The Philosophies of Ayi Kwei Armah-gctid23192

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"Their first appearance among us was that of beggars. Haggard they came, betrayed and lonely in their hunger of soul and body. We pitied them, for is it not a part of the way that the stranger shall be given sustenance and helped along his road? But the way is not a partial remembrance only. How was it forgotten then that it is also part of the way, insepaAmwle from every other part, that the guest who turns contemptuous is a guest no longer but a parasite? How was it forgotten that hosts who spread a welcome for parasites prepared their own destruction?"

Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"But how shall we explain this disease? Let sleep and death again give us an image. The mind is the soul's conciliator with the body, the guide to keep the awakened body and soul together. In sleep, in death, body and soul are apart. The body may fall victim to attack. The body may fall victim to an alien conqueror. The mind can also suffer atttack, the mind can also fall to conquest. A mind attacked and conquered is guided easily away from the paths of its own soul. The body is then cut off from its spirit as in sleep, yet still instinct with the conqueror's imposed commands, a soulless thing, but active. In this state of souldeath the body blindly, sleepily obeys the conqueror. Such a body is set to persist in such obedience even if its conqueror be a distance of days and days away, a time of seasons separate. Such are zombis."

Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"If a body and soul are working together the mind thinks: I should do this; the will decides: I will do it; the muscle tenses itself to help the will; and the hand does what the mind has thought. Everything works together. But say there is a bone broken in the body. The mind may think something; the will may desire it; but when the muscle tries to move the hand, there are two pieces of the broken bone pushing against each other, fighting each other, instead of working together. This is disease. The cure of that kind of disease is one of the first steps in healing.[...]There is disease which comes from conflict between body and soul in the same individual. That is more serious. It takes much longer to cure. Years, usually."

Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"Endless our struggle must seem to those whose vision reaches only to the end of today."

Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"For he is no liberator whose skill lies in calling loudly to the bound, the trapped, the impotent enslaved, to rise upon their destroyers. The liberator is he who from a necessary silence, from a necessary secrecy strikes the destroyer. That, not loudness, is the necessary beginning."

Ayi Kwei Armah
Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"Parents willing to be slaves should have children born to be slaves, for they deserved them."

Ayi Kwei Armah
Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"If I see things unseen by those who have eyes, why should my wisest speech not be silence?"

Ayi Kwei Armah
Fragments

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"How have we come to be mere mirrors to annihilation? For whom do we aspire to reflect our people's death? For whose entertainment shall we sing our agony? In what hopes? That the destroyers, aspiring to extinguish us, will suffer conciliatory remorse at the sight of their own fantastic success? The last imbecile to dream such dreams is dead, killed by the saviours of his dreams. Such idiot hopes come from a territory far beyond rebirth. Those utterly dead, never again to wake, such is their muttering. Leave them in their graves. Whatever waking form they wear, the stench of death pours ceaseless from their mouths. From every opening of their possessed carcasses comes death's excremental pus. Their soul itself is dead and long since putrified. Would you have your intercourse with these creatures from the graveyard?"

Ayi Kwei Armah
Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"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."

Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"Everywhere on earth the issue of power is decided with weapons, metal, fire and stone cutting through flesh, smashing bone. Raiders are thieves before the battle. After the victory they are called conquerors. Rulers are gods before the battle. After defeat they are remembered as fools."

Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"When words are bent to mean the opposite of what they mean, the violation of people is not far."

Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"Pain too long absorbed dulls intelligence. Pain endured, channeled for energy, used for conscious work aimed at ending the source of pain, sharpens intelligence."

Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"There was a third white destroyer: a missionary who wanted to replace all knowledge of our way with fables even our children laughed at then. We told the white missionary we had such fables too, but kept them for the entertainment of those yet growing up - fables of gods and devils and a supreme being above everything. We told him we knew soft minds needed such illusions, but that when any mind grew among us to adulthood it grew beyond these fables and came to understand that there is indeed a great force in the world, a force spiritual and able to shape the physical universe, but that that force is not something cut off, not something separate from ourselves. It is an energy in us, strongest in our working, breathing, thinking together as one people; weakest when we are scattered, confused, broken into individual, unconnected fragments."

Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"...when a people become contemptuous of the repositories of history, they have taken the last step before contempt for their own narrative, that is to say, contempt for themselves as living process. I say a society that holds its own history in contempt is dead in the heart and sick in the brain. That is where we are now."

"...foolishness comes to a people through deliberate training..."

-Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"What their arms and weapons have shattered with force, their theories have sought through fraud to sanctify as fragments beyond rejoining. What in the course of time they used force to divide, their thinkers have tried to present as divided by the very nature of the universe, eternally sundered."

-Ayi Kwei Armah