its future. However, other critics have found his work controversial and have derided his technique and vision. His early works, particularly his first three novels, have been faulted for being derived from foreign literary sources; Armah's many years abroad in the United States led some reviewers to charge that he was uninterested in traditional African culture. Several Western commentators have noted the influence of French literature on his work, in particular the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Celine. African critics, such as Chinua Achebe, have accused Armah of being "un-African" and more in line with European writing about Africa than with authentic African literature. His later works, which focus on the idea of a return to traditional African values as a model for the continent's future, have also met with criticism. Reviewers have faulted his fictional portrayals of a new sociopolitical order in Africa as vague and unrealistic. Others have complained of Armah's change in tone in his later works and have accused him of being too idealistic to inspire real change. Moreover, they have argued that his depiction of white people as corrupt and evil is simplistic and racist. Despite these criticisms, Armah's work has inspired much discussion about Africa's future and holds an important position in contemporary African literature.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born (novel) 1968

Fragments (novel) 1970

Why Are We So Blest? (novel) 1972

Two Thousand Seasons (novel) 1973

The Healers (novel) 1978

Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Past, Present and Future (novel) 1995

KMT: In the House of Life (novel) 2002

CRITICISM

Ode Ogede (essay date 2000)

SOURCE: Ogede, Ode. "Bridge across Generations: The Author in the Works, Intention, and Practice." In Ayi Kwei Armah, Radical Iconoclast: Pitting Imaginary Worlds against the Actual, pp. 10-25. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000.

[In the following excerpt, Ogede discusses the unifying themes found in Armah's essays and sociopolitical commentary.]

In contrast to other major African writers such as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who quite early in their careers realized the need to discuss their writing constantly in interviews, essays, and symposia, Armah has until recently remained a recluse. Believing that communication between the artist and his readers should be through the medium of the work, he once declared:

Many African writers discuss their work and themselves quite willingly, sometimes even eagerly, with Western critics, newspapermen, magazine pundits, radio commentators, television hosts and just plain dilettantes. That is their choice. I don't. I have no personal contact whatsoever with any Western critic of African literature. I have never granted any interview about my person or my work, no matter how prestigious the publication asking for it. That is my choice. I have never gone on lecture tours. I have never accepted invitations to Writers' Conferences. And I have never, until now, found it necessary to write any article about my writing.

          (Armah 1976, 11-12, emphasis added)

However far postmodernist theorists may go in asserting that the author is dead, authorial commentary or biographical revelation will rightly continue to be a precious source for illuminating artistic intentions and achievements. We should be grateful for Charles Larson's invidious comments,¹ which eventually rattled Armah out of his shell to take up the practice of the artist who is also a critic—a practice that has been at the foundation of socially committed literature.

The tradition of practical criticism by which literary artists clarify their writings outside the creative works is by no means peculiar to Africa; in Western literature it has its roots in Johnson, Coleridge, and Dryden, and was only later extended by such moderns as Woolf, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. For African writers like Ngugi, Achebe, and Soyinka, who conceive of literature as part and parcel of the liberation struggle of the oppressed African people, the practice naturally became a necessity from the very beginning of their writing, since these writers, who were seen as leading members of the revolution, did not wish to be viewed as aloof or ambiguous. Interview comments, lectures, addresses, articles, and symposia have over time become not only valid but indispensable supplements to the creative work of other African writers.

Armah may have learned in a roundabout way that African writers who discuss "their work and themselves quite willingly, sometimes even eagerly" seek for something far less trivial than fame and its privileges: they cry out for their message of hope, often the African point of view, to be heard in no uncertain terms (Armah 1976, 11-12). Armah, however, has taken his place among African writers who, in Dan Izevbaye's words, "create taste for [their] own type of literary compositions by prescribing literary criteria and standards which are often more valuable in the appreciation of [their] own works than for the criticism of other works" (Izevbaye 1971, 27). A possible grouping of Armah's works of this category could be: (a) the review essays "The Definitive Chaka" (1975/76), "The Caliban Complex" (1985a), and "Battle for the Mind of Africa" (1987b); (b) incidental responses to criticism of his work, including "Larsony, or Fiction as Criticism of Fiction" (1976) and "The Lazy School of Literary Criticism" (1985d); (c) sociopolitical theories, as elaborated in "African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?" (1967) and "The Festival Syndrome" (1985b); and (d) such items as "One Writer's Education" (1985e) and "Armah's Celebration of Silence: Interview with Dimgba Igwe" (1987a), which basically provide biographical insights on the writer.

Such a classification, though, is neat and simplistic; it is only valid as a convenient tool of analysis, because all the writings are linked by an obsessive preoccupation with the question of Africa's future. Armah isolates the colonization of the mind of the African—with all the attendant inferiority complexes—as the most devastating legacy of colonialism, an approach that is cultural, as opposed to the materialist view, which lays emphasis on economic exploitation. These are the issues with which the writer is concerned in his novels and short stories as well.

The most frequently recurring element in these works is the issue of an African perspective. It dominates Armah's first published essay, "African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?" which appeared in 1967, a year before the publication of his first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born in 1968,² with which the essay evinces a convergence of ideas. Deploring the absence of an ideology that could facilitate Africa's decolonization, Armah attacks Africa's leaders for their unimaginativeness. The leaders have been cut off from their roots by Western education. They have become greedy and opportunistic, subscribing to "an ethic that has everything to do with consumption and notoriously little to do with production of any sort" (1967, 15). In their desperation to safeguard their power, the leaders corrupt the urban workers, among whom they base their influence; they aspire to the elitist privileges associated with whites but are frustrated by their color. They are torn between two cultures and belong neither to the black world into which they are born nor to the white world for which their education has prepared them.

Armah presses home his point with the example of Leopold Senghor, whose Negritude he describes as an artistic statement that reflects the leader's inferiority complexes, his slave mentality. Armah is quite harsh on Senghor, whose Negritude he calls a wooden attempt to perpetuate Western assumptions in reverse. Armah criticizes Senghor for "swooningly" extolling the beauty of black womanhood while being married to a white woman, and he declares that Senghor is "a colonial political boss, necessarily Janus-faced, guiltily hating and despising his black roots but being pushed back to them" (1967, 21). Armah was twenty-eight years old in 1967 when he published "African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?" and impatience and youthful exuberance could be discerned in that article but, twenty years later, in 1987 Armah still persisted in his outright condemnation of Negritude—even though by this time no fewer than five novels, six major short stories, and a number of essays had poured from his pen, all of which can be shown to resemble Senghor's work in tone, intention, and achievement.

In his 1987 article "Battle for the Mind of Africa," Armah reinforced his original conviction about the irrelevance of Negritude to the modern needs of Africans, calling it "a blind artistic summary of actual relations between Europeans and Africans from about the start of the slave trade to the latest adjustment program designed in Washington, Paris, London, or Rome for adoption and implementation by an African elite that still refuses, out of sheer inertia and habit, to do its own thinking" (1987b, 62). He thus joins Wole Soyinka, Lewis Nkosi, and Esk'ia Mphahlele³ as English-speaking Africans who show insensitiveness to the significance of Negritude, although their own works are replete with the main features of this ideology which Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, and Léon Damas originated in Paris in the 1930s to counter-act white domination.

These features include the common aims among these writers to revive and reassert the cultural values, identity, and dignity of Africans, and to glorify the ancestral achievements and beauty of Africa, through usages, images, references, and symbols that are taken from African traditional life. As Abiola Irele has ventured,

When all is said and done, we Africans have since the beginning been thinking the same thoughts and putting them in the same words, whatever colonial flag has been waved over our heads; and here, I include our brothers in America whose condition has not been significantly different from ours on this side of the Atlantic. … When we take a comprehensive look at ideological development among black people, what strikes one is the remarkable correspondence between its various areas of expression, and beyond this, the organic identity of thought.

          (1981, 109)

Although he himself would disagree with the above dictum, no writer illustrates better than Armah the curious way in which the English-speaking African writer's own reliance on the essence of Negritude has been obscured by his persistent criticism of the occasional tendency toward sloppy sloganeering and posturing in that theory.

It is all too easy now to overlook the historical significance of Negritude, which has played no mean role in establishing the humanity of black people before a world that denied them such a claim. Wole Soyinka's dramatic revision of his earlier stand on Negritude after he received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1986 and singled Senghor out as another legitimate African aspirant for the Nobel Prize in literature, shows that he has finally come round to seeing what he should have seen all along. That not even proximity—when Armah moved to Senegal, Senghor's country, in 1985—could temper his attitude, may show how deeply Armah is a victim of the fallacy involved in underestimating the significance of Negritude. But Armah's criticism of Senghor also exposes some of the major contradictions inherent in the Negritudinist project.

One of the paradoxes of the Negritude movement is that it was created and popularized by a group of black intellectuals who were themselves so thoroughly Westernized. They wanted to create a movement to bridge the cultural gaps that existed among all the members of their group worldwide; however, because of their severe alienation from the African culture they wanted to promote, both the act of retrieval and the substance retrieved were too often lacking in authenticity. Armah's work brings these contradictions into focus. It may well be, as he claims in another essay, "Larsony, or Fiction as Criticism of Fiction," that he seeks to address himself primarily through an African sensibility, but his writings are devoid of any specificity of locale. This alone, however, cannot explain why Derek Wright's (impossible) attempt to locate some presumed Akan roots in his book Ayi Kwei Armah's Africa (1989) results in serious oversimplifications (after all, the greater issue is the question of the researcher's integrity which such a venture calls into play).⁴

One of his quarrels with Senghor, as I have mentioned, is that Armah considers it hypocritical for Senghor to be "swooningly extolling the beauty of black womanhood" in poetry while Senghor is married to a white woman, and yet a similar criticism can be made against Armah, who directs his work primarily to an African audience but started publishing in some of the USA's most bourgeois and conservative magazines, outlets to which only a few African elite with international contacts have access. Furthermore, he wishes to be a teacher—and an artist who wants to be a teacher should be direct, open, clear, and accessible—but Armah, like Okigbo and Soyinka, hides behind mystifications in what is generally regarded as his uncommitted work. By refusing to discuss his work openly in the early phase of his work Armah cultivates the cult of obscurity.

Armah's commendation of Cheikh Anta Diop, the late Senegalese scholar, in the same breath in which he condemns Senghor, points up further inconsistencies in his thinking, since there is not much difference between Senghor's "false names of famous kings and glorious empires," to which Armah objected, and "the origins … indispensable beginnings of the long, continuing process of human civilization" Diop claims for Africa (1987b, 62). However, Armah is full of praises for Diop for being able to set out in "his lively, friendly, and persistent fashion," to look at "the Western intellectual monument," without being overwhelmed. The significance of Diop, says Armah, is that he was able to probe beyond the fog of white racism to unearth the authentic African personality (1987b, 62).

Armah's criticism of Nkrumah and Nyerere is similarly uncharitable. Although in its mood his own writing resembles Nkrumah's beliefs, he tells us that Nkrumah's "African personality and consciencism" are falsifications of African reality, doctrines designed to rehabilitate Nkrumah's battered psyche. Armah wrote that Nkrumah should have backed up his "exhibition of self" by relying on indigenous technology instead of imported Eastern and Western technology (1967, 24). This criticism oversimplifies the issue of self-reliance. To Armah, not even Nyerere's imagination appeared adequate at this point for the task of combating neocolonialism; hence Armah's description of Ujamaa's ideas as "the sort of simplistic formulae dispensed by the less astute religious leaders" (1967, 25). Whereas Armah castigated Nkrumah for borrowing from the East, he lashed out at Nyerere for failing to borrow ideas from socialism as practiced in the East.

Armah is erratic on this issue, but there is no doubt the question of greatest concern to him is the nature of the flag, or phony, independence gained by African nations and the fact that the African elite are slaves of their colonial masters. Armah laments that Africa is cursed with such slaves:

It is not every age or continent which can boast of fiery revolutionaries who have never ventured within the smelling distance of a revolution, of freedom fighters whose suits are made in Paris and whose hair-raising campaigns are fought and won in the scented beds of posh hotels, and who ride to work in chauffeur-driven German limousines. This is Africa's heroic age.

          (1967, 28)

This is the image in which Armah casts Christian Mohamed Tumbo, Africa's representative to the Anti-Drought Organization in "Halfway to Nirvana," a story in which he aptly employs drought as the symbol of neocolonial domination of Africa. In that story, Tumbo, who perpetuates Africa's problem instead of eradicating it, symbolizes Africa's political leaders of all religious and ideological persuasions; but his name can also be seen more specifically as an indirect reference to Oliver Tambo, leader of the African National Congress of South Africa, and thus to the leadership of the liberation movements in Africa.

Although in substance Armah's observations reflect the corruption inherent in Africa, he exaggerates and makes sweeping generalizations that fail to take into account exceptions. Such is his criticism of the sumptuous lifestyle of African leaders in the midst of mass squalor and poverty and the way the ruling elite use ideology as a cover for their materialistic ways. This criticism cannot apply to Nyerere, for example; neither has Armah's prediction that the existing class distinction in Africa will lead to a revolution come about on the scale he has stressed.

Perhaps the most redeeming feature of Armah's criticism is his sincerity of purpose. Writers not infrequently drag out Africa's name to plead selfish causes, but Armah's commitment overrides all personal considerations. His eagerness to be seen as African is not gratuitous self-dramatization. The desire for the revival of Africa's heroic past, expressed in "The Definitive Chaka," for instance, is deep-rooted. In praise of Mofolo's achievement with regard to his authentic picture of the legendary exploits of one of Africa's greatest nationalists, Armah makes the following revealing comment:

Mofolo's Chaka is a masterpiece. It is also a work of art essentially African. By all accounts the book in its original Sesotho language is breathtakingly beautiful. Despite this excellence, or, to put it more accurately, because of this excellence, the book never saw print. That is because its author wrote under the most unfavorable publishing circumstances any black artist has ever faced. He was writing for his fellow Africans, but no African individual or group owned a printing press, much less a publishing house. Mofolo was therefore entirely dependent upon whites—and missionary whites at that—for publication facilities.

