Ayi Kwei Armah

Ayi Kwei Armah (born 28 October 1939) is a Ghanaian writer best known for his novels including The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Two Thousand Seasons (1973) and The Healers (1978). He is also an essayist, as well as having written poetry, short stories, and books for children.

Ayi Kwei Armah

Quotes

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968)

• Alone, i am nothing. i have nothing.we have power.but we will never know it,we will never see it work.unless we come together to make it work.

• Disgust with injustice may sharpen the desire for justice. Readers who don’t see this connection merely wish to be entertained, and I have neither skill nor desire to turn the agony of a people into entertainment.

• So in a way the thing was new. Yet the stories that were sometimes heard about it were not stories of something young and vigorous, but the same old stories of money changing hands and throats getting moistened and palms getting greased. Only this time if the old stories aroused any anger, there was nowhere for it to go. The sons of the nation were now in charge, after all. How completely the new thing took after the old.

• In the intervals, between successive layers of distemper, the walls were caressed and thoroughly smothered by brown dust blowing off the roadside together with swirling grit from the coal and gravel of the railroad yard within and behind, and the corners of the walls where people passed always dripped with the engine grease left by thousands of transient hands. Every new coating, then, was received as just another inevitable accretion in a continuing story whose beginnings were now lost and whose end no one was likely to bother about.

• I know people who won more than Five hundred cedis last year they still haven't got their money. I hope some officials at the lottery place will take some of my hundred cedis as a bribe and allow me to have the rest.
  • Page 19

• Take that one for yourself and give the other one to your friend.
  • Page 30

• Have you ever seen a big man without girls
  • Page 37

• Mmmm life has treated her well
  • Page 42

• These men who were to lead us out of our despair,they came like man already grown fat and cynical with the eating of centuries of power they had never struggled for old before they had even been borninto power,and ready only for the grave.
  • Page 81

• Alone I can nothing,I have nothing.we have power but we will never see it work,unless we choose to come together to make it work let us come together
  • Page 87

• Vagina sweet, money sweet pass all, who born fool socialism chop make chop country broke you broken not so? Pray for detention jail man chop free
  • Page 106

Two Thousand Seasons (1973)

• Of unconnected consciousness is there more to say beyond the clear recognition this is destruction's keenest tool against the soul?

• She spoke of those needing the white destroyers' shiny things to bring a feeling of worth into their lives, uttered their deep-rooted inferiority of soul, and called them lacking in the essence of humanity: womanhood in women, manhood in men. For which deficiency they must crave things to eke out their beings, things to fill holes in their spirits.

• A people losing sight of origins are dead. A people deaf to purposes are lost. Under fertile rain, in scorching sunshine there is no difference: their bodies are mere corpses, awaiting final burial.

• It is not easy to hide any kind of love and young love loathes disguise.

• Dishonest words are the food for the rotten spirits.

• Purpose lends wings to the traveller.

• To them that know their destination fatigue is a brief stranger merely passing in the glare of day.

• Isanusi sees Abena and, thinking she is alone, despairs. When the other 19 members of the community are revealed, Isanusi asks about Tawi and invites everyone to his small shelter. Isanusi asks them about their motivations for returning. They explain that they view their project as the “necessary work of preparation against destruction.
  • p. 243

• Two thousand season, a thousand going into it, a second thousand crawling maimed from it, will teach you everything about enslavement, the destruction of souls, the killing of bodies, the infusion of violence into every breath, every drop, every morsel of your sustaining air, your water, your food. Till you come again upon the way.

The Healers (1979)

• If we do not help the whites, we shall be left by the roadside. And if we are such fools as to stand against the whites, they will grind us till we become less than impotent, less than grains of bad snuff tossing in a storm.

• The present is where we get lost -- if we forget our past and have no vision of the future.

• I am saying this is seed time, far from harvest time.

• Words are mere wind, but wind too has always been part of our work, this work of sowers for the future, the work of story-tellers, the work of masters in the arts of eloquence.

• There would be no kings if some catastrophe brought all black people together. . . . And if we are such fools as to stand against the whites, they will grind us till we become less than impotent, less than grains of bad snuff tossing in a storm. That is the choice before every one of us. I myself, I have already chosen. And those who think like me have chosen. We shall be on the side of the whites. That is where the power lies. We have chosen power because we find impotence disgusting.

• He saw a fierce, nameless beast, half serpent and half forest cat. The beast had coiled itself around the body of the prince Appia, still alive, and Densu saw it bare its fangs to destroy Appia. In halfawake nightmare state he was in, Densu had only seen the body of the prince. But at the moment when the beast was on the point of sinking its fangs into his neck Densu saw Appia's face. It was his own.

• If we do not help the whites, we shall be left by the roadside. And if we are such fools as to stand against the whites, they will grind us till we become less than impotent, less than grains of bad snuff tossing in a storm.

• I am saying this is seed time, far from harvest time.

• Send me words of eloquence.

• The present is were we get lost -- if we forget our past and have no vision of the future.

Osiris Rising (1995)

• It was to work against such continuous disasters (induced by our interaction with the whites) that the companionship of the ankh was bom: an ellipse of life linking future with past through intelligent work in the present. This, [...] was no royal society. There were farmers and princes and potters in it, there were masons and cobblers and aristocrats and fishers in it, there were priests and scribes in it. They were in the companionship not because they wete peasants or princes or aristocrats or scribes, but because they agreed to work to its aims. [...] Because it was devoted to life, its chosen symbol was the oldest of Africa's life signs, the ankh
  • Page 261 - 262

• The companionship risked attack from those ambitious todominate others. For it respected no social hierarchies, only the fellowship of shared ideals and work. Those whose powerwas based on force and fraud quickly enough understood that this society of intelligence and wotk, this society of life, the companionship of the ankh, would end their rule if it survived. They tried to destroy it
  • Page 262

• He seemed to have no weight at all. There he was winning prizes, playing for the school team, starting a study group. Yet he drew no feeling of importance from anything he did. He floated
  • Page 71

• Here, educated people use their intelligence to avoid risk, to accumulate power, money, privilege. We call it security. That makes our choices sound less cowardly, not so greedy
  • Page 71

• Changes that seem reasonable, natural and basic," Armah says, "the academic world, far from performing as the rational part of a confused universe, seemed peculiarly denatured in its own right
  • Page 272

• Yet she suspected that in its ten thousand disguises Cinque's Zombi corpse still ruled Africa; that those working to remember the dismembered continent were still fugitives in need of sanctuary from the storm troopers of destruction.
  • Page 11

• Others have come searching. Wha t they find they take back to America [...] to sell [...]
  • Page 252- 253

External links

• The Healers
• eNotes
• Web Archive