AYI AND ME
Friday, January 06, 2017
By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman
Humility has a very tart taste.
I have tasted profound humility, yet again, reading THE ELOQUENCE OF THE SCRIBES by Ayi Kwei Armah (2006). I purchased this book in 2014, but did not begin reading it, until 2016. The fireworks began in 2017, being tectonic, tsunamic.
“I was returning to my first love, literature, but my affection for the discipline had undergone a profound shift in emphasis. I enjoy literature both as a consumer activity and as a productive practice, and have grown to see the two aspects as inseparable. This change in attitude was not a direct result of my formal education. For in the schools I went to, especially at Achimoto, there tended to be a deliberate, official accent on the consumer aspect of literature….You could earn passes, credits, distinctions, and certificates for studying literature as a consumer activity, admiring the literature produced by others. There was nothing to be earned on the official scale of values for learning to do the work of production, learning how a creative writer went about the job of converting ideas into publishable texts.”
p.111.
Having returned to literature, myself, after a stroke ended my 30-year legal career, I intuitively understood what Ayi Kwei Armah meant by “my first love.” Literature had also been my first love, until the 9th grade, when an equivocation set in about law.
“I am grateful to collectors of old narratives, gatherers of ancient traditions, and translators of ancient texts, who preceded me along the paths of consciousness, and enabled me to see, in spite of indoctrination and distortion, that Africa had a tradition of literary work stretching back before the time of European and Arab destruction of to the beginnings of history…. Here I want to pay a debt of gratitude to those whose works have served me most usefully as signposts on the way to the development of an African consciousness: Acquaaah, Plaatje, Mofolo, and Abrahams, Niane Kouyate, Fagunwa and Soyinke, Cisse and Wa Kamissoko, Kestaloot and Dieng, Sall and Lam, and, of course, Diop and Obenga. In many ways, this narrative is theirs too.”
p.119-120.
Here, I paused. Cheikh Anta Diop and Theophile Obenga I knew. I knew Diop from having read the English translations of his iconic books. Diop also had been a subscriber to THE NILE REVIEW, my now-defunct black historical newsletter. He had also written me a letter in French, of course, in praise of it. Obenga I knew as a companion and cohort of Diop, whose erudition had shocked the United Nations in 1974 into recognizing the primacy of Africa in world historiography. Obenga I now knew better, as I am currently read his wonderful AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY: THE PHARAONIC PERIOD, 2780 B.C. TO 330 B.C. This work was translated from French into English by none other than Ayi Kwei Armah. So, it all connects for me! Although most of the other authors were unknown to me, these two sealed the deal!
“Once I had made the decision to return to writing as my life work, I was faced with the kind of basic issues every practicing writer has to think through carefully. Substance: What would I write? Identity: As what would I write? Audience: With whom would I be hoping to communicate? I did not approach these issues serially. In my experience, the issues of substance and voice, identity and audience, are inseparably linked. I knew that if I attempted to write without first finding a voice of my own, I would be lost. That meant it would be a waste of time if I tried to grope my way toward a readership without a clear consciousness to write from. To know who I want to talk to, I must know who and what I am, and what I want to say….
“My father came from a patrilineal background, my mother from a matrilineal one. Both groups supposed I belonged to them. For me there was no sense believing I belonged to any particular group. My parents had met and bonded across ethnic lines. They had given me a life that made it easy for me to think of a wide range of individuals as closer to me than my blood kin. Blood could not be the only factor determining my identity; it could not even be a determining factor, unless I wanted it to be, and I did not. Thinking was for me as important as blood, perhaps more important….
“I was going to have to re-educate myself.”
p. 120-121.
Re-education I understood. Beside my bedside rests a table with almost two-dozen books by a broad range of authors, on a broad range of topics, which I replenish continually, as I complete each one, reading bit-by-bit, serially. Occasionally, my interests or curiosity fixates on an already-purchased book, or a new arrival, and I may add it to the stacks, or those in the study, family room, dining room, or garage. Armah’s book came from a stack in my study. I praise the day I began to read it!
“The dispute between Senghor and Diop was essentially an argument between two thinkers drawing conclusions about African society from completely different sources of data. Senghor, having done no independent research on Africa, absorbed the conventional opinions current in Europe during his time, and supposed that those opinions gave him usable information about Africa. Diop, distrusting the conventional wisdom of Europe, investigated hard-to-access evidence, learning a few dead languages to do so, and found himself in possession of data directly contradicting the European vision of a savage Africa.
“Ultimately, then, their different conceptions of African identity, history, philosophy, science, culture, and literature depended on the amount of real knowledge available to each. We work and write from the basis of what we know….
“The challenge, in sum, is to make sure that coming generations have free access to information about Africa, in generous quantities, abundantly distributed….
“Narratives provide a great aesthetic medium for the projection of worldviews…. Well-known examples include Greek and Roman myths, Chinese and Japanese myths, the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran. Africa has the oldest such narratives in the world, the mythic narratives of ancient Egypt. But like the gold, diamonds, oil, and coltan of the continent, these narratives do not yet belong to us, the continent’s inhabitants. Under European domination, we were taught not to see this perverse penury as a result of a theft of our intellectual resources comparable to the pillage of our natural resources.”
p. 134-135.
As African American, the massive “theft” of our forebears, in which continental Africans were complicit, is a far greater “intellectual” and “natural resource” that was lost or “pillaged,” than any enumerated, jointly or severally, over the centuries, by Ayi Kwei Armah. As an estranged numerical minority rather than an indoctrinated majority, we struggle upward to the oxygenating air of natural, cosmological freedom.
#30
AYI AND ME
Friday, January 06, 2017
By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman
Humility has a very tart taste.
I have tasted profound humility, yet again, reading THE ELOQUENCE OF THE SCRIBES by Ayi Kwei Armah (2006). I purchased this book in 2014, but did not begin reading it, until 2016. The fireworks began in 2017, being tectonic, tsunamic.
“I was returning to my first love, literature, but my affection for the discipline had undergone a profound shift in emphasis. I enjoy literature both as a consumer activity and as a productive practice, and have grown to see the two aspects as inseparable. This change in attitude was not a direct result of my formal education. For in the schools I went to, especially at Achimoto, there tended to be a deliberate, official accent on the consumer aspect of literature….You could earn passes, credits, distinctions, and certificates for studying literature as a consumer activity, admiring the literature produced by others. There was nothing to be earned on the official scale of values for learning to do the work of production, learning how a creative writer went about the job of converting ideas into publishable texts.”
p.111.
Having returned to literature, myself, after a stroke ended my 30-year legal career, I intuitively understood what Ayi Kwei Armah meant by “my first love.” Literature had also been my first love, until the 9th grade, when an equivocation set in about law.
“I am grateful to collectors of old narratives, gatherers of ancient traditions, and translators of ancient texts, who preceded me along the paths of consciousness, and enabled me to see, in spite of indoctrination and distortion, that Africa had a tradition of literary work stretching back before the time of European and Arab destruction of to the beginnings of history…. Here I want to pay a debt of gratitude to those whose works have served me most usefully as signposts on the way to the development of an African consciousness: Acquaaah, Plaatje, Mofolo, and Abrahams, Niane Kouyate, Fagunwa and Soyinke, Cisse and Wa Kamissoko, Kestaloot and Dieng, Sall and Lam, and, of course, Diop and Obenga. In many ways, this narrative is theirs too.”
p.119-120.
Here, I paused. Cheikh Anta Diop and Theophile Obenga I knew. I knew Diop from having read the English translations of his iconic books. Diop also had been a subscriber to THE NILE REVIEW, my now-defunct black historical newsletter. He had also written me a letter in French, of course, in praise of it. Obenga I knew as a companion and cohort of Diop, whose erudition had shocked the United Nations in 1974 into recognizing the primacy of Africa in world historiography. Obenga I now knew better, as I am currently read his wonderful AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY: THE PHARAONIC PERIOD, 2780 B.C. TO 330 B.C. This work was translated from French into English by none other than Ayi Kwei Armah. So, it all connects for me! Although most of the other authors were unknown to me, these two sealed the deal!
“Once I had made the decision to return to writing as my life work, I was faced with the kind of basic issues every practicing writer has to think through carefully. Substance: What would I write? Identity: As what would I write? Audience: With whom would I be hoping to communicate? I did not approach these issues serially. In my experience, the issues of substance and voice, identity and audience, are inseparably linked. I knew that if I attempted to write without first finding a voice of my own, I would be lost. That meant it would be a waste of time if I tried to grope my way toward a readership without a clear consciousness to write from. To know who I want to talk to, I must know who and what I am, and what I want to say….
“My father came from a patrilineal background, my mother from a matrilineal one. Both groups supposed I belonged to them. For me there was no sense believing I belonged to any particular group. My parents had met and bonded across ethnic lines. They had given me a life that made it easy for me to think of a wide range of individuals as closer to me than my blood kin. Blood could not be the only factor determining my identity; it could not even be a determining factor, unless I wanted it to be, and I did not. Thinking was for me as important as blood, perhaps more important….
“I was going to have to re-educate myself.”
p. 120-121.
Re-education I understood. Beside my bedside rests a table with almost two-dozen books by a broad range of authors, on a broad range of topics, which I replenish continually, as I complete each one, reading bit-by-bit, serially. Occasionally, my interests or curiosity fixates on an already-purchased book, or a new arrival, and I may add it to the stacks, or those in the study, family room, dining room, or garage. Armah’s book came from a stack in my study. I praise the day I began to read it!
“The dispute between Senghor and Diop was essentially an argument between two thinkers drawing conclusions about African society from completely different sources of data. Senghor, having done no independent research on Africa, absorbed the conventional opinions current in Europe during his time, and supposed that those opinions gave him usable information about Africa. Diop, distrusting the conventional wisdom of Europe, investigated hard-to-access evidence, learning a few dead languages to do so, and found himself in possession of data directly contradicting the European vision of a savage Africa.
“Ultimately, then, their different conceptions of African identity, history, philosophy, science, culture, and literature depended on the amount of real knowledge available to each. We work and write from the basis of what we know….
“The challenge, in sum, is to make sure that coming generations have free access to information about Africa, in generous quantities, abundantly distributed….
“Narratives provide a great aesthetic medium for the projection of worldviews…. Well-known examples include Greek and Roman myths, Chinese and Japanese myths, the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran. Africa has the oldest such narratives in the world, the mythic narratives of ancient Egypt. But like the gold, diamonds, oil, and coltan of the continent, these narratives do not yet belong to us, the continent’s inhabitants. Under European domination, we were taught not to see this perverse penury as a result of a theft of our intellectual resources comparable to the pillage of our natural resources.”
p. 134-135.
As African American, the massive “theft” of our forebears, in which continental Africans were complicit, is a far greater “intellectual” and “natural resource” that was lost or “pillaged,” than any enumerated, jointly or severally, over the centuries, by Ayi Kwei Armah. As an estranged numerical minority rather than an indoctrinated majority, we struggle upward to the oxygenating air of natural, cosmological freedom.
#30