          (1975/76, 13)

The two problems—of a black writing in an indigenous language and of an authentic African work confronting Western prejudice—are relevant to Armah's own career. Armah's first novel was almost suppressed for being too African.⁵ The similarities with Mofolo are legion; and Armah allows us to see that the genius of Mofolo lay in his painstaking "labor of love," which enabled the writer to travel "all over Natal, South Africa, the site of Chaka's Zulu empire, gathering and checking background material for his book" from sources as authentic as "traditional historians, storytellers, and poets among the Zulu people" (1975/76, 13).

This emphasis on fiction as mimesis of life, and on fidelity to actual experience, is equally reflected in Armah's novels and short stories, which are fictional recreations of his experiences around the world. Thus, his first two novels, The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born (1968b) and Fragments (1970), and the story "An African Fable" (1968a) mirror the spate of corruption that engulfed his native Ghana in the years immediately after independence; "Contact" (1965) and Why Are We So Blest? ([1972] 1974), attempt to convey the feel of Armah's American experience; Two Thousand Seasons ([1973] 1979) and The Healers ([1978] 1979), written when Armah lived in Tanzania from August 1970 to May 1976, demonstrate the influence of Nyerere's Ujamaa; and his latest novel, Osiris Rising (1995), mirrors his Senegalese experience. Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers, in a sense, are particularly imitative of Mofolo's Chaka, whose imaginative indulgence of traditional heroism Armah's work somewhat advances.

Given Armah's obsession with the African image, his belligerence toward George Lamming is justified. The quarrel is ideological and non-personal. In "The Caliban Complex," the failure of Lamming, a West Indian, to understand his African roots is attributed to Western education (of which Armah says Lamming is a victim), an education which imparted to the colonial the false notion that "the non-Westerner has no culture or literature comparable in historical depth with Western culture or literature" (1985a, 570). Armah's criticism is based on the fact that Lamming succumbs to the equally false notion that to become "really cultured, literate, and historically conscious, it will inevitably be through his assimilation into the mainstream of Western civilization" (570).

Lamming's dependence on Shakespeare for "insights" on Africa in The Pleasures of Exile, "even when the Shakespearean mind gift is poisoned" (570), is evidence of Lamming's mental unpreparedness to return to his roots. As Armah rightly states, "exile may be an unavoidable human predicament but the only lost soul is the soul that does not seek the way back home" (570). Were exile simply a question of physical distance from home and not essentially spiritual separation, Lamming's brief visit to Africa would have restored his culturally dislocated personality. Armah argues that a more authentic return, of the sort Lamming could not achieve, one that could have had enduring results, "would have involved an intellectual return also." Armah asks the Lammings of the world, "victim(s) of the Western Weltanschauung … in Port Elizabeth and Durban and Mombasa … in London … Windhoek and Port Harcourt and Abidjan," to find evidence of Africa's contribution to world civilization left behind by our ancestors on "papyrus sheets, on wooden tablets, on shards and Ostraca, and, most reassuringly of all, on lasting stone" (1985a, 570).

A more pointed advancement of this conception of the relevance of the past to the present can be found in "The Lazy School of Literary Criticism," where Armah exhorts the critic to cultivate "a particularly solid grounding" in African history with which he can give direction to contemporary society (Armah 1985d, 355). His other dictum expressed in this same essay, to the effect that "it is impossible to be a genuine critic of an art one hasn't, in practice, mastered," should not, however, be interpreted literally as an arrogant claim that encourages mystification and obscurity: seen correctly, it is a plea for collaboration between artists and critics in the creative endeavor, for only when readers feel with the same passion as the writer can they get the message.

Literature is not about literature, any more than physics is about physics. In the same way that physics is about the environment, literature is a life discipline. Reflections of life. Reflections on life. An understanding of literature requires a corresponding understanding of that which it reflects, that on which it is a reflection.

          (1985d, 355-56)

"The human value of literature," Armah adds, "must lie in its ability to improve man's life on earth. Literature should stimulate us with questions such as, ‘What is the quality of our life now? How did it get this way? What are our future options?’" (356). Thus Armah lays emphasis on the social value of literature, like fellow African writers such as Sembene Ousmane, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Chinua Achebe, Okot p'Bitek, and a host of others.

The weight of "Larsony, or Fiction as Criticism of Fiction" also lies primarily in the manner in which Armah, overreaching personal indignation, places the discussion in the overall context of African literature. In addressing some critical responses to his work mainly by Western critics like Charles Larson, Armah naturally devotes a good deal of the essay to the issue of the audience to which he directs his writing, the question being invariably tied to the larger subject of a writer's commitment or lack thereof. The essay is generally expressed with elegance and vigor, and, in the tradition of Swift's "Modest Proposal," employs a deadly understatement and scathing sarcasm. There are snatches of dispassionate and informative writing, however, a candor that is most evident in the passage where Armah cites his publishing history in support of the argument that he is so African that such Western publishing ventures as the Heinemann African Writers Series tried to sabotage the publication of his novels.⁶

The substance of this part of the essay is to adduce facts which refute allegations such as Larson's that Armah is so Western that Africans rejected him, that he had exiled himself in the West, and that he had said he no longer remembered his mother tongue, Akan. The allegation that Armah models his novels on the work of the Irish writer James Joyce is also challenged. Armah asks:

By what occult means does Larson say I have absorbed the influence of Joyce when I have never even once placed myself in contact with his work? Does Larson offer any textual evidence to back up his assertion? … Ordinarily, a scholar indicates the source of this type of information [about Armah's having said he no longer remembered his mother tongue] as precisely as he can. But Larson does the opposite. He takes care not to indicate in any way the source of his expert information about me.

          (1976, 12)

The aphoristic occult in the above-quoted excerpt recalls Achebe's image of the harmattan in reference to the hostility of "colonialist criticism," which is unsympathetic and destructive (Achebe 1975, 3-18). Even though Achebe fails to apply his own creed to his criticism of Armah's work,⁷ his disquiet about the framework of superstition within which colonialist criticism operates corresponds with Armah's in many respects. The major difference lies in the fact that whereas Achebe allows that the Western critic of African literature who does his homework well and overcomes traditional prejudices can contribute meaningfully in the criticism of African literature (Irele 1981) is another well-known defender of this position), Armah makes a blanket condemnation of all Western critics.

What Armah regards as Larson's unaccommodating nature and intransigence leads him, in fact, to the conclusion that all Western critics are enemies of African writers. Larson's determination to damage Armah's image is underscored by the false information he persistently peddles about Armah's art and personality, with claims in The Emergence of African Fiction (1971a) of Armah's having forgotten his mother tongue, of his exile, and of his debt to Joyce, graduating into the allegation in Africa Today (1974) of Armah's rejection by Africans. The key used by Western critics like Larson in their approach to African writing, Armah states, "and the way to the pet assumptions of Western racism is the claim that Africa is inferior and the West is superior" (Armah 1976, 13). Larson's rumors attempt to prove the myth of the superiority of the West by denying that creativity, "the highest instance of human intelligence" (13), can take place in Africa.⁸

Armah does not know Larson personally, and he has not revealed to Larson or anyone else information that could possibly be construed to support Larson's assertions: "It is within the framework of white Western racist prejudices about Africa that Larson's assertions make sense" (Armah 1976, 13). "For the benefit of anyone curious to know where I did get the organizing idea for Fragments, " Armah reveals about the book in question, "it grew out of a conversation with my elder brother concerning the quality of life at home" (12). Armah sends a disclaimer on the issue of exile, over which not only Larson but other critics such as Achebe (1976), Ben Obumselu (1973), and Arthur Gakwandi (1977) have all taken him to task, and answers back that he travels outside Africa "by choice, and following a long-standing plan," like any other person: "As for traveling to countries in Africa, I do not even think I am in a foreign country as long as I'm here in Africa" (Armah 1976, 12). In fact, Armah was at "home in Africa" when Larson placed him "physically in the West" to defend his racist claim that Africa naturally rejects talent.

In conclusion, Armah suggests that, to enable Larson to achieve his ambition of becoming the most popular "Western critic of African literature, his name a household word," Larson's style should be christened "Larsony, the judicious distortion of African truths to fit Western prejudices" (14). In all fairness, we should add that the cultural frontiers Armah erects are nonexistent, as there are obviously many Westerners who approach African writing with objectivity. Insularity of the sort Armah advocates is surely to be discouraged, although the point should also be conceded to him that honesty and assiduous open-mindedness are essential to criticism, whether of African or any other literature. As Armah puts it in "The Lazy School of Literary Criticism" : "Genuine scholars and critics address themselves to the author's work; their conclusions and insights, negative or positive, are backed up with serious textual spade-work and analysis" (1985d, 355). These are qualities that cut across races and are surely not the preserve of any one people.

One might argue that there is nothing about the values that Armah's writing champions which confers special privilege on African critics (and such an objection would only strengthen the claim about his Negritudinist sensibilities). The notion of African culture which his works defend, poignantly articulated in his article "The Festival Syndrome" (1985b), consists rather of universal life-giving forces placed in an African context. In that article Armah points out that for authentic African culture we must go beyond festivals such as FESTAC, for instance, which he describes as "wasteful demonstrations of intellectual bankruptcy." "The most sensible demonstration of cultural awareness," he adds, "would be to use available resources" to ensure that Africans are able to contain the scourge of "drought, famine, and poverty ravaging their continent." "Culture is a process, not an event," and its promotion should be a regular and continuous activity, "not a haphazard scattering of spastic shows." Armah states that "the development of culture depends on a steady, sustained series of supportive activities whose primary quality is not a spectacular extravagance but a calm continuity" (726). He cites the examples of the Chinese, Japanese, Americans, and Europeans as people who rely on their culture to improve their daily lives.

Armah warns that the failure to reactivate African culture will forever force Africans to remain dependent consumers of the products of others who create culture daily from their "publishing houses, television stations, and movie industries working full time [not only] to promote their culture on the domestic level, but also to export it" (726). This is the view of self-reliance reflected in the objectives of Baako, the central figure in Fragments, whose efforts to encourage productivity at Ghana-vision (where he works) are, however, frustrated by the established dependency syndrome. Armah asks Africans to look inward into themselves, to improve their inventiveness and management strategies, to shun corruption, and to regain their self-reliance. From the foregoing, it can be seen that it would be simplistic to say that these qualities Armah would like to see restored are unique to Africa, just as are the claims of a critic (Aidoo 1969) who argues that Armah leaves the impression in his writing that the same values are alien to Africa.

"Armah's Celebration of Silence: Interview with Dimgba Igwe" (1987a), his first and only interview to date, is a summary restatement of some of the long-standing controversies surrounding his work and personality, but it is not sufficiently comprehensive. For instance, an opportunity is missed to confirm Armah's claim in an earlier essay (Armah 1985e) as to how he dropped out of his undergraduate studies at Harvard on account of his response to white racism. Another gap that is not filled relates to information on the writer's formative years, childhood, and primary and secondary education, which could throw much-needed light on his writing.⁹

Of the issues touched upon in this interview, the most salient are the burning allegations of debt to Western authors. Armah does not reopen the issue with Larson, but he is surprised that Achebe, a fellow African writer with whom Armah has much in common, should have capitulated and become a purveyor of what he regards to be Western racist assumptions. Armah, "who says he defers to Achebe as an elder in the literary world," writes Dimgba Igwe, asked Achebe when they met at Ibadan to substantiate the allegation of Western influences on Armah's work. During this interview, Armah's wide travels in Africa, which he claims are research trips and further evidence of his pan-African perspective, receive adequate coverage, as do his views on the relationship between history and literature and the relevance of the past to the present. A sense of the past is an essential guide to the present and the future, and is best enhanced by knowledge of African languages; hence Armah has taken to learning Kiswahili and the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic language in which the wealth of Africa's civilization is encoded.

His interest is not really literature, however, Armah says, but rather practical action to bring about change for the better in society.

To me writing is still a very weak response to the enormous problems in Africa. If we can survive the multifarious onslaught of these problems, one had to acquire a weapon to match or neutralize the enemies…. I don't think writings have done much, created much impact in that regard.

          (Armah 1987a, 12)

Armah tells us he would want to "go into the people's life" to "actually affect them and get involved" (12). This objective is analogous to the goals of the Ghanaian scholar Modin Dofu, in Armah's third novel, Why Are We So Blest? who, like Armah, gives up his studies in his final year at Radcliffe and returns to Africa to enlist in a liberation movement; as well as the motives of Ast, the African-American female protagonist in Armah's latest novel, Osiris Rising, who travels to Africa to offer her services. The faith in action also explains Armah's respect for Wole Soyinka. Armah describes Soyinka's novel Season of Anomy as "one of the greatest works in the world today if only people will read it carefully and check out his allusions, his imageries, and so on" (12).

Armah's defense of Soyinka's obscurantism lacks merit, however, for his own works are not as labored, even if his conception of the value of revolutionary violence in Two Thousand Seasons corresponds fairly closely to Soyinka's in Season of Anomy (we cannot talk of direct borrowing, because the two novels appeared in the same year). Similarly, Armah expresses a lack of faith in the power of the written word but proceeds apace to plead the cause of writers: "The publishers do not promote books in a realistic fashion. Why are there no serious book clubs in Africa? No good marketing strategies and so on? I think the publishers should support writers with appropriate remuneration to sustain them" (12). These issues are part of the paradox of the African writer, who is conscious of the limitations imposed by the form within which he functions in his own kind of setting yet faces a situation in which no viable alternatives suggest themselves.

