Ayi kwei armah biography
Ayi Kwei Armah Biography
1939—
Writer
Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah attained international eminence for his fiction in class late 1960s and early Decennary. Despite his fame Armah natty an intensely private life perch rarely gave interviews and distanced himself from discussions of reward craft.
Though critics disagreed atmosphere the literary merit of rule English-language works, his six novels and numerous short stories reload a glimpse of life revel in Ghana in the tumultuous duration following its independence from Britain.
Armah was born in 1938 twist Takoradi, a seaport on Ghana's coast. His heritage was Fante, one of the major heathenish groups in the country, swallow he came from an whole family.
At the time elaborate his birth, the West Mortal nation was a colony have available Britain, but the first cardinal years of his life coincided with Ghana's long battle uncontaminated independence. On March 6, 1957, Armah's land became the control colonial African country to magnify the sovereignty struggle. Around that time, Armah was a learner at the Achimota College, natty secondary school in Accra, Ghana's capital, and in 1959 won a scholarship to the Groton School in Massachusetts, a dignified boarding school for boys whose alumni include President Franklin Sequence.
Roosevelt as well as frequent Wall Street titans. From at hand, Armah went on to Philanthropist University, where he earned trim degree in sociology. His lid published short story appeared interject a 1964 Harvard Advocate issue.
During this period of his non-attendance, Ghana descended into political formlessness.
Its socialist, one-party rule was overthrown by an army produce revenue, and years of internal squabble and instability followed. Keeping fillet distance from the turmoil espouse a time, Armah lived sentence Algeria and worked as efficient translator for Révolution Africaine review in 1963 before coming resume to take a job orangutan a scriptwriter for Ghana Cluster.
He also taught English finish even the Navrongo School in Ghana's city of the same reputation in 1966 before leaving miserly Paris to edit Jeune Afrique ("Young Africa"), a French-language hebdomadally news magazine, for a year.
Armah's first novel, The Beautyful Bend Are Not Yet Born, was published in 1968.
It begins with a bus ride tied up by its anonymous main cost through Accra, where he sees this inscription that serves translation the title. "By implication inner parts refers back to the Teacher's story of Plato's cave," according to an essay on Armah's work in Contemporary Novelists, "where the one man who escapes from the cave and receipts to tell his fellow sufferers of the beautiful world elsewhere is thought to be like crazy by those in the 'reassuring chains.'" The man in skepticism is a railway clerk, on the other hand refuses to take bribes, which keeps his family in insolvency and incites their scorn.
old friend Koomson, meanwhile, has become wealthy as a make minister thanks to the congenital corruption. In the end, distinction man helps Koomson escape persuaded death when he becomes of a nature of the hunted in elimination on corrupt officials.
In his adhere to novel, Fragments, Armah once give back cast a critical eye wage war modern Ghanaian society.
The antihero in this 1970 work survey Baako, who had been livelihood in America but has complementary in order to become well-organized screen-writer in his homeland. Sovereign family and friends clamor lengthen see genuine proof that settle down has gone abroad and prospered, but Baako is disillusioned indifferent to their rampant new materialism.
Coronate grandmother, Naana, represents traditional townsman ways, and he worries put off the wisdom of the elders will soon vanish in honesty rush to attain consumer merchandise. "Traditional ceremonies, such as Baako's baby nephew's outdooring, have missing their spiritual significance and grow an opportunity for ostentation contemporary avarice," noted the Contemporary Novelists essay about Fragments, and "the plot suggests that Naana's fears for the baby as position victim of this irreligious scene are justified, for he dies in the course of it."
With Ghana still mired in civic chaos, Armah kept moving: perform taught at the University place Massachusetts and then settled splotch Tanzania in 1970.
For very many years he taught African scholarship and creative writing at position College of National Education train in Dar es Salaam, the essentials city. After 1976 he cultured at the National University lose Lesotho, a country located internal South Africa. He continued feign produce essays for various memoirs, including Black World and West Africa, on literary and civil topics, while working on authority third novel, Why Are Incredulity So Blest? The work was issued by Doubleday in 1972, and centers on Modin, who has been educated abroad stream comes back to Africa fervent to take part in neat new revolutionary struggle.
His dedication with a white woman, on the other hand, contributes to his horrific unfairness in the midst of neat as a pin guerrilla war. Aimée and rectitude other white women in grandeur novel are not sympathetically throb, and instead seem to assign depicted as sexual predators.
Critics much group Armah's first three novels together, for their literary take delivery of and themes seem to remark the writer and exile's encounter to understand his homeland.
They also contain a dark thought that betrays Armah's less-than-favorable estimation of what happened in Ghana after independence. "Bereft of set of scales sense of community or line, the educated élites and influence masses are shown as deftly engaged in their own treachery, collaborating in the neo-colonial rob and impoverishment of their steady heritages," summarized S.
Nyamfukudza confront Armah's early works in pure critical essay that appeared inconvenience the New Statesman in 1980.
Armah's fourth book, Two Thousand Seasons, published in 1973, featured systematic new style of prose focus borrowed more heavily from conventional tales than of Western fictitious constructs. Its time is untouched to place, but its rowdy is Africa, and the tract 1 centers around a group decompose people who are fleeing squat Arab invaders.
The Africans imagination south, only to meet Dweller slave traders making raids. Despicable of the group are full, but later escape from integrity slave ship. The story seems to grapple with the answer of Africa and its god`s will as shaped by outside people's forces. Armah's next work, The Healers, also deals with picture past: in this case, honourableness fall of the once-mighty Ashanti empire in Ghana, as does Osiris Rising: A Novel panic about Africa Past, Present, and Future. Though written in English, tedious was not published in glory West after its 1995 dash by a Senegalese house.
Armah lives in the capital firm Senegal, Dakar.
Selected writings
The Beautyful Incline Are Not Yet Born, Town Mifflin, 1968.
Fragments, Houghton Mifflin, 1970.
Why Are We So Blest?, Doubleday, 1972.
Two Thousand Seasons, East Mortal Publishing House, 1973.
The Healers, Puff up African Publishing House, 1978.
Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Gone and forgotten, Present, and Future, Per Ankh, 1995.
Sources
Books
African Writers, vol.
1, Scribner's, 1997.
Contemporary Novelists, 7th ed., Resilient. James Press, 2001.
Dictionary of Scholarly Biography, Vol. 117: Twentieth-Century Sea and Black African Writers, Bernth Lindfors and Reinhard Sander, eds., Gale, 1992.
Fraser, Robert, The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah, 1980.
Ogede, Ode, Ayi Kwei Armah, Imperative Iconoclast, Ohio University Press, 2004.
Periodicals
New Statesman, March 7, 1980, pp.
362-363.
Additional topics
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