The Philosophies of Ayi Kwei Armah-gctid23192

[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]

"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]

"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]

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

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]

"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]

"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]

"Chief among the parasites were the ostentatious cripples, [those] who for no other reason than the need to veil their own atrophy of spirit wanted to be raised higher than everybody else even if that raising was merely the pushing down of all of us."

Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"Have we not seen the devotees of death? They are beyond the source's beckoning. Purpose has no power to draw them forward 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 back blighted leaves. Some restful night after the first thounited snakesnds and the second thounited snakesnd seasons the loss of such, devoted to whiteness (death) in their souls, will appear justly: a gain."

Ayi Kwei Armah

[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....[Forgetfulness] 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
towards health. But when the period of forgetfulness
is prolonged unnaturally, then it doesn't work towards
health. It works toward death....Sleep is
natural...even when it comes after unnatural
disasters. But waking is even more natural. Healers
are just awakeners of a people who have slept too
long. The awakening is natural. Healing work is part
of nature. Very much a part....There will always be
work for healers, even when the highest work is done.
That highest work, the bringing together again of the
black people, will take centuries....Often, our
confusion comes merely from impatience. The disease
has run unchecked through centuries. Yet sometimes we
dream of ending it in our little lifetimes, and
despair seizes us if we do not see the end in
sight...A healer needs to see beyond the present and
tomorrow. He needs to see years and decades ahead.
Because healers work for results so firm they may not
be wholly visible till centuries have flowed into
millennia. Those willing to do this necessary work,
they are the healers of our people."

- Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"It is very easy to get used to what is terrible."

- Ayi Kwei Armah

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

THE RETURN

The pressing needs of the time after our first escape from the destroyers' proffered destiny left little time for rest, little time for conversation. That little time was consumed in the search of kindred spirits reaching for each other.

Of ultimate directions, along which paths we would turn the remainder of our lives, to the realization of what long vision we would bend our energies, of that we had had no time to talk...

It was no hurried passage, this conversation of discovery. It took careful time, and at the end of this sufficient time we heard among us three kinds of voices uttering three separate visions.

First spoke the voices of tired bodies, voices seeing happiness in the present situation [after escaping whitey enslavers], unwilling to risk a return [to the villages that sold them in the first place] to the dangers of known pasts, afraid to follow any future vision. Those whose spirits found their utterance in the message of these voices chose to stay and continue in this new home. They were a third of us.

The second range of voices drew the most spirits, far more than a third of the whole. What dream did these voices utter? Returning was their dream. Strongest for these spirits was the call to return, the unequivocal call simply to go back to the places where mothers had borne them, places where fathers' brothers had dug from these places, from these homes, and it mattered little, the thought that destruction had reached into these very homes to blight them. To the listening ears of these nostalgic souls it did not matter, could not matter that it was at home they had first been betrayed into destruction's whiteness. Perhaps it was also their hope that their specific betrayals, their single sales were mere unhappy accidents, forgettable, easy to forget once the return home had been accomplished, once beloved ones could see again the eyes of loving ones so recently betrayed, now miraculously returning, not wiped out, only grazed by death?

Ah, blind illusion of nostalgic spirits. Ah, self-murdering deafness of ears forever cut off from the quite, reasonable call of our way. Most, far more than a third of the whole, chose to listen to the voices calling betrayed spirits back to betraying homes.

Far less than a third of us were left to drink in the meaning of the third voice. What was the meaning of this voice that called us?

Its farthest meaning, that meaning large enough to hold all other meanings, was the meaning of the way itself: the call to reciprocity in a world wiped clean of destroyers, innocent again of predators. What was the meaning of the call to the way? Its closer meaning was destruction's destuction. Its closest meaning: the search for paths to that necessary beginning...

There was no blind groping backwards along any nostalgic road. This was to be nothing stupid, nothing futile. This was not to be a static holding on to that security - ultimately directionless - we had found in the present. The present station had been kind, more than kind: perfect for ourselves when rest was what we needed, when we were not yet recovered from the sicknesses leading into the whiteness of death. Remaining would be a choice of the permanent life of invalids. Better to leave the nostalgic along their backward road. Better to leave those frightened of vision in the static comfort they had found. Better to work out better directions, to follow better visions in our salvaged lives.

...No, we would not return to homes blasted with triumphant whiteness. We would not remain here in invalid security...We would seek the necessary beginning to destruction's destruction.

...Peering into our people's soul, what was this destiny we saw after so long spurning? This. It is our destiny not to flee before destruction, not to wander impotent, our soul turned coward, our bodies mere vessels for the demonstration of a massive impotence. This is our destiny: however far in our blind anxiety we may think to fly, however distant the places we reach seeking an unconscionable quiet, there the predators, there the harbingers of destruction will find us.

It is our destiny not to flee the predators' thrust, not to seek hiding places from destroyers left triumphant; but to turn against the predators advancing, turn against the destroyers, and begin all our soul against their thrust, turning every stratagem of the destroyers against themselves, destroy them. That is our destiny: to end destruction - utterly; to begin the highest, the profoundest work of creation, the work that is insepaAmwle from our way, insepaAmwle from they way.

This has been no useless explosion of rage animating us, hurling us singly into the brief, senseless acts of momentary, particular revenge. In us has been the need to spend life against the present killing arrangements, destuction's established system; to spend life cutting through deceiving superficies to reach again the essential truths the destroyers must hide from spirits if their white road is to prevail; to spend life acting on the truth against destruction's whiteness; to spend life working with our people, searching for paths to our way.