Often the result is a profound uncertainty, which threatens to bring about a complete paralysis of the creative intellect; it may also explain why it took nearly two decades since the appearance of The Healers in 1978 for Armah to return to the novel.¹⁰ Writing is surely in some way a poor means of trying to reach the grassroots populace in a largely analphabetic society such as Africa. It is the awareness of this fact that has led writers like Ousmane and Ngugi to explore other, more direct modes such as the cinema and the theater. Still there can be no guarantee that a writer who branches out to these other areas will achieve better results.

It is in light of these disquieting realities that the publication of Osiris Rising in 1995, an event that inaugurates a major initiative in African publishing, gains stature. According to information provided on the novel's dust jacket, its publisher, Per Ankh, is a new African publishing cooperative launched by Armah himself and managed by his friends who are "committed to the emergence of a quality African book industry." Per Ankh means "The House of Life" in ancient Egyptian and was the name of the cultural and intellectual institutions ancient Egyptians established for the preservation of their ancestral heritage. This publishing venture is evidently the expression of Armah's dissatisfaction with the role of foreign publishers in African literature, and a realization of his long-standing ambition to achieve publishing independence. Though how Per Ankh fares in the years ahead will undoubtedly have a practical impact on indigenous publishing in Africa as a whole, the saliency of this courageous act is an issue that cannot be measured solely by market forces, by the laws of economic viability; rather, the gesture must remain its own justification, one that will remain undiminished by whether Per Ankh as a business is an economic success or a disaster.

Because of the crosscurrents of ideas and concerns running through them, all Armah's statements outside the creative works (his essays and only one interview to date) should be considered as one unified piece of data, which helps us more fully to understand his creative temperament. Vituperation animates the early papers, especially "Larsony, or Fiction as Criticism of Fiction," but there is now a movement toward increasing calm in the more recent articles as well as his latest novel. In retrospect, we see the logic in the fact that when Armah started writing he did not feel called upon to paint a picture of traditional Africa in the Senghorian, glamorized perspective, as opposed to that presented by European writers such as Joyce Cary and Rider Haggard which denied the African tradition any form of dignity. Since Camara Laye, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong's and other African writers together with Senghor, had all shown that in the early phases of their work, a matter of greater urgency was the need to confront the increasing fact that political independence, far from ending the problems of colonialism, was in fact intensifying these problems. As the African leaders who took over from the European masters simply slipped on the robes of their predecessors and then marched in their footprints, they emerged as the new colonialists. Not only were the structures that facilitated colonial subjugation and exploitation left intact or fortified, infected by European materialism, the leaders became wild in their drive to acquire the luxury goods of Europe, such as cars, refrigerators, and European-style houses and liquor.¹¹ Corruption became pervasive. The leaders ran away from the responsibility of good government to alleviate the hardship of the majority, and threw their societies into chaos, giving the new generation of African writers material for their work. Armah belongs to this generation. However, what Armah shares with Senghor and his generation is the ideal of restoring the lost African dignity. Armah was able initially to transcend the romanticism which constantly forms a major limitation in Senghor's work. However, he, too, has found himself increasingly trapped in a situation where he has to fall back on the Senghorian mystique, a situation that says a lot about the power of the hold that Negritude exercises on African writers generally. Irrespective of their individual interests or intentions, few African writers have been able to completely suppress their Negritudism; Armah provides a classical example of why this is the case.

Notes

1. See Larson [1971a] 1978 and 1974 (Africa Today). Ironically, Larson praised Armah highly; for other African critics who find Larson's comments patronizing, see Izevbaye 1975b.

2.The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968); my page references, however, depend on the Heinemann African Writers edition, reissued in London in 1969.

3. See "Interview with Soyinka," Third World Book Review 2 (3) (1987): 7.

4. Among the various other efforts that have been made by critics along similar lines, none does it with as much honesty as Chantal Zabus. As she reports in her 1991 book The African Palimpsest, despite her intensive fieldwork in Ghana among Armah's Fanti group of the Akan people, all that she can see of essentially Akan origin even in a work like Fragments, which is still one of Armah's closest links with his traditional roots, are superficial embellishments such as "[t]he Akan headings, which function as the linguistic remnants of a dying tradition" and "soliloquies [that] are replete with allusions to Akan proverbial wisdom, funeral rites, matrilineal bonds and the concept of sansum or the unformed outer or worldly personal soul or ego, here relexified into ‘shadow,’ as opposed to ikra, the inner soul" (148-50). Zabus notices the predominance of repetition in Armah's fiction but, for her, "Neither this device nor relexification from Fanti are ideologically central to the novel." Such devices, she argues, "seem to have outgrown their own usefulness in that they can only recuperate ‘fragments’ of an ailing linguistic and cultural substratum" (151). It is Zabus's belief that when an African language is "relexified, it falls prey to a textual glottophagic process in the course of which the dominant language" (say English or French) "devours" the African etymons and morphemes; and she discovers this process in operation in Fragments, where, according to her, the English language, which "does the devouring," gets "revitalized" instead of the Akan language (152-53). When a foreign scholar reports her findings with such honesty, she deserves commendation; though it remains another matter altogether whether or not native scholars will confirm her results.

5. See Armah 1976 for details on this sensitive issue.

6. Sandra Barkan's cogent argument (1983) suffers somewhat from her failure to tackle this important aspect of Armah's essay.

7. For details on Achebe's unsympathetic and subjective criticism of Armah's novels, see his "Africa and Her Writers," in Morning Yet on Creation Day, 19-29 and his panel contribution in Issue: A Quarterly Journal of Opinion, 6, 1 (Spring 1976), 37.

8. Sandra Barkan has, of course, exposed the shallowness of this assumption. See Barkan 1983.

9. In this regard, even Bernth Lindfors's recent essays "Armah's Achimota Writings" (1995) and "Armah's Groton Essays" (in Lindfors 1997) offer little help and we must await a full biography of Armah.

10. See Ayi Kwei Armah, Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Past, Present and Future (Popenguine, Senegal, West Africa: Per Ankh, 1995).

11. For a detailed discussion of how alcohol, originally a sacred fluid, has been transformed from being a vehicle for spiritual power into a social marker, a symbol of power and conspicuous consumption in colonial and post-independent Ghana, see Akyeampong's excellent study Drink, Power, and Cultural Change (1997).

References

Works by Ayi Kwei Armah: Novels, Short Stories, Essays, and Interviews

1965. "Contact." The New African 4 (10): 244-46, 248.

1967. "African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?" Presence Africaine 68:7-30.

1968a. "An African Fable." Presence Africaine 68:192-96.

[1968b] 1969. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1968. Reprint, London: Heinemann, 1969. Page references are to 1969 edition.

[1970] 1974. Fragments. London: Heinemann. Page references are to 1974 edition.

[1972] 1974. Why Are We So Blest? New York: Doubleday, 1972. Reprint, London: Heinemann, 1974. Page references are to 1974 edition.

[1973] 1979. Two Thousand Seasons. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973. Reprint, London: Heinemann, 1979. Page references are to 1979 edition.

1975/76. "The Definitive Chaka." Transition 50 (October 1975-March 1976): 10-13.

1976. "Larsony, or Fiction as Criticism of Fiction." Asemka 4 (September): 1-14. Reprint, Ife, Nigeria: Positive Review, 1978: 11-14. Page references are to the 1978 edition.

[1978] 1979. The Healers. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1978. London: Heinemann, 1979. Page references are to 1979 edition.

1985a. "The Caliban Complex." West Africa (March 18): 521-22, and (March 25): 570-71.

1985b "The Festival Syndrome." West Africa (15 April): 726-27.

1985d. "The Lazy School of Literary Criticism." West Africa (25 February): 355-56.

1985e. "One Writer's Education." West Africa (26 August): 1752-53.

1987a. "Armah's Celebration of Silence: Interview with Dimgba Igwe." Concord (Lagos, 2 April): 11-12.

1987b. "Battle for the Mind of Africa." South (August): 62.

1995. Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Past, Present, and Future. Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh.

Critical Studies on Armah and General Works

Achebe, Chinua. 1975. Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. London: Heinemann.

———. 1976. Panel contribution in Issue: A Quarterly Journal of Opinion 6 (1): 37.

Akyeampong, Emmanuel. 1997. Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

Barkan, Sandra. 1983. "Beyond Larsony: On the Possibility of Understanding Texts Across Cultures." World Literature Today 57 (1): 35-38.

Gakwandi, Shatto Arthur. 1977. The Novel and Contemporary Experience in Africa. London: Heinemann.

Irele, Abiola. 1981. The African Experience in Literature and Ideology. London: Heinemann.

Izevbaye, D. S. 1971. "Criticism and Literature in Africa." In Christopher Heywood, ed., Perspectives on African Literature, 25-30. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd.

———. 1975b. "The State of Criticism in African Literature." African Literature Today 7:1-19.

Larson, Charles. [1971a] 1978. The Emergence of African Fiction. London: Macmillan.

———. 1974. "Ayi Kwei Armah's Vision of African Reciprocity." Africa Today 21 (2): 117-19.

Lindfors, Bernth. 1995. "Armah's Achimota Writings." Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 18 (1): 62-72.

———. 1997. African Textualities: Texts, Pre-Texts, and Contexts of African Literature. (Including "Armah's Groton Essays," 51-66, and "Armah's Harvard Writings," 67-85.) Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press.

Obumselu, Ben. 1973. "Marx, Politics, and the African Novel." Twentieth Century Studies 10:107-27.

Soyinka, Wole. 1973b. Season of Anomy. London: Rex Coilings.

———. 1987. "Interview with Soyinka." Third World Book Review 2 (3): 7.

Wright, Derek. 1985. 1989. Ayi Kwei Armah's Africa: The Sources of His Fiction. New Perspectives on African Literature, Eldred Jones, general editor. London: Hans Zell.

Zabus, Chantal. 1991. The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi.

John Lutz (essay date 2003)

SOURCE: Lutz, John. "Pessimism, Autonomy, and Commodity Fetishism in Ayi Kwei Armah's TheBeautyful Ones Are Not yet Born." Research in African Literatures 34, no. 2 (summer 2003): 94-111.

[In the following essay, Lutz provides a Marxist interpretation of The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born, arguing that if the world portrayed in the novel "can be characterized by the abject failure of its political leadership to collectively imagine and implement a true socialist community, it must also be understood as a society imprisoned in a hopeless and repetitive dialectic between an all-encompassing desire for material possessions and a pervasive condition of psychological and physical impoverishment."]

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 Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born (90)

A common critical focus in treatments of The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born concerns the ontological status of the novel's vision of social reality in Ghana immediately preceding the February coup of 1966.¹ Considerations of the work's depiction of a paralyzed, thoroughly corrupt social order range from those that perceive the work as an expression of profound philosophical pessimism to those that view the closing moments of the novel as an articulation of guarded optimism for the future. Writing from the optimistic school of thought, Neil Lazarus notes that "[c]ritics of the novel have not found it easy to describe [the] relationship between affirmative vision and degraded reality" (137) expressed throughout the work. This difficulty has led many critics to identify the dominant perspective of the novel as pessimistic. Furthermore, much of the criticism that views the novel as a work of uncompromising pessimism refuses to grant any critical substance to its representation of Ghanaian society.

In an essay that dismisses the possibility that the novel provides more than a superficial reading of the social and economic reality of Ghana at the moment of the February coup, Leonard Kibera suggests that The Beautyful Ones is "not part of that literature which probes below the obvious at critical moments of history […] but rather the unyielding statement that the world remains static, unfeeling, and that the hopes of the early sixties have given way to pessimism—and death" (64). Viewing Armah as both a "cosmic pessimist" who understands the world as inherently evil and a "pejorist" who sees corruption and degeneration as inevitable natural processes, Charles Nnolim claims that Armah is "a writer whose philosophic pessimism is undisguised" (207) and Beautyful Ones a book that "refers to no real Africa but to some abstract human condition" (209). In two separate essays, Chidi Amuta notes that in the novel "the power of decay and despair rise to the level of being deified" ("Mythopoesis" 54) and suggests that the creation of characters who "do nothing physically about their decadent societies […] makes Armah a pessimistic African novelist" ("Contemporary African Artist" 473). Similarly, Derek Wright suggests that "[t]he explosion of new births at the end of the book does not disguise the strong suggestion that the ritual of annulment has initiated only a new cycle of decay, a renewal of evil" ("Flux and Form" 76). This pervasive sense of the novel's pessimistic ontology even extends to criticism that overtly focuses on Armah's use of the metaphorical potential of ritual to suggest the possibility of social transformation. In his essay on the novel's figurative use of the Akan carrier rite, Wright notes that the "impersonal spirit of ritual formality" that attends the man's performance of the ritual makes it impossible to derive from it anything but "an apparently fatalistic acceptance of corruption as the total condition of reality" ("The Carrier Rite" 129). In these accounts of the novel, the ponderous, oppressive representation of social reality is taken as evidence for the novel's endorsement of a form of cosmic pessimism that views the social corruption and degeneration of Ghanaian society as the inevitable consequence of natural processes.

Given the pervasive presence of commodity consumption and the obsessive desire for material wealth represented in the novel, however, it is surprising that no critic (either from the pessimistic or optimistic school of criticism) has sought an explanation for the fixed, reified character of the social relations of Armah's Ghana in Marx's theory of commodity fetishism. Indeed, Marx's understanding of the process of objectification set in motion by capitalism that transforms human beings and the natural world alike into commodities provides an alternative explanation for the dense materiality and crushing monolithic presence of the novel's object world that not only shows the inadequacy of theories that attribute to the novel a pessimistic ontology, but also elucidates the social and economic foundations of philosophical pessimism itself. Although Armah himself has unequivocally made it clear that he views Marxism as a Eurocentric discourse inapplicable to the social, economic, and cultural contradictions that characterize postcolonial struggles for autonomy, the novel presents a social world riven by contradictions that can best be understood through Marxian categories. This is not to say that Armah's artistic effort can be identified as "socialist" in its ideological aims, but simply that, given Armah's authorial viewpoint, the text must be viewed, in some respects, as an artistic production that contradicts his own stated intentions and attitudes. In the novel's vision, the very conditions that produce a cynical view of the social world as doomed by natural, unchangeable forces to degeneration, corruption, and cyclical eruptions of violence are interrogated, and the pessimism that these conditions produce rejected as an historically contingent, surmountable ob- stacle to positive social development. Armah's antipathy to Marxism notwithstanding, if the world depicted in The Beautyful Ones can be characterized by the abject failure of its political leadership to collectively imagine and implement a true socialist community, it must also be understood as a society imprisoned in a hopeless and repetitive dialectic between an all-encompassing desire for material possessions and a pervasive condition of psychological and physical impoverishment.

In Armah's novel, this dialectic constitutes the basic underlying contradiction of Ghanaian society: wealth dominates the lives of individuals and holds uncontested sway over all aspects of social existence. The desire to consume has created extreme forms of individualism responsible for the fragmentation of all social bonds and a collective experience of social isolation. In Armah's depiction of Ghanaian society, we are presented with a startling and disturbing critique of the legacy of colonial exploitation and an implicit criticism of the system of international capitalism that perpetuates it, a critique in which "the power which each individual exercises over the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner of exchange values, of money" (Marx, Grundrisse 157). In Ghanaian society, "[every] individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket" (157). Although Ghana is ostensibly a socialist society, the desire for consumption and the power it implies are consistently linked to Western forms of economic imperialism. As Robert Fraser notes, "It is this lust for wealth, specifically seen as a kind of material dependence on the capitalist West, which undermines the solidarity of the people and leads to sterility" (9). This sterility is not confined to the stagnant, unproductive economy, but extends to the consciousness of the new ruling elite whose narrow and self-serving interests have made them incapable of creating a social policy that might eliminate the prevailing conditions of poverty, exploitation, and misery that are part of the legacy of the colonial past. The existing social and economic relations have brought to power a political and bureaucratic elite whose main activities consist in competition for government power and the consumption of wealth. The objective effects of these conditions have rendered moral obligations between individuals without any true force and created a situation in which individuals have become powerless to assert those obligations as part of the social fabric of their relationships with others. This problem is dramatized by the plight of the unnamed man at the center of the story, who struggles to maintain a commitment to honesty and decency in an environment where ethical values have been completely subordinated to the values of the marketplace.

An apt term for this condition is commodity fetishism, a concept that can provide insight into the objective social and economic relations in which the characters in the novel subsist as well as their collective predisposition to seek psychological and emotional fulfillment almost exclusively through wealth. Throughout the novel, Armah explores the psychological and social consequences of fetishism both as an objective economic process and a subjective psychological one by continually depicting the complex, often contradictory relationship between subjective desires and the objective social structures in which individuals unsuccessfully seek to satisfy or articulate them. From the beginning of the novel, a pervasive sense of social entrapment and powerlessness serves as a primary focus of Armah's attention:

So mostly people held out the exact fare and tried not to look into the receiver's face with its knowledge of their impotence. […] 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. The men who dreamed them walk like rich men, and if they give a fifty-pesewa coin they look into the collector's eyes to see if he acknowledges their own importance.

          (2)

In this passage, Armah describes the psychologically debilitating effects of an endlessly repeated economic cycle: the system under which working people live creates a sustained condition of socio-economic domination and psychological dependency. Even when they have money, the temporary feeling of power that it imparts to them proves illusory. They walk like rich men and can temporarily find confirmation of their power and importance in the eyes of others; however, the passage makes it clear that even when they have money in their pockets they remain prisoners of an economic cycle over which they have no control. When they have money, the "fearful dreams" are gone and people no longer feel trapped or imprisoned, but the walking dead "sleep still" and remain dominated by a set of social structures that are all-encompassing and seemingly inescapable. As Wright describes this process in reference to Fanon's influence on Armah's fiction, two key images in the novel consist of "the all-pervasive, saturative white monolith, and the doomed cycle through which it leads everything back to its own total reality, causing all energy and movement towards liberation to run itself into a circle of frustration and enslaved dependence" ("Breaking the Cycle" 72). In the phase of consumption, i.e., pay day, this cycle produces the illusion of autonomy, but the days of "fullness" are merely a prelude to the suffering and deprivation that invariably follow from them. Since a person's value is expressed only through the amount of money he or she possesses, the economic cycle condemns the majority of the popu- lation to a life of self-loathing and abjection punctuated by unstable moments of illusory happiness.

Yet another effect of this system is the transformation of subjects into commodities. Individuals become carriers of a sort entirely different from the one noted by Wright: they become carriers of an exchange value that completely subsumes their identity. Tellingly, when the conductor throws the man off the bus, he refers to him as an "article of no commercial value" (6), an insult that suggests the extent to which the values of the marketplace have eroded any other possible basis for evaluating the worth of a human being. In the society in which the man subsists, the only nexus remaining between human beings is naked self interest and callous cash payment; personal worth has been completely resolved into exchange value (Marx, Communist Manifesto 37). This process is inescapable even for the man, who still gets an uncontrollable feeling of power and happiness when he purchases expensive imports for Koomson's visit to his home:

If the aristocratic drinks, the White Horse whisky and the Vat 69, had been available then, he would have bought them gladly in the foolish happiness of the moment, no matter how bitterly he would have cursed himself later. It was not only because of the admiring glances of the people in the shops, for whom a man's values could only be as high as the cost of the things he could buy.

          (115)

This passage demonstrates the inescapable power that the prevailing social and economic conditions have on individuals: even though he attempts to retain a set of values distinct from those of the marketplace, the man cannot help but be affected by them. Even the members of his family recognize a person's worth only in relation to how much he or she can purchase. The objective process of commodification colonizes the consciousness of individual subjects and even erodes the moral and psychological bonds that traditionally hold the family together. Indeed, there is perhaps no more shocking description of the disintegration of community that accompanies the uncontested, monolithic reign of market values and the servility and dependency of Ghanaian society on the capitalist West than Teacher's despairing, pessimistic depiction of the corrupt Party men:

No difference at all between the white men and their apes, the lawyers and the merchants, and now the apes of the apes, our Party men. And after their reign is over, there will be no difference ever. All new men will be like the old. Is that then the whole truth? Bungalows, white with a wounding whiteness. Cars, long and heavy, with drivers in white men's uniforms waiting ages in the sun. Women, so horribly young, fucked and changed like pants, asking only for blouses and perfume from diplomatic bags and wigs of human hair scraped from which decayed white woman's corpse?

          (89)

Although Teacher's statements spring from a perspective of philosophical pessimism, within the context of the novel's depiction of commodity fetishism, they provide an illustrative example of how the objective structures of Western capitalism have transformed individual subjects into objects of consumption to be exploited and used up like any other article of commercial exchange. Here, the color white serves as a figure both for the haunting legacy of colonial exploitation and for the fetishizing impulse inherent in the system of international capitalism, an impulse that is both part of its objective structure and internalized psychologically by those whom it dominates. The young women mentioned, just like the Party men, are willing to prostitute themselves in return for the material satisfactions of the commodities produced by the system. In the process, they too become objects on the market, purchasable for whatever price (or, in the case of the corrupt Party men, whatever bribe) enables them to fulfill their own materialistic desires.

Significantly, even time is not exempt from this process and operates as a palpable material force conditioning the consciousness of the workers in the railway office. Providing a critique of the psychological effects of the commodification of labor power, the novel's treatment of time calls attention to the passivity and helplessness that characterize the subjective experience of the workplace. The man's consciousness reflects that "contemplative stance" that Georg Lukács describes as a primary characteristic of "the perfectly closed system" of the labor process, a system "mechanically conforming to fixed laws … enacted independently of [human] consciousness and impervious to human intervention" that "reduces space and time to a common denominator and degrades time to the dimension of space" (Lukács 89). In keeping with the system of production and its effects upon human subjectivity, this process of rationalization fragments individual subjects and breaks time down into distinct, unconnected moments, creating a subjective experience of living in a monotonous, eternal present. Like commodities, time becomes a fixed, measurable quantity that transforms human subjects into passive participants in a process that excludes autonomous activity and the qualitative needs of the human personality. Depicted in a contradictory fashion that reflects the contradictions endemic to the labor process, time is depicted as a petrified, stagnant motion that produces the sense of overwhelming weight bearing down upon the daily existence of the average Ghanaian citizen and serves as a figure for the hidden mechanisms of social and economic domination that constitute the underlying structure of international capitalism. As Oyo's ideology of "driving fast" indicates, the consumption of commodities and the expenditure of time are each part of the same process: both lack any sense of direction or continuity and are incapable of serving as the foundation of a meaningful social practice. Time has lost all direction and can go nowhere: degraded to the position of objects in a process that escapes their effective control, individuals can take no active, vital role in shaping their world. Creating an absence of any genuinely communal, democratic activity or bonds of intimacy between subjects, capitalism's conquest of time empties it of all social significance. Human beings and the material world alike are transformed into mere instruments.

As a figure for the objective forces of production and exchange that dominate the lives of Ghanaian citizens, time is experienced as a crushing, seemingly inescapable mechanism. For those who spend their days and nights performing unfulfilling, pointless labor in jobs like those at the railway office, the mechanism spins on aimlessly like the office pencil sharpener and creates a condition under which nothing seems to be happening because nothing meaningful can happen:

This was very true of the night shift. Very true of the dead nights when whole hours could go by pierced only by the departing sounds of goods trains, lone and empty. On certain nights—these last days were not only Saturday nights, but other nights as well—the loneliness was made more bitter by the distant beat of bands on the hill creating happiness for those able to pay money at all times of the month, to pay money and to get change for it—the men of the Atlantic-Caprice. Sometimes also the sudden blast of car horns coming briefly and getting swallowed again forever, each particular sound going somewhere very far away. And underneath these single cries the night itself, a long, unending sound within the ear, just too high or just too low to disturb the captive hearer. Then the mocking rattle of the Morse machine mercifully breaking now and then into the frightening sameness of the lonely time.

          (15-16)

Working at one of the hubs of commercial circulation, the railway clerks exist entirely within a structure of time that transforms them into passive objects. Described as a corporeal presence, time represents the fetishizing of social relations within the system of production and exchange, a process that imprisons those who participate in it by subverting their individual and collective autonomy. As Lukács describes this process:

[T]ime sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified, mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, wholly separated from his total human personality): in short, it becomes space.

          (90)

The workers in the railway office are not free to shape the social, political and economic institutions under which they subsist: the unequal distribution of wealth creates an unequal access to power, while the subordination of all human activity to the values of market makes it impossible for individuals to construct relationships with other human beings based on ethical bonds. The solidarity that is required for a genuine pursuit of the common good has been undermined by a process of systematic domination, and the most obvious effect of this process is widespread passivity and dependency. Although they may experience the passing of time differently, the men of the Atlantic Caprice remain as dominated and passive as those without the money to buy happiness. Neither the wealthy nor the impoverished are able to create happiness for themselves; they remain dependent upon external material objects to produce happiness for them. Indeed, dominated by socioeconomic mechanisms beyond their control, both the wealthy and the poor suffer from a profound psychological impoverishment that arises from the absence of autonomy and genuine community and the meaningless seriality produced as an inescapable effect of commodity fetishism.

The fact that those who are seduced by the lure of the "gleam" seem oblivious to their own passivity and social imprisonment can be attributed to yet another effect of commodity fetishism. Not simply an objective process of domination, fetishism must also be understood as a mystification of social relations that makes them appear in the guise of natural, immutable laws of nature. The man's experience with the timber merchant makes it clear the extent to which the prevailing market values seem to originate in natural laws. After refusing to accept the bribe, the man experiences feelings of guilt and isolation that suggest the subtle power that the mechanisms of social and economic domination possess to shape how reality is represented in the consciousness of individual subjects:

The man was left alone with thoughts of the easy slide and how everything said there was something miserable, something unspeakably dishonest about a man who refused to take and to give what everyone around was busy taking and giving: something unnatural, something very cruel, something that was criminal, for who but a criminal could ever be left with such a feeling of loneliness?

          (31-32)

The social isolation that the man experiences could follow only from a social context in which bribery and graft are understood as basic, unquestionable features of everyday existence. Although they are not necessarily endemic to capitalist social relations, bribery and graft find an historically specific articulation in Ghanaian society due to its subordinate position in relation to the capitalist West. The nonproductive, stagnant character of Ghana's economy is a product of its continuing domination by Western interests. Although exploitation still takes place between the wealthy and the poor in Ghana, its primary site of operation lies between Ghana and the Western powers that continue to exploit the nation's people and resources.

Wealthy Ghanaians are not the primary beneficiaries of the exploitative labor process but are mainly engaged in the business of capturing for themselves as much wealth as possible before it arrives at its destination in Western bank accounts. Economic imperialism provides the underlying explanation for the fact that commercial exchange in Ghana takes the form of bribery and graft. Although the conditions under which the wealthy live are far less miserable than the impoverished, the elite are still proletarianized to the extent that they lack effective control over the economic forces shaping their existence. In such a context, corruption takes the place of exploitation as the predominant means of self-enrichment, but remains contingent upon the global contradiction between capital and labor. To be sure, from a Marxian standpoint, prosperity and ethical activity remain incommensurable whether corruption exists or not: the capitalist's objective status in the production process makes him or her an agent of exploitation regardless of his or her moral character. Nonetheless, in Ghana corruption can be understood as the historically specific means by which monetary values condition the consciousness of individuals. Indeed, the all-encompassing nature of monetary standards and values is so taken for granted by the merchant that the man's refusal can only be perceived as an act of perversity or deliberate malice. The ingratiating familiarity that precedes the merchant's attempt to bribe the man, a familiarity significantly evoked by the merchant's use of the word, brother, to address him, is the closest those engaged in an individualistic pursuit of material advantage can come to human intimacy. The timber merchant's later insult that he is a "very wicked man" who "will never prosper" (107), although it functions ironically when viewed alongside the mountains of waste and excrement that populate the novel's object world, testifies to the monolithic status of monetary values. In the consciousness of most, the only kind of prosperity that can be imagined is the kind that entails material consumption.

