Decolonizing the Mind: Dialectic of the Personal and the Continental in Ayi Kwei Armah’s “Why are we so best”

DECOLONIZING THE MIND:
A DIALECTIC OF THE PERSONAL
AND THE CONTINENTAL IN
AYI KWEI ARMAH’S
WHY ARE WE SO BLEST?

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 Born²and 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 Seasons⁴and 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 flashare 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 . 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