D Vol. Caribbean C: \ L ter ure, eds Ayi Kwei Armah Derek Wright . , , ~ f~iYe:rsit:, Col~egf, rm.:~!\ 1 v. ~ · U.~, f"j~ ve 1>f No.-tkev-1\ Terr,t-uJ ~ ,.~ ~,. ~--~ A -.-.... (. .J vo..v-w,.,,_' A..,s".f-ro.. i {t_ "2..J? BIRTH: Takoradi, Ghana, October 1939. /\ EDUCATION: A.B., Harvard University, 1963; Columbia Universi ty, 1968-1970. rle..,., '/ork: Co 11,er Mo.c...., ,/{tt. BOOKS : The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968; /l 1 .--;,::$ C~, 1 .,."(t..:..: 7 )'-:1: ;zco'-. e • p._.J;.r ·c~ lt.:·r;~c ,.! ~::-, . 1 :..t3i L,., 1, ..... .. # i;:) . ..... - .,.,.,1 London: Heinemann, 1969; reset edition, London: He inemann, 1975 ) ; Fragments / ..,,,,.. t 1 .. ...... .. ' • 1~, ,-. ·,.. I "' , .; ..., • • ' "' - ~ • - · , --, t::oL£.C..l..i!t'"1.t.1 I:.. .' ... -<. ... L ,-- , c::,:t.,,.,, ,,Ar . , : .. a! ; • ._ _.... "j - - ·: _(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970; Londo~: Heine~~nn 197½~ ; Why Are .We So Blest 0 8 ·\ ~,~,·.c~ _·:_: -"''· ':. (New York: Doubleday, 1972; [~~~c;~: ~:~n;::~{'\~;7~) ~ ~~-:;h-:u{:;~-=~-e~~s ~ - ~AI • :. ,I" ~ ~ · ( ,.:. !)·, <,-, \~\.'o;_, ,·-~ (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973; London: Hei nemann, 1979; \'•A...) ! r, ..-t\· Chicago: Third World, 1980) _; The Healers (Nairobi : East African_Publishing \ , , ~,..; ." .. ·:.......:. ; ,~,,._ ,-.: .. .· ~ •: .....,! ... -> ·1,, .._ , · ,. :·~...:.-:.-,.~ 5t::_) _; - : . ? -.: ·. House, 1978; Lond;~:- -Hei~ema~~ - 1979). / 1. ·1"'··-'" . 9,, -, / o · u\, ? c- un • • --; t ' ' • 1 ... I\ .,- ,... :s I - ..... -:> / . - ..) ~,. I _, ' , I ' a, .r •J ..1 r,. } ·-:: ·, ' ·• . · · ' .., :~~:~~r~:!~~~~!:!'N~; :::~: ,' ':, 10;;.~ ~b~;-~~~;- ~~4-24sY "As-a"',i Okyeame,' 3_,l(December 196$: 28-32[; "Yaw Manu' s Charm", Atlantic (May 196~: 89-957; "An African Fable~ Presence Africaine, 68(1968): 192-196~ "The Or°fal ~.:---- ~ It"[!(' . ~ ' 1\ Kindl[!,.~ H~per's Magazine, 1424(January 1969]= 79- 84p; 't« r-w~ f o A/, ; va_.,a., \,le.st- A-f'trc~ (1.. 1.f Se!.pi-ew-ber {q¥'~o ~ l'fL/7-/'?l.(f, ~ ----- ---- 7 . -------- -------------- IN on-fiction: II Afri~an Soc iahs'm:··"t}to"pLan_~ Sci"enti"iic? It ' Presence Africa i ne ,'. 64 ( 196~: 6-~; "Pour les i bos ,~e-·-;-~·~;; cie --~ haine silenc ieu's~; eune \ Afrigue, 355(29"~-Q~~ber -9fi~l8-2~; "A Mystifica:~_~:azy:~~rican Independence \ Revalued~ Pan-At; ·ca"i1··Jo~,:1_al, 2,2(Spring _1 _?6~:·''i41-1~·; '!.F.a_n.?~,: The ' Awaken?~ Digest, 18,12{-0 ober 1.96'9)= 4-9, 29-~; "Chaka~ --.B-la,ck ~26,4(Februa.ry 197~: 51-52, -90; ~-s..o._w, or Fiction as Crit{~, . ; 1 '- ~ ____ i, µ +1 ( of Ficti~n~ New Classic, 4(-NtSvember 1977/ 33- 4~ U ~~1t1 ..... ~ ,S..,..vx; 11-R o..-x,s j ......_E:tkos VlS-c..-v,·s- A-f.-, '-0-.... ~ 1nd1.t.t•o "'""v~ neon1 ~ .CP. ------------~/ P(/;'/Ji: "Aftermath", in Messages: Poems from Ghana, eds. Kofi Awoonor and I G.Adali Mortty(London: Heinemann, 1970); l89-91. P:yi Kwei Armah i s per haps the most versatile, innovative and provocative of the younger generation of post{war African novelists V and, like all authors who express extreme views in their books, he has become a controversial figure I e ~ - but the controversy has been cen1;«_red exclusively on the works and not on the man, about whom extremely little is known . Armah is a very private~ person. He gives no interviews, attends no conferences or writers' workshops , releases no press statements, and does not seek to promote or publicize his work outside of Africa in any way . Only ,beyond el:ldi1rai:ise by the AmeFiean oitic 8ha1lc:rLar1oo~ 1 s rnisrea~ has Armah broken his rule of silence about himself -1'""-'o - 11 '' ' 1 J /(On e. ~se .,_ ..._+ob,~i",.,-la.1cc,J/ e S~"-'j4-/ LMS 0 ~1 · ~cl -f,. A f ~ier 's Ed~,a o• and his work , and it 1s to that siH~le- e~~ey that Western critics A owe nea~iy all of their biographical information about this author. Born to Fante- speaking parents in a sea port of the then British colony of the Gold Coast at the start of the Second World War, Armah was apparently too young to take in the full import of his country's postlwar social unrest - the strikes, unemployment and the shooting J of demonstrating ex- serviceken back from the colonial war by the V J British authorities. But the first twenty years of-his life coincided with the growth of Ghana, through a mixture of political negotiation and violent struggle, into Africa's first independent state, and the violence of this period and the nationalist hopes of the independence movement clearly left their mark upon him. These are convincingly documented in the sixth chapter of his first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born(l968), where the reminiscences of the two characters provide what is really a collective autobiography of the new nation. Armah left Ghana on an American scholarship, to Groton school and then on to Harvard, shortly before his twentieth birthday: this was two years after independence and before