This consciousness is expressed trenchantly by the man's wife when she compares him to the chichidodo. After expressing her belief that it does not matter how people get what they have because "[e]verybody is swimming towards what he wants" (44), Oyo explains her comparison:

‘The chichidodo hates excrement with all its soul. But the chichidodo only feeds on maggots, and you know the maggots grow best inside the lavatory.’

          (45)

The implication of Oyo's comparison, i.e., that the man wants to eat well but doesn't want to do what is necessary to do so, while revealing an attitude of disrespect derived directly from commercial values, also reveals a contradiction that is not simply part of the man's consciousness, but endemic to the social organization of Ghanaian society: material prosperity can only be attained at the expense of the ethical obligations that typically hold communities together. The social relations that encourage individualistic consumption create a collective consciousness underwritten by cynicism and despair. It isn't the novel that is pessimistic; rather, the work's depiction of subjective attitudes towards wealth and prosperity functions as a diagnosis of the extent to which the social contradictions endemic to everyday existence have produced a perspective of philosophical pessimism that has eaten into the very foundations of consciousness. Oyo's narrow definition of prosperity, along with her belief that it can only be arrived at by getting one's hands dirty, may very well be grounded in a realistic appraisal of the nature of her society; however, the fact that this condition seems natural and inevitable to her and many others only testifies to the mystifying power of commodity fetishism in its ability to conceal the self-negating, life-denying contradictions of capitalism.

If, however, the pessimistic attitudes of individual characters can be understood as the product of the social relations that are part of everyday life, at first glance, some of Armah's metaphorical passages might seem to implicitly endorse a pessimistic ontology as well. One passage in particular that has received a great deal of attention is the description of the banister in the railway office. Most frequently read as a metaphorical description of natural processes of corruption and decay, the description of the banister seems to suggest that social corruption has its origin in immutable natural forces that are futile to struggle against:

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 cleansing power of the chemicals in them, and it would convert all to victorious filth, awaiting yet more polish again and again and again.

          (12)

In the man's description of the banister, the forces of decay seem to take on the significance of a cosmic principle. Ayo Mamadu aptly summarizes this perspective: "At its roots, nature carries self-destructive or self-denying contradictions; the state of being is the very assurance of decay" (236). However, given the subjective nature of the man's perspective and the metaphorical significance of the mechanism of time in the work as a whole, interpreting this passage as clear evidence of the work's pessimistic ontology fails to take into account the possibility that it addresses social contradictions rather than natural ones. Indeed, all of the subsequent descriptions of the passage of time in the railway office describe it as a socially constructed mechanism rather than a natural one. When the passage speaks of the wood winning until the end of time, there is little to indicate that time should be understood as an eternal process and a great deal of evidence that suggests that descriptions of time in the work have a predominantly social significance. Given the metaphorical function of time in later passages as a figure for the fetishizing of social relationships, the "end of time" could equally be read as the end of an unjust, life-denying socioeconomic order. Furthermore, interpretations that view the passage as an expression of philosophical pessimism invariably read the wood as signifying something natural and the paint, polish and chemicals as attempts to halt the natural, inevitable process of decay.

What such readings fail to take into account is the fact that the banister is not natural, nor is the wood that comprises it a living, vital substance, but a dead one. Both the description of the banister and the context in which the man perceives it never leave the realm of social reality. Merely yet another product of human labor, that is to say, dead labor, the banister is a commodity like everything else in the railway office. Like all other commodities, its material form conceals the exploitative social relations and contradictions that constitute its real substance. The contradictions that the man perceives it as expressing are not natural ones (even if he may perceive them as such), but contradictions that spring from a specific set of social and economic relationships. The diseased and deeply fissured banister represents the totality of Ghanaian history from colonial rule to the present state of foreign economic domination. The war going on between the wood and decay implies both the fragmented nature of the social world and an ongoing historical struggle for individual and collective autonomy repeatedly suppressed by a destructive economic cycle.

The forces described at work in the banister are the same forces at work in the railway office and the nation as a whole. The fetishistic allure of the gleam reflects the ordering structure of an exploitative and fundamentally unjust social and economic order that imposes "an ethos of instrumentality on the ground where a system of humane values ought to stand" (Lazarus 152). The gleam displaces the natural order of a true community, but it does so by representing itself as natural. Neil Lazarus refers to this process as the "ordering rationality of the gleam," yet this process has two distinct moments that would be better understood under the rubric of commodity fetishism. On the one hand, as an objective process of production and exchange, the system of commodity fetishism does construct the totality of what is real; it produces a set of social and economic structures that excludes all human possibilities besides those subsumed under the domination of capital. It shrinks the sphere of human activity to the exchanges of the marketplace and, in doing so, negates any singular or autonomous human activity struggling for articulation. On the other hand, as a process of mystification, commodity fetishism finds representation in novel as the gleam. As the psychological element in the process of domination, the gleam falsifies reality in so far as it constructs itself as the only possible reality. In the mystified world of the gleam, there are no other alternatives; in effect, subjects are enslaved psychologically to the extent that the gleam misrepresents the historically contingent nature of the social world as permanent at the same time as it conceals its crippling, self-destructive contradictions. The implicit connection between the "clean life" lived within the gleam and the miserable, abject one lived among mountains of waste and excrement speaks directly to these contradictions. Squalor and universal abjection before the alien power of money constitute the hidden reality concealed by the gleam. The gleam can be understood as one aspect of the monolithic system of commodity production and exchange, an aspect that prevents most individuals from seeking autonomy and self-worth in any activities other than those that are certain to subvert those very same ends.

Not simply an effect of objective structures, the social and economic domination concealed by the gleam is predicated upon the divided psyche of those whom it imprisons. The participation of individual subjects in their own domination finds partial expression through the metaphor of the cave taken from Plato's The Republic, an image that plays a recurrent role throughout the text and serves to foreground the issue of social justice (Folarin 117). Far from negating the metaphorical significance of Plato's allegory as Stewart Crehan argues, "the riven psyche of [the novel's] main character" (104) reflects a society divided against itself, a world imprisoned in polymorphously perverse forms of material satisfaction that manifest themselves through an unrestrained pursuit of social desire entirely consistent with Plato's account of an unjust life. The effects of these social contradictions on the psyche of individuals are clearly conveyed by the man's conflicted feelings about his social desires:

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.

          (10)

Although Crehan's claim that the novel does not "support the notion of a dominant specularity" (105) or "endorse the penetrating eye of moral certitude" (106) is clearly borne out by the man's ambivalent response to the power of the gleam, there is far more to Plato's metaphor than a contrast between the degraded world of appearances and the absolute moral certainty engendered by an understanding of truth.

In the context of the entire argument put forth in The Republic, those imprisoned in the cave are understood primarily as prisoners of social desire who have been miseducated in a way that makes them incapable of recognizing what is in their own best interests. Creating a clear parallel with the miseducation in imperialist discourse that has convinced the colonized to worship the very things that enslave them, Plato's allegory retains a central importance in the novel despite the man's ambivalent, fragmented psyche. Driven exclusively by social desire and the quest to gratify the senses, the prisoners in Plato's cave pursue activities that undermine the very foundations of society. As an association that arises out of fundamental human needs that can only be met by cooperative activities (The Republic 60), no society can function justly when its citizens fail to recognize moral obligations to one another. For Plato, society comes into existence because no individual is self-sufficient, an assumption that serves as an implicit point of departure for Armah's critique of the irrational, life-denying effects of individualism on Ghanaian society.

In The Beautyful Ones, the disintegration of community is presented as a consequence both of the system of commodity fetishism that is part of the remaining legacy of imperialism and the unlimited pursuit of material desires that this system explicitly encourages. As such, Plato's metaphor participates in one of the central organizing themes of the novel, the socially destructive confusion between appearance and reality that is also a central feature of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism. Just as Plato's allegory suggests that those who live in a society driven exclusively by the desire for material gain and social recognition (in Plato's psychological model, an existence driven by desire or competition rather than reason; 159) suffer from a form of imprisonment imposed both by external forces and internal ones, so in Armah's novel, the pursuit of commodities and the social power invested in them is shown to create a society of passive and easily manipulated individuals trapped, in part, by their own desires. Reversing Plato's idealist assumptions, the novel presents the false world of appearances not by shadows but in the social mystifications created by commodity fetishism, while the political and intellectual liberation promised by the metaphor finds expression in the critique of Western capitalism initiated by the novel itself. As in Plato's allegory, the novel seeks to demonstrate how a society that rewards false and superficial values creates human beings who misapprehend their true interests and seek material advantages through a cynical use of their abilities.

The crucial difference between Plato's allegory and the novel's appropriation of its metaphorical potential lies in the materialist assumptions through which the novel presents the opposition between appearance and reality. Viewed in this way, pessimism proves to be a central feature of the vision of the deluded cave dweller, but not of the novel's vision of a social world dominated by historically contingent, and therefore alterable, economic forces. If not sufficient in itself to transform that world, at the very least, the novel's critique seeks to demystify its dazzling appearance by calling attention to its degraded reality.

Furthermore, the novel links the question of social justice to human psychological well-being just as Plato does in The Republic. The system of commodity fetishism has created varying forms of impoverishment that range from the deprivation of material needs and the stunting of human potential to the negation of autonomy and community. Each of these related conditions finds expression in the widespread loss of "connectedness" and social cohesion perhaps best conveyed by the description of the broken pencil sharpener, the handle of which speeds "round and round with the futile freedom of a thing connected to nothing else" (17). As much a critique of the futility of the pervasive forms of individualism that have separated human beings from one another as it is a diagnosis of the existential consequences of an absence of ethical obligations, the description of the pencil sharpener calls attention to the profound social isolation created by the tyranny of market values.

In this respect, the pursuit of self-interest proves to be a profound act of self-betrayal that ultimately produces only loneliness and despair. Moreover, the powerful negation of individual and collective autonomy characteristic of a system grounded in social and economic domination also finds a powerful expression in the man's meditation upon the likely fate of his young colleague at the railway office:

No doubt, being only new, he was calculating in his undisappointed mind that he would stay here only a short while and like a free man fly off to something closer to his soul. What in his breeziness he had yet to know was this: that his dream was not his alone, that everyone before him had crawled with hope along the same unending path, dreaming of future days when they would crawl no longer but run if they wanted to run, and fly if the spirit moved them. But along the streets, those who can soon learn to recognize in ordinary faces beings whom the spirit has moved, but who cannot follow where it beckons, so heavy are the small ordinary days of the time.

          (33)

In this passage, the contrast between the youthful enthusiasm of the man's new colleague and a system that destroys the unique aspirations of individual subjects suggests a collective experience of frustration and disillusionment that can only be rooted in a universal need, suppressed under capitalism, for an effective ability to shape one's social existence. The desire to "run" or "fly" implicitly endorses a need for autonomy common to all human beings, a need that can only be realized in singular forms of expression and communal activities suppressed by the uniformity and passive consent produced by the system of commodity fetishism. The young man's desire for freedom and self-expression is not shown to be essentially misguided; however, his belief that he is "like a free man" and alone in his aspirations suggests his inexperience in this particular social world. He has yet to understand that his dream is "not his alone," and that in a society characterized by ruthless competition, this means that other individuals are obstacles to achieving one's dreams.

The obstacles to community that are produced by this condition exist in direct contrast to the sense of solidarity prevalent before independence that Teacher describes in the early part of his narrative of Ghana's struggle for autonomy. Testifying to a collective experience of physical impoverishment and frustrated social desire, Teacher's narration of the raiding of the white colonialist's orchards gives clear expression to the class boundaries that separate colonizer and colonized:

There were so many children with so many hungers and desires. Stones flying upward and arcing down, bringing not the wanted fruit but entire bunches of unready mangoes. […] Around the white bungalows on the hills no hungry children had thrown any stones and the mangoes that would long ago have disappeared hung heavy and ripe and beautiful, and the white men in the bungalows did not even want to eat them. The feel of sunlight on naked neck just above the khaki collar, and the short whistle of wet grass under naked feet making the climb up toward shiny white bungalows. 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.

          (67-68)

Before independence, the boundaries that divide one class from another remain clearly defined by race. The experience of physical and psychological deprivation common to the oppressed provides the material foundations for the nascent forms of political resistance represented by the orchard raid. The "hunger" for material prosperity that has seized the psychology of the nation is not simply a destructive delusion but a direct consequence of centuries of exploitation and deprivation. Hunger and desire are all the more intense given the prolonged period of impoverishment that the people of Ghana have endured.

The needs and desires that have gone unmet due to oppression, however, are not only physical but psychological in nature. The tall white boards "pointed and glinting in the sun" and the hedges topped with menacing thorns evoke associations with a concentration camp enclosed in barbed wire that call attention to the violence inherent in colonial domination. In the postcolonial context, this domination remains an essential feature of the nation's social and economic structure. The "party men" have merely taken the place of the white colonialists, but with one crucial distinction: their love of the "gleam" constitutes a form of psychological dependency. Both the party leaders and the rest of the people are still imprisoned behind the barbed wire. Literally and figuratively, they occupy a position on the outside looking in; the materialistic nature of their social desires perpetuates their psychological imprisonment in a way that reinforces their subordination to foreign capital. The deprivation they suffer from is real, but the attempt to rectify this lack exclusively through material goods fails to take into consideration the psychological needs for autonomy, community and singular development that are just as necessary for human happiness. In other words, freedom is sought only in material prosperity and even those who have every reason to reject the materialistic values of the ruling strata adopt a set of social desires that negate all possibility of the kinds of resistance represented in the orchard raiding episode. As Wright aptly summarizes this process, "Mass subscription to the totalitarian psychology of materialism ensures that there is really only one set of class values, a single harmony of division in which the oppressed worship their oppressors and the fragmented seek most strongly after what fragments them" ("Saviours and Survivors" 136).

The structural inequality and exploitative class relations that underwrite this psychology find expression in images linking the circulation of waste with the circulation of money. Both forms of circulation are presented through recurring representations of haunting that illustrate the historical connections between the violent legacy of the colonial past, the draining of the nation's resources, the exchange of commodities, and the obliteration of human vitality and singularity. As ghosts, the white colonialists maintain a haunting presence even after independence that signifies the ubiquitous nature of capitalist social relations. The ghosts that haunt the text function as traces of the historical reality that eludes the consciousness of those who remain fixated upon the seductive allure of the gleam.

The fetishism of commodities and money signifies a regression to an early stage of psychic development whose metaphorical significance is extended to encompass the forms of dependency, psychological impoverishment and socio-economic domination produced as inescapable features of the hegemony of capitalist social relations. The haunting presence of decay and decomposition suggest "that a neocolonizing Westernized acquisitiveness has rotted the social structure from top to bottom, creating a hierarchy of ghost powers, who are merely agents for the West, and ghost victims" (Wright, "Totalitarian Rhetoric" 214). The international system of circulation has transformed all values into commercial ones by subordinating human activities to the demand for profit, a process that the fetishism of commodities perpetuates by repressing the origins of wealth even as it undermines human autonomy and produces uniformity and subservience to a single criterion of value. Human needs and values are effaced by economic processes that reduce all considerations of the common good to the index of exchange value. Marx aptly summarizes this process: "Circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as the money crystal. Nothing is immune from this alchemy, the bones of the saints cannot withstand it […] Just as in money every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished, so too for its part, as a radical leveler, it extinguishes all distinctions" (Capital 1: 229).

Figured in the circulation and accumulation of waste, not only does the haunting presence of social reality suggest that there is nothing beyond commerce, but, in the novel's metaphorical linking of digestion and the circulation of capital, there appears to be nothing beyond the degraded world of excrement and waste in which all human activities have become uniformly reduced to the same level. It is in this sense that the bewitched pursuit of the gleam signifies a collective act of repression. The pursuit of material prosperity and the social desires that drive it conceal the social and economic reality of widespread impoverishment, economic stagnation, and human misery.

On a psychological level, the obsession with wealth proves to be synonymous with the consumption of excrement since it utterly fails to produce a viable community capable of sustaining life-affirming values and activities. As Joshua D. Esty trenchantly observes, "[S]hit has a political vocation: it draws attention to the failures of development, to the unkept promises not only of colonial modernizing regimes, but of postindependence economic policy" (32). In other words, waste and excrement expose the irrational, destructive character of commodity fetishism and reveal a degraded social reality riven by mutual antagonism and systematic violence. The distinction between the ideological appearance and the social and economic reality of Ghanaian society finds subtle expression in a passage that overtly incorporates both the manifest and latent features of the system of commodity fetishism:

The walker steps back into the ambiguous shadow between the lights, waiting with a strange voice for strange faces in the dark. More sellers under more faint lights, selling more of the same inconsequential things. From the rise ahead an object of power and darkness and gleaming light comes shimmering down in a potent moving stream, and it stops in front of a half-asleep seller close to the man. Above the cool murmur of the engine the voice of a female rises from within, thin as long wire stabbing into open eyes.

          (36)

Driving down the street in "a potent moving stream," the limousine provides an apt symbol for the circulation of commodities that suggests the tyrannical power that such objects hold over the imagination of individuals and the absolute sovereignty that the market system wields over their day-to-day existence. At the same time, the image of "long wire stabbing into open eyes" suggests both the blinding force of the gleam and the violent, destructive reality of the social and economic system.

That this system is described in monolithic terms in no way implies that the novel endorses a pessimistic ontology. Armah's commitment to social realism leads him to evaluate the February coup as nothing more than a shift in power that will not fundamentally alter the system. At the same time, Armah's attitude towards socialism plays an important role here. The indeterminate status of the man's class along with the absence of any clear agency of revolutionary change reflect, despite the novel's critique of commodity fetishism and its effects, a significant level of pessimism in regard to the possible success of socialism. Despite this disavowal of socialism, however, the closing image of the novel endorses an optimistic vision of the future based on an implicit affirmation of the project of individual and collective autonomy that is entirely consistent with its goals. The change in leadership will not be likely to improve the conditions of most people's lives because the "new life [that will] maybe flower in the country [will] not choose as its instruments the same people who had made a habit of killing new flowers" (159-60), yet the possibility of a just social order coming into being in the future is suggested by the very existence of "new flowers." The promise of this future appears to the man on his way home after saving Koomson:

In the center of the oval was a single flower, solitary, unexplainable, and very beautiful:

As he got up to go back into the town he had left in the night, the man was unable to shake off the imprint of the painted words. In his mind he could see them flowing up, down and round again. After a while the image itself of the flower in the middle disappeared, to be replaced by a single, melodious note.

          (183)

Despite the man's final insight that his feeling of "aching emptiness would be all that the remainder of his own life could offer him" (183), the inscription on the bus and the painted flower it encircles represent the emergence of singularity in the midst of the uniformity and mediocrity inspired by the leveling effects of the market system. In a metaphorical sense, the inexplicable appearance of the flower testifies to the enduring vitality of the human desire for singular development and the irrepressible nature of the psychological need for individual and collective autonomy, a group of basic needs that, in the final analysis, will prevail over the unjust, irrational social forces set in motion by commodity fetishism. Even the deliberate misspelling of the word "beautiful," which gives the novel part of its title, participates in the affirmation of an enduring human passion for singular development and social justice. Not simply another repetitive component in a linguistic series, the word "beautyful," invokes the presence of those beautiful ones yet to be born who, in their creative vitality and singular identity, evoke the promise of those genuine forms of autonomy that can only be found in a community where human needs hold uncontested sovereignty.

Note

1. In this respect, Armah's views are entirely consistent with the prevailing consensus of most recent postcolonial critiques of Marxism. This essay represents a departure from that perspective. In this author's view, in The Beautyful Ones, specifically, the Marxian analysis of commodity fetishism provides an enduringly useful and relevant set of categories for understanding the social world depicted in the novel.

Works Cited

Amuta, Chidi. "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): 473.

Armah, Ayi Kwei. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. London: Heinemann, 1969.

Crehan, Stewart. "Phantasy and Repression in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born." Research in African Literatures 26.4 (1995): 104-20.

Esty, Joshua D. "Excremental Postcolonialism." Contemporary Literature 40.1 (1999): 22-59.

Folarin, Margaret. "An Additional Comment on Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born." African Literature Today 5. Ed. Eldred Jones. London: Heinemann, 1971. 116-29.

Fraser, Robert. The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah. London: Heinemann, 1980.

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.

Lazarus, Neil. "Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will: A Reading of Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born." Research in African Literatures 18.2 (1987): 137-75.

Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: MIT P, 1971.

Mamadu, Ayo. "Making Despair Bearable: Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Fragments." Neohelicon 10.2 (1983): 231-49.

Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol I. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage, 1977.

———. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Verso, 1998.

———. Grundrisse. New York: Penguin, 1973.

Nnolim, Charles E. "Dialectic as Form: Pejorism in the Novels of Armah." African Literature Today 10. Ed. Eldred Jones. London: Heinemann, 1979. 207-23.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Wright, Derek. "Breaking the Cycle: Fanonian Patterns in West African Writing." Literary Half Yearly 35.1 (1994): 64-77.

———. "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): 119-33.

———. "Flux and Form: The Geography of Time in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born." Ariel 17.2 (1986): 63-77.

———. "Saviours and Survivors: The Disappearing Community in the Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah." Ufahamu 14.2 (1985): 134-56.

———. "Totalitarian Rhetoric: Some Aspects of Metaphor in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born." Critique 30.3 (1989): 210-20.

Obododimma Oha (essay date 2005)

SOURCE: Oha, Obododimma. "Living on the Hyphen: Ayi Kwei Armah and the Paradox of the African-American Quest for a New Future and Identity in Postcolonial Africa." In Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Society in a ‘Post'-Colonial World, pp. 259-71. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005.

[In the following essay, Oha "analyses and discusses the attention Armah draws to the problems encountered by African Americans in relocating themselves in Africa, the place of their roots, especially in terms of personal and social tensions."]

To Live on the Hyphen, or to live (as) a hyphenated identity, is to live between lives, cultures, languages, spaces, ideologies, etc. It already always suggests a destabilization and an ambivalence. Quite typical of postcolonial and transcultural circumstances, living on the hyphen is a condition which Ayi Kwei Armah, a Ghanaian novelist now resident in Popenguine, West Africa, significantly addresses in his Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Past, Present and Future. In this book he explores the African-American elites' intellectual and political attempts at recuperating their African philosophical values, and re-creating their futures from their pasts in postcolonial Africa. This essay analyses and discusses the attention Armah draws to the problems encountered by African Americans in relocating themselves in Africa, the place of their roots, especially in terms of personal and social tensions.

Armah's contrastive discourse in Osiris Rising is examined in relation to responses manifested by some African Americans who have relocated to some West African countries, particularly Ghana and the Republic of Benin. It turns out that, apart from being vulnerable to exploitation, African Americans who have returned to Africa face serious problems of alienation and marginalization as an emerging minority group in these African countries, and these problems tend to intensify the frustrations attendant on living on the hyphen, and which this return to the roots was meant to resolve in the first place.

My first task will be to provide a critical and theoretical background, especially with reference to Armah's literary concerns and practices, so as to locate the designs pursued in Osiris Rising within such literary concerns and practices. Ayi Kwei Armah, the author of The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born, Why Are We So Blest?, Fragments, Two Thousand Seasons, and The Healers, has received much critical attention for his commitment to the exposure and interrogation of dismal conditions in postcolonial Africa, as well as of the racial problems faced by Africans both in the diaspora and on the continent. In fact, sometimes, Armah links the dismal conditions in Africa to racial tension and neocolonization. Colonization and racial exploitation are treated as two interactive weapons used in undermining and destroying community in Africa. The closeness of Armah's representations in his fiction to Frantz Fanon's philosophical arguments about the colonization of Africa has been noted by Kofi Anyidoho and Gareth Griffiths.¹ Anyidoho also draws our attention to the fact that "Armah's fiction is engaged in […] a continental, racial battle,"² in which the novelist clearly takes "sides with his people and 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."³

In taking Africa (as a whole) as "his primary constituency"⁴ in a racial political conflict, Armah operates within a vision which, as further noted by Anyidoho, has at its centre "the mythic reconstruction of a united Africa, a vision of all people of African descent as one people"—a vision which is pan-African and which is deemed "necessary as a force to oppose and neutralize the sense of fragmentation and of weakness in the face of ‘world powers’ which have reduced African peoples to scattered easy prey for much better united opponents."⁵

Some critics of Armah have queried his handling of race in his writings, especially in terms of his sentimental rhetoric and attempt at seducing his readers into racial hatred. Identifying Why Are We So Blest? as "an attempt to nail the novel down," as a "malignant fiction," James Booth, for instance, argues that the book "is not only an analysis of the psychological effects of racism, it is itself a racist book."⁶ It is an interesting paradox that Armah's strategy of using racism against racism does seem to entrench his art in a form of pedestrian sentimentality. It is for this reason that Booth has further argued, with respect to Why Are We So Blest?, that "as a cry of resentment and suffering the book is unparalleled. As a universal myth of race relations it is deceptive,"⁷ and that "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 analysed, in their political manifestation, in his article on ‘African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?’. "⁸

Armah, it seems, uses his promethean characters—for instance, Modin in Why Are We So Blest? —to play out the consequences of the African intellectual's attempt to belong to European and African worlds. Modin, the protagonist of the novel, "is pulled in different directions by his intellectual involvement with Western civilization and his emotional involvement with his own people."⁹ With Armah, we are trapped in a binary logic of either/or, and to cross to the other side is to become a casualty. His promethean figure in the case of Africa becomes "inevitably the vector of ‘foreign culture’," and "although he makes a ‘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 the two worlds."¹⁰

From a more critical perspective, crossing to another world to cross back later could be a process of education and reinforcement. The person who has crossed would be more familiar with the space of the (racial) Other, and by disturbing racial coordinates enables a rethinking of such boundaries as a dimension that is not necessarily natural, not necessarily permanent. Rosemary Colmer consolidates this perspective in arguing 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."¹¹

There seems, then, to be a lot of sense in Edward Said's argument in Culture and Imperialism that

No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are no more than starting points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities.¹²

Indeed, for many African Americans, crossing back to their roots in Africa is more than just a ritual or an attempt at recognizing Africa and being recognized by Africa. Robert Fraser has rightly observed that "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 and recrossed the Atlantic in both directions seeking various sorts of experience."¹³ Quite interestingly, just as many people in (West) African countries are trying to escape to America—either through the American visa lottery or through other means—and also to other parts of Europe and Asia, some of those who became African Americans through the experience of the slave trade would want to return ‘home’ to their ‘roots’ in Africa. This search for a future and identity in Africa is stimulated mainly by black-consciousness movements in America. Also, the history of the slave trade has been repackaged as part of a tourist attraction by some West African countries like Ghana and Benin, and African Americans visiting these countries are led through oral and visual narratives of their origins, with a subtext about the need to ‘return’ to their African roots. It has been observed elsewhere, in relation to the visualized drama of the ‘return’ on the slave trail at Ouidah, Benin Republic, that "spiritual return to Africa is, in fact, the major idea communicated by the ‘Tree of Return." Along this line of thought, the ‘Tree of No-Return’ is a symbol of death"; and also that "walking round the ‘Tree of Return’ several times—a ritual the returnees and visiting diasporic Africans are asked to perform […]—is a symbolic reversal and revocation of the journey to loss and death which the slaves were forced to make round the ‘Tree of No-Return’ before being taken away finally."¹⁴ Further still,

the climax of the evocation of anger and pity in the dramatic experience of the trail is the memorial on the mass grave of the slaves […] with motifs of blood and tears shed by the slaves. The visualization of the slaves' blood and tears is a powerful means of summarizing the tragic experience of the slaves, and the grave itself generally returns and retains the presence of the dead ex-slave, a presence that accuses the enslaver, and reminds and recalls the descendants of the dead slave home.¹⁵

But apart from narratives of tours into the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, festivals that involve the celebration of black heritage, such as PANAFEST (held in Ghana), have done much to encourage African Americans to cross over to Africa. Of course, some African Americans may have other reasons for wanting to return to Africa. The crucial thing is that such return has its own important story, which is that of the negotiation of identity and which must complement the stories of disaster Armah has told about his promethean characters. Such questing for identity seems to be well in line with Armah's vision and literary ideology, which he reveals when he says that

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.¹⁶

It will therefore be useful to discuss the paradox that attends the African-American quest for identity and a future in Africa, focusing on Armah's Osiris Rising, which, interestingly, he subtitled A Novel of Africa Past, Present and Future —in line with his literary ideology and his sense of historicity. In his defence of Armah from criticisms about his attitude to Africa's history, Anyidoho writes that "a historian with his eyes on the future is under no obligation to merely reconstruct past events."¹⁷ But the "futures" of the quest for identity in Osiris Rising are already full of fissures, the identities sometimes dented when their pasts are remembered. The problem of pessimism in Armah is still far from being settled.

Osiris Rising tells the story of Ast's return to and frustrating search for identity in Africa. Ast, an African-American lady professor, is made aware of her past by her grandmother, Nwt, who gives her some initial training on hieroglyphics and ancient Egyptian mysticism. Through her, Ast is able to reconnect to her African past:

Conversations with Nwt turned into voyages. Crossing space and time, the growing Ast stayed up nights with ancestors thousands of years gone puzzling over the motion of stars, wind, flood. Connections. Wonder turned to knowledge of measurable time. She watched kindred priests divide the year into seasons departing and returning, the day into twelve hours going, night into twelve tirelessly coming. Her mind met ancestral priestesses, companions caring for green fields on Hapi's riverbanks, turning desire into myth, naming the myth Sekhet Iarw, perfect place, evergreen fields of the wandering soul returning home.¹⁸

Just like "typical Armah protagonists," who are "soulsearchers, caring for things of the mind and spirit rather than the heavy things of the flesh,"¹⁹ Ast is determined "to follow her soul to a different outcome, a reversal of the crossing and its motivation, both" (11). Her decision to return to Africa was generated by the processes of her education in both the formal and the non-formal contexts, the latter stimulating and enhancing the choices she makes in the former. Armah tells us that

She took World History for her first degree, then shifted closer home to Egyptology, for the second. Her doctorate focused on Kemt; she wrote her thesis on identity and social justice in the philosophy of Ancient Egypt. By graduation time her search for knowledge of self, of self within universe, had led her through a flow of changes, some so generous with knowledge they made pain worthwhile in the end. The search accelerated her decision: to return.

          (8)

On getting to the unnamed African country (obviously Ghana), Ast runs into trouble because of a document on an African philosophical revival which she carries and which the government of the host country associates with dissidence. This brings her into contact with Seth, a former ambitious classmate in the USA, who has rapidly risen to the position of head of security (referred to as Deputy Director or simply DD or SSS, to mystify him). Refusing to enter into a love affair with DD, Ast becomes a target for his vengeance on both a personal and a professional level. She locates Asar, another school friend—a typical Armah visionary and revolutionary—who is a member of the Companionship of the Ankh and a college teacher. Ast secures a teaching job at Asar's college after a long frustrating search and encounter with the decadent civil service system. Her rediscovery of her love relationship with Asar, and the attempt by members of the Companionship of the Ankh at the college to introduce cultural ideological direction in the curriculum, further intensify DD's bitterness and decision to destroy Asar and to make Ast rethink her inclinations. DD, ironically, uses some African Americans, Ras Jomo Cinque Equiano (formerly Sheldon Tubman) and Prince Wossen (formerly Earl Johnson, and later Rodney Jones) to betray Asar and Ast.

Cinque had been a student activist in America where he betrayed his fellow African Americans by joining a fraternity that promoted white exclusivity and supremacy. Cinque was admitted because he could be used by the group to undermine black consciousness and solidarity. He later emigrated to Africa after losing out in America and changed his name from Sheldon Tubman to Ras Jomo Cinque Equiano, establishing an ambivalent Africult that combines the doctrines of Islam, Christianity, Rastafarianism, Negritude, and African traditional religion. He desperately searches for means of legitimizing his claims about his having a royal ancestry, and about his ancestor having been sold into slavery through conspiracy. Cinque is able to brainwash members of his group, and to reduce his harem of wives to the position of slaves—in fact, zombies. While exploiting members of his group and constructing the identity of priestking for himself, Cinque actually engages in dubious activities, running criminal errands for DD.

With the conflict between DD on one side and Ast and Asar on the other, Cinque, who has also been prevented by Ast from adding another helpless African-American lady to his harem of wife-slaves, comes in to play the dirty role of betraying Ast and Asar. His driver, Prince Wossen, another African American masquerading as an Ethiopian prince, is used by DD to plant incriminating items in Asar's apartment, to enable the execution of the latter under the pretence that he made an attempt to assassinate the Head of State and to undermine state security through espionage.

Obviously, while inviting a genuine spiritual and intellectual rediscovery of Africa by African Americans, Armah is critical of the roles played by some of these in their search for origin and identity, as well as of the criminality that attends their quest for power and survival. The authentic quest for a non-material African identity and commitment to Africa's redemption is presented in Ast's return and spiritual and intellectual quest in the ankh tradition. As she tells Asar, she is "trying to help create a future" (112). This commitment to the creation of "a future" in and for Africa is evident in Ast's role as Asar's companion, lover, and wife (analogizing the collaboration of god and goddess), in her involvement in the Companionship of the Ankh and in changing the colonial curricula at college, and finally in her interrogation and exposure of Cinque's and Wossen's criminal and disgraceful roles. In fact, the novel's storyline centres on Ast, so that it is against hers that other African Americans' quests for identity and futures in Africa are tested and judged.

It seems that Armah is not interested in the issue of the return of African Americans to Africa on a surface and emotional level. He appears to be more interested in motivations for return, and prefers a motivation that cannot be easily subdued—that, instead, subdues conspiracy as staged by (in)security agents, and subdues nostalgia and its symptoms, including the hunger for ketchup:

"Ketchup?" Ast asked.

"Hot dogs. Hamburger. Mayonnaise."

"That what this grand ceremony was about?"

"That, and nostalgia. He's one of a group of African-Americans come back into the black womb. Mother Africa. After a while they get homesick for America. Ketchup's just a symptom.

          (80)

What motivates the return to Africa of those like Cinque (Sink!) and Wossen (Worsen!) who insist on ketchup is more important to Armah than their big show about possessing royal African identities. Bailey and Ast are used as the authorial voices in exposing and interrogating the ‘hidden’ agenda:

"What's Jomo really doing in this country?"

Bailey sighed. "Razz Jomo Cinque Equiano has transposed his American Africult here. His line is he's offering the uprooted their lost roots. Turning Americans into Africans. Only his process has nothing to do with Africa. It's a funky mix of Christianity, Islam and Negritude. Take those three anti-African slave philosophies, mix them, and what d'you get? Something outasight weird. That's what he has to offer."

          (125)

Living between lives, cultures, spaces, and ideologies, Cinque has a destabilized and paradoxical identity. This is even signified in the multivoicedness of his name, "His Excellency Ras Jomo Cinque Equiano"—unlike Ast, who is simply "Ast," the name of an intelligent African divinity suggested by Nwt, her grandmother (7). Indeed, name-changing is one strategy used by some African Americans in negotiating their African identities, and is not necessarily wrong-headed. But in Cinque's case (just as in Wossen's) it is a way of putting on different masks, of cultivating ambiguity, which enables him to deceive and work out selfish objectives. His name-changes and additions may be seen as surface transformations of his identity, but his real dubious self remains constant. He uses these transformations or ‘deaths’ of surface identity for the sake of his duplicity. He prefers his dead selves or identities to be irrecoverable, as revealed in the following encounter he has with Ast:

"Sheldon Tubman," she said, amazed her voice was so quiet. In the shock of recognition the man reacted as if Ast had shot him. The reaction lasted a sly moment, then yielded to something rigidly controlled. He shook his head in a slow, studied, dramatic movement meant to deny he was the one Ast had named.

"Sheldon Tubman," Ast called him again.

The man continued shaking his head. Then he said:

"My sister, why keep calling up the dead?"

Immediately the words were echoed by the three women:

"Yes, sister, why keep calling up the dead … the dead … the dead?"

"Who died?" Ast asked.

"Sheldon Tubman," the man in gold said. "That's who died."

"When?"

"Long ago."

Ast smiled. "But I can see you, Sheldon Tubman."

The man shouted: "I am not Sheldon Tubman!"

Under the anger Ast also heard the anguish of a soul in pain.

The explosion seemed to ease the anger. The golden man's tone grew calmer. "Hear me, sister, hear me well. This is not Sheldon Tubman."

          (85-86)

Indeed, quite ironically, apart from being morally dead, Cinque died a long time ago in the ancestor (Apo) whose history of enslavement he seeks to reconstruct to legitimize his claims to having royal blood, and whose life of duplicity he re-lives without knowing it. A traitor who had been subverting the efforts of members of the ankh cult fighting slave trade and oppression, Apo had submitted himself to white slave merchants to be taken to America, in order to escape being punished for his crime. He eventually found himself in slave chains and was shipped to America, becoming the victim of his own machinations.

Apo (in his second life as Cinque/Sheldon Tubman) continues to play this role of traitor, as shown in the diagram below:

First life

Apo

1st betrayal: of the Ankh in the ‘old’ slave trade Setting: (pre)colonial Africa

Second life

Ras Jomo Cinque Equiano Sheldon Tubman

2nd betrayal: of the blacks in America

3rd betrayal: of African-Americans and of the Companionship Setting: (post)colonial Africa

The second and the third betrayals are actually a playback of the first. And while Cinque would not want his ‘dead’ identity to be called up, he still wants to use the history that goes along with Apo, to reinvent it, so as to create a grand but oppressive future for himself, only to abandon the project when the grand narrative turns out to be one of debasement and shame. Obviously, he is caught in the paradox of searching for an identity which he cannot accept when he eventually finds it.

Although Armah maintains the posture of anti-racist racism in his fiction generally, he nevertheless insists on our realizing that "the initiative for the slave trade came from Africans themselves," such a realization being very important for "a realistic appraisal of the African past and the future of Africa."²⁰ An archaeology of identity that cannot accept the facts when they are found is dubious indeed. The form of history and identity that Cinque is searching for is the one that gestures towards heroism, but at the same time cultivates what unmakes heroism. It is the kind of search for origin that Michel Foucault deplores, preferring a Nietzschean genealogy that recognizes the lower states of being and the fact that traditional history, as a means of recuperating an authentic past, is pretentious and is shot through with paradoxes—not high, but low; not sacred but profane.

In Cinque's driver, Wossen, the politics of name-changing and identity-construction is even more disturbingly demonstrated. First "Earl Johnson," then "Prince Wossen" ("the Ethiopian," or simply "the Ethiopian Prince"), and much later "Rodney Jones," he wears several masks, reminding one of Michel Foucault's idea of the parodic mode of history, which "offers the modern European a number of masks or alternate identities, which serve to hide his own confusion and anonymity."²¹ Wossen is more of a chameleon, each transformation corresponding to the deception and damage he could do as one manipulating his inbetweens. Such deceptive and harmful use of change of identity is seen in his role in the betrayal of Ast and Asar, whom he had deceived into allowing him to stay in the latter's apartment before travelling back to America:

"So you didn't go back to America after all," Ast said.

"Nat yet," Wossen answered. "Gat lotsa time."

"What of the suitcase you planted in Asar's apartment, Prince Wossen?"

"First place, Sis," Wossen said, "I aint no Wossen. Name's Jones. Rodney Jones. Good black American name. You c'see it on my new passport if you want, plain as life. Sister, you like digging up dead folks. Better stop. T'aint healthy.

"What's the matter?" SSS asked.

"Sister here calling me Wossen. Prince Wossen, no less." He laughed. "Sister's got imagination." He laughed louder.

          (95-96)

Names given to the characters, especially the African Americans, are particularly related to their conditions and roles in the novels, confirming Niyi Osundare's poetic assertion:

names serve as the door to the house of experience, a guide to hidden meanings in the shadowy nooks of time and place. Names tell stories, liberate or imprison; they may also serve as self-fulfilling prophecies. Names commit; which is why the Yoruba say that it is only mad people who do not mind the names they are called, or who refuse to see the difference between the names they choose to bear and the ones the world prefers to call them by.²²

But, indeed, some mad people do mind the names they are called, and would fight anybody who tries to joke with their names. For Armah, the stylistic-semiotic choice is to give characters like Cinque and Wossen names which seem, on their own, to hang the dog, as Osundare further puts it playfully. Anyidoho, who has done a proper cultural study of Armah's earlier works, also states that "with Armah's central characters, names begin to take on special significance beyond the expression of identity. They lead us into the very centre of the character's being, his fundamental conception of the self as a basis for action or inaction,"²³ which is what we find clearly expressed in Cinque's and Wossen's name-changing practices. Instability of their choices and uses of names relates to their unreliability and duplicity; the diversity of the stories told by them signifies the tension in the self of the bearer; whereas in the case of Ast, she is always the "African" Ast, stable and reliable, with no need for name-changing, with no need to dig for her royal origin, because she already knows that she has it.

