Anyone who knows me knows I'm a big Armah fan. For me, he has the ability to write in such a way that I'm transported from my here and now to wherever he decides to take me.... there, I see and feel it all, intensely. The images his words create have been branded in my mind and, years later, are still fresh. I just completed reading his 7th novel, KMT: In the House of Life, my 4th Armah novel and, like Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons and The Healers, I think this book is a definite must read for any serious Kmtyw. Even as I start this thread I know the full impact of book hasn't yet reached me.
Below are some quotes and passages from the book that have moved me. For those of you who have read the book, please feel free to add quotes and passages that have had the same effect on you. For those of you who have not yet read the book, I strongly recommend it.
I read this book right after it came out in 2002. I remember not thinking much of it as I read it until I realized what Armah was doing and was astounded. Definitely high on my list of fiction. I've been wanting to read again all these years but haven't yet.
"Seek rowing to the source,
you have come pulling against the easy current
and left behind the slow waters of the delta beeland;
you have passed between the land of spirits on your left,
the home of the recent departed on your right,
come all the way past the rushing cataract of Swnw
to touch secrets hidden from
the reach of millennial destruction
in the land of the papyrus stalks.
That you have come all this way
in peace
is the surest sign of who you are:
a friend arrived at last among friends.
Welcome.
Now accept this offering
of caution from departed companions
to companions on arrival.
The voice you hear as you unroll this menahad
and read the signs we've left here
is not a voice of prophesy. It is a voice
offering hope,
and hope is a plant growing far from certainty,
since to live it requires work.
If you come seeking a narrative of kings and queens,
princes and nobles with servants
and slaves in their train to magnify them,
go seek elsewhere.
Our offering to you is a narrative
of the creation of knowledge,
of its confiscation by men of greed and violence,
and of the defeat of women and men
whose dream was to work
to make knowledge abundant as air.
Since their defeat, destroyers have danced
on the ruins of the house of life
thinking Maat lay buried there,
never to rise again.
This is a narrative of loss,
loss of a dream beautiful and
useful as the flow of Hapi between Abydw and Min Nefer,
yet too briefly held, then wasted, for too long now.
Travel with us back up the river of time,
in the boat of memory.
Near the source let us remember a time and a place
where we still knew purposes of our own.
When shall we come to that time and place again?
Where shall we work again to purposes of our own?
You who have rowed to the source,
you carry the answer in the tension of your hand,
in the energy of your heart,
in the works you do to call the future into now.
How, you wonder?
First, pluck up your fear of this surrounding chaos,
throw away the terror
of the pervasive violence of what exists now.
In place of the old habitual fear,
let your love from companions grow,
for the love of companions working in balance
is soil for creation.
From the chaotic desert of single awareness in pain,
we begin the motion into consciousness
the moment we think past our personal pain.
Then we can see around us other souls,
just like ours,
each trapped in a similar torment of singular, senseless awareness.
If we can focus our mindgaze
beyond the single self, we free ourselves
to see that the pain each isolate mind
calls its special fate
is multiplied in thirty million separate cases.
Far from each mind being locked by nature
into its peculiar spot of pain,
all suffering souls inherit a common territory bereft of peace,
a field of torment.
From that field of torment a soulpath leads
out of the prison of the isolate self,
from pain to peace. But the soul on its quest,
hoping to find alone an exit from the field of suffering,
is doomed to repeat endlessly
the hallucinating trip from illusion to mirage to fantasm,
as long as it seeks solace for itself alone.
From the field of torment, home to isolate awareness,
there is a way out.
But that way is not an individual path.
The soul in pain takes a step on
the path to consciousness when, breaking out
of the self-absorption of individual pain,
it feels the torment of neighboring souls,
and sees its own trouble mirrored there for clearer contemplation.
The soul in pain takes a second step
away from sterile pain
the day it moves to touch a companion soul.
Then two souls, leaning out with an invitation
to share the insight of awareness,
turn the shreds of segmented perception
into the ground of shared vision.
Another step: two souls, a pair now, seek kindred souls.
Two become four, six, eight, ten, thirty, forty-two
spirits no longer feeling themselves lost
in a world of disasters smashing into me, you, her, him,
but souls awakening, recognizing in the pain each felt a common dare,
their strength before that challenge a common strength.
Souls reaching for each other out of past confusion
do not need telling they have begun a change.
They know. The rest is work,
a common effort so steady it moves companions
beyond the range of discouragement,
to goals we choose together."
Ayi Kwei Armah - KMT: In the House of Life
@Yaw Asare Aboagye (http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/member.php?u=7644), I also found myself comparing KMT to Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons and The Healers and feeling it just wasn't the same...of course, that's the point, i suppose. I found the characters to be mouthpieces for his messages to the reader much more bluntly in conversations. Although, the point could be made that Isanusi and Damfo were his mouthpieces, as were all the "good guys" we identified with in TTS and TH this was different like "I don't have time to wrap this in too much scenery, it's too urgent that I get this message to you". Presentation aside, in terms of the messages that I got, this was a very "anti-romantic" novel...in the sense of being "romantic" about Kmt and our history, particularly KMT; from romanticizing Kmtyw slavery was more humane/less cruel than krakkka-rab slavery to the idea of secrecy. To me, that was the main point of the book: secrecy in knowledge and information as our unraveling. I actually have this idea in my thoughts often and this post reminded me that I got a lot of that from KMT. From initiation rites to putting things under the guise of magic that people can't understand when things could be explained to those people scientifically, for lack of a better word. As I think about it, the original name of this forum was Abibitumi Kasa Resource Center. For me, there were always people who were like "I have this book, I have that book" but those books were stuck in their personal library and no one had access to it. Their possessing it was only good for them bragging about it. The idea was to basically extend all the resources I had in my personal library and making them available...that thought, to some extent, came from reading KMT. Now, issues of copyright and financial sustainability of making the info available are more central than they were then, but the major idea behind the forums is the provision of information as much as possible and as free as possible while still being sustainable. @Akua Ma'at (http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/member.php?u=3212), I look forward to you sharing what you got from reading it when it the full impact reaches you.
i love Ayi Kweh Armah. When I was toying with the idea of writing a dissertation one of my chapters was going to be on Armah as a historian. I've read 2000 Seasons and the Beautiful Ones...., but it has been years ago for both. Ayi Kweh Armah is without a doubt one of my favorite Kmtyw thinkers. One of my goals is to read all of his novels in order. He is incredibly overlooked by many nationalists/pan-Kmtywists. All of his books are must reads.
@Obadele...I honestly don't remember the fine points of KMT as much as TTS or TH since I've read those books multiple times and also had the opportunity to sit in on a class Marimba Ani was teaching back in the 90's. So I also associate those books with meeting her and getting to know her well. Her class was Blacktastic.
What I specifically remember about KMT was the feeling I got when I realized what Armah was trying to say because before that realization I thought the book was mundane. Ya'll got me wanting to read this next after finishing IWA since I'm now wondering what I'll think of it after re-reading it.