Nkrumah had turned Ghana into a one-party state and shut down all political opposition. No doubt he carried with him to an America caught in the throes of Civil Rights agitation the youthful idealism of Nkrumahn socialism, and the betrayal of that idealism in the 1960s and subsequent disillusion- ment were to color all of Armah 1 s early writings, The early short stories and polemical essays on African socialism, independence and Fanon, written in the decade of post-independence disenchantment, contain in embryonic form the themes of the novels: Africa's continuing oppression under the "mystification" of independence and entrapment in a cycle of neoiolooial dependency in both the political and J economic spheres; the failure of human reciprocity in the lives of modern urban Africans under the pressure of a manipulatory and exploitative system of relationships; the resistance to genuine ) revolutionary growth and regeneration i n the politics of the post- colonia~ world. Notable among these early pieces are the essay, "A Mystification: African Independence Revalued11 (1969) , which charts the unchanging economic flow-pattern from African province to Western metropole in the neolcolonial economy, and the story, "Yaw Manu' s J Charm" ( 1968) , a remarkable and disturbing study of the far-reaching effects of neofcolonial psychology, even at the lowest levels of ~ aspiration, in the lives of Westernized clerks. The American-set ~tory, "Contact11 (1965), is a subtle exploration of the ways in which the racial stereotypes of colonial history still penetrate to the private corners of intertersonal and sexual r elationships and, along \.....I with the novel Why Are We So Blest?(l972), clearly draws upon Armah's experience of America in those years of racial confrontation which saw a marked shift from Integrationist to Black Separatist politics. An early poem, 11 Aftermath"(1970), which telescopes themes of personal, artistic and racial betrayal, reveals an early fondness for the syncret.ic image which is a marked feature of his mature work. Armah has financed his writing by a mixture of t eaching, script= writing, translating and editing, and his work, along with his desire ) to write from an African base and find a genuinely African focus for his novels, has taken him to a number of African countries. He has been employed as a translator for Revolution Africaine i n Algiers(1963), and, in his native Ghana, as a scriptwriter for Ghana Television and an English teacher at Navrongo school(l966). In 1970, after a productive six-year period which saw the publication of his first novel, the completion of a second and commencement upon a third, he settled in Tanzania and taught African Literature and Creative Writing at the College of National Education at Chang'ombe from 1972 to 1976, when he left to teach the same subjects at the National University of Lesotho. Interspersed with Armah 1s African travels were periods in Paris as an editor of Jeune Afrique(1967~1968), and in the United States, as an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachussets(l970), and, more recently, as an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin(l979). He has since returned to Africa and is currently living in Dakar, Senegal. Armah's early departure and lengthy absences from his native Ghana, together with his setting of his early novels in an unashamedly modern, urban and Westernized Africa, have helped to create the impression that his writing reveals little real knowledge of or interest in traditional African culture. The fact that he has always eschewed the notion of exile and has spent his longest periods of residence abroad not in .America and Europe but in other parts of Africa seems to have done little to correct this misapprehension. Armah's combination of an African background with an .American education has made the question of the literary sources of his fiction a vexed one . During the 1970s the notion that the vision and techniques of his first three novels were foreign-derived or at least foreign-inspired became a commonplace in the criticism of African fiction, and Western commentators who detected echoes of French writing - Sartre, Beckett, Robbe-Grillet and Celine - were legion. In the case of the third novel, Why Are We So Blest?, black .American literature and polemic might have been added to the list of influences. More seriously, the divergence of Armah's visionary, symbolic fictional modes from the realist mainstream of African fiction provoked charges from African critics, notably Achebe, that his characterization and style were "un-African" and had more in common with expatriate fiction about Africa written by Europeans than with African writing. In } fact, the modern malaise of the alienated "been-to11 hero in the second and third novels is not simply a foreign literary imposition, either of existential angst or absurdist ennui, which upholds an un-African view of the universe.