The tension in personal identity in the novel relates to that of social identity. The African-American characters indeed face a problem of integration within the African society they have relocated to. Only Ast barely manages to achieve this integration, and this is because of the assistance of Asar, coupled with her own personal decision to endure, which is based on her vision that she is returning to where she belongs, "to help create a future" (112), instead of helping to destroy such a future (like Cinque and Wossen). Probably because of the perception of the implications (for the future of the society) of the activities of people like Cinque and Wossen, the citizens who are committed to creating a liveable future, especially members of the Companionship of the Ankh, appear to hold returning African Americans in great suspicion. Even Asar at first is not very sure about Ast's motives for returning, and expresses his objection to the manner in which African Americans (like Cinque) search for origins. Also Tete, the female oral historian and sage, is initially suspicious of Ast's interest in her past as a commodity or treasure to be dug up and exported to America. Obviously, there is a silent hostility among these ordinary people in the society against African Americans who collaborate with internal and external forces of exploitation and oppression, and who do not see themselves as insiders or commit themselves, as Ast is doing, to the task of undermining oppression and the ‘new’ slavery. At a moment of deep spiritual insight and communion at Tete's house, Ast hands herself over completely:

"I asked about the companionship of the ankh, the ancient, the new, the connection," Ast said. Still no answer. "Or is the choice of the symbol accidental?" She did not stop her gaze from wandering upward. Still that silence. "Whoever you are," she said, speaking neither to Asar nor to Tete but in the direction of the ankh, "I have sought you and found you. Here I am. I want to work with you. To live with you."

          (271)

Unlike Cinque, who is interested in discovering a past that would enable him to create a future in which the returning African American is betrayed to another slavery, Ast's commitment is to the revival of Africa's spiritual and intellectual traditions as means of liberating Africa, and so she easily negotiates and finds space in the underground group, the Companionship. In her, Armah idealizes the type of African-American group that deserves welcome. Conversely, Cinque represents the unwelcome and undesirable group, since his commitment is to restore slave-holding in another form in Africa, even paradoxically, using fellow African Americans as victims. In other words, Armah seems to be alerting us to the danger of a second enslavement of African Americans by fellow African Americans who, like Cinque, have always been agents of enslavement, even in their past lives.

Related to the views of some African Americans interviewed (orally and via e-mail), Armah's representations of the African-American quest for identity and new future in Africa appears to suffer from reductionism: it appears to reduce the problems of integration faced by the homecomers to mere perceptions of the misdemeanours of undesirable elements like Cinque and Wossen. Of course, there could be some saints still left among continental Africans who would want to act as guardians of Africa's philosophical and spiritual values, and who might be fighting or resisting the homecomers acting as agents of oppression. But my study shows that the increasing alienation and marginalization of the African Americans who have relocated to Africa is not based on the undesirable-element theory, nor on the roles played by them in the countries where they have settled. It should be clear, rather, that some continental West Africans, especially educated ones, feel that the African Americans are "difficult to handle," or "hard to please." (Those of us who have been nurtured in contexts of dictatorship will always be inclined to handle people, as if they were mules!) Some of them think that these African Americans still nurse grievances against Africans on the continent, and against Africa, for what their ancestors experienced in terms of slavery in America.

On the other hand, there is resistance to the possibility of the emergence of a powerful and rich immigrant group from among the African Americans, who would in time dominate and control the continental Africans. A professor of history at the Université Nationale du Bénin, who, from his comments during a conversation in Ghana recently, appeared to be opposed to the return or repatriation of African Americans to Africa, very strongly emphasized the aspect of economic competition and its power implications.

However, the ‘voices’ of African-American homecomers who either granted us interviews or responded to the questionnaire we designed and distributed through e-mail quite eloquently reveal that there is growing prejudice against African Americans who have relocated to Africa, and that this prejudice is not at all connected with the roles they play in the social or political system. They reveal that they are denied access to social services, refused employment, and, of course, denied access to positions of authority. One of our respondents, Abena Safiya Fosua, who, along with Kwasi Issa Kena, has been living in Ghana's Ashanti region capital, Kumasi, for the past four years, says:

We are treated with contempt, regarded as strangers and heckled on the streets with the degrading epithets reserved for whites! We have not been accepted by the church that we work with here. In fact, they took several years to stop calling us by our previous names which someone dug up in a file. The whites among them receive far greater respect than we do.

In answer to the question, "How do you respond to the treatment you have been receiving?" she says: "We have finally begun to tell them how we feel about being misused. We have let them know it is a betrayal of our collective history." She also very frankly discloses that "We will be leaving in a few months and do not intend to attempt this again."

Another respondent, who wished to remain anonymous, reveals that she was also mistreated and that for a long time she "felt very hurt, angry and alienated," but that she has come to a better understanding now, particu- larly of the fact that African Americans and continental Africans do not inherently, by dint of colour or culture or history, share a bond—often an African-American misperception—but must work to build a relationship and to give it meaning."

Vanessa P. Williams (Togbo Si), who, like Ast in Osiris Rising, relocated to the Republic of Benin in search of spiritual and cultural self-fulfilment, to develop herself as a priestess of the water goddess in the area—she holds three Masters degrees from well-known American universities and is completing her PhD—also recounts her bitterness and frustration at not being offered any job, because, she says, "Getting a job here is based on either whom you know or whom you can bribe. Nepotism is the order of the day. As for me, I am an outsider and a foreigner … not to mention being a woman." In addition, the fact that she could speak neither French nor Fon, she says, makes matters worse, as if she could hear the society clearly telling her: "I cannot give you a job if my tonton does not have one. Your degrees mean nothing to me! You speak neither French nor Fon … you are not here!" Convinced that returning to Africa ought not be something based on theory or political motivations, she, like Armah's Ast, insists that her return is a call of the spirit:

My ancestors dwelled in this place. Just recently their name was revealed to me. […] The name is Agassou. I believe that I may be the first child, of Agassou, returning from the diaspora in over 400 years. So you see, Benin […] I am not a foreigner […] I belong here […] for I am your child returning home. And for that Benin should rejoice.

Judging from these African-American voices, whose return has been fictionalized by Armah, I would argue that their marginalization tends to intensify the frustrations arising from living on the hyphen, which the ‘return’ to the ‘roots’ was attempting precisely to resolve. If African-American homecomers are denied jobs, mistreated, or alienated, then it is no wonder that some of them settle for dubious acts like those carried out by Cinque and Wossen. It is also when they are marginalized that they begin to think of ways of getting back at the society, and start working for themselves only, rather than for anybody else's fictional future.

It thus appears that Armah's fictional exploration of the African-American quest for identity and a new future in Africa fails to tally with the real-life evidence that we have gathered. For the novelist, the ideal return is portrayed as being motivated by the wish to rediscover and re-use African spiritual and intellectual traditions for the liberation of the continent. On the other hand, the undesirable return is that which is motivated by the desire to create self-importance and heroism, and to restore slavery in a different guise. This form of return, for the novelist, is full of paradoxes, because it restores what it is escaping from, or what it claims to eradicate. However, by relating Armah's narrative to the narratives offered by other African-American returnees, we have found that prejudice and discrimination against those who have returned is not based on a perception of the subversion of spiritual/intellectual systems of liberation. On the contrary: these returning Africans often make serious efforts to restore African values and to fight for meaningful liberation—but they are either resisted or alienated. I would therefore argue that Armah's vision of desirable return is shot through with paradox, because of its infection by pessimism—a typical inclination on Armah's part. The destruction of Asar and the frustration Ast is made to suffer tend to cancel out any meaning otherwise inscribed into the return to rebuild Africa or to create a future for this continent. Ast will bring forth Asar's baby probably; but the baby would be fatherless.

Notes

1. Kofi Anyidoho, "Literature and African Identity: The Example of Ayi Kwei Armah," in Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah, ed. Derek Wright (Boulder CO: Three Continents, 1992): 42. Gareth Griffiths, "Structure and Image in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born," in Critical Perspectives, 84.

2. Anyidoho, "Literature and African Identity," 42.

3. "Literature and African Identity," 44-45.

4. Chidi Amuta, "Portraits of the Contemporary African Artist in Armah's Novels," in Critical Perspectives, 13.

5. Anyidoho, "Literature and African Identity," 42.

6. James Booth, "Why Are We So Blest? and the Limits of Metaphor," in Critical Perspectives, 228.

7. Booth, "The Limits of Metaphor," 240.

8. "The Limits of Metaphor," 238.

9. Joyce Johnson, "The Promethean ‘Factor’ in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments and Why Are We So Blest?" in Critical Perspectives, 212.

10. Johnson, "The Promethean ‘Factor’," 215; my emphasis.

11. Rosemary Colmer, "The Human and the Divine: Fragments and Why Are We So Blest?" in Critical Perspectives, 197.

12. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993): 407-408.

13. Robert Fraser, "The American Background in Why Are We So Blest?" in Critical Perspectives, 257.

14. Obododimma Oha, "The ‘Tree of Return’: Home, Exile, Memory, and the Visual Rhetoric of Reunion," Context: Journal of Social & Cultural Studies 3.2 (1999): 72-73.

15. Oha, "The ‘Tree of Return’," 74.

16. Ayi Kwei Armah, "Teaching Creative Writing," West Africa (20 May 1985): 994.

17. Anyidoho, "Literature and African Identity," 41.

18. Ayi Kwei Armah, Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Past, Present and Future (Popenguine: Per Ankh, 1995): 7. Further page references are in the main text.

19. Anyidoho, "Literature and African Identity," 37.

20. D. S. Izevbaye, "Ayi Kwei Armah and the ‘I’ of the Beholder," in Critical Perspectives, 28.

21. Michal Payne, Reading Knowledge: An Introduction to Barthes, Foucault and Althusser (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997): 25.

22. Niyi Osundare, African Literature and the Crisis of Poststructuralist Theorising (Ibadan: Option Book & Information Services, 1993): 3.

23. Anyidoho, "Literature and African Identity," 37.

Works Cited

Amuta, Chidi. "Portraits of the Contemporary African Artist in Armah's Novels," in Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah, ed. Wright, 13-21.

Anyidoho, Kofi. "Literature and African Identity: The Example of Ayi Kwei Armah," in Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah, ed. Wright, 34-47.

Armah, Ayi Kwei. Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Past, Present and Future (Popenguine: Per Ankh, 1995).

———. "Teaching Creative Writing," West Africa (20 May 1985).

———. Why Are We So Blest? (London: Heinemann, 1974).

Booth, James. "Why Are We So Blest? and the Limits of Metaphor," in Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah, ed. Wright, 227-41.

Colmer, Rosemary. "The Human and the Divine: Fragments and Why Are We So Blest?" in Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah, ed. Wright, 191-203.

Foucault, Michel. "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1997): 204-17.

Fraser, Robert. "The American Background in Why Are We So Blest?" in Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah, ed. Wright, 257-64.

Griffiths, Gareth. "Structure and Image in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born," in Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah, ed. Wright, 75-91.

Izevbaye, D. S. "Ayi Kwei Armah and the ‘I’ of the Beholder," in Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah, ed. Wright, 22-33.

Johnson, Joyce. "The Promethean ‘Factor’ in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments and Why Are We So Blest?" in Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah, ed. Wright, 204-16.

Oha, Obododimma. "The ‘Tree of Return’: Home, Exile, Memory, and the Visual Rhetoric of Reunion," CONTEXT: Journal of Social & Cultural Studies 3.2 (1999): 61-87.

Osundare, Niyi. African Literature and the Crisis of Poststructuralist Theorising (Ibadan: Option Book & Information Services, 1993).

Payne, Michael. Reading Knowledge: An Introduction to Barthes, Foucault and Althusser (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993).

Wright, Derek, ed. Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah (Boulder CO: Three Continents, 1992).

FURTHER READING

Criticism

Agho, Jude A. "Ayi Kwei Armah's Osiris Rising: New Wine in an Old Wine Skin." Ariel 33, no. 2 (April 2002): 57-70.

Discusses Osiris Rising within the context of Armah's literary career and elucidates the central themes of the novel.

Killam, Douglas. "Ayi Kwei Armah: The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born (1968)." In Literature of Africa, pp. 47-53. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004.

Provides a thematic and stylistic overview of The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born.

Lazarus, Neil. "The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born: Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will." In Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction, pp. 46-79. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

Explores the dichotomy between the "affirmative vision and degraded reality" in The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born and argues that 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 transformation."

Lutz, John. "Pessimism, Autonomy, and Commodity Fetishism in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born." Research in African Literatures 34, no. 2 (summer 2003): 94-111.

Provides a Marxist interpretation of The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born, arguing that if the world portrayed in the novel "can be characterized by the abject failure of its political leadership to collectively imagine and implement a true socialist community, it must also be understood as a society imprisoned in a hopeless and repetitive dialectic between an all-encompassing desire for material possessions and a pervasive condition of psychological and physical impoverishment."

Wodajo, Tsegaye. "Introduction." In Hope in the Midst of Despair: A Novelist's Cures for Africa, pp. 1-20. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2004.

Traces the development of the West African novel in English and examines the critical reaction to Armah's novels.

Additional coverage of Armah's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale: African Writers; Black Literature Criticism, Ed. 1; Black Writers, Ed. 1; British Writers Supplement, Vol. 10; Concise Dictionary of World Literary Biography, Vol. 3; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 61-64; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 21, 64; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 5, 33, 136; Contemporary Novelists, Ed. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 117; DISCovering Authors Modules: Multicultural Writers, Poets; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Ed. 1; and World Literature and Its Times, Ed. 2.