Identity Quest in Ayi Kwei Armah's Novels

Abstract

The Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah (b.1939) has developed his prose fiction into a quest for ways to postulate a satisfying concept of identity. In The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Fragments and Why Are We So Blest? he uncovers the tenets of the present dysfunctional identity which Africa has adopted. Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers seem to attribute the present dysfunctionality to the African past. The same undertaking is repeated in the last two novels: Osiris Rising (1995) and KMT in the House of Life (2002). In both, this writer offers a similar approach to the cultural, social and political impasse in the continent. What is new in these last two works, however, is that Armah excavates historical evidence that attaches West Africa to the land of Kemet, or ancient Egypt. For him, the revival of present day African culture cannot be achieved until African communities connect and identify with the tradition of Ma'at back in Kemetic times. The present malaise and passivity on the part of the African communities, in Armah’s opinion, have been attributed to a long epistemic conditioning rooted in cultural imperialism via the western educational system. Persistent misinformation about African culture and a crude falsification of Africa’s millennial history have paved the way to the slave trade and colonial occupation. Meanwhile, archaic forms of thinking and the institutionalization of legitimacy in tradition have caused a deep-seated self-hatred and inferiority complex on the part of the African before the non-African. In other words, the post independence period is characterized by a lack of any constructive postulation of identity; a fact that has been detrimental to, and perhaps, the principal reason for, the burgeoning of political corruption, military coups, civil wars and illegal immigration. Still, in Armah's opinion, the sorry state of affairs in Africa can be reversed via serious considerations of the millennial past of the continent reaching to the times of ancient Egypt. According to Armah, one should reach a point where ancient Egyptian mythology, philosophy, architecture, egalitarian ethics and other civilizational additions start to be celebrated as African achievements, and thus form the basis for a true cultural renaissance in present day Africa. The deployment of the myth of Isis and Osiris in Armah’s last two novelistic experiments falls in the direction of placing Africa at the heart of ancient Egyptian cosmology and worldview. The authorial intention in iv Fragments, Armah’s second novel, reflects a bleak worldview; a defiled set of values epistemologically rooted in ancient Greece. The switch, in his last two novels, idealising Egyptian worldview, suggests that Armah blames the Greek matrix for generating the present cultural malaise in Africa. A close reading of Armah’s novels suggests that what can be called the ‘Egyptian paradigm’ is favoured over the Greek one, simply because this latter has spelled only patriarchy, hunger for profit and power, plus unjustifiable violence. Additionally, Armah finds the Egyptian paradigm, with its constellative trends of identity, more egalitarian, peaceful, self-enhancing and empowering. This thesis tries to advance the argument that Armah's placement of two mutually contradicting paradigms (Greek versus Kemetic) can be an oversimplification of the problems facing Africa. While some elements in the Greek paradigm, like patriarchy, characterised by the hunt for profit via slavery and violence, is indeed harmful, history proves that patriarchy has not been limited only to ancient Greece. The myth of Isis and Osiris, Armah's principal myth of liberation, itself exudes patriarchal overtones. Besides, Armah's drama is more in favour of polemics where instead it should opt for analysis. Armah neither appreciates African lore as it has always been, nor does he show how western educational schooling is inhibitive when it come to Africa's cultural regeneration. Armah's identity quest is part of that school of thinking whose main problem is its inability to process and evaluate larger quantities of updates than it feels it can handle. As the novels considered in this thesis clearly illustrate, Armah can be qualified as a self-styled realist who often equates imagination with wishful thinking and sees imagination as a way to address the realities of present-day Africa.