The Philosophies of Ayi Kwei Armah-gctid23192

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"The events that have shattered our people were not
simply painful events. They were disasters. They
were strange, unnatural catastrophes. Those who
survived them could only survive in part because they
found ways to forget the catastrophes. When you're
still close to past dangers that threatened to wipe
you out, even remembrance pains you. Our people
forgot a lot of things in order to survive. We even
went beyond forgetfulness. To forget thoroughly the
shattering and the dispersal of a people that was once
whole, we have gone so far as to pretend we have
always been these silly little fragments each calling
itself a nation. Is forgetfulness natural? It is
natural, but only for a while, not for all time.
Forgetfulness helps the diseased cross over the time
of greatest pain. It is a sort of sleep, like the
sleep brought on by herbs to help a sick man rest when
his disease has exhausted him. In that case
forgetfulness works toward health. But when the
period of forgetfulness is prolonged unnaturally, then
it doesn't work towards health. It works toward
death."

-Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"Terrible is the fragility of good beginnings. Look at the egg; what strength can you see in it with your physical eyes? Yet from that fragility can come great vitality. That is one reason for us not to lose courage simply because our current reality is so fragile in the face of established chaos."

-Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"Healers are just awakeners of a people who have slept too long."

-Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"...but what is a gift from the powerful if not a cut from property stolen from the people?"

-Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"The loss of our names is the death of our soul. Memory is soil, water and light for life."

-Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"Sometimes work itself gives us energy. If it touches us where it matters."

-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

[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]

"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]

"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]

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

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]

"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]

"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]

"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....Have we not seen the devotees of death? They are beyond the source's beckoning. Purpose has no power to draw them foward from dead todays. Make way for them along the easy road. Those with their guts cracked out of them, those with minds so minced all their remembrance would turn to pain, leave them along the easy road. Do not condemn, do not pity them. Let them go. Or would you try reminding them of their murdered selves? As well graft black blighted leaves. Some restful night after the first thounited snakesnd and the second thounited snakesnd seasons the loss of such, devoted to whiteness in their souls, will appear justly: a gain."

Ayi Kwei Armah
Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons