DECOLONIZING THE MIND:
A DIALECTIC OF THE
PERSONAL
AND THE CONTINENTAL IN
AYI KWEI ARMAH’S
WHY ARE WE SO BLEST?
K. DAMODAR RAO
Ayi Kwei Armah’s third
novel, Why Are We So Blest?1, in a dialectical sweep, comprehends the alternatives and
corroboratives that define the African situation. In his first two novels, The
Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born2 and Fragments3, Armah deals with the
post-individuals who wish to preserve their integrity in a ramshackle society
of fragmented vision. In the last two novels, Two Thousand Seasons4
and The Healers5, Armah attempts to designate ‘the way’ of the people in a
positive reconstruction of African history from a viable native stand-point and
finds the beautiful ones in seers, visionaries, artists and healers. Why Are
We So Blest? marks the centre of the shift to a plural and communal
voice. These two analytical and constructive stages provide a clue to Armah’s
fictional strategy in approaching the African reality.
Armah is concerned with
the dynamics of social change. The basic stance of the novelist as a curator
and a therapist is exposed through the process of diagnosis, analysis and
reconstruction of African history. Armah’s fictional frame in the analytical
stage is marked by an attempt to expose the malady affecting the Ghanaian
society in particular and the African society in general. It is followed by a
positive and constructive sweep of the history and ideals of the continent in
the second phase as part of an attempt to show the way of ‘reciprocity’ and the
way of ‘wholeness’. As such, his fiction becomes a manifestation of ‘integral
vision’. Frantz Fanon points out that in the process of evolutionary progress,
a colonized writer creates ‘a lighting literature and a national literature’.
Literature produced under these circumstances represents a new reality of
action while the writer himself gets transformed so as to become ‘an awakener
of his people’6.
Armah’s incisive probing into the matrix of past, present and future in his
work points to such fighting and national literature. The present study
attempts to explore the complex patterns - history, human relations, symbol and
structural rhythms - as mediated in his third novel, Why Are We So
Blest?
Modin Dofu, the central
character in the novel, is a double exile. He goes to America for higher
studies where he is constantly reminded of his race and continent. He tries to
find various means of overcoming his alienation which drives him into a
relationship with Aimee Reitch. She is white, insensitive, and is always on the
look out for new and exciting experiences. Solo, the artist-figure, reminiscent
of the protagonists in the The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Fragments, pieces their story
together and forewarns the impending doom of their relationship. Within the
framework of the interplay of these characters, Armah attempts to probe into
the relations of the colonizer and the colonized, Africa and Europe, black and
white.
The search for a
technique that effectively reflects the conflicts, inner and outer, is
continued in Why Are We So Blest? The novel, in fact, is
structurally more complex than Fragments. The cinematic techniques of freeze
shots, close-up and flashback are exploited to the fullest extent in this
novel. The story is unfolded from the point of view of the three main
protagonists but much of the narrative function is left to Solo. It is only in
the last pages of novel that we come to know the added advantage of Solo’s
point of view and the reason for the late entry of Modin into the narrative
process. After Modin’s death, Aimee hands over their diaries to Solo for safe
custody. Solo’s reminiscences which begin half-way through the novel, can be
assumed to have been benefited by his observation and their own
self-revelation.
Although the purpose of
Solo in re-arranging the pieces of their story together is self-admittedly
“littleness itself” it has wide-ranging implications in the context of personal
and racial relations. Solo’s question, so explicit in its dimensions,
underlines the significance of the novel’s concerns: “What is the root of this
fatal attraction, this emotional fixity drawing us to these daughters of our
white death?” (P. 230). If the willing submission of the prey to its predators
is the one reason for the miseries of a continent, the aggressive insensitivity
and the manipulative morbidity as exemplified in Aimee have driven it to state
of near collapse. Solo identifies himself with Modin and his fatal relationship
with his white mistress reminds Solo of the debilitating, impact of Africa’s
contact with Europe:
The man in me: The
African absorbed into Europe, trying to escape death, eager to shed privilege,
not knowing how deep the destruction has eaten into himself, hoping to achieve
a healing juncture with his destroyed people. (p. 232)
Solo is a translator in
the People’s Union of Conghera, seat of the government in exile. He has spent
some time in a revolutionary organization for his country’s freedom but for
some unknown reasons is driven back. He remains a mute witness to the wastage
of hard-won independence by the native masters. He meets Modin and Aimee in
Laccryville, a home-ground of revolutionaries of different hues. While Modin
comes there to search the means of overcoming his alienation through ‘a
revolutionary commitment to Africa’, Aimee mouths out revolutionary jargon more
as a means of finding excitements than with deep commitment. Like Europe, she
did not try to understand the black African, since her aim was ‘survival, not
union’. Solo observes both Modin and Aimee from close quarters and has a
deep-rooted sympathy for him since he knows that the girl was ‘a consumer of
experience, user of people’. He also forewarns himself about the sadistic
streak in Aimee but remains helpless as he realizes that the death of Modin was
‘multiform’, waiting for him whichever way he chose to turn: “And if the
experience was the death of her companion? The intenser the experience, the
blinder fool the dead.” (p. 232)
Aimee, the symbol of
white destruction, is insensitive, rigid and tries various methods of
overcoming her morbidity. For her, revolution is synonymous with adventure and
excitement. She has recorded a high of thirteen points in a psychology test
conducted to record the threshold of pain. She has also visited, in her quest
for exciting experiences, an East African country where, she gets involved in
sexual encounters with the leaders of Moya Moya rising and also the leaders of
the nation list government. The episode is significant in that it portrays the
depravity of the neocolonialist political structures and also the mobid search
of the European for the exotic in black Africa.
Modin’s problem is two
fold: In the first instance, he is separated from his people by his education.
Modin’s alienation must be viewed in terms of physical and psychological
distance from his countrymen: “ Imust contain my loneliness while I am here.
But why in fact remain?” (p. 157) he often asks himself. The alienation of the
individual is part of the cultural hegemonism sought to be established by the
colonial masters in a bid to perpeturat their imperialist schemes. Solo
understands the problem in all its ramifications:
This loneliness is
oppression’s symptom of success...What is this love of their people’s creatures
but a love for the manipulable, the already manipulated, open open to further
shaping? … we float between the blessed and the damned, attached to none but
our specific murderers, caught in their deep-hating embrace. Ah, Africa. (pp.
208 - 209)
Secondly, Modin is
perceived only as a ‘factor’ in Europe or America and not as an educated man
nor even as a fellow human being. The ‘factor’ was a black slave trader who
acted as a middleman for the export of the slaves. His modern successors, the
educated elite, govern Africa for the whites. He realizes that ‘the educated
Africans, the westernized African successors are contemptible worms’. (p. 161)
The sense of alienation
forces Modin to seek companionship in sexual experiences with while women.
Naita, his black girlfriend in America, warns against such misadventures in the
initial stages itself: “There’s nothing like friendship possible between us and
them. You get involved with them. You are just dumb, that’s all. They all mess
you up”(p. 123). Later, he realises that the warning of Naita has come true
with an alarming precision. His relationship with Mrs. Jefferson is exposed and
Modin is assaulted by her husband. With multiple dagger wounds, he also
realizes that he has been on a self-destructive swing:
Nothing Surprising in all
this. My life here has had a self-destructive swing all the time, only I have
not thought seriously about it. Loneliness. The search for a way out.
Involvement, the thing you warned me against, Naita. Catastrophic involvement.
Disaster. Exhaustion. Then withdrawal, intense, complete. Loneliness again (p.
156)
While Mrs. Jefferson’s
lust resulted in physical multilation, Aimme’s interest in Modin, borne out of
her search for new sensations, proves to be fatal for him. She ignores his
individuality and often accuses him of lacking in revolutionary fervour. In bed
with him, Aimee imagines herself a memsahib whose husband, a repressive
colonial administrator, comes home to find her making love with a houseboy. In
the last scene of the novel. Aimee is used to arouse Modin before he is
sexually mutilated by a group of Frenchmen. Modin is left alone in the desert
to die.
The novel’s structural
rhythms could be observed in the series of forewarnings that culminated in the
impending death of the protagonist. Naita’s warning and Aimee’s fantasy have
wide-ranging implications in terms of personal and colonial encounters. Armah
is not merely content to show the simple division between a corrupt white
Europe and innocent black Africa. In fact, the stress in the novel is more on
the self-destructive streak of the natives. Armah thrusts upon himself the task
of exposing the nightmare of modern history in which the effects of the past
and present conspire to deprive the Africans of any significant freedom.
The recurring images of
the novel - those of centre and periphery - make clear the alternatives faced
by the Africans. Modin describes his life as a ‘search for the centre, away
from the periphery of the world’ (p. 32). He has the intelligence to see the
danger, but the forces within him are so strong that he continues in the same
self-consuming path even after he sees though Aimme’s motives. Like Solo, he
observes a parallel between his personal crisis and that of Africa; ‘Europe has
no need to destroy us singly any more. The forces of our own death is within
us. We have swallowed the wish for our destruction’ (p. 159).
In The Wretched of the
Earth. Fanon
advocates rightful and creative violence at personal and social levels in the
process of overcoming phsychological timidity:
At the level of the
individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his
inferiority complex and from despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and
restores his self-respect.
Solo, in moments of
retrospection, echoes Fanon:
Only one issue is worth
our time: how to end the oppression of the African, to kill the European beasts
of prey, to remake ourselves .... (p. 230)
Modin’s attempts to join
the revolution are sympathetic and complex. To begin with, he has genuine
political convictions unlike Aimee who is only in search of excitement.
Secondly, To overcome his alienation Modin tries to identify with the masses.
He ardently belives that the ‘war against the invader should be the educational
process for creating new anti-European, anti-imperial and anti-elitist values’
(p. 222). This is precisely what signifies the fictional credo of Armah.
NOTES
1 Ayi Ewei Armah, Why Are We so Blest? (New
York Dobleday, 1972; London: Helinemann Educational Books, 1974; Nairobi: East
African Publishing House, 1974). All page references indicated in parantheses
are to the Heinemann Educational Book edition.
2 The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born. (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1968; London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1979).
3 Fragments. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970; London: Heinemann
Educational Books, 1974; Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1974).
4 Two Thousand Seasons. (Nairobi: East African
Publishing House, 1973: London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1979).
5 The Healers (Nairobi: East African Publishing Publishing House,
1978; London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1979).
6 Frantz fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London:
Penguin Books, 1965), P. 73.
7 Ibid., p. 178