This should be the lifework of spirits still open to the remembrance of the way, capable already of visions of its rediscovery, willing, determined to make it a living way again.

Vision is the aim of this vocation: the clearing of destruction's pale, thick-lying pus from eyes too long blinded to every possibility of the way. This lifework, its fruit should be the birth of new seers, other hearers, more numerous utterers. And the fruit of all our lifework together: that should be destruction's destruction.

And the passage of seasons? What of that? This is no hurried hustle hot with the sweaty anticipation of impatient profit but a lifetime's vocation. This is work of undying worth, the only work of worth in these surroundings blighted with death's tinsel, in all truth. It is not the passage of seasons that concerns this vocation then. It is the thoroughness of work, the trueness of the search for our way, the way."

Ayi Kwei Armah
Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"The third day early in the morning the great drums were beaten. The people assembled and were a little heartened to see the speaker this time would be Isanusi himself, best spokesman, of whom it was said truth was his food. Isanusi looked tired, like a man who had spent days and nights without sleep with no comfort for a punished body and no rest for a mind wrestling with heavy matters. Isanusi walked to the centre of the public place, greeted the people with respect but as briefly as he could, and began at once:

I have been unwilling to speak at all. The king persuaded me I would be betraying our people if I held back my voice at such a time. I will not betray our people.

'It is about the white men. You have seen them. They have brought to the king and his courtiers greetings and presents. Those also you have seen. And they have brought requests, which the king bids me lay open to you for your thinking on. The king wishes you to know beforehand that as far as he himself is concerned - and that goes for his courtiers too - his heart responds kindly to all the white men's wishes, and he is of a mind to grant them. Of the white men's killing of our people they bade me say nothing. I was bidden to speak to you only of the men's wishes.

The first wish of the white men is this: they have heard of our land, of the beauty of the mountains and the plains' fertility here, and of the metals our earth contains - iron in abundance, gold, silver, and our pure, red copper. These metals it is the white men's wish to take away from us, to take them to their home beyond the sea. In return they promise to give the king and his courtiers shiny things, entertainment for their eyes. They would have us break up the mountains, take out what is good in them to give them, leaving ourselves here the waste sand.

The people assembled murmured their astonishment, but they respected the custom forbidding any interruption at a time like this. As for the king he was still in his palace with his guests the white men.

This is the white men's second wish,' Isanusi continued. They have been told of the forests here and of the grasslands; of the birds and animals we have roaming the land. It is the white men's wish to have us help them kill these birds and these animals. They do not want their flesh for food. The elephants they say they want destroyed, but only for their tusks. There is a hunter among the white men, and a trader. These tow say tusks can be sold for riches. Leopards they want dead for their hides. As for our gazelles, they would kill them to use their heads for decoration.

You have heard me. The white men, guests of the king, would have us destroy our mountains, then our animals, and give them what is of use to themselves, leaving here the offal. In return they would reward the king with gifts, the king together with his courtiers.

There is a third wish the white men have made. Land they want from us, but not the way guests ask the use of land. The white men want land cut off from other land and set apart for them, as if land could ever be a thing belonging to any but the people as a whole. On this their cut-off land they would like to have crops grow. But the white men are not accustomed to doing their own planting and it is not in their minds to get accustomed here. They would have the king give them men to work the land - I use their language, for they think the king owns men he can give away to others - so that to speak truth ours would be the planting and the caring, theirs, the harvest and its profit. In return they would reward the king and his courtiers with more gifts.

Listen to their fourth wish. The white men say they have heard we have many people here - too many, they say - and that our women's fertility is reported a wonder among them. It is their wish to take numbers of our people away from us. They say these numbers would in the new places beyond the sea work on land as ours here...'

Hear now the last wish of the white men. They have a road they follow, and something called a god they worship - not the living spirit there is in everything but a creature separate, raised above all surrounding things, to hear them speak of it rather like a bloated king. It is the white men's wish to take us from our way - ah, we ourselves are so far already from our way - to move us on to their road; to void us of our soul and put their spirit, the worship of their creature god, in us. For this they do not think it will be necessary to reward to the king and his courtiers. They say it will be reward enough when we have lost our way completely, lost even our names; when you will call your brother not Olu but John, not Kofi but Paul; and our sisters will no longer be Ama, Naita, Idawa and Ningome but creatures called Cecilia, Esther, Mary, Elizabeth and Christina.

Hear now the end. The white men wish us to destroy our mountains, leaving ourselves wastes of barren sand. The white men wish us to wipe out our animals, leaving ourselves carcasses rotting into white skeletons. The white men want us to take human beings, our sisters and our sons, and turn them into laboring things. The white men want us to take human beings, our daughter and our brothers, and turn them into slaves. The white men want us to obliterate our remembrances of our way, the way, and in its place to follow their road, road of destruction, road of a stupid, childish god.'

From:
"Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons" by Ayi Kwei Armah pgs. 82, 83, 84

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"The whole world is covered over with the hell of eureurasia."

Ayi Kwei Armah
Why Are We So Blest?

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

"There is no beauty but in relationships. Nothing cut off by
itself is beautiful. Never can things in destructive
relationships be beautiful. All beauty is in the creative
purpose of our relationships; all ugliness is in the
destructive aims of the destroyers' arrangements. The mind
that knows this, the destroyers will set traps for it, but
the destroyers' traps will never hold that mind. The group that
knows this and works knowing this, that group itself is a
work of beauty, Creation's work. Against such a group the
destroyers will set traps for the body, traps for the heart,
traps to destroy the mind. Such a group none of the
destroyers' traps can hold."

- Ayi Kwei Armah
Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons