Wednesday, October 31, 2012

A WORD ABOUT WRITER AYI KWEI ARMAH







Giant of an African writer Ayi Kwei Armah, clearly getting conversationally pithy with an acquaintance.  I Goodman Manyanya Phiri beg to confess to owing Armah some serious reading, what  with  the only literary thing to cross my eyes from his metacarpals being his “Why Are We So Blest?” I read “Why Are We So Blest?” while I was still a virgin in 1979, aged 18 years.  And guess what? I found Ayi Kwei Armah to be too raunchy for completion. Of course, I completed some things very nether and biological while reading the book; but I could not complete the book itself and as such never came to know why I am so blessed.  My memory tells me he talked about sex (of which I knew nothing beyond my Biology lessons from a Thembeka Senior Secondary School’s Mr Ngcane who taught me about clitorises and phalluses distended or merely flaccid).  Worse, Mr Armah’s “Why Are We So Blest?” seemed in those 1970s of mine to be talking about sex between an African and a European (of which practice was banned by an Act of Parliament in the Republic of South Africa as an ‘immoral’ act).  But now, at advanced age of 52, I realize Armah is more serious than Eros: he seems to connect the primacy of the larger universe over the earth and its earthlings; he reiterates the dominance of the unseen to the seen, and the originality of humanity in the womb of Africa.  But maybe I am pre-judging and pre-lionizing Armah; let me now read him rather than sing him maybe even prematurely.. This picture is courtesy please click


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