Ways of Dying
Ways of Dying
by
Zakes Mda
Ways of Dying covers only a few days, from Christmas through New Year’s Eve, but these mark a considerable change in the life of the central character, Toloki. He meets and winds up moving in with a childhood friend from his hometown, Noria, as both come to terms with much of the past and find in each other a person that perhaps can complete their respective lives.
The world they inhabit, in a South Africa just beginning the post-apartheid transition, is far from idyllic. As Toloki says:
’Death lives with us everyday. Indeed our ways of dying are our ways of living. or should I say our ways of living are our ways of dying ?’
With death omnipresent Toloki has chosen to deal with it head-on: he has become a Professional Mourner, the first of his kind. He already has something of a reputation, and people hire him to come to the funerals of their relatives. In his dapper mourning outfit he makes quite an impression. Like another standard feature of funerals — the Nurse, someone who describes the death of the deceased –, Toloki thinks he’s onto something. For now he still accepts whatever people are willing to give, but eventually he hopes to set fixed rates for providing this professional service.
The book opens at the funeral of Noria’s son, and Toloki eventually re-connects with this woman he knew from his village. Much of the book revisits the past, something both of them have left behind but not completely escaped from. Noria was a bewitching child, and it was especially Toloki’s dad, Jwara, who was under her spell: when she sang for him he was inspired, and created fantastic small figures. He would bribe and praise her, but as she grew older she found that she could get more interesting rewards from men closer to her own age. Without her, Jwara was sullen and could not create — and he took much of his frustration out on his ugly son, Toloki.
Toloki eventually ran away from home, finding some success along the way and then in the city. By now, however, he was reduced to being homeless, keeping his belongings in a cart by the beach. It was a lifestyle that suited him: he wasn’t particularly ambitious and he got by well enough.
Noria married badly and had a child who died horribly, as would the next one. Her circumstances by now are also poor — “I have been chewed, Toloki. Chewed, and then spewed”, she explains –, but she had become a generous soul, and made do with her lot.
Death is all around, and it is a big part of the book. Senseless violence touches almost everyone, and some of it is truly shocking. Yet, helped by the fact that Toloki and Noria are almost relentlessly optimistic, the book is also surprisingly upbeat. Life is not easy, heart-breaking tragedy common, but still the two of them are able to look forward and find some joy in small things. Their generosity of spirit, and willingness to allow imagination to trump reality (as when they decorate the walls of Noria’s new shack, and practically move within the images there) is enough to allow them deal with the horrors all around them.
Both Toloki and Noria are broken people, but instead of going entirely to pieces they have found ways to channel their despair. Toloki’s mourning for strangers — praised as adding: “an aura of sorrow and dignity that we last saw in the olden days when people knew how to mourn their dead” — is, of course, also a mourning for all that he has lost and never had, and for a whole society in trouble.
Their circumstances, and that of the whole nation, are extremely difficult, but Mda suggests there is hope for it all. The message may be too simplistic: neither Toloki nor Noria are entirely believable characters, but the stories are well-told and woven together, making for a powerful and appealing novel. Mda’s light touch keeps the death-horrors from overwhelming the book — though occasionally death is also kept almost too much at a distance. The central death — that of Noria’s boy, buried at the funeral where Toloki meets her — is, when finally explained, absolutely devastating, and the reactions not entirely convincing. This is the book’s biggest failing: that it confronts the horrors only obliquely, and that Mda is not willing to allow his characters to react fully to them.
Ways of Dying is a very good book: powerful, entertaining, and well-written. It is full of good stories and scenes, and Mda manages to present his material without sensationalizing it, which is far more difficult than it looks. Well worthwhile.
Review Consensus:
Generally favourable, though find it a bit simple
From the Reviews:
- “Mr Mda adds a touch of magic to the grim realism more common in accounts of black South African life.” - The Economist
- “Mda finally seems to be saying that if violence is in this particular people, then so is the answer and solution to violence, in the form of the people’s gods and ancestors. The spirits will deliver.” - Norman Rush, The New York Review of Books
- “(A) rollicking, at times whimsical tour through the dying days of apartheid as witnessed by the Professional Mourner, Toloki, who wanders from township funeral to township funeral with the hapless wonder of a Chaplinesque loner. Despite its lighthearted touches, though, as the title suggests, Mda’s story is still rooted in the endemic violence that has long stained South Africa” - Anderson Tepper, The Village Voice
- “Ways of Dying is a politically brave work, one which uncompromisingly suggests that the new leadership about to assume power has elements that are elitist and corrupt (…..) Ways of Dying is saved from its whiff of didactic one-dimensionality by the eccentric quirks of its main character. (….) Ways of Dying is not an adult novel and will frustrate the English adult reader. However, very few works address the sophisticated needs of a young adult to be challenged and captivated by issues that are appropriate to a teenager but in a language accessible to a second-language user. Ways of Dying does just this.” - Brenda Cooper, World Literature Today
Bound to Violence
Bound to Violence
by
Yambo Ouologuem
From the Reviews:
- “Bound to Violence, a first novel, is a great one (…..) It deserves many readings, since mistaken views are apt to come out of the first. (…) Ouologuem writes of surviving all oppression and, perhaps, even thriving on it. His novel is something of a skyscraper. It has multi-levels, a variety of actions, characters and scenes, all neatly confined to the French-touched African experience.” - John A. Williams, The New York Times Book Review
- “Bound to Violence (…) conveys, through Ralph Manheim’s translation, a startling energy of language. (…) The intelligence expressed by the book seems all too withering, all too Gallic.” - John Updike, The New Yorker
The complete review’s Review:
There was a lot of fuss about Le Devoir de violence in the years after it was first published. It won a prestigious French literary prize and was widely (and generally positively) reviewed and well received. It was rendered into English by heavyweight translator Ralph Manheim and received a great deal of media attention. The book was widely reviewed in the US and UK and Ouologuem was interviewed and written about in many prominent publications. The author even appeared on the Today show, NBC’s popular morning news-entertainment programme. (Times sure have changed: when was the last time a foreign author of literary fiction appeared on any American news programme ?)
