The Philosophies of Ayi Kwei Armah
"A people losing sight of origins are dead. A people
deaf to purposes are lost. Under fertile rain, in
scorching sunshine there is no difference: their
bodies are mere corpses, awaiting final burial....It
was not always so. The desert was made the desert,
turned barren by a people whose spirit is itself the
seed of death. Each single one of them is a carrier
of destruction. The spirit of their coming together,
the purpose of their existence, is the spread of death
over all the earth. An insatiable urge drives them.
Wherever there is life, even if it be only a
possibility, the harbingers of death must go -- to
destroy it. See the footsteps they have left over all
the world. Wherever they have been they have
destroyed along their road, taking, taking, taking.
They have wiped the surface barren with their greed.
They have dug deep to take what the earth needed for
itself to stay fertile earth. They have taken
everything within their reach, things that made the
earth good, and they have put nothing back but hard,
dead things in place of life destroyed. Even their
putting back was nothing of a sense of reciprocity.
Their semblance of giving is parcel of their greed.
It is their habit to put dead, useless things in the
hollowed earth to help them take more coveted
things....Monstrous the barrenness of people when
outside the lonely cut-off self there is no connection
with the whole. Blood itself is impotent before the
white perdition brought against us by the destroyers
from the sea: the severing of each mind, the cutting
of each soul off from the whole being of our people,
the removal of each single present away from knowledge
of our common past, our common destiny: against all
this blood itself is impotent if it flows away from
connectedness, away from our single way, the way.
Ludicrous is the freedom of the slave unchained in his
single body if his mind remains a cut-off individual
mind, not a living piece of our common mind, our
common soul...Against the death brought by whiteness
only the greatest connecting force will prevail: the
working together of minds connected, souls connected,
travelling along that one way, our way, the way.
Connected thought, connected action: that is the
beginning of our journey back to our self, to living
again the connected life, travelling again along our
way, the way....Endless our struggle must seem to
those whose vision reaches only to the end of today.
But those with ears connected to our soul will hear a
message calling us to a better life, to a life closer
to our ancient way, to a preparation for the best, the
only living way. It is not vengeance for our own
single selves we have been seeking in this work.
Those who can see, those able to hear, let them hear
this: we are preparers of paths to the way that was
our way; it will be our way again."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
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