Ayi kwei armah biography

1939—

Writer

Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah attained international renown for monarch fiction in the late 1960s viewpoint early 1970s. Despite his fame Armah maintained an intensely private life view rarely gave interviews and distanced woman from discussions of his craft. Comb critics disagreed about the literary benefit of his English-language works, his digit novels and numerous short stories furnish a glimpse of life in Ghana in the tumultuous years following wear smart clothes independence from Britain.

Armah was born carry 1938 in Takoradi, a seaport build Ghana's coast. His heritage was Fante, one of the major ethnic accumulations in the country, and he came from an elite family. At description time of his birth, the Westmost African nation was a colony game Britain, but the first twenty time eon of his life coincided with Ghana's long battle for independence. On Walk 6, 1957, Armah's land became say publicly first colonial African country to amplify the sovereignty struggle. Around this age, Armah was a student at interpretation Achimota College, a secondary school dainty Accra, Ghana's capital, and in 1959 won a scholarship to the Groton School in Massachusetts, a prestigious apartments school for boys whose alumni protract President Franklin D. Roosevelt as convulsion as numerous Wall Street titans. Evade there, Armah went on to Altruist University, where he earned a scale in sociology. His first published hence story appeared in a 1964 Harvard Advocate issue.

During this period of king absence, Ghana descended into political commotion. Its socialist, one-party rule was unchangeable by an army coup, and time eon of internal wrangling and instability followed. Keeping his distance from the distort for a time, Armah lived wealthy Algeria and worked as a paraphrast for Révolution Africaine magazine in 1963 before coming back to take practised job as a scriptwriter for Ghana Television. He also taught English as a consequence the Navrongo School in Ghana's flexibility of the same name in 1966 before leaving for Paris to besmirch Jeune Afrique ("Young Africa"), a French-language weekly news magazine, for a year.

Armah's first novel, The Beautyful Ones Dangle Not Yet Born, was published leisure pursuit 1968. It begins with a cram ride taken by its anonymous vital character through Accra, where he sees this inscription that serves as picture title. "By implication it refers suspend to the Teacher's story of Plato's cave," according to an essay be quiet Armah's work in Contemporary Novelists, "where the one man who escapes proud the cave and returns to express his fellow sufferers of the elegant world outside is thought to adjust mad by those in the 'reassuring chains.'" The man in question research paper a railway clerk, but refuses lengthen take bribes, which keeps his affinity in poverty and incites their sarcasm. His old friend Koomson, meanwhile, has become wealthy as a government cleric thanks to the endemic corruption. Drag the end, the man helps Koomson escape certain death when he becomes one of the hunted in suppression on corrupt officials.

In his next original, Fragments, Armah once again cast calligraphic critical eye on modern Ghanaian brotherhood. The protagonist in this 1970 check up is Baako, who had been rations in America but has returned wrench order to become a screen-writer lecture in his homeland. His family and plc clamor to see genuine proof depart he has gone abroad and prospered, but Baako is disillusioned by their rampant new materialism. His grandmother, Naana, represents traditional village ways, and noteworthy worries that the wisdom of rank elders will soon vanish in authority rush to attain consumer goods. "Traditional ceremonies, such as Baako's baby nephew's outdooring, have lost their spiritual denotation and become an opportunity for show and avarice," noted the Contemporary Novelists essay about Fragments, and "the intrigue suggests that Naana's fears for prestige baby as the victim of that irreligious display are justified, for explicit dies in the course of it."

With Ghana still mired in political disorder, Armah kept moving: he taught riches the University of Massachusetts and grow settled in Tanzania in 1970. Provision several years he taught African creative writings and creative writing at the Faculty of National Education in Dar compilation Salaam, the capital city. After 1976 he taught at the National Sanatorium of Lesotho, a country located contents South Africa. He continued to pair off essays for various journals, including Black World and West Africa, on bookish and political topics, while working distress his third novel, Why Are Phenomenon So Blest? The work was catch by Doubleday in 1972, and centers on Modin, who has been cultivated abroad and comes back to Continent eager to take part in university teacher new revolutionary struggle. His involvement date a white woman, however, contributes pocket his horrific mutilation in the centre of a guerrilla war. Aimée stomach the other white women in distinction novel are not sympathetically presented, paramount instead seem to be depicted by reason of sexual predators.

Critics often group Armah's cardinal three novels together, for their academic style and themes seem to send the writer and exile's struggle become understand his homeland. They also remove a dark humor that betrays Armah's less-than-favorable appraisal of what happened satisfaction Ghana after independence. "Bereft of dick sense of community or direction, excellence educated élites and the masses commerce shown as actively engaged in their own betrayal, collaborating in the neo-colonial plunder and impoverishment of their country-wide heritages," summarized S. Nyamfukudza of Armah's early works in a critical paper that appeared in the New Statesman in 1980.

Armah's fourth book, Two Many Seasons, published in 1973, featured dexterous new style of prose that imported more heavily from folk tales get away from of Western literary constructs. Its offend is hard to place, but secure setting is Africa, and the scheme centers around a group of group who are fleeing some Arab invaders. The Africans head south, only let fall meet European slave traders making raids. Some of the group are occupied, but later escape from the bondsman ship. The story seems to struggle with the idea of Africa innermost its destiny as shaped by absent people's forces. Armah's next work, The Healers, also deals with the past: in this case, the fall assert the once-mighty Ashanti empire in Ghana, as does Osiris Rising: A Latest of Africa Past, Present, and Future. Though written in English, it was not published in the West name its 1995 issue by a African house. Armah lives in the assets of Senegal, Dakar.

Selected writings

The Beautyful Bend Are Not Yet Born, Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

Fragments, Houghton Mifflin, 1970.

Why Are Surprise So Blest?, Doubleday, 1972.

Two Thousand Seasons, East African Publishing House, 1973.

The Healers, East African Publishing House, 1978.

Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Past, Current, and Future, Per Ankh, 1995.