To add to the excitement came a flurry of accusations of plagiarism. Bound to Violence clearly incorporated passages from Graham Greene’s It’s a Battlefield, André Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just, and works by Guy de Maupassant. Beside the legal issues these appropriations raised they also caused a media-backlash.
As recently as 1990 Thomas Hale could speak of “the most controversial novel ever written by an African writer” (in his book Scribe, Griot, and Novelist, and the excerpt reprinted in Yambo Ouologuem: Postcolonial Writer, Islamic Militant, ed. Christopher Wise (see our review)). Perhaps so, but who really remembers one-hit wonder Ouologuem nowadays ? Bound to Violence was still listed in Heinemann’s 2000 catalogue; now it appears to be out of print. The French original is also unavailable; it is unclear whether it has been available at all since the early 1970s. (In a 1983 article, also reprinted in Yambo Ouologuem: Postcolonial Writer, Islamic Militant, Christopher Miller states that: “To this day the French public is enjoined from buying the novel.”)
Bound to Violence is certainly an interesting and even exciting novel. The plagiarism complicates matters — a great deal, actually — but there’s no doubt that Ouologuem wrought (one way or another) something quite remarkable.
The novel focusses on the fictitious African country of Nakem. Ouologuem recounts its history, from grand empire to French colony and the truncated modern African Republic of Nakem-Ziuko. The ruling dynasty of Saifs dominates the history of the land, from ancient times to modern.
Bound to Violence has four parts. The first is a compressed history of the first several hundred years of the Nakem Empire, starting around the year 1200. It is a brutal, violent, oppressive, corrupt country. Slavery is widespread: “a hundred million of the damned — so moan the troubadours of Nakem when the evening vomits forth its starry diamonds — were carried away.” There’s even cannibalism: “one of the darkest features of that spectral Africa over which hung the malefic shadow of Saif al-Haram.”
The Arabs had conquered the land (settling over it “like a she-dog baring her white fangs in raucous laughter”), and the common (black) man — the négraille, as Ouologuem calls it, translated here as “niggertrash” — suffers for it. Religion — Islam — is abused in order to consolidate and keep power. It “became a means of action, a political weapon.”
The brief second part sees the coming of the Whites at the close of the 19th century. The empire is “pacified” and divvied up by the Europeans, with the French controlling what remains of Nakem. There is the hope that life will improve:
Saved from slavery, the niggertrash welcomed the white man with joy, hoping he would make them forget the mighty Saif’s meticulously organized cruelty.
Each side uses the niggertrash to their own ends. The Saif remains influential and powerful even under the French administration; the subjugated commoners still have little chance of tolerable lives.
The bulk of the book is taken up by the third section, The Night of the Giants, set in the first half of the twentieth century. There are still all manner of horrific incidents as the Saif indiscriminately wields what power he has left. From female infibulation to the Saif’s curious assassination technique (using trained asps) there is a lot of ugly violence here.
Beside the Saif the stories of two other figures are particularly important in this section. One is Fritz Shrobenius, transparently based on German archaeologist and anthropologist Leo Frobenius. He comes to learn about Nakem — and to buy relics, masks, and other cultural artifacts. The Saif — uninterested in history — makes up stories and sells whatever cultural legacy can be procured. More — tons — is donated by the niggertrash “to the acolytes of ‘Shrobeniusology’ “. Later, after Shrobenius, this “salesman and manufacturer of ideology”, has popularized African art in Europe many others come to purchase pieces. Since no originals are left, Saif “had slapdash copies buried by the hundredweight” and then sold at exorbitant prices.
Another significant figure is Raymond-Spartacus Kassoumi, a child of poverty who takes advantage of the schooling offered by the French and achieves academic success that allows him to pursue his studies in France. He meets both success and failure in France, experiencing highs and lows. Beside his varied academic experiences he also is reduced to becoming the lover of a wealthy Frenchman and encounters his sister in a bordello — finding that the long reach of Saif is practically inescapable. Raymond eventually returns to Nakem, in what he thinks is triumph, only to find that the ruling Saif is again manipulating him (and his country).
The brief concluding section, Dawn, offers some hope. Abbé Henry,
the hunchback priest obsessed by the tragedy of the Blacks, half crazed with the Christian duty of love, as humbly beautiful as the despair of a Christian soul
is now a bishop. The last section consists almost entirely of a dialogue between Henry and Saif, both philosophical discourse and power struggle. Saif — this Saif — appears vanquished, but Ouologuem reminds the reader:
one cannot help recalling that Saif, mourned three million times, is forever reborn to history beneath the hot ashes of more than thirty African republics.
Bound to Violence is an odd book, careening wildly about. Hundreds of years of history are compressed into a few pages, while brief episodes — Raymond’s homosexual corruption, various misdeeds by any number of the Saifs, the training of the asps, the visit from Shrobenius — are more languorously drawn out. The shifts are radical and unexpected. From broad satire (the Shrobenius episode) to inconceivable violence (throughout) to isolated glimpses of humanity, Ouologuem throws it all in.
It is a furious flurry of a novel. Scenes are off-puttingly direct and touchingly circumspect. The language veers between carefully controlled and completely overblown. Generally, Ouologuem’s style works — but there is some horrible writing here too: “the caressing sun nibbled at her insolent, swollen breasts”, for example. Indeed, sex, especially, is problematic throughout:
Her mouth was still hungry for this man’s pink, plump mollusk, and the tongue in her mouth itched to suck at the pearl of sumptuous orient that flowed, foaming as though regretfully, from the stem ….
(Ouologuem also published a book of pornographic short stories, Les Milles et une bibles du sexe, under the pseudonym of Utto Rodolph in 1969. We haven’t ever seen a copy, and can only dream about how bad it must be.)
Ouologuem’s novel is also controversial because of its approach to Africa. There is almost no romanticizing here, and it is a complete counter to Senghorian “négritude” — as Ouologuem intended it to be. The portrayal of native blacks as victims not only of the Western colonial powers, but also of the Arabs (and, significantly, the religion of the Arabs, Islam) was also a significant step. The portrayal of blacks sold by each other was also an uncommon one. Ouologuem’s tone, at times, is one of contempt for the victims, doomed, he suggests, to remain as such forever.
The reach of history is one of the more impressive aspects of the novel. While only a relatively small portion of the novel is devoted to the time from 1200 to the 19th century, there is no romanticizing of the pre-European past. The niggertrash was subjugated long before then.
Little is holy to Ouologuem, and it is this sweeping all-out assault that makes the novel a success. Relentlessly, until the very end, Ouologuem portrays a sick society and a people that can not help themselves. The unscrupulous powers that be are also largely untouchable. It is not a book that will please many people, but that makes it no less effective or impressive.
And the plagiarism ? The plagiarism complicates matters. The styles vary greatly throughout the novel, and once one knows that pieces have been borrowed it is difficult not to see the whole as a grand collage of material appropriated elsewhere. This is unfair to Ouologuem: the book is also bursting with originality. Still, if, as Christopher Miller suggests (in Trait d’Union, reprinted in Yambo Ouologuem: Postcolonial Writer, Islamic Militant), “hardly a page of Le Devoir goes by without incorporating a passing reference to or an outright theft from some precursor”, then this weighs quite heavily on the text.
The story of the plagiarisms remains unclear. In a 1998 piece reprinted in Yambo Ouologuem: Postcolonial Writer, Islamic Militant, Christopher Wise repeats Ouologuem’s claims that the French publisher removed the quotation marks around the passages in question, as well as stating that “the novel had been translated into English without his consent.” Wise also states that Ouologuem claimed “Bound to Violence had been published before he’d even signed a contract.”
The various competing claims remain murky. As to the missing quotation marks: it is unclear what purpose they might have served even if they ever existed. Without concomitant attribution it doesn’t really make that much of a difference — and once one starts acknowledging the borrowings the text gets sidetracked in that tangle.
Do the plagiarisms make a difference ? Aside from the fact that it is just bad form to steal what others have written (and that it is also, in many cases, against the law), it would not appear to add as much to the text as it distracts from it. Among the greatest weaknesses of the novel are aspects of its uneven collage-like quality, which is more pronounced in some places than others. Weaving in passages from other works no doubt accentuates this fault — if it isn’t, in fact, the outright cause.
Of course, there are those that say Ouologuem plagiarized with a very real purpose. Our favourite theory (care of Christopher Miller): that the novel is, in fact, “an assault on European assumptions about writing and creativity.” If so, he certainly paid a high price for it.
Bound to Violence is many things, including a literary-historical curiosity. It is a wildly uneven book, but still very worthwhile. And ultimately it is more interesting as a piece of literature than for the controversies surrounding it (especially the plagiarism controversy — though it too raises valid and important questions that continue to appear to be unanswered).
Worth seeking out.
Two Thousand Seasons
“(H)is Two Thousand Seasons — in which he is trying to re-create the history of Africa — I find unacceptable on the basis of fact, and on the basis of art. The work is ponderous and heavy and wooden, almost embarrassing in its heaviness. It doesn’t have the air of epic authenticity which Ouologuem achieves in his Bound to Violence (…..) (I)t is like a lump of concrete sitting in place.” - Chinua Achebe, in an interview with J.O.J.Nwachukwu-Agbada, Massachusetts Review 28 (1987)
The two thousand seasons of the title of Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel represent the enormous arc of time of African history covered in it. “We are not a people of yesterday”, begins the first chapter, but the book does cover the long and awful yesteryears that were traversed and endured. The book hopes to put it behind: “Soon we shall end this remembrance,” Armah writes near the close of the novel, “the sound of it.” And the hope is for the present and especially the future.
Armah’s novel is a pan-African epic. In many ways it is a summing up of the African experience for the past two thousand seasons. Armah reduces it effectively to “a thousand seasons wasted wandering amazed along alien roads, another thousand spent finding paths to the living way.”
Two Thousand Seasons is a novel of seeking, of loss and redemption. He warns: “Woe the race, too generous in the giving of itself, that finds a highway not of regeneration but a highway to its own extinction.” He traces the paths taken: the many false ones, and the true ones.
The place of origin, the home, is an unspecified African country, standing for all of (sub-Saharan) Africa. The story truly begins with the coming of the predators who bring ruin. First it is the the Arabs, then the Europeans — “whites” all . And always there are the weak and complicit locals, showing from the first a “fantastic quality (…): fidelity to those who spat on them”, helping to bring ruin from within.
The first predators to appear come as beggars. Their pitiful appearance — hardly to be taken seriously — is misleading. They are cunning and patient. They use their religion to inspire and hold sway over the weak, turning them against their fellow Africans. The predators reduce them “to beasts” by starving their minds with their foreign religion and “indulging their crassest physical wants.” These beasts — the perfidious askaris, who will play an important role in keeping the locals subjugated throughout the thousands of seasons — are pathetic, but though the others hold them in contempt (calling them “white desert-men’s dogs”) they become the willing and often very effective tools of the predators.
Time and again Armah shows the African to have been party to his own culture’s demise, willing to deal with the (white) devil and selling out (often literally) his fellow man.
The “white man from the desert” patiently makes inroads, returning stronger and wiser each time. The locals do not know how to protect themselves:
This time again the predators came with force — to break our bodies. This time they came with guile also — a religion to smash the feeblest minds among us, then turn them into tools against us all. The white men from the desert had made a discovery precious to predators and destroyers: the capture of the mind and the body both is a slavery far more lasting, far more secure than the conquest of bodies alone.
There are revolts — of great ferocity. The gluttony of the predators is their own undoing — yet it is never enough that is undone. Success is limited, the next wave of predators seemingly always at the ready. The locals never seem the wiser for what happened.
The locals flee, “our hope being that new places, new circumstances, might bring us back to reciprocity, might bring us closer to our way, the way.” But it is apparently only “the way” of a few.
Leadership is a problem: the rulers are the worst of the lot. Armah has nothing but contempt for the powers that were: “The quietest king, the gentlest leader of the mystified, is criminal beyond the exercise of any comparison.” This certainly holds for his prime example, the greedy fool Koranche.
The whites who come after the Arabs are not merely predators but destroyers — the armed colonial European powers. And Armah is certain: “There is nothing white men will not do to satisfy their greed” — or: “Monstrous is the greed of the white destroyers, infinite their avarice.” Fortunately for them then, there is little Koranche and his flatterers won’t do to satisfy their greed either:
Among the white destroyers there was no respect for anything we could say. They had come determined to see nothing, to listen to no one, bent solely on the satisfaction of their greed, of which we had ample news. But the king was infatuated with the white destroyers and would not heed the people’s will, as quick in its expression as it was clear: to tell the white men to go.
Among the destroyers are missionaries, too, with a different poisonous religion. It seems too simple, too ridiculous — and yet it too will subvert the ancient society from within.
Wise Isanusi warns time and again of the dangers, but he is not heard or, at first, understood. Later, after they have been sold into slavery by their king and escaped “his words came back an echo to what we had lived to know.”. Finally, they are determined not to look into the past, or “return to homes blasted with triumphant whiteness.” They would “seek the necessary beginning to destruction’s destruction.”
Isanusi sees how long the road ahead is, warning that this generation “would not outlive the white blight”, that only the groundwork could be laid, the beginnings undertaken. Despite “the treachery of chiefs and leaders, of the greed of parasites that had pushed us so far into the whiteness of death” there is some hope for the future — but not an immediate one.
Two Thousand Seasons is a story of triumphs of the spirit and the will, despite unspeakable horrors, oppression, and betrayals. Enslaved, there is a daring escape from the ship — and then the rescue of others. The white predators are beaten at their own games, their own arms stolen from them and then turned against them. Treachery does not stop, but there are successes, small movements along the right way.
Much of this is dramatically related, though some of the chronicle is overly simple and overly stark. It is a very broad canvas Armah is painting: two thousand seasons, and almost all of Africa’s history of that time reduced to these two hundred pages. It is a stirring, angry, often horrifying, often touching read.
But ultimately it is too simplistic. The valiant triumphs that are recounted don’t reflect the actual sad history of the continent. The white predators and destroyers are more complex creatures than Armah is here willing to acknowledge.
Much that he relates — the weakness of the native leaders, the perverting effect of Islam and Christianity, the greed of the whites (and blacks alike) — is convincing. But there was more complexity at work there, and most of it Armah glosses over. Worse yet, “the way”, the grand, promised way to salvation is naïve and unrealistic. Noble, yes, but not a path likely to be taken. Idealism is all well and good, but it should also convince — and here, unfortunately, it doesn’t.
Armah’s anger is well-placed, and often well (if too vigorously and subjectively) expressed. His idealism, his solution, is something that readers want to embrace, but truth and fact stand in the way. The history of the continent in the seasons since he has finished the novel sadly show the many wrong paths that continue to be taken. Armah’s voice is not a lone one, but in Africa actions often speak louder than words and for the past three decades actions have only reinforced the ugly picture of the continuation of the destructive past he painted.
Narrative Situation And Ideology…
Narrative situation and ideology in five novels of Ayi Kwei Armah
Garry Gillard
The novels of Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah provide an opportunity to study a confrontation between European and African patterns of thought. [1] This confrontation (and its effects: the original confusion and disillusionment, followed by fragmentation and disintegration and then by compromise and consolidation) is a principal thematic concern running through the novels. This will be exposed here by a consideration of their formal features, especially narrative situation and characterisation; and in the former analysis depending on the method introduced by Stanzel, [2] although there is also a debt to Genette. [3] These features show a progression from the use of indistinct personae and a shifting point of view, through clear but fragmented narrative situations, to a clearly defined and highly controlled strategy, where, although individual personae are submerged in the collective, the point of view is remarkably unified and maintained, and then finally to a narrative situation that is self-reflexive. [4]
Franz Stanzel uses a simple analysis based in three main terms, only two of which will be required in this paper: ‘authorial’ and ‘figural’. They refer to these fundamental situations: one in which the experience of the narrative proceeds from a point of view external to the action, and the other where the point of view is that of one of the actors, although narrated in the third person. (The third of Stanzel’s categories is the first-person narrative situation.) While such a simple schema is capable of a high degree of elaboration, as in Genette, it continues to be adequate for analyses such as the one carried out here.
‘Ideology’ in this paper refers to the relationship between the presented world of narratives and their process of presentation. The material base of the ideology of a novel is its rhetoric and stylistics: its unique poetics; its superstructure is the architecture of belief systems represented in the work. ‘The imaginary is not just in ideology (it is in relations) and ideology is not just reducible to the imaginary (it is that real instance in which the imaginary is realized). What is held in ideology, what it forms, is the unity of the real relations and the imaginary relations between men and women and the real conditions of their existence.’ [5] And: ‘ideology is a production of representations.’ [6]
In The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, a worldview that has features of breakdown and confusion pervades the amorphous characterisation and ambivalent narrative situation, particularly with regard to the main character and to the lack of distinction between him and the external narrative voice. One of the aspects of the characterisation of ‘the man’, who never achieves the distinctiveness of an individual name, is the character of his thought. The contrast between his manner of thinking with that of the Teacher shows up his inability to think in abstract terms or to formulate any alternatives to his mode of being. His intuitive way of perceiving and understanding the world is revealed in his mental conflicts which are expressed in terms of symbols that have no specific referents. The most outstanding of such symbols is ‘the gleam’, which proceeds initially from the mans perception of the Atlantic Caprice, which is an ‘insulting’ gleaming white. (p.12) Immediately it is established as an image, however, the gleam frees itself to become a symbol associated with a number of manifestations of such ideas as success, speed, wealth, and power. These ideas are rarely formulated explicitly as such, and what the reader is permitted to know of the character’s consciousness is almost always expressed in terms of visual images. One outstanding example may be taken from the end of the narrative. It is especially apt in being a verbal idea which is presented to the mans mind: the legend on the back of the bus which becomes the title of the novel: ‘… the man was unable to shake off the imprint of the printed word.’ But they do not remain stable, and begin to metamorphose: ‘In his mind he could see them flowing up down and round again.’ And finally they change into visual and aural phenomena: ‘After a while the image itself of the flower in the middle disappeared, to be replaced by a single, melodious note.’ (p.215) There could be no clearer example of the inability of the man to hold onto and deal with ideas at an abstract level.
A similar lack of definition may be seen in the sphere of the mans actions, the most significant being ones that he does not in fact perform. He moves in the same circles day after day without the possibility of change, despite the fact that he has many opportunities to be aware of the meaninglessness of this existence, such as that provided by the agonised cry of the telegraph operator: ‘Why do we agree to go on like this?’ (p.30) What he does not do is take bribes, like the one offered by the timber contractor, or become successful, like Koomson. So although he may be seen as a hero as regards moral integrity, this is achieved only by the use of negative criteria, of the kind created by Camus with his anti-hero Meursault in L’Étranger. When the man helps Koomson to escape, for example, it seems to be merely because he does not see why he should not.
The man’s inability to bring to full consciousness and therefore act upon his inchoate understanding of a fuller and more authentic mode of existence is emphasised in the novel’s presentational process by the gap between the levels of awareness of the naive protagonist and of the central consciousness of the work. Although the narrative situation is largely figural, it is also often authorial, in passages that provide a much broader context for the action of the novel than any of which the man is capable of being aware. While the reader is aware, through the presence of a narrative voice, of a central consciousness organising the narrative, giving it form and expression, he or she is at the same time involved in the experience of the man who is only dimly aware of the fuller implications of his lifestyle. The irony created in this way underlines the mans naivety and helplessness in the face of his problems. A fuller consciousness is only possible in the province of the narrator, and is therefore part of the presentational process, but is also exemplified in the presented world by the presence of the Teacher. He is the character who stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from the successful ones like Koomson, and so might have embodied the ideals of purity and moral integrity; but ironically he is also the character who has become most completely withdrawn from life. He seems to be present in the narrative because of the need to have a character capable of expressing ideas essential to the work, although the main character is incapable of comprehending them completely. This may be seen as another division and intentional complexity in the work’s ideology.
However, the most convincing example of the basic diffuseness at the ideological level is the confusion between the the consciousnesses of the man, the Teacher, and the narrator. Throughout the narrative there are moments of ambivalence in the narrative situation when the point of view moves fluidly between narrator and protagonist. This is the technical outcome of an ideological attitude involving a high degree of tolerance of diffuseness and uncertainty.
Narrative ambivalence is most noticeable in the important Chapter Six where the situation is actually divided between two personae, one of the strands being narrated in the first person and the other in the third. It is possible to make an interpretive decision on the basis of certain indications to the effect that the first person sections represent the speech of the Teacher to the man while the intercalated third person sections represent the reaction of the latter as seen partly from inside his viewpoint and partly authorially. However such a decision can only be made after close examination of textual signals, such as ‘I know it is like a lie for me to talk like this…’ (p.90) indicating speech on the one hand, while others indicate a listener: ‘The listening mind is disturbed by memories from the past.’ (p.78); ‘The listener has heard. He is not so far in the cave that he cannot hear what is said. (p.100) The indeterminacy of these passages forces the reader to attend closely to the text—which will however remain schematic.
This metonymic mode of representation (’the listener’, ‘the listening mind’), referring to characters by activity, anticipates and perhaps is Armah’s way of referring to the community that is referred to passim in Two Thousand Seasons. Compare this passage, for example:
You hearers, seers, imaginers, thinkers, rememberers, you prophets called to communicate truths of the living way to a people fascinated unto death … (p.xi)[7]
The passage quoted from the earlier novel is a small example of the kind of ambivalence discussed above. It indicates that the man has heard, but then moves on to characterise his way of hearing in terms which may or may not be available to him, that is, the cave metaphor taken from Plato’s Symposium. The passage continues: ‘But what can a person do with things that continue unsatisfied inside? Is their stifled cry not also life?’ Although in terms of the narrative situation this is presented in free indirect style, that is, indirect presentation of the character’s consciousness, the expression of it is stylistically authorial, placing it, through the use of rhetoric and imagery, in the context of the whole work. Armah’s use, in his first novel, of an interaction of narrative situations with imagery and delimited characterisation constitutes a rich and complex world view containing significant patterns of disillusionment and degradation.
His second novel, Fragments, on the other hand, is characterised, as might be expected from its title, by fragmentation in several important aspects. One of these is the enclosure of the central—predominantly figural—narrative by another which emanates from the consciousness of Naana, the grandmother of the protagonist Baako. She seems to represent the values of the old Africa being being swept away under the influence of Western ideas. It is significant that this mother figure encloses the story of the son who falls a victim to the unresolvable tension between the two value systems, Western and African—in the sense that her voice is heard at the beginning and end of the novel. The enclosure has the effect of restoring the lost balance by placing the story of Baako’s rapid decline into madness within the context of the traditional ideology, which, although in fact neither timeless nor changeless, contains a cyclical worldview. Naana believes not only that those who go away will return, but also that there is a continuity of life in death, and that contact with the dead must be maintained.
Those aspects of Fragments which are concerned with the American psychiatrist Juana are almost completely to do with the cultural clash and with its interpenetration with her relationship with the African Baako and with his mental states. The dichotomisation of his mind is shown not only in the presented world by the presence of a therapist, but also in the presentational process by the presence of a second supporting persona, who is also, like the mother and grandmother figures, feminine. But the most convincing demonstration in the work of the powerful divisive pressure of the clash of cultures may of course be seen in the decline into madness of the protagonist. This is the clearest expression of the way in which a worldview may become divided and fall into fragments.
In Why Are We So Blest? the splitting process is carried a stage further, by the division of the presentation into three completely separate narratives representing three distinct personae. With regard to narrative situation, then, two opposite but complementary developments have taken place in the course of Armah’s first three long works. On the one hand, one central character becomes two, then three. On the other hand, the delineation of the personae has become more precise. The amorphous ‘man’ of the earliest work is replaced in the second by Baako, the confused and divided but more identifiable character, with clearly defined socioeconomic characteristics. He is then succeeded by three figures of roughly equal importance, two of whom—Modin and Aimee—have characteristics that remain fairly constant throughout the work, while only the third—Solo—carries the burden of the ideological schism running through all three of these novels.
Not only is the narrative concerned with three characters, but it is itself split into three completely separate strands, each told in the first person by the character in question. The effect of this is to create a polyphony of worldviews, each voice following the other, and in some cases taking up the same material for treatment from a different point of view. The motif of Aimee’s fantasy about the houseboy, for example, is introduced by her as her solitary experience. (pp.186-189) The next segment of the narrative, Modin’s, presumably refers to a time soon afterward as the same motif recurs, but this in the context of their mutual relationship. (pp.193-200) Aimee’s following segment comments on this development and thus completes the exposition of this motif. The comments from Solo that follow, although cast in an abstract mode removed from any particular event, deal with the same material. He has read the journals to the point at which the reader has himself arrived, and is therefore meditating on the events just narrated. The tone of Solo’s segment removes the reader to a distant perspective, contrastive with the close spatio-temporal locus of the narration of Modin’s and Aimee’s segments. In this way the same material is drawn into the context of a different worldview so that each informs the other, filling out their range of meanings.
These meanings may be partially contradictory and even dialectical, holding opposing meanings in a fruitful tension. Solo’s remarks refer to Aimee as one of the white ‘destroyers’ who ‘use the accumulated energy within our black selves to do work of importance to their white selves’. (p.208) However, Modin’s and Aimee’s following segments undercut this conclusion by presenting a new orientation in their interpersonal relationship, permitting an apparently non-manipulative and successful sexual union. The tension between the two views is maintained until the final scene of the novel when it is resolved by the outcome of the action, although in such a way as to leave its meaning incompletely determined.
The other main feature of the work’s ideology is an investigation into the nature of revolution, and again the three narratives will provide a variety of attitudes. All three principal personae have in common a desire to take part in a meaningful revolution combined with an inability to become actually involved. Aimee represents the point furthest removed from a committed involvement. It is clear from the nature of her characterisation that she is a thrill-seeker who desires merely a new and more complete sensation. This is made evident in the obvious connexion between the experiment in the psychology laboratory, Aimee’s sexual experience, and her reaction to the torturing of Modin. He is more sincerely committed to the revolution, but the naivety of his understanding of the real factors at work is brought out by the placing of his story inside the comments of Solo. The latter has proceeded through the revolutionary experience and emerged from the other side into a state of passive cynicism. That he has been committed is shown by the way the active revolutionaries trust him to continue to perform administrative tasks for them, although they expect no more than that. However, unlike the other two, he has achieved at one time a true revolutionary consciousness. He is simply insufficiently integrated to maintain it.
Thus, despite offering brief glimpses of commitment, the work creates a view of revolution mainly by negative means, in the studies of characters on the periphery, and of the origins of their deficiencies. Each of them has a specific psychic problem, textualised in a specific way. Aimee’s is manifested primarily in her frigidity, which is complementary to her sensation-seeking. The key text for her is the fantasy she uses for masturbation. Modin’s problem is verbalised as a sort of death wish, expressed in confessional form—giving the ending the force of apparent inevitability: ‘Nothing surprising in all of this. My life here has had a self-destructive swing all the time…’ (p.156) Solo’s relationship to texts is that of the professional translator, and he functions as an interpreter in relation to people. Thus he writes of Modin’s morbidity: ‘Once, seeing him, I caught myself thinking a thought that put fear in me: “Here is a corpse.”‘ (p.262) He is probably able to see it because he sees himself in much the same way, beginning his own story with ‘Even before my death I have become a ghost ..’ (p.11) His problem is ‘this lack of confidence which deepens into the despair of the guilty’ (p.14), his guilt arising from his sense of failure, his inability to carry out what he sees as being required of him. Thus his writing is the most verbose, because it is the most periphrastic, the least decisive. The essence of this work may be seen as produced by the characterisation emerging from the texts produced by the three characters; from the polyphony of typifications, and their interpenetration with the thematic concerns of the work.
In Two Thousand Seasons, characterisation of a conventional kind is almost completely absent. The trend away from centrality of one character and toward multiplicity is continued, to the extent that a large number of figures are given equal importance. Only a few emerge as individuals and none of them is used as a figural viewpoint for any length of time. Considering the figure of Anoa reveals the nature of this work’s narrative strategy particularly with regard to characterisation. She enters the narrative first as a prophetess, but gradually loses her human status as it progresses, becoming a spirit of place—her name being given also to the town and to the sacred grove that is the centre of revolutionary activity. The other symbolic character, Isanusi, also takes on a more than human significance, heroic if not divine.
Its narrative situation is the most indicative formal characteristic of the work. It is narrated in the first person plural throughout, although the time covered is one thousand years (the two thousand seasons, dry and wet alternating). The recognition of this transcendent ‘we’ leads immediately to the interpretive abstraction that the essence of the book’s meaning is to be found in the collective ethic and experience delineated. The nature of the narrative strategy supports this view. Although the viewpoint is consistently figural and although particular members of the group are named, it is always from the viewpoint of the group as a whole that the action is seen. Thus, when a particular actor is identified it is as if he or she steps out of the group to perform the action as observed by the others and then moves back again into the group of observers and reporters.
This is the case with the central group of characters endorsed by the narrative voice. Another group constitutes the negative aspect of the work’s dialectic. Its members are the invaders, colonisers and exploiters, the white ‘predators’ and ‘destroyers’ who come first by land and then by sea, to take advantage of the black race’s resources, human and otherwise. The history of the native peoples is a constant struggle against these forces of oppression, a struggle in which, it is prophesied, the former will prevail and re-establish the ‘way’, which may be seen as the institutions of traditional values and ethics. A figural narrative viewpoint is never permitted to the whites: they are always narrated about, in the third person.
Finally, in The Healers, the splitting process is extended from the plane of the diegesis to the plane of narration, from the enonce to the enonciation. Armah’s narrator here is at times literally self-conscious and discusses with itself some of the aspects of the narrative process. For most of the novel the modes of narration are conventionally novelistic: mostly authorial, with the usual varying degrees of figurality. At other times, however, the narrative voice refers to African conventions of story-telling in creating a dialogue with itself to discuss proper ways of conducting the narrative, a dialogue in which the story-teller speaks to its tongue, as in this passage:
The speeding tongue forgets connections. Let the deliberate mind restore them. Proud tongue, child of the Anona masters of eloquence, before you leap so fast to speak, listen first to the mind’s remembrance.Did you remember to tell your listeners of what time, what age you rushed so fast to speak? (p.2)
This is typical of a certain tendency towards generalisation in Armah’s writing, and in fact recalls a passage in the first novel, in which, as I have suggested above, there is a schematisation and consequent typification of what would otherwise be a naturalistic rendering of dialogue. Here the effect is rather the reverse, in that the ‘mind’ perhaps of the story-teller engages in a conversation with its tongue, in a sort of domestication of the epic impulse—an equivalent, perhaps, of the Classical epic poet’s invocation of the Muse, as in the opening of the Iliad, for example. There is, in fact, at times just such an invocation:
Ah Fasseke, words fail the story-teller. Fasseke Belen Tigui, master of masters in the arts of eloquence, lend me strength. Send me eloquence to finish what I have begun. (p.51)Send me words, Mokopu Mofolo. Send me words of eloquence. Words are mere wind, but wind too has always been part of our work, this work of sowers for the future, the work of story-tellers, the work of masters in the arts of eloquence. (p.52)
In both novels and in both cases, the self-consciousness and the division of the narrator are characteristic of a writer in whom the experimental, in terms of composition, moves with the revolutionary, in terms of political vision. There is a marked disparity between one item and the next in Armah’s varied oeuvre, and a failure to come to terms with this as a critic, can result in the ‘forging of spurious continuities between individual novels’ which Edgar Wright disparages. [8] Ayi Kwei Armah has an ability for generic change which is unusual, and remarkable when considered in isolation.
Notes
1. Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (London: Heinemann, 1969 [1968]).
Ayi Kwei Armah, Fragments (London: Heinemann, 1974 [1970]).
Ayi Kwei Armah, Why Are We So Blest? (London: Heinemann, 1974 [1972]).
Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973).
Ayi Kwei Armah, The Healers (London: Heinemann 1979 [1978]).
2. Stanzel, Franz, Narrative Situations in the Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971) trs. from Typische Erzählsituationen im Roman, 1955.
3. Genette, Gerard 1982, Figures of Literary Discourse, trs. Alan Sheridan from Figures, 1966-1972, Columbia University Press, New York.
4. One of the two major works on Armah, Robert Fraser, The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah: A Study in Polemical Fiction (Heinemann, London, 1980), is thematic in its approach, and makes no use of any such a formalist approach. The other, Derek Wright’s invaluable Ayi Kwei Armah’s Africa: The Sources of his Fiction, (Oxford: Hans Zell, 1989), subsumes discussion of narrative situation to concerns with ‘vision’ and ‘image-patterns’: see for example p. 85.
5. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), p. 5.
6. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989) p. 33. “Ideology is indeed a system of ‘representations’, but in the majority of cases these representations have nothing to do with ‘consciousness’: … it is above all as structures that they impose on the vast majority of men [sic], not via their ‘consciousness’ … it is within this ideological unconsciousness that men [sic] succeed in altering the ‘lived’ relation between them and the world and acquiring that new form of specific unconsciousness called ‘consciousness’”. (Louis Althusser, For Marx, New York : Pantheon 1969, trs. Ben Brewster from Pour Marx, (Paris: Maspero, 1965), p. 233, quoted by Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural studies: two paradigms’, in Richard Collins et al., Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, (London: Sage, 1986), p. 42.)
7. Wright, p. 240.
8. Wright, p. 12.
The Ghanian Star
Ayi Kwei Armah was born in 1939 to Fante-speaking parents in the twin harbor city of Sekondi Takoradi, in western Ghana. On his father’s side Armah was descended from a royal family in the Ga tribe.
Ghanaian novelist and poet, known for his visionary symbolism, poetic energy, and the extremely high moral integrity of his political vision. Armah’s first three novels were hailed as modernistic prose, while his next two challenged the Euro-centric notions of history. Armah has lived and worked in the different cultural zones of Africa. Much of Armah’s earlier work deals with the betrayed ideals of Ghanaian nationalism and Nkrumahist socialism.
Armah attended the prestigious Achimota College. In 1959 he went on scholarship to the Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts. After graduating, he entered Harvard University, receiving a degree in sociology. Armah then moved to Algeria and worked as a translator for the magazine Révolution Africaine. In 1964 Armah returned to Ghana, where he was a scriptwriter for Ghana Television and later taught English at the Navarongo School. Between the years 1967 and 1968 he was editor of Jeune Afrique magazine in Paris. In 1968-70 Armah studied at Columbia University, obtaining his M.F.A. in creative writing.
In the 1970s Armah worked as a teacher in East Africa, at the College of National Education, Chamg’omge, Tanzania, and at the National University of Lesotho. He has also lived in Dakar, Senegal from the 1980s and taught at Amherst, and University of Wisconsin at Madison. In in the village of Popenguine, some 70 km from Dakar, he has established his own publishing house, Per Ankh: the African Publication Collective.
Armah started his career as a writer in the 1960s. He published poems and short stories in the Ghanaian magazine Okyeame, and in Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, and New African. Armah’s first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are not Yet Born(1968), was an allegorical story of the failure of an African ruling. The protagonist is an anonymous railway office clerk, simply called “the man,” who struggles in the slums against poverty on one side and material greed on the other. He is pressured by his acquisitive family and fellow workers to accept the norms of society, bribery and corruption in order to guarantee his family a comfortable life. His virtues go largely unrewarded, his wife thinks him a fool, and his relatives prosper. At the end of the novel, the moral strength of “the man” is contrasted to a once-powerful politician, who has been deposed in a military coup. In the essay ‘Africa and Her Writers’ (1972), presented at the Eliot House, Harvard University, Chinua Achebe perceived Armah as a “a brilliant Ghanaian novelist, but an “alienated native” and argued that it was a mistake to set the novel in Ghana, not in some “modern, existentialist no-man’land”, because if “the hero is nameless, so should everything else be”. As a reaction to the criticism, Armah replied with several abusive letters to Achebe.
In Fragments (1971), the protagonist, Baako, is a “been-to”, a man who has been to the United States and received his education there. Back in Ghana he is regarded with superstitious awe as a link to the Western life style. Baako’s grandmother Naana, a blind-seer, stands in living contact with the ancestors. Under the strain of the unfilled expectations Baako finally breaks. As in his first novel, Armah contrasts the two worlds of materialism and moral values, corruption and dreams, two worlds of integrity and social pressure. Why Are We So Blest? (1972) was set largely in an American University, and focused on a student, Modin Dofu, who has dropped out of Harvard. Disillusioned Modin is torn between independence and Western values. He meets a Portugese black African named Solo, who has already suffered a mental breakdown, and a white American girl, Aimée Reitsch. Solo, the rejected writer, keeps a diary, which is the substance of the novel. Aimée’s frigidity and devotion to the revolution leads finally to destruction, when Modin is killed in the desert by O.A.S. revolutionaries.
Not many African authors have dealt with the slave trade in the African past. However, this subject was touched on by Armah in Two Thousand Seasons (1973), an epic, in which a pluralized communal voice speaks through the history of Africa, its wet and dry seasons, from a period of one thousand years. Arab and European oppressors are portrayed as “predators,” “destroyers,” and “zombies”. The novel is written in allegorical tone, and shifts from autobiographical and realistic details to philosophical pondering, prophesying a new age. The Healers (1979) mixed fact and fiction about the fall of the celebrated Ashante empire. The healers in question are traditional medicine practitioners who see fragmentation as the lethal disease of Africa.
Armah remained silent as a novelist for a long period until 1995 when he published Osiris Rising, depicting a radical educational reform group, which reinstates ancient Egypt at the center of its curriculum.
Armah has often been regarded as belonging to the next generation of African writers after Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. At the same time he is said to “epitomize an era of intense despair.” Especially Armah’s later work have evoked strong reaction from many critics. Two Thousand Seasons has been labelled dull and verbose, although Wole Soyinka considered its vision secular and humane.
As an essayist Armah has dealt with the identity and predicament of Africa. His main concern is for the creation of a pan-African agency that will embrace all the diverse cultures and languages of the continent. Armah has called for the adoption of Kiswahili as the continental language